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10/16/11 | Uncategorized

Startup America Partnership: The Best First Date Ever!

By Heddi Cundle (Founder & CEO, myTab)
It’s tough being a startup, putting yourself out there and hoping someone will love you back. So when I asked if myTab.co could be considered to join the Startup America Partnership, it felt slightly like asking the cool boy at school if he’d let us be in with his ‘in’ crowd. We know he’s popular, achingly good looking, and his IQ is off the charts.

Then a miracle happened -– he said yes! He not only said yes immediately but he also offered to introduce us to all his friends -– the business friends who have deals that we can utilize and the new startup friends who signed up as members.

Within the past two weeks of joining the Startup America Partnership, myTab has fallen in love.

Now I know you’ll tell us that we’re naïve and it’s just a first-time entrepreneur crush but consider this: our ‘boy’ has kept in continuous communication with us, tweeting myTab tweets, replying back to our tweets, emailing us updates so we’re in the ‘know,’ inviting us to join his ‘cool club’– aka private LinkedIn Group — and making sure all his business friends and new membership friends keep us in the loop full of resources to help myTab.co be the best we can.

If that’s not attention, consideration and pampering, I don’t know what is.

We even posted a LinkedIn “need help on something” request on a Friday and an impressive number of group members made an effort to reply over the weekend. Yes, they were active on Saturday and Sunday, not just focusing on their own startup but making sure myTab gained answers to questions.

Our boy certainly knows how to attract a good, decent, hardworking crowd of friends who share the same ethics and consideration. Kevin Bacon, myTab’s logo pig, is a very lucky person!

Talking about luck, this is my first startup so everything is obviously very new so I’m praying for heaps of luck. I buy fortune cookies weekly and even Googled “luck dancing” but it rained instead -– I’ve two left feet, it was an honest mistake.

,b>I attended a brilliant Startup Exits event hosted by myTab.co Advisor, Nathan Beckord. The keynote speaker was the genius Russell Fradin. His speech was inspiring and beyond entertaining.

As an incredibly successful entrepreneur, Russell summed up that anyone who is a budding startup needs three things: great product, a great team and tons of luck. Along with a fantastic monologue elaborating on this, he also stressed that startups must extensively use available resources, ask questions and utilize the experts around us. In layman’s terms, wring the resource cloth till it’s dry… and then repeat the following week.

I truly thought the luck would come to us immediately upon launch, primarily because forming myTab’s “band” of team members and advisors was so easy. Yet when we launched things became harder, something I discovered is the norm. That’s when the real work started, (I think someone forgot to tell me this).

You think 5 months of building a site, 6 weeks of bug testing and 18 hour days is hard work? Wait ‘til you open the web doors and instead of a stampede, Gladiator style, you get more of a Florida Old Age Home waddle — a few stragglers who want a couple of minutes of exercise in their new Dr. Scholl’s, took a wrong turn and fell on your site by accident.

So you push on social media, promote to every journalist, attend a zillion networking events and nervously eat ice-cream at 2am (golden rule: if you eat it out of the freezer instead of a bowl, the calories don’t count). It’s a really big struggle to get going so yes, luck is the real charm and key to opening the flood gates of traffic.

As Charles Hudson also mentioned at Startup Exits, every entrepreneur is certain they’re only one press release away from success. It’s just hoping that the next release will be the winner. This isn’t the case though. It’s that trio combination, sheer ambition, and someone having your back.

My new Startup America Partnership boy has made myTab’s life more secure and given us that nudge of luck. He vowed it’d be a long-term relationship so we now can relax a bit, knowing he’ll not cheat on us or dump us anytime soon.. especially not on social media. He gave myTab a whole new set of relevant friends that we’ve not experienced before in any other startup group or membership, and his positive nature made us tell more entrepreneurs about him.

We want to show him off, and we truly hope they have a perfect first date with him also. This guy is amazing; does his mother know how awesome her son is?

The Startup America Partnership is working with some of the country’s most successful organizations to provide valuable resources to young companies with high growth potential.

The five resource areas we are focused on are: Talent, Services, Expertise, Customers and Capital. To access these resources, please apply for your My Success Kit account, where you can view partner offers, update your company information and interact with our team. The Startup America Partnership is planning on building more tools to help your startup in the coming months.

My Success Kit is currently available to young, for-profit companies in the Startup, Rampup and Speedup stages with more than two employees who meet the registration criteria. If your company is in the Idea Stage, please click here for resources and information. Ready to get started?
Apply here for the Startup America Partnership. Gather your company information including year founded (2006 or later for Startups, 2001 or later for Rampups and Speedups), your Employer Identification Number, founder/employee count (miminum 2 for Startups 6 for Rampups), revenue information, Company web site, LinkedIn Company URL and your personal LinkedIn URL and then click Next.

This post was originally posted at Startup America Partnership.

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