Start at Go

“Do More With Less” is key tenet of any startup entrepreneur and one of the 10 Core Values at Zappos.com. Here is a quick D-I-Y project from this weekend. Since moving to Las Vegas from NYC, I’ve been busy setting up my work space. I have used white board paint in the past, but I decided to do it up Home Depot style.

Total Project Cost: Approximately $35

Comparison: Staples sells a 8×4 white board here for $299.99. Are you nuts?

Home Depot sells dry erase board material which is just a melamine surface for $11.87 for a 8′ x 4′ sheet! It’s called “White Panel Board.”

Measure and cut your wood grain molding. You will use this as your frame.

Stain the wood grain moulding and use a level tool to ensure it’s straight. I chose to drill small holes to make nailing into the wall easy.

Nail each moulding side into the wall, flush with the white board as shown above.

And there you have it folks, a brand new white board at a fraction of the cost!

If you weren’t at the #VegasHack public data hackathon on Saturday, February 23, 2013, you sure missed an “open data” great time. Vegas Hack and Code For America collaborated to bring a civic innovation hackathon for people dedicated to finding new solutions to address real issues in the community.

Here’s what you missed:

13 teams of hackers competed for open data, with several walking away as winners at the end of the night. Some highlights include: Fitendo uses your Fitbit data to show how many steps Super Mario would take using the Fitbit API. With FluBuddies you can “check in” to your illness, and receive information from CDC back to you (created by local high school students). Terror Alerts uses the Homeland Security API and integrates Twilio and SendGrid to receive information about terror alerts currently active. Can I Sprinkle? scraped government data and turned it into their own API.

The Vegas Tech community continues to foster tech innovation and creativity with its ongoing collection of events, hackathons, meetups, and venture investments. Many companies and local startups pitched in to sponsor the event, including a museum and a pants company.

Sign up and stay tuned for more information about future Vegas Hack events. This post was first published on ProgrammableWeb.

Good ideas are just not good enough to become a great entrepreneur.

You have to live at the intersection between need and opportunity. What makes up an enrepreneur’s DNA is often not the idea itself, but action and inspiration to make things happen.

First published for the Startup Weekend Las Vegas blog here: http://bit.ly/Vh66rS

What’s in a good idea pitch? What should you say? How do you prepare?

First published for Startup Weekend Las Vegas: http://bit.ly/TEIOwt

“Our market has ten-gazillion-million potential customers” may sound impressive, however there is another way to communicate just how how well you know your startup’s market. Consider PAM, TAM, SAM, SOM as a guide to determine the size your market. Below is an easy to understand guide:

Some partnerships fail before they get started, especially if you haven’t communicated effectively. When you are negotiating a partnership, build broad support to give you a more fluid mandate for your business objectives.

1. Cross-functional feedback

This will be the most important. You’ll get a wealth of different perspectives, engage team members at every level, and understand where the land mines are while trying to embark on a new partnership or strategy. Feedback helps you dexterously manuever ahead with an idea and spot signs of potential challenges. For instance, if you’re meeting with your product team and you discuss new a idea, when you see your development team later that day, get a feel for what their response might be.

2. Be Data Driven

To show that a partnership holds promise, put forth a compelling vision that places the customer’s behavior and the company brand first. Test, learn, and ask the right questions to determine an actionable business case.

Goal of analytics = [ Smarter Decisions, Insights, Actionable Info] = Better Outcome.

3. Listening > Talking

Listening allows you to uncover pain points, real or perceived problems for the person on the other side of the table. There is no magic formula to guarantee that these partnerships will success, but the entrepreneurial spirit and drive that creates partnerships is definitely worthy of excitement.