Help Get The Word Out!

I’ll be direct in my request. I’ve written a book on entrepreneurism that fills a gap in content that has been missing in the market place. After starting, running and selling a business of ten years the inspiration for From Idea to Exit came to me. The book covers the evolution of the entrepreneur and the entrepreneur’s business from idea, startup, running and exit. New methodologies and theories are shared that inspire the dreamer and existing entrepreneur.

I’m currently running two new startups, I’ve been an adjunct teaching entrepreneurism, mentor for Founder Institute, board advisor for Loyola University of Chicago’s entrepreneurism program and volunteer for NFTE. That keeps me busy, and subsequently I do a poor job of promoting my book. The book has received three national awards in the category of entrepreneurism and I regularly receive praises from readers.

From Idea to Exit is a mission with the purpose of inspiring and educating entrepreneurs. I want my target audience to have the book in hopes that it helps them take well educated and calculated action on their dreams. Unfortunately, I can’t devote the needed time and effort to get the word out – on a bootstrapping author’s budget mind you. Therefore, I look to the community to help spread the word. My purpose is not about book sales, but to continue to receive responses such as the one below:

Hi, Jeff,
I just finished reading your book, and felt compelled to thank you. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and found it more than the great majority of books I pick up, that have very little substance and are merely surrogate cheerleaders with little else. I found it in the airport on my way to the annual HIMSS (Healthcare Information Management Systems Society) conference for something to read on the plane. It was well-worth the money and time – and I’ve already re-read the first half, and will keep it close at hand for ready reference.

I’m planning on embarking on my own journey – which I’ve been trying to flush out for a couple of years. And, your book has been encouraging to me as I try to get out of my risk box and move ahead. I’m somewhere between the napkin and a fully built business plan stages, and have a novel idea that should reap excellent rewards if I can execute well. I’m excited to get started, and need encouraging thoughts as I move ahead, and your book was a pleasant surprise.

Thanks again, for sharing your story and insights along your entrepreneurial journey!

Randa Degerness

If you have a method to promote From Idea to Exit to your audience I would greatly appreciate your effort – as will those who entrust your guidance and message. I’m asking you to blog, post, discuss or any other method available that would let your members know about From Idea to Exit. Let’s get more entrepreneurs doing what they do best – launching businesses!

Available at: Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/From-Idea-Exit-Entrepreneurial-Journey/dp/098270299X
More info at: www.jeffweberventures.com

2011 Book of the Year Awards

ForeWord Magazine Reviews has announced its Finalists for its 2011 Book of the Year Awards, and From Idea to Exit has made the cut!

Triple Nickel Press is thrilled to announce that From Idea to Exit: The Entrepreneurial Journey by Jeffrey Weber is a finalist in the Business & Economics category.

See the complete list at http://www.bookoftheyearawards.com/finalists/2011.

Seeking hungry college entrepreneur in Chicago area

I’m looking for a hungry college student (Grad or undergrad, JR/SR) wanting to lead a new venture. I am an experienced entrepreneur that has founded and sold a company to a Fortune 100 and I’m looking to do it again. I have an idea that has received very good feedback in terms of the concept, is unique, clear revenue model and strong path to scale. I am however, committed to my primary start up and cannot lead two, therefore I need someone for this effort. I’ve built all the wire frames and related planning ground work for this cloud business. I even look to have a critical component lined up soon, which is a partnership that makes a national roll out possible.

The leader I seek requires:

- Full time dedication in off school hours (nights and weekends)

- Follow direction from me to execute strategy

- Require to close partnership with national distributor to establish network of restaurants (I’ve started this, just needs follow through.)

- To help find developer talent (Mine your network – nothing more, need to move fast and start coding). Otherwise, I will pay a team and I already have generated quotes to start coding.

- Develop last missing piece, which is a go to market strategy to target Business development people and companies that cold call. How do we identify them and then extend a message about our service to them.

- This person needs to be sharp and hungry – very committed to wanting to be an entrepreneur a must.

- This is not an employee, but an equity owner. A partner. A student with the time I don’t have is ideal and I can mentor/direct them.

To learn more about me visit: http://www.linkedin.com/in/encubator

I will share details with those who seem to fit the initial requirements. Ideally, this person may even enroll in Excelerate Labs or a similar incubator. Mar 16, 2012 is the final Application Deadline for Excelerate so I need to move fast.

Contact me at jweber@buyulunch.com

30/30/30

Hello,

I’ve asked you all to vote for my book, “From Idea to Exit” and I wanted to thank you and the community for your efforts. The top five books in each category were awarded – and we won!

