I’m an entrepreneur, or so I thought after starting my first company, A & D Lakeside services.
Let me tell you my story. I was recruited to be the CTO and co-founder for a very young property management company that had intentions to build software tools to make property management easier. I quit my comfortable, safe, and secure corporate job to join forces with the founders of this company to start from scratch and build a business. I introduced this company and its founders to Minnesota’s tech ecosystem. After extensive talks with some of the gurus in this ecosystem we came to the conclusion that it would be more advantageous to commercialize these software tools. With this business model, we decided to apply to Project Skyway, Minnesota’s first technology accelerator program. While the application window for Project Skyway was open I attended a Project Skyway orientation meeting with Casey Allen. To quote Casey during that meeting “If you’re wondering if you should apply, just go do it, it will only take a half hour of your day.” We started the application process, worked on it, tweaked it, slept on it, created a video, and three days later submitted it!
A few weeks later Project Skyway informed my team that we would be making it into Project Skyway’s Inaugural bootcamp — talk about some excitement! We were young entrepreneurs just getting our start and were chosen as the top 25 companies to take part in Minnesota’s first ever technology accelerator against teams from all over the country and world. The week before boot camp weekend, my team and I worked on perfecting (or what we thought was perfecting) our elevator pitch and executive summaries. We made sure that all three of us were on the same page when it came to pitching our business to the esteemed members of the tech ecosystem that were going to be interacting with us and challenging us at bootcamp.
Bootcamp kicked off with an opening party on Friday night. Cem Erdem gave his welcome speech to the 25 teams chosen and the other members of community that made an appearance. After Cem’s speech, the Project Mavericks presented us with a few challenges to kick off the weekend.
Saturday morning we awoke from our camp we set up in our office in downtown Minneapolis and headed over to St. Paul to kick off the second day of bootcamp. Now you would think that sleeping in your office would not be the best place to sleep if you wanted to be on top of your game in the morning! However, at this point that was not much of an issue because I had already been setting up camp there for a few months to work on the startup. The second day of boot camp was a true entrepreneur’s bootcamp experience. We started the morning by pitching other team’s businesses to the group. We then moved on to round tables occupied with attorneys, marketing experts, head hunters, investors, strategic partnership gurus, and product development pros. All of these people were there to help us and challenge us with hard questions. Talk about getting raked over the coals! We learned a lot about our business and ourselves that day.
We started Sunday with about 4 hours of sleep but ready to kick some ass. We focused on crafting three separate pitches for the pitch session that would conclude bootcamp. We worked with Project Skyway’s pitch doctor, Chris Carlson, to perfect our pitches. The afternoon rolled around and it was time to pitch. Folks from the community were invited to come and watch. Each team gave three quick pitches and were rated by everyone in the audience. After the pitching was completed bootcamp was concluded and off to Alary’s bar we went!
A week or so later Project Skyway announced the eight companies that were chosen to move forward with the program. I started refreshing my phone browser on tech.mn at about 8am that morning and refreshed it once every 15 minutes until the news came out at about 10pm. Our team was included in the top eight!
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
On August 1st of 2011 Project Skyway’s first session kicked off, my team settled into our new workspace at CoCo and got to work. Cem and Casey hosted our first round table Monday morning meeting with all teams. Each team would discuss their accomplishments from the prior week, make plans for the week ahead, and also discuss personal accomplishments they were proud of with the group. These meetings were a key asset to the program. It empowered all teams to share any challenges that they were having with the group in a confidential atmosphere. It was like having 15 founders on your team that are just as passionate about your business as you are.
