Ultimately, Mindy and I went our separate ways, and we sold our client list and moved on to other things. This photo is from our third Everblue office here in Goshen, in the editing room. I remember thinking, when the photographer told me to lean on top of the monitor, “this is dumb.” I still think that:

They pulled us from the CrunchBase database. Interesting, not sure how useful it is…yet…

• you’d like to check out a tradeshow in a nearby city like, say, Chicago
• you don’t want to go to the keynotes or workshops or anything
• you’re cash-strapped/extremely frugal

Here’s what you do:

1. Go to the convention center (tip: if you go to McCormick in Chicago, just park on S. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, right near the McDonald’s — it’s free, on street parking that’s a closer walk than the convention center parking lot)
2. Get out your badge from another trade show you’ve been to, put it on and flip it backwards so the front’s not showing
3. Find the least attentive security person guarding the entrance to the trade show floor, enter there and hope they don’t ask to see your badge, it helps if you’re on your cell phone or something to make yourself look busy and un-interruptable; it also helps if you don’t go on the first day, as they’re more attentive then
4. You’re in! If vendors ask to scan your badge (which you should take off immediately upon gaining access) just say you left it in your hotel room.

Money saved: $295 registration + $20 parking

Running a startup is a practical business, not an academic exercise in morality. Dishonest? It’s in a grey area, for sure. A net positive $315 saved to check out an industry and your competition? Worth it.

Oh, and actually, if you want to get in for free with no chance of dishonesty, just get a free pass from one of your vendors who’s exhibiting there — they usually have a bunch to give out.

I wasn’t quite sure what going from a 15′ ceiling to an 8′ one would be like, but it’s really been better than I expected. The new space is quite homey, as you can see from the pictures. It’s also conveniently located inside of BetterWorld Books Goshen retail store…so…we’ll all be buying a lot more books now.

Here are some pics:

It’s a little bit reminiscient of our original office, which was in an old garage in the end of this very same building. No lead paint chips falling or leaky rooves, however. I think RedPost is through that phase of our existence, at least. We even have A/C and a decent heating system here! Crazy.

• Circumstances haven’t changed much since I wrote that post just over 2 years ago, other than that Elkhart County is making national headlines with the worst jobless rate in the nation, going from 4.7% a year ago to 15.3%. Most of this unemployment has come as a result of the tanking RV and mobile home industry, two of the drivers of our region’s economy. For obvious reasons, however, people aren’t buying a lot of RVs or mobile homes right now.
• Also making national headlines, President Obama is coming to Elkhart County in two days for a town hall meeting about 5 miles away from RedPost’s world headquarters to tout the stimulus plan that’s currently in congress.
• Elkhart County has gone through several major industrial upheavals, from the invention of Alka-Seltzer and rise of Miles Laboratories and simultaneous rise of Charles Conn and the band instrument industry in the 1800s, to the 14 car manufacturers in the early 1900s, to the creation of the RV industry after the Great Depression, to the present-day diversified manufacturing base.
• Coincidentally, RedPost just completed an updated study of intellectual property (patents) in the state of Indiana, focused on the 5 county region that makes up North Central Indiana. This is the third revision to this study, which builds on my previous consulting work pre-RedPost. What this study shows is that Elkhart County has the fourth highest per capita number of patents in the state (if you throw out 3 tiny counties), just below Koscuisko County to our south, which is home to the prosthetics capital of the world. Elkhart’s higher (per capita) than Marion County, where Indianapolis is and the pharma giant Lilly; perhaps most surprisingly, higher than Tippecanoe County, home to the research powerhouse that is Purdue University. Here’s the top 10 per-capita patent producing counties in Indiana (throwing out the counties with less than 50,000 people):
  1. Kosciusko (prosthetics capital)
  2. Bartholomew (Columbus, IN)
  3. Howard (Kokomo)
  4. Elkhart
  5. Hamilton (Indianapolis)
  6. Marion (Indianapolis)
  7. Tippecanoe (Purdue)
  8. Allen (Ft. Wayne)
  9. Vanderburgh (Evansville)
  10. St. Joseph (South Bend)

So how does this all fit together? Yes, the economy is tanking. “Old ways” of doing things, including producing gas-guzzling, heavy RVs, don’t work anymore. But innovation is a process, not a product. People in this here region in Northern Indiana know how to innovate. It’s in our blood, part of our culture. Yes, times are bad right now. But we’re planting the seeds in a thousand garages and pole barns right now.

Oh, and I should note that the RV companies themselves are at the top of a huge supply chain (much like the auto industry). And being at the top, they don’t innovate that much themselves (with a few exceptions). They’re essentially marketing firms. It’s all the suppliers in that chain, who have to compete with China and the rest of the world, where the real innovation is. And those suppliers are all about diversification.

