Aaron Patzer – Mint.com – How to Take Your Startup to the Next Level @ FOWA 2010

Idea to $170 mil acquisition in 3 years.

3 Phases of a Startup

1. Garage – <$100k in funding
   • Validate and idea
   • Create a prototype
2. Seed < $1mil
   • Launch and alpha product
3. Scale > $1mil

Garage – Rapidly Validate an Idea
Original Idea: Goal setting software

Talk to as many people as possible.  Don’t keep your business idea inside.  Don’t worry about stealing the idea.  Talked to 50-80 people.  He found that the money component really resonated.  People had issue with existing tools like Quicken & Microsoft Money.  Customer feedback before even building the app.
Solve a real problem that exists now and 5-10 years from now.  Don’t build a feature, build a business.  In 5 years, will this problem still exist.  Is it a transitional problem?

Garage: Goal = Prototype
Pre-revenue Valuation solver:

• + $500k / engineer = prototype development
• - $250k / business guy = idea, but not much to do

They built a real UI, and real prototype in July 2006. A prototype that is real and tangible will get you seed funding.

Garage to Seed: Raising Funding

1. solve a real problem
2. in a large market
3. real revenue potential
4. sustainable advantage – patents, people, user interface. need to be able to be leader

Seed: Proving revenue … before you have any

• The hockey stick looking curve is total BS
• Per transaction / per user revenue is much more important
• And a huge market opportunity

Competition: Quicken & LowerMyBills

• Lead-Gen & CPA Opportunity: $30+ /user / yr
• Business Model: Referrals & Lead Generation
• 7% of 16Bil online ad market

Seed Result – raised $750,000 and built prototype

Funded: Scaling People

• Train yourself to hire
• Hire better than you… then let them work
• Recommended book – Topgrading – sequential interview process. In interview questions “the why is always more important than the what.” – looking for pattern recognition. You can spot gaps, you can see true colors.

Funded: Beta -> Big Launch

• started blog ecosystem – find people to write guest posts
• private beta builds demand
• use exclusivity
• user feedback is key

Mint had 20,000 email addresses 1 month before launch. If you put a badge on your site, we’ll give you priority access to Mint.  600 people did it. Also gave great pagerank.   The alpha users got velvet rope treatment.

Beta Product: Jul-Sept 2007
Saw scalability issues come across with the real users.  Focus on building architecture.  Hiring marketers properly. Scaling marketing by building the blog outreach.

Funded: The Big Launch

• Venue: TechCrunch 40
• Aggressive PR – hire an agency
• Have a presence

Mint mojitos. Everyone in t-shirts. Rent adjacent space.  People’s choice award winner.  Result: Mint wins TC40 People’s Choice Award.  Off to the races.

• Q – Validate your idea?
• A – Talk to people.  Is it a real problem? Would you actually use it?  People will poke holes in it.  Find out other services that exist.  Don’t be super secretive.  Talk to parents friends, non early adopters.  Write down “concept statements” – go to train station, normal people.  What do you think of this concept?  Try different positioning statements & feature sets.  All on paper before you built anything?

• Q – Story behind domain name?
• A – Original domain – MyMint.com – he bought himself originally.  It must be easily spelled.  Have all its vowels.  Don’t chose your brand name based on availability.  Couldn’t afford Mint.com until series A round.  He bought it from a hedge fund investor.

• Q – Where’d the Mint interface come from.  UI is critical.
• A – The way that it was perfected was putting it in front of real users.  Take people off the street for a Starbucks $10 gift card. Mixture of ages, men, women, screaming babies.  Hire designers with very specific background Photoshop, CSS/HTML, and UI.  Designers make tradeoffs themselves.

I’m at FOWA in Miami today w/ Peter and Alex from Flatsourcing.  The first presentation was from Fred Wilson who makes amazing investments in great companies:

