#leannewark

If you frequent the tech scene in Newark, you know him. He's the sleek, polished, gentleman at a corner table in the Converge co-work space or =SPACE incubator, perhaps wearing a lapel pin and carrying the classic 80's laptop bag sold by his company, Geek Supply, which could pass for cool streetwear or, better, geek-wear!  In fact, he can't walk down the street without feeling he's been transposed to a Bugle Boy jeans commercial; only the question is where did you get that bag? It's been such a hurdle getting to his destination that he's even resorted to turning the bag's eye-popping details inward, to hide them from view and facilitate his commute. It's a great problem to have when your products are sought after, when you've merged, quite well in my opinion, the iconic elements of street, geek and gentleman. Jimi Olaghere, co-founder of Geek Supply Co. powered by Geek Cook, is doing just that with his new line A Geek & A Gentleman.  The line is described as a fusion of two unique lifestyles creating accessories to enhance your suit and products to make you stand out. Yup! If the creator is any indication, this line is definitely his offspring.

But it's Olaghere's cause-related consciousness that sparked me to reach out and talk business. You see, he and I share a common thread--Sickle Cell Anemia. My mother passed on due to complications related to the genetic disease. Olaghere is bravely battling and living with Sickle Cell Anemia daily and brings awareness to our nation's need for more education and bone marrow donors. He and I will be partnering in these efforts. 

It's cool to be fashionable, tech savvy, cause-conscious and innovative all at once. Olaghere has founded companies such as BagAWriter.com and GeekCookUSA. He's an alumnus of Lean Startup Machine Newark and has taken his businesses and ideas through the validation process, made pivots, and seen resulting growth. So this year, Jimi Olaghere signed on to not only mentor, but his company, Geek Supply, is a Sponsor of this year's Lean Newark weekend in November. 

Come meet Olaghere and his product lines, Geek Supply and A Geek & A Gentleman, at the Lean Indiegrove Social (#LeanIndiegroveSocial) in Jersey City, Wednesday, October 8, 2014 6:30p-8:30p. Browse items to increase your cool at our Geek Swag Boutique.

There will be other presentations during the night, including Bad Ass Startup Hacks, Lean Startup How To, and Google+ Enlightenment, to help you achieve stress-less existence and higher efficiency through tools to make your life and business better. Attend the last Lean social mixer of the season before we kick off our Lean Newark workshop next month! Check out the full agenda.

Grab your tickets, bring friends! Join the convo on Twitter #LeanIndiegroveSocial.

Geek Supply Swag Boutique: A Geek & A Gentleman powered by GeekCook featuring Founder, Jimi Olaghere

The fusion of two unique lifestyles creating accessories to enhance your suit and products to make you stand out.

April Peters, Founding Organizer | Lean Newark

Join the Movement to Unlock Newark and bring Lean to the city in 2014! Sign up in support here.

Guest post by April Peters, Recording Artist, Singer-Songwriter, and Founding Organizer for Lean Newark 

Before you find yourself in the pitfalls of false starts and failed attempts month after grueling month, perhaps even years, launching an idea or product, I’ve got something great for you! Last week, I spent quality time at Brick City Tech’s Meetup and fireside chat on Crowd-funding and Intellectual Property, featuring panelists David Postolski, a registered patent and intellectual property attorney at Day Pitney, and Kim Wales of Wales Capital, a thought leader in the crowd-funding industry. Conversation surrounded tech startup, protecting yourself and your ideas, and beating a lack of capital through alternative investment paths like crowd-funding.

The room was electric with riveting personal stories of stolen ideas, inventions on the market, copyright infringements, successful fundraising efforts and failed crowd-funding campaigns (this one hit close to home). David and Kim adeptly shared what differentiated the failures from the successes—such as lack of market research, unprotected inventions, sharing new ideas too soon, the need to sufficiently build networks (professional and social media) before launching a fundraising campaign, and ignoring the tried-and-true value of face-to-face personal interaction.

Now for that great thing…. Lean Startup Machine Weekends in Newark teach the above-mentioned key principles in only three days, treating startup like an experiment and helping you ask, “Should this product be built?” and “Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?” During a Lean Newark weekend you’ll be able to: 1. Figure out the problem you want to solve; 2. Learn before you launch; and 3. Get out of the building to test the product’s/service’s viability with ACTUAL customers.

