Momentum

Want to give a great pitch?  Go with the FLOW

by Laura Percherski

Public speaking is typically not the first skill of a web-based entrepreneur. In fact, from my experience, many entrepreneurs dread it.

Despite that, pitching is a necessary part of being an entrepreneur. Presenting well to investors, potential customers and even your team at times requires intention and practice. To help this year’s startups, Momentum brought in an expert.

Zoe Carmichael, Communications professor at Aquinas College was on hand to give proven tips on presenting, an example of what she aptly calls a “brilliantly executed and memorable presentation” and real time feedback for the Momentum team pitches.

Sidenote – Zoe is also the better half of Grant Carmichael, who delivered Monday’s Momentum’s workshop on user experience and people focused design. Um, can you say power couple?

Zoe gave us these four steps to help any presentation become ‘brilliantly executed & memorable’.

F.L.O.W.

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Customer Development the Zipments Way

By Laura Pecherski

Over the course of Momentum, there are weekly dinners for the teams, mentors and students to learn from local entrepreneurs and experts in fields relevant to starting a web based business.

I’m Laura Pecherski, by the way. I will be guest blogging for Momentum at events like this and other programs throughout the summer. I love creating things, connecting with people and being apart of a community like Momentum that fosters the growth of ideas and startups in Michigan.

This week’s dinner was held at GRID 70 on Ionia Ave downtown and we heard from local serial entrepreneur, Garrick Pohl. I work with Garrick at Zipments so it was particularly interesting for me to hear his perspective on customer development and how it’s changed over the years.

Garrick is CEO & Co-Founder of Zipments, an online marketplace for local delivery services. Prior to this role, Garrick spent five years as CEO of Crayon Interface, a company he co-founded in 2005 that developed mobile applications. In 2010, this company was sold to several parties including Ingersoll Rand and others (including one of the largest insurance companies in the U.S.).

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Recap-The Michigan Lean Startup Conference

by Momentum blogger, Laura Percherski

On Thursday, 20 nationally recognized speakers came to Grand Rapids, Michigan to talk to our completely-sold-out Michigan Lean Startup Conference. The audience was filled with all things startup: founders, investors, consultants and people simply interested in innovation.

The concept of the Lean Startup is a relatively new one across the country and this conference marked the formal introduction of the lean principles into West Michigan. Some attendees were brand new to the lean startup methodology and others were familiar with it through reading the many great books on lean startup methodologies.

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The Start-Something Startups

By guest blogger Grace Eyre

These days, things look pretty grim. Our currency is losing value. Prices are rising. Unemployment is high. From GM to Wall Street, many of our favored industries have lost face in the international community. The USA has hit the debt ceiling and is at risk of default.

In short, it’s a stressful time to be alive, and a stressful time to be young. But the next generation of business has grown up in the shadow of these mistakes, and I think we’ve absorbed some valuable lessons. I’m 25. The stock market plummeted and layoffs began the week after I finished school. I’ve worked for non-profits, small businesses, and done some government consulting. I admit that my perspective is limited. I’m not an expert in business, but what I have seen, particularly the contrast between new and old, bureaucracy and flexibility, gives me hope. My experience in coming to Mutually Human from a decidedly stodgier old-school employer has initiated me into a surprising world wherein profit is not the end-all be-all, but only one in a handful of company goals. Among them is creating real change in the community, being a thought leader, and caring about the market success of our customers. What’s more, the approach is sensible, measured, and effective. Yes, a small flicker of optimism is growing in my cynical heart.

Culture and technology are shifting in favor of the homemade business. You can start from your home. You can start from a rolling stand. You can start with a website. You can start at the Starbucks counter. You don’t borrow money, you don’t lease storefronts. You start small and you build out until you need the storefront and you have the money. This may seem awfully shoestring and cavalier, but the truth is, it’s smart. It’s low-risk and test-driven in the real world of incomprehensible human behavior. Suits be damned. This is the era of Lean Startup.

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Momentum kicks off 2011 program, reaches out to universities

Momentum kicks off 2011 program, reaches out to universities

By Olivia Pulsinelli | Business Review West Michigan

As it enters its third annual summer “boot camp” program, Momentum continues to try new things.

This year, the Grand Rapids-based seed accelerator will partner with a limited number of colleges and universities to give students real-life exposure to the world of entrepreneurism.

“It’s a real test for us because we haven’t done anything like that before,” Executive Director Bill Holsinger-Robinson said. “I think it’s going to expose those students to some really interesting situations and information and really frame what they’re learning in the classroom very differently.”

Students from partner schools will participate in Momentum’s weekly entrepreneurial workshops, speaker dinners and networking events, as well as other events throughout the summer.

“The idea came from wanting to have a deeper connection within the universities because we don’t necessarily have natural connections to a research university in town,” Holsinger-Robinson said.

For the partnership’s inaugural year, Momentum reached out to a limited number of colleges and universities to gauge their interest. They all signed up.

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Meet the presenters of Michigan Lean Startup Conference-Eric Ries

We are just 2 days away from The Michigan Lean Startup Conference! There will be over 250 people traveling from throughout Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana to learn more about the lean startup movement. The leader of this movement is Eric Ries.

Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup methodology and the author of the popular entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned. He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content.

