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…

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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.

Like a good lifestyle designer, I try to adhere to a low-information diet. While my Google Reader and @bknotts twitter account subscribes to much more, these are the select few information sources that don’t receive the “mark all read” kiss of death without actually being read.

Notice that none of these are from Indianapolis. I’m still looking for those people who can provide consistently great content on the startup and innovation scene here in Indy.

I started this blog because I saw that as a gaping hole in our community and I have some friends who are doing their part too, like Drew Loftus at RewardSnap, David Weisburd of Indy Tickets Express, and Matt Hunckler of Repurify. They along with some other friends have started an ongoing meetup for people interested in Indianapolis startups which I will certainly be sharing more about.

In the meantime, check out these content sources to learn something about startups and get your inspirational fix.

Fred Wilson
Blog: www.avc.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/FredWilson

Wilson is a New York-based venture capitalist with a focus on early stage web services. His blog posts are pithy and you can expect great gems of wisdom on nitty gritty details like this post on the affect of options pools on valuation. Follow his tweets too since they’re infrequent (once or twice daily) and interesting.

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In startup hotbeds like Silicon Valley, Boston, and even New York it’s common for law firms to work out special arrangements with startups who generally have little cash (usually that’s why they need a law firm in the first place, to raise cash). These law firms are willing to defer payment until the cash is raised or even accept equity as payment.

Law firms in Indianapolis are also familiar with special arrangements for startups.

At Pocket Tales, we’ve looked to Nick Mathioudakis from Baker & Daniels for help, but I’ve also seen Barnes & Thornburg, Alerding Castor, and to a lesser extent Ice Miller (although right now they have a case study for a startup on their homepage), hanging around the Indianapolis startup scene.

This is great for the startup but obviously there’s something in it for the law firm too. Assuming they continue to survive, startups generally require a lot of legal work and a successful startup can be a big revenue source for law firms. Mint Founder Aaron Patzer estimated legal costs of $10,000 - $50,000/ month not including special events like incorporation and additional rounds of fundraising.

What if you’re not quite ready to seek professional legal advice?

You can help yourself.

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