SourceYourCity better connects reporters with expert sources for local news stories. As a member of the inaugural 2010 class of Jumpstart Foundry, SourceYourCity was chosen in the month of August. From there, we secured tech talent to build out our minimally viable product in preparation for a January 2011 beta launch in Nashville — the scariest and most exciting thing I’ve ever done.

A Year in Review

In this past year, I’ve spent time marketing not just a product but a concept—a new way of operating in what many consider to be an antiquated industry. In my humble opinion, it’s merely changing. What I can’t learn, absorb or process in my waking hours, I instead address in my sleep.

What most people don’t expect when they become an entrepreneur is that it NEVER stops. By starting a company, you agree to carry an 800 lb. gorilla on your back at all times, even when you’re not necessarily physically, mentally or emotionally prepared to do so.

The good news is: if entrepreneurship is in your blood, you will keep going. Once you fall down and pick yourself back up a lot, you get stronger. And while the pressure is never off, the weight somehow starts to lift. This is because you build a new source of strength that’s impossible to have from the start—perspective.

5 Things I’ve Learned

What I’ve learned from my first year as an entrepreneur under the mentorship of many talented individuals, including those in JumpStart Foundry:

1. Set Goals — There’s no set path in entrepreneurship. No single recipe for success. When you have multiple goals to achieve and multiple ways to achieve them, establish and rank your priorities. It sounds simple but failing to do so can fragment your attention and delay your progress.

2. Listen to Market — You’ll hear a lot about pivoting in the world of entrepreneurship. While pivoting is essential to the success of most startups, pivot wisely. Listen to the market, find out what it needs and when possible, test. This helps ensure that your pivot is a value-added decision rather than a wild-goose chase.

3. Take Advice from Others but Listen to Yourself —  As a new CEO, the amount of advice you receive can be overwhelming. Listen to it all but take only what you need. You know the market and concept better than anyone and as the CEO, it’s up to you to filter all recommendations to determine the best course of action.

4. Networking Never Ends — A strong network is critical to the success of a startup. No matter how busy you are, make time to meet with new mentors, peers and contacts relevant to your market or industry. With these connections, don’t just ask but also give when you can. 

5. You Get 10 Minutes — Good or bad, you get a limited amount of time to grieve a failure or celebrate a win. That’s because the highs and lows are endless and there’s a lot of work to be done.

A Year Ahead

In November, we launched in Austin, Texas as our second of many markets to come. All the while, we’ve been prepping for a Spring launch of SourceYourCity San Francisco — a decision that was made to test a major market and better position us for our next round of investment.

From one Jumpstart Foundry startup to all those considering this journey, be thoughtful in the decisions you make but above all, Go Be Amazing.

Listen to Neely’s interviewon the Jumpstart podcast.

Are you ready to apply to JSF 2012? Do it now.

The Jumpstart Podcast is back and we’re looking for more great guests. Please leave a comment with a suggestion of who you would like to hear interviewed on the show.

If you wish to be a guest, please contact dave at jumpstartfoundry.com. It’s going to be an amazing new season! 

You may recall that we spoke with some innovative entrepreneurs last year. Our guests included: 

• David Hooper
• Jason Moore
• Jacques Woodcock
• Kate O’Neill
• Scott Rouse
• Cliff McKinney
• Justin Davis
• Chris Ennis
• Seth Godin
• Dan Hammond
• Nicholas Holland
• Rajeev Gupta
• Neely Burks
• Drew Fassett
• Jackson Miller
• Robert Hendrick
• Chris Blanz
• Marcus Whitney
• Mark Montgomery
• Rex Hammock

Don’t miss your chance to be a guest on a future episode of Jumpstart, a podcast for entrepreneurs. You can subscribe to the show in iTunes now, so you never miss an episode. You can also subscribe here to get new episodes in your inbox.

If you don’t know Robert Scoble you should. He is not only an early adopter, he is among the very first digital content producers (he’s also a great guy!).

Watch this presentation where he speaks about his days with companies from Microsoft to RackSpace. Scoble shows examples of how quickly communication travels across the social web. He studies how people work and how ideas spread from person to person. He has much to teach any new business or established business about using social media. 

Robert Scoble Notes:

• Follow Scoble’s Twitter lists for insight from business innovaters and thought leaders.
• Learn that we must tell our stories and how to spread your our stories across the web.
• Determine who you want to reach and how to achieve your goals.
• If you’re trying to raise money, go to where the money is.
• Study who’s following who. Take someone out to lunch.
• Start with someone you know. Ask who else you should meet. Ask for introductions.
• How do you build networks and gain trust.
• Figure out how to get your company on 24 hours a day. Look at Rackspace and Zappos as examples.
• When you meet someone face to face, they become credible.
• Don’t get caught up in the tools. What’s the story you want to tell? Decide this and then use the tools.

