Boulder is regularly recognized as a great place to live, work, and eat by its inclusion in a variety of Top 10 lists each year.  It’s great PR for the city, due in no small part to the fine folks at the Boulder Convention and Visitors Bureau and other organizations with the budget and structure to elevate Boulder’s profile for our collective benefit.

Adding my photo to Flickr was a piece of cake.

With the recent launch of I Love Boulder, individuals like you and me now have a variety of tools to add our personal perspective.  Tweeting about something inspirational you heard at Startup Women?  Add the hashtag #iloveboulder.  Snap a cool photo of kids frolicking in the jet fountains on Pearl Street?  Add it to the Flickr pool.  Many of you already pimp the Boulder brand; making it part of the I Love Boulder effort is a natural extension.

Hats off to my friends at Quick Left and Cypher13 for building out the website and creating the branding.  The fact that they’ve donated their services is a reflection of what makes the Boulder community so great.

Quick Left’s role in this project is no surprise if you’ve read Jennifer Roberts’ post about them.  Steve Hubert had this to say on behalf of the Quick Left team:

Giving money wasn’t an option for our small startup but we could give something we had plenty of, engineering talent.  Being in Boulder has been amazing for Quick Left on both a professional level and on a lifestyle level.  So, when the opportunity came to support this community, we were excited to jump in.

When I got in touch with Todd Berger and Lucian Föhr about getting Cypher13 involved:

Cypher13 Design studio considers itself part of the fabric of Boulder and…has been provided with exceptional opportunities from within the Boulder community… When Cypher13 sees an opportunity to give back to Boulder and make a difference, it’s very happy to do so.

I can tell you from first hand experience that both Quick Left and Cypher13 are companies that have loads of talent and take a huge amount of pride in what they do.  The fact that they are willing to share their talents with the Boulder community as a whole is a wonderful thing.

As a beneficiary of what the Boulder community offers, I feel it is my giri, my duty, to do my part in spreading the Boulder love.  I’ve uploaded a few photos to Flickr and written this post to get started.  I can hardly wait to see what our collective creativity will come up with.  What do you have in mind to help out?

• Pivotal Labs
• Viget
• Slice of Lime
• Imulus
• GB Studios

The general theme is test driven development (TDD). For a full list of potential topics and all other details, see the announcement. Come hungry!

The address:
1919 14th Street
Suite 714
Boulder, CO 80302

[Disclosure: I work at Quickleft.]

Photo by Andrew Hyde

It turns out that my Cheap Seat for yesterday’s TechStars Demo Day was more expensive than the investors’ seats (free), but I’d happily make another donation to the Entrepreneurs’ Foundation of Colorado for a spot next year.

Just about every seat reserved in the balcony of the Boulder Theater for the community at large was filled – more people were there yesterday than last year, if memory serves.   It looks like the word is getting out that this is a great event to attend.  Deservedly so.

The entire first floor was reserved for investors, with many from out of town already in attendance at Boulder’s second Open Angel Forum the previous night.  Laptops and smartphones were everywhere to be seen.  A busy couple of days in Boulder for the investor community.

TechStars co-founders David Cohen, Congressman Jared Polis, and Brad Feld kicked things off with a few updates on TechStars’ alumni, the TechStars Global Affiliate program (expect 5-10 more Global Affiliates to pop up in the next year or so) and the Startup Visa Movement, among other things.  The co-founders continue to have their hands full with developing the startup ecosystem here and abroad.

Once the presentations got going, it was slide deck after slide deck of polished pitches (in this order):

ScriptPad lets doctors write prescriptions safer and easier than traditional handwritten notes, saving lives and saving money.  ScriptPad offers a freemium app to doctors and receives a per prescription fee from pharmacies.

Omniar wants to make the real world clickable, Terminator style.  Find information attached to an object by taking a picture of it with a smartphone, allowing Omniar’s mobile app or apps developed on Omniar’s API to visually recognize it and retrieve any data attached.

StatsMix creates custom dashboards to help businesses aggregate, visualize, and draw insights from a variety of metrics.  Drag-and-drop what you want from Google Analytics, WordPress, MailChimp, and more into a single place.  StatsMix even helps analyze your data for you.

