I would compare our decision to build a product before thoroughly defining its scope to an attempt at walking through your own living room with the lights off.

The shag carpet between your toes means you’re in the right room. You won’t run into the sofa or the armchair—they’re always in the same place. But the ottoman usually hovers near the middle of the room. It just floats there for anyone on the sofa to move and prop their feet. Today it’s abnormally close to the edge of the carpet, and you just stubbed your toe on the way by. Or worse yet, your teammate moved in two more ottomans overnight and you just tripped and knocked over the lava lamp. That’s going to be a hell of a cleanup.

To nail all proverbial ottomans to the ground, we’re mapping out process flow charts, informed by a pattern library and business rules. If multiple members of your team are calling the same feature by a different name—nail down that ottoman. If you’re using a freemium business model, and multiple mock-ups display conflicting user limitations—nail down a decision. Set your scope in stone. Consistency is key, especially if – like us – you’re contracting out a demo.

A few months back, my business partner Jonathan and I decided it was a good idea to prove our concept by outsourcing a demo—we’re working on a social project-planning tool to help bands connect with their skilled fans. So we scribbled down the general gist of our requirements, shared a few mock-ups, and explained our site to the offshore team through a series of conference calls. We were essentially dumping a pile of chairs, lamps, and throw pillows into the corner of our living room, and leaving feng shui up to them.

The strategy resulted in frustrating miscommunications with the development team, and a realization that Jonathan and I were miles apart on many features the site needed to operate seamlessly. A testimony from onstartups.com accurately foretells our narrowly avoided fate, “A year ago I outsourced a website to be built. Went into it blindly, failed miserably, lost tons of money.”

So we’ve changed our mentality. We aren’t contracting out the minimum viable product; we’re conducting the construction of our minimum viable product, by taking charge of defining modules and deliverables. As we move closer to kicking off development, we’ll focus on attributing time variables to carefully assembled modules. But at the moment, we’re focused on managing our site’s high-level design by rigorously documenting its data flow.

First we built a pattern library to account for every little function we wanted to include in the initial version, while simultaneously consolidating features to create functional conventions across the website. By developing patterns in functionality—e.g. all Project Archives are stored on the Band’s Profile—we hope to make the product more intuitive for our users.

During the idea stage, a product is particularly susceptible to sprawl. In line with our brand, we’ve planned to implement a cross-promotional B-side strategy, where a user who downloads a song receives an additional song from another band for free. Nice and simple enough. But soon we got carried away, and began brainstorming more crafty cross-promotional strategies, including one that allowed smaller bands to advertise on the pages of bigger bands. This was all well and good, but we had lost sight of our supreme mission—to provide bands and fans a vessel for collaboration.

We’ve positioned ourselves as an organizational tool, so we’re prioritizing a messaging feature, recommendations feed and market research metrics for the first version, while pushing more peripheral content hosting features to the second version. By uncovering trends, and prioritizing features, our site has organically broken itself into more manageable modules.

After sketching a layout of the living room, it was time to begin developing our business rules, which basically meant performing walk-throughs in pursuit of uncovering every single impediment.

We attacked our business rules by creating a series of If-Then statements. You’ll have no concept how many Ifs your site leaves unanswered until you’ve ruthlessly vetted the product. For example, “If I want to check how much money a band has made, then where do I go?” Or, “If I want to change the amount of songs a band can upload, then what do I do?” As a result of asking the aforementioned questions, we realized we’d made major gaffes that could be fixed by building out a reporting panel and an administrative panel. In other words, we caught the lava lamp just before it shattered on the floor.

On the other hand, answering the mundane questions can be just as important to long-term success. For example, “If a user registers a false email address, then…what?” “If a user enters four digits for his zip code, then…what?” The answer: the system should reject set user. If we hadn’t answered these basic questions, we would not be able to accrue data on where our users are from and how they’re finding the site.

Our six-person team all met up in Arlington, Va. a few weekends back to eat chili and convert our business rules into process flow charts over a hardy 12-hour day. Putting our site in ink only encouraged healthy debate amongst teammates and growth in the product. It was the first time our graphic designer Kelsey had met our technical advisor Nick in person. So we poured over each business rule one at a time, as Kelsey examined UI details in depth, and Nick designed the logic and process flowcharts, while making recommendations to ensure a data-driven site.

We also want to design the logic in a flexible way that won’t inhibit future growth. Creating data-driven features means you don’t hard-wire features into your site that will make it more difficult to iterate later. Create X-Variables. So instead of us putting in stone that we’re going to allow a band only five spaces for log-ins on their account, we can govern that number from the Admin Panel and iterate according to user feedback.

