article placeholder

Inventing Jeanome: Big Problem, Big Consumer Market

Editor

By Mercedes Mapua (Founder, Jeanome) I am in love with shopping. But I don't like crowded malls, long lines at the checkout counter, or trying on a dozen items in order to take one home. So I thought why not create something that revolutionizes shopping?

Let me digress here by saying I've been on a career path of designing user interfaces, and have quickly grown weary of the corporate world. Not one to sit idly, I've decided to to take charge of my life by taking a risk and launching my very own startup.

I'd be lying if I said I simply had a spark of genius one day.

Dreaming up ways to improve some small aspect of life, I began to extensively research the denim industry as an Industrial Design student at San Jose State University. I discovered a huge consumer market with an equally huge consumer problem: Finding jeans that are both stylish and figure-flattering. This inspired me to create Jeanome, a social web service dedicated to jeans, run by jean lovers for jean lovers. Users connect with friends and fellow jean-aholics to exchange shopping advice, collect points for rewards, and create and share their denim collections online.

... Read More...
Uncategorized1 min read
article placeholder

Solo Founder Takes the Long Way with Accompl.sh

Editor

By Jenn Vargas (Founder, Accompl.sh) I'm about 18 months into the journey of taking Accompl.sh (formerly 101in365) from a little weekend project to automate my own annual goal tracking to a living, breathing web application.

Taking the "long way" of being a solo founder, I found working on Accompl.sh as a side project has been a crash course in time management, community building, product development, design, coding, you name it. But the most difficult part of all has been making the big decisions about the direction of the project itself.

Without a co-founder to help rationalize my own thoughts about the future of the product, I was stuck in a bit of a quandary -- Do I stay on the path I originally set out on, potentially limiting the growth of the site, but staying true to my original design? Or should I compromise a bit and open the doors for even more people to use the tool that I built and believe in? The answer may seem obvious, but when you're up until 3 or 4 in the morning working on your pet project in virtual isolation for over a year, it's not as clear.

Decisions, decisions. Over the last few weeks I've made a few major decisions about the future of Accompl.sh -- decisions I’ve been struggling with for well over a year but that I finally took the leap and acted on. I'll share a bit of the process with you all in hopes that it'll help you avoid the traps that I fell into.

Trap #1: Not fixing the things that bother you about your product

I was tired of explaining why I had so many arbitrary rules in my product every time so I shut down physically instead of just fixing the product.

... Read More...
Uncategorized1 min read
article placeholder

Insights on Hosting a Tech Event: Happy Go Techy Expo

Editor

By Mai Hoang (Co-Founder, Happy Go Techy Expo) My sister, Tri Hoang, and I have always been the creative outgoing type with tendencies to be workaholics. It’s hard to keep anything contained when we feel excited or motivated by something. We grew up in the heart of Silicon Valley and have been exposed to technology all our lives. Now we are the ultimate tech junkies with a mission to build a community around fun and fashionable tech with Happy Go Techy Expo!

Happy Go Techy Expo will bring out a crowd of 1000+ tech enthusiast in the greater Seattle area on June 25 to peruse one-of-a-kind tech accessories and fun mobile apps from the Seattle Startup Community.

... Read More...
Uncategorized0 min read
article placeholder

Singapore Women Entrepreneurs Chill With Women 2.0

Editor

By Aihui Ong (Founder & CEO, Love With Food) and Gwen Tan (Founder, SGEntrepreneurs) SINGAPORE - A thriving cosmopolitan country in Southeast Asia brims with diversity, as well as a multiplicity of culture, language, arts and architecture. Women 2.0, in partnership with SGEntrepreneurs hosted our first ever mixer in Singapore on June 6, 2011. We were curious, were there any female founders on this tiny island -- an area just 8 times the size of Manhattan?

A roomful of about 40 current and aspiring entrepreneurs attended the event at SmartSpace (venue sponsor). One of the beauties of entrepreneurship is the willingness to help. We kicked off the night by encouraging everyone to share their skill or talent, no matter how big or small, how they can help someone else in the room. It was indeed an awesome night, sharing entrepreneurial challenges, stories and meeting new faces.

Read the full post at "Chillin with Female Founders"

... Read More...
Uncategorized1 min read
article placeholder

5 Free Passes to Silicon Valley Web Builder’s June 29 Gamification Best Practices Event

Editor

By Bess Ho (Founder, Silicon Valley Web Builder) Gamification is a fast growing trend in web and mobile app design. Gamification gained popularity since SXSWi 2010 after the successful launch of Foursquare and Gowalla — two check-in platforms to use achievement and badges to engage users. For decades, traditional industries have successfully implemented Gamification strategy in Frequent Programs and Nike Plus.

Gamification is a design approach to apply game elements to engage users to share or interact in activities and to induce users to accomplish targeted business goals. In short, gamification is also defined as application of game mechanics to non-game environment. As social network giant Facebook has restricted the viral channels such as limiting the number of friends you can invite daily on each app and removing the notification feature, many developers are exploring using the game mechanics to increase user engagement, in addition to the social layer.

What is gamification?

... Read More...
Uncategorized0 min read
article placeholder

A Love Letter to Idea Junkies

Editor

By Starla Sireno (Co-Founder & CEO, Fearless Women Entrepreneur Network) Dear Entrepreneur/Aspiring Entrepreneur,

I may not have met you before, but I know a lot about you. You are my people. I love your passion, creativity and scrappiness to get it done.

But the thing that I love most about you is that you are an Idea Machine.

Is there a week that you don’t have a new idea? They come to you in the shower, at a restaurant, in the car, or over drinks (oh wine, you inspired the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and you still do the trick today). Ideas are intoxicating. They are your oxygen. Each new hit sweeps you up into a vision of what could be. You imagine what it would be like to….

