As I look back on 2019, Startup School was one of two things I did that I can honestly say were the best use of my time. (The other if you are curious was the CodeSLO bootcamp).
As an entrepreneur, it's a extremely helpful to be part of a community like SUS.
They have created a pretty amazing framework of support consisting of:
A massive library of 300+ tutorials on how to start a tech company
A dashboard to set weekly goals and track progress
A community of over 40,000 other startups with a weekly group session to pitch your company and get advice from your peers.
Deals for early phase startups from service providers (now requires 4 concurrent weekly updates)
http://callswitchboard.com/ Some of them are using https://provely.io/ on their landing pages. It really got me thinking that PubWriter is the ultimate A/B Website Testing Tool. Why? Can you can spin up new pages so quickly. You test. You see where the clicks go. It's a great way to create a 'digital flier' and gain insight into who is stopping to look at the flier you posted! My elevator pitch... PubWriter is the fastest way to publish a website. Beginning with set of templates optimized for google, you can spend less time designing a website and more time writing quality content. A simple save-to-publish technology automates publishing through your own Dropbox. Click save and the page is published or updated. PubWriter is ideal for fans of Markdown, users of minimalist editors, and anyone who needs a professional pre-built websites. PubWriter is a part of the static website generator ecosystem that are quickly becoming favored over drag and drop editors of yesterday. To date we have over 50 sites and published over 1000 pages.
This was the most valuable part of the experience! Getting an opportunity to give your elevator pitch to over 50 other founders is amazing experience! My pitch:
Write locally, publish globally.™ Pubwriter publishes to your site seconds after you click save. No login or uploading required 😀 Automates publishing to your domain so you can focus on your writing!
Year 1
Here are the companies I shared sessions with:
Givestack - Tyler Morten
Opterview (no show)
Growthipedia - Masterminds for Real Estate Investors
Mike Tatum - Leads for Realtors (Adwords & Facebook ad campaigns for $500/mo. plus ad cost)
Youth Innovation Lab (http://www.youthinnolab.com/) - Long Island, NY.
Excelleo LLC (https://www.excelleo.com/) - Wael Damra. No code platform. Similar to Sales Force. Small to Mid Sized Business.
omma365.com - Medical MJ - Alibaba for Medical Marijuana - Portal to bring the different entities in the state of OK to be able to do business easily. Also bringing the businesses to the consumer/ medical patients at no cost.
Alridaa - ??
PRORECLAMADOR - Help people and businesses have access to 5 stars legal services without having to worry about initial fees or having to walk into a lawyer`s office.
YummyThreads - Various collections of food-based home goods and apparel. Designs are created using high quality photos or digitally drawn art.
Khross - Derek Sawaya
Tripviary - Franco Sanchez
NoPareshan - Aditya Nanagiri
GroWrk Remote - Carlos Escutia - Since Nov. Product Hunt Tonight!
Daybook - Bino Thomas
Chowjoy - Danil Kozyatnikov
Safe Deal - protect yourself from bad deals, scams and poor service.
Nicolas de Mauroy - 10 minutes Open Lowcode tutorial - Open Lowcode
Nedko Nedkov - Brandvertisor.com - Marketing & Advertising Agencies Partnership Program
Apollo.io: Sequences - Email, calls, and task steps. With these, our platform builds a continuously improving structure around your engagement strategy. Clients can't pay? What if you don't give 'em the leads until they do? Q. If you were suddenly given $5k for marketing, how would you spend it?
Put the money into offline promotional materials.
PR/Media Outreach, Entrepreneur Mag., anywhere I could get valuable backlinks for SEO
LinkedIN (create short videos for Social Media/YouTube)
Consult with Adam Robinson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k&t=381s
Startup Grind as a genre.
Find a Product Hunter to get your product featured on ProductHunt.
Put analytics on a single page or add a simple a form on a page. Measure how well it converts!
Check out IndieHackers.
Check out Webflow for fast web development (Adrian gave it a huge endorsement).
Use AirTable?
Hunter.io - wow!
Codepen as a mastermind for coders!?
Twilio
It hit me after tonight that these group sessions are kinda like Speed Masterminds (think of speed dating, only for entrepreneurs!) - you never know what you're gonna get! Some groups are awesome, other less so. One thing I found helpful was to share my linkedin page @ the group session, so we could follow-up with each other afterwards: https://www.linkedin.com/in/50interviews/
PubWriter is a synchronous publishing framework (pages are published when saved) static website generator that integrates with Dropbox. Optimized for Markdown, Bootstrap, and JavaScript.
A effortless web publishing framework for Dropbox. Write locally, publish globally.™ Pubwriter publishes to your site seconds after you click save. No login or uploading required 😀 Automates publishing to your domain so you can focus on your writing! Pubwriter is a static website generator that publishes from your Dropbox to your website after you click save. No login or uploading required. Automates publishing to your domain so you can focus on your writing! It's a save-to-publish framework built on a Markdown, Bootstrap & JavaScript toolset within infinite possibilities. Write locally, publish globally.™
What do you do?
How far along are you?
How big is the market? 500 Million Dropbox Users (Source: Forbes/2018)
How will you make money? After introductions, feel free to ask clarification questions if you didn't understand someone else's investor pitch.
Go around again in the same order and share what you accomplished last week in relation to your primary metric, your biggest obstacle, and what you hope to accomplish next week. (in relation to your primary metric) Try to be concise. Don't just list everything crossed off your todo list. Only share what made a difference. If the primary metric is zero and growth is zero, that's okay. If you think you can help someone with their biggest obstacle, do share. After everyone finishes, feel free to ask follow up questions and switch to open discussion. Celebrate your successes! Last month...
Gracie Museum went live and Portuguese mirror site
Finished Clippers? Waiting on client. Last week...
Started putting out themes on codepen for live demos What if you measured your progress during SUS?
While I loved the weekly group sessions, It would be spectacular if SUS found a way to assign a successful SUS alumni to sit in on each session and offer their words of wisdom.
Indie Hackers. Less structured, but great community as well.
