My presentation for The Feast last Friday revolved around lessons I have learned in my 9 years as an entreprenuer and business owner.  I’ve included the slides below, but wanted to add some notes, because many of the slides are not self explanatory.

• Impostor Syndrome – An entrepreneur’s crisis of self confidence.  You’ve got to believe in yourself to make anyone else believe in you. So you just quit your job 2 weeks ago and started a company… that’s what you do now, go for it with confidence.
• Sprinklers & Golf – That’s where I started my career after college.  From sprinkler salesman to business development of golf course management contracts. The only problem, I don’t like golf.  You must do what you are passionate about.
• TRS80 & Vegas – What am I passionate about? I’ve loved computers since the days of BASIC on a Trash-80 and I love going to Vegas.  My best friend Matt and I were in biz school and traveling back and forth to Vegas.  So we decided to start a company that combined the things we love.  Internet + Vegas = Internet-based Bachelor Party Planners
• Biz Cards – I have a biz card fetish. 1) we printed at Kinko’s with the logo design by Bill Gates (MS Word Clipart).  2) BachelorBlowOut got a little more professional 3) changed the name to Destination VIP because no-one takes you seriously with a name like BBO 4) Got aquired.  Notice title change.  Realized 8 months into it that 25% owner means youre not in charge any more, so 5) started Voodoo Ventures
• Charts - big changes over the last 10 years.  Cost of starting a startup is falling to zero.  Witness Y Combinator, TechStars, etc.  Meaning, the number of startups is skyrocketing.  Result? Best bet is to bootstrap until you have something “real”. 3 stages of a startup.  1) Ramen soup phase – you should be able to scrape together something and get a few customers to get yourself to 50k in rev. 2) Then the bootstrapping starts and you grow your company to 500k.  3) Growth capital is available beyond that because you have a real business.  This is where I believe more capital will be entering the market.
• You’ve got a Website, Now What – You need traffic.  Best source for traffic = Google.  How to get free traffic from Google?  Dan Finnery gave me my “The Graduate” moment in 2001 when he whispered in my ear “Search Engine Optimization“.  Check your current website, if your page title says “Frontpage” you ain’t got it.  Learn this and do it.  It’s free and easy and powerful.
• Customer #1 – Relentless focus on getting in business.  Get that first customer.  Until someone writes a check, you aren’t in business.  Mine was Dave Mullen who wrote us a check for $5000.
• Friction - Now that things are getting serious, you are going to get distracted from your business by all the other “stuff” you have to do.  Legal stuff, IRS, opening bank accounts, permits, insurance, etc.  You will figure this stuff out.  Don’t pay a lot of money to do this, you can do this yourself.  Find an attorney who will give you a break and help you grow with them.  Don’t fall victim to paralysis by analysis.  If you mess something up, someone will tell you. Just keep moving forward.
• Funding - Several options: 1) credit cards 2) rich uncle, friends & family 3) wife (mines not available) 4) cash flow.  This is why cash flow is king.  Focus on driving revenue.  Cash flow = sustainability.
• How Do You Make Money? – figure it out.  You don’t have the luxury of not focusing on it.  Google Adsense ain’t it.  And you’re not getting bought by Google.  How do you add value, and what will people pay you for?
• Markets - I started my first company in Vegas in 2001.  Vegas boomed, and so did we.  A rising tide lifts all boats.  New Orleans is seeing the same energy, and rumblings right now
• Be Local but Act Global – Don’t focus just on your city.  Have a global strategy for your supply chain and collaboration.  Also focus on global customers, not just local ones.  But have a personality and leverage whats special about you being in New Orleans. Culture, music, social change.
• Be Disruptive – If someone is telling you to slow down, you’re doing something right. If you’re making people mad or nervous, thats a good thing.  My first idea was GrooveOn.com and I called a bunch of record labels in LA and asked for their digital music rights. In 1999.  They were mad. And scared.  Understand?
• Launch Early and Often & Fail Fast – We built and launched Huckabuck.com, a meta search engine for $50,000.  We did some crazy things like signing Rebirth Brass Band to a ringtone contract and flying a plane around Jazz Fest.  Then we got a check for $2.42 for our first month revenue. Spending $25,000 to make $2.42 doesn’t compute so we sold it.  Launch to sale in 9 months.  Not a home run, but a single and it was fun.
• Failure - You learn a lot from failure.  You have to erase fear of failure from your mind.  Be fearless.  You will fail, but you are not a failure.  Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and do it again.
• Ideas Are a Renewable Resource – They are also worthless unless acted upon.  Keep following your dreams and making your ideas a reality.
• Give Without Expectation – This builds social capital.  The old term for it is Karma.

