In Spring of 2009, we applied to the TechStars Summer program as well as several other startup incubators. We were non-selected, and for good reason. We didn’t have much to show at that point, and we lacked direction. It would take a few months for us to solidify exactly what it was we were doing and how we were going to make money.

Fast forward about 9 months, to last month where again, we found ourselves applying TechStars. This time, we were applying to the Boston program which they had moved to the Spring. At first, we applied with a crazy side project that I’d dreamt up over the holidays. Shawn Broderick encouraged us to apply again with GreenKonnect which we thought they would have no interest in. I was also feeling a little down on GreenKonnect. It’s been a long year, and we took a lot of wrong turns (each of which taught us something). Shawn was apparently interested in what we were doing, so reapplying was a no brainer for us.

It changed everything. All of a sudden, we had to focus again. We had to show progress, basically every day, if we wanted to make it into to TechStars. Stuff that had been pushed off for months got done. We had to seriously evaluate a few key parts of our business in order to prove its viability.

I was excited again. Excited in a way that I hadn’t been in a long time. Part of it was the potential of being a TechStars company, but really, we found ourselves moving forward which we hadn’t done in a long time. I was forced to forget about the unimportant stuff and only work on what mattered. We’ve had weeks and even months like this before (typically when we had deadlines), but it had been a while since we had. All of a sudden, we knew where we were going again. It was awesome.

And then, we were non-selected. Again. Man, were we disappointed. We really want to be in Boston. I had expected that if we didn’t get accepted, I’d start to have serious doubts about our business, but I didn’t. I was reinvigorated. I saw this clear path and realized that there is still a huge opportunity for what we’re doing.

Shawn and TechStars are unbelievably kind when they let you know you didn’t make it. They go out of their way to make sure that you know that non-selection does not mean that you don’t have a good idea. It just means that there are at least 10 ideas/teams that they think are better than yours.

I still interpret this as, “You suck!“ It’s not what they mean at all, but I know that the chances of success in this crazy world of startups are astronomically slim. We should be good enough to get into TechStars. Besides, if I know that if I look at it this way, it’s only going to make me want to prove that statement wrong.

TechStars had two primary concerns:

1. Slow progress since applying last year.
2. That we might be late to the market.

That hit me hard because I knew they we were right. Although, I’m confident that we’re still not too late to the market to make it work. We’ve got some competition, but none of us have established any foothold in the market, and we’re doing everything we can to provide a better experience than the others (and based on feedback, we’re doing that).

Now that we’re here, I decided to do two things, figure out how we got to where we are and figure out how to suck less.

So how did we get here?

1. We chased money too early: Six months ago, we started looking to raise money. We thought we had it nailed. We had a source that was very interested. Everything we did was focused on them. We weren’t worrying about the product or gaining traction. Long story short, that source disappeared and we’d wasted months.
2. We talked too much: This problem was especially true of me. I started talking about partnerships and thinking about what we could do with our API. I was constantly trying to make new connections, hoping that an amazing opportunity would open up. We got tons of leads for amazing opportunities, but it had me out of the office or on the phone all the time which significantly slowed the development of our site. It’s hard to convert these leads without a full-featured product. No one is actually going to agree to anything until they can play with the product. Even then, it will probably take several months to make something happen.
3. We tried to do too much: We had this grand vision when we started over a year ago. We were going to revolutionize B2B marketplaces across every vertical. We were going to be VerticalNet 2.0. Ya, that wasn’t going to happen. Too bad it took us 6 months to realize that.

What are we doing to suck less?

