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 (;

 

This week I attended midventureslaunch, the largest startup conference in the Midwest. I was pretty impressed with the second day, a lot of successful local & national entrepreneurs with great advice. A key takeaway from the first talk?  Incubators are smart...got me thinking if we need one too! Y Combinator, Techstars, Excelerate & Dreamit folks were all there. A new incubator called 500startups just opened up too.

 

Sorry about the pictures quality, it was with my iphone. There's a few really interesting SMS statistics if you look hard enough...Send me a tweet if you have any questions.