Star(tup)Date: 0001
If anyone finds this, welcome to the journey. First, let’s get one thing straight. I am no trekky — no funny ears, no props, no uniforms (okay, maybe my ears are funny, but I came by them honestly).
It just seems like an apt and fun metaphor for a startup — “to boldly go where no [wo]man has ever gone before” (except for a half dozen other entrepreneurs who are working on the exact same thing, all of whom are more talented, better connected, and have more funding than you!).
Here you can follow the progress of givby.com, to see what it’s like giving birth to a startup on a mission “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new civilizations” and to claim its own tenuous place in the vast universe. No doubt there will be many hairy moments where we’ll be sure to shake the camera hard to show our peril (because it’s cheaper than shaking the whole set).
What we did yesterday
What’s in a name?
First, we picked a name. Oh yeah? It’s harder than you think! With the galaxies crawling with domain name speculators and squatters it’s almost impossible to find a name that expresses who you are and what you do that hasn’t already been taken by someone just waiting for you to pay them outrageous rents to buy it. And when you do find a URL you still have to be able to get the matching handles for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr and everywhere else. Since we couldn’t afford to buy a so-called “premium” name or to hire an infinite number of monkeys hitting an infinite number of typewriter keys (Mechanical Turk was down), we wrote a secret algorithm to keep generating random sets of letters until the program spit out one with semantic meaning — and “givby” (give-bee) was born. Okay, maybe we’re stretching the truth on that one, but that’s how legends are born and it sounds more “techie” than just slogging through with persistence and creativity until you come up with one that works.
Wiring the rooms.
Then we took that name and:
- got an EIN from the IRS for GIVBY INC to make it official
- registered the givby.com and givby.org (nonprofit affiliate) domain names
- set up a host account for our future website & online/mobile app
- set up rudimentary givby pages on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest & Tumblr to begin socializing (we’re using a honeybee photo placeholder until we get around to a real logo)
- claimed the “gogivby” namespace for a “givby” Facebook app
- created pages for givby on AngelList, Vator.tv & StartupAmerica (places where all the cool startups hang out & meet investors)
Warming the incubators.
Then we began applying to some startup accelerators (aka incubators). These are like hot clubs with long lines and velvet ropes. Seriously, getting into a good accelerator program shifts the odds of startup success from something like 1-in-10,000 to 1-in-2. You get to hang out with great mentors who have succeeded in doing what you are trying to do and mingle with some of your most promising startup peers while you all work on your companies inside the incubator. We applied to Excelerate in Chicago, Techstars in Boulder, and The Brandery in Cincinnati. Givby may be a bit too early stage for them, and it’s really hard to get in before your startup has a team — but you have to try. They only come around once a year, and yesterday was their filing deadline.
So, that’s about it. I know, what a slacker! I’ll try to do better today.
