#crowdclock

The startup scene in San Diego has become much better in the past ten, if not five years and this is no small part to the tireless efforts of people like Brant Cooper who is a best selling author of Lean Entrepreneur, Eric Otterson and more. And yet has that been enough? Have we as startup founders done our part? We have certainly talked a big game, some more than others, and some others merely observing from a distance and partaking every now and then. Some of you reading this may think I am wrong, maybe you work with other companies in the vicinity, same building, or even the same office. You live in your own bubble in other words. I am certainly no less guilty than anyone else. But being in your own little bubble are you truly being honest with yourselves? Are you truly on the path to becoming a truly great startup tech company from San Diego? Or are you merely a company who has some form of web presence and act as a tech company? Perhaps you are very successful and have raised millions of dollars, maybe tens of millions. Whatever bracket you belong to in terms of success, the one bracket we all belong to is Startup San Diego. 

Founders are not all to blame though. There is plenty of that that can be assigned to different places. One such place is the very city we work in, the smb’s who are in our neighborhoods. What is the city of San Diego doing for us? How are they helping us? Is it enough? Or is the city mentality (and the surrounding cities of San Diego) too conservative? Is it too risk averse when it comes to startups but all too comfortable in continuing to develop on more land for large developers? Adding to this mix of shortcomings are the “VC’s” of town. Are they ever the lead investors? The recent success of Mel and Jeff “Flash” Gordon with the recently published post would have you think that investors outside the Bay Area, or more specific in San Diego are lead investors. When you dig in and read, their amazing payoff was a result of years of nurturing the right people, but the lead investment began outside of San Diego, not in San Diego. Why is that so? Why can San Diego investors not become pioneers in this field? And even when a startup does get an offer it is such a ridiculous offer that when I retold the story to VC’s I have had the pleasure of meeting in the Bay Area, they all gasped and said that such a thing would never happen in the Bay Area because reputation is everything. Are the investors in San Diego that few and far between that they hold an iron grip over the capital? Are the San Diego startups that gullible that they allow such incidences to exist? Then when you look at the San Diego startup ecosphere as a whole, it becomes quite clear that the shortcomings of our beautiful city are a direct result of our collective failures and not the failure of one over another. It doesn’t start with a “VC” or a startup, the city, or even the journalists who could give us all a boost. Rather it is all of us failing individually by not doing enough, giving enough, risking enough, and believing enough in one another. So what can we do? The answer to that has been for many former San Diegans to move themselves and their startups and companies up north to the Bay Area, and sometimes even to L.A. I met many former San Diego founders in the Bay Area who once they moved away from San Diego found immense success, started a new venture, or became part of another one with great success. They all have been trying to convince me to move myself and my company to the Bay Area, and the thought has been seriously weighing on our minds at CrowdClock. Especially because I came here on a Tuesday to meet with Yelp and ended up getting an investor interested on the second day of my stay with a pending deal happening on the third. I never imagined CrowdClock would be so quick to garner interest, and actually get it going. But it has, and that has made me both ecstatic, but also very pissed off as crude as that sounds. Because I love San Diego and I want to grow CrowdClock in San Diego, not outside it. There is also an excellent article by Mark Suster on what a city needs in order to thrive and San Diego is mentioned as a city with problems, and going down the list it is easy to see what is missing.

So what makes the Bay Area so different? It’s certainly not the weather. Do they have more intelligent people? Not really. What they have is the following:

Investors who are willing to take a chance and who see “experience” based on what you have built and accomplished, not on what previous exits you have had, nor on whether or not you got your PhD from Stanford as a minimum criteria. 

Startups who truly give back by setting up events with lots of food and drinks. You can have free food every day and not pay a single day for it. One example is Stripe that recently closed an $80mm deal at a valuation of $1.5BB who threw a CTF event to invite hackers to break their codes. What Stripe and companies like it gain is an opportunity to hire the best talent from the ones who went furthest, but also to fix their codes where it was vulnerable. 

Coffee shops and banks setting up their locales in such a way that you could practically run your startup from those places. One such place is Capital One 360 Cafe which is a bank, or Workshop Cafe.

Investors hosting free events and being truly available by mingling with the “mere” mortals of startups.

Journalists and tech blogs actually writing about startups, not merely interviewing startups and then deciding whether or not to publish the interviews. 

After my successful meeting with the investor, I called up Eric and I told him the good news, but I also shared with him my personal disappointment in the San Diego startup scene. Some of the things I shared with him were that many of us claim to be all about helping each other when in reality it is all just talk and no walk. When CrowdClock announced the launch of its App in the App Store it was clearly evident that most, if not all startup founders in San Diego, including others who did not bother to download our App, let alone review it. When Tanya Goodwin launched Activebudz I immediately downloaded it and told my wife and friends to do the same. If we really truly want San Diego to join the list of best startup cities then we must help one another. Imagine we have 200 startups in San Diego with an average headcount of 10 people at each. Multiply those by the number of people they can each convince to review, join, or download the new App in town, well you get the idea. A new San Diego startup could all of a sudden get 20,000+ downloads, reviews, members, and much more in a very short amount of time. Eric and I talked about this at length and we have decided to do something about it. Because the people up in San Francisco and surrounding areas are working 10x harder than any of us, helping the community 100x than us, and attracting more engineering and design talent than anywhere else in the world. So let us help you to help us, and ultimately bring San Diego up the ranks from the bottom of the pits we are stuck in right now. We will be announcing something very soon and I will take as active of a role as I possibly can with Eric and others. I strongly encourage you all to do the same because this is our city, our future, and ultimately it can be our demise, or our success. The choice is in our hands. 

Sincerely,

So what were these changes? Here is a sample of what they asked.

1. During the signup process the business signing up should be able to get to the dashboard ASAP. That meant we cut out the whole process of setting up the Services offered, and went straight to the credit card info once the business name, and email was given.

2. Employees of a business should not be able to see customer emails. The thought behind it was that what if an employee decides to email the customers by copying and pasting the emails? So we disabled the ability for employees to see individual emails. 

3. Once signed up, and pressing Login, the button should not go away with the move of the mouse pointer. It should remain in place. 

There were some ideas we did reject though, and they all had their logical reasoning behind them. Here they are in no particular order.

1. Allow business owners to add each service underneath a category. While the idea is good in theory, it would mean we'd have to add one more step for the end user to swipe through on the mobile App. So we rejected the idea. For now.

2. Extend the viewing area of the Services area inside the dashboard. We did it on our staging server, and the results were disastrous as best. So we rejected that idea as well. 

As we continue to getting more customers, and continue receiving feedback from the existing ones, CrowdClock will surely evolve as it looks and feels today to something better, more robust, and far more functional. 

This begs the question, what is Phase 2, and when is that coming? Phase 2 in our roadmap is the launch of the redesigned iPhone App for iOS 7. We finished the App back in the summer, but held off on releasing it. Then came iOS 7, and as they say the rest is history. So we began to rethink the way our App ought to function and behave. That is our Phase 2. 

You might ask, will there be a Phase 3, Phase 4, and so on? The answer is yes. We cannot reveal yet to the public what they are, but they are not only on the drawing board right now, but some of them are also in early development stages. 

Stay tuned as our journey continues to unfold. And as always, we always welcome feedback, both small and big. And if you just want to give us a thumbs up please Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or +1 us on Google+. 

With humble gratitude,

Yashar