RoundPegg helps companies hire for cultural fit, evaluating job candidates on a variety of traits, comparing them to current employees, and measuring for an overall match.  RoundPegg is built on a process developed by Chief Psychologist Dr. Natalie Baumgartner, putting “The Doc in a box”.

RentMonitor aims to make being a landlord easy by streamlining their Circle of Pain – marketing, tenant screening, rent collection, and property maintenance – into a Circle of Profit, especially for owners of multiple rentals.  RentMonitor also helps come tax time.

GearBox has developed a robotic ball controlled by a smartphone as it rolls across the floor, entering the new “smart toy” market.  GearBox plans to sell the ball and allow developers to create a myriad of games and other apps on its API.

Vacation Rental Partner takes the work out of renting out a second home.  Vacation Rental Partner goes beyond marketing, allowing renters to book your property as easily as they would a hotel room, with online payment processing, booking management, and more.

BlipSnips lets you share a moment of time.  Rather than sending a link to a video with a note “the clip I want you to see starts at 10:24″, BlipSnips lets you tag a particular clip from a longer video and share it with others.

Spot Influence find key influencers across the web based on your keyword search.  Spot Influence grabs data from a variety of sources to calculate the Reach, Relevance, and Impact of individuals, resulting in their overall Influence score for a particular keyword.

ADstruc has created a marketplace for outdoor advertising to make selecting and bidding on billboards as easy as PPC.  ADstruc allows advertisers to view available locations on Google Maps, retrieve valuable data, see their own ads superimposed on a street view of the billboard, and to bid accordingly.

Kapost is a content marketplace connecting writers with publishers.  Kapost lets publishers find strong writing, facilitate payments, manage rights, and plug that content into a variety of popular content management systems.

One of the first things that jumped out at me was that many of the “asks” were for more money this year than last (again, if memory serves).  Four of this year’s 11 teams were raising $500k or more, while none were in 2009.  What didn’t change from last year, however, was the quality of the pitches.

The presentations were strong across the board, with each team refining and rehearsing throughout the TechStars program this summer – an entire summer’s worth of blood, sweat, and tears, distilled into 5 minutes on stage (if you haven’t seen their level of commitment in The Founders yet, you should).  For anybody wanting to learn how a pitch is done, TechStars Demo Day is a great classroom.  I’ll be there again in 2011.

Congratulations to all the TechStars Boulder 2010 teams for surviving the summer – I can’t wait to see what you all do next.  Which of you will be the first to earn a gold shirt for being acquired?

Meetups

• Ruby Code & Coffee: A weekly meetup on Wednesdays at 8:30am. According to the Boulder Tech Calendar … “Get together with some other rubyists in the area to write some code, share stories, and swap ideas.”
• Boulder Ruby: Educational talks on Ruby, Rails, or other general programming topics at the Collective Intellect offices. Click the link for more info.

Dev Shops

• dojo4 is a Boulder based dev and design collective. They say it best themselves – “We will send ninjas.”
• Foraker: I haven’t had a chance to meet anyone from the Foraker team yet, but it seems they focus on Ruby/Rails development as one aspect of their full service offering.
• Quick Left is a web engineering firm helping young and established companies alike build and improve their products. (Disclosure: I am employed by Quick Left.)

Conferences

• Mountain.rb Conference is a new single-track event being held this fall around the same time as boco and Startup Week. This should be awesome!

I’m excited to start checking out some of these events and meetups, and will hopefully meet some new Boulder people along the way. Let me know if you have anything to add to the list!

UPDATE: If you’re interested in learning Ruby, make sure to check out the hilarious _why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby

When Andrew wrote that post, I agreed – it felt like Ignite Boulder was leveling off.  I wrote a lengthly comment, carefully outlining all of the things from prior Ignites that were now missing from the last two and suggesting ways to recreate them.  I never did publish it.  At the end of the day, I just couldn’t write anything that didn’t sound like a “I knew the band before they became popular” kind of a thing.