Fred Wilson – 10 Golden Principles of Web Apps

1. Speed – The most important feature, if its not fast, users will leave.  Early adopters are forgiving, the mainstream is not.
2. Instant Utility – It has to give people something immediately.  If you have to spend an hour loading data into the app before you can actually do something, people will leave.
3. Have a Voice – Stand for something, have a voice, don’t be bland.  The Twitter Fail Whale ending up on t-shirts, meant that something about their voice was connecting w/ society.  It sounded like a human being talking.
4. Less is More – Start by being simplistic. Delicious was a great example. People used it every day.  You do one little thing but you do it all day, its quick, easy and fast.
5. Programmable – Make your app programmable.  Make it possible for others to add to and build on top of your application.  If your API is not read/write its not an API, its RSS.  When people can add value to your application, they can add energy to your app, more data, and more richness.
6. Personal – Infuse your application w/ your users energy.  People feel more ownership when your app is personal for everyone.  Backgrounds, avatars, user generated content.   Makes people care about your app.
7. RESTful – In a REST architecture, your resources have a URL, and can be called by that URL.  Make the entire application have a clean URL.  Every component has its own URL that people can remember and type in.   Everyone can understand what a URL stands for, and it also is crawlable by search engines.  The web can get access to your app in deep ways.
8. Discoverable – When you launch a web app, its a needle in a haystack.  How is anyone going to find yours.  You must understand SEO, and build your application from the ground up to be optimized for Google.  It also needs to be optimized for social media, meaning virality.  The product itself must push itself out into the web and social media.
9. Clean – The application itself must be clean on the page.  Whitespace.  Big fonts.  Not too much functionality on each page.  Anyone landing on the page should know immediately what to do. (Tumblr login.) People underestimate how important it is to be efficient w/ the features on each page.
10. Playful – The ability to play in an application is important.  The game dynamic is something you can use to get users to do what you want.  Weight Watchers is a good example.  Set goals, and get rewarded for meeting goals.  Create a game dynamic in all apps to make it “fun to play.” Foursquare uses game dynamic as a way to power the development of a local information service.  Users will have more fun, and you can incent the kind of behavior you want in the application.

The marketing for an app has to be in the product.  Don’t hire a marketing team.  Guerrilla, street, or stunt marketing.  It’s not a coincidence that two of Union Square Ventures  apps (Twitter and Foursquare) broke out at SXSW.   It’s authentic, and not expensive.

The Union Square Ventures, five of the six keywords they believe in: Mobile, Social, Global, Playful, Intelligent.

Here are his slides:

The 10 Golden Principles for Successful Web Apps

Fred emphasized that these are his 10 principles, but there is a lively discussion going on over on his blog, where many other opinions are being expressed about what core tenants are important to an successful app.

Peter Bodenheimer and I went up the the Web 2.0 Expo the week before Thanksgiving, and spent the week hanging out with some pretty impressive folks. It’s clear there is a lot of energy in the NY startup scene right now, it reminded me of the first FOWA conference in 2006 where the Web 2.0 energy was palpable in San Francisco.

It’s important for me and Flatsourcing, TribeCon, and Launch Pad to be connected to New York. As strong as the New Orleans startup movement has been, its critical we maintain our direct ties to innovation hubs like Silicon Valley & New York. We need to know what they are up to and vice versa. In this post, I’ll summarize some of the exciting things we saw and people we met. In addition, I’ve got a proposal that I want to float to continue to build our ties to NY.

First, what we did and what’s happening in NY:

• Monday night we went to Ignite NYC and ran into Elliott Adams (good to see the state going to these conferences). This was my first Ignite, and we saw some great presentations in preparation for the launch of Ignite NOLA in February which Adele Tiblier and Chris Boudy are leading the charge on.
• Spent Tuesday hanging w/ Andrew Hyde, he’s just ran the NY Marathon and is hard at work on his new startup which I’m trying to twist his arm into locating to NOLA. (He hates winter weather. Advantage: NOLA)
• Watch the keynote by Tim O’Reilly for a great overview of the state of the web. He’s concerned that we may be entering another “closed garden” period.
• Chris Brogan was surprisingly Zen in his presentation, but and great. It reiterated to me how great it was to have his co-author of Trust Agents at Tribecon. Favorite quote: “The difference between audience and community, is which way you turn the chairs”
• Having the tweets running on the screen behind the speaker blew up with the final keynote. IMHO this is a bad idea, and I was glad we didn’t do it at TC.
• Tuesday night Pete and I went to the Net Neutrality Tech Debate at IAC. It was fascinating to see the policy makers who will shape the FCC legislation debate in this forum. Thankfully, the need for net neutrality won the debate with the more convincing argument.
• On Wednesday we went to the Launch Pad to watch startup pitches by 5 companies: Foodspotting, Apstrata, Earth Aid, Neighborhoodr, & Set Jam. All the pitches were strong, and it really pounded home to be how tight a pitch needs to be and how well the constraint of 5 minutes worked.
• Baratunde Thurston brought down the house with his keynote on Wednesday: “There’s a hashtag for that” If you watch one thing I’m posting, make it this.
• The conversation with Caterina Fake (founder of Flickr) was interesting for her commentary on the NY tech scene, and the reasons why she chose to locate her new startup Hunch in NYC.
• I really enjoyed the conversation with John Borthwork, founder of Betaworks. This is probably the most startup company/incubator going right now, and is an inspiration for me for where I want to take Voodoo Ventures. If you like Tweetdeck & Bit.ly, you’ll like where he thinks the web is headed.
• Wednesday night we met up with Mike Karnjanaprakorn, its exciting to hear about the success of By/Association and his understanding and use of the importance of mystery, human curation, and exclusivity.
• He soon spotted a check-in from Foursquare founder Naveen Selvadurai at a nearby bar. The power of Foursquare to connect people was quickly evident as it seemed every startuper in the city was there within 15 min. Chatted with Tantek Celik and Richard Blakeley. I think I finally grokked hype-local from Richard. Basically, the concept behind Neighborhoodr, is that the more granualary you slice a community the more you care about it. You may not care about everything going on in New Orleans (perhaps just the tech scene), but you care about everything going on on your street.
  

