Startup Sioux Falls - May 2019 Update

Hey guys, Matt Paulson here. Startups 2 follows is about six weeks into its launch and I thought it would be a good time just to give a little update about what we've accomplished so far and then what we are trying to do to move forward. So the idea to Launch the website StartupSioux Falls really came on around March 6th when we had our 5 year anniversary party for Amelia Cups. And it was Entrepreneurship day in Sioux Falls and great participation from city hall and just really the startup community in general. On that day at a million Cups, we had Andy Trop come back from Take Permission Marketing. He was the very first speaker at our million Cups and we invited him back to speak and he had some really good encouragement and really some challenges for our community. And I guess I really took those to heart. And one of the things that he said at our event was something like, sioux Falls, it's a great city. You've got a great community, you have great entrepreneurs, you have great resources for entrepreneurs. You should really be proud of the city that you have and you should celebrate it. I really thought about that. I just started making a list of all the different resources, the state agencies, the NGOs, the venture capital firms, the meetup groups, all the different stuff that we have for that make up the startup ecosystem in Zoo Follows all the different things that help entrepreneurs, all the different groups, the people. And it got to be a pretty long list. When I was done, I had about 30 different organizations on my list of startup ecosystem organizations. And I really thought to myself, you know, there's probably not a person in Sioux Follows that can identify all of these organizations and what they do to help entrepreneurs. So I set out and I thought, okay, maybe I could just make a website that lists all of these. So I tried to make a digital hub for people that are just interested in starting businesses or maybe already started a business and are looking to grow a business. I thought the idea was pretty simple. It was just one, give people access. I guess it was really to promote all of the great resources we have for entrepreneurs, then give people a chance to be inspired by people that have kind of been there and done that and been successful. And then finally just give entrepreneurs a chance to connect to each other. Because as I have learned, building a company in your home office tends to be a very lonely endeavor because you're working by yourself for a very long period of time and not a whole lot of other people around. And really not very many people understand what you're going through. So having a chance just to be around other entrepreneurs is a very, very helpful thing to anyone starting a business. So since we initially launched the website, we've really been. I guess I've really been working to build a team and develop systems so that the website would really be a sustainable operation that could continue to grow and create new content regardless of how much time I and Matt Paulson stick into the website. Personally, I'm a busy guy, so I brought on some people to help. There's a gal named Becky Squire. She's managing the events calendar event website, so you can always see what startup events are going to come up that you could attend. And she also does the Monday newsletter that we send out with different startup news and events that might be of interest to you. I also brought on board Andrea Van Essen. She's a freelance writer and she's been going out and interviewing all the different organizations and community groups that kind of make up the startup ecosystem. And she's been doing a great job with that. And finally, I partnered with Josh Satko to create two new seasons of the Sioux Falls Startup Stories podcast and to have them hosted by and published by Startup Sioux Falls. So we've got really a good team in place in terms of the content creation now. And honestly, I knew that if I were in charge of all those things, I'm a busy guy and I would probably flake out on it and just end up stock doing it after a couple months. But by having this team in place, we'll make sure the site is always current and always up to date and always has new content for you to read. You know, I'm a big believer in partnerships in general, so I thought, you know, who else, you know, could we kind of bring on board to help make this, make this thing go? So initially, excuse me, we brought on the Zoe center for Entrepreneurship, the co working and accelerator organization in town. We kind of brought in the Sioux Falls Chamber of Commerce as well as the Sioux Falls Development foundation as well. And I've kind of lined it up so that kind of the Chamber and the Development foundation and the Zio websites all kind of linked to Startup Sioux Falls as the primary resource or the primary digital resource for information on starting a business in the city. So kind of both. So, you know, like the Chamber's got a website, entrepreneurship. The Development Foundation's got the website on entrepreneurship. You know, Zio is all about entrepreneurship. So on those pages they all link to startups. Who follows now? Which is pretty cool. Both the Chamber and the Chamber News magazine and then the Development foundation in their Newsletter. They wrote some very nice stories about startup Sioux Falls, so certainly thankful for that. We've also developed a new partnership with the Arcus leader where they're syndicating our stories about organizations that make up the startup ecosystem in Sioux Falls. So when we publish an article, they will also publish it to the Sioux Falls Business Journal on a website. And I think in most of the they publish the business show on Sundays now. So typically they'll include one of our stories in the business journal as well. Which has been really good for everybody involved because they get some additional content to put in the business journal. It creates some nice awareness of startups who follows and also more importantly creates awareness for the organizations we're writing about every week because there are a lot of great resources out there for entrepreneurs and different organizations that will sit down with entrepreneurs, coach them, do financials, help with marketing, But a lot of people don't know that they're there. So to get coverage of these different organizations like SBDC and what the SBA does