To say thank you, I am offering 30/30/30. I will mentor 30 entrepreneurs for 30 minutes each over the course of 30 days.

Entrepreneurs need mentors. They also need a road map that guides them from their idea to their exit. I’ve mentored and reviewed countless entrepreneurs helping them launch , grow, strategize and move to the next level. Offering 30/30/30 will help entrepreneurs with that road map and need for mentoring.

The first 30 people to purchase my book “From Idea to Exit “ will receive 30 minutes of mentoring from me to discuss their idea, business, problems or whatever topic they wish to cover. The book’s content will help frame the discussions. Share this opportunity with friends, family or acquaintances that have that entrepreneurial bug and could benefit by gaining a new perspective to their effort.

It’s easy.

1. Tell your network about this opportunity (FAST!)

2. Purchase From Idea to Exit at Amazon.com or other retailer.

3. Send an electronic copy of your purchase receipt to info@jeffweberventures.com

The first 30 valid entries received will be notified and asked to schedule their 30 minute mentoring session.

So what are you waiting for? Someone to take your idea? Spread the word now!

Help get the vote out!

My book is up for an award and it seems to take social media votes to win. Seems silly to ask people to vote – regardless if they read the book or not.?! Anyway, the publicity helps. See below – and Vote!.

Triple Nickel Press needs your help! From Idea to Exit has been nominated for a Small Business Book Award sponsored by Small Business Trends, and we need your votes! Winners are selected through voting which takes place from February 1 – February 16. It’s easy – to vote, simply click here

or paste this link in your browser

http://bookawards.smallbiztrends.com/story/27818

Click on the “VOTE” button. Come back daily and vote. (One vote per IP address, per book, per day)

If you’re on social media, please share the link and encourage others to vote daily!

Thank you for your support!!
Enjoy your journey,
Jeff Weber

The Birth of a Start Up – Built In Chicago! (Part 11) – “Validation”

This may conclude my blog journal of the start up experience – at least for a while. For the past month or so I have been meeting with various stakeholders to validate our purpose, solution, business model and revenue streams. Everything has been positive, but since we are something new and leveraging very new concepts in gamification to direct desired user behavior, I have been looking to get some sort of overwhelming validation.

The break through came last night when one of my co-founders found this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnR5YYmyWqo&feature=email. Now this does not let the “cat out of the bag” on our solution but it profoundly validates that we are on target to something big. As such, I’ve decided to accelerate seeking funding. Ideally, I wanted to pick up some customers for our training and enterprise edition, however our first priority needs to be properly funded to complete our v.2 development roadmap as fast as possible.

Therefore, my goal is to pitch to the coasts and right here in Chicago to secure funding by the end of February. Honestly, I feel Job Search Board is the 1% that investors seek to make their portfolio profitable. Several converging factors explained in our executive summary are colliding making it urgent that we go to market now. Since I am currently a mentor, I plan to attend the Founder Institute summit Jan 19 in Mountain View, and with the help of my network and law firm Perkins Coie, I hope to secure some meetings while I’m out there.

This is going to be a very time consuming process and I’m not sure if I’ll have time to post. I’ll ask you to help us reach our goal by reaching out or passing our story along to those in the investment community who are looking for great promising companies. I think we “fit the bill”.

The Birth of a Start Up – Built In Chicago! (Part 10) – “Break Throughs”

It has been a very busy time since my last entry.

1. We decided on a law firm.
We chose Perkins Coie to do our incorporation and founder’s agreement. They have a focus on start ups and have west coast roots. They have helped us to create a legal path with investors in mind and have experience and relationships in the VC world. Further they have a customer base that we may be able to be introduced to that could serve strategic partners or customers for our solution.

2. We decided on a new logo.
Our company was founded by “piggy backing” off of our founders existing consulting company. We somehow integrated a blend of logos and ended up with a confusing brand strategy – if you’d call it a strategy. So it was immediately evident that we needed to solidify our brand, logo, tag lines and general use of branding images. We used LogoDesignGuru to come up with a new logo. I was very happy with the experience and results. In five days we had over 100 design submissions and we will officially select our winner on Friday. I think it’s pretty cool.

3. We completed our “pitch” deck
Wow, what a process! This was probably two months or more in the making. Initial iterations of the deck were drastically changed based on where we are at today. Our business model and business concept has grown into sophistication and after seeing our latest screen designs I am really excited. We’ve really come up with a great and timely solution that potentially disrupts an industry – or at least attacks it from a completely new angle. We are able to say we are the only ones doing or providing certain aspects to solve some deep emerging problems in the employment vertical. I will share more when it is appropriate to do so. I do want to thank those at Mint.com and SCVNGR who shared some of their start up experience, which helped us formulate our solution.