Case in point: RedPost and Lucid Energy (the company we share an office with).

Lucid, a green alternative energy company, grew out of a company supplying RV doors and windows. RedPost sources parts from local manufacturers and takes advantage of the ability to rapidly and cheaply prototype hardware locally. Both companies have been around about 2 years and have great potential. Both are located here, in Elkhart County. Both have innovation at the core of their being.

So don’t worry about Elkhart County. We know how to take risks, make new things and make other things better.

I’ll get off my soap box now, and end by saying, as much as I’d like to hear the president speak Monday, I’ll be doing my part to stimulate the economy by going to work.

Agency Clients Slash Budgets 20% or More, Digital Only Bright Spot
62% of N. American CEOs think digital ad spending will grow this year.
(tags: digitalsignage economy advertising downturn spending digitaladvertising)

Business Dynamic Statistics Briefing: Jobs Created from Startups
“…it is striking that business startups remain robust even in the most severe recession…”
(tags: gooddata entrepreneurship downturn startups studies)

BoomtownUSA by Jack Schultz: Small Town…Big High Tech Cluster
Warsaw, Indiana, is 30 min from Goshen…and the undisputed orthopedic capital of the world.
(tags: indiana technology innovation warsaw)

I was just about to write my blog post, and this automatic post went through. It’s kind-of a cop-out to use a perl script to do my blogging duties for me, but hey, I’m a lot busier than I’ve been in years past. So you can’t blame me, you can just…not read the blog as much, I guess. As a form of protest.

More seriously, check out this graph that goes with the second link above:

Fascinating, isn’t it? Major downturns don’t kill startup job creation…they may kill startups themselves, but if they do, those some entrepreneurs are right back at it creating new jobs again (or, potentially, other entrepreneurs take their place).

From the CNN article:

When to quit — said Kamen, also the inventor of health care technologies and the Slingshot water purifier — is “the toughest question there is” for any entrepreneur who survives on creativity and instinct.

“It’s not nearly as glamorous as people think to keep working on something and to keep hitting roadblocks and to keep going,” he said.

Stubborn, delusionally optimistic, creative, fearless, flexible and focused are some of the ways psychologists and business people describe the personality of an entrepreneur. Surprisingly, another word is ignorant.

“You need to be in denial or in ignorance about the huge challenges you face,” laughs Guy Kawasaki, a former Apple executive and entrepreneur who’s starting the self-described “magazine rack” alltop.com. “You have to believe that it wouldn’t be hard for you to succeed.”

Ignorant. I kinda like that — being ignorant of the constraints of what’s possible allows you to do the impossible.

On a side note, I took CNN’s “Do you have the right stuff for entrepreneurship?” yes/no-highly-unscientific-fluffed-up quiz. Turns out I have “entrepreneurial tendencies.” Who knew?

Raising OPM, however, does not equal success, by any means. Plenty of companies raise millions of dollars of OPM and then quickly (or slowly and painfully) crash and burn. An economic downturn accelerates said crashing and burning, especially when no viable business model exists.

Operating with OPM is not fun. In some sense, it’s dishonest. Think about it — you’re not actually making something that people are paying for. So you’re operating off of the pretense that someone will pay for what you’re making at some future point. There are terms like vaporware for this phonemenon, the opposite of which, in my opinion, is 37 Signals’ Getting Real design philosophy. I could go on and on about Getting Real, but they wrote a whole book about it, it’s really great. Just read it and you won’t have to listen to me on my soapbox.

I digress.

Examples of RedPost “pretense” are:

• a launch party for a software product that is barely ready for prime time
• a Trade Show exhibit without working Signs

Examples of RedPost “getting real” are:

• generating revenue within 3 months of forming as a company, thereby testing out our own ideas for how digital signs can work and make money
• shipping a hardware product that fills a niche in the market within 6 months of forming
• actually launching a working software product that’s unlike anything in the industry a year after forming
• partnering with someone who’s an expert at hardware to allow us to focus on software 18 months after forming

My first full day of work in 2009, January 2, affirmed for me that we’re definitely on the right track. I’ll blog about that tomorrow.

Consider each of these items by themselves. Is it innovative if:

• you’re using the latest and greatest technologies to do something that’s been done 10x before
• you’re tackling an industry that’s stuck in a certain mindset by using principles from outside that industry…essentially, bringing new ideas into an industry that are commonplace and not new at all elsewhere
• you’re not patenting anything
• you’re doing something in a way no one ever has before, but using components that everyone’s currently using in other ways (the uniqueness is the combination of those components)

The answer depends on your definition. But who am I to define such things? Ok, I’m me. Here’s my definition:

Innovation is a process. It’s not about the what but the how. The process either produces something new, unique, different than what’s come before AND/OR produces something that has come before but is better in some way. It may even look and function the same, but may simply cost less.