All in all a great week. I know the bullets review like an itinerary of “here’s what we did,” but I’m trying to convey the energy we felt being up there. Some of the clear concepts were mobile, hyper-local, and simplicity of concepts. I heard on more than one occasion from people that they hear “New Orleans has something going on…” but they all wondered “who was our signature startup?” Who is our signature startup? Not just a company that we all know about… a startup that everyone knows about.

So, what about the NOLA -> NYC connection you mentioned?

Well, we’re conjuring up an idea, and though its not ready for launch yet, I am interested to get feedback on it. It is based on a conversation that Brian Oberkirch, Perry Chen and I had at TribeCon. The idea is theirs, I’m just hoping to help implement it:

A visiting scholar program for startups.

The idea would be to bring startup CEO’s down from NYC to NOLA to work here, interact, mentor, and learn about what people are doing down here, and then take that gospel back to NY with them, spreading the seeds of what is happening here. Basically a direct, personal, mentorship and marketing program.

Take it a step further, and reverse it, sending Louisiana startup CEO’s up to NY to work, learn, and engage. Then we’ve got the sharing going both ways.

Economic development agencies like GNO & LED are already spending a lot of money on familiarization tours. I wonder if a program like this would qualify under that kind of budget? My guess is that using the lean, mean, startup fundamentals we all know so well, that we could create a very effective program.

What do you think? Would you support a NOLA-to-NYC visiting scholar program?

There’s been a lot of good news lately about entrepreneurship in Louisiana. With the renewal of the digital media tax credit and the energy around startups lately, things are just going to start taking off, right?

Well, maybe.

I still see some gaps in current eco-system that can be filled with a true mentorship-based seed fund. (In case you’re wondering, I mean a Y-Combinator / TechStars style investment program. Mentorship-based seed funds exist all over the country, I’ve compiled a listing here)

So where are the gaps? Well, here’s what I see:

1. The “Moving Companies to Louisiana” Strategy – one of the biggest stated goals of the digital media tax credit, and a strategy I see LED & GNO Inc among others pursing is trying to lure companies to move to Louisiana with the tax credits, etc. GNO Inc put together a great deck, on what makes New Orleans so appealing. Probably the most visible impact thus far is the EA Sports testing facility in Baton Rouge. Here’s the thing: Established companies have employees. Employees have families, houses, schools located near where the company is currently based. Even though knowledge-based industries like digital media don’t have large infrastructure needs, their employees have established lives.
2. Supporting the “Shoot for the Moon” Companies – I had a conversation with a Launch Pad member on Friday who has been through the startup process several times, and he and many others feel we don’t have the deal flow in Louisiana right now. The problem is that were not quite at the point where people are seeing the wealth creation of other successful companies, and frankly we’re just new to building a startup ecosystem. Deal flow is directly related to entrepreneurs willing to take huge risks. Entrepreneurs willing to take huge risks and “shoot for the moon” is directly related to having an ecosystem that supports risk-taking and acknowledges and accepts failure.
3. Bridging the Gap Between Business Plan and Business - having a great idea doesn’t mean you are prepared to run a company. Most people starting a company have great subject matter expertise or talent, but may not have a fully rounded skill set in the ancillary areas of building a company. First time entrepreneurs get bogged down in this stuff: accounting, legal, personnel management.

