Nov
24
There are non-believers among you, and to them I say begone!
Filed Under production, sales | 1 Comment
Event Seek began as an idea around March of 2007. It started very simply as a dream - nothing more than a fleeting concept. Over the last 20 months or so, it has transformed from an idea to a belief, to a goal, to a series of to-dos, to a set of accomplishments, and to a thriving company.
We’ve talked to countless numbers of people about Event Seek: investors, advisors, potential customers, friends, family, and even strangers. To say that we’ve gotten a series of reactions is an understatement. I’ve heard everything from “brilliant” to “seriously? are you kidding?” And I’ve come to realize that in these conversations I’m not talking, not sharing, not storytelling, but evangelizing. Every business conversation is an opportunity to spread the gospel that is Event Seek.
Certainly I’m not trying to compare myself to any of the greats here - I don’t have that kind of hubris! But I do have a significant appreciation for what they experienced. The moment of epiphany you see in the faces of your listeners, the joy that comes from seeing someone convert, the excitement of seeing disciples preach the gospel for you, the disappointment you feel when someone just doesn’t get it, and the awkward feeling that comes after you’ve tried your best to tell this amazing story only to realize you’ve solidified another non-believer.
Ahh, the non-believers. Those all-to-intelligent individuals who understand what you’re preaching and just don’t believe you can do it. Conversations with non-believers is like banging your head against a brick wall. Once someone has made up their mind about you, there is often no changing it. You can huff and puff all you want, but often these are bricklayers and you aren’t about to blow that house down.
Non-believers are also wonderful people. They don’t believe in you and your idea - can you imagine that? Nothing riles up an entrepreneur like non-believers. We often will put in that extra hour, that extra call, that extra meeting simply because we know we can prove you wrong. Non-believers are simply believers who haven’t been convinced yet. You know how non-believers are often convinced? Miracles.
No, not walk on water or anything truly miraculous like that. Simpler miracles. Non-believers don’t think you can sell the product, raise investment, or get people to use it. So anytime someone does any of those things it is like a small miracle to a non-believer. So the best way to convert non-believers is execute on all the things you told them you would execute on. Do exactly what you set out to do!
Sure it’s exciting when all the people who beleived in you congratulate you for your accomplishments and achievements. It feels great, it makes your day, its a needed shot of confidence. But when a non-believer says: “Hell, maybe its not such a bad idea after all…”. Now that makes for a good day.
This weekend, Event Seek signed our first customer/distribution deal. Hometown Times, a provider of the technology supporting local news websites, has selected Event Seek to provide local events support for 250 of their corporate websites and all future franchise websites. This partnership allows us to support small local websites that we would not be able to sell to on our own. Through Hometown Times, we can expand our market coverage and serve customers both large and small. We’re absolutely thrilled about the Hometown Times partnership and the impact it can have for both companies. We believe this is the beginning of a long-lasting mutually beneficial relationship.
This is the first of many deals to come for Event Seek. I don’t believe we have a good product and interested buyers - I know it. Our development team is really excited about launching our first customer, but little do they know it’s not going to slow down anytime soon.
There are non-believers among you, and to them I say begone!
Oct
1
Event Seek Beta - live and ready for action!
Filed Under product design, production, public relations | 1 Comment
It’s been just over a year in the making, but Event Seek is finally ready for prime time! Last night at midnight, we officially launched www.event-seek.com as a platform for discovering new and interesting events. Anyone is welcome to use the website to discover events and activities in Atlanta. Other cities will be coming soon, but right now we’re focused on proving the concept out. If you’d like to see Event Seek carry events for your area, send an email to info@event-seek.com and we’ll use your requests to drive our expansion.
In addition to launching the beta product today, we are also celebrating our 1 year birthday. Exactly 365 days ago, we began full-time work on creating a product that would allow media companies, struggling with their current revenue, to expand their online offering and drive value from the website. Today we have completed our fully-functioning commercial product and are in several conversations with early-stage pilot program customers. Before you know it, you’ll see Event Seek powering the local events calendar of your favorite newspaper, tv, and radio station.
The year has gone by amazingly fast, far more quickly than I would have expected. As I look back over our accomplishments through the past year, I’m proud of what we’ve been able to do, but more importantly, excited about the future. In addition to closing several rounds of fundraising from friends and family investors, we’ve established a market need and developed a product that our customer contacts absolutely love. I can’t explain how exciting it is to demonstrate the product for potential clients and hear the words “this is exactly what we’re looking for - and more.”
