Startup Weekend is back! We’ll be descending upon Houston Technology Center April 26-April 28, creating companies over the course of a weekend.

From Startup Weekend:

All Startup Weekend events follow the same basic model: anyone is welcome to pitch their startup idea and receive feedback from their peers. Teams organically form around the top ideas (as determined by popular vote) and then it’s a 54 hour frenzy of business model creation, coding, designing, and market validation. The weekends culminate with presentations in front of local entrepreneurial leaders with another opportunity for critical feedback.

As a past participant and current organizer, I encourage you to attend if you’ve been considering launching your own startup. You can make some incredible progress in 54 hours. Visit the Houston Startup Weekend site for more information about the event.

]]> http://startuphouston.com/2013/04/12/startup-weekend-returns/feed/ 0 http://startuphouston.com/2013/04/03/exclusive-city-of-houston-hackathon-coming-in-may/ http://startuphouston.com/2013/04/03/exclusive-city-of-houston-hackathon-coming-in-may/#comments Wed, 03 Apr 2013 22:20:45 +0000 Jeff Reichman http://startuphouston.com/?p=2725 The City of Houston is throwing an Open Innovation Hackathon the weekend of May 18 at the Houston Technology Center. The hackathon will kick off an open data initiative, where the City will work with Houstonians to develop practical and useful applications. Check out some sample projects for ideas.

Check out HoustonHackathon.com for further details. Write some code and do some good!

How about solving a widespread problem in healthcare?  That’s what attendees of the inaugural Health 2.0 Houston Code-a-thon did on March 23-24 at Platform Houston.

The Code-a-thon brought together medical professionals, patients and software developers to tackle existing problems in the healthcare system.  The 40 initial participants divided up into 7 teams, addressing everything from legislative issues and promoting company wellness to the decision process for everyday meals.

The diversity of ideas highlighted so many areas ripe for disruption and innovation in the industry. “One of our goals is to introduce health care problem owners to people who can help build the solutions and products that can change healthcare,” said Laura Shapland, one of the co-founders of Health 2.0 Houston, an organization that launched in January.

While the idea of changing healthcare may seem like a daunting task, congregating fearless developers at events like these just might be the way to make it a reality.

“I’m so amazed at the progress teams made this weekend and am excited to see which ideas will turn into companies,” Shapland said.

Though the competition was fierce with Houston’s finest free thinkers, the group Shame.Me ended up taking the cake—which included a $1,000 prize, team passes to the Health 2.0 National Fall Conference (a $1000 value per ticket), a 1 month communal membership to Platform Houston and some O’Reilly books on the house.

Their big idea? To create healthy eating patterns using redirection. The user inputs dietary goals in the app and will redirect them to a healthier option nearby if they’re debating fast food. If they still get the fast food, the app will post statements on their social media sites and/or text their Mom about their poor food choice.

Other teams and their ideas included:

• Econsent, 2^nd place winner, provides an easier way to give consent for clinical trials and solves the issues of poor participant understanding and low accrual rates
• MedForm.me, 3^rd place winner, cuts down the time spent on medical paperwork with a platform that allows you to save, print and share your medical history with doctors
• Open Legistlatr, tracks the latest status updates on changes in Texas healthcare legislation.
• Healthscoreboard.com, measures company health and wellness in a competitive, fun way to ultimately increase productivity and decrease health insurance costs
• Secure Healthcare Communications, securely transmits personal healthcare information from patient to doctor
•  OCAD, helps dentists properly diagnose pre-cancerous lesions with an app for oral cancer screening

With the diversity of talent showcased, I’d chalk this up as yet another successful adventure for Houston’s startup community. Just hacking for healthcare on the weekends.

The diversity of the crowd pushed conversations in all directions, from thermodynamics to organic pecans to that good ol’ Texas oil and gas. And as the night went on, some conversations became a little more candid.

There were passionate entrepreneurs seeking advice about their startups.  New-to-Houston transplants trying to build their network and adjust to the city. And even people looking for career changes while asking those big, soul-searching questions that resonate with all driven hearts…“What change am I actually going to bring to the world?”

But there was one conversation really struck me.  While I watched complete strangers find common ground, I commented on the importance of bringing people from all industries together. A young entrepreneur fresh out of med school replied, “Yeah, I get what you’re trying to do with Startup Houston and bring people together, but I really don’t have time to talk to people that are doing things I’m not interested in.”

So what are we trying to do here?

Most people in the room were looking to make connections, but they also kept an open mind.  They started out as strangers talking about their worlds, and soon found parallels in their work and their personal lives.  They were getting to know one another.  And as relationships develop over time around areas of mutual respect, a diverse and dynamic community evolves.

While the med student turned entrepreneur can make a case that he doesn’t have the time to meet people outside of his field, I’d argue that he’s missing the bigger opportunity of learning from other people.  You can’t control where a random conversation with a stranger takes you.  And after talking to people all night about so many great things happening in Houston, why would you want to?