Tonight’s event wasn’t awesome because it was like the early Ignites (nor was it awesome because the presenters use the word “awesome” so many times), it had an awesomeness (it’s contagious) all its own.

First of all, there’s the change in venue.  Chautauqua and what it offered was amazing.  There was the pre-show barbecue next to the auditorium and the families picnicking out on the grass.  My wife and I chose to sit on the porch of the Dining Hall, which is always a treat.  Throw in a little sunshine, free beer, and the Flatirons as a backdrop, and you’ve already got yourself a winner.  The auditorium itself was beautiful, an all-wood building with giant doors opened to a nice breeze.  When it got darker, a bit of light peaked through the slats in the walls.  I really look forward to TEDxBoulder, if for no other reason than to be in that building again.

The speakers…yes, the speakers – the best bunch from top to bottom that I’ve seen.  Ef Rodriguez warmed things up with his usual charm, and Anna Sawyer immediately followed with the crowd pleasing How to Marry the Rich, a practical guide to marrying up.  My personal favorite Spark of the night was Josh Fraser’s Snakes and Staircases, which taught me that vending machine deaths are a very real risk and that Scottish accents are very persuasive.  The 14th and final slide deck of the evening, Justin Crowe‘s Modulate Your Life: High Fives & Livin’ On A Prayer, had 1,300+ of us high fiving and belting out the Bon Jovi chorus together to end things just so.

Andrew and I were wrong.  Ignite Boulder just keeps getting better, and there’s plenty of room to grow from here.

The Team

Both John and Josh are Midwesterners born and raised. John grew up in Michigan and attended college in Maryland. A prolific amateur ping-pong player, he recently won a tournament while back in NYC and will be playing in France sometime this summer. Josh is an Ohioan turned big city guy. He went to undergrad in Ohio and law school in Florida after a stint as a professional drummer. What little free time he has these days is spent prepping for his wedding later this summer.

The Business

ADstruc is an online buying platform in the form of an auction and listing based marketplace with the goal of improving the profitability of buying and selling outdoor advertising. John and Josh recently worked together at a large brand licensing agency and John got involved in outdoor advertising while running his own consulting gig on the side. Outdoor advertising, also known as OOH (out of home) advertising to industry professionals, is a massive market at around $6B annually. In terms of competition, both John and Josh acknowledged that it exists but view it in a very healthy way – as validation of their market and a benchmark to improve upon.

The Moves

We touched on two specific topics during the discussion that relate to their potential for success. They were timing and customer development. After developing ADstruc and speaking with customers for a few months, coupled with the TechStars opportunity, John and Josh realized it was time to quit their jobs and pursue ADstruc full time. By working with customers from the beginning, they were assured that they were building a product that the outdoor advertising industry wanted and would pay for.

On Techstars and Mentors

So far, they have both been blown away by their whirlwind experience at TechStars, especially in terms of the “invaluable mentor feedback” and interaction between teams. During the mentor dating period, ADstruc was working along with the other teams to find people who have useful input and connections to help their companies grow. One of the best mentor presentations for them was by Eric Ries on customer development as it related so much to what they were already doing.

As far as the environment in the Bunker goes, John and Josh both attribute a lot of their progress so far this summer to the wealth of knowledge being shared between teams. They’re helping people out with their sales experience and getting tons of knowledge drops from others on solving technical and user interface problems and questions.

On Boulder

According to them, being in Boulder this summer has helped them immeasurably. Getting away from the go-go-go atmosphere of the Big Apple has allowed them time to focus as well as “… given us the opportunity to relax, take a break from our usual responsibilities, and think about the answer to questions twice. Not to mention the relatively cheap rent, comfortable lifestyle, and clean air.”

Some Other Quotes And Tidbits

• “Without a program such as TechStars, starting a company as a first time entrepreneur, even in New York City, is like starting a company in Alaska” – John
• “We’d be crazy to not try to bring some of the community aspect of TechStars and Boulder back to NYC” – Josh
• Everlater has been really inspirational to them as they go through TechStars and learn what they should be capitalizing on while in the program
• “Josh and I are the only two people in TechStars this summer with Blackberries” – John
• Blue is both John and Josh’s favorite color

If you get a chance to meet these guys this summer in Boulder or later in New York, take it. They’re funny, skilled, and out there making waves.

