I was deeply moved as I stepped onto Dilworth Park. Awestruck. It was buzzing hive of gamified creations.
The Kickoff brought everyone out into the streets. Out of their high-rise caves, filled with moving pictured screens. Down to another venue housing similar technologies, yes; but also many real, living, breathing human beings, who’ve been dying to feed the most fundamentally social aspect of Maslow’s hierarchy, belongingness. Community.
We live in a very beautiful time in which the appeal of creative endeavors is beginning to outweigh the comfort and allure of barely equitable wages. More than ever, people are considering working for themselves, answering to their own ambitions and ultimately, serving their own passions.
The onslaught of a roaring underground movement in Philadelphia is beginning to surface above the fragile veil of public acknowledgement. Philly is a the birthplace for new discovery! Invention has been a ballasting cultural element throughout our history, and it’s about time that a new renaissance has taken such a solidified form.
Having been a humble contributor to the tech scene for no more than a year and a half, I felt profound sense of gratitude for how many familiar faces were there to greet me. I was equally grateful to meet so many new faces, many of them attracted to the freshness that technology offers our city. The excitement at Dilworth Park was palpable. It was a tangible energy, impossible to synthesize.
The juxtaposition of such an archaic architecture and the burgeoning seeds of Philly Tech Week’s Kickoff seemed to shout out loud, “Innovation has found it’s home here! We welcome a major shift in our nation’s timeline to a new paradigm in accessible technologies, filling the western world with new solutions to old problems and new opportunities, never previously imagined.”
I’d like to personally thank the Technically Philly Team. Thank you for leading the way. You are creating a voice for the movement and helping to ensure that our region will remain adaptive as our post industrialized society continues to shift.
Right now, Dave Mann’s coveted “shiny object” is a red and white RV nicknamed “the Beast.”
The giant vehicle will carry him and his family on adventures all over the country. A part of Dave’s evolution toward semi-retirement, the Beast perfectly embodies his family-centric balance of freedom and innovation. It’s the next stop on a journey that spans philosophy, retail, consulting, and more.
Origins Dave started his consulting career in 1996, but not until after he experienced a job in retail over the Christmas holidays which made him realize the retail industry wasn’t for him. His English major/Philosophy minor degree, although “perfect for arguing both sides of a point with myself,” wasn’t getting him where he wanted to be. So he jumped into consulting, becoming an MVP for Microsoft’s SharePoint platform at the just the right time, watching the technology explode exponentially soon after joining the space. Today, Dave is one of only 215 SharePoint MVPs in the world.
The grind of the consulting lifestyle began to wear on him, though. “With consulting, If you don’t work any hours, you don’t get any dollars. I didn’t want to do that anymore.” It was time for a change, so Dave sat down and put together a 3-year plan.
In the Startup World For the first part of Dave’s plan, he decided to build a marketing channel that would leverage his SharePoint knowledge. Enter “Office 365 Concierge,” a weekly newsletter covering all the developments surrounding the cloud-based Office 365 platform. He hired a contractor to write and categorize content, after which Dave would review and publish the newsletter.
The second part of the plan included developing some training videos and starting to work on a new product. Things were moving along as intended….until the app that Dave had designed to generate his newsletter started capturing its own attention.
VisualCMS Dave’s newsletter publishing app creates HTML that can be published to WordPress. Information is stored on Trello cards (online index cards) that can be managed visually by dragging and dropping from one list to another.
“Someone approached me about selling it. I thought, ‘Do I make it a SaaS application? Might people want to buy it?'” It became a shiny object that distracted him from his original plan. “The problem was that it was completely outside my wheelhouse. I had zero credibility in the space.”
But the diversion was tempting. “I’m easily distracted by shiny objects. I move from one interesting thing to another. It’s been my biggest problem in the startup space.”
Must. Resist. Shiny. Object. Dave had an epiphany. “The mailing list was only supposed to be a marketing channel. VisualCMS was only ever intended to be a prototype. I would run it when I needed to and it would do its thing. It took me maybe 20 minutes to make the newsletter. I would put an RSS mail feed from mail chimp and send it out to my mailing list.”
