I feel completely drained.
So what went on this week besides power points? Well, now that Randall's handling the technical part, freeing me up to be a nerdy social butterfly, I've been trying to meet all the right people around Atlanta to get my idea off the ground.
The week started with lunch with my former boss who happens to be an Emory grad and a huge proponent of entrepreneurship for the Atlanta area. I invited him to lunch to get some insights into starting up and opinions on my idea. After all, as realistic I think I am, I'm sure I'm still in some kind of tunnel vision. A few tid bits came out of lunch which were great advice.
1. The cheapest way to get free legal advice from a lawyer is to take them out to lunch.
2. Getting some key people in the industry behind your product as advisers will greatly enhance your credibility especially if you're a first time entrepreneur.
Both seem so simple yet one of them I definitely did not think about.
He also raised another good question to me which actually required a bit of thought. How far do we actually want to take this venture? Despite all the videos we were taunting earlier last month, are we going to be happy starting this up and have it make $20k residual income on the side or do we want to get some venture money and take it mainstream? (Randall and I agreed, we're going mainstream. "Go BIG or go home!")
On Wednesday after work, I decided to go check out an entrepreneurial event sponsored by Emory. The great news is you don't have to be affiliated with Emory to go though I'm sure for networking purposes, that would've helped. While I was there, my old boss who helped with the event introduced me to a guy from Manheim, who spoke to me a little bit about our project. I must say, I was not pleased with my questions since 1. I didn't know what Manheim did and 2. I was not prepared to ask competitor questions. Either way, I'm sure I sounded pretty stupid asking the most basic questions that you could have answered from just searching the web. I did learn one interesting fact that I didn't know from previous research: AutoTrader also started off with a free to list version for consumers and eventually got to where they are today after finding out what was profitable vs. what wasn't.The event at Emory was pretty cool. Amongst some cool (but awkward) entrepreneurs, I got to meet Sean Belnick and hear him speak about how he started his business. If nothing else, I wish I would have had some help starting up... I think that would have made a huge difference.
Thursday night was a bit of a different animal. I skipped a Google Oktoberfest party to go to another networking event. Instead of getting advice this time, I was dishing it. The Atlanta Entrepreneur Meetup group had another meeting and the topic this month was SEM (search engine marketing). Well, guess what? I do SEM as my day job and I'm SEM is actually something I'll write about here in a few months; it's just so far away at this point for this project and there's definitely no need to put the cart before the horse. However, from meeting some of the other entrepreneurs last night who told me what they knew, I would say this is definitely an important part of a startup's success that you should learn with care. Hopefully the people I met last night will keep in touch; some of them are definitely further ahead than we are in terms of where they are in their business so it'd be great to bounce ideas.
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