I’ll get us started with the Boulder Small Business Development Center (SBDC).  DISCLOSURE: I’m employed by the Boulder SBDC.  Hey, start with what you know (and I’m a little short on time this week).  It’s a non-profit economic development organization backed by the SBA, Boulder Chamber, City of Boulder, and slew of other sponsors, designed to help plan, launch, and grow businesses throughout Boulder County.  Clients include your favorite retailer on Pearl Street to the nanotechnology startup you’ve never heard of.

The Boulder SBDC offers inexpensive workshops, free and confidential one-on-one consultations, and connections to other valuable resources to entrepreneurs and businesses.  This organization is a great place for general business needs: understanding financials, developing a business plan, conducting market research, pursuing loans, and more.  This is especially the case for any of you who don’t quite feel ready to go out to pitch to investors or want to learn more about business fundementals.  One of its strengths is that most of its employees, instructors, and consultants are or have been entrepreneurs themselves (100% of them these days).

The key to getting the most out of the Boulder SBDC is to be proactive and to understand that it can’t do the heavy lifting for you.  The center handles a huge volume of requests for one-on-one consulting and serves the needs of a wide variety of businesses, so expect the burden to be on you to get things done.   Another thing to note is that while many of its instructors and consultants are experienced attorneys, CPAs, and the like, the Boulder SBDC is not designed to be a replacement for hiring professional services providers.

By the way, if you’re looking for some pointers on how to land your first investor, you may want to check out How to Pitch an Angel, which is coming up next Tuesday the 22nd.  At the end of the event, a few brave souls will be pitching to a panel of angels to get feedback for all to see and learn from.

With that said, the Boulder SBDC has quite a bit to offer.  To find out how they may help address your specific needs:

Boulder SBDC
2440 Pearl St
Boulder, CO 80302
(303) 442-1475 x2
bouldersbdc.com | @BoulderSBDC

In future Resource Roundups, I’ll highlight some of the other events and organizations that support the Boulder entrepreneurial community.

Check it out and comment if you have any updates/changes or additions. Also, if you feel compelled to style this to look a little bit better, let us know that as well!

Here’s the methodology in a nutshell: “Stop wasting people’s time.” Ries implores entrepreneurs to stop building products and services that customers don’t want by replacing guesswork with validated learning. At a high level, this requires three actions:

• Build. For the first iteration, build the minimum viable product, as basic as is possible for customers to understand and use. For subsequent cycles, release small batches of code through continuous deployment.
• Measure. Ries recommends measuring the high level stuff, the stuff that matters. Unless it tells you something important about whether what you have built is more or less likely to make customers pay for it, don’t bother measuring it.
• Learn. Talk to customers, look at the data, and face reality. Apply that validated learning to the next cycle before building anything else.

Many of the principles are derived from lean manufacturing, made famous by Toyota, applied in the startup environment. Speed is key here, and progress is measured in how much you learn, not how much code you write.

There’s no need to recount the entire presentation line by line because you can view a recent webinar of Ries’ and hear him directly instead. If you’re curious as to whether the Lean Startup methodology has applications beyond writing code, the answer is yes. Erica O’Grady, who was also there that night, has even applied the Lean Startup methodology to dating.

The Lean Startup methodology seems to be gaining momentum, especially as of late with bloggers and the press. In April Ries held the first Startup Lessons Learned Conference in San Francisco, which was streamed into locations around the world, including Boulder’s own Rally Software.

With that said, coupled with the fact that entrepreneurs, present and future, filled The Bunker that night, it seems that the future for Lean Startups is bright in Boulder. I, for one, can’t wait to see what happens.

“The Innovation Lab” The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 2 from TechStars on Vimeo.

“The Question is Why” The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 1 from TechStars on Vimeo.

The videos are produced by Megan Leigh Sweeney. This summer’s videos are here (check out the teasers!) and you can find last summer’s videos over here.