The Lean Startup movement is taking hold in companies both new and established to help entrepreneurs and managers do one important thing: make better, faster business decisions. By testing assumptions earlier, faster, and with more rigor, you can improve your success rate. Bringing principles from lean manufacturing and agile development to the process of innovation, the Lean Startup helps companies succeed in a business landscape riddled with risk. In this presentation, author and serial entrepreneur Eric Ries will share practical solutions based in his work building IMVU to more than 25 million members worldwide and his experiences consulting to more than a dozen technology startups.

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Meet the presenters of Michigan Lean Startup Conference-Jeffrey Schox

The Momentum Lean Startup Conference is just over a week away! Until then, we will continue to introduce you to the awesome speakers that will be presenting that day. Today we will feature patent attorney, Jeffrey Schox.

Jeffrey is a Registered Patent Attorney and the founding member of Schox Patent Group, a boutique patent firm devoted to building patent portfolios for early stage startups. Drawing on his experience of over twelve years in patent law and five years in angel investing, he has written patent applications for startups that attracted investments from high profile venture capital firms, such as Bessemer, BlueRun, DFJ, Flagship, Founders Fund, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins, and Union Square. As a Consulting Professor, Jeffrey teaches patent law at Stanford University (in the engineering and law schools) and at the University of Michigan (in the engineering school). His presentation is titled “MVPS (minimum viable patent strategy)”

There is a misunderstanding that startups must choose between sharing their ideas during customer development, or protecting their inventions with a patent. In fact, by avoiding the patent pitfalls, startups can choose both. Jeff will cover how to develop a MVPS (minimum viable patent strategy) that attracts money from investors and increases chances of an acquisition.

We look forward to welcoming Jeffrey and the other speakers to Grand Rapids next week!

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Meet the Momentum 2011 Startups!

Release Date: May 10 , 2011

Meet the Momentum 2011 Startups!

Grand Rapids, MI— Momentum, the West Michigan seed accelerator that provides initial investments, mentoring and business launch assistance to internet technology entrepreneurs is pleased to introduce their latest batch of startups- Chext, FoodCircles, Booker, Converati, and recent 5X5night winner, Weather Collage!

You can meet the Momentum 2011 Teams at The Momentum Kick-off Celebration on Thursday, May 19th, at The BOB, downtown Grand Rapids from 5:30 to 7:30 pm. For more information visit http://momentumkickoff.eventbrite.com

“We are excited to enter another year of contributing to a start-up culture in West Michigan by investing in these exciting teams and ideas.” says Momentum founder, Rick DeVos

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Meet the Founders’ Panel of the Michigan Lean Startup Conference!

The Michigan Lean Startup Conference is just 2 weeks away and we have already sold out! We are not too surprised, we have an awesome speaker line up (be sure to get on the waiting list if you have not already signed up)! Today we are going to introduce you to our prestigious Investor Panel.

The panel will be moderated by *Matt Bower *of Safford & Baker PLLC, a Southeast Michigan law firm specializing in representing startup and early-stage software and technology companies and their respective owners. Matt is a business attorney with Safford & Baker PLLC, a Southeast Michigan law firm specializing in representing startup and early-stage software and technology companies and their respective owners. Matt provides his clients with a wide variety of business legal services from “cradle to liquidity”, including entity planning and formation, private equity financing, and intellectual property protection and licensing. In addition to general corporate representation, Matt focuses his practice in the areas of copyright, publishing, software, Internet, mobile, and other areas of technology and intellectual property law.

Matt will discuss the VC perspective on Lean Startups: Do VCs looks for Lean Startup Principles in prospective portfolio companies? How are Lean Startups changing private equity financing? What advice do VCs have for the Lean Startup? When should companies make the transition from Lean Startup to Big Company? The panel will consist of both Michigan and out of state investors to give us a broad perspective. The panelists are:

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Meet the presenters of Michigan Lean Startup Conference-Rob Walling

The Michigan Lean Startup Conference is less the 3 weeks and registrations are rolling in! We will continue to feature our awesome slate of speakers as we approach May 19th. Today we would like to introduce you to entrepreneur, blogger, and author, Rob Walling!

Rob has been starting companies for most of his life and is author of the book Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup. His blog, Software By Rob, is a top 20 startup blog and is read by about 20,000 web entrepreneurs each month. It covers startup marketing and software entrepreneurship. Rob also owns the leading ASP.NET invoicing software on the market in addition to a handful of other profitable web properties, and runs an online learning community called the Micropreneur Academy that helps one-person web startups go from zero to launch in about six months.

As a software developer turned entrepreneur Rob’s learned most things the hard way. Years of trial and error have unearthed a laundry list of false assumptions, missed expectations and times when “best practices” were far from the best approach to a problem. Using stories from his experience Rob will share lessons he’s learned over the past several years, each of which has had a profound impact his ability to run a company. Some of those lessons are:

• Why the traditional approach to sizing a market is wrong
• Why being a good technician is not enough
• Why your first success is the hardest, but likely the most important
• Why you should always build equity
• Why free plans don’t work
• Why Adwords is really good for one thing
• Why you should start marketing the day you start coding
• The #1 goal of your website
  And more…

We can’t wait to meet Rob and the rest of the Michgian Lean Startup Conference speakers! Hope to see you there!

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