We want to turn the lights on now, so later we don’t trip.

Catch us out at Indy Hall, a Philly Tech Meet-up, in Little Berlin, or out at a show in Fishtown. We’re down for a good conversation.

My business partner Jonathan Kriner and I are newly minted startup entrepreneurs. We first embarked on our startup journey with a polished business plan in hand and fantasies of angel investments during the idea stage. Unsurprisingly, this way of thinking has been deemed unrealistic by established entrepreneurs, intellectual property lawyers, chief technology officers and accountants. So in the past few months, we’ve leaned down our approach, taken incremental steps toward making our idea a physical reality, and in the meantime, discovered ways to begin learning about our user’s needs right away.

First off, the notion that we would receive funding in the idea stage was not only unfeasible, but not in our best interest. Investors are more interested in putting their money behind a team they believe in than an ‘idea.’ The life of a startup presents endless chances to ‘pivot or persevere’, so while the idea is ever changing, the founding team is one of the few constants.

The question has become: how can we conjure up some sort of demo or physical representation of the idea, begin testing it on a user community, and demonstrate to investors that there’s value?

While we’re still in the process of assembling a team to construct a demo, we’ve been able to use wireframes, mock-ups and an animated video to make contact with our potential users and begin learning where our product’s value lies, and where we need to make changes.

At first, Jonathan and I decided the best option would be to use sites like Craigslist, Elance and oDesk to seek out a CTO as a cofounder. We received over 100 responses, including a few from well-qualified programmers. But none were very impressed with our compensation package—a share of the equity and the rights to the third bedroom in our house.

Though a stiff market has thus far precluded us from finding our tech cofounder, our online ads have put us in touch with over 100 potential users, from bands to graphic designers, A&R guys and booking agents to recording studios. And we’ve made the best of it.

Among those who reached out, we met up with an animator named Jay O’Meara (http://www.toomuchmetal.net/), who is creating the tutorial video on how to use the site. We’ve also met bands and industry professionals, who have helped us begin booking shows in our basement venue.

We have been able to use wireframes and mock-ups of the site—put together by our incredibly talented Creative Designer, Kelsey Jones (http://klcjones.com/)—to begin the process of validated learning, even before the release of our first official minimum viable product. By explaining the fundamental value proposition, and basic functionality, we’ve been able to maneuver our vision to fit the needs of our users.

Developing a minimum viable product means having the courage to test your assumptions now rather than later, and it means having the humility to listen to what your users want.

We came to realize through our meetings that musicians seem particularly interested in the market research elements of our site, and the way they allow bands to learn more about the identities and desires of their fans. In turn, we’ve begun developing additional market research metrics for our Alpha, in the hopes that we can split-test at least 13 or 14 to discover which are most useful.

Alex Markovitz, keyboard player and vocalist for a cool new band called The Day Life (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thedaylife/the-day-life-album), explained to us that the measure of his band is not how much music they sell, but how many true fans they have. His band seemed higher on playing house shows than formal venue shows, because they can gig more and have more personal contact with old and new fans alike. As a result, we’ve tailored our project-planning platform to gauge community support, in order to guarantee a better degree of certainty in an event’s eventual success.

Usability experts and tech entrepreneurs have stressed the importance of a slimmed down demo that tests initial assumptions, first and foremost, without the clutter of additional features.

We think the learning we do now will help make our cycles of validated learning even more productive once our demo makes it to the Beta test phase. Of course, we need that day to come sooner, rather than later.

Yasmine at 123Linkit writes:

We have been working hard to help bloggers make money from what they are already doing since early 2010. We believe by seamlessly transforming product and brand keywords into money-making opportunities, we enable bloggers to effortlessly build passive income from their published content.

After integrating our software with tens of thousands of blogs, we believe now is the best time to expand our efforts with another team that shares our vision of enhancing the online advertising process. We’re excited to announce that we have been acquired by Netline and will be joining their RevResponse team to continue creating an enriching and unobtrusive advertising experience on the web.

What does this mean for you? Continue using our product as you normally would. Stay tuned for more improvements to your blogging monetization experience. For feedback or suggestions on how we can progress, do not hesitate to reach out to us at any time using our GetSatisfaction page. You can also email us your questions atyasmine[at]123linkit[dot]com.

About RevResponse: RevResponse is a B2B ad network that enables publishers to generate revenue with free business resources such as trade magazine subscriptions, whitepapers, eBooks and software trials.