So, how does a mentorship-based seed meet these needs and more:

1. Move Folks when its Easy to Move – Start young. Most people entering Y Combinator are just graduating from college or in their 20’s. People are portable at this stage and many digital nomads would love nothing more try out New Orleans for a stint. We’re already seeing this with all the amazing young people coming down here post-K for Teach for America and programs like that. There is a huge difference in a person’s willingness to move based on what stage they are in their lives.
2. Go Big - A lot of people have a “go big” idea, and given the opportunity to pursue it, even for 3-6 months will usually determine if there is something there or not. Of course, this is the riskiest stage of an idea, but most people never get the shot to really go for it. I know so many people trying to bootstrap a startup right now, but paying the bills with freelance work. The freelance work engulfs you and you never really get to go for the big idea. Often times (I am an example), people build service businesses to pay the bills, and though they may be successful, they aren’t investable and aren’t the big win that we all want to see happen. A seed fund that provides Ramen-soup money for founders to pursue an idea and get it to a prototype without having to divide their time to pay the bills really gives entrepreneurs a shot to go big. Think what would happen in Louisiana if every summer we gave 10 young startups enough funding to build out their big idea.
3. Mentorship – these funds are called mentorship-based seed funds for a reason. They don’t just hand entrepreneurs $25k. They have a curriculum and program that teaches the skills required to run a business. Already in New Orleans we’ve created a set of entrepreneurial hubs. This is a huge start, because startups can ask each other questions, and tackle problems together. Filling this out with a true curriculum that removes the headaches of setting up your accounting, legal, etc would enable entrepreneurs to have a singular focus on building their product. We have people in this city willing to devote the time and effort, but the value of this contribution needs to be acknowledged and compensated.

What kind of investment are we talking about?

• 10 companies selected for June – August 2010. Each company gets $25,000 to build a prototype. – $250,000
• The administrative costs of the program are probably equivalent to the investment dollars. – $250,000

When I think about the real-world impact that a program like this would have and the allocation of economic development and grant dollars that are being spent in Louisiana on advertising, conferences, infrastructure, administrative staff, workforce development, it seems like a drop in the bucket to get a program like this off the ground and I believe it is an investment worth making.

What do you think?

A friend emailed me this afternoon with a question:

How do you deal with the negative reviews/press/self doubt phase in this entrepreneurial world?

This is a great question, and one that we all have faced as entrepreneurs and undoubtedly will face again. Building a business, launching a product, producing anything is incredibly difficult. It is all-consuming and an emotional rollercoaster.

First, its important to understand that we all go through it. I’ve felt on the brink of collapse before:

• I was producing a Mardi Gras event in 2004, and lost control of it before it even started. I can’t bring myself to say what happened but for a little while it looked like it wasn’t going to happen, and I was going to lose $25,000 deposit and refund $25,000 in tickets. Ugh. I went to my good friend Vaughn Mordentti and he bailed me out of the situation (not literally). I went to him hat in hand, and he saved my butt.
• In December 2008, I pulled the plug on siteMighty, a web app that I had put years and lots of investment into.
• I had dinner with my wife at Slice Pizza in 2003 and she told me that she felt if nothing happened with Destination VIP, I needed to start making arrangements to close it down. I had 14 employees on payroll at the time.

Looking back, each of those fit the old saying: things are darkest before the dawn. We pulled off the Mardi Gras event. Letting go of siteMighty allowed renewed focus on Flatsourcing and Launch Pad. And I sold Destination VIP three months after that conversation.

A few thoughts on how to get through these difficult moments when you face the self doubt and are thinking “what the hell am I doing, and how did I get myself into this.”