I could make pencils that look like every other pencil but do it in incredible new ways that don’t use trees. Or I could splice genes but use paper and pencil to write down everything in a notebook instead of using a computer. The former is innovative, the latter is not.

Unfortunately, it’s not up to me to define such things. At least, not outside my own lectures.

Anyways, as far as video, obviously we didn’t deploy it yesterday despite saying we would. One bug remains and it’s just being…well…buggy. So it IS coming…Monday…

In the meantime, I’ll leavy you with a formula to determine how long something will take to complete:

A = time you expect something to take
B = time in actually takes

A x 4 = B

I’m not trying to be snarky here, the above is true, at least for me. And despite knowing the formula, I still always predict something will take B/4 instead of predicting B. Call me an entrepreneur-optimist?

And ok, so no one showed up but me and Nick Hoffman, the museum director. I benefited, however, with a personal tour of the museum, their new archives annex and a great, wide-ranging conversation with Nick. It’s amazing the things he and his staff of 4 are doing there…they’ve over doubled attendance in one year (from 5,000 to 10,000) and [something that's not public yet] and [something that's not public yet]. Really really cool.

I blogged about a conversation I had with Nick in July of 2007, shortly after he arrived. Tons of progress since then…almost like a startup (oddly, I think of everything in terms of whether it’s “like a startup” or “not like a startup”), starting from the ground up, building a world class museum.

And man, there is some crazy stuff in that museum. Like a huge collection of original photos from Nazi Germany and the Nuremberg War Crime Trials.

Oh, and the answer to the question is: Both and neither — innovation is a process, not a product. There are high- and low-tech ways of doing most things.

It hit me as I was chatting with them that my video production company, Everblue Media, existed entirely pre-YouTube. On my car ride back from Indy, I reflected on this more…how much YouTube has changed the Internet world, broadcast media, elections, etc. After 4 years of doing video production, I was kinda tired of it. I think blending video production with a software app would have been more exciting to me, but alas, web video “back in the day” meant using Windows Media, QuickTime, or Real and playing downloaded video files or using shody streaming techniques — nothing like today’s one-click Flash video playback.

Amazing how a confluence of tech (Flash, video codecs, broadband) comes together to truly disrupt and change our way of life through one simple innovation: one-click video playback. Deep thoughts with Eric.

• Step 1: Dig, scratch, and claw yourself to $100,000 of funds from friends/family.
• Step 2: Gain reputation by digging, scratching and clawing some more (i.e. don’t hire a PR firm)
• Step 3: Release your prototype (late)
• Step 4: People like your product. Bootstrap your way to growth, 10-15% a month.
• Step 5: Lots of options! Sell, get more investment, or keep bootstrapping to growth.

For RedPost, Guy’s Plan B has been our Plan A. I believe we’re at Step 4 (although sometimes I think we’re still back at 2). Steve Johnson of The Chicago Tribune took on this whole philosophy, summed up so nicely by Mr. Kawasaki, in an article called Cyberstar about “Chicago-style startups” and the nifty EveryBlock startup:

“There’s the dot-com, Silicon Valley, blow-all-your-money-on-booze style,” says Holovaty, 27. “Then there’s the Chicago thing: Do something, do it well and be modest about it.”

Google‘s Chicago office, a few blocks north, has an espresso machine, Lava lamps, free lunches. EveryBlock, located in a room it sublets from a map company in a drab 4th-floor office overlooking the downtown “L” tracks, has desktops and electrical outlets.

Indiana-style startups must take Chicago-style a step further. We have desktops, electrical outlets AND a leaky roof. It rained 10″ this past weekend, remnants of Hurricane Ike. So I spent quite a bit of time over the weekend moving desks, wet-vac’ing water, emptying buckets, draining Signs (no damage, what a great design!), and setting up fans. At $.12/square foot for our 60 year old former-dry-cleaner’s, we don’t have too much room to complain. (On a side note, oddly, the formerly biggest leaky area didn’t leak at all…and a new biggest leaky area formed. Weird.)

Sometimes I envy the Plan A companies. It’d be great to have an espresso machine and lava lamps (ok, we actually do have an espresso machine. It was $200 on eBay, and Hannah’s a former barista so we needed to keep her in practice). Envy aside, I thoroughly enjoy being at a point where we’re getting actual real live customers who actually really like our product and tell us things like “I didn’t think it would be that simple.” (Thanks Daniel). 10-15% growth is happening. At that rate, we double in size every 6-8 months.

Slowly but surely. Indiana-Plan-B-style.

