When I joined the BULX team in July 2010, I was completely new to the tech startup world. I had always considered myself an entrepreneur and had founded a handful of my own companies. But it wasn’t until my involvement with BULX, TechColumbus, and social media that I became conscious of the incredible network of people and programs available here in Central Ohio.

As we work to grow and evolve ChatterJet, the network of talent people and the number of resources we have at our disposal are astonishing.

Accelerators

• 1492 (http://onefourninetwo.com/) - A partnership between Columbus State Community College, CCAD, and TechColumbus, this Ohio Third Frontier-supported program provides early stage startups up to $20,000 in funding along with access to mentors, resources, and weekly business development sessions during an intensive 11-week program.
• 10x Program (http://10xelerator.com/) - A mentor-driven accelerator program headed by Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business. This 12-week program often draws hundreds of entries from across the nation to attract and retain some of the best talent in the space.
• Founders Factory (http://foundersfactory.com/) - A blend between an accelerator and a typical startup fund, the team at Founders Factory place an emphasis on their mentors, agile pre-seed funding, and lean acceleration.

Events & Groups

• Wakeup Startup (http://wakeupstartup.com/) – Have a big idea but don’t know about next steps or who you should be talking to? Attend this monthly meetup to hear other pitches and meet the people involved a wide range of early stage concepts.
• Startup Weekend (http://columbus.startupweekend.org/) – Supported by the Kaufman Foundation and held multiple times throughout the year, Startup Weekend is a 54-hour sprint to build something (anything!) with other budding entrepreneurs. Another great way to meet talented people looking to build “the next big thing.”
• TechLife Ohio (http://www.techlifeohio.com/events) – A hub for all things technical, this group supports the startup ecosystem by connecting people with local events and meetups.

Other Resources & Funding

• TechColumbus (http://techcolumbus.org)
• Ohio Small Business Development Center (http://www.entrepreneurohio.org/)
• Ohio Growth Summit (http://ohiogrowthsummit.com/)
• Ohio Tech Angel Fund (http://www.ohiotechangels.com/)
• NCT Ventures (http://nctventures.com/)

People

The most important part of any community is the people. The startup movement is no different, and Columbus is not an exception.

While there are far too many talented, driven, and connected people to list here individually, locating and reaching out to those involved is easier than ever – especially with the use of platforms like Twitter. And unlike many of the traditional tech hubs (Silicon Valley, New York, etc.), those involved in Columbus are extremely approachable, active, and supportive.

Keep It Going…

This blog post is intended to serve as a starting point and an on-going, continually updated resource for past, current, and future entrepreneurs in the central Ohio area.

So please leave a comment below with other tips, programs, and people that should be added to this list.

It’s an exciting time. I can’t think of a better place to start something great than here in Columbus.

In fact, in the early days it is as much about making hypotheses and testing assumptions as it is about actual product development. Many a talented entrepreneurs have embarked on journeys that led nowhere because they failed to ask two simple questions:

1. Am I solving a problem that people actually want/need solved?
2. Can I build a solution that people will actually use?

At ChatterJet, we are dedicated to understanding how small businesses currently use social media. Most importantly, we are interested in uncovering their biggest challenges and frustrations small businesses face online.

On a recent Skype call with my founder, I alluded to the fact that I didn’t feel like we were tracking “enough” and that we should consider some other metrics to ensure we were making progress.

The problem: I didn’t really know what else to track.

Later that night as I was browsing through Running Lean, I learned that my suspicion was at least partially correct.

Ash Maurya, author of Running Lean and founder of the Lean Canvas,  takes a scientific, actionable approach to launching a startup. The Lean Canvas is not only a one-page tool that keeps teams on the same page (pun intended) but something to base your experiments and/or interviews off of. Each of the boxes on the canvas represents a portion of our business that you can make a hypothesis about, run experiments on, and track results for.

This discovery helped me extract the following:

Problem- Our hypotheses (in order):

• Small businesses don’t have time to do social media every day.
• Small businesses don’t know what to do/where to start with social media (lack of experience).
• Small businesses don’t have the budget to do social media properly (dedicated staff member/can’t afford to pay someone else to do it).

With the goal of uncovering the main issues small businesses face, our job is to make hypotheses about the Problem, share our hunches with those we interview, ask them to rank them, and then look at the data. We might discover our guesses were correct, or we might uncover there are other/larger problems to solve (that lead to new solutions).