MIT grad Stacy Lutz with Holly Johnson from Water Standard, Neil Churman from Michael Baker Corporation and Jeff Reichman from January Advisors.

The contest closes March 1 and winners will be announced by March 21. The contest relies on community voting, so if you enter, let us know!

SURGE started out with a powerful core purpose…to enable entrepreneurs to solve the world’s energy problems. Our investment thesis (& personal core values) drove us all to commit blood, sweat, tears and a lot of capital to building an entrepreneurial ecosystem as a bolt-on and disruptor to the already existing energy capital whereby a majority of the world’s energy decisions are touched.

Over the past two years, our investment thesis has been validated (ok, trending in the right direction. We will write more about this in detail in the coming weeks). BUT…we were missing something, WATER.

Read the full article here.

From Aron Susman of TheSquareFoot:

I joined my first startup about 4 years ago, early in the life of that company. We had about 50 paying enterprise customers using the product and who willing and eager to share feedback to make the product better. While I was there, we were lucky enough to grow and continued to add customers to our subscription service. We grew enough to get our cash burn down to zero and eventually became profitable (20mph – 100mph). However, we faced many challenges along way. Some of which at the time made it seem like we were never going to make it through.

Essentially, we were facing a scaling problem, except I did not know the term because I did not go to business school and it was my first startup experience. In my naïve mind, all startups were equal in the sense that we were young companies trying to grow. As we grew and overcame the challenges of scaling a product that our customers needed and loved, I put those lessons learned away for the next start-up–preferably one I founded myself. I honestly thought the hardest challenge of my professional life was behind me.

Read the full post here.

Saturday, March 30, 2013
Noon to 5p
Cleveland Park, Houston, TX
( map )

FREE. No assholes allowed.

RSVP here: http://www.startupsoftball.com

Brought to you by January Advisors.

At JobKaster, we’re in the middle of a complete overhaul. We are rebuilding everything from the ground up to create a sturdy infrastructure as well as a better UI. With the developers completely immersed in rebuilding the site, what is a non-technical Co-founder to do?

I’ve been laying the groundwork by putting together a plan for launch: making lists of press contacts and lists of every blogger in our niche, reaching early adopters via social media, getting interviews and press mentions, putting together early partnerships, SEO, and of course, getting massive exposure to our JobKaster Beta.

How did I increase traffic over 500X?

Blind luck and a bit of SEO. Being new to the JobKaster team, I did a quick SEO audit, and I started building some easy links to the site to build up our authority. One of those links was this post to Reddit: Would you use Google Maps to find a job nearby? with a link back to our home page.

I didn’t think much of it at the time so I posted it and went to bed. I checked our analytics before crashing for the night, and I believe there were around 70 visits from the post.

The next morning I got a text from my Co-founder saying that his secretary told him congratulations as he walked through the door. When he asked why, she said that she had saw JobKaster as the second result on the Technology SubReddit.

I quickly checked my Google Analytics on my phone, and I saw a huge spike! We were at about 15,000 visitors at 9 AM, and it kept going up. And up. And up…

The Aftermath:

By the end of the day, Reddit sent us over 29,000 new visitors, generated over 1000 new signups, and at least 5 leads.

Most importantly, we proved our concept. With over 300 comments on the Reddit post, we were clearly able to see that users our ecstatic for a map based job search.

Lessons Learned

I have to admit that it was definitely a rush to see JobKaster’s traffic explode, but it’s short-lived.

I think the number one lesson was that we just weren’t ready. The site wasn’t optimized for a huge influx of traffic. Our lead gen wasn’t up to par, landing pages weren’t ready, our servers couldn’t take the load, and simply put our app is still a long way from being the game changer we hope it to be.

Conventional startup wisdom is all about getting your work out there. While I do believe in this, sometimes you’re not ready to unveil your work to the world. Sometimes it’s better to have something more polished, more user friendly, and more useful.

Here are some lessons we’ve learned from our Reddit debacle:

• Release early, get feedback, reiterate, and release again. Follow the lean startup methodology, but don’t seek big publicity until you are ready for it.
• Build something useful. For proof of concept, we used an Indeed feed to back-fill the jobs. While that’s all good to prove the concept, it defeats the purpose of location based jobs because the Indeed listings were mostly grouped by zip code and not by actual address.
• Optimize your sign-up process. Don’t ask for too much information. Name and email. That’s it.
• Add a “sharing widget” to spread the word even further.
• Ensure a “call to action” for whatever action that you want your users to do on every page.
• Respond to comments! Listen to what users are saying and let them know you are listening.

More importantly, remember that startups are all about moving the needle. Keep working to get those small wins. At first, those small wins will be miniscule, then they will get bigger, and we’ll need to do more to move the needle. One day, just maybe, a sudden spike of 30,000 new visitors will just be a small blip to a small startup trying to change the world of job search.