Happy blogging,

Yasmine Mustafa
Founder & CEO

ResourceWebs is a Santa Monica based internet company. It boasts a network of 17 targeted educational resources for users to enjoy. The traffic hitting the company’s network of websites has risen to an impressive level of 3 million unique visitors per month.

ResourceWebs was founded by Philly native, Evan Britton. Evan grew up in the Lafayette Hill area and he attended Plymouth Whitemarsh high school. Evan has been working within the web since the late 90′s and he founded ResourceWebs to grant internet users access to free and simple educational resources.

The company has grown its traffic via focusing on targeted niches. These niches, such as railroads, homeschooling, fuel efficiency, symbols, clowning, and sympathy letters are so narrow that ResourceWebs is able to make a considerable impact. The content ResoruceWebs adds is unique content with quality research and analysis behind it. Visitors to ResourceWebs can not only enjoy the content, but also interact with it via social media outlets Twitter and Facebook.

The plan ahead for the company is to continue to dig deeper into these niches to offer additional high quality and useful information. As more visitors reach ResoruceWebs properties, and interact and engage with the content via social media, the company will benefit and be able to provide an even better experience for its users.

It’s your responsibility as a leader to hire the staff, set the standards and grow the business however; it’s easy to let people fall into their roles and out of the sell-to-survive mentality. This will help you reset the paradigm and turn everyone into entrepreneurs selling their ideas to you – everyone wins because they will find things you missed! Remember, you don’t know everything and the best leaders find innovative ways to get their teams to enthusiastically embrace improvement!

It makes no difference what level or role your audience occupies at your company; they could be answering the phones in customer service, they could be implementation engineers, supervisors, managers, directors, “VP’s”, “C’s”, board members or your peers, it doesn’t matter! What matters is how you teach them to communicate and drive resolution to issues, problems, deficiencies and opportunities at your startup. That’s the beauty of a startup – you have hired the people with the “IT” factor, now you have to get them to understand how to provide input and sell their ideas in an organized way. Tell your people how to improve their company, sell their ideas and break out of the daily routine. It’s great to have a technocrat code the hell out of something but even better to get his or her ideas on what’s not working properly and his or her proposed solutions to the problems. This turns your code person into a living, breathing conduit to all of the hidden issues you may be too busy to see. To grow the lawn you have to kill the weeds and who better to do that than the very people who play in the weeds all day?

You hear people complaining about this or that to co-workers at the water cooler, coffee machine or at lunch – what you need to do is to get that information sent to you in an organized, measurable fashion so that you can use it to improve and grow the business. At the same time, you incent people to contribute when their ideas are implemented and they are recognized for their efforts. Just having your coders code, your sellers sell, your ops people op is not enough. Each day that goes by represents dozens of opportunities wasted. The status quo isn’t good enough anymore. Teach everyone to channel their complaints, issues and ideas into a simple sales presentation to their immediate supervisor and then weekly, gather the leadership team and review the suggestions. The people with the “IT” factor will thrive when their ideas are heard, considered and implemented, turning an operational workforce into a cohesive group of thinkers and entrepreneurs. You have just turned your workforce into the consultants you no longer need to hire.

The methodology is simple, at your next all-hands meeting ask the team to look at their roles, their process and procedure, the systems and everything around them. Ask everyone to take the things that bother them, the things they believe are broken or can be improved and ask them to create a Word doc with three simple headers: The issue, The Fix and The Result. Each header will have no more than 4 sentences for each section and each person will submit the document to their immediate supervisor whenever an idea pops into their head. On a weekly basis, team leaders will meet to discuss the issues, much will be learned and some of the suggestions may lead to real improvement. Once you have explained the drill, the ideas will begin to flow in and you may be very surprised at how many of these suggestions merit some action.

In Volume 2 of this series I will share with you a huge customer service win that was realized shortly after this culture was implemented in one of my prior startup experiences. We are talking dollars and time saved, improved service, reduced call waiting times and improvements in up-sell. In future editions, we will walk through many examples where this culture has improved everything from sales to marketing, SEO, Operations, shipping, receiving, software implementation, order conversion, web site effectiveness and back-office efficiency.

