TeachStreet™

Starting in March of 2008 you will be able to buy Tigerade. It will actually be called “Gatorade Tiger,” but either way, you’ll soon have a choice to make when you buy your next 32 ouncer: “Be like Mike” or “Be Like Tiger.” If increases in PGA Tour TV ratings and Nike apparel sales are indicators, then I’m guessing many will chose the later. Tiger’s popularity has not just benefited corporate sponsors though; it has benefited everyone in the golf industry. In many ways, the effect Tiger has had on golf is similar to the effect Lance Armstrong has had on cycling. And somewhere on the hierarchy of those who have benefited from Tiger’s popularity are local golf coaches.

Tiger Woods Picture: Britannica.com

Yesterday I got a chance to sit down with one of Seattle’s best golf coaches, David Elaimy. Though Elaimy has built his teaching and seminar business on regular customers and little marketing except for word-of-mouth, newer teachers may need to be more proactive to generate students. To tackle the problem of finding students, let’s first ask the reverse question, how would a student find a teacher?

In the absence of a friend’s recommendation, a student would likely turn to Google. (Where else?) On the results pages they would find course listings and Yellow Pages or City Search style directories. Then, after not finding any sort of aggregated information such as teacher ratings, reviews, etc., the student would likely take a shot in the dark by going to the local driving range or golf course.

This process is not a problem for many coaches because often times, especially during the summer, good coaches have more students than openings. So really, whether they are conscious of it or not, the problem belongs to the student: the weekend golfer who wants to finally break 100 or the accountant who wants a few tips before the company golf tournament. So how are these people going to find a good teacher?

Alright, alright, you see where my framed question is going, but in speaking with David it became very clear that golf is a space where TeachStreet could really deliver a worthwhile service to students, especially because no one else is focusing their attention on the teacher/student connection. There are, however, some interesting newcomers and relative newcomers in the golf industry who focus on helping teachers and students in other ways.

Cybergolf.com: Mukilteo based Cybergolf, founded by Jeff Shelley, serves up its own channel of golf TV. Cybergolf TV episodes are 3-4 minutes long and are broadcasted daily. It is a well produced show that gives Sporstcenter a run for its money.

SmarterLessons.com: Subscription based value-add for teachers that includes calendaring, bill pay and email services. Essentially it’s a place where students can sign up for classes online.

The First Tee: A great organization with over 1.5 million participants that gets inner city kids involved in golf.

Last night was one of those nerve wracking moments for yours truly — let me paint the picture.

TeachStreet was chosen to present at Startup Demo 2007, along with 6 other local startups, at an event hosted by MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest. We were excited about our first public demo to a larger crowd, and the team made a big push to get us ready — we were fired up! I tested the demo beforehand at our offices, and then to be extra safe, we checked the live demo at the location itself — all’s looking great, right? Wrong! When I walked up to the podium, the first 1-2 minutes went smoothly… I was on a role… feeling quite the speechmaster, actually. Then, I moved to the demo itself. Drum roll, please. Yes, as you can guess, the site wouldn’t load. Tech veterans will say “it isn’t a demo until something malfunctions”, but in most of those cases, it’s in a conference room with a few folks wh0 will happily accommodate a 5 minute intermission, to give you a chance to research and fix the problem. In this case, I had a 100+ person audience, not to mention the field of judges, including John Cook, from the Seattle PI (thanks for the nice TeachStreet article mention anyway, John!)

We did what we could — and were really excited by the enthusiasm from the crowd, despite our technical glitches — it always feels good to be reminded about the excitement around our idea/strategy.

In the end, Brent Lamphier from Athleon Sport took home the first prize, and it was well deserved — his presentation was really crisp, and his demo came off flawlessly!

Note to self, and other startup entrepreneurs — don’t set up your development website server on port :2001 — much smarter to use the normal :80 (when the wireless switched over on us, we got bumped to a wireless hub that blocked :2001). See… we learn something new every day!

