But as the founders of any website, even these guys, will tell you, money doesn’t come rolling in once a site’s launched. So we’re live, and the balance on the bank account isn’t moving much, so what’s next? We’re now starting the real “business” phase of our operation, where the focus is on branding, marketing, advertising and sales, all for driving more users and restaurant relationships. We’ve been going through lots of marketing books and talking to like-minded entrepreneurs recently and we’ll share some details in a future post.

Kicking off a new project phase requires a lot of discussion, so I flew into Chicago late Wednesday night for our seventh(!) working session. The main goal for this session is to create a coherent and consistent marketing, advertising and sales strategy that we can run with for the foreseeable future. And as if the weather gods were also heralding our change in focus, my arrival was greeted with a massive cold front, freezing wind and snow showers. What’s life without the little challenges?

-John

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We felt that having a private beta test was absolutely critical to our business, as it’d be our last chance to make any major changes (both for the site and the business direction) before opening it to the general public. We had a couple of goals for the beta:

1. Solicit feedback and suggestions.
2. Build a base of data – user contributions help our site, and we wanted to get the process started.
3. Publicize – a beta test is one of the first steps in a long road of publicing and marketing our site.
4. Test our systems – this is possibly the most overlooked aspect of having a beta. Since there’s just two of us, we need to be sure we’re ready to handle all the issues that might occur when running the site.

So far the beta’s been going well, and we’ve been receiving a ton of good feedback, which just makes us busier than ever.  I guess it’s a good problem to have.   Stay tuned, we’ll have more updates about the beta process as it continues…

-JL

The recording lasts an hour and can be a bit dry at times, but there’s a lot of good nuggets of wisdom, like where your company should be before being appealing to investors (when you have decent customer traction). Even though we’re not looking for investors right now the clip is still useful to help learn about the rules (and rulemakers) of the startup game. Check it out if you’ve got the time.

-JL

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1. Release Early
2. Keep Pumping Out Features
3. Make Users Happy
4. Fear the Right Things
5. Commitment is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
6. There’s Always Room
7. Don’t Get Your Hopes Up

Of course, just reading the list doesn’t provide enough context for any real benefit; you should read the full essay. Paul lays out convincing arguments and compelling examples for each lesson, and his track record with startups proves he knows what he’s talking about. With respect to our startup, I was heartened to see that the article validates a number of beliefs we already have towards our project, and serves as a great heads-up for other points to keep in mind.

-JL

Since we decided to take the quitting route, I thought I’d comment on a few of our decision points (since they somewhat relate to the articles):

• Knowing how we work, we decided that doing something on the side would not give the venture the time it deserved. We figured, if you’re going to do it, then do it right and well.
• We figured that we had enough saved up to last enough time to determine if we have something worthwhile.
• We decided that with our venture, we didn’t need or want seed money. According to our analysis, we think we can launch it on our own funds and soliciting venture funding opens up a whole new bucket of things to deal with. We’d rather concentrate on building our product.

Of course there’s no right or wrong way to do it. If you’re thinking about doing it, just weigh all the options, do some planning, and have the confidence in yourself to follow through either way.

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• Easily share calendars with other google account holders
• Gmail integration – when you send an email you can also send a calendar invite (similar to sending a meeting invite using Outlook)
• Comments on events – anyone can make comments on the event so you can also use it as a planning tool (and you can allow or prevent others from inviting others to the event)
• Have your daily agenda sent to you via email. Have other notifications via email or SMS to your phone.
• Easily search for and subscribe to public calendars (holidays, sports/tv schedules, etc.)
• Beautiful AJAX implementation – no downloads required and a very quick and rewarding user experience (seems quicker than gmail)

We’re trying to use it to help manage our schedule, milestones and tasks (supposedly a task list is coming soon too). We planned out the phases of work to complete for the next few months including tasks for each and then placed them on a shared calendar that we can both see and edit. The phases show up as multi-day events and in the notes we have the tasks outlined. We can then make comments on the event about each task’s status. Ok, it’s not the most elegant solution, but it’s good enough for our purposes. We tried using basecamp but we found that we didn’t use it much since it involved checking yet another website. It’s much easier for us to check Google Calendar when we check Gmail. Score another for Google.