Great article in the WSJ today about problems start-ups face in selecting names. It discusses the potential for trademark infringement and how some companies have already lost thousands of dollars in disputes over the company name. Here’s a link http://online.wsj.com…

While the article discusses potential risks in choosing a company name it does not discuss how to avoid them. One easy way to avoid possible trademark infringement is by doing a search on the Internet for the name you propose using. If there is already a well-established company with that name, chances are it’s not worth using. On the other hand, if the company is not in your same geographic territory and provides a service or product far different from yours, it is worth exploring further. At this juncture, you may want to perform a trademark search on the US Patent and Trademark Office’s website and/or consider contacting a lawyer. A lawyer can help perform a deeper search of the potential trademark and assist you with trademark registration should you encounter any opposition, which may likely occur.

Nimblelight builds dynamic web presences for businesses, non-profits, and artists. Their work includes web design and development, web consulting, web application development, paid search and search engine optimization, site analytics and user response optimization, social networking and relationship marketing, and online reputation management.

Nimblelight was founded in 2007 and has already established successful web presences for clients as distinguished as CarSense, Postgreen Homes, Auto Lenders, the City of Philadelphia, The Delaware Children’s Museum, and the seaside vacation town of Mystic, Connecticut.

Start Philly caught up with Nimblelight’s Brian Melton (Partner), who graciously answered our probing questions so that you, our treasured readers, would be thoroughly enlightened and informed about Philly’s companies on the rise.

Read on to get the inside scoop on the joys and pains of starting up, how failure can be valuable, and Brian Melton’s secret code name…

(SP) A couple of years ago, what did you think you’d be doing now (have you always been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug?)?

(BM) Before we started Nimblelight in 2007, I worked as a freelance cinematographer and then for a web technology start up that was building an online video channel. I had no clue I’d be doing this now, but I’ve always had the stomach for risk-taking and have always been into new media.

(SP) What motivated you to get involved in starting Nimblelight?

(BM) I was motivated a lot by my past experience working at a start-up. The president of that company ran 2 other businesses and was also a practicing doctor. Inevitably, he got stretched really thin and was pretty aloof to day-to-day operations. That leadership vacuum basically forced me into doing sales and developing a business plan even though that wasn’t really in my job description. I had no business school training and no experience pitching, but I was literally presenting our business plan to Microsoft VC’s and leading sales meetings with big companies like Borders and Crozer-Keystone.

As you might’ve guessed, that start-up didn’t quite make it off the ground, but the experience gave me a lot of confidence to try starting my own company and showed me how essential it is to build start-ups on a foundation of good ideas and reliable sources of revenue.

(SP) Your partners seem like a pretty cool group of guys:how did you find the key people for this enterprise?

(BM) Thanks! They are cool and very good people to work with. Patrick and I met six years ago while we were at Wake Forest and Patrick has been friends with Adam, our other partner, since 7th grade. So I didn’t have to do much looking — getting together was the easy part.

(SP) Did you have an “official” business plan? If so, what lessons did you learn from the preparation of it? If not, what type of planning did you do prior to starting up?

(BM) Not really. We thought that implementing our ideas even on a small scale was more useful than working them out in a formal document and, since technology changes so fast, we wanted to ensure a certain flexibility in the direction we were heading. After a month or so of research, brainstorming, and beating the ground for potential clients, we started working small jobs with a broad set of ideas about the kind of company we wanted to be.

That initial work provided us with a sort of reality-based business development where we shaped our company as we tested our ideas in the real world. We quickly learned exactly what our strengths, weaknesses, and capabilities were and saw things we needed to change to keep our company afloat and moving forward.

(SP) And now *drum roll please* the inevitable question of funding: how did you guys raise capital to get Nimblelight going?

(BM) We didn’t… This was a huge decision that generated a lot of discussion but it was important to us as friends coming together in business that we had the freedom to do what we wanted, including the freedom to stop if things weren’t working out.

None of us liked the idea of potentially owing money before we’d made any. Or, if we did make money, we didn’t want the goals of investors to clash with our own. So we made the decision to start up with the (meager) savings and equipment we had.

I don’t necessarily recommend starting up a company like this — it was extremely stressful and we definitely lost sleep over it. We were operating on virtually zero capital. In hindsight, we probably should’ve at least started a small line of credit or something. Luckily my partners and I were relatively young and living and eating like poor college students was still a familiar state of being. However, we learned some valuable lessons in budgeting and containing costs in that first year and it certainly feels good now to run a company with no debts.

(SP) What’s been the most difficult part of starting up?

(BM) Working for nothing. In the beginning, we knew we had to outperform similarly-sized companies, over-deliver to clients who were essentially taking a risk by choosing a company as new as us, and put every dollar we made back into the business. All of that was very difficult.

(SP) What’s your concept of a fruitful day?

