You: Make women swoon and grown men cry with your website designs (or maybe vice versa).  More importantly you “get” web usability and clean, creative design.  Your designs are bleeding edge, pushing the envelope from Web 2.0 to the future.

• xhtml/css experience not necessary, but must have a solid understanding for designing for the web.
• ability to design web sites where content is the primary focus and graphics engage users to experience the content.
• post-Web 2.0
• clean, crisp and detailed down to icons, bullets, character spacing and line heights

Voodoo Ventures: Looking for a web designer for a specific project.  This is a contract gig, but we hope to establish a long-term relationship, as we have a lot of work that comes through Voodoo.

• Requirements: Produce layered PSD’s for a website based on wireframes & concepts we provide.
• Location: Anywhere. Preference = New Orleans > Louisiana > Anywhere
• Compensation: We’ll provide requirements and will need a project cost from you.

If you’re interested, send us the following:

• Portfolio
• Hourly rate

Get involved with this cool project we are working on.  We’re doing some cool things and want you to be a part of it. Don’t be shy, apply.  We want to see what you’ve got. Contact Mary Ann at maryann@voodooventures.com or apply on Hirefly today.  Be sure to include the above to be considered.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the first night of Startup School last Thursday. It was a great event and I think everyone is pretty jazzed about the 504ward competition and the enthusiasm of the participants who are all going to be entering great biz plans in it.

We had a great lineup of speakers: Me, John Laurie from UNO, Richard Montgomery from VCE Capital, Chris Reade from Carrollton Technology Partners, and the inimitable local film auteur Ben Reece from Deltree.

Some highlights:

• My presentation is embedded below, but I focused on finding and communicating the reason your business needs to be in New Orleans.
• John emphasized the need not to work backwards.  You really should have your whole plan done before you write your exec summary.  Bios, not resumes.  Financial highlights, but not full pro-forma for the exec summary.
• Richard spoke to the difference between what he views as a fundable company, and the goals of 504ward.  He is looking for high-growth companies that can do $50 mil in sales in 10 years.  While those companies are a fit for 504ward, so are sustainable “lifestyle” companies, that generally aren’t able to attract VC capital.
• Chris got everyone fired up with turning their plan into reality.  He spoke of the pitfalls of expensive office space and friends as partners.  He also recommended an LLC for most companies and talked about filing online through the Secretary of State’s website.  He recommended having a good lawyer to make sure you have a good operating agreement if you have partners.
• Ben got people thinking about their video submission.  It was agreed that everyone should do one because its an opportunity to forge an emotional connection with the panel of judges.

We’ve prepared an extensive collection of business plan resources and added them to our wiki.

On Friday, Jessica White of the Idea Village invited me to join her and Leslie Jacobs who is behind 504ward on the Garland Robinette show to talk about the entreprenuerial community here in New Orleans.  You can listen to the podcast of the interview online on the WWL site.

Idea Village asked me to emphasize the following points with regards to what they are looking for in 504ward submissions.  I wanted to post them here for anyone who wasn’t able to be there:

• You must be a sustainable business
• You must prove how you retain the 23 - 34 year old demographic
• The competition is not about attracting new people but about the retain the people currently in New Orleans

So, thanks to everyone for making it such a great event.  The second part of the workshop series is this Saturday, Nov 22 9am-noon.  We’ll be doing “speed dating” work-shopping of business plans.  More details on the wiki.  If you’re not registered yet, sign up and attend.

There are a couple great events coming up for the entrepreneurship community in NOLA that you should take advantage of.  I’m excited about going.  Voodoo Ventures’ own Will Donaldson has been instrumental in organizing these in his role as president of the Tulane Entrepreneurship Association.

Tulane Entrepreneurs’ Fall Workshop

Tulane’s Uptown campus on Friday November 21st from 9am-12:30pm.