Do you agree or disagree with Scoble’s thinking? Have you used his methods? What have your experiences been in business on the social web?

Photo from Flickr by: Kris Krug

Photo by: Ferf

Needless to say, applying to Jumpstart Foundry is a crucial part of getting accepted into the 2012 program. Early applicants are in an even better position, because of the perks that come along with it.

Jumpstart For A Day

On February 22, we will invite all of the 2012 applicants for Jumpstart Foundry to a special event called Jumpstart For A Day.

This event will let you see behind the scenes of Jumpstart Foundry. Get answers to all of your questions including: How is it possible to achieve 18 months of progress over the summer? What goes on? Will it work for my company? What are the drawbacks? If I know I want to attend JSF, how do I make my application stronger?

You’ll get to hear from our Managing Directors, Mentors and Alumni about what it takes to create a killer startup with JSF.  Most importantly, you’ll be able to meet everyone in a fun, casual atmosphere.

Don’t miss this important early opportunity. Apply right now and we’ll see you at Jumpstart For A Day soon. 

January of last year I had a vision. At first it was just a stream of ideas in my head. But then I started to believe in it. I believed enough to pack up everything I owned, move across the country, and start a company.

I think many entrepreneurs are believers by nature. We believe in ideas about things that don’t yet exist. We start companies to close the distance between what “is” and what our hyperactive imaginations tell us is possible.

The problem, I discovered, is that entrepreneurs are often wrong. Even when our vision has legs, we often lack the discipline, resources or sustained focus to hone our vision and convert it into reality.

Jumpstart Foundry helps solve this problem

My name is Steven Buhrman. I’m the CEO and founder of Wannado (formerly “Kahootzz”), a 2011 Jumpstart company. Wannado is a mobile platform that recommends local events based on your unique preferences. Think eHarmony but if you were somehow “dating your city”. Or Pandora but for all the everyday stuff you “wannado” but don’t always have time to search for. Makes sense, right?

Naturally, it makes perfect sense to me. I’ve been consumed by the idea since I saw the Promise Land back in January. But I also learned quickly that personal conviction and a few catchy metaphors aren’t enough to get a business off the ground. I needed some help.

Jumpstart helped my team and I accelerate through early stages of ideation, business model generation, prototyping, and customer development. The process was transformative, not only for our fledgling company, but also for me personally as a first time entrepreneur facing a trial-by-fire scenario.

Looking back on this 14 week experience, I’m extremely grateful. Because I see that so much of the progress we’ve made springs from the investment of others. Ironically, I’m perhaps most grateful for aspects of the program I most resisted early on. Like the bootcamp-style programming, and the early morning pitch sessions, which had a way of crushing my best efforts, perpetually demanding more from me.

This transformative (but often painful!) process began immediately. Day one, 7:00 a.m., my first pitch. Thinking of it now actually makes me cringe a little. What I lacked in substance, I compensated with high flying rhetoric. And the critique that followed was pretty damning: “I have no idea what he is talking about,” one person said. “Who are the customers? How does this make money? What’s the model?” another added. The conclusion in the room: I didn’t have a business – just a half-baked idea and a lot of unwarranted enthusiasm. I wasn’t prepared for this kind of rejection. My instinct was to defend myself. How could they not see the genius in what we were doing? After all, my team and our faithful interns all “got it”. My friends and family seemed to understand and “believe”. It took some time, but I eventually came to appreciate the scrutiny, as well as the singular purpose behind it: to make us stronger.

Sleep less, work harder…and smarter

In fact, there were a number of glaring weaknesses we needed to face. Our revenue model was overly complex and unrealistic. The structure and content of my pitch was convoluted and failed to address some of the obvious questions investors need answered. And the initial product design relied too heavily on technology we couldn’t yet support. The amount of work in front of us was unsettling. But it was ok. It just meant we needed to sleep less, work harder… and smarter.

Fortunately, the resources at our disposal were essentially inexhaustible. We were able to lean on the experience and counsel of our mentors, who stepped in and advised in critical areas of need. We also learned to take advantage of the collective genius available via the Jumpstart Rolodex, which gave us access to many of the region’s leading technologists, consultants and business leaders. This extraordinary support system allowed us to see every obstacle as surmountable. When challenges arose, we simply identified those who could help, zeroed-in on solutions, and carried on with our mission. What a gift.

Since graduating from Jumpstart, we’ve been fortunate to secure Series A financing and are now aggressively moving to launch a new and much improved product in the first quarter of 2012. We’ve still got a ways to go to. But our vision has deepened and clarified. Our team is stronger and more resolved. And I’m personally better prepared to lead my company in the coming months and years ahead.