Our conversation started from how to better use RedPost to promote the market and continued on to market economics, the situation in Paraguay (David and his wife own a cattle ranch there), marketing/branding (David used to run an ad agency, working with clients throughout the Midwest and up into Canada), meeting-angst (some people love to go to meetings…I love to do things) and Goshen’s sustainability challenges/opportunities.

The Goshen Farmer’s Market, I learned, is one of only 2 or 3 in the nation that are run as a co-op between the vendors. All the produce is also organic and locally-grown.

Two ideas from our meeting:

• Print a ton of stickers that have some icon or recognizable Farmer’s Market logo and stick them on produce, menus at restaurants that serve food bought at Market…I eat a lot of food in a week’s time at various restaurants, coffee shops, etc. that comes from the Market but don’t know what actually does…it’d make me feel warm and fuzzy to know what is actually local. Something like Intel’s incredibly successful Intel Inside ingredient branding
• Advertise some sort of special code word or coupon thingy Mondays only on RedPost/Goshen to try to drive traffic to the market on Tuesdays…make it measurable and worth someone’s time to take them to the market…not sure where this is headed but I think we had some good ideas

Another point David made was that the market is more or less still in “startup phase” — much like RedPost — even though it’s been running 8 years. 2 years ago was the first it started to reach a point of break even. Their total annual expense budget is around $30,000…that’s very, very little money. RedPost burns through that in much less time than a year…

I think there’s a cattle ranch in Paraguay I need to visit sometime soon…

From the MTV review of the movie:

The gags that work, however, are almost worth sitting through the ones that don’t. (Maxwell’s acing of an agency test with an essay on existentialism — even though, as he says, “I left that section blank” — has the shape of a joke, but doesn’t scan when you think about it.) There’s plenty of vintage ba-da-bing (“Welcome back. How was the assassination?”), and Carell’s gift for physical comedy puts across such slapstick set pieces as a one-man mini-crossbow struggle in an airplane lavatory (don’t ask) and an elaborate and surprisingly sweet dance-off in which he partners with the very large and entirely lovable actress Lindsay Hollister.

Lindsay’s doing a one-day intensive workshop here in Goshen. From the PR:

This full day (6) hour film auditioning intensive will be co-taught by L.A. based actress Lindsay Hollister (most recently seen as a supporting actress in the film Get Smart starring Steve Carell) and Minda Cerva, casting agent with Peter Strain & Associates.

Hear how they’ve made their careers in a very tough field and what it was like to work with Steve Carell. Also learn how to write a cover letter and package yourself for agencies, how to prepare an auditioning scene, and have the opportunity to do a practice audition and turn in your resume and headshot to a casting agent.

A great opportunity for anyone looking to “make it big” in the film industry. AKA sell your soul to the Hollywood machine.

And on a side note, I love having friends who have ideas for things and then actually turn their ideas into businesses. That’s why me and all my friends are so incredibly wealthy: entrepreneurship.

Anyways, today, Brad receieved the first shipment of about 4,000 books, starting the sorting/inventorying/shelving process. For some comparison, the average small town used book store has about 1,500-5,000 books in inventory. Here are some pics:

And a video, featuring Brad and his words of wisdom (roughly translated: “don’t shop at Amazon.com”)

You should be BWB Goshen’s Facebook Fan. You really should.

Oh, and they have working A/C (which we don’t) so Brad may end up with a room full of RedPost employees when it gets super-hot in August…

I was definitely dreaming. And VERY focused on physical renovation, I mean, I had apparently priced out the cost of an all-glass conference room ($2,828.08). Ha. I love finding stuff like this, it helps me realize how much I’ve learned and changed in thinking since less than 2 years ago. That picture to the right is of the first prototype RedPost I built in my garage with an old laptop and an LCD that we’re still using today in our Signs.

So what was did I actually spend?

Let’s see, in February of 2007 (my true startup month) I spent…well, just look below. Of course, I didn’t start paying myself until much, much later. Just for kicks, here are my first 6 months:

Total Expenses (cost of sales included, on a cash basis):

• February 2007: $1,535.31
• March: $892.18
• April: $2,729.11
• May: $2,997.73 (the first month I started paying someone to work for me, half time)
• June: $21,251.39 (my first big inventory purchases)
• July: $8,537.31 (2 employees now)

Technically, I turned a profit in June of 2007, just 5 months after starting, if you account on an accrual basis. Not too shabby.

And really, WHAT WAS I THINKING? $27,354.28 to startup??? It’s just funny. As was our burn rate back then. Geez. If only my monthly expenses were $892.18 now!

It’s easy to dream big and write a nice business plan or make a nice spreadsheet. But when it comes down to actually spending your own, hard-earned/borrowed money, it becomes a lot harder to spend $27,354.28. I’m glad I learned that lesson. But am still able to dream.