My favorites:

2. If you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.

3. It is better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace.

4. Marketing is not a battle of products, it’s a battle of perceptions.

5. The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect’s mind.

6. Two companies cannot own the same word in the prospect’s mind.

This post originally appeared in Indy Spectator’s new endeavor Startup Spectator, an email newsletter for people following Indianapolis Startups. If you’re reading this, then you’d probably find some great things to do in Indianapolis by signing up for it.

Founders can hide their startup from the boss at their day job, but they can’t hide it from me. Until Google fulfills its promise of one day putting a tracking chip in every one of us, here’s your best guide to finding Indianapolis’ Mark Zuckerberg…

Broad Ripple Avenue

Hubbard & Cravens is the adopted co-working space for those who can’t afford offices and a hot meeting place for those who can. H&C is the best place to overhear investor pitches, first hire interviews, and other startup gossip. Friday after lunch is the best time to spot a founder. If you get there after 4pm, you missed them. They’re grabbing a drink at Barley Island, Brugge Brasserie, or the Broad Ripple Brew Pub.

(Expert tip: If your startup is in stealth mode or you don’t want to be interrupted, head to “Perk Up” which also has free wifi and is off the main drag.)

Monument Circle

Downtown has its startup aura, too, for many reasons, not the least of which are its being home to start up success Exact Target, The Venture Club, and the 21st Century Fund. For startups trying to attract out-of-town hires, there are few better venues than an office overlooking Monument Circle for selling the virtues of both Indianapolis and an equity-based salary.

The Mira Awards

An event not a place, the Mira Awards are the Oscars for Indiana’s tech industry. Although the companies winning the awards are easily found in yesterday’s news, the attendees are usually working on the next big thing you’ve never heard of. Collect extra drink tickets for an easy conversation starter.

Indianapolis International Airport

“Crossroads of America” or “Fly-over State,” whichever motto you choose to adopt, doing business in Indiana often means getting out of Indiana. Here’s where cyber-stalking can help you identify your next angel investor since everyone likes to look like a jetsetter with their Foursquare checkin - although, all the early adopters have already switched to Planely.

IUPUI

It’s a good time for startups that merge the art of design and the science of computer programming, and IUPUI’s Media Arts & Science Program in the Informatics school does just that. Look for a class called “I590 - Entrepreneurship in Informatics” taught by Mark Hill and usually offered in the Fall. Its weekly guest lectures are an Indy entrepreneur hall of fame. Don’t worry if you’re not a student. Founders learn it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Earth House

Home to the 400 member strong Hackers and Founders Meetup, the Earth House is a proxy for Meetup.com which is where you can find every niche of Indianapolis’ startup community. Even Indianapolis Ruby Brigade and IndyPy agreed on Meetup for organizing their groups’ activities, but don’t expect the same when you ask them what language to build your coupon app in.

Some of the highlights:

“Pre-dodgeball I went thru 3-4 years thinking I was going to meet some magical engineer who would build all the stuff I was thinking about.  But I never met that person, so I taught myself ASP and MS Access (yikes! eventually PHP an MySQL) out of a book and got to work just hacking stuff together.  I’m still a really shitty programmer”

“Don’t let people tell you your ideas won’t work…If you’re passionate about an idea that’s stuck in your head, find a way to build it so you can prove to yourself that it doesn’t work.”

Even if you don’t have a single “ask” I recommend saying something like, “listen, I’m going to make this call short.  I don’t have anything I’m asking for, I was just hoping to get 10 minutes of your time to tell you what we’re up to so that the next chance we get to meet down the line you’ve got more of an understanding.” -Mark Suster

On the First Round Capital website we write that: “We love investing in technologies and business models that are able to shrink existing markets. If your company can take $5 of revenue from a competitor for every $1 you earn – let’s talk!”…

How wrong am I?

I think that’s all it would take to start a coworking space in Indy right now and I think time is a more important variable than quality of space or amenities.

Obviously the variable missing from this equation is people, but people don’t need funding. People are the funding. If you get the right people to frequent the space other people would follow.

Let’s call what I propose above the “minimum viable product” version of a coworking space in Indy. I know nothing about real estate but I have to assume there is an open space in Broad Ripple within walking distance of the avenue that’s been vacant for a depressingly long time. I also have to assume there are some desks, chairs, and maybe even a conference table just sitting around and some previously promising company that has gone out of business or since down-sized.

