Congratulations! I see GrubHub is there, too. It's great to see the increased number of startups in Chicago, which is, you know, not a big startup hub.
My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
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Re: My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great question. Someone asked me about funding last night at the HN Chicago meetup. In all honesty, I haven't thought a whole lot about it. I reached out to alumni entrepreneurs from my university when I was starting Windy Citizen to get advice. One of them, a guy who works in VC in the energy field, pointed out that I had no clue what I was doing, so: a) Evaluating a technical partner would be extremely difficult. b…
Could you elaborate more on the process of getting the grant? That is an avenue of funding I would love to hear more about. Please don't give away any information that might hurt you or that you would be uncomfortable sharing.
I wish there was some magic to it. I've only applied for stuff that was aimed at supporting new news-related ideas. So far I've applied for 7 grants and won one of them. I have two applications in the hopper right now but both are longshots.
For this grant in particular, the Chicago Community Trust announced it had $500,000 and wanted to give it to Chicago-based, Chicago-focused, news-oriented projects. About 70 people applied and they gave money to 12 applicants. I received a little less than half of what I requested but am extremely grateful and excited to have some cash to play with. Considering the criteria, I probably would have done something drastic had I not made the cut for that one... :)
Re: My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
#13Congratulations! I see GrubHub is there, too. It's great to see the increased number of startups in Chicago, which is, you know, not a big startup hub.
Yes indeed! Last night's HN Chicago meetup was a lot of fun. This is the third or fourth one we've had. There's a great mix of bootstrappers, VC-types, CTO-types, and gainfully employed devs looking to make the leap.
Re: My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
#14Congrats! No obligation for you to answer, but have you raised any funding yet? Would you be able to spend a lot of money to scale more rapidly or is going more slowly a better strategy for you?
Great question. Someone asked me about funding last night at the HN Chicago meetup. In all honesty, I haven't thought a whole lot about it. I reached out to alumni entrepreneurs from my university when I was starting Windy Citizen to get advice. One of them, a guy who works in VC in the energy field, pointed out that I had no clue what I was doing, so: a) Evaluating a technical partner would be extremely difficult. b…
Here's a great example of how our users feel about Windy Citizen: http://www.windycitizen.com/chicago/media/2010/02/25/windy-c...
The nice thing about Windy Citizen is that is embraces a diversity of views -- even allowing stray libertarians and organic conservatives on board -- along with the usual multitude of bloviating Chicago nanny state enthusiasts. I just wish that WC could get someone to work out all of the computer programming glitches.
Re: My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
#15Awesome!
Re: My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
#16Congratulations! I see GrubHub is there, too. It's great to see the increased number of startups in Chicago, which is, you know, not a big startup hub.
Yes indeed! Last night's HN Chicago meetup was a lot of fun. This is the third or fourth one we've had. There's a great mix of bootstrappers, VC-types, CTO-types, and gainfully employed devs looking to make the leap.
Shucks, I didn't know we had HN Chicago meetings. I joined the Google Group. Will be there next time.
Re: My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
#17Congratulations! I see GrubHub is there, too. It's great to see the increased number of startups in Chicago, which is, you know, not a big startup hub.
Yes indeed! Last night's HN Chicago meetup was a lot of fun. This is the third or fourth one we've had. There's a great mix of bootstrappers, VC-types, CTO-types, and gainfully employed devs looking to make the leap.
Where the fuck were the gainfully employed devs looking to make the leap when I was there? I didn't want to move to Boston... And it's baseball season, to boot. :(
Re: My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
#18Congrats! No obligation for you to answer, but have you raised any funding yet? Would you be able to spend a lot of money to scale more rapidly or is going more slowly a better strategy for you?
Great question. Someone asked me about funding last night at the HN Chicago meetup. In all honesty, I haven't thought a whole lot about it. I reached out to alumni entrepreneurs from my university when I was starting Windy Citizen to get advice. One of them, a guy who works in VC in the energy field, pointed out that I had no clue what I was doing, so: a) Evaluating a technical partner would be extremely difficult. b…
> He offered to give me a call every Sunday for a year for advice and moral support if I promised to go it alone for one year, build my own tech (tricky considering I'm a decent designer but not a backend guy), and not take any money from anyone.
sounds like a great guy, really good of him.
Re: My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
#19Congrats! No obligation for you to answer, but have you raised any funding yet? Would you be able to spend a lot of money to scale more rapidly or is going more slowly a better strategy for you?
Great question. Someone asked me about funding last night at the HN Chicago meetup. In all honesty, I haven't thought a whole lot about it. I reached out to alumni entrepreneurs from my university when I was starting Windy Citizen to get advice. One of them, a guy who works in VC in the energy field, pointed out that I had no clue what I was doing, so: a) Evaluating a technical partner would be extremely difficult. b…
Could you elaborate on your experiences of building out an ad sales program/team?
How much traffic did you have when you started selling ads? What type of CPM are you able to see?
The reason I ask is that I run a niche community site that gets a decent amount of pageviews but I'm not sure how much I could make by selling ads against it.
Re: My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great question. Someone asked me about funding last night at the HN Chicago meetup. In all honesty, I haven't thought a whole lot about it. I reached out to alumni entrepreneurs from my university when I was starting Windy Citizen to get advice. One of them, a guy who works in VC in the energy field, pointed out that I had no clue what I was doing, so: a) Evaluating a technical partner would be extremely difficult. b…
> He offered to give me a call every Sunday for a year for advice and moral support if I promised to go it alone for one year, build my own tech (tricky considering I'm a decent designer but not a backend guy), and not take any money from anyone. sounds like a great guy, really good of him.
Yup. His friendship has been a big plus through this. Being buddies with his buddies who he's roped in to help from time to time has been another big plus!