The event will focus on social enterprises and feature:

• Andrea Chen of Social Entrepreneurs of New Orleans
• Stephen Shelton of the Louisiana CleanTech Network
• Jackie Richard of Louisiana Cultural Economy Foundation
• Nadiyah Morris of the Office of Lt. Gov. for Social Entrepreneurship
• Carol Bebelle of the Ashe Cultural Arts Center

Followed by an interactive business planning workshop on Sambazon, a social enterprise, featuring John Elstrott, Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship, Executive Director of the Levy-Rosenblum Institute for Entrepreneurship and Lead Director of Whole Foods Market.

RSVP at http://tea.tulane.edu. Coffee and bagels will be served at 9am and the program will begin at 9:30am. The program is limited to 60 participants.

Panel Discussion: “The New New Orleans for Entrepreneurs: Opportunities for Entrepreneurship”

Tulane’s Uptown campus on Monday, November 24th from 5:00 - 7:30pm.

• Stephen Moret - Secretary of Louisiana Economic Development
• John E Koerner III - Koerner Capital
• Pres Kabacoff - CEO & Chairman, HRI Properties
• Ashton Ryan, Jr. - CEO & Chairman, First NBC Bank
• Crichton Brown - Managing Director, Advantage Capital

To see more detail please go to the Speaker Series page.

I definitely plan to attend these events and highly recommend them to the NOLA startup community.

UPDATED: Due to high demand, we extended Startup School from eight to sixteen people.  4 tickets are available right now.

There is a lot of excitement around the upcoming 504ward and Tulane Entrepreneur Association business plan competitions. I have had many people contact me excited to enter and looking for direction with biz plans.  I think it would be really helpful for all of us in the New Orleans entrepreneurship community to have a workshop to review and strengthen the biz plans we all plan to enter in these competitions. So, let’s do it!

Part 1: Business Plans 101

• Thursday, November 13th - 5:30 - 7:30 pm
• Voodoo Ventures Offices
• Learn how to write a winning business plan. Chris Schultz and other coaches will lead a group discussion and share resources about the fundamentals of a sound business plans. Learn about the sections you should cover, how to prepare financial pro-forma’s, and pitfalls to avoid.
• Resources: We’ll provide a list of valuable resources online to help you craft that perfect plan.
• Prepare: Come ready to give your “elevator pitch” to everyone in the room.  It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just be ready to pitch.
• Bonus: Filmmaker Benjamin Reece will give a session on making a compelling video submission for 504ward.

Part 2: Workshop Your Business Plan

• Saturday, November 22nd - 9am - 12pm
• Voodoo Ventures Offices
• Workshop your plan with experts.  We will have a “speed dating” sessions with biz plan coaches who are local entrepreneurs and VC’s.  You will have a session with each of them to workshop your plan, review strengths/weaknesses and get feedback on your idea.  If you have a video submission storyboarded ready, you will get the opportunity to review that with filmmaker, Ben Reece.
• Prepare: Come ready with a draft of your executive summary or the whole plan if you’ve got it.  Entering a video? Bring any ideas or storyboarding.

Limited Space

Startup school is free and will be limited to eight ( 8 ) twelve (12) sixteen (16) people.  Sign up below, first come first served.  We are doing this in order to ensure that the enviroment is small enough that everyone who takes part really gets a lot of value out of the training.

Ready to get schooled?  Get more details and sign up for Startup School.

Another great tech event is coming to NOLA tomorrow and I hope that we can show up in force.  As is becoming common at tech events, there is a BarCampApache to go alongside the annual ApacheCon which is being held here this year.

Whether you are going to ApacheCon or not, you should go to the BarCamp, which is free.  Let’s support these type of tech events here in NOLA. Highlights will include:

• Inventor of OpenID to present
• New Orleans’ own Ryan Lane will give a session on configuring a web infrastructure for use in a PKI environment using mod_ssl and/or mod_nss. This is fairly big in DoD right now, due to their CAC (Common Access Card) infrastructure.
• Plenty of free t-shirts to all attendees

So, go vote and then stop by BarCamp Apache.

• BarCamp Apache - FREE
• Sheraton New Orleans - 500 Canal Street New Orleans, Louisiana 70130
• Tue, Nov 4th - 10am - until afternoon

Barcamp Apache