The pitch deck is under 20 pages and has all of the major buckets investors should be looking for. The challenge is in conveying the depth of our solution in the allotted time. To do so, I need to practice, practice, practice the pitch. Not fun – but very anxious to get out and do it. We are ready to go full steam ahead as the market opportunity for our solution is now!

4. We determined the progression of our business model and revenue streams
So the pitch deck helps condense the business plan down to a very concise document. Part of the challenge in the deck was explaining our business model and how we make money. Since a big portion of our solution and secret sauce is dependent upon scaling users, some of our revenue streams will not activate until the user base grows to a certain level. However, we have other revenue streams which we can go after immediately. Therefore, our business model slide needed to show the various streams and when they would activate based on the launch, growth and maturity phase of our company. I got it down finally. A spreadsheet helps to run scenarios on projected revenue based on plugging in various selling prices and market acquisition percentages. Don’t ever tell investors your numbers are conservative! I will have to resist doing so myself. We have some really big potential, simply by hitting a few lead customer targets. Again, very exciting now that we have working models and plans that pull everything together.

5. We completed forecasts for sales and expenses and ideal amount to seek for funding
As I mentioned the sales forecast were completed once we identified our revenue streams and when they would activate. I also spent some time figuring out what resources were needed to make this all happen. That became our expense projections. Now that I had the revenue and the expense side, I could start to ascertain what amount of funding we need. This is tricky, as I am typically very conservative and would ask for as low amount of funds as possible. However, we have a unique business start up. I would say one of the few that has very large scalability and potential. I’ve reviewed and advised dozens of entrepreneurs and I have seen all sorts of businesses in all sorts of industries. Very few, had the high growth potential that investors struggle to discover. I can tell you, we have it. We have the social layer, the gamification layer (to direct behavior modification), training, unique process, mobility, large addressable market, API’s, community creation, CRM and more. All addressing unique market opportunities being driven by legislation, extreme environmental ramifications and technology advancements. A perfect storm. All of this necessitates that we get in the market now! To do so, we need funding. Further, our solution is involved and some may say complicated. We’re no iPad app – although that is on the roadmap We’re solving a big problem in a big way and we want to be the global leaders. So we are seeking $1.5mm in funding to make it happen.

6. We completed page designs for our v.2 of our site
I’ve put in the initial seed money to keep moving things forward; prior to $1.5mm we are seeking. This will sustain our development and other plans for some time, but we really can’t explode. We have two developers in India and we are seeking a US based user experience intern. One of the co-founders and me (there are three of us) architected the v.2 design and we’ve passed it to the graphic designer. The graphic designer will provide the screen designs and look and feel. We’ve gotten some of those pages back and all will be done by the end of December. Then the developer will rip into it. It’s really cool to see what the pages look like and once again, it is exciting.

So our solution has really come together over the past two weeks, but we still have a lot to do. Starting next week we go out selling our training and enterprise edition to get some customer and revenue traction. Further, we are working on two very strategic (big name) partnerships and hope to close those within a month. Our goal is to secure funding by the end of February.

That’s all for now!

(As always, forgive typos, etc. Just pounding out thoughts and moving on to the next to-do)

The Birth of a Start Up – Built In Chicago! (Part 9) – “Hard Work Continues”

Monday roles around too fast (my target day to blog). Here we are at Tuesday.
We anticipate migrating from a partnership to a C corp, registered in Delaware by month’s end to take advantage of a unique investment exclusion for new start ups: (http://www.perkinscoie.com/news/pubs_detail.aspx?op=updates&publication=2896).
I thought I would bullet point my challenges and to do list today to provide a perspective on the varying pulls on an entrepreneur’s time during start up:

Legal
- Decide on law firm
- Meet with firm and establish operating agreement, stock rights, incorporation details, governance procedures, etc.
- Incorporate
- Pay all applicable fees for services and licenses
- Obtain contractor agreements and get our current offshore developers to sign off

Development
- Document all new development components and establish dates for completion.
- Decide on graphic design for page layout (User Experience).
- Add Feedback method to site pages for current users to provide input.
- Create rules and logic related to gamification aspect to site.
- Run through current reporting aspects.
- Create LinkedIn API.
- Formulate requirements for mobile and iPad application.

Staffing
- Determine requirements, write job description and source an intern for User Experience design.