1. Do more, faster: This is the TechStars motto, and I heard it over a year ago, but it wasn’t until recently that I really took it to heart. Personally, I often get caught up in details which aren’t particularly important. I’ve gotten better in the past year at prioritizing the important things. Today, I look at what needs to get done, and I think, “What can I do that accomplishes the most in the least amount of time?” Right now, this means focusing on our product, getting it to 1.0 while continually receiving feedback from users and refining it. I’ve stopped pursuing those potential partnerships that I was so preoccupied with. (I haven’t cut it out completely, keeping lines of communication open, but I don’t dedicate a lot of time and energy here.) It’s been unbelievably refreshing to put my head down and focus on the product. I forgot how much I love doing it, and we’ve seen amazing progression recently.
2. Be the best in the world at something: We have competition. We didn’t when we started (that we know about). We’d be in a much better position today if we’d focused on building an awesome product and launching it quickly, but we thought we needed money to accomplish this. We really didn’t. The great thing about much of our lost time over the last year, is that we’ve never stopped thinking about the problem we’re addressing. A lot of the research that we did for the potential investor is helping us avoid a number of potential problems. We now understand all the little details and the pain points of green building product research and selection. When you combine this knowledge with the amazing hacking skills of my business partner, you get something that is seriously epic. (You’ll see it soon enough.) Right now, it’s all about the product, making it as amazing as we possibly can.
3. Feedback, Fix, Repeat: I mentioned this above briefly, but we’ve made it a priority to get the people who need our product to give us feedback, regularly. We’re not even waiting until we have the site up. We have a great, small group of people that love and need what we’re building and will give us feedback on mockups. We’re not wasting time developing the wrong thing. It’s awesome.
4. Ignore everything that doesn’t fit 1-3: I work best when I’m able to focus. Me entire life is in Things. I know I’m overextended when I’m consistently not finishing everything I set out to do at the beginning of the day. By cutting out those things which don’t help us achieve 1-3, my to-do list is empty at the end of the day (well, mostly). Not only does this keep us on track, it feels great to get things done regularly.

We didn’t get into TechStars, but we’re acting like we did. These next three months are all about getting to the point where we have something to show that people really want to use. Will we succeed? Absolutely. (I have to believe that we will, otherwise, why am I doing this?)

And you know what? We’ll apply for the TechStars Summer program.

I won’t use the app because it does not fit in with the GTD methodology, but the demo video is something worth imitating. It’s simple and straight to the point, but it uses humor effectively to pull you in.

Thanks @bjennelle for sharing this at the PSL Open Hack Day.

By the way, I use Things for task management and love it.

I’ve been able to check out a lot of new music this week thanks to Peel. Here are a few of my favorites from the week.

We’ll start off with a chilled out Electro song:

Take My Picture (Digitalfoxglove Surprise Remix) – Heads We Dance

Download

And then we’ve got a little extra bass from down under in this Nu Skool Breaks track:

Pressure Point (Thayer’s Drop The Bass mix) – Nick Thayer

Download

Then we’ll close things out with an epic Nu Disco track:

I Want U (Disco Trash Music’s Bounce Mix – unreleased version) – Azzido Da Bass & Jence

Download

Let me know what you think, and if you’ve found any great tracks recently, make sure to share.

Let me start by saying that I’m a fat kid at heart. I was chubby until seventh grade when I got really sick and didn’t eat much for a week. After recovering, I had lost quite a bit of weight, and it finally hit me that eating less was the only way to actually lose weight. Since then, I’ve been very conscious of what I eat and generally lead a healthy lifestyle consisting of regular exercise and a controlled, typically healthy diet. But eating healthy still does not come naturally for me.

I’ve been reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (almost done and review forthcoming). One of the major points of the book is to demonstrate how are culture and conditioning are very difficult to break. This got me thinking about my eating habits.

You see, I grew up in a home where I was surrounded by way too much food. I had three younger brothers, so my mother was always scared that we’d run out of food. Unfortunately, we grew up in Lancaster County, and food around here is not exactly of the healthiest variety. We always had all kinds of food available, and dinner was high carb, high calorie and often included dessert. If I wanted it, it was there.

When I moved away from home, it became much easier. I simply didn’t buy and keep food at home that was unhealthy. If I want dessert, if I want soda, if I want coffee, if I want potato chips, I have to go out and buy them and typically spend a premium on it. This has been very effective, but I still struggle to eat healthy sometimes.