We’re presenting at the MIT Startup Demo 2007 event tonight, and as part of that presentation, they ask that we describe how we started our company, what resources we use and ultimately, which we recommend. At the same time, we see similar questions on the Seattle Tech Startups email list (highly recommended, by the way, for Seattle entrepreneurs). So, with no further ado, here’s our list of people, organizations and business tools that are helping us get TeachStreet off the ground. (NOTE: As our business is about connecting people, we’ve “eaten our own dog food” and tried to do business with people who we’ve connected with through other people we trust.

Accountant:

• Terri Fujinaga - thus far, we’ve only needed a few hours of her time each month. She helped us set up our books, explained basic payroll and helped set up payroll taxes/filings, and will handle our year-end tax situation. She came highly recommended by an advisor. (fujinagas -at- msn -dot- com)

Attorney / Advisor:

• Beacon Law Advisors (Chris Hurley / Brian Richmond) - Chris came highly recommended by a past co-worker/lawyer - BLA’s legal assistance has been fantastic, but maybe even more important for aspiring entrepreneurs is that they’ve also filled the role of advisor across many areas. All of the principal attorneys at Beacon have personal startup experience; that’s invaluable.
• BAE Law Group has been incredibly helpful with immigration attorney work — if you have any green card/visa issues, just call them.

Banker / Payroll Service:

• Wells Fargo (Madison Park Branch) - I do my personal banking at Wells, and am happy with their service, so I was inclined to have our banking all in one interface. The customer service with all of the staff we’ve worked with has been outstanding — in fact, our personal handling is amazing, given the size of Wells. Our account manager sat down with us and helped open all accounts, and has personally gotten involved whenever we’ve botched something with funds transfers, payroll, etc. (it’s inevitable).
• Regarding the payroll service, we’re not raving fans on that end. Wells has a client install that is quite clunky, and we’ve had a number of snafus on tax mistakes, repeated manual checks (when we thought we set up direct deposit) and other little things. There are likely better alternatives. I’ve heard good things about www.paycycle.com, but honestly, I’ve also heard that mistakes on payroll are inevitable because of the number of setup options for each employee. What’s nice is that we have our account manager and an unbelievably helpful and understanding customer service support team dedicated to Wells Fargo Payroll that helps us clean up any messes that we make!

Design

• Our current placeholder site was designed by Keith Rondinelli at Woodhouse Creative in New York/Jersey — I worked with Keith at JibJab, and he’s a fantastic designer who works incredibly well via remote location (easy to work with, incredibly thorough, etc.) At the same time, that makes him in high demand! But, if you have well-defined work and don’t need someone in house, I couldn’t more highly recommend him. (keith -at- woodhousecreative -dot- com)
• For our to-be-launched website, we’re combining an in-house full-time UI/UX designer with assistance from a local external resource (who we have prior experience with). Name not disclosed because they just may have a full-time job as well

Email / Calendar / Chat

• Google Apps for your Domain - For $50/person/month, we get virtually infinite email storage for employees, private calendaring, chat, and easy-to-use collaboration tools like Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Yes, we still use Microsoft Office products for some work (powerpoint presentations, mostly… but we also use Word for our business plan and other docs, and then often convert to PDFs to distribute), but the majority of our in-office work is coordinated over email/google docs/etc. Sometimes it’s been a little hard to get external folks to use Google Docs we send them, but after a mini walk-through, most folks are taking to it with ease.
• Zoho Wiki - this is a free Wiki — we’re honestly not raving fans. For stand-alone wikis there are likely other alternatives that may be more full-powered (www.wetpaint.com, www.pbwiki.com, etc.) but because we’re active Google Apps users, we’re anxiously awaiting their Wiki solution (following their purchase of www.jotspot.com), that will hopefully integrate with all of our other Google apps usage.

