This month’s mentoring session was held with Carl Mercier founder of Defensio (blog anti spam platform) recently acquired by Websense.
We got a nice break down from Carl on his experiences as and entrepreneur. Like James Duncan last month’s mentor Carl created his first business in his early teens, and never looked back. From monetizing one of the internets earliest bulletin board systems, creating management software business for a niche market, to writing several use group platforms, as well as an Ajax based domain name search tool, it was interesting to follow how a technical entrepreneur could quickly generate products (many as code learning experiences) and with the right business savvy monetize them.
One key take away from the meeting particularly pertinent to technical entrepreneurs was to the lesson to avoid getting bogged down with your product. As a developer it is very easy to continue to focus on adding features versus trying to sell the product. As all us technical entrepreneurs know, if given the choice between a little quiet time to add a cool new feature or picking up the phone to cold call, we’d keep adding features till their was no choice but to do sales.
Carl also stressed the importance of properly assessing the market (for example using landing pages and Google ad words to evaluate interest), but at the same time touched on avoiding the tendency to sit back and wait for the perfect idea to start building a Startup. According to Carl using an Agile methodology and lean business practices you should be able to course correct your way into a successful business. It seems the art is in finding the right balance of quick smart and smart start.
Some questions asked by our attending entrepreneurs:
- Did you self fund all your business and why?
- How did you know when to remain on vision versus make a major pivot?
- Does having a strong Startup community help?
- Did moving to Silicon Valley make a big difference for your businesses/career?
- How did you sell your first business?
- When and how did you incorporate your business?
- What were the advantages of forming the business in the US?
- How did you handle stock options?
- How did you determine the amount of stock options to give early employees?
This meetup was particularly interesting and relevant for technical entrepreneurs who are coding or directly managing the development of their Startup product. Next month we will likely have a slightly different view on launching and running a Startup. Marc Gingras from Tungle will be joining us to share his story of entrepreneurship, raising money, and driving the vision of his product. It should be another interesting and insightful evening.
Limited Space:
To keep the meetings somewhat informal and laid back, we’ve chosen to keep the meeting size to a maximum of just 20 entrepreneurs.
So far the format seems to have created the types of conversations we were hoping to stir up between the entrepreneurs and our guest mentors. One of the drawbacks of offering a limited space free event is the occurrence of no shows. For our last meetup we had a standby list of about 10 people, but only 17 of the 20 signed up showed (meaning 3 people on the wait list could have come).
Long story short, this coming month we have decided to charge $10.00 to attend the meetup in an effort to avoid no shows. Think of it as a deposit since you will have a spot reserved as well as 1 free drink. With the remaining funds will be used to buy some food for everyone to share.
Register now for November 16th Tap in Tuesday with Marc Gingras
The last 2 meetups space filled up in the first day or two after registration opened. So if you plan on attending please register now here: http://www.tapintuesday.eventbrite.com