Marketing & Sales
- Standardize everyone’s messaging (email signature, biz cards), etc.
- Decide on new Job Search Board Logo
- Complete white paper/endorsement from current customer
- Put correct logo placement on all works
- Close strategic opportunity to OEM our online training
- Move two other strategic opportunities forward and establish dates to close
- Set up the city of Toronto Social Services (Ontario Works Program) as a pilot for our online training
- Get report back on beta use at high profile college using our service for past month.
- Discuss & finalize revenue models & retail pricing with team
- Establish and act on go to market plan for our Enterprise Edition
- Secure new Canadian college beta site

Overall
- Establish yearly budget using seed capital and yearly budget using proposed investor funds.
This gives a sense of our top priorities. The true to do list is much longer. You have to break down what is most important to act on now and what you can do to bring revenue and users to the table as fast as possible. The focus is on getting things done. You can start 50 different things and not complete any of them. The role of the entrepreneur is to assemble the necessary resources to get a company launched. A big part of that then becomes delegation. So each of us has been assigned portions of the above “to-do” list, which we will accomplish or delegate out to other resources.

There is tremendous urgency to get further to market, yet we still need to balance the desired user experience. Therefore, we will have slow and planned releases to specific groups where we can closely monitor results. Once we are satisfied that we have the right mix of functionality and user experience we will kick into our go to market strategies designed to rapidly scale users.

But first things first, back to working on the business plan and investor deck.

Intern Wanted: User Experience Design

Opportunity:
Learn the pros and cons of a technology focused start up, planning for high growth and professional funding. Three seasoned professionals are the co-founders of this start up, which is based on many years of PhD level research. The company is led by a serial entrepreneur who founded TRC, Inc. in 1995, which made the INC 500 Fastest Private U.S. Companies list in 2001 and 2002 and was then sold to a Fortune 100 in 2006. Version 1.0 of the platform has been built and the next round of development is starting now, which will initiate the founders to seek their first round of funding. This company is funded currently off of founder’s seed capital and all three partners work virtually. Chicago area based.

What we are looking for:
Intern Responsibilities:
- Lead the charge on user experience for our solution
- Create wireframe and design interactions, task flows, screens and other details that optimize the user experience
- Prototype your designs and maybe even deliver HTML/CSS/JavaScript to our developers.
- Develop our own brand vocabulary when it becomes appropriate to do so.
- Creativity to establish a compelling product and user engagement.
- You are in charge of this critical area of development. We will lean on you and help find answers you can’t provide. True leadership and hands on experience.
Intern Requirements
- Ability to work remotely with minimal supervision.
- Sufficient knowledge to develop user experience for web applications.
- An entrepreneurial mindset. Someone who challenges us as much as we challenge them.
- Excellent visual and interaction design skills.
- Experience with social applications and current web functionality is highly desired.
- Ability to prototype designs is highly desired, however we will consider non-technical too.
- Regular communication via Skype, phone or face-to-face (ideally near you – no commute).

Who we are:
Job Search Board organizes the job search process and available resources resulting in improved productivity using a unique web-based process. That process empowers job seekers directly, the job professionals that assist them, and the hiring companies that employ them to continuously improve the job search process. This is a great opportunity to witness the start up process, while at the same time having tremendous autonomy in designing a world class user experience.

We’re not pretty, but we believe we have a team that can make it happen. Hopefully, we will be a company you will brag about and consider as an employer when appropriate.

Internship Learning Objectives:
- Work side by side with our team of seasoned professionals. JP Hatala is a PhD specialized in social capital, John Hillsman is a marketing expert who founded Sports @ Home and Jeff Weber is a serial entrepreneur who authored From Idea to Exit: The Entrepreneurial Journey¸was an advisor to dozens of start ups, angel investor, adjunct faculty teaching entrepreneurism and is highly connected to the Chicago start up scene.
- Intern will learn lean business start up principles, sales and marketing, customer intimacy, value proposition conveyed into a deliverable product and engagement of offshore development resources.
- Intern will likely witness and play a role in the funding process of a start up.
- Intern will participate and will provide input to tactical weekly meetings.
- Intern will be exposed to the founder’s professional network and company stakeholders.

Compensation: Hourly rate of $10 p/h and intern will be classified as a 1099 independent contractor and will be issued a Form 1099-MISC. Intern will be asked to sign a NDA as well as a contractor agreement related to works created by intern being owned and property of company.

We believe this will be a fun opportunity and a tremendous learning experience to any employer. Who knows we may be that employer down the road?