I stopped by the “Group Think” that SENO held last night with local entrepreneur Blake Haney.  You may have heard that his ambitious new project, HumidBeings is launching in beta later this month.

One of the biggest mistakes that I have made, and I coach others on is not following the “if you build it they will come” strategy of launching a project. (There is always an exception to the rule, in this case Brian Bordainick’s 9th Ward Field of Dreams Project. But I digress…)  In the fight for mind share on the web, you will always be the tree that falls in the forest and doesn’t make a sound.  You’ve got to make some noise!

Blake has had his head down building out the site, and he was open about the challenges he’s faced with funding it through client work, and distractions from his other business Dirty Coast.  It’s clearly been a 2+ years labor of love, and he’s getting close.

But, let me dispel the notion that he is launching this month.  He launched last night in front of 40 people, and he has been launching for the last six months.

Here are some lessons that I am taking from his launch:

• Following the “launch early and often” mantra, he’s has had teaser site up for over six months and he’s collected over 2000 email addresses for interested beta users.
• He’s been very visible publicly and is engaging his target market, the New Orleans community, in the development of Humid Beings, and will continue to even after he opens the doors.  He makes it feel as if its being built for us, a gift to the community, and I believe it.
• Running a targeted banner ad campaign to build brand awareness even before he opens the doors.  The audience for Humid Beings hangs out on sites like Gambit’s Best of New Orleans right now, so he’s running ads there.
• Leveraging Dirty Coast by getting stickers out there.
• Partnering in different ways with local talent like Ben Reece and Supasaint.  He’s building content and building a halo for his brand around cool content producers.
• Identified 85 local blogs that are going to provide content to Humid.  They get to blog on their own sites, and the content gets pulled in through RSS to a place where it will hopefully have more conversation around it.
• Identifying “the villian” NOLA.com so that we can root for him against a identified competitor.

Of course, I have some additional thoughts on what I think he could be doing:

• Follow Guy Kawasaki’s success with Alltop of feeding blogger ego’s by giving them a badge to identify themselves as “featured bloggers” or “founding partners” on their own blog.  Make this invite only, with an perception of exclusivity.  (Blake, what I am trying to say is give me a HumidBeings badge to put on Voodoo saying I’ve been “selected” to provide content… free advertising.)
• Get on Twitter.  You should be all over this already, tweeting out content, building followers.  Twitter is the best medium for launching a brand in a personal, transparent way.  You need a Twitter strategy if you don’t have one already… let’s talk.

PS: Blake, I’m cybersquatting for you.  In my research of discovering you aren’t on Twitter, I found that you handn’t registered @humidbeings.  Twitter handles are the new domain names.  So, I thoughtfully registered it for you as FakeBlakeHaney, and I will happily turn it over when you read this post and hit me up in the comments below.  Unless some other commenter can convince me to turn it over to them.

Lots of good updates to post today, so I’m going to get at it rapid-fire…

• The Feast, a social innovation conference that Michael Karnjanaprakorn is bringing to New Orleans for the first time on February 6, 2009 has moved to a larger venue due to the strong demand. Michael announced today that the conference will be held at the Contemporary Arts Center.  They’ve released additional $99 tickets (available only until Friday) so go register to attend today.  I’m going to be speaking at the conference, and I’m working on my talk now.  Any thoughts, send them my way.