• A word on advice – everyone has advice for you. Only you have the complete picture. It’s OK to tell someone, I’m really not looking for advice here. Or to just listen and take it in. But always understand that advice or guidance is only one person’s opinion. Only you know what is really going on in your business, and you have the privilege (and maybe burden) of running it yourself. You’re an entrepreneur and you’re the boss.
• Dealing with criticism - criticism is like advice. Easy to give. Hear it, just like advice. But don’t dwell on it. It’s much easier to criticize than to produce something for someone to criticize.
• Forget everyone else – someone is getting more press, more attention, making more money, and having more fun than you right now. Forget about it. It’s not what is important. Focus on your business and let go of any comparisons to, or competition with others.
• Prioritize and let go - you have a ton to do. How much of it is mission critical, and how much do you want to get done. During times like these you’re feeling swamped. Make a list of what you have to do, then order the list. Focus on the top 20% of it. The rest probably can wait. Everything may not be perfect, or the way you envisioned, but as long as things are happening, you can improve it later.
• Ask for help – you know who is rooting for you. Now’s the time to ask for a little help. Be as open as you want to be, and don’t be afraid to be specific on what you could use some help on.
• Find balance – when times are tough, you need your family & friends more than ever. It is difficult to balance, because your business needs you more than ever, but you need support. Make time for family.
• Make a plan – One of the best stress relievers is getting things out of your head and onto a sheet of paper. Write down everything you have to do. Break it into chunks you can accomplish and feel like things are moving forward.
• Persevere – keep putting one foot in front of the other. Focus on crossing things off your to-do list. As much as you want to give up, don’t. Perseverance is one of the most important attributes of an entrepreneur.
• Everything will be ok – of course there are no guarantees, but you’re going to get through this. Take a deep breath, and keep pushing forward. It probably doesn’t feel like it right now, but someday you’re going to look back on this and how much you grew during this difficult time.

This post is based on personal experience. It’s not a panacea, but hopefully by reflecting on what has helped my during difficult times, I can help you when the going gets tough.

My presentation for The Feast last Friday revolved around lessons I have learned in my 9 years as an entreprenuer and business owner. I’ve included the slides below, but wanted to add some notes, because many of the slides are not self explanatory.

• Impostor Syndrome – An entrepreneur’s crisis of self confidence. You’ve got to believe in yourself to make anyone else believe in you. So you just quit your job 2 weeks ago and started a company… that’s what you do now, go for it with confidence.
• Sprinklers & Golf – That’s where I started my career after college. From sprinkler salesman to business development of golf course management contracts. The only problem, I don’t like golf. You must do what you are passionate about.
• TRS80 & Vegas – What am I passionate about? I’ve loved computers since the days of BASIC on a Trash-80 and I love going to Vegas. My best friend Matt and I were in biz school and traveling back and forth to Vegas. So we decided to start a company that combined the things we love. Internet + Vegas = Internet-based Bachelor Party Planners
• Biz Cards – I have a biz card fetish. 1) we printed at Kinko’s with the logo design by Bill Gates (MS Word Clipart). 2) BachelorBlowOut got a little more professional 3) changed the name to Destination VIP because no-one takes you seriously with a name like BBO 4) Got aquired. Notice title change. Realized 8 months into it that 25% owner means youre not in charge any more, so 5) started Voodoo Ventures
• Charts - big changes over the last 10 years. Cost of starting a startup is falling to zero. Witness Y Combinator, TechStars, etc. Meaning, the number of startups is skyrocketing. Result? Best bet is to bootstrap until you have something “real”. 3 stages of a startup. 1) Ramen soup phase – you should be able to scrape together something and get a few customers to get yourself to 50k in rev. 2) Then the bootstrapping starts and you grow your company to 500k. 3) Growth capital is available beyond that because you have a real business. This is where I believe more capital will be entering the market.
• You’ve got a Website, Now What – You need traffic. Best source for traffic = Google. How to get free traffic from Google? Dan Finnery gave me my “The Graduate” moment in 2001 when he whispered in my ear “Search Engine Optimization“. Check your current website, if your page title says “Frontpage” you ain’t got it. Learn this and do it. It’s free and easy and powerful.
• Customer #1 – Relentless focus on getting in business. Get that first customer. Until someone writes a check, you aren’t in business. Mine was Dave Mullen who wrote us a check for $5000.
• Friction - Now that things are getting serious, you are going to get distracted from your business by all the other “stuff” you have to do. Legal stuff, IRS, opening bank accounts, permits, insurance, etc. You will figure this stuff out. Don’t pay a lot of money to do this, you can do this yourself. Find an attorney who will give you a break and help you grow with them. Don’t fall victim to paralysis by analysis. If you mess something up, someone will tell you. Just keep moving forward.
• Funding - Several options: 1) credit cards 2) rich uncle, friends & family 3) wife (mines not available) 4) cash flow. This is why cash flow is king. Focus on driving revenue. Cash flow = sustainability.
• How Do You Make Money? – figure it out. You don’t have the luxury of not focusing on it. Google Adsense ain’t it. And you’re not getting bought by Google. How do you add value, and what will people pay you for?
• Markets - I started my first company in Vegas in 2001. Vegas boomed, and so did we. A rising tide lifts all boats. New Orleans is seeing the same energy, and rumblings right now
• Be Local but Act Global – Don’t focus just on your city. Have a global strategy for your supply chain and collaboration. Also focus on global customers, not just local ones. But have a personality and leverage whats special about you being in New Orleans. Culture, music, social change.
• Be Disruptive – If someone is telling you to slow down, you’re doing something right. If you’re making people mad or nervous, thats a good thing. My first idea was GrooveOn.com and I called a bunch of record labels in LA and asked for their digital music rights. In 1999. They were mad. And scared. Understand?
• Launch Early and Often & Fail Fast – We built and launched Huckabuck.com, a meta search engine for $50,000. We did some crazy things like signing Rebirth Brass Band to a ringtone contract and flying a plane around Jazz Fest. Then we got a check for $2.42 for our first month revenue. Spending $25,000 to make $2.42 doesn’t compute so we sold it. Launch to sale in 9 months. Not a home run, but a single and it was fun.
• Failure - You learn a lot from failure. You have to erase fear of failure from your mind. Be fearless. You will fail, but you are not a failure. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and do it again.
• Ideas Are a Renewable Resource – They are also worthless unless acted upon. Keep following your dreams and making your ideas a reality.
• Give Without Expectation – This builds social capital. The old term for it is Karma.