He sold the usage rights to a company that manages content in the Office 365 space. “I still own the code and I get some advertising income from the newsletter. But it keeps my name out there.”
The plan is working. “At the end of January 2015, I had 23 subscribers. In the middle of April, I had 7,412. And that’s just from jumping into bed with this company.That number is what convinced me I was making the right decision.”
Remember the End Game Dave says the moral of the story is to know when to pivot, and know when a “shiny object” is distracting you from your original purpose.
“I don’t want to work so damn hard. I don’t expect any of my products to be my single source of income. I want to have 3 to 4 smallish products, little plugins for Office 365. Each one brings in an ok amount of money, and I’m good. I don’t need to have that one huge single product.”
Today, Dave’s working on an umbrella product (code name: Blackburn), an “intranet in a box for small to medium businesses. A family of products that will allow small-medium businesses to spin up their intranet quickly.”
He’s also self publishing some ebooks and creating software products and packages, as well as speaking and teaching. “Everything is repurposed,reused, and recycled. I do things one or one and a half times, but I get multiple uses out of them.”
What was the problem that you aimed to solve with Little Talkers?
“Little Talkers aims to make it easy for parents, caretakers or family members to record, store, view and share their children’s first words and expressions.”
— Nada Jaksic Pivcevic, Founder of Little Talkers
How does little talkers app solve that pain point?
“Little Talkers has a simple interface which makes it easy for anyone to start recording a child within seconds of starting the app. It then stores the word, location, date, and any other information that the user wishes to enter into its database, which can later be viewed in the app’s dictionary view. A phrase can be shared with others, and the entire dictionary can be exported to a file for easy viewing or printing.”
— Nada Jaksic Pivcevic, Founder of Little Talkers
What’s next for little talkers?
“Improved sharing, ability to sync data to cloud and possibly ability to follow friends. I would also like to come up with a convenient way to export and bundle all the data for those users whose kids have grown up and they no longer need to input data through the app.”
— Nada Jaksic Pivcevic, Founder of Little Talkers
“We want to be the Flintstones vitamins of stock market games.”
John Walters is bringing the thrill of fantasy sports leagues to the stock market. The Villanova grad started off at First National Bank, where he learned first hand about the problems confronting small businesses. Today, he’s a Senior Living Balance Sheet Specialist at eMoney Advisor, as well as the founder of StockJock, an online fantasy stock trading game.
Although finance consumes his professional life these days, his path to entrepreneurship started out in a much, well, sweeter way.
The Origins “Crepes are the ticket.”
Needing an infusion of cash, John took a semester off from studying at Villanova to work at a bank. “That was the first time I ever had a chunk of money in my pocket. I thought I’d use that $2500 to buy a bass amp.” The universe had different plans, though. A buddy of his was working at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire and noticed that the crepe stall was killing it. “He called me up and said ‘listen man, we gotta make crepes,’” John says. “‘Crepes are the ticket.’”
Three months later, John and his friend started Main Line Crepe Company, selling their crepes at festivals and catering events. “We did the Kennett Square Mushroom Festival, and we were in the black after that first time. Everything was going fantastic.”
Then, a couple weekends later, the two friends ended up at a bluegrass festival at Lake Wallenpaupack, an event populated with bluegrass fans, but not necessarily crepe aficionados. “We slept in a tent. It was a great musical experience, but that kind of trumped what we were trying to sell. It gave us perspective on our business.”
“When you think about finding your drive, although it’s personal, you have to realize what you have to do every day to reach the goals you have.” The duo realized that crepes weren’t in their long-term future, but the endeavor prepared John for his next venture.
StockJock “We’re bringing Wall Street to Main Street.”
Like fantasy sports leagues, StockJock involves building a roster. Once users pay the entry fee, they proceed to set their stock picks. StockJock pulls data from Yahoo, and at the end of the day, users find out how they did compared to their competitors. John says, “StockJock gives people a foot in the door to learn about the volatility of the market and how the economy works.”
