This post is the second edition in my retro-blog about the origins of GitBax, 5 Degrees, and the mobile-first CRM for which you have been waiting.
The following week, I went on my first spring break trip in years (as a part-time student holding down a full-time job, they weren’t easy to come by). I led a Booth team to the New Orleans Entrepreneur Week, where we paired up with a local startup and helped them work on critical business issues. While there, I met Kai Nunez, a senior usability analyst at Salesforce, who saw promise in GitBax and offered to provide guidance as an informal advisor. Her insights have been critical in helping us improve the product, especially because we see Salesforce as a potential partner as we progress.
We readied a minimum viable product (MVP) for launch at a Tech Cocktail event at the end of March. Whipping a basic app together in three days, we showed it off and received positive response from an overwhelming number of event attendees… We knew we were on to something!
Over the month of April, we became very familiar with the competitive landscape, from Bump to Hashable to more traditional CRMs such as Highrise by 37Signals. As we dug into the competitive set, we learned what delighted people, as well as what just didn’t work as advertised. People shared opinions on Bump, Hashable, Gist, and many of the other newer geo-locative apps that have recently launched. We took careful notes, probed for opportunities, and decided on an initial feature set.
As we were putting the finishing touches on the GitBax MVP, we also reached an agreement with Kelly Schwedland, a friend from Chicago Booth. Kelly, an early angel investor in The App House at the product level, liked our new direction. We agreed to convert his position into equity in The App House, bringing him on board as our COO.
We planned for our official launch on April 27th, 2011 at AppNation, one of the largest industry shows in San Francisco. However, we couldn’t move fully into development of GitBax at that time because we still had a number of projects to wrap up for our existing appreneur clients, which fell somewhere between incubation and contract development. So as we finished up our development cycles for our clients, we managed to fit in development on GitBax around the margins… barely launching in time for the show.
Fast forward to April 27th, 2011…
Kelly and I travelled to San Francisco for the conference. When we arrived as the show, we managed to secure a booth at AppNation directly adjacent to Sequoia Capital funded businesses, including Evernote and Meebo, and across an aisle from BlueRun Ventures funded startups. We had great conversations with Mark Dempster at Sequoia and Jay Jameson at BlueRun, who were generous with their time and perspectives. The last day of the show was our best day, as we won a pitch contest judged by app review bloggers, were interviewed by IntoMobile, and were selected to pitch in front of a crowd of 300 people at the AppCircus event.
We also met with Mark Leahy of Fenwick & West, one of the premier startup/ IP law firms in the world, during our trip. Linda Darragh, the Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at Chicago Booth, had suggested we reach out to Mark as we built our business.
Reflecting back on the trip, we met great players across the mobile startup ecosystem, including new media players, founders and top executives at quickly growing startups like Waze, and heads of businesses that help startups gain visibility within the App Store. At the end of the week, we vowed to take a bit of the Silicon Valley magic back with us to Chicago…
The following week, we pitched at Feeding Funding Frenzy on May 4th. It was the first time Kilton and I had pitched together. We kept our talking points to eight minutes and gave a great pitch, which helped earn us an advisor and strategic partner in Les Teichner, the President of Turbulent Energy and a successful entrepreneur with a strong focus on IP development.
Immediately after our pitch, Kilton and I raced to O’Hare to catch a flight back to SF to participate in another conference, called Social Loco, focusing (as the name mostly implies) on the intersection of social and local mobility.
We had another great conference, and made some valuable connections, including Danny Bloomfield and Arabella Santiago of Chicago-based (and TechWeek organizer) midVentures and Trevor Dryer from Intuit.
We returned to Chicago, determined to “Bear Down” and bring GitBax to the next leve.
Tune in tomorrow to hear about how our recent acceptance into Illinois Launch, an entrepreneurial resource program sponsored by University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, helped set us up with groups to pitch to, resources to mentor us, and a brand new company name!
Jeb Ory is the CEO of The App House and 5 Degrees, which is best described as Mobile CRM meets Google Circles. It launches Friday.
You can join me for the official TechWeek after party on Friday, 7/22 at the launch party for 5 Degrees with DealsGoRound here.
.jpg)
