Highlight - an amazing little iPhone app

I just installed Highlight today after reading a post by Robert Scoble and wow -- what an amazing experience.  For those of you who don't know, Highlight is an iPhone app that alerts you to when people are nearby with whom you may enjoy an interesting conversation.  It detects your location, compares to others nearby, and checks to see how many mutual friends/interests you have.  It keeps a log of all relevant connections, and enables you to message them.

The power of this app is remarkable -- imagine reconnecting with people you haven't seen in years because they happen to walk nearby you.  If/when Highlight achieves critical mass, this will happen.  The good news is the Highlight has a virality model that's smart -- it leverages your existing Facebook graph, and has an "Invite All" button to get your friends using it.  There's a natural incentive for you to want to invite your friends because you want to know if they're around.  This "natural" virality has made Highlight explode in popularity in just a short period of time.

I had my first Highlight meeting today.  Someone who walked nearby and noticed me sent a message out of the blue asking to have coffee.  I had some spare time, and was curious, so I agreed to meet him at a nearby coffee shop in downtown San Francisco.  It turns out he was an entrepreneur too, from Montreal.  I had just spoken at a startup conference in Montreal and so there was an immediate connection.  He told me about his company -- he had grown it to $3.2m in revenue, was profitable, but didn't know how to raise money to fuel his growth.  He was looking for a new CEO too.

For fun, I connect entrepreneurs with each other (and to investors) and so I was more than happy to help him.  We're following up afterwards.  Thanks to Highlight, he may well be on his way to taking his company to the next level, and I made a new friend :)

A need for entrepreneurial "Best Practices" and "Case Studies"

Over the past year I've become very curious about what makes startups succeed verses fail.  So I have started to informally interview entrepreneurs and document their case studies.  From these case studies, I believe we can extract best practices which are short (few paragraph) summary of a reusable lesson learned when starting a business.  This is similar to a design pattern in software engineering, which is a succinct, reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design.  Since the startups are not necessarily about programming, I decided to use a less technical term.

I'd like any feedback from the community about whether you feel this experiment would be valuable.  Please reply with any thoughts.  You are the customers for this product, and so I'd like to hear from you.

Do you feel that you may have a story about your startup that's compelling? I'd be happy to work with you on the writeup.  Please email me (link available at http://about.me/Edro) or message me on twitter (@ed_roman).  I'd love to hear from you.

The Lean Startup methodology

Over the past year, I've been networking quite heavily in Austin TX.  Meeting with entrepreneurs for coffee, mentoring, and advising startups (both formally and informally).  This has been a lot of fun, and I've met some amazing entrepreneurs as a result of this activity.

One of those amazing entrepreneurs I met is Ash Maurya, who just finished a book Running Lean (http://book.runningleanHQ.com).  Ash is an expert in the Lean Startup methodology, which is an approach to starting a business that aims to improve the odds of 9/10 startups failing.

The Lean Startup methodology is of particular interest to me.  One of the businesses that I launched, http://www.ghostfiregames.com, would have benefitted quite a bit from that methodology.  That business lost money (we are still trying to recover the investment), primarily because we followed a more "traditional" way to start a product-based business, which is (Build Product -> Sell Product -> Build Demo).  Unfortunately, this leaves little room for customer feedback, to iterate on your product, and to validate that customers want to buy your product.  Had we built a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) rather than spending almost 2 years in development, we would have reduced risk considerably.

Lean Startup is becoming adopted all over the world -- there are dozens of meetup groups, including the USA, Israel, and the UK.  Over 3700 people subscribe to the Lean Startup Circle google group.  I've been informally advising companies on Lean Startup for several months now, and it really resonates with me.

-Ed

Who am I?

Thanks for visiting!  I’m a serial entrepreneur, author, and investor in Austin TX, with 12 years of experience running startup companies.  My expertise is focused mostly in marketing, sales, leadership, and software development.

I founded Ghostfire Games, an Austin TX company specializing in making exercise video games for the Nintendo Wii system.  Prior to this, I was founder and CEO of The Middleware Company, a Java training/consulting company, which I sold to Precise Software.

While at The Middleware Company, I founded the world's largest Java developer community, TheServerSide.com.  I also founded TheServerSide Symposium, a series of international Java conferences which brought the brightest developers together.  I also wrote "Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans", a book on developing complex business systems in Java.

In my spare time, for fun I advise several startup companies.  If you’d like to connect with me, just shoot me an email -- you can reach me on http://about.me/Edro.