I haven’t tried to crunch the numbers so correct me if I’m woefully ignorant, but I think this could be established with very little funding, I’m going to even venture a guess and say less than $100,000, maybe much less. I think this is especially feasible if you can get a short term deal on a lease to prove that there is actually a market for this before you commit to an inescapable monthly rent payment which drastically increases your financial risk. (maybe people experienced in commercial real estate are laughing at me right now, but that’s why they’re not starting a coworking space).

If you think investors like “pre-order” signups and potential revenue, well, they absolutely love current customers and current revenue. I’d build something first and then try to raise a significant portion of the money.

I’m not trying to pick on Indy Coworking 3.0 aka Union Workplace. I don’t know anyone there (although I’d like to and I’d love to hear from them in the comments). I’m just musing on what’s the quickest way to get me and a lot of my friends out of the coffee shops we work in all the time, and into an office. I can’t remember when I first heard about them, but I think it was over a year ago and it seems (from the tweet above) they’ve been plagued by funding delays.

Who reading this would be willing to pay just to have a place to go whenever you wanted with desks, chairs, great internet connection, a room to make private phone calls, and most importantly, really smart ambitious people?

Forget all the style and amenities, who is interested in being an early adopter based on what I just described above?

I’m going to pose this question to everyone I see at Hubbard and Cravens this Friday. Maybe I’m wrong.

Indy needs a co-working space, a place that can be a hub of technology startups at their earliest stages, a place that host events like Hackers and Founders which at 110 RSVP’s to it’s latest meetup, keeps outgrowing the spaces it chooses.

Not only does Indy need it, but I think Indy would pay for it, and embrace it with so much buzz and word of mouth that anything other than grassroots, social media marketing a la @brewhouse style would be all the advertising it needed.

I remember at a board meeting at Powerset Peter Thiel asked us how the morale of the company was going.  Like all founders at board meetings, we said it was going great.

Peter said “let’s prove it.”

What we did is offer the following:

1. Anyone can voluntarily, permanently reduce their salary by one or more strata levels,
2. For each competency level forfeited you get XX,XXX more ESOP shares.

That’s from Steve Newcomb, the founder of Powerset, in a post that contains the most thorough, nearly step by step advice on implementing good hiring practices and culture at a company that I’ve encountered.

It’s long but worth the read.

For those who don’t know what Powerset is, Microsoft bought it for $100 million and it essentially became Bing. Steve Newcomb wasn’t the guy I met or insulted though. That co-founder of Powerset was Lorenzo Thione, and I insulted him as at a gay piano bar in New York called Marie’s Crisis.

After drunkenly begging the piano player to play “Gary, Indiana” (It was musicals night and that was the only musical song I knew any of the words too, plus, my friends and I were all from Indiana. No one in the bar was happy about this song choice.) my friend told me a guy he was talking to was from the Valley and that he’d started a company.

That’s all I knew. I had no idea who Lorenzo Thione was or what Powerset was. I can’t tell you exactly how that conversation went except that I didn’t hesitate to tell him that I thought starting a search engine was a dumb idea. I didn’t mince my words.

At that point in time, I was skeptical of anything that sounded like a “me too” idea to the point that I acted supercilious towards anyone not working on something innovative, and in my first 2 minutes of talking to Lorenzo, that’s how I assessed the situation. (Remember, I was drunk enough to request “Gary, Indiana,” and even that doesn’t begin to describe my state of inebriation. Also, I think there were a lot of new search engines in the news around that time like Cuil and WolframAlpha which really did disappoint)

I probably talked down to this guy for a good 10 or 15 minutes and he just heard me out. He never once took a shot back at me or even really acted annoyed.

He asked about me and I told him I had just started a company and was working on it full-time. He asked where I was from and I told him Indianapolis, and the only thing he had to say about me was “You’re trying to start a company? Then why are you in Indiana?”

Well, somehow I stumbled back to my friends apartment after that conversation. In the morning, I remembered just enough of Lorenzo and Powerset to do a Google search.

At this point, I still had no idea I was talking to anyone of any significance. For all I knew, I was just talking to another entrepreneur at the same stage as me in starting a business.

But then Google showed me that I was actually talking to a guy who had helped build one of the most powerful natural language search engines ever built.

Foot in mouth. Open palm to forehead.

Sometimes I think what a wasted opportunity that night was, but usually, after I cringe from nostalgic embarrassment, I just think how much that event cleared away a bunch of my unhealthy bravado. There was a lot more bravado clearing as I proceeded to start my first company, but never again was so much cleared in one swoop.