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?

Earlier this week Ryan Cook did a great job of mapping out the Boulder entrepreneurial community to give us an idea of the breadth and depth of the resources that are available to it.  I thought I’d highlight one or two of them every now and then in a series we’ll call Resource Roundup.

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.

Fiona Schlachter had the excellent idea of coming up with a map of Boulder’s entrepreneurial community to show relations and give some context to events, foundations, groups, etc. that we may have heard about but not known what they were.

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!

On a recent visit to Boulder, entrepreneur and thought leader Eric Ries was kind enough to stop by the TechStars Bunker to lead a discussion for a room full of folks interested in the Lean Startup methodology. In reflecting on that night, I can’t help but wonder, will Lean Startups be the standard in the Boulder startup ecosystem someday soon?

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.

Allow me to introduce myself:  My name is Warren Ng and I am one of Boulder’s newest entrepreneurs.  Having just begun my entrepreneurial career, you might call me an entrepreneurial virgin.  While my education and professional experiences have been peppered with elements of entrepreneurism, Napkin Labs is my first leap into the unknown associated with how to create a successful company.  While the idea was very much there, the execution needed help and in the few short months that my business partner and I have dedicated to Napkin Labs, we’ve accomplished a great deal because of the camaraderie and support of the startup community in Boulder.

Immediately, in many of our preliminary conversations to suss out the viability of our business, a few names who have been pivotal to creating the startup community I’m writing about came up which include Brad Feld, Andrew Hyde, and David Cohen to name just a few.  Through these contacts, we were quickly welcomed and assimilated into the diverse community of experienced entrepreneurs who approach business in a “pay it forward” sort of attitude. Each of the contacts we met with felt the need to help others as they had been helped early in their growing careers.  These sort of interactions happened multiple times a day and has resulted in success at a pace that would have otherwise taken many more months if not years to arrive at had the community not lent the support to Napkin Labs as it has.

For the support received to date, thanks goes out to all!  I look forward to the day that I too can pay it forward.

So what does all that mean.  If you are considering taking the entrepreneurial plunge or have just done so never hesitate to reach out.  Schedule as many meetings as you can to learn from those around you.  Don’t be afraid to reach out to those you’ve never met.  You will quickly find a welcome committee in response to your requests.

No longer should it be difficult to get time with VCs or advisors; remember it is you the entrepreneur that offers upside potential.  It’s VCs like Brad Feld who get this and know that with some advising they can help.  Thus programs like http://winterinthebunker.com/ where world class advising is offered for free and Entrepreneurs Unplugged where slice of life interviews are open to the public are popping up more and more across the entrepreneurial centers spread throughout the states.

The approach to entrepreneurism has been redefined and the barriers that have once prevented it have now dissolved due to the support of startups.  How do you support startups?

More about the author:  Warren Ng is the co-founder of Napkin Labs, a product innovation consultancy that utilizes a crowdsourced approach to innovation to enable breakthrough ideas to bubble up at the intersection of diverse thinking as consumers and experts in all fields.  For more information about the author or Napkin Labs visit www.napkinlabs.com or follow on Twitter: @warrenng or @napkinlabs.

The Underpants Business of South Park goes like this:  Phase 1, steal lots of underpants.  Phase 3, PROFITS!

So the logical question here is, what’s phase 2?

I loved that episode of South Park, mostly because of all the startups I’ve talked with, most of them get a clueless look on their face when you bring up their go-to-market strategy.  What do you mean? they ask.  I’m going to do some Adwords Campaigns, maybe I’ll hire a sales guy when I can afford it. Prepare for a really hard and fast landing if that’s your strategy.  You need to think about vertical markets, horizontal markets, how to get your lists, what kind of marketing you’ll do (print, online, phone, direct, whatever) – its exhaustive.  While I don’t mean to scare you, I do wish more entrepreneurs would start thinking about it before launching companies.

So, to help you start thinking about it, CU’s Silicon Flatirons program is running a free seminar tonight and on the 27th to help give some insights on how to market your product and company.  Start thinking about Phase 2 BEFORE you execute Phase 1!  And of course its a good place to come network.

But the real question is who else is missing their underpants?  Ummm….no comment.