Recently I got to sit down with TechHustlers‘ (@techhustlers) Eric Strait (@ericstrait) and had a conversation via Skype over the atlantic between Cologne, DE and San Marco, TX.
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with my new friend, Vidar Andersen, & founding genius behind the “people magnet” app Gauss! We recently had the craziest happenstance way of connecting and believe it or not, we meet each other via Glancee, one of his competitors app at SXSW! He happened to be the closest SXSW event attendee staying near my home, so I thought I would connect. Little did I know, he was actually launching their direct competitor app Gauss. Gauss is a mobile app that let’s you discover and connect with interesting people around you. They describe it as a “People Magnet for your pocket.” I would not just say this and just blow smoke up your a$%, but after Vidar demoed Gauss to me, I was blown away at it made Glancee look like an amature! […]
Wow! Thank you, Eric!
Make my day: Get Gauss on the Apple App Store for free and start discovering new people around you today! :)
Recently I was invited to speak and share some of my experiences as an entrepreneur at Betahaus Cologne‘s Startup Supper event.
Startup Supper is an informal evening dinner event where invited startup entrepreneurs share selected stories from their experience and answer questions from the audience.
The subject of my little chat was “going from nothing to something”, about how I got from just an idea to building an actual team and shipping an actual product beta with our startup Gauss – The People Magnet.
Here’s the main points:
Search XING, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and events for talent, potential co-founders, line up dates
Attend as many tech and startup events as possible in your city
Create your own events to attract your people if the existing ones aren’t
Have coffee dates with as many potential co-founders as possible
Avoid people who overlap your skill set too much
Avoid people who are all talk and no do
Avoid people who don’t align with your values
Try to find small projects to work together on before getting to third base
Talk to everybody about everything (screw NDAs)
Only promise what you can deliver, no ponies and double rainbows (instead: pain, suffering, hard work and real possible risk of personal bankruptcy)
Have a name, a logo and some impressive mockups of what you want to build made before you can expect any traction with potential co-founders and other helpers (paint more salient pictures in the real world to accompany your nebulous dream speak before expecting other people to grasp what you’re talking about, let alone join in on your vision and team up
Communicate your needs to everyone, everywhere (this is not the time to be secretive)
Offer equal equity split for any potential co-founder(s), save discussions
Get into a startup competition event, use it as leverage to get accepted to the next, make sure to shoot it on video, bring your own crew to shoot it or have someone in the audience do it for you with their phone or yours
Publish everywhere, nag people, get our of your comfort zone
Dont’t give up, keep on going (if you are feeling despaired, you’re only just beginning – keep going)
In summary, it took about six months of searching and dating to attract and recruit the right people. From there on it took a month to build a prototype (MVP) and another four months to reach a public beta stage and another three months before we launched on the Apple AppStore.
I was recently invited to speak about my lessons learned as a startup entrepreneur at the steps2startup program at the University of Cologne.
steps2startup is a student initiative at the University of Cologne to help young people interested in startups and entrepreneurship build their network and exchange experiences and ideas with like-minded people. It is important for entrepreneurs to get started on their ideas and build on their business, so they will need as much advice as they can get, this may even mean contacting a trade secret lawyer California firm or a firm in their location so they can see how they can protect their ideas.
It was inspiring to see about 50+ student in attendance at a very busy exam time.
1.) It’s just a whole lot of damned good fun!
2.) SWAMS has got to be one of best Startup Weekends anywhere
3.) I recently founded Startup Weekend Cologne so I had to attend a Startup Weekend as a requirement – Stay tuned for more!
James Digby (@digbyj) kicking it all off:
Then the awesome legendary Steve Blank (@sgblank) made a cameo appearance and I just had to ask him if he invests in European startups – On which he retorted I should first take some of his classes. Hah, so we meet again, Steve! I think I’ll have to take you up on that one! :)
Easygiving.co winning the grand prize for thinking big; A non-profit charity where 100% of your donations go to the cause:
And of course I couldn’t help pitching myself and accidentally ended up winning the Startup Weekend Spirit award for our team http://lunchroulette.co for completely p0wning the judges and capturing the audience but also by telling the story of the learning made, how we invalidated the business model of some other guy’s idea I had originally joined, how the team then collapsed and the idea owner going home, leaving us basically a couple of hours on the last day to come up with this.
Almost exactly one year after i presented Lunch Roulette at Startup Weekend Amsterdam, I was visiting the new Facebook HQ in Menlo Park and found out that they had implemented some of the ideas for their staff internally.
Hah! Even the logo looked uncannily familiar! I’ll take that as validation, thank you.
See for yourself:
Internal Facebook memo on the wall at the HQ in Menlo Park, June 2013.
On Thursday the 6th of May I attended the Freigeist Conference at Rheinenergie Stadium in Cologne. The conference connects movers and shakers in the regional online tech and marketing scene; marketers, agencies, programmers, global companies (Google, Microsoft, etc), start-ups, consultants, venture capital, funders, founders, investors and the like. I thought it would be a good opportunity to reconnect with old contacts, meet new and sample the general status of the regional tech scene.
I had to cut the conference short to attend to matters at work, not being able to attend the more social sessions and the start-up pitch competition in the evening, but here’s a rough of what I experienced before having to leave prematurely.
Google
Steffen Kramer from Google Germany showed off some of the tools they provide to plan, track and monitor online marketing efforts and a brief primer how to use them:
Google Insights For Search
Google Ad Planner
The Google Business Channel on YouTube provides more videos on their solutions.
I managed to live-stream some of the talks, but the network and software was unfortunately a bit flaky.
Thierhoff Consulting
Dr. Kai Thierhoff talked about successful German startup stories, but unfortunately – at least in my personal opinion – the focus of the talk was mostly on clones of US start-ups, the German mee-too companies that will, as I see it, have extreme problems sustaining business after launch (just a hint to copycats; the Internet knows no borders, you know) – and besides are very boring and very non-innovative. He also mention the brilliant presentation template from Sequoia Capital that is worth checking out if you are thinking of pitching VCs for funding.
Microsoft Azure
MSFT Azure is (like e.g. Amazon Web Services) a software and hardware answer to cloud computing needs with their respective products and services.
The potential applications of Microsoft Azure are vast so many people take exams like this az303 exam to earn certifications to show they have good knowledge of the application. These exams cover everything from network, storage, and security to cloud development to self-service management capabilities.
Carsten Humm, technology evangelist at MSFT held a basic primer on the concept and pricings. A selling point was that they comply with EU data storage and privacy laws – the data is saved within the EU should you require it.
He also mentioned that MSFT will be holding a BizSpark Camp in Cologne on the 24th of June if that’s your sort of thing.
Here’s a short primer on MSFT Azure lifted off YouTube:
Recently I got to sit down with TechHustlers‘ (@techhustlers) Eric Strait (@ericstrait) and had a conversation via Skype over the atlantic between Cologne, DE and San Marco, TX.