• Startup School v2 will be held at Tulane on Thursday Jan 29, and Saturday, Feb 7.  This Startup School will be geared around the $40,000 Tulane Business Plan Competition.  We’re putting this together in conjunction with the TEA, SENO, VoodooTEQ, and hope to have the participation of many of the excellent judges from last time.  Keep in mind that for the Tulane competion, each entry needs to have a student (from any university) on the team.  More details to follow.

• 504ward will announce the first round finalists this Friday.

• 9th Ward Field of Dreams is an amazing project that Brian Bordainick behind.  He working to build a $1.85 million state of the art football field in the Upper 9th Ward for Carver High school and the community.  If you haven’t heard about this yet, check out the ESPN article and find out how you can help make it a reality.

• Net2NO is taking a road trip to SXSW and we want you to be a part of it.  We’ve broken into subcommities to put together the party, travel and pitch.  If you’re interested in helping New Orleans to take SXSW by storm in March, sign up here.

• GNO Inc’s Michael Hecht presented at NetNO last night about the new Digital Media Alliance launch.  This initiative is focused on equipping us, New Orleans’ creative class of knowledge workers to succeed and attract more businesses and talent to the city. One of the things that has already been prepared is a slide deck to pitch New Orleans as a great place to locate your business.  Take a look below.

Gno Cdm Deck

If you have anything that I’ve left off, hit me up in the comments.  I’ll include it in the post.  Thanks to everyone who is contributing.

I’m thrilled to announce that Benjamin Reece’s company, Deltree will be moving into the LaunchPad @ Voodoo starting tomorrow!

Ben and Tung Bach Ly were over here at the offices yesterday, and they are already designing the editing studio environment and making themselves comfortable. They are going to be a fantastic addition to the creative, collaborative workspace we are building.

Deltree is rapidly becoming one of the preeminent film and creative studios in New Orleans. The runaway viral hit, 50 People 1 Question has generated buzz all over the internet and led to immediate expansion opportunities for Deltree including work for 504ward, Canary, Trumpet, Crush & Lovely, and a music video for Lucky Dog Audio.

In addition to moving into the LaunchPad @ Voodoo, I’m pleased to announce that Deltree submitted the winnning logo to the Launch Pad logo design content. We’ll be showcasing the logo as well as updates on the progress of the Launch Pad in an upcoming post.

In the meantime, on behalf of Voodoo Ventures, Tanguis Development, Zydego… Welcome, Deltree!

We got our submission in today for 504ward.  We’re excited to be a part of the competition and ready to rock on moving the Launch Pad forward.  We’ve been somewhat under the radar with this project until now.  Starting today, we’re looking for local New Orleans entrepreneurs who want to get out of their bedroom and into a stimulating, collaborative and fun environment without the burden of traditional commercial leases.

Launch Pad – 504ward Business Competion Submission from Chris Schultz on Vimeo.

Startup businesses are born in a spare bedroom or college dorm. Once off the ground, entrepreneurs need an office for legitimacy and support, but find traditional commercial office leases daunting and expensive. The Launch Pad is a flexible office space for startup companies. We provide short-term leases, furnished offices, a support staff and multiple networking and educational events to get a new business off the ground.

Innovation doesn’t happen in isolation. The core value Launch Pad provides is the interaction, networking, and mentoring among entrepreneurs in a modern workspace. Our office space includes access to the services that all startups need so entrepreneurs can focus on their core competencies and build viable businesses.

Launch Pad is the brainchild of entrepreneurs who are intimately aware of the startup culture in places like New York, San Francisco and Austin. Launch Pad will be New Orleans hub for events like Startup School, BarCamp, Co-working, Net2NO. Launch Pad will thrust New Orleans into consideration for entrepreneurs nationwide deciding where to start businesses.

Want in on Launch Pad? Got feedback on what would make it work for you? We want to hear from you.  Contact us today for more details.

If you’re not freaking out a bit right now with the current economic crisis then you must have ice in your veins.  With the meltdown on Wall Street, a lot of us are thinking about how this is going to affect our own businesses.  In the web world, some have felt insulated from the downturn, but warning signs are coming in from VC’s loud and clear.

