Vital Statistics

When: September 9th - 12th, 2010
Where: Bloomington, Indiana
What: “The Combine is a display of talent, entrepreneurship and innovation. It’s an event about tech, specifically the people, ideas and environments that drive technology.”
Featured Speakers: See below
Ticket price as of writing: $199 (buy yours) 

Lucky for you, the guys at SproutBox love the town of Bloomington, Indiana, and work hard and pull their connections to draw some of the internet’s top innovators closer to home.

For the first time, they’ve put together a technology conference in Indiana that startup founders are excited to go to. It’s called the Combine and is designed in the spirit of another “midwest” conference called Big Omaha. Since you’ve probably never heard of that either, just picture all the talent, creativity, and innovation of SXSW, but in a setting where you can spend some time getting to know interesting people, instead of spending all your time fighting the throngs of people.

Just check out the lineup of this year’s speakers. Did you ever think you’d find a group of people like this just an hour south of downtown Indianapolis? And I wouldn’t be surprised if they added more before the event.

The price might seem steep to all of you starving founders trying to make something happen, but I promise you there isn’t a better value this close to home.

Mark Hill of Collina Ventures presenting at Hackers and Founders - Indianapolis

I wrote a response to a post on Smaller Indiana by Doug Karr about the 21 Fund and their mission.

In particular, I was responding to this quote: “(Steve Hourigan) shared that the benefit of the fund really isn’t the money as much as it is the education that they could be providing companies with the right resources.”

My comment:

“I really enjoyed this post and your commentary on the 21 Fund, although it has left me confused about what the 21 Fund’s mission is - but I think that’s the point. Their mission isn’t what I thought it was or what most people think it is.

I’d be interested in hearing more about what “education” the 21 Fund is providing. I think the industry of educating entrepreneurs is already oversubscribed. I shudder to think how many productive hours have been wasted teaching a group of “entrepreneurs” the different ways to finance a startup. I say wasted because most people who consume this knowledge will never end up starting a business or are years away from using it.

Financing a startup is just one of those subjects that comes up a lot. There are plenty of others like which corporate entity to choose and how to hire your first employees.

This type of entrepreneur education feels good but it doesn’t move the needle. This type of generic education is a Google search away and the doers, the people who start businesses and create value from nothing, don’t usually get their entrepreneurship education from sitting in a classroom.

Most of the education someone needs when starting a business is very time sensitive and subject specific. For instance with Pocket Tales, my biggest issue today, June 9th, is redesigning our application UI. We also have a lingering issue of hiring a tech lead, and that is actually a place I think the 21 Fund could really help the state of Indiana.

How can we better match technical talent, whether it’s software “technical” or medical “technical,” with business talent to form stronger founding teams?

How can we imbue more people in Indiana with the attitude of “screw it, let’s do it,” instead of training them to sit in classrooms consuming knowledge, further delaying the act of creating until they know all the answers?

As you and I both know Doug, you never know all the answers. You only hope you can find the right answer when you need it, and you don’t have the time or the resources to think much beyond today’s bottleneck.

Just my two cents about most of the entrepreneur education I see.”

The best thing about starting a company in Indianapolis is you can avoid the “startup” hype. Indianapolis in general (not the tech community, but the general community) doesn’t care about startups. The only way they’ll pay attention to you is if you’re successful.

This is a good thing.

Even the most good intentioned founders can get caught up in the hype.

• The hype is what makes you seek unnecessary press, twitter followers, facebook fans, and other vanity metrics. 
• The hype is what makes you worry about how much money you’re raising, who you’re investors are, and who your partners are regardless of how it’s helping you serve your customer. 
• The hype is what makes you feel like you’ve accomplished more than you have or less than you have. 
• In general, the hype distorts the reality, which is lethal

If you phrase that another way, you also get the worst thing about starting a company in Indianapolis - it’s harder for legitimate startups to attract any hype. 

• The hype helps you get press, twitter followers, and facebook fans which help market your product
• The hype helps you raise money, attract strategic investors, and strategic partners to better serve your customers
• The hype can make you feel like you’ve accomplished more than you have which is good for morale, or less than you have, which pushes you to achieve more
• In general, the hype distorts the reality, which if channeled correctly, can be helpful

As they say, “all things in moderation.”

We have a new name, a new website, and a new meetup.

Don’t worry, the mission is staying the same - to bring together Indianapolis’ startup community.

Our next meetup is Monday, February 1 at the Upper Room (located upstairs at Broad Ripple Steak House). Click through to join the group and RSVP

The Indianpolis-based mobile answer service ChaCha and I have had a tumultuous relationship.

It started out great, like most relationships do. I’m talking about Autumn 2007 through Winter 2008. I loved ChaCha and I used it often for serious reasons (What’s the address of the Broad Ripple Brew Pub?), for curiosity’s reasons (What does the Pope’s brother do?), and for laughs (NSFW).

I showed ChaCha off to all my friends. They loved it and used it to.