Some of my favorite successes from the past year include:
- Leaving our full-time jobs with an idea and a few dollars in our pockets
- Developing a prototype in less than a month and presenting it to a wildly impressed top 20 newspaper nationally
- Being selected as one of the top 15 technology startups in Georgia as part of the GRA/TAG business launch competition
- Selecting an early-stage development partner and rapidly building the basis for what would become Event Seek
- Convincing a host of talented, successful, intelligent, and experienced professionals to join our advisory board
- Expanding our team to include the most talented front-end and back end-designers I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with
- Developing an alpha product, launching it, and using customer feedback to continue to improve the offering
- Honing our individual and corporate strategy to focus the business where we can drive the greatest value for customers, investors, and employees
- Being selected as one of the companies for CapVenture, a fundraising preparation boot camp in Atlanta
- Expanding skills we always knew we had, developing ones we never knew were there, and faking everything else
- Establishing our name in the Atlanta entrepreneurial community as a company to watch
- Being profiled in several technical trade journals
- Finally launching a product that not only are we proud of, but has real potential to help people and companies
I’d like to think that we’ve been able to get where we are today thanks to our hard work and determination, but I know better. We have been damn lucky and have been helped along the way by individuals of all walks of life. I’m not sure why these people see something in us, but I’m just glad that they do. I’ll be thanking each and every one of you over the next few years and for years to come. We couldn’t have accomplished what we have without you and for that I am eternally grateful.
With all of that being said, stop reading and go to the website! Use it, tell us what you like, tell us what you don’t like, and tell your friends. Event Seek becomes more and more useful and valuable the more users we have. We’ll continue to add content, find great local events, develop useful features, and bring on new geographies - you just enjoy it and spread the gospel: “Stop searching for events…start discovering them!”
Sep
24
Startup analogies
Filed Under product design, production, public relations | Leave a Comment
Read a really cool article today about what Startups can learn from Superheroes. It is a neat little blog post that shares a lot of the same values we have around here, basically: Focus, Don’t Quit, Be the Best, Be a Team Player. All of this results in a team having one goal and being able to accomplish pretty incredible things. Even if you aren’t in a startup its worth the three minute read.
This article led me to reflect on all that we’ve been able to do in the past year and how we’ve been able to do it. Amazingly next Wednesday is our one year anniversary. Next week we can officially say that our company has survived for 365 days, which if you ask me is a pretty monumental accomplishment. We’ve done some really cool things along the way, but I’m not going to detail them in this post (we’ll save that for later).
This all seems pretty fitting for what will happen next Wednesday. On October 1st, we will launch the open beta of Event Seek - free for everyone who wants to use it. No closed doors, no invitation codes required, everyone is welcome. Event-Seek.com will be focused on Atlanta for the time being, but expect that to change moving forward. I’ve watched a lot of websites go up and down in the past year, some grow, some shrink, some explode, and some fold altogether. We’ve stuck to our singular purpose and the fruits of our labor are about to be exposed to the world.
Is the team excited? You bet. Are they nervous? Absolutely. Will we throw one hell of a launch party? Damn straight!
Pretty soon you’ll be hearing about Event Seek all over the place - get ready we’re about to take the events world by storm.
Oh and just for fun I took the test that compares you to a superhero, I’m Ironman. Who are you?
Aug
21
Alpha 2.0 coming soon
Filed Under alpha, production | 2 Comments
In the next week or two, we’ll be relaunching our alpha site with a few key features that should make the site a live and working local event discovery tool. I’ll be sure to update everyone with an email and invite you all.
Key improvements include:
- Complete working offering (no more bugs or random pages that don’t go anywhere)
- Access for all browsers (IE, Safari, Firefox, Opera and a few others)
- The ability to invite your friends to events through our guest list feature
- Simple event management and tracking with a new dashboard
- Improved recommendations through our updated suggestion engine
- Capability to invite friends to the Event Seek system (more users and less closed doors)
Before you know it, you’ll be discovering new events through Event Seek, inviting your friends and tracking all of your interesting events in one place - just like you’ve always dreamed.
Get excited - alpha 2.0 is just over the horizon!