I stopped by the “Group Think” that SENO held last night with local entrepreneur Blake Haney. You may have heard that his ambitious new project, HumidBeings is launching in beta later this month.

One of the biggest mistakes that I have made, and I coach others on is not following the “if you build it they will come” strategy of launching a project. (There is always an exception to the rule, in this case Brian Bordainick’s 9th Ward Field of Dreams Project. But I digress…) In the fight for mind share on the web, you will always be the tree that falls in the forest and doesn’t make a sound. You’ve got to make some noise!

Blake has had his head down building out the site, and he was open about the challenges he’s faced with funding it through client work, and distractions from his other business Dirty Coast. It’s clearly been a 2+ years labor of love, and he’s getting close.

But, let me dispel the notion that he is launching this month. He launched last night in front of 40 people, and he has been launching for the last six months.

Here are some lessons that I am taking from his launch:

• Following the “launch early and often” mantra, he’s has had teaser site up for over six months and he’s collected over 2000 email addresses for interested beta users.
• He’s been very visible publicly and is engaging his target market, the New Orleans community, in the development of Humid Beings, and will continue to even after he opens the doors. He makes it feel as if its being built for us, a gift to the community, and I believe it.
• Running a targeted banner ad campaign to build brand awareness even before he opens the doors. The audience for Humid Beings hangs out on sites like Gambit’s Best of New Orleans right now, so he’s running ads there.
• Leveraging Dirty Coast by getting stickers out there.
• Partnering in different ways with local talent like Ben Reece and Supasaint. He’s building content and building a halo for his brand around cool content producers.
• Identified 85 local blogs that are going to provide content to Humid. They get to blog on their own sites, and the content gets pulled in through RSS to a place where it will hopefully have more conversation around it.
• Identifying “the villian” NOLA.com so that we can root for him against a identified competitor.

Of course, I have some additional thoughts on what I think he could be doing:

• Follow Guy Kawasaki’s success with Alltop of feeding blogger ego’s by giving them a badge to identify themselves as “featured bloggers” or “founding partners” on their own blog. Make this invite only, with an perception of exclusivity. (Blake, what I am trying to say is give me a HumidBeings badge to put on Voodoo saying I’ve been “selected” to provide content… free advertising.)
• Get on Twitter. You should be all over this already, tweeting out content, building followers. Twitter is the best medium for launching a brand in a personal, transparent way. You need a Twitter strategy if you don’t have one already… let’s talk.

PS: Blake, I’m cybersquatting for you. In my research of discovering you aren’t on Twitter, I found that you handn’t registered @humidbeings. Twitter handles are the new domain names. So, I thoughtfully registered it for you as FakeBlakeHaney, and I will happily turn it over when you read this post and hit me up in the comments below. Unless some other commenter can convince me to turn it over to them.

