Startedby was a project I worked on off/on for a year. The motivation for the project stemmed from experience I had as the founder and executive producer of Ideakick. Ideakick is an event that gives aspriring entrepreneurs a forum to present their ideas for new products and companies. Following Ideakick events, I would often get feedback from people that they were looking for a way to connect with a wider audience than just the attendees at the event. Also, people expressed a desire to more easily find co-founders for their ventures and engage in some form of customer development. Startedby was an effort to solve these problems.
Project Varsity was a company I spent 2 years of my life trying to make happen. I was a first-time entrepreneur and made a number of mistakes (just about every one in the book come to think of it). In an effort to articulate what the vision behind Project Varsity was, I’ve put together a few slides that illustrate the product marketing and positioning of Project Varsity.
@econtalker just wanted to pass along a high-five for an entertaining and educational podcast.I learn something new/cool each week.
— Trevor Goss (@TrevorGoss) December 10, 2012
This is my first post. I plan on updating this blog on a weekly basis with content about startups, entrepreneurship, business, politics and other things I find newsworthy or interesting.
So what motivated this anyway?
During the run-up to the presidential election, I began posting more often on Facebook to voice some ideas I had and felt strongly about. That effort garnered a fair amount of engagement from my friends and several encouraged me to expand on the writing effort.
In addition to politics, I have a number of thoughts on economics and startups that I’ve wanted to share. This blog will be for that too.
Writing style
One of the things I’ve learned having read a number of very talented writers is that you need to write for one audience. When you do, your voice comes out and people come to know you as the author. In the past I’ve had problems with that as I think I’ve tried to put too much into writing. This blog will be more of a stream of conciousness writing effort, and in that sense it will be an experiment so we’ll see how it goes.
Observations:
- Most colleges do a pretty lousy job at helping their alumni connect to one another.
- At best, schools have a website with some basic search functionality that either doesn’t work at all or doesn’t work well
- Most college alumni associations are managed at the local level by volunteers (trust me, I am one) and are run in a very “Mom ‘n Pop” fashion with little understanding or utilization of new technology
Hypothesis:
- A mobile app that was purpose-built to connect college alumni in a given geography would be useful to alumni and help them create new friendships and business relationships, all while increasing affinity for their college.
Problems/Opportunities:
- Many people enjoy cooking
- Many other people don’t enjoy cooking, know how to do it well, or have the time to do it well. This is especially true in cities and amongst the “young professional” crowd.
Solution:
- What if there were a service that let anyone turn their personal kitchen in their home into a functioning restaurant and allow other people to either come over and dine with them or come over and get takeout from them?
- This would allow people who like to cook to do so for more people–a common complaint is that cooking for 1 person is no fun and/or to much trouble–and monetize their existing talents and physical asset (the kitchen).
Devil’s Advocate:
- Using a personal kitchen as a commercial kitchen would be in violation of commercial kitchen laws. This might pose a problem if jurisdictions chose to crack down like they have with app-based cab services like Uber.
Name Idea & Logo
Observations:
- Sports is an incredibly large and important part of many people’s lives
- Sports is very well covered at the professional level, most of the collegiate level and some of the high school level
- Athletes of all ages have taken to social media as a means of better connecting with their fans and followers
- Using services like Facebook and Twitter to follow your favorite athletes is difficult because you have to do so manually and uniquely for each athlete & team
Hypothesis:
- Would’t it be a better idea if there was a blogging platform that purpose-designed for sports, and included an easy way to publish photos, videos, stats and other content?
Devil’s Advocate:
- We already have Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr (and now Google Plus) and host of other social platforms. Do we really need another one, even if it is sports focused? What benefits does a blogging platform that is “purpose-designed for sports” have that would make it better than the existing options?
- Assuming this product is ‘better’ than existing options, what are the switching costs of those other options and what strategies and tactics would it be necessary to employ to get people to switch? (is switching even the right word here or could people just use yet another service and vote with where they spend their time?)