Fundraising

• Good luck Seriously, it is a grueling process, and rumor has it that it never ends. I’ve probably made initial presentations to more than 150 individuals, angels, VCs, and more. All of them require personal email follow ups with a variety of different attachments (executive summaries, business plans, term sheets, convertible note documents, etc.) and often lead to multiple additional interactions. In the end, the hit rate/close rate is probably less than 10%, but that just highlights the importance of keeping this part of your daily routine. You get valuable feedback and advice from just about everyone, and if you make it part of the process, almost everyone makes introductions to someone else (potential employees, contractors, investors, or advisors).
• We had most of our success with friends and family, but we’re probably now at 40-50% external investors and I expect that most all of our future investors will be more 3rd-party, as we move to a live website with demo-able software. In the early goings, when most of what you have is a business plan and a pitch, you’d be best served focusing on folks who know you and your team — remember, that’s really what they’re investing in at that point!
• One individual I’ll call out who’s been incredibly helpful to me over the years is Janis Machala at Paladin Partners — (no, we have no fundraising or advisory relationship — she’s just given freely of her time and contacts over the years, and she deserves recognition for all she does for entrepreneurs) If you have needs in the advisor/consulting/fundraising/recruiting space, she should be one of your first calls.
• Once you’ve raised your seed funding, you’ll likely want to reach out to the local angel groups (Alliance of Angels, Puget Sound Venture Club, Keiretsu Forum, and others) and there are a host of local VCs (I’ll spare you the list…)

Hiring

• We found all of our employees (7 in total, as of December 2007) via word-of-mouth introductions or past work experiences. But, that doesn’t mean it was a painless/fast process. We did place a few ads on Craigslist and in other spots, but the candidates were of a totally different caliber. I highly recommend that you work your personal network — you’ll find people who are more engaged/motivated, and who you have valuable feedback on, from people you trust, going in (and they’ll know more about you as well).
• That said, I would give a shout-out to a recruiting firm where an ex-Amazon recruiter now resides — his name is John Bilodeau, and you can find him at Recruiting Point.

Hosting

• HostMySite is taking care of our current placeholder site — they’ve been incredibly responsive for a lightweight site, and have been easy to use.
• We haven’t made a decision yet on our longer-term hosting provider — we’re looking at all the usual suspects, including EngineYard, Joyent, RackSpace, etc. — any suggestions appreciated (if you’re a raving fan).

Insurance

• AHT Insurance - we were referred to Ned Sander at AHT by our attorney (are you seeing a trend here? Chris Hurley at Beacon Law rocks — he saved us a massive amount of time with high-quality referrals to folks who know how to treat startups with amazing customer service). AHT handles everything from getting you set up with health insurance for employees (they gave us multiple options, but we chose Regence), and will also be helping us with D&O and E&O Insurance, when the time’s right. (nsander -at- ahtins -dot- com). Our other personal contact at AHT is Shelley Welch — her customer service should be cloned! (swelch -at- ahtins -dot- com)
• Parker Smith & Feek Insurance, in Bellevue — referred here, and was really impressed with their responsiveness and knowledge.  Maybe more ideally suited for startups that are a little farther along, or maybe preferable if you’re over on the East side!  Contact John Schmidt (jfschmidt -at- psfinc -dot- com), Nick Montera (namontera -at- psfinc -dot- com) or Jeff Murphy (jsmurphy -at- psfinc -dot- com).

Office Supplies

• Amazon.com - ’nuff said (and get yourself an Amazon Prime membership — pays for itself with free/fast shipping)
• Craigslist - ’nuff said 2x (we found our microwave, first 8 chairs, coffee machine, fridge, filing cabinets, office supplies and tons more for less than $200 and a few hours of hard work)