Our business was affected by the credit crisis starting about a year and a half ago.  It has been challenging, but actually has led to a refocusing on low-cost services model through Flatsourcing which I believe is poised to thrive in the current enviroment.  We got credit when we didn’t need it, which I’m glad we have now, and we have trimmed our cost structure to weather the storm.

This is what other start-ups clearly need to be doing.  Launching a product in this market is going to be tough, if you don’t have cash for a long runway, you better have a revenue model that gets you to cash-flow positive quickly.  If you are solely dependent on advertising revenue, buckle up, its going to be a wild ride.

The embedded presentation that TechCrunch posted is what Sequoia Capital made to the CEO’s of its startups is interesting for its clear and (relatively) consise explanation of where we are, and how we got here.  It’s one of the most comprehensive analyses of the current crisis that I’ve seen and I recommend you take time to understand it and the impact the current enviroment is going to have on your business.

CEO_ALL_HANDS_10-7-08_FINAL – Free Legal Forms

The 504Ward was announced this week by Idea Village.  It’s a business plan competition with a $100,000 grant to the winning business along with services by many other New Orleans area firms.

The competition is designed to attract new start-ups to New Orleans or to seed local start-ups with the expressed intent of providing good jobs for 23-35 year old’s in the city.

At the competition launch on Thursday night at Tipitina’s, representatives from Google were on hand to throw their support behind the competition.  They included a promise to promote the compeition on YouTube which potentially will draw quite a bit of attention.  An interesting component of the competition is its emphasis on a video component to the submission process.  This is a trend that I see continuing to grow, we submitted a video application as part of our TechCrunch50 conference application.

The evening’s highlight was the unveiling of a short film produced by Trumpet and directed by Benjamin Reece promoting the rising to the challenge of entrepreneurship in the new New Orleans.  Ben has emerged in the last several months as one of New Orleans’s brightest young talents along with his partner Tung Ly.  His short film 50 People 1 Question has drawn attention all over the world, and he directed a inspiring short for the 504ward that you can watch below. You should come see him speak at the next Net2NO meetup. (Who is that guy in the opening shot I wonder.)

504ward Promotional Film from Benjamin Reece on Vimeo.

I am very excited about the interest and support in the New Orleans start-up community right now, and this is just another example of great things happening.  Though the award will likely have a national applicant pool, I really hope that many bright young New Orleanian’s apply for the grant.  I feel a sense of pride and a competitive desire to show that this award can be won by a home grown business that will benefit New Orleans, that great businesses don’t just have to locate a satellite office here, but that they can be born here.  My personal challenge to local start-ups is that we take this award home ourselves.  Let’s make it happen NOLA.

Learn more about the 504ward, read the complete rules, and apply. Applications are due December 4th.

UPDATED 9/29/08: I’ve moved this blog post over to our wiki.  Please continue to add companies here.

I was having the conversation on Friday night about if we are getting close to a tipping point here in New Orleans and in Louisiana with regards to technology and startup culture.  As I’ve been talking about for a while, we need an ecosystem. Entrepreneurs need to know one-another and they need to know whats going on.  We need organizations and a government that support startups.

Its happening right now.

Jessica Rohloff has been instrumental in getting Net2NO off the ground, and she has talked about getting a blog together that highlights the good things that are going on around here.  The “Good News” blog it could be called.  I’m a big fan of distributed systems: all of us blogging rather than one blog we all read, free unconferences instead of traditional conferences, meetups rather than meetings, groups with participants not committees.

I’m also a fan of just getting started, so here goes on the highlight reel of New Orleans tech & entrepreneurs for the last several weeks in no particular order.

