Fall 2012 Recap: StartUp Weekend, Entrepreneurship, What’s Ahead

Happy Thanksgiving! Hopefully the holiday left you charged to not only count your blessings, but multiply them for yourselves and those around you.

Innov8Social has not been far from my mind for the past few months. And I am excited to share my recent adventures and ideas for what’s ahead with you.

In September 2012 I participated in StartUp Weekend, an exciting entrepreneurship event that brings together developers, designers, and non-coders for 54 hours of a ‘hackathon’-like experience of building out a startup idea. The goal is to be able to give a brief pitch of the idea and show a prototype to the judging panel by Sunday evening. Our team won recognition for our website design.

The event was a mind stretch—requiring participants to wear multiple hats, think through potential pitfalls and problems, and be able to pivot our idea in any direction as we built it. It was the quintessential experience in entrepreneurship.

I was fortunate to have joined with a dynamic team and together we began building a solution to the problem of how people in a neighborhood can ‘vote’ on which local businesses they wish to see in their neighborhoods. From our review, there seemed to be a need for effective ways for people to support and encourage small businesses they desire in their neighborhoods. That, combined with the popularity and influence of crowdfunding platforms, put us on a fascinating journey involving lots of interviews, product market fit testing, and pivots on the idea.

I have learned that in social entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship is the initial challenge. And the challenge can be formidable! Before you think about how your business should run and what it’s core values are…you have to have a business.

The experience makes me all the more appreciative of start-up entrepreneurs who bootstrap their way to profitability and then scale and grow their ideas to broader audiences and markets, all the while staying within the broad course of their core values.

The past few months have been all about ‘getting out of the building’ a phrase that Steve Blank uses often in his Udacity lectures to encourage entrepreneurs to be action/input-oriented rather than insular inventors.

I’ll be posting more on these recent adventures. But for now, I wanted you to know that I am thankful for this space for us to connect and that there is so much we can do together. I have ideas of ways to continue building and improving Innov8Social, and would love to hear your input on what you would like to see.

All the best, always.