Also of interest: Kahootzz eyes capital raise to fuel ‘opportunity engine’

Howard Schultz

This week we selected Harvard Business Review’s “We Had to Own the Mistakes”. An Interview with Howard Schultz by Adi Ignatius

 Schultz answers the following questions:

• He had a vision, built a successful company, and moved on. But then Starbucks ran into trouble, he had to return as CEO. How hard has it been to get things right?
• To what extent did the financial crisis add to the management crisis?
• How did he face serious competition during the emergence of social media?
• What was the low point after his return?
• How had things gone so wrong?
• Is there a clash between trying to be a premium destination with a premium-priced product and being a public company?
• Every company that begins small and “authentic” eventually finds it hard to retain that image as it expands. How can you combat that?
• How did he start to get things back on track? To what extent was it an advantage that he had been in the CEO chair before?

Please read (or listen) to the full interview with Howard Schultz, then leave a comment here. What did you learn? How can these lessons be applied to your startup?

Photo from Flickr by: University of Denver

To be a real entrepreneur, the words in the title need to be in a different order. But, since the first one is non-negotiable for those of us with families, it comes down to the other two. How then do you balance the other two? It took me a while to get over the fact that “I can do both” at the same time. It’s incredibly hard. Pesky things like a day job get in the way. But, you can work toward it…. and it takes a few years. Of course, you could also jump into cold water and alter your future, but very few do that. And we all admire those who do.

Urge is our startup. Will Clark, Tyson Tune and I started building our prototype in 2009. The idea for the product was – we all spend money on unnecessary purchases, be it coffee on way to work everyday, lunch in the cafeteria, buying pajamas at the supermarket when you really went in to buy a gallon of milk, petty items at your local electronics store or online; the possibilities to spend money are endless. What if there was a way to allow consumers to save this money at the point of decision; better yet provide an easy mechanism to transfer that money from a checking to savings accounts toward specific goals? These goals could be to pay down credit card debt, pay off that car or home loan, take that family vacation, buy a flat screen TV cash down or simply give to charity – just because…

Don’t make us do work for you – create a product… then come talk to us!

In March of 2010, we got seed funding from Townes Duncan, Vic Gatto and Jumpstart Foundry – a micro-fund in Nashville. We didn’t really want or need the money; we wanted the experience and connections of people who had both succeeded and failed as entrepreneurs – to help us think through our business idea and make it a reality. We talked to banks that were and are still are our potential customers. But, most of them said – “Don’t make us do work for you – create a product, figure out a way to transfer money across accounts then come talk to us!” So we spent a year trying to build or acquire this technology. In the meantime, we continued simplifying the product down to literally 3 taps on the iPhone.

Then in 2011, we had a breakthrough. We licensed technology from Buxfer Inc. (a Y Combinator company) for the banking backend. We continued to have conversations with banks to offer Urge to their customers. Dave Andrews, a superstar iPhone app developer in Nashville helped us with the development. Suddenly, we were in business. We launched Urge in private beta to friends and family. It’s an awesome experience creating jobs, even if fractional, and investing money back into the local economy.

Jumpstart Foundry and the Nashville Entrepreneur Center have been great partners and mentors for us.

Here are 5 things we learned from the Jumpstart Foundry experience

1. You can’t sell an idea. Create a working product quickly. Vision is great, but focus on execution. Line up customers.
2. Don’t do it for the money. Mentors will tell you that money is directly proportionate to your passion.
3. Put in your own money. Your chances of success go up tremendously when you have skin in the game. You also gain credibility with your sponsors and within your community.
4. Listen to suggestions of where your product could go, but never forget your original vision. If you do, you might come back 360 degrees. Stick to what you know best.
5. Don’t give up! Working on your startup will make you go through phases of excitement, depression, almost giving up, breakthrough, and excitement again. Be determined, talk to successful entrepreneurs & VCs. Some of them may become confidants. Develop and nurture relationships one at a time – one every week is good enough.

Today, we announce the worldwide launch of Urge on iTunes. Urge is available not only in the United States but also in the UK, Canada, Australia, India and many other countries. Urge is available as a free app for anyone who wants to save money by not making those impulse purchases. The $1.99 version (after a free 7-day trial) lets US based consumers at 300+ banks and credit unions transfer money from their checking to savings account. Urge doesn’t ask for your email, doesn’t store your banking credentials on our servers, and doesn’t ask for any other personal details. Try it – we think you’ll enjoy saving a little money every day. You can download Urge here.

So, where does Urge go from here? We have many products in our pipeline, but the one we’re most passionate about is helping charitable organizations become successful in their humanitarian missions. What if, during the lunch hour or on the way home, there was a way for consumers to give $5 to their charity with three taps on their smartphone – just because?! That’s what Urge is working on next.