I went to the gym tonight for about an hour and a half. Today was cardio and abs. I spent 45 minutes on the stationary bike and 15 minutes in the pool. (I’m planning to do the Philadelphia Triathlon next summer.) While I was on the bike, I checked Twitter and saw @kessler’s tweet, a picture of his Double Double Animal Style from In-N-Out Burger. All of a sudden I wanted a burger. I’d already planned out a healthy dinner at home, but even getting hopping off the bike, doing abs for 20 minutes and hopping in the pool for 15 minutes, I still wanted that burger. I wound up at Five Guys and undid all my work in the gym tonight.

Now, I’m not such a health nut, I’m not so obsessive with my health that I’ll never eat a burger, but I was disappointed tonight because I had already planned a healthy meal, and I’ve been on a bit of an unhealthy kick recently. I knew I shouldn’t have eaten that, but I still did.

No matter how hard I try to not be a fat kid, I just can’t seem to stop it. I guess I’ll just have to continue to keep crappy food out of my pantry and just realize that sometimes, I’m just going to give in. If I do figure out how to decondition my habit, I’ll let you know.

(Disclaimer: I don’t blame my mother for any of my habits. Frankly, she was just making sure that we were well fed and able to grow, and two of my brothers are the exact opposite of me when it comes to food. The other one is just like me. The problem is that people in the US are conditioned to think that the traditional American diet is actually healthy. It is not, and more importantly, we don’t understand portion control.)

Email is a big problem for me. I get too many, I send too many. I spend too much time in my inbox. I’m a slave to it. I check it all the time. I read emails, then I ignore them, mark unread and let them pile up in my inbox.

Lets face it, email sucks. We’re overloaded, and most of us don’t know how to change that.

I read a great blog post yesterday from Mark O’Sullivan, the creator of Vanilla, with some pretty basic, but effective tips. It got me thinking about what I can do to actually become more effective at email.

I think one of the key things that I’ve realized is that I really need to spend less time actually thinking about what I’m writing. I can’t tell you how many times I get a stack of business cards from an event and get back and put off writing those people because I’m afraid it will take too long. I think too much about emails to people who may or may not actually care about what I have to say.

Don’t invest too much time in a first email. Keep it short but make sure to check the spelling. This allows you to get these emails out more quickly, but more importantly, it increases your chances of getting a response back. After you’ve determined that that person is interested in a discussion, then you can dig in more deeply.

I’ve decided that when it comes to email, I’m going to think less, write less and procrastinate less.

On last note, don’t be afraid to bother a person again if they don’t email you. A lot of times, things just slip through the cracks for these people. You may bother some people, but at least you don’t have to worry about missed opportunities.

One of my favorite ways to find new music is to follow way too many music blogs. My Google Reader music folder currently has 1000+ posts from a few dozen music blogs that I wish I actually had the time to read. Obviously, I don’t, so I’ve been dreaming for a year about a feed reader made specifically for music blogs. I couldn’t find anything until a few weeks ago when I was complaining about this problem and someone told me it had already been solved. I nearly jumped out of my shoes in excitement and couldn’t wait to get home to try it. Of course, I completely forgot about it by the time I managed to get in front of a computer, but today, I found the note in my bag about it. I immediately checked it out.

The answer to all my problems is Peel, and it is better than what I had dreamed about. Peel is very simple, you add a blog, and it finds all the MP3s in the RSS stream. When a new song is added, it pops up under that blog in Peel. Peel doesn’t force you to download the song before listening. Instead, you stream the song straight from the blog. Peel keeps track of which songs you have already listened to. If you like the song, one click (or a keyboard combo) allows you to download it, add it to your iTunes library and even add it to a playlist for that blog if you’re so inclined.

Unfortunately, for many of you, Peel is Mac only right now. It has a 25 day trial and costs $14.95. I’m already 100% positive that I will purchase it at the end of the trial period. Peel is an amazing example of a beautifully simple app built to accomplish one thing. What used to be a task that would take hours for me to do has been reduced to a simple background task that I can do all day long. Peel is going to make music discovery a much more enjoyable experience for me.