StockJock went to Philly Startup Weekend, where John and his team earned second place. “That second place kind of bugged us, but it showed us that we’d begun to validate our idea.”
“We are changing the way stock games work. We’re introducing people to what it is about the market they’re trying to get into.”
“It’s wildly popular to call yourself an entrepreneur these days.”
Jason Browne thinks that lots of people want to be entrepreneurs simply because they don’t want to be labelled as anything else. “Is it that you want autonomy, or because of the impact you want to make? If it’s just that you don’t want to have a boss, then don’t be an entrepreneur. Because you just get a different set of bosses as an entrepreneur.”
In 2011, the Drexel business and finance grad got a 3D printer and started experimenting. The ‘every day working and living me’ needed a charging source for my electronics. The ‘hacking side of me’ wanted to break things apart, make something of my own.” And the Spor charger was born.
The Approach “It needs to be less about the what or the how.”
“I’ve found that a lot of electronics companies compete on the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of their product. We’re taking it to the next level by focusing on the ‘why.’” For example, Jason is passionate about hardware. “With hardware, you need a certain amount of confidence, and that comes from exposing yourself to the tools and the people involved in making the hardware. We have access to the same tools as the factories in China, just on a smaller scale. We want to know everything about how our product is manufactured.”
The Product: Spor “You can 3D-print your own funky skin.”
The palm-sized square will charge your iPhone 2 1/2 times. A solar panel is mounted on the top so you can leave it in a sunny spot to recharge.
Comprised of a battery, a circuit board, and the solar panel, the elegantly simple concept is housed in a 3D-printed shell. The shell on Jason’s prototype is pink, green, and wood-grained, but the possibilities are endless. “We’ll sell you the solar panel, the charger, and the battery and you can 3D-print your own funky skin.
Spor’s MVP was a non-functional 3D-printed prototype that Jason and his team literally put in people’s hands. “We wanted to know how this feels in your hand. In your pocket. How much would you pay for it?”
The Financing “How hard could it be? Really hard, actually.”
Jason and his team raised $100K in 30 days through Kickstarter. “I can attest to the power of the crowd. I raised $100K from people I don’t even know. I think that’s because Kickstarter gave us a platform to tell our story the way we wanted to tell it.”
Even though they met their goal, it was a stressful month. “I’d go to sleep at night hoping there will be a little bit more in there in the morning. You stress about reaching that bar you’ve created for yourself.”
Sharing It “If I wanted a cup, I wouldn’t design it. I would download it for free and print it myself. That’s the power of the crowdsourcing movement.”
Spor’s initial activities were largely crowdsourced, including the logo, marketing, and early web site design. Jason is a big believer in open sourcing. “Don’t build up a wall–let everyone in there together. My board design might cost $50, but somebody in Uganda can’t pay that. I can put my design up on the internet and somebody will redesign it for 80% cheaper.”
Jason also releases the designs for the D-printed 3shells for free. “Why wouldn’t I? It’s only a quarter of my product. Someone who can print a shell themselves might buy my product where they wouldn’t otherwise.”
Making It “It’s easier to build 50,000 things than it is to build 2,500.”
There are challenges in moving from prototype to small production, and to full-scale mass production. “It’s totally different to build 5 things than to build 2500 or 50,000. It’s actually easier to build 50,000 than 2500. Unless you’re building 10,000+ things, a contract manufacturer isn’t going to take you seriously.”
Right now, Jason’s house in West Philly is filling up with boxes. “Storage is a real thing when you’re talking about hardware. We’re getting a sense of ‘what do 3,000 adapters look like? What do 3,000 adapters look like?’ I can’t imagine doing this in my apartment. You need room.”
In just a few months, Jason envisions Spor being being all over the world. “We’re trying to put as much love in this product as we can. Our fingerprints are all over this. If you’re building something, put some of yourself into what you’re building.”