(BM) Well I wear a lot of hats around here. We all do. So a fruitful day would need to be a well-rounded one where I make headway on current projects, line up future projects, check in with our freelancers, chat with with all the clients we talk to regularly, run analytics for the highest traffic sites we maintain, pay bills and update the quickbooks, and still make happy hour at the Memphis Taproom.

(SP) Random question #1: What internet site do you surf the most?

(BM) I spend an embarrassing amount of time on coudal.com — I think Jim Coudal is one of the most exciting and inspiring entrepreneurs in the world of design and technology. There’s everything from essays on experimental web publishing to 14-step martini recipes on the site. I also love Andrew Sullivan’s blog which is constantly tackling provocative subjects and proving how ineffective and irrelevant old media is becoming.

(SP) Nimblelight describes itself as “small company” that gets “big results” and prides itself on the strong relationships it builds. How do you address your competitors while not allowing them to define you?

(BM) About 80% of our new business comes from word of mouth referrals or face-to-face networking — it’s where our best-fit clients seem to come from — so we’ve spent very little advertising ourselves and haven’t done much to address our competitors. We’re not too concerned at the moment about how our competitors may define us… Instead, we stay focused on exceeding our clients’ expectations and let that define us…

Starting out, we kept noticing our clients were choosing us partially as a reaction to how unhappy they were with their previous web company. They’d found it hard, for instance, to get a live person on the phone or difficult to get their questions answered if they wanted advice or were having technical problems.

There’s a perception — deserved or not — that web developers and technology geeks have poor social skills and trouble taking responsibility for deficiencies in their work. You may have heard the joke: How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? … None, it’s a hardware problem.

Well we’ve been trying to counter this perception with a more “old-fashioned” client-relationship approach. If you call us, you get us on the phone; if you want to know why we chose jQuery over Flash, we help you understand the reasons why; and if your site isn’t loading, we help — even if it’s not our fault.

Overall, the work we do helps guide our clients into the right decisions about their web presence and provides platforms for cultivating long-term relationships with past, current, and future customers. We believe the best way to help our clients achieve those goals is to first build strong relationships with our clients.

(SP) Random Question #2: If you were a spy, what would your alias be?

(BM) Snake Eyes.

(Snake Eyes was a completely awesome G.I. Joe covert operations specialist who had a pet wolf named Timber.)

(SP) What do you think about the entrepreneurial scene in Philly? Are you optimistic? What would  you like to see more of?

(BM) I don’t have much to compare it to. I’ve had a fantastic time running a business in Philly and I couldn’t ask for much more — in just a few years, we’ve been lucky enough to meet and work with some talented entrepreneurs who are all doing amazing things — Postgreen, Machinery, Caspari McCormick, and great independent minds like Fran McGowan, Max Sobol and Ed Tettemer.

Read the full post here.

WinTheView™ (WTV™) is a powerful interview preparation and presentation tool that is designed to help job seekers determine the critical hiring requirements and formulate the key points they wish to articulate during the interview.  A PDF file is generated in the form of a flip chart-like presentation that can be printed and taken to the interview. The WTV™ development center is secure and enables the job seeker to prepare multiple presentations, follow-up letters and accomplishment stories with online access 24/7. An example of a sample presentation:

WTV™ Can Be Used In The Following Ways:

1. Focus process and thinking on your most compelling key points so as to enter interview situations prepared and confident.
2. Introduce WTV™ as a professional looking printed qualifications summary during the interview to impress the hiring manager and help guide the discussion your way.
3. Create a lasting impression with a printed or emailed “leave-behind” WinTheView™ summary for each hiring team member.
4. Email a WTV™ PDF file immediately after each phone screen interview to increase your chances of earning that coveted face-to-face interview.
5. Email a WTV™ PDF file in advance of each face-to-face interview to facilitate discussion and demonstrate a proactive mindset.
6. Generate a “career summary” presentation, then link its PDF file on your LinkedIn.com profile via SlideShare, so they can find you.

Benefits for the Job Seeker:

• Bolsters confidence just by going through the WTV™ process
• Demonstrates high level of preparation and professionalism
• Helps to gain a better understanding of the key hiring criteria
• Correlates candidate talking points directly to hiring criteria
• Differentiates candidate from competitors not likely using this approach
• Prepares job seeker for behavioral interviews via accomplishment story feature
• Makes job seeker think through qualifications carefully
• Accesses online portfolio of presentations, follow-up letters and accomplishment stories for easy future use

We are currently selling WTV™ directly to job candidates via the web, and to channels such as career experts, outplacement firms and executive recruiters.  In the near future we will be pursuing the University and MBA programs throughout the U.S. which we believe to be a high potential market for WinTheView™. We’ve been particularly pleased with the high level of acceptance from well respected “Career Thought Leaders”, which are the experts that write resumes and career documents, LinkedIn profiles, provide job search strategies, interview coaching and more.