The Problem was built into our survey, but the next item on the Lean Canvas (Customer Segments) was not. As a result, we added the following questions to our survey to validate our assumptions about the types of early adopters who we were targeting.

Customer Segments

• How many employees work at your company?
• Do you have anyone dedicated specifically to marketing, lead development, or sales?
• How many locations (offices or storefronts) do you have?
• Is your business location-specific, or can you do business anywhere (i.e. – Internet)?
• How much technology do you use at your office? Websites, email, social media, etc.?

If our assumptions are right about the problems they are having and the type of organization they are, we can start to feel more confident how we deliver the solution (through our Unique Value Proposition and Solution).

After we solidify our solution and start moving into the true testing phase, we can then set up metrics to track our progress on acquisition Channels, Costs, Revenue Stream, Key Metrics (Product Usage Rates), and Unfair Advantage.

If you’re a startup, what other questions are you asking your prospects and users? What actionable metrics are you tracking to ensure you’re on the right track?

My newest venture, ChatterJet, is a shift in the way I have approached business in the past. By utilizing a new framework, we are applying many of the concepts from Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup. Perhaps most exciting is our willingness to ship early, continuously deploy new features, constantly collect feedback, and evolve our product based on the hard data and soft feedback from our users.

To me, this is shaky ground. I’m a reformed perfectionist. In the past, I only bet on sure things – things that I could extensively research and plan, labor over, refine, revise, perfect, and absolutely love. The problem is that every goal is a moving target. The time it takes to build out a full-featured version of any product often means that the game will have shifted by the time you’re ready to launch. And then you’re back at square one.

Realizing this, our team agreed that our product does no good living secretly behind closed doors in the hands of our developers for months (or weeks or days). ChatterJet solves no real world problem for the people who need it the most – small business owners – if it sits in a secure development environment.

So we have committed to launching it far earlier than we feel comfortable with, putting it in the hands of the customers who want and need the service. Instead of “Ready, Aim, Fire!“, we are focusing more on “Ready, Fire… Refine!” approach. This is not to say we are content with an unfinished product. Instead, consider this:

A minimum viable product (MVP) that is 30% complete is infinitely more valuable to your customers than one that is 95% complete but has not yet launched.

Critics say that “good is the enemy of great”, but I disagree. Good is only the enemy when settling is the end goal. But if continuous improvement and validated learning is a part of the process, good will help you get to great faster while providing value to the marketplace immediately.

What’s your take?

“You may have a fresh start any moment you choose…” -Mary Pickford

If this is the case, why does the beginning of January create such a surge of new resolutions, goals, and commitments? Why not July 16th or November 3rd or February 22nd?

We have the opportunity and the choice to start new ventures, make new decisions, and form new habits at any given time throughout the year. Yet most of us wait until until 12:01AM to “get healthy” or “make a million dollars.”

I have two theories on this:

• The first is that the start of a new year allows us to quantify our results and place our successes and failures from the previous twelve months into a neat little box. It gives us a clean break from our efforts and helps us wrap our heads around what we accomplished within a given time frame.
• The second is that the end of the calendar year presents us the opportunity to slow down and collect our thoughts. It is a time to reflect, to spend time with family and loved ones, and consider what is important to us. It’s also a time to review our results, learn what worked, and plan for the next chapter in our lives.

We reflect back and think, “I didn’t achieve what I had hoped to last year, so I really need to work harder now and set my goals even higher to make this my best year ever!”

Sound familiar? The problem with this approach is that we create these enormous goals with unrealistic plans to help us achieve them. As a result, an overwhelming majority of resolutions are forgotten by the middle of February.

Goals, by themselves, aren’t unrealistic because they are impossible. Anything can be accomplished given a long enough runway or enough resources. But if your current habits and performance aren’t aligned with the new goals, you are simply setting yourself up for failure. And when the positive reinforcement of achieving our goal doesn’t take place, we throw our plans to the wayside, along with the goals we hoped to achieve.

Instead, let’s all agree to make continuous improvements throughout the year: to ourselves, to our routines, to our habits, to our relationships, to our skill sets, and to our goals.

What other tactics do you use to keep yourself honest and aligned this time of year?

Here’s to a successful 2012.