Contact: Jeff Weber,
President/CEO
Send all applications to: jweber@jobsearchboard.com

The Birth of a Start Up – Built In Chicago! (Part 8) – “The Curtain Is Off”

I’ve decided it’s time to pull the curtain off this start up I’m involved with. I resisted at first, because I did not want people rushing to the site and forming opinions. Here’s why.

The company’s original focus was a tool to support job professionals counsel job seekers. You could say it is a CRM of sorts that allows job professionals to coach and monitor their clients. The tool in its current state is a train the trainer model. In other words, I need to train you how to use it, and then you go use it and bring on your clients. For those in the industry (job professionals) they “get it” pretty fast. However, for those just signing up on their own, they can get lost pretty fast. Further, the method to scale the tool to job professionals was not in place.

I also recognized and my co-founder team agreed, that there is a much bigger market in providing this tool directly to job seekers and allowing them to be self directed – in addition to using a job professional if they wished. So we’ve spent the last six weeks hashing out how to develop a self directed approach to the web tool. That in turn, required an entire review of the business model, revenue streams, go to market strategies, strategic alliance prospects and more. I’m happy to say we’ve got it figured out and are actively developing toward our 2.0 version.

To go down this path, I needed to validate that our target market wanted what we were going to offer. Sure I had a PhD behind the research and development of our product, but classroom sometimes does not meet “market”. So I went out to validate our business model with our two initial customer targets that are designed to pull in large numbers of users and serve as a single point of revenue for acquiring those users. I learned a great deal. I discovered new aspects of competition, potential overlap in some of our service offering, constrained funding and other aspects that may dampen our enthusiasm. However, I also discovered tremendous need and validation that we are on to something of tremendous value to a big market. A perfect storm is brewing and now timing is everything.

We are focused on the college career center and state employment agencies. In both cases, our company is looking to serve the unemployed. Colleges and state agencies represent a very large portion of the unemployed and that is why we selected them as our first primary “go to” markets. Significant events are happening in both.

1. Colleges
A piece of proposed federal legislation called the Gainful Employment Rule. The wiki says, “create career colleges and training programs that better prepare students for gainful employment. In order to determine if programs prepare students for gainful employment, the U.S. Department of Education intends to measure the relationship between the debt students incur and their incomes after completing the program as well as the rate in which program enrollees repay their loans. If a program, graduates a large share of students with high debt-to-income ratios, the program may be ineligible to participate in federal student funding.”
This Rule is impacting for-profit colleges dramatically right now and it is highly influencing every other type of traditional college who fears they may be next.

2. Employment Agencies.
Again legislation has come into play where unemployment benefits have been extended from 26 weeks to 99 weeks. Take into account the number of people now off the unemployment books and who designate themselves as underemployed, you have a very large market of job seekers. Something has to give as it relates to benefits being extended to 99 weeks. States are increasingly looking for solutions to get people back to work and to be placed in the right jobs for them and the employer.

We believe we have a solution that serves both of these target market and the job seekers they support. By going out and listening to our customers we’ve learned a bunch, which has influenced our feature set and development roadmap. We’ve allowed a customer in Canada to use our product in its 1.0 version and they love it! They claim use of our system gets people to work faster than the comparable 18 other similar agencies that do not use our product. Wow – what an endorsement – and that’s just using version 1.0!

So at this point I am comfortable to share the company name and more details. Mind you, we still have to incorporate – plan to do that this week. We are operating under a partnership agreement at the moment. Once we incorporate as a C registered in Delaware we will aggressively go for funding. Why funding? Because we have an opportunity that is perishable. While the competition is focused from the angle of the employer, passive candidates and recruiters (i.e. LinkedIn and others) we are focused on providing the unemployed job seeker with aggregated resources, training and a process that gets them zeroed in on their ideal job and employed faster.

A big part of our solution is helping seekers build their social capital. That involves networking which “Gives & Takes”. As a company we need to practice what we preach and thus the reason for my blogging. Further, I’m open to help any entrepreneurs at any stage of their business with my feedback and experience to help in their efforts. Just send me an email.

Finally, without further adieu our company name is Job Search Board and can be found at www.jobsearchboard.com. It is open for business for job coaches, job recruiters and counselors. We expect the v.2.0 to be on line in about four weeks where individuals can self direct their search using our process.

We spent a great deal of time on legal counsel review, name review, target market, problem identification and validation. Next topics will cover code development, IP protection, operational process development for sales and marketing and probably a hundred other things.

Disclaimer: As always, I apologize for poor grammar. I’m writing fast to get back to page design and wire frames.

Enjoy your journey!
www.jeffweberventures.com