The WinTheView™ user success stories continue to mount and we are building new functionality based upon individual user feedback, along with feedback from the career expert community. In addition to the three offerings today which include; interview presentation development, career accomplishment story development and follow up letter development, we will be adding the capability to develop an elevator pitch or 2 minute drill for effective networking. These files are retained for the job candidate for use throughout their career via subscription renewal.

The conference opened up with a keynote speech by Peter Schwartz, Co-founder and Chairman of the Global Business Network, and a partner of The Monitor Group. The speech, both dynamic and engaging, encouraged entrepreneurs to look at risk in new ways. Mr. Schwartz asserted that entrepreneurs would have to learn how to “embrace failure” while noting that  one of our biggest cultural barriers is the idea of “instant success” which is becoming increasingly hard to achieve post-1990s. It was hard to feel discouraged as he maintained that future successful entrepreneurs would be those that had a willingness to persist.

After a stellar (free!) lunch, two panels: “Financing Your Business Venture” and “Using Social Networks to Build and Sustain a Business” commenced simultaneously, with the latter being the panel of choice. It was truly an interactive session, with real-time poll results from the audience shown on the screen to gauge interest in discussion topics, as well as live comments/questions from the audience coming in on TwitterFall. The panel was led by a group of savvy entrepreneurs (all Swarthmore alums) with impressive backgrounds: Dom Sagolla (Co-Creator of Twitter and founder of Dollar App) proved quite helpful in sharing helpful websites and other technical resources, while Ted Chan (Founder/CEO, Upward Mobility and MocaHealth) talked practically about how to get things accomplished using social networking. Chan also touched a bit on how social media technologies can be of great use when trying to get the word about how socially responsible your business is. The third panelist, Noël Theodosiou (Strategist and Facilitator, Luminous International Ltd.) gave concrete and concise suggestions about using social networking to measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.

Following the panels were multiple round table discussions, which covered a wide range of interesting topics. A few titles included: “American Style Bootstrapping”; “The Patent Market”; “Business Tools and Technology for Social Change” and “What Is a Woman with Brains, Talent, Drive and a Good Idea to Do?”  Start Philly participated in the exciting round table discussion titled “The Entrepreneur’s Dilemma: How Do You Create Value When All You Have is Vision?” led by Tracy Korman (CEO and  Co-founder of Longitude Health, Inc.). We only wish that we could have been at every round table discussion simultaneously.

The final panel, titled “Your Company: the First Five Years” proved to be a spirited discussion centering around issues like choosing business partners, creating company culture and of course, bootstrapping vs. accepting VC/Angel  and other outside funding. Heading up this discussion were Amity Cox (Former Vice President of Talent & Culture at Clarix LLC), Tracy Korman and Chris Pearson (CEO, Sound Innovations); all of whom provided detailed advice to audience members along with candid  insights into their personal experiences with startups.

The networking reception drew the conference to a close. Start Philly, ever the opportunist, did get a chance to chat with a few interesting folks. When we asked Twitter co-creator Dom Sagolla about the most surprising thing that’s happened to him within the past 5 years, he replied:

“My son. I’m surprised at how much having a kid is like having a start up.”

Pardon?

Sagolla clarified by describing the similarities: “You nurture it, obsess over it, and want it to succeed so much!”  His countenance noticeably brightened as he gushed about his startup- er, son and suggested that he was inspired to greater heights of innovation now, more than ever before.

We also caught up with Amity Cox and chatted a bit about her philosophy concerning company culture: “As a founder, you have the opportunity to mold the culture of your company into what you want it to be…it was important-to me at least- to create a values-centric work environment.” Cox added that “the first few employees are critical to your company: you want to make sure they really understand the goals and mission of your company because not only will they become the unofficial spokespeople and promoters, they will be training the next group of incoming employees…you want the values and mission of your company to be passed down in its purest form.” Cox also suggested that “bootstrapping it” is really helpful in maintaining control over company culture for obvious reasons.

Overall, the conference proved to be insightful, diverse in the topics it covered and a dispenser of practical guidance for people in all stages of startups. The food rocked too.

Did we mention it was free?

Next conference on the agenda:   The 85 broads 2020 Vision