Real Estate / Property Assistance

• We made a go of it trying to work out of coffee shops, and my house — but, it just didn’t work. Felt like the money we were saving was being far outweighed by decreased productivity.
• Clay Nielsen at WA Partners came highly recommended by our attorney, and also by other startups — I know that Clay works with massive organization/businesses (folks like Amazon), but treated us with the same level of respect and promptness. He showed us all of the properties in our space range (<2,000 SF, preferably downtown, <$20/SF) and ultimately negotiated a much better deal than was originally quoted. (clayn -at- wapartners -dot- com)
• If you’re very early on, and want something that bridges coffeeshops and your own full-time space, Seattle’s fortunate to have two intermediate providers:
  • Office Nomads, located on Capitol Hill, provides shared office space for independent workers, telecommuters and contractors. They have daily or monthly memberships/fees, and customers get all the tools and systems of a modern office. Check them out at www.officenomads.com
  • My Day Office, located downtown by the Olympic Sculpture Park, provides some similar services — it feels a bit more corporate to me (that may appeal to some folks), but location will probably be the deciding factor for many entrepreneurs (deep downtown, or up on the hill) — more info here.
  • StartPad (see below) also offers co-located office space for startups, at 811 First Avenue, Suite 480 (located just north of Pioneer Square — yet another area of town covered!). They charge a base rate of $300/month inclusive of basic office furniture, internet access, copier/printer, kitchen, shared meeting space and 24 hour secure access. Besides the basic office amenities, their main value proposition is the opportunity to get peer support on technical and startup problems just by walking down the hallway. They’re specifically limiting tenants to software startup companies (currently all web service companies).
  • SoDo Saturday House, also offers co-working for a monthly member fee (rumored to still be a pretty loose and unstructured environment, which may be a plus for some!) — and, another area of town addressed with a co-working solution!

Startup Support Groups

• Seattle Tech Startups — check out their website, and definitely subscribe to the daily digest email — I’d rate the email topics/thread an 8 out of 10 on utility (and that compares to most list-serves that get a 2 out of 10) — unless of course you get caught in a flame war between bitter entrepreneurs and angels/VCs… those are the days you need to quickly delete
• Seattle Startup Index - monthly listing of startups around town, some rough traffic estimates, etc. — compiled by Sampa’s Marcelo Calbucci
• Open Coffee Club — every Tuesday at 8:30am at Louisa’s Coffee on Eastlake — Andy Sack got this going, and it was helpful for me as I got TeachStreet started. I admit that my attendance has trailed off as busy-ness has escalated, but it’s very supportive.
• Lunch 2.0 - monthly group meetings at different startups around town.
• StartPad - Mike Koss got this going, to try to help organize threads/resources — and also provides co-working space (see above) and other networking opportunities.
• Required Reading / Local Blogs:
  • John Cook
  • Brier Dudley
  • I’ll stop there… honestly, there are so many… get yourself a Google Reader set up, and start to build your daily reading list…

Software / Dev Environment

• Ruby on Rails / Postgres / Mysql — ’nuff said 3x. My hunch is that most of the folks reading this are fairly technical, and will have their mind made up regarding their dev environment.

Web Development Assistance

• Our placeholder website was built by Mark and Kitty at Sage Computer Services — we’ve worked with them before at Unitus, and couldn’t more highly recommend them. In fact, we wonder when they find time to sleep!

Other:

• Email Service Provider — we’ll likely live to regret this decision, but after a large amount of research, we’ve decided to build our Email solution in-house. We’d be remiss if we didn’t give a shout-out to the folks at WhatCounts, here in Seattle — David Geller and his team were incredibly responsive, and I’d bet that we end up working with them when our email needs become more pronounced.

• We’re making use of a number of Amazon Services, including the Associates Program (for referral fees), Mechanical Turk (for outsourcing some data collection and other routine/repetitive activities that require human judgment); we’re also assessing other web services such as S3 (Storage) and EC2.

Friends, Family and Loved Ones

• Yes, they warrant their own bullet point! All we can tell you is, be honest with your friends, family and loved ones up-front. Your startup is going to take a massive effort on everyone’s part, and that includes the folks who will cope with your absence(s), assist with bug testing, suffer endless late night and early morning networking meetings, and serve as your overall cheerleading/morale backbone.

I’m sure we missed a bit here — let us know via comments, direct emails or the good ol’ telephone what we missed.

Hope you learned something new — that’s what we’re here for!

