ColinAke.com…until I write a book.

Yesterday I blogged about CloseBuy.me, the project I worked on at Atlanta Startup Weekend. I didn’t talk about much else… Today I’m going to break down what I took away from Atlanta Startup Weekend, as suggested recently in Skribit (by the way, use it if you want me to blog about something).

First - Atlanta has a great entrepreneurial community. Debate that if you want, and people will, but I think that the people make the community. Everyone’s approachable. Everyone makes an effort to help out. Everyone has their own opinion, and it’s respected. People are accessible - I met most of the community at BarCamp (or I still haven’t met them yet) and I feel at home and welcome in the community. No, we may not have the track record of the larger communities, but there’s a ridiculous amount of talent in Atlanta that I think will serve the city well over the coming years.

Second - Working with motivated people motivates people. It’s a drag to walk out of Startup Weekend - where you’re working on something with extremely motivated people - and go back to your ‘normal’ job where it’s really hard to get pumped up about something. You’re not sitting in a conference room bouncing ideas off of very smart people. It’s demotivating. It makes me want to work with motivated people. For the first time, I really became interested in coworking.

Thirdly - Short Term Success != Long Term Success. Our project is one that works - it has a prototype that works. It was “successful” in that the team stayed together and worked together. It is not a success as a startup. It’s nowhere near. What happened over Startup Weekend is a good basis for a platform, but most likely we’ll have to rebuild the code entirely, spend more time thinking about how things operate, and completely start over. Just because we were able to present a demo does not mean we’re successful. It means we now know more about what we don’t know. I now realize that I have so far to go before true success.

I could go on. (97% of) the people impressed me. Atlanta Startup Weekend encouraged me to take the leap and work on my own startup out of college. I learned a bit about when to try and lead and when to step back and let others do their thing. I saw firsthand how projects either fail or morph into “something that works” when a short amount of time is involved. I learned how to not compete against other projects and support them instead. I’m looking forward to seeing how bad my public speaking is, thanks to the video footage of the event. I’m sure I’ll annoy myself as I watch me.

The result of the weekend, to me, is far greater than just a few product demos and a few “failed” projects. Any one of the “successful” demos could fail at any time. The result of the weekend is a closer knit community - a more motivated community bringing in new people to focus on building businesses in Atlanta. The result is motivated individuals going back to their own lives and being unsatisfied with mediocre effort.

To the Atlanta startup community: If I can ever do anything to help out on a project you’re working on, let me know. If I ever do something that is annoying / stupid, tell me to my face. I want to improve as a person continually. I want to contribute to the community.

Colin

As I mentioned in my last blog post, Atlanta Startup Weekend was this past weekend.  What a weekend! I pitched my idea for a web-based product search through local inventory, and it got picked by a few people. I got to work on it all weekend with some rockstar coders, marketing advisors, and a few people that drifted in and out. And folks, we have a prototype (that you can’t see yet) for CloseBuy.me (what used to be Project Mayhem)

First off, a huge THANK YOU to Jason, Joshua, Hsiu, and Jay for helping all weekend. I don’t want to forget Blake, Glen, Dean, George, Jeremy, and whoever Jeremy called on his cellphone about JQuery stuff.

Needless to say, the project is nothing without this team. Jason and Joshua wrote an absolute crap-ton of backend code. Hsiu did a great job on the front end in concert with Jeremy and some help with the sorting features by Jason. Jay, George, and especially Dean did a great job helping me look at vertical segments for the site, as well as user base and how to appeal to them.

CloseBuy.me is going to be my project for some time. I will likely need some PHP / JQuery coders at some point, so if you want to help out and get in on a startup that is in it’s extremely early stages, then come talk to me, drop me an email, or send over a homing pigeon.

CloseBuy.me has some massive hurdles to jump, but that’s what makes it fun - and more importantly, that’s what makes it valuable. We’ll keep you up to date, but if you want to join the CloseBuy.me team, get on it. Most (if not all) of the people involved this past weekend have other projects to take care of, and I need people who can get pumped up about it.

In the meantime, I’m absolutely exhausted. But I’m absolutely thrilled about the progress.