... Read More...
Uncategorized0 min read
article placeholder

7 Reasons Why It’s Better to Be a Female Founder

Editor

By Katherine Hague (Marketing, ecobee) I want to see more female entrepreneurs as much as anyone. But at the same time I think that we tend to undervalue the power of being in the minority.

It’s important to acknowledge the opportunities that come with being a female founder, rather than focusing on those aspects that might make it less than ideal.

... Read More...
Uncategorized0 min read
article placeholder

Survey Monkey and Amazon Mechanical Turk Validated My Startup Idea

Editor

By Lindsay Harper (Founder, Swayable) So you have your genius idea that you just know everyone is going to love, why on earth would you need to do user testing? After all, since the idea is genius everyone is just going to "get it" from the first visit right?

To validate your genius idea (or invalidate it and save you wasted time, sweat and tears) as well as get actual users to test your site once you think it's ready for mass market, survey your potential and current users.

Testing your hypothesis won’t cost you a lot in money, or time for that matter, and will provide a great deal of insight to improve your product/service dramatically.

Here's what I learned about viability testing:

  1. Create a Survey Monkey first, then use Amazon Mechanical Turk to direct Turkers to click on the survey link and to complete the survey.
  2. Test your survey with a small group first and keep tweaking it until you get the right level of response.
  3. Sort and prioritize the results. Don't expect yourself to fix everything that every users tells you, so prioritize the feedback.
  4. You can use MTurk for consumer-facing as well as B2B products.
  5. Good tool for testing price points in Mechanical Turk to see where the sweet spot is for your survey/feedback.

Let's start from the beginning.

... Read More...
Uncategorized1 min read
article placeholder

Confident or Imposing? Self-Monitoring Can Lead to Rewards for Women Leaders

Editor

By Katie Corner (Contributing Writer, Women 2.0) None of us want to be the disliked “career woman” who speaks up quickest and seizes projects only to get promoted faster. She's the one who doesn’t mind bad-mouthing her peers to make herself stand out. She's the one who talks with this unwarranted confidence, as if she is always right. About everything.

How many overly confident, aggressive women like this do you know? Probably very few, as most women don’t fall into this category. Research shows that traits such as aggressiveness are typically associated with males and masculine leadership. As a woman very early in my own career, I too occasionally slip too far on the other side of the spectrum: meek as a mouse, feeling slightly overrated and wondering how I fooled everyone into securing another dream job. It turns out I’m not alone.

Beating Imposter Syndrome

I first stumbled upon the Impostor Syndrome when my sister, also an electrical engineer, sent me a link the handbook How to Feel as Bright and Capable as Everyone Seems to Think You Are.

... Read More...
Uncategorized1 min read
article placeholder

From Boston Software Engineer to Running A Venture-Backed Startup in San Francisco

Editor

By Leah Busque (Founder & CEO, TaskRabbit) The Beginning of TaskRabbit

It was a cold night in Boston in February 2008. My husband, Kevin and I were getting ready to go out to dinner and had just called a cab when we realized we were out of dog food for our yellow lab. We thought of our options -- have the cab stop on the way home to pick up dog food, or run to store real quick before dinner. None was very appealing.

Both my husband and I are in technology so we tend to have some geeky conversations. That night it turned into -- “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was just a place online we could go, say we needed dog food, and name the price we were willing to pay. We were certain there was someone in our neighborhood willing to help us out.”

In that moment of inspiration (or desperation), TaskRabbit was born. Little did I realize that my life would take a dramatic turn.

The Beginning of TaskRabbit

I spent four months talking to anyone who would listen about the TaskRabbit concept. One of the people I met was Scott Griffith, the CEO of Zipcar. I didn’t know Scott before, but a friend of a friend introduced us. I spent 30 minutes describing my vision for TaskRabbit and at the end of the conversation he said, “I think you are onto something here. I think you should see how far you can take it.”

In fact, this response “see how far you can take it” was a common theme with the people that I met. Thankfully, no one said, “You are insane, this is an awful idea!.” So four months later, in June of 2008, I decided to quit my job at IBM and build the first version of the TaskRabbit website. I cashed out my IBM pension to float us for the next six month, hoping that would be enough time to see what I could do with the idea.

Before that fateful night, I spent 7 years working as a software engineer at IBM, building enterprise software.

I loved my job and I really enjoyed the people I worked with at IBM. But that flash of inspiration had taken a hold of me -- I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I had more to offer and more skills to develop and share beyond programming.

I holed myself up for 10 weeks in the summer of 2008 and coded the first version of TaskRabbit. It was a rough MVP, but it was enough to determine if there was any interest from the market.

... Read More...
Uncategorized2 min read
article placeholder

Dress Me Sue’s Sing-Along Lean Startup Blog Post

Editor

By Sue Kim (Founder, Dress Me Sue) I always wanted to go to a sing-along Messiah at Christmas time. This is when the audience brings a score and sings Handel's Messiah along with the professional choir and orchestra. Why? Because it's Christmas and the music is awesome, and sometimes you just want to sing a long at the top of your lungs -- but you need the people onstage to take the lead. (Now that I'm using Things maybe it'll actually happen.)

Another startup buddy and I decided to get serious with Running Lean and do it like a self-led workshop. This is the first resource I've come across that lets me get really real -- like actually pouring the concrete and hammering the studs, and putting muscle to something.

It occurs to me that maybe there are other people wanted to do lean startup who just need to roll up their sleeves. You know? Time to stop reading blogs, getting all excited watching videos, following lean guru twitter feeds, etc. Time to JFDI and take action -- not just one action. But many actions inside a structured process.

Below is our syllabus for the first section -- finding the Problem/Solution fit.

... Read More...
Uncategorized1 min read