Lots of good updates to post today, so I’m going to get at it rapid-fire…

• The Feast, a social innovation conference that Michael Karnjanaprakorn is bringing to New Orleans for the first time on February 6, 2009 has moved to a larger venue due to the strong demand. Michael announced today that the conference will be held at the Contemporary Arts Center. They’ve released additional $99 tickets (available only until Friday) so go register to attend today. I’m going to be speaking at the conference, and I’m working on my talk now. Any thoughts, send them my way.

• Startup School v2 will be held at Tulane on Thursday Jan 29, and Saturday, Feb 7. This Startup School will be geared around the $40,000 Tulane Business Plan Competition. We’re putting this together in conjunction with the TEA, SENO, VoodooTEQ, and hope to have the participation of many of the excellent judges from last time. Keep in mind that for the Tulane competion, each entry needs to have a student (from any university) on the team. More details to follow.

• 504ward will announce the first round finalists this Friday.

• 9th Ward Field of Dreams is an amazing project that Brian Bordainick behind. He working to build a $1.85 million state of the art football field in the Upper 9th Ward for Carver High school and the community. If you haven’t heard about this yet, check out the ESPN article and find out how you can help make it a reality.

• Net2NO is taking a road trip to SXSW and we want you to be a part of it. We’ve broken into subcommities to put together the party, travel and pitch. If you’re interested in helping New Orleans to take SXSW by storm in March, sign up here.

• GNO Inc’s Michael Hecht presented at NetNO last night about the new Digital Media Alliance launch. This initiative is focused on equipping us, New Orleans’ creative class of knowledge workers to succeed and attract more businesses and talent to the city. One of the things that has already been prepared is a slide deck to pitch New Orleans as a great place to locate your business. Take a look below.

Gno Cdm Deck

If you have anything that I’ve left off, hit me up in the comments. I’ll include it in the post. Thanks to everyone who is contributing.

I’m thrilled to announce that Benjamin Reece’s company, Deltree will be moving into the LaunchPad @ Voodoo starting tomorrow!

Ben and Tung Bach Ly were over here at the offices yesterday, and they are already designing the editing studio environment and making themselves comfortable. They are going to be a fantastic addition to the creative, collaborative workspace we are building.

Deltree is rapidly becoming one of the preeminent film and creative studios in New Orleans. The runaway viral hit, 50 People 1 Question has generated buzz all over the internet and led to immediate expansion opportunities for Deltree including work for 504ward, Canary, Trumpet, Crush & Lovely, and a music video for Lucky Dog Audio.

In addition to moving into the LaunchPad @ Voodoo, I’m pleased to announce that Deltree submitted the winnning logo to the Launch Pad logo design content. We’ll be showcasing the logo as well as updates on the progress of the Launch Pad in an upcoming post.

In the meantime, on behalf of Voodoo Ventures, Tanguis Development, Zydego… Welcome, Deltree!

We got our submission in today for 504ward. We’re excited to be a part of the competition and ready to rock on moving the Launch Pad forward. We’ve been somewhat under the radar with this project until now. Starting today, we’re looking for local New Orleans entrepreneurs who want to get out of their bedroom and into a stimulating, collaborative and fun environment without the burden of traditional commercial leases.

Launch Pad – 504ward Business Competion Submission from Chris Schultz on Vimeo.

Startup businesses are born in a spare bedroom or college dorm. Once off the ground, entrepreneurs need an office for legitimacy and support, but find traditional commercial office leases daunting and expensive. The Launch Pad is a flexible office space for startup companies. We provide short-term leases, furnished offices, a support staff and multiple networking and educational events to get a new business off the ground.

Innovation doesn’t happen in isolation. The core value Launch Pad provides is the interaction, networking, and mentoring among entrepreneurs in a modern workspace. Our office space includes access to the services that all startups need so entrepreneurs can focus on their core competencies and build viable businesses.

Launch Pad is the brainchild of entrepreneurs who are intimately aware of the startup culture in places like New York, San Francisco and Austin. Launch Pad will be New Orleans hub for events like Startup School, BarCamp, Co-working, Net2NO. Launch Pad will thrust New Orleans into consideration for entrepreneurs nationwide deciding where to start businesses.

Want in on Launch Pad? Got feedback on what would make it work for you? We want to hear from you. Contact us today for more details.