During the first week of the program my team and I had a disagreement on the strategic direction we needed to take the company. My business partners decided to change the business model back to a traditional property management company. At this point they were not a good fit for Project Skyway and left the program. I am very passionate about technology and did not have a high level of interest in being an IT guy for a property management company. I decided that I would no longer participate with the founders of that company. Completely unexpected, Cem and Casey gave me the opportunity to move forward with Project Skyway as a founder of a new company. I accepted their offer and started from scratch.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
CribFrog was born! This was a very exciting change of direction for me. I lost 2 cofounders but I felt as if I could move faster on things. It was much easier to make decisions and execute. If I needed advice or someone to bounce an idea off I had an entire arsenal of Captains, Gurus, and other Skywalkers. My biggest challenge at this point was limited time needed to execute.
Each Monday after our round table meetings with the other Skywalkers we would meet with Captains as a group. During our meetings, each team would introduce themselves and their business. The Captain would speak about their successes and would then meet each team one on one. During these one on ones each Captain would take a different approach on what needed to be tweaked to make my business model successful in their eyes. Not only did I gain valuable insight for my business, I also learned many valuable things from these people. On many different occasions I would reference my experience during Project Skyway as “Working on my MBA.”
As the session moved forward and the Skywalker teams made progress on their businesses, our Monday morning meetings evolved into a more intimate discussion with the Captains. Each team would give their quick pitch to the group and the Captain(s) would ask questions and provide their feedback for 10 – 15 minutes per company. This was highly effective because each session was a new mix of very sharp minds working on my business model. It was also the perfect environment to craft and practice my quick pitch.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Every Thursday all the Skywalker companies would get together for a family dinner. The dinners were more casual however we would still invite Captains in to chat with us. Dinners were a good way follow up on the week’s progress and chat about any challenges that we were having. I really looked forward to the dinners because it was a good way to get to know the other Skywalkers, Captains, Cem, and Casey on a more personal level.
I’ve written some code but I’m not an experienced developer. Project Skyway provided a development team for each company. This team consisted of two developers and a project manager located in India. It was a bit of a challenge to learn how to effectively leverage these resources. Once I was able to present CribFrog to the development team in such a way that they completely understood the “what” and the “why” the development process took off like a rocket ship. This is the first time I’ve managed a web development project with an intense amount of back end logic. I now know that it takes twice as long and twice as much money to build the product.
It was early October and demo day was fast approaching. Demo Day was scheduled for the end of October and marked the completion of Project Skyway’s first cycle. Up until this point I had focused more on cultivating my business model and developing my product. I had hardly worked on my story for demo day. I was starting to feel the pressure as some of the other teams already had a story crafted and were practicing their pitch. Over the course of the program I was regularly meeting with Chris Carlson to plan the content of my story. Most of our sessions were recorded so I was able to listen to them and begin building an outline for my pitch. Once the outline was created, Chris and I met to clean it up a bit and start working on the content of the story.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
I then started practicing, practicing, and practicing my pitch. I practiced by myself, I practiced in front of other Skywalkers, I practiced in front of Chris, I practiced in front of Cem and Casey, and I practiced in front of my friends. I would say that I ran through my pitch about 30 times, each time tweaking and changing things. One of the biggest problems that I struggled with was speed. I tended to run through my presentation very fast, coming off sloppy and sometimes confusing. With Chris’s help I was able to use certain tactics to slow down and better articulate my sentences. With all this help and practice, Demo Day was a success. I was the third Skywalker to pitch and it went extremely well. When the pitches were complete I had the opportunity to network with some known investors in the Twin Cities. You know that awesome feeling that you get when you’ve completed a very important presentation that you’ve been anticipating for a long time? Well I lived off that high for about a week after that presentation!
Project Skyway introduced me to a whole new world. I’ve experienced what it takes to begin the execution of “a good idea.” I now know what it’s like to be a true entrepreneur, it’s not easy but it feels right. I would like to thank everyone from Minnesota’s technology ecosystem for fostering the success of CribFrog and Project Skyway.
I am continuing to work on CribFrog, the private social network for neighbors. I should have a beta product out by the end of this year. If you have any questions or would like to find out more, feel free to reach out to me or sign up for my mailing list.