Colin

I’m beginning my job search, and it’s a doozie. We’re in some uncertain economic times… is it a weak job market for those of us who are about to graduate from college?  Or do we have a leg up because more of us can be hired for the same amount of money as more experienced employees?

Who knows?  I know I don’t.

I just know that there’s one thing I’m trying to use to guide my job search: Will I enjoy the job? Will I want to go to work? Am I going to love it?

I’m not sure what that looks like - I don’t even know where I want to work, or what I want to do. But I want to understand and love the big picture associated with the company and the job.  I would love to work in the private space industry, but I’m not sure where to start, especially if I want to stay in Atlanta for a little while.  We’ll see where that goes, if it goes anywhere.

I’ve also thought about starting something, but I’m not sure there’s any early stage capital available anywhere at this point.  So do I just camp out at my current job and weather the economic storm?  Try and find a job I love?  Throw all my effort behind my idea and work until I can’t go anymore?  What’s the best thing to do?

Every morning at 6:45, someone drives by the front of our house and honks for a good 3-4 seconds. You can almost set your watch by it.

We live on a residential street that is often used as a cut-through between two more industrial streets.  Someone (in a not-quite-so-new silver sedan) has decided they don’t like people parking on the street and honks EVERY time they drive by.  This has been going on the last six months or so - I kept hearing it from bed in the spring, but when I started getting up at 6 AM over the Summer, I noticed it happened every morning about the same time.

Mark and I decided to see who it is - and try and figure out why they’re doing it. If this person is just turning onto our street, honking, and turning off immediately, we think we have a fairly good case to argue our street should allow no thru traffic, or at least argue that constant honking is a disturbance of the peace.

Then the question comes - what’s next? Call the cops? Who do we petition to get this craziness stopped? Or is someone just going to slap a No Parking sign on our street?

Take care, and don’t be a jerk for no reason.

Colin

These bailouts have got to stop. At what point does this madness stop? We’ve already fallen down a slippery slope.  Our tax money is being used to bail companies out whose management have made poor decisions.  I realize that in almost every case this happens, an argument can be made for the overall better well being of the economy, but at some point, after we hand out tens of billions of dollars every time a company is about to go under, aren’t we just throwing money down the drain?

At what point is there no longer a free market?

Here’s a quote from Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post (found via my friend Rob Johnson):

“What we are witnessing may be the greatest destruction of financial wealth that the world has ever seen — paper losses measured in the trillions of dollars. Corporate wealth. Oil wealth. Real estate wealth. Bank wealth. Private-equity wealth. Hedge fund wealth. Pension wealth.”

He’s right on. It’s scary.  But is constantly handing out billions of dollars a good long-term idea??

Just something to think on…

Colin

How are you branded? What do people think about you, your blog, your facebook, your picture, the way you dress, your overall image? We’ve always wondered what other people think about us, and this is just another way of asking that same question, except in this case I’d like to emphasize that you have control over your brand.

I started thinking a bit about this last week and I have found myself wondering how I’m perceived at work, online, etc. My twitter account says something about me. My blog says something. My work says something, my clothes say something, the way I talk to people says something.

So here’s the challenge - how do you want to be portrayed?  Are you doing everything you can to be portrayed that way?

It’s hard enough for me to figure out how I want to be portrayed, let alone make sure everything I do is in line with that line of thought.  How do you view me?  If someone says “define Colin” - what are the first words that HONESTLY come to mind?

Just something to think about (but I want your feedback!). Take care.

Colin

One of my classes this semester is Services Marketing - an elective for management majors persuing a marketing certificate. The class is taught by one of my all time favorite professors at Tech, Peter Vantine. Professor Vantine has some extensive history in the services marketing industry and his experience contributes to a course that encourages us to treat the marketing of services differently than traditional product marketing.

How is a service different from a product? Customers usually don’t obtain ownership of the service. They cannot be inventories and sold later - this they’re very perishable. Often there is a level of service variability that depends on the person performing the service. Services are subjective to the opinion of the customer.

One of the things I have to turn in is a Service Journal - a series of entries documenting my service experiences, both good and bad. I’ve already done a little bit of that here with my rantings against AT&T, so I believe I’ll continue the trend and post some service journal entries for you all to enjoy. I’d also love to hear from you as I post the entries to determine if you’ve had a different experience with the same company, or if you feel my interaction typifies the company’s customer service.