and what Zio does, there's a long list of them that's really helpful to everybody. So since we launched the website we've had about 5,000 unique different people visit the website as best as I can tell from Google Analytics. And this is really about the number I would expect given the number of people that are kind of in the early stages of launching a business or getting ready to launch a business at any given time. That may only be a few thousand people in the Sioux Falls metro area. My guess is we have somewhere between 5 and 15,000 business owners in the city of Sioux Falls. So it really is kind of a small niche community we're targeting. We've also seen some nice growth in the Facebook community. I think we were at about 5,800 members when we launched the website and now we're up to about 6,100 members since then. So that's pretty cool. We've started a new email list for startups yous followers to send a newsletter to and we've gotten that up to about a thousand people. So you know, that's cool as well. You know, certainly these aren't earth shattering numbers compared to MarketBee or Go GoPhoto contest or really any other business that I'm involved in. But you know, I don't know that I expect it to be. This really is a niche website for a certain type of people that are in a metro area of a quarter million people. So just it's kind of a niche website for a niche group. So I don't expect it to serve tens of thousands of people, but I do hope that it will serve the several thousand business owners in our community and communities around Sioux Falls very well. Moving forward, my plan is to continue to run Startup Sioux Falls as primarily a digital resource and kind of an online community for probably at least the rest of this year, maybe into next year. Right now I'm not planning on trying to become a true ecosystem organization like Emerging Prairie is. Startups who Follows isn't even a proper non profit. I'm running it through my business right now and the unfortunate reality is that I've got a business to run. MarketBeat. We have six, soon to be seven employees and we have advertisers to keep happy, we have customers, we have to keep happy, we've got bills to pay and that really does need to be my primary focus. You know, kind of as It's a necessity. StartupDufols is going to be kind of continue to be a side project as long as I'm the caretaker of it. But I don't know that I need to be the caretaker of it forever. So right now I would like, even though Startups who Falls itself might not become isn't intended to become the ecosystem organization, I would like it to be kind of the platform that could launch an ecosystem organization. You know, it's like if somebody were to say here's the nonprofit, we're going to fold in a million cups, we're going to fold in Zeel, we're going to fold in whatever else. I'd say here you go, here's the website, you've got your community, you've got your email list, you're ready to go. Personally, I can't be the Greg to be his two followers. I can't be the person that runs the ecosystem organization. It's just not my skill set. I'm not an events coordinator, I'm not a non profit leader. I'm not. Yeah, it's just not me. Yeah, it's not my skill set and it's just probably not my interest either. What I do hope will happen though is that Zio has been moving in a direction of doing more programming and events and more community stuff and hopefully sometime in the next few years I can just gift startups who follow over to Zio when they kind of have the resources and more of a team to manage it and, and I'm optimistic we'll be able to get there. I'm on the Zio board. We just hired a new executive director. We were getting some really good committees in place and really over the last 18 months we've been trying to reinvent the organization and rebuild the team from kind of the ground up with rich and agents who are moving over to the Discovery District and Ryan Oyness went here with him. So we were really kind of starting from ground zero with the team. But I think we do have a solid team in place right now and I think that'll continue to grow over time. So. So if we can get Zio to the place where Zio is the ecosystem organization or that's ultimately what we want it to be, here's the website. You've got a community ready to go, you've got Facebook group ready to go, you've got an email list ready to go and you've got all these great content and resources available as well. Ultimately that would be the goal. But I'm a realist. Let's say for some reason that Zero ends up not being able to fully move in that direction that we want to, and let's just say it primarily continues to be a co working space and an office space for startup companies, then at that point I would probably try to turn it into a proper non profit. I'd probably have to fund it myself for a while and then maybe find a new leader just to run the brand and maybe do some events. At that point there might be a possibility to if for whatever reason startups do fall off camp merging to Zeal, maybe there's an opportunity to make kind of a community nonprofit that folds in Startups who Falls and A Million Cups and some of our annual events like Casey Falls and TedX. But it is really too early to kind of tell where it's going to end up. But those are a couple possibilities of the future vision of Startups who Falls. So that's the update for now. We've made some pretty good progress in the short time we've been around. I've got a great team in place. My plan is to continue to create some content and just foster community through our Facebook group and through the events that I don't organize, but our community members themselves organize, which is fantastic. And that's kind of the plan for the rest of the year. I'd very much love to hear your feedback. I don't have a whole lot of time to start something brand new in addition to Startups who follows. But if you have ideas to improve the website or improve the community or if you just see some big gaping holes that you wish somebody would solve in our startup community. Feel free to reach out to me because maybe I'm not the person that is able to solve that particular problem, but maybe I can find somebody who is. I'd love to hear any feedback that you guys have, and I'd just love to hear some feedback in general. That's what I got in this video for an update. Hopefully you guys have learned something and enjoyed watching it. Thanks.