Then something happened. I’m not sure what and I couldn’t tell you exactly when, but in ChaCha’s quest for a sustainable business model, their service completely fell off a cliff. I stopped getting responses to my questions, or if I did, it would come 30 minutes later. Sometimes I was told I was out of questions (see below). Sometimes they would ask me multiple tedious questions about what phone I was using, and after I answered they would then tell me I was out of questions (to this I would scream outloud “But I haven’t asked a question in 4 months!)

I stopped using ChaCha then, which should have ended the drama, but there was another event that would really add to it…

Read More

There was a great write up in Techcrunch about a product from Indianapolis-based startup formspring called formspring.me. (Almost anytime a local company gets attention in Techcrunch, I get excited)

If you haven’t heard of it, formspring.me is a super simple tool that allows people to ask you a question anonymously. It’s particularly popular on Tumblr.

I know a few of the guys at formspring, and from what I’m told they created formspring.me AFTER users started using their core product for this social networking purpose. While this doesn’t quite rank up there with penicillin, it’s always cool to see unexpected discoveries from just doing great work.

When Yaw and I decided to start Pocket Tales before we had a programmer on board (we must be idiots right?) we knew hiring was going to be one of our biggest, most important challenges.

To be frank, it’s been a much bigger challenge that we expected, but a few months ago we made our first technical hire. Jeromy Darling joined our team just before Thanksgiving as our frontend developer. This particular hire came as a surprise for a couple reasons 1) He’s located in Minneapolis and we were sure we wanted someone from Indianapolis 2) He wasn’t referred to us and usually the best hires are referrals.

We’re ecstatic with the result, but it was a long road. Below are some details of our process which should help anyone out there trying to hire technical resources in Indianapolis:

Our Strategy

Hiring is important but we believed it was also something that could still be bootstrapped and done well with a lot of time and effort, something Yaw and I had plenty of. Our strategy was to offer a compelling position (livable salary, co-founder’s portion of equity, cool job, great company mission) and to blast it out to as many relevant friends and sites as we could.

Additionally, we knew were going to need to hire multiple skill sets to complete our application, so we posted 4 positions (Frontend Developer, Backend Developer, Graphics/UI Designer, Rich Internet Applications Developer); however, our intention was to only make one hire in the beginning and we were leaning towards hiring a Frontend or Backend Developer first.

What We Were Looking For

Here were the most important qualities we were looking for when we started our search. I put them in order of importance:

1. Experience building web applications
2. Unbridled enthusiasm for our idea
3. Available to work full-time
4. Ability to fill multiple technical roles (e.g. Can do both graphic design and frontend programming)
5. Desire to work for a startup
6. Located in Indianapolis
7. Able to serve as a technical lead

These qualities were required for all 4 of the open positions we posted.

Sources of Job Applicants

Below is a list of how applicants heard about our job openings. Most of these are sites where we posted the job ourselves; however, a few are job aggregator sites. In total we had 145 applicants and we invited 23 for phone interviews. We invited 2 people for second round interviews, although that number would likely have been higher if we decided to fill some of the other positions we posted.

Website (http://www.pockettales.com/)
35 total applicants
7 invited for phone interviews
It probably goes without saying that you should post your job openings on your website or your blog. Note: This “source” is a catch-all bucket for us. If someone contacted us and we didn’t know where they came from we put them down as “website.”

Craigslist (http://indianapolis.craigslist.org/)
34 total applicants (including Jeromy whom we hired)
5 invited for phone interviews
We only posted our position to the “Indianapolis” section of Craigslist. I wanted to post it to more cities but the Craiglist spam bots are aggressive and undoubtedly would have flagged and removed my multiple listings. As it turned out, my listings did get flagged the first time because our 4 job openings contained a lot of similar language. Despite the spam bots, you will get the most spam from Craiglist.

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ExactTarget continues to be Indianapolis’ premier darling. Even the location of their offices on Monument Circle, the heart of downtown, is the perfect analogy for the position they hold in the Indianapolis tech community.

As much as I look up to and try to emulate ExactTarget, I think too often their success is used as proof that the Indianapolis startup community is thriving.

As this Indianapolis Business Journal article jokes, the Indianapolis tech community didn’t get ExactTarget back in 2000: “They couldn’t even raise $1 million,” recalled Kidd, now a senior vice president at Indianapolis-based Walker Research, who admits to scratching his head at just what the entrepreneurs were proposing to do back then.”

What I wonder is, has this mentality really changed? If ExactTarget started today, and email marketing was just as much a new concept as it was back in 2000, would it have an easier time getting funded?

There are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about Indianapolis, but the vitality of a startup community is proven by the accomplishments of…well, startups. ExactTarget hasn’t been a startup for 9 years.

With our first event we had a great turn out of ~40 people, all of whom were involved with fast growing startups in the Indianapolis area.

Details:
Monday, December 7, 2009
6:00 - 9:00pm
Upstairs of Broad Ripple Steak House

Click through to RSVP on our Facebook page.