1. Brent McCrossen was in town last week and has secured office space open a branch of his startup, Audiosocket, right here in NOLA.
2. Kenneth Purcell moved his company, iSeatz back to New Orleans from New York after Katrina.  In August iSeatz was named to the Inc 500 and is the only Louisiana firm ranked in the top 500.
3. Nic Perkins of The Receivables Exchange and the rest of the team at StartupNewOrleans have started to reach out to expat New Orleanian entrepreneurs in an effort to get them to relocate their business back here.
4. Will Donaldson and the Tulane Entrepreneurs Association have put together a fantastic speaker series featuring some incredible entreprenuers that is open to the public.
5. The Idea Village is launching the 504Ward initiative to to connect entreprenuers with talent and peers with some exciting things to come.
6. Zach Kupperman recently launched PolicyPitch, a community powered platform for sharing public policy ideas.  It’s in the running for a $10,000 grant from Advanta, so go vote for it now.
7. Jessica Roloff (and many more) have gotten Net2NO launched.  We had a first meetup last week and another is coming up in October.  There’s a lot of energy in the group, so you should join.
8. Jonathan Joseph, a Tulane grad, launched the Ultimate Football Network, a social media resource for fantasy football, at TechCrunch50 last week.  Loren Feldman selected him as best of show.
9. Eric Marcoullier, another Tulane grad and founder of MyBlogLog and GNIP has generously offered to come speak to the New Orleans tech community next April.  We’ll be putting a BarCamp together around it.  Details to come.
10. Blake Burris, a Shreveport native has raised funding for a new Facebook app called Challenge which helps users create a support system for training.  He’s also considering a move back to Shreveport to take advantage of the angel investor tax credits.
11. Ben Reece, an techie and filmaker produced a short called Fifty People One Question that went viral on Vimeo.  If you haven’t seen it yet, you should.  Even Barrack Obama’s campaign dug it.
12. Blake Killian now has 4 brands under his BlakeMakes empire.  His videoblogging effort is taking off over at BlakeTakes.
13. Jeffrey Lyons and his team are putting the finishing touches on IdeaBreaker, their Louisiana-born project management app that will be launching soon.
14. Yours truly, Chris Schultz, was invited to the TechCrunch 50 conference to launch the new Flatsourcing Dashboard in the demo pit out there.  It was an incredible experience.
15. Tom Martin of Zehnder Communications and Brandmarken has launched NOLAdeals connecting locals with local businesses through a insiders membership discount program with no coupons.
16. Neel Sus is in talks with several hospitals to implement his mobile patient data platform, eLYMPUS.  His company’s website, Susco, was recently relaunched by Matt Wang of Good Work Marketing, a rockin local marketing and branding firm.
17. Michael Karnjanaprakorn of AllDayBuffett in New York compiled a list of 100 great things going on in New Orleans and took the web by storm with the New Orleans 100.
18. Catherine Markel alerted me to a great looking new hiring management web app called HireFly that she and her Metairie-based firm EmployApp has launched.  It’s in beta right now and really looks impressive.
19. Blake Haney and his crew have a new home called The Canary Collective on Julia street.  It’s is an open gallery / workspace / screening room / party space.  He’s also gathering some of the best and brightest above for a new effort he’s launching through Humid Beings.
20. Dukky is a New Orleans startup that is going to revolutionize the direct mail industry by making it as easy to buy space on a demographically targeted mailer as it is a Google Adwords ad.  Founded by Trumpet and other local partners.

I’ve moved this blog post over to our wiki.  Please continue to add companies here.

Wow, 14 17 18 19 great things going on right here in Louisiana.  Congrats to all. Congrats to us! We are hitting a tipping point and there’s no looking back.

Photo credit c@rljones

I’ve lived in New Orleans for just six years now, but it feels like a lifetime in internet years when I think about the transformation of high tech in the state during my time here.

When I got here, the internet community was shaking off the crash of the dot-coms and New Orleans felt like a internet ghost town to me.  Though there were several successful internet companies locally, they weren’t connected through tech organizations or informal social networks.

There has been a confluence of events and initiatives that are starting to gel, and I believe Louisiana is on the brink of massive opportunity. Here are the things that are keeping me up at night and that I am positioning Voodoo Ventures to leverage.