Jul
2
Coming soon…
Filed Under production | Leave a Comment
* This message has been brought to you by the Event Seek Production Team*
Greetings everyone! I want to take this opportunity to thank you all for your excellent feedback to date. Please know that all of your suggestions are being weighed and prioritized each and every day, so please keep them coming and I will make sure to let you know when you can start to see your ideas in motion.
Just a couple of updates on what you can expect to see in the coming weeks. My first priority is getting Event Seek compatible with Internet Explorer (versions 6 and 7). While our front-end programmer spends his evenings developing nefarious plans to facilitate the downfall of Microsoft, both Connor and I realize that accomodating 60% of the browsing market is substantially more than a “nice-to-have”.
Also, look out for Version 2 of Searching and Sorting in the coming weeks. I have a little secret for you all, good recommendations start with a good search engine. Once we fine tune our search methodology, our recommendation algorithm will have the room and flexibility it needs to grow and develop over time.
Keep the suggestions coming! I will let everyone know when new features get pushed to our Alpha site.
Jun
23
Let’s be clear on exactly what an “alpha release” is
Filed Under alpha, product design, production | Leave a Comment
Wikipedia defines an alpha release as “The alpha build of the software is the build delivered to the software testers, that is persons different from the software engineers, but usually internal to the organization or community that develops the software. In a rush to market, more and more companies are engaging external customers or value-chain partners in their alpha testing phase. This allows more extensive usability testing during the alpha phase.”
Say what you want about Wikipedia and whether or not it will ever make a valid source, but they are dead on here. Alpha is a chance for us as business owners to take the software out of the hands of the development team and have some of the QA department really take a look at the product. In many cases an alpha release is internal to the company - no one else is allowed to see or use it - especially given than an alpha release tends to be buggy and inconsistent.
No, we don’t have a formal QA department. Tristan and I do our best, but we’ve both got about 100 other jobs to do any given day, so we’re soliciting your help. Many of you’ve asked me for an invitation - and many of you haven’t. We want to see as many people using the product as possible and deep down I know you all want to play with it, so yes everyone will get an invitation. At least everyone who won’t go sharing our hard work with the press or our competitors.
It’s late Sunday night and we all still wish we had three more days to work on the product, but we’re sticking to schedule. We’ll deliver invites tomorrow morning and unleash a bevy of friends and supporters on Event Seek. Be kind, but be brutal. Tell us what works, what doesn’t, what needs to be fixed, and what needs to be added. Event Seek is a consumer driven application that is designed to help people discover and attend events - so tell us what we’re doing to support that and what we could be doing better.
Imagine you have an early pass to the development of facebook, MySpace, or Google. Think about how many times you’ve wished a website would do something differently or offer you different functionality - this is your chance. You have a great power, and with great power comes great responsibility - we need you to talk to us. Don’t just keep it to yourself when something doesn’t work right - tell us! Don’t mutter when you wish another feature existed - tell us! Links to the forums can be found in your alpha toolbar - don’t be shy.
This is our alpha launch of Event Seek, but this is your chance to shape a young product and a young company.
Jun
20
Time to ship the product
Filed Under alpha, product design, production | Leave a Comment
Our invitations to private alpha hit mailboxes monday morning. If you haven’t already signed up, send an email to MakeMeATester at event-seek.com and we’ll send an invite your way. It should be pretty cool to see all the neat things we’ve been working on. It’s time, as they say, to ship the product. We set a deadline for ourselves and have stuck to that deadline.
We will deliver alpha on time.
Is every last piece of functionality we dreamed up for alpha included? No.
Are their bugs that we don’t know about? Surely.
Are there bugs that we do know about? You betcha.
Are their portions of the website that could and probably should work better? Uh Huh.
Do I wish I had several more weeks to go back to the development team and get this thing right? More than you know.
It is time, however, to ship the product. It will inevitably have errors, minor bugs and things we wished we noticed before the launch, but that is okay. That is sort of the idea of an alpha launch - put a stake in the ground and push yourselves to deliver. We could spend the next three months building the product, getting it perfect and you know how we would feel three days before launch? Exactly the same we feel now - wishing we had more time to go tweak.
There is another incredible benefit to a private alpha launch - customers. We get to see in a real live working environment what the consumers use, what they like, and what they find difficult. The best product design comes from customers and we want to harness that. Sure they’ll dream up ideas we’ll never be able to complete anytime soon, but I’ll bet more than anything else, they’ll want the very features we want and help us shape what those features should look like.