-JC

While we didn’t have the crazy excitement of breaking ground on a new project, we were still energized and motivated and got a lot of stuff done, including:

• code-completion of our first-pass functionality
• tracing the core use scenarios and one-offs to create a set of core test cases and plans for more
• continued iterations with Julie on the logos and site design
• investigation of our production needs
• planning our large-block work items for the coming months

All in all, a very productive two weeks. It’s nice to see the project start to come together, and it’ll be much easier to accomplish work items separately as we were able to eliminate a lot of the ambiguities that can make early-stage project work tough. Now for the highlight reel:

• getting a PO box
• admiring our official business Operating Agreement – what a beautifully printed stock Word document
• the first purchase with our spiffy new corporate card
• multiple costco runs for cheap polish sausages and massive quantities of light beer
• the Diet Pepsi+Diet Mountain Dew+chicken+spinach debacle
• blowing our food budget by being too happy at happy hour
• one really, really clogged toilet

We’ve got a full list of things to do before I head to Chicago in mid-April, including good-to-write-about stuff like trademarking, business foreign entity registration, and site deployment processes. Stay tuned for more to come! For those who are really curious, mark your summer calendars for our projected Beta release. Exactly when in the summer depends on how many happy hours we can avoid.

-JL

The “Basics” workshop I attended was $50 and it went from 9am to 4pm. The class had pretty good attendance – probably about 30 aspiring entrepreneurs, ranging from knitting to web design to construction. The topics were taught either by SCORE counselors or local professionals who volunteer their services. Here are the items that were covered:

• Intro: What is SCORE? The secrets to a successful business – Henderson Feagin, SCORE counselor
• Legal: How to select the legal structure of your business and how to pick an attorney – Ms. Daliah Saper, Attorney
• Insurance: How to protect you and your business – Larry Hyman, Insurance Industry Specialist
• Financial Basics: Determining funding needs and different sources – Bob Leventry, SCORE counselor
• Accounting and Taxes: Basics of tracking revenue and expenses along with how to file the appropriate tax forms – Tom Redler, SCORE counselor
• Marketing and Business Plan: How to develop and marketing and financial business plan – Elliot Shear, SCORE counselor

Overall, I was very pleased with the class (which included handouts: templates, IRS forms, guides, etc.). It was definitely a whirlwind of everything, but the instructors/counselors were very knowledgeable with many of them very experienced industry veterans and owners of their own small businesses (with plenty of entertaining stories ). The class environment was also comforting because you see all the other normal folk out there who are trying to do the same thing as you – follow their dreams and achieve financial independence – and that alone makes the whole process less intimidating.

Fun fact: According to the SBA, small businesses represent 99.7% of all employers in the US. More Info.

-JC

Core to any business plan:

• Executive summary
• Mission statement
• Market and position: What is the market you are going after and what is your unique selling proposition (competitive advantage)?
• Business model: How exactly do you plan on making money?
• Marketing: How will you reach your customers?
• Financial projections: Revenue and expense per customer? When is breakeven?

If you’re writing it for investors (existing or potential), you’ll be taking a more management perspective. It will include more information about the management team (who are they and why they are qualified to execute on this plan), and the company valuation and investment needs. The business plan will also have to be more polished and well-written. This form of the business plan needs to sell your audience on you (the management team) and your value proposition.

If you’re writing it for yourself for validation and planning purposes, you’ll be taking a more tactical perspective. There will need to be more focus on the details and thought about how you are going to execute. The business plan itself might be in the form of bulleted items instead of beautifully flowing text, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t spend any less time doing the deep thought. This form of the business plan is to validate with yourself that this is a viable business worth your time and also helps you plan the activities to reach your goals. I would say this form is a stepping stone to the investor version. If you can’t prove it to yourself, you won’t prove it to anyone else (even with slick writing).

Whichever plan you’re writing, make sure your intentions are true and you are critically analyzing the business. If you’re just going through the motions of filling in the blanks, you won’t do nearly as thorough a job as you should be doing and you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot…and, unless it’s the left foot, that’s not the way to start off.

What does it mean to define the product vision? If what you had was a great idea for a screenplay, the product vision would likely be a rough outline of the major plot points. Even if you aren’t blessed with “the vision thing”, you can still find success in this step. Coming up with the product vision involves thinking beyond just the jazzy whiz-bang of the initial idea and answering some very important (and basic) questions:

• who is the target customer?
• what is the problem your solution is solving?
• how is your solution going to make money?

In the course of addressing these questions, we found that our initial idea was actually not the best solution for the problem we were trying to solve, but we were able to make adjustments and enhancements so that we were truly happy with our end result. Trying to answer the money question also forced us to be creative with applications for our solution that we might have otherwise ignored.

In the end, this process turned “just another neat idea” into a vision for something that we we’re willing to bet the next N months/years of our lives on. I’d say that that’s time well spent.