Become an entrepreneur. Help the economy. Take a shot at changing the world.

Disclosure:
I am a founding member and investor in Jumpstart Foundry. My partner Will Clark pitched to JSF with full disclosure to everyone involved that I was also a cofounder of Urge. I did not participate in the voting that selected Urge as the first investment of JSF.

Additional Reading: Urge helps you stop nickel and diming yourself into the poorhouse

Richard Branson

This week we selected a 15 Small Business Lessons from Richard Branson by Anne Handley.

The 15 lessons encompass these topics:

1. big companies vs. small companies
2. the foundation of a brand
3. his inspiration in nature
4. seeing things through your customer’s eyes
5. positioning
6. hiring
7. listening to customers and employees
8. social media
9. having a sense of humor
10. failure
11. his fascination with space travel
12. the importance of company culture
13. partying with employees
14. success
15. which business is his favorite

Take a moment to read the interview and leave a comment here please. We’d love to know which point resonated with you most? How does it apply to you and your startup?

Photo from Flickr by: riz94107

Nashville, Tenn. (January 31, 2012) – Nashville-based tech business accelerator Jumpstart Foundry has opened its application process and is now accepting applications from entrepreneurs interested in participating in the JSF 2012 program.  The application form may be found on the JSF website:  http://jumpstartfoundry.com.

Competition for last year’s class was robust, as nearly 100 tech-oriented businesses from 25 different cities and 8 countries were considered.  “A year ago we were overwhelmed by the response to our call for applicants,” said Marcus Whitney, chief technology officer for Moontoast and one of Jumpstart Foundry’s managing directors.  “Given the program’s established track record of success for our graduates, I expect this year to be bigger.” 

The JSF 2011 program accelerated the growth of six startups and built on the overall Jumpstart Foundry track record of success.  Like other accelerators around the country, JSF measures its success based on the number of graduates that are able to raise capital or boot-strap operations without additional capital. Over the two first years of the program, JSF has achieved a very strong 62% success rate.  Eight alumni have raised follow-on capital and are building operations.  These results combined with our multiple years of experience, deep mentor pool and affiliation with TechStars position Jumpstart Foundry as one of the best accelerators in the country. 

Jumpstart Foundry has just launched an Alumni section of its website.  Please go check it out at http://jumpstartfoundry.com/the-alumni/            “I am pleased with the quality of JSF program graduates.  We have proven that the Jumpstart program can help entrepreneurs achieve 18 months of progress over one intense summer experience” said Vic Gatto, Partner for Solidus Company and another of JSF’s managing directors.  “JSF has a strong program in place.  However, we are always learning and adopting other best practices for ourselves.  Expect us to announce a few surprise changes before May.”

#  #  #

 About Jumpstart Foundry

Jumpstart Foundry (JSF) accelerates the growth of fledgling tech-oriented businesses.  Started in 2010, JSF is a formal, mentor-driven 14-week business acceleration program held over the summer months – with the goal of launching successful companies, prime for funding, at an Investor Day in late August.  

Those startup companies – keying on the areas of healthcare IT, data systems and social engagement tools – will derive resources and guidance from a hand-selected group of mentors who bring a wealth of experience from a variety of fields.   Jumpstart Foundry also enjoys key partnerships with the Nashville Entrepreneur Center and the TechStars Affiliate Network.

For more information, please visit http://jumpstartfoundry.com. Download Press Release (PDF). 

Contact: Vic Gatto  vic AT jumpstartfoundry DOT com or Tel: (615) 576-0573.

Jumpstart Foundry will prepare you for war. No, we don’t fire live ammo and haven’t anyone killed (yet). But answering the call to action to build an important product, disrupting an entire industry and beating down competitors, feels a lot like war. This is why JSF runs an intense, competitive and fast-paced program modeled after a Marine-style boot came.

Over the course of the 14 week JSF program, you will do the following ten things:

1. Pivot your business model multiple times (in the first week)
2. Work 15-18 hours per day – six days a week
3. Learn methodologies, strategies, tricks and shortcuts to help win battles
4. Get advice from 100+ Mentors who have been to war multiple times (having both won and lost)
5. Build your product and get customer feedback
6. Rebuild your product (lots)
7. Meet 25-30 other entrepreneurs from around the country preparing for their own wars
8. Craft a story to sell to angel or VC investors
9. Have a lot of fun, but not sleep much
10. Change your perspective on business and life

Are you planning to go to war with a start-up concept? Are you crazy enough to want to join the JSF Marines? We will teach you to kill with your hands and be a bad-ass entrepreneur for the rest of your life. APPLY NOW.

Too hard for you? That’s not a problem, we understand – not everyone is cut out to be a bad-ass entrepreneur… go back to watching reality TV. The world needs followers too.