Is my development team wary of what people will say? Yeah. Should they be? Maybe a little. Am I? Of course. Do the vast benefits outweigh the risks? Damn straight. It’s time for Event Seek alpha.
We may not yet be ready for prime time, but much like “Magnum,” the preview is still pretty breathtaking.
May
7
So, after all of this hoopla about me “stepping back” and getting out of the way of production, it has been a fairly smooth transition. Thanks go to both Event Seek’s and Hashrocket’s teams, but mostly to the respective production managers, Tristan and Rein.
To give it bit of background, we’re now in our third week of full-scale production and we’ve had a few hiccups in the first two weeks, but are settling in. After two weeks, it was clear to both Tristan and I that we weren’t building at a speed which would allow us to hit expected milestones and goals. Obviously this was incredibly disappointing to us and something we had to remedy right away (we’re not made of funding). As a young CEO, I really had a few options:
- Get on the phone with Rein and hoot and holler that they need to work faster
- Get on the phone with Rein’s boss and hoot and holler that they need to work faster
- Threaten to stop the project, not pay my bills, etc.
- Give my production manager (Tristan) a few days to create a plan to get us back on schedule
In keeping with the “stepped back” Connor, we chose the fourth option. You know what happened? Exactly what needed to.
I came to work Monday morning to a full status assessment - a complete an honest review of our progress so far, identification of the major issues that had plagued us, and simple next steps to remedy the situation. I should comment this wasn’t halfway done either. This was exhaustive and brutally honest. Tristan had spent a significant amount of time talking with Rein (their production manager) about the progress, the issues, and how to get back on track. Together they were able to identify the issues and develop a plan to overcome them.
The really cool thing about working with talented motivated individuals is that even though you know they are good and you have high expectations from them - they can exceed those high expectations.
Obviously we’ll continue to track our progress and have honest reviews of where we are, but we’re already getting back on track. Who’s ready for Event Seek Private Alpha testing? Counting the weeks…
Apr
28
Hitting our stride
Filed Under management styles, production | Leave a Comment
After a lovely weekend in Charlottesville, Va at the Foxfield races, we’re back to work in Atlanta.
Starting the third week of full-scale production, our team is really beginning to hit its stride. We’ve worked out a few of the kinks associated with working in different locations and having the development team split between Atlanta and Jacksonville. I’d like to give credit here both to our development partner, Hashrocket, Andrew (our front-end guy), and Tristan. Specifically Tristan has really taken up the responsibility of making sure all of the pieces are moving smoothly and making sure everyone has the direction they need to move as quickly as possible.
Because of the progress we’re making, we are hoping to have a private alpha version of Event Seek available for testing by friends and family in the next month or so. We’ll put up a semi-working version of the product for everyone to check out and give feedback on. You’ll all be part of the development process, sharing what you like, don’t like, what you want to see, and what you managed to break. Keep your eyes open…
I’d like to take a moment as well to comment on some of the production tactics we’re using that have been working well:
- Front-end driven development - Thanks to the hard work put in by Tristan and Andrew, much of the design for the product is already completed. This allows them to sit down with our development team and walk them through how the site will actually work when it is being used. Nothing paints a picture for developers like the ability to “see” the finished product.
- Output focused - The team overall is very focused on generating valuable output. Rather than tackle big meaty problems off the bat, we’ve tried to break them into smaller pieces that can be completed and show meaningful progress. Not only does this keep me (the end client) happy, but it also allows us to very clearly track and understand our successes and what is holding us back.
- Distinct roles and responsibilities - Even though I struggled with the idea at first, we have all begun to really adapt to our different roles. Everyone on our team knows what they are responsible for and is focused on delivering their piece of the puzzle. This makes sure that we aren’t all looking over each other’s shoulders and second guessing work. At the end of the day, I believe this is making everyone more productive and happier.
Tristan and I certainly didn’t plan all of these facets in advance - it is a very organic and constantly changing and improving process. Our production processes will continue to get better and better over time. I just keep my fingers crossed that we don’t screw up anything big before then.
Kudos to the team for their progress to date. Next time maybe I’ll talk about all the things we’re doing poorly. I wouldn’t hold your breath though…