With the sawing of another door desk, I was welcomed last week as the newest member of TeachStreet. As TeachStreet is the first tech start-up I’ve ever been a part of, not everything was altogether familiar on my first day. In some ways I felt a bit like Forrest Gump in the scene where he is on the bus going to his first day of class. I am pleased to say, however, that unlike the kids on Forrest’s bus, the TeachStreet team welcomed me with open arms. And thankfully, the seat at my door desk was not taken.

Pic: Creative Comons | grantmac

One thing that became immediately clear to me upon arrival is that life at TeachStreet will be fundamentally different than it would have been if I had taken a job at a bigger company. How? Well in more ways that I could say, but here are a couple things I likely wouldn’t have gotten across the pond over at Microsoft.

1. My interviewer would probably not have ripped apart my resume. And I don’t mean figuratively. In our first discussion Dave literally tore my resume in half. In his defense, he was writing something down for me and didn’t have any paper, but still, it certainly was a first.

2. Don’t think I would have gotten to use a power drill. It’s not every morning that you get to see your CEO with a grande drip in one hand and an electric saw in the other. Dave you are quite crafty with that thing, by the way. You thought about teaching a do-it-yourself class on TeachStreet?

As for things I’ve learned so far, well, I will spare everyone the full list, but I will say that high up there is learning the subtle distinctions between plant genuses. I’m still no botanist, but after seeing the plant on Fred’s desk the other day, I now know the difference between fica and mistletoe. Apparently the same rules do not apply when standing next to fica. Sorry Fred, it really was an honest mistake.

Anyway, there will be more to come, I just wanted to share an inaugural blog post and thank everyone for the warm welcome. I believe there is a bright future for TeachStreet and I look forward to being a part of it.

I was watching an Eddie Murphy comedy performance the other night, and he was talking about Janet Jackson’s “What have you done for me lately” (ahh, the memories ).

That came to mind when I was just reading a post about the importance of local reviews in the decision making process for individuals.  The article cited local research from comScore and the Kelsey Group that showed that more than 75% of users think that reviews are very important in their decision process, and that consumers value other consumer’s opinions more than those of professions (we noticed this at Amazon as well, and verified it with A/B testing!).

Two other really interesting tidbids:

I think those two points are critical — I don’t think that the sheer volume of reviews for an individual teacher/class/business are paramount (although someone with a ton of reviews will obviously indicate popularity or notoriety!), but rather their presence at all.  That is – 1-2 glowing reviews will likely be all that’s necessary to help someone make a first step toward learning, and likewise, a single well-written and obviously fact-based negative review will do the opposite.  That’s what we’re trying to do — provide valuable decision-making learning information for students (and parents of learners)  – then, step back and let the interactions happen!

If you’re interested in what’s new in the Seattle startup community, Marcelo Calbucci (from Sampa) provides a really helpful service with his monthly Seattle Startup Index.  The list now totals 228, with 29 new entrants.  We continue to chuckle, since we’ve maintained our spot of #106, despite the fact that we haven’t officially launched yet; but, that can’t be bad news — in fact, we continue to see our blog traffic increase, and last month we noticed that our website and blog both achieved a Google Page Rank of 4 — not lighting the world on fire, but every little bit helps!

It takes a fairly self-confident woman to admit that “Austin Powers - International Man of Mystery” is one of her favorite movies. But I am, and it is. And the famous “judo chop!” line from the first movie made me quite excited to go see my first judo tournament a few weeks ago.

Judo means “the gentle way”. However, to the untrained eye, one might think Judo actually means “the way of slamming your opponent’s face into the mat”. However, after recently attending a local judo tournament to watch a young family friend participate, I gained a greater appreciation for the fine art of Judo. Here’s what I learned:

Judo Founder, Jigoro Kano

Background: The founder and creator of Judo was the Japanese educator, Jigoro Kano (1860 - 1938). Kano started learning the martial art of jujutsu around the age of 17. Kano was a small young man and he wanted to be able to defend himself from the bullies who picked on him.