• Tax Incentives – On the heels of the success of the film tax credit, the state instituted various powerful tax incentives that are starting to work their way into the consciousness of investors and startups.  They are here for the taking today.  The angel investor tax credit that enables an angel investor to receive refundable tax credits of 50% of their investment in a qualified Louisiana entrepreneurial business. Digital media tax credit enables a company to receive a tax credit worth 20% of expenditures in Louisiana.  The definition initially applied to video game development firms, as Geoff Daily reports, apparently Chris Stelly, director of film industry development within the Office of Entertainment Industry Development, feels the definition is expanded so that “that potentially any interactive Internet application could qualify.”

• Startup Ecosystem – When I moved here I’d go months without running into someone who worked on the internet.  Now I have lunch twice a week with folks doing exactly what I do.  The transformation has been dramatic.  It is both an influx of new talent to Louisiana, but more than that I think it is a new interconnectedness.  This results from new social networking tools like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Twitter being the most powerful locally at this point to connect the many techies in New Orleans and Louisiana.  Beyond that, I see movements taking place that are bringing a new energy to wanting to get together.  I say movements rather than formal organizations because most of the excitement is not “owned” by anyone.  People are self organizing with unconferences and meetups that are more chaotic but more satisfying than traditional organizations.  We hosted the first BarCamp in Louisiana in February and got a great response and generated a lot of connections.  The next BarCamp is being organized as we speak in Lafayette around the theme of the coming fiber to the last mile and the opportunities that will generate there (more on that later).  The need for a database of techies, startups, and the people that support them is one of the biggest initiatives that I have heard people talking about, and its going to happen very quickly.  Alan Gutierrez and I have been talking a lot about this and he may host it on ThinkNola.  Benjamin Reese has started a self organizing spreadsheet already and Jessica Rohloff wants to push this ahead.  If anyone has feedback on the best way to do it, I am all ears.  This needs to be by the community, for the community and probably warrants its own post.

• Katrina – Katrina was a terrible tragedy that affected so many in New Orleans and Louisiana.  Its impact is still being felt.  Out of great tragedy comes opportunity, and in years since Katrina, a new crop of talented people have moved to Louisiana.  New business have sprung up to replace old ones.  And there is a realization that the creative and tech economy can be the economic engine we need in New Orleans and Louisiana to supplement tourism, the port, and oil and gas.  I believe it will be.

• Air Force Cyber Command in Shreveport – Barksdale Air Force base has been selected as a provisional location for the Cyber Command center.  This is generating a tremendous amount of excitement in the state and has the potential to generated tens of thousands of new jobs in the area.  Already planning is underway for the Cyber Innovation center located there that will promote research and provide infrastructure to businesses and startups spawned by the Cyber Command center.  A recent editorial in the Shreveport Times touts the tremendous impact this will have on the state economy.

• Lafayette “Last Mile” Fiber Network – Lafayette is building out the country’s only fiber into the home network that is equipped with a free 100Mbps intranet for every subscriber and tied to the limitless dynamic computer power of Abacus Data Exchange’s LiquidIQ and the LITE Center’s array of supercomputers.  The network is owned by LUS, a public utility, (and not a telco) and will eventually reach about 120,000 subscribers in Lafayette.  The first residential subscribers will come online around January, 2009.  This is going to bring revolutionary increase in the bandwidth available to the internet that will undoubtedly spawn new services and business.  This is one of the first networks of its kind in the US, but it is a vision for the way we will all one day be connected.  Lafayette and Louisiana will get a sneak peak at what this speed of access can bring, and we have to opportunity to get a jump on developing business models and services that leverage it.

These five factors have me incredibly excited right now about the opportunities that are presenting themselves right now to entrepreneurs in this state.  I’ll be sharing more about some things that Voodoo Ventures will be doing to leverages these opportunities and I’d love to hear what you think.

How are these changes going to affect our lives?  What opportunities do you see?

(If any experts want to expand on any of the details I’ve laid out or offer corrections / clarifications, please do so.  It’s a lot of information that I’m trying to aggregate.)

I came across Dave McClures “Startup Metrics for Pirates” presentation this week from the Foo Camp conference.

It really has some great metrics and is highly recommended for anyone starting a web-based business.  You’ll learn what you should be tracking, and the conversion funnel approach that I’ve talked about in the past.

AARRR Matey! Take a look:

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