By the way, normally, I wouldn’t endorse software on my blog, but this is just too cool and I know many others would benefit from know about Peel.

Last night, I went to bed at 4 am. What was I doing? Trying to decode LEED as a part of the new features we’re working on rolling out at GreenKonnect. While I believe it was an intelligent decision for USGBC to reference existing standards for a large portion of the credits, it makes it quite confusing for someone trying to get started with LEED. In addition to the reference guides, there are countless independently produced study guides to help you learn the intricacies of the prolific green building standard. LEED is complicated for a reason. Building sustainably and responsibly is not a simple task and requires a greater understanding of every choice a person makes when designing a building.

I’m not complaining about the complexity but about the fact that it is very hard to gain even a basic understanding of LEED. Building consumers (i.e., the people who actually sit inside of them) don’t really know what LEED is beyond the fact that green = less energy + special “green” materials and that the building gets a special plaque . If the average person off the street picked up a LEED reference guide, they would not be able to comprehend half of it.

LEED registration is growing at an extraordinary rate, but I think those numbers could be even higher if the USGBC educated the “consumer” about the benefits of green buildings. If you take a look at the USGBC home page, you will see that it is aimed directly AEC professionals. They are trying to drive people to join USGBC and buy reference guides. The “Highlights” section is primarily composed of operational info that only those who are intimately involved would care about.

If USGBC is trying to build a brand, they should make it easier to figure out what it actually stands for. All of the info on the website is important, but I would venture a guess that these days, more “consumers” than professionals are visiting the website.

As an additional note, it would be great to see a better way of labeling buildings and educating people about the benefits beyond just the energy savings, including such things as low-emmitting materials and increased daylight, which result in better health and productivity, and the importance of regional materials which has a huge impact on the carbon footprint.

I decided that I’m going to keep Sunday posts simple and fun. Today, I wanted to share some music I like listen to when I work out. A few days ago, I wrote about the music I listen to when I’m working to stay productive. The right music is even more important when you’re working out.

I prefer to listen to DJ mixes when exercising because they tend to be more energetic and the BPMs stay pretty consistent. BBC Radio 1 has a weekly show called The Essential Mix where they invite DJs of all styles to play for two hours. Often, it results in some really amazing mixes. And two hours is about how long I’m in the gym for most workouts. Here’s a few of my favorite mixes from over the years.

Essential Mix (04-10-2005) – Mylo

Download / Track List

Essential Mix (02-01-2005) – Radio Soulwax (2mandydjs)

Download / Track List

“Because startup entrepreneurs need each other.”

I can’t tell you how helpful this community has been. If it weren’t for this group of amazing people, I don’t know if we would still be going over at GreenKonnect. Everyone in the group understands what we’re going through.

As an entrepreneur, you greatly increase your chance of success by involving yourself in an active and supportive community. There are three main benefits:

1. Support – Starting a company has a lot of ups and a lot of downs. Only other entrepreneurs understand this.
2. A Network – You greatly increase your chances of success when you’ve got other people on your side. If they believe in you, they’ll give you access to your network. (Use LinkedIn to your advantage. I’ll post more on that later.)
3. Education – I’ve made a lot of mistakes starting my company. PSL has helped me reduce the number of those mistakes.

But there’s one more thing that PSL has done for me, and it may be the most important thing to come out of my involvement. That’s the friends I have made and the discussions I’ve had with them. The best discussions are those I have with people who aren’t afraid of to step on my toes. As an entrepreneur, you need to be able to take criticism. You need to seek it out from your peers, potential investors and your users. These conversations have significantly changed the way we operate and talk about our business.

As I’m writing this, I’m realizing I don’t have enough of these conversations, so next time you see me, ask me about my business, then let me know what you think we could be doing better.

So, if you’re in Philly and starting a company, join PSL yesterday. If you’re not in Philly find a community or start one. Most importantly, find those people who aren’t afraid to smack you when you’re headed in the wrong direction.

I’d love to hear in the comments about your experiences with PSL and other similar communities.