Sit back, enjoy, and feel free to critique the ride.

Take care,

Colin

Nancy Pelosi dismissed the House of Representatives yesterday and the Democrats went home, but the Republicans stayed around today to protest that they weren’t given a vote on domestic offshore drilling.  Now, I’m not sure the details, but Republican Texan Congressman John Culberson began using Twitter to update people on the goings on.  Follow @JohnCulberson if you’re into that sort of thing.  I believe @PeteHoekstra is a Representative as well.

A couple things -

• I don’t follow politics nearly as actively as I used to, but what good did this do besides be symbolic?
• Filibusters don’t end at 5 PM with a press conference.
• Awesome to see Twitter used as a communication tool directly between Representatives and their constituents.
• I’d LOVE to be able to hear directly from my Representatives and Senators like this.  I wonder if I can write my reps and encourage them to get on Twitter?

Those are just some thoughts… Not sure what I think of the actions in D.C. on either side (I think we should have had a vote, but I don’t see the point of a publicity show like the GOP tried to pull off) - but I LOVE seeing Twitter used as a method of direct communication at least so we can know what people are working on.

We elect them - shouldn’t we have the option to easily find out about their day just like we find out about our friends’ days?

Colin

You know all those Domino’s commercials, the ones that push “You’ve got 30 minutes” over and over again?

Well, turns out, you have at least 30 minutes.  Sure, they’ve gotten pizza to me in 20 minutes before, that’s why this was so strange to me.

I ordered my pizza at 6:33 PM last night.  Have an email to prove it.  I even got this message at 6:47 in my “Pizza Watch” window.

Now, Domino’s is up the hill a mile, take a left, and it’s another half mile.  Google Maps says it should take them 5-6 minutes to get to my house.  There’s between 2 and 5 stoplights, depending on the route you take.  But they didn’t get to my house until 7:19 PM - that’s 46 minutes if you’re counting (which I was, because of their ad campaign).  22 minutes after my pizza got put into a hot HeatWave™ bag, it got here.  Sure, it was still hot, but I find an issue with companies who advertise one thing and then back off it when they don’t deliver.

It’s not a guarantee for safety reasons.  I get safety reasons - but I would have made the 5 minute drive to Domino’s and back in 12 minutes less than it took them to drive it once.  But why would you advertise something so often and then not deliver on it?  That’s creating ill-will among consumers.  And it’s hurting your delivery people - the delivery woman was really pleasant about it when I asked her - and I tipped her OK, but you better believe it crossed my mind to not tip, since I was already paying a $1.50 delivery fee.

This “You’ve got 30 minutes” stuff is bad marketing juju, I say.  I’d back off fast if I were Domino’s corporate.  What say you?  Am I off my rocker or have you had similar experiences?

Colin

UGA is playing Fresno State for the College World Series.  My extended family (bless their poor souls) are UGA fans.  If you’re not aware, I go to Georgia Tech, and we hate UGA.  I pull for two teams - Georgia Tech and whoever’s playing UGA.  I grew up that way, and the rest of the school is that way.  That’s how a rivalry works.

Now when I mentioned I was pulling for Fresno State, I got the normal “I’d be pulling for Tech if they were still playing,” line.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that line.  The Parkers give me a hard time about it - Mr. P went to West Point and Matt went to the Air Force Academy, and I can see how they pull for each other’s schools when they’re not playing - they have a common bond in military service.  I heard it when I refused to pull for UGA over Hawaii, no matter what the odds.  But for GT and UGA, there’s nothing more that I want in college sports than for UGA to be completely irrelevant.  In fact, I want UGA to be ranked preseason #1 in football.  That way there’s nowhere for them to go but down in the rankings, disappointment saddening their fans.

I’ll give you a rivalry - it’s so intense at GT that we want UGA to lose no matter who they’re playing.  That’s animocity between two schools.  None of this “we’ll pull for you when you’re not playing us” crap.  It’s hardcore.  There’s a reason they call the football game “Good, clean, old fashioned hate.”

That’s a rivalry.  Go Fresno State.