Over the past year my brother David and I have experienced incredible highs (building the application or hearing we saved students from missing exams) and incredible lows (our text messaging won't work for a major carrier, the application crashed mid-day, we didn't get into to that incubator, again).

Inevitably, there will be more ups & more downs. I was interested in seeing if there was a trend, so I could learn to "stabilize" the roller-coaster ride a bit and stay focused. I've been using a really cool web application to monitor my mood called Mercuryapp. It allows you to track decisions & feelings. In my case, I was interested in my overall mood. It pings me 3 times/day and asks me how I'm feeling on a 1-5 scale. Since December 17th, my mood has been relatively stable (which is totally hypercritical to the "ups and downs" of this post). I may actually be getting better at managing my mood!

@CAgarland was kind enough to edit this post, and mentioned I need to elaborate on why I decided to do this. It's easy to get laser focused on your product & miss the big picture. I, for one am a candidate of this. All I think about is remind101, but there are other important things in life like healthy eating, friends, the gym, reading etc... I was finding that it was difficult to figure out how to balance all these things. I speculate that most 23 year olds have a full time job that starts around 8ish & ends at 5. This provides structure. For me, I have to define my own structure. Up at 7(ish) work, eat, workout etc...I'm still trying to get into a good routine but after a year it's starting to come together. So, Mercuryapp was a great tool to to track and benchmark the way I was feeling. Now, I can track what I did on the "good" days and figure out how to minimize the "bad" days. (It also let's you comment each day so if there is a specific event that occurs you can take note of it). 

Lessons learned on how to minimize the bad

• If you get denied, use it as fuel!
• Build a supportive community who believes in you & your company
• Focus on the good 
• Recognize what went wrong & learn from it
• Accept that you may very well fail 10 times before succeeding once.  

Meet Rob. Rob was connected to me through my friend Georgia. I was inspired to write this short post because I really admire what he's doing. He had the courage to quit his full time gig, move to a new city & not settle. He's on a mission to figure out what he loves to do and is trying to talk to different people. No level of expertise necessary, no industry prefereance, just need to love what you do. I recommended he check out Road Trip Nation & think he should speak with Megan about 52 cups. Any other recommendations? People want to talk to him? Everyone has a story! 

 

 

I've been meaning to write this post for a long time. In late November, we were invited to Techstars for a Day in NYC. For those of you who aren't familiar, Techstars is a seed stage incubator with roots in Boulder Colorado. They have since expanded to Seattle, Boston & New York. The basic idea: they give a small amount of money to a startup in exchange for equity in the company. You live in the designated location you applied to and work intensively for 3 months while getting advice from some of the best mentors in the world. These mentors have started, ran, and sold multi-million dollar companies. If you want to read more about them, check it out

The Story 

We applied to Techstars NYC with the hopes of advancing remind101 faster. I received an email from Dave Tisch at 1:00 am on Friday inviting us to the day-long event.  I booked my flight on a whim later that a.m., and was on the plane Friday night.  What a rush. I literally cried out of excitement when I first found out. 

The People

I met some amazing people and received invaluable advice. I got to chat with @garyvee who recommended we make remind101 fun:
"students need to laugh!" and "scale with people."  I found the second point to be very interesting. In a time when we have all this fancy technology to manage relationships, the best way to grow a company is really care about people. Care about your users. He really tells it like it is too, I felt as much energy meeting him in person as you see on TV & the web. During his talk, he made a few points I think are worth sharing:

• Business does not give a fuck about you (excuse the French). A lesson he explained with a story he told about a small company complaining to the daily deal king Groupon that they sold too many deals & couldn't handle the capacity. 
• Make yourself useful
• How do you scale? Scale with human beings who give a shit

David Cohen (Techstars founder) was nice enough to give me a free copy of Do More Faster (after I confessed my frugal-ness & lack of funds). Many lessons learned from "Do More Faster," it's a quick, must-read for all startupers. I lent the book to a friend but if anyone in Chicago wants to borrow it let me know! There were 49 other startups that day and some awesome young entrepreneurs. It's really energizing and makes me feel more competitive to be surrounded by such incredible talent.

Did We Get In?

The big question...did we get in? Unfortunately, no. It was very hard for me come to terms with that in the beginning. I guess that's where the whole "resiliency" part of a startup founder comes in. I've become accustom to no's and am doing my best to learn how to deal with it. This time, I gave myself one night to sulk. I could be as angry or down as I wanted.  But, in the morning, I had to wake up earlier and work harder (and smarter) than ever. And I did just that, 5:30am I was up pumping out work. After a few day's passed I really assessed the Techstars For a Day experience. A lot of good things happened: I got to meet some of the coolest people in the world that I really admire, Techstars obviously thought we had some potential because we were "pre-invited" and I got to mingle with all the past co-founders. I also realized that it was well worth the money I don't have to go because at least we tried! 

Major Lessons 

• Scale with humans 
• Try. We would have never known if we didn't try!
• Focus on the positives: we made great connections, learned a ton and have some really great traction with remind101 as it is (: 
• Resiliency: for any young person who is starting a company or even thinking about it, realize that this is a part of the experience. You too will have rejections & failures. I've found that the best way to deal with them is being 100% honest with yourself, getting back up and working harder. 

Worst case? I got a great book & free T-shirt (;