By 22 he’s already become a master instructor, but he saw jujutsu as a disconnected bag of tricks. Kano wanted judo to be different that most traditional Japanese martial arts, which had the sole purpose of killing one’s opponent.

A focus on finesse: “Jujutsu” refers to the “art” or the “science” of softness. In martial arts, the “soft method” relies on the basic idea of using finesse over brute force. More specifically, softness refers to the principle of using an opponent’s strength against him and adapting to changing circumstances. A good example would be stepping to the side of an attacking opponent and tripping them, rather than just blocking a punch.

As mentioned before, judo refers to the “way” (or the “road” or “path”) of softness. Kano wanted judo to become a way of governing the whole person: the physical, mental, emotional and the moral. He wanted judo to extend outside of the dojo and help it’s practitioners to have the “best use of energy” lead a life of “mutual prosperity“. When refining his judo methods, Kano threw out many jujutsu techniques that relied only on superior strength, and added skills that involved redirecting an opponents force, off-balancing an opponent and make use of leverage, timing, skill and efficient movement.

The moves: The sport of Judo involves pins, arm and joint locks, choking techniques and, of course, the spectacular throws. One of the ways to win a judo match is to hold an opponent on their back for 25 seconds.

Interesting side note: The rules in 1905 stated that it was only necessary to hold an opponent down for 2 seconds, which was about the amount of time needed for a samurai to draw their sword or knife and dispatch their opponent.

I was surprised to learn that there is no striking, punching or kicking in judo, since these cause certain injury. (Some of the highest level judo competitors learn striking or atemi waza in training, but it is never used in competition or outside the dojo.) I guess Austin Powers lied when he was “judo chopping” bad guys left and right. But… we forgive him, don’t we?

I was just getting the hang of understanding the pins, throws and arm locks, when I saw my first choke hold. I must say it took me by surprise to see 12 year old girls attempting to strangle one another. I had a momentary flash back to the World Wrestling Federation shows my brother used to be fond of.

However, after a little more research, judo surprised me once again with it’s focus on skill over brutish force.

More than you might want to know about choke holds and strangulation: Chokes occur by blocking the airway at the front of the neck, whereas strangulation is when one cuts off the bloodstream to the brain by compressing the sides of the neck. Both are referred to as “shime-waza” and can win a match if the opponent submits or becomes unconscious. What interested me most was that when done properly, shime-waza take only a few seconds to subdue an opponent, but rarely cause any injury.

(Supposedly… they don’t get hurt.)

My final observation: The last thing that impressed me about judo competition I saw was not just the skill and strength of the competitors, but also the degree of respect and ceremony that the sport maintains. Contrarily to most youth sporting events I’ve been to that have equal parts poor sportsmanship, foul play and angry parents in ample supply, there was none of that at the judo competition. Even though people were quite literally getting slammed into mats and pinned into clausterphobic little balls, it was obviously understood that to compete in judo meant that you’d also be well-behaved, under control and respectful to your opponents, the judges and the other participants.

Unlike the hundreds of soccer, basketball and football matches I’ve played in and attended, there was not one person who ever questioned a ref’s call. It was all quite refreshing.

After watching my first judo match, the seemingly brutal became graceful, the thuds on the mats looked skilled, disciplined and focused, and I started to understand the true meaning of “the gentle way”.

—

Want to learn judo?

Judo is a great sport for all ages but is particularly good for young people. Parents will love it because of the discipline it instills and because it has fewer injuries for youth than other more traditional contact sports (football, soccer etc.). Kids will love it because it’s so active. What kids doesn’t want to learn cool throwing and flipping moves? Judo is an Olympic sport for both men and women, both guys and gals are accepting in just about every dojo. And because judo is a sport of skill, strength, speed and agility, it’s great regardless of whether you’re small and wire-y or of a stockier build. Note: Some judo classes are specifically targeted at women because of the excellent self defense skills you can learn and use regardless of body size.

JudoInfo.com has a database of some of the judo dojos around the country and the world.