4 ms·

Congrats! 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

by rms 17y ago

Congrats! 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?

brandnewlow 17y ago
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) Evaluating potential angel investors would be just as hard. 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. That first year was miserable as I iterated through a few versions of the product and lived on about $10k that I earned from freelance writing and design gigs. The first idea was to build a big blog network for Chicago. I found about 20 writers, but ran into two big problems: 1. Drupal's content creation forms are not suitable for non-technical users or people without special training. They have some WYSIWYG add-ons, but they're frankly terrible compared to Wordpress/Squarespace/MT. This meant I had to post up most of the blog posts myself and my writers were always frustrated and demoralized. On my end, I lacked the skills to build a good writing UI or the funds to hire someone to do it for me. 2. With my time swallowed up by posting and editing stories, I had no time to even worry about ad sales or recruit new writers. I think a local blog network could work really well...if you had 2-3 guys. As a solo project, no dice. So 9 months in, I switched to letting anyone join up and share links to their favorite local news, blogs, and events. We've been doing that for the last 14 months. Midway through that, I picked up someone to handle ad-sales on commission with some opportunity to earn equity in the business. Together we've reached a healthy "ramen profitablity" position and are having a lot of fun. 4 months ago, I scored a $35k grant from the Chicago Community Trust to invest in our tech. We've spent a bit of it on performance improvements and are looking to spend a bit more on FB/Twitter integration (if you're good at that stuff, drop me a line!). So I've been pursuing the slow growth strategy. All bootstrap so far. I believe we're very close to "cracking the code" for doing this sort of thing which then could change things a bit, but in the meantime we're working on incremental improvements to our sales strategy and product.
- nkh 17y ago
  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.
  - brandnewlow 17y ago
    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... :)
    - tbrooks 17y ago
      How do you hear about these grants? Are there any sites that specifically focus on available grants?
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
- brandnewlow 17y ago
  Here's a great example of how our users feel about Windy Citizen: http://www.windycitizen.com/chicago/media/2010/02/25/windy-citizen-named-one-of-chicagos-40-new-essentials-by-time-out-chicago#comment-21317 http://www.windycitizen.com/chicago/media/2010/02/25/windy-c... <blockquote>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.</blockquote>

by rms 17y ago

Congrats! 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?

brandnewlow 17y ago

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) Evaluating potential angel investors would be just as hard. 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. That first year was miserable as I iterated through a few versions of the product and lived on about $10k that I earned from freelance writing and design gigs. The first idea was to build a big blog network for Chicago. I found about 20 writers, but ran into two big problems: 1. Drupal's content creation forms are not suitable for non-technical users or people without special training. They have some WYSIWYG add-ons, but they're frankly terrible compared to Wordpress/Squarespace/MT. This meant I had to post up most of the blog posts myself and my writers were always frustrated and demoralized. On my end, I lacked the skills to build a good writing UI or the funds to hire someone to do it for me. 2. With my time swallowed up by posting and editing stories, I had no time to even worry about ad sales or recruit new writers. I think a local blog network could work really well...if you had 2-3 guys. As a solo project, no dice. So 9 months in, I switched to letting anyone join up and share links to their favorite local news, blogs, and events. We've been doing that for the last 14 months. Midway through that, I picked up someone to handle ad-sales on commission with some opportunity to earn equity in the business. Together we've reached a healthy "ramen profitablity" position and are having a lot of fun. 4 months ago, I scored a $35k grant from the Chicago Community Trust to invest in our tech. We've spent a bit of it on performance improvements and are looking to spend a bit more on FB/Twitter integration (if you're good at that stuff, drop me a line!). So I've been pursuing the slow growth strategy. All bootstrap so far. I believe we're very close to "cracking the code" for doing this sort of thing which then could change things a bit, but in the meantime we're working on incremental improvements to our sales strategy and product.

nkh 17y ago
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.
- brandnewlow 17y ago
  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... :)
  - tbrooks 17y ago
    How do you hear about these grants? Are there any sites that specifically focus on available grants?
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
brandnewlow 17y ago
Here's a great example of how our users feel about Windy Citizen: http://www.windycitizen.com/chicago/media/2010/02/25/windy-citizen-named-one-of-chicagos-40-new-essentials-by-time-out-chicago#comment-21317 http://www.windycitizen.com/chicago/media/2010/02/25/windy-c... <blockquote>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.</blockquote>