I’m excited to reconnect with our partners, Judith Sheft, NJIT, Anthony Frasier, The Phat Startup and Brick City Tech to co-host additional tech meet-ups and social events leading up to the Lean Newark 2014 workshop. We still need about 100 more signups to bring the workshop to Newark, so please add your email at https://www.leanstartupmachine.com/cities/newark to help us UNLOCK Newark!

Follow Lean Newark on Twitter

April Peters

True Story - I'm sitting in Art Kitchen clearing a 1,000+ emails.  A pleasant young lady asks to take a picture of my Lean Startup Machine Fail Fast/Succeed Faster sticker.  Turns out it's Tiffany Aliche, The Budgenista.

I'd been following Tiffany's ascent from blogger to author to Today Show guest.  Between our mutual friends and Facebook, I felt like I knew her well (although we never actually met until a couple of weeks ago).  A week prior, I mentioned to Emily Manz of Brick City Development Corp that Tiffany would be a great case study for running Lean. Low & behold, she introduced herself on the strength of my sticker -- from there agreed to keynote the Lean Newark workshop on November 8th!

I'm excited for The Budgetnista to share her journey from experience, to business idea, to validation and scale -- it's what LeanStartup is all about.

And to think, our encounter was created by a sticker ... or really a willingness for us to share our beliefs with one another.  Few lessons learned I that day about creating relationships:

Engage in conversation. Communication is the first step to success. Whether it's developing a plan, pitching a product or more importantly meeting the talented people to push a vision forward.  Don't be afraid to build new relationships.  #ThePowerofWho

Always represent.  I believe in the power of lean principles to create change through entrepreneurship.  So I rep' it all day -- on my computer, in discussions with colleagues and even my own family when I'm approached about business ideas.  #StayTrue #BeYou

I had a quick conversation with Mark Annett, founder of Snackbuilder about his experience winning the LSM Newark workshop in March 2013.  Here are his thoughts ...

There is a different class of people that are willing to give up an entire weekend dedicated to learning and practicing the lean start-up methodology in a 72 hour marathon.  They are not the same people that you will meet at normal meet-up.  These are dedicated individuals who you definitely want working on your start-up team! This is also definitely not a hack-a-thon!  In order to win you need to get out of the building and talk to your potential customers and learn what they really want, not what you think you want.  It is a very humbling experience to learn that the brilliant idea that you walked in the door with is completely wrong.  However, it is the most empowering experience in the world to not only watch the team that you are leading pivot but to lead them by rewriting your company’s new narrative. Reading the techniques  in a book is one thing but practicing them among a group of highly motivated learns like yourself is life changing. You will not be the same entrepreneur that you walked in as 72 hours later. Our riskiest assumption as a new company is that “We think we know what we are doing.”  If you are not listening to your customers and validating your assumptions then believe me you have no idea what you are doing.  We constantly return to our experience and the tools we learned in Lean Start-up Machine Newark to guide our new company, and you will too.

#LeanNewark was in the building for The Phat Startup + Brick City Tech Meetup - Being a (non-tech) Founder: Contributing With Code  taught by Zach Goodman, CEO of Unlockable.  

Big Ups to Anthony Frasier and James Lopez  of The Phat Startup for shipping a dope event, and K&L Gates for continuing to support our growing startup community in Newark.

Code vs no-code, buy vs build, lean vs waterfall is in heavy debate amongst startup communities and our web forums.  One aspect that's universally accepted (at least I think so) is that building a sustainable business requires great teams, interesting markets and solid products.  All of which can and must be built by the founder and require no code at all to begin to understand.  This is one of the core tenets of #leanstartup methodologies - to understand what to build prior to writing a line of code (or manufacturing a widget, or leasing a storefront, etc. etc.).

Zach Goodman, seasoned entrepreneur, Vimeo copywriter and CEO of Unlockable shared his bumps & bruises as a non-tech founder who lost $20K and a few years on building a consumer trivia-based advertising solution - a product that no one wanted.  After intimately learning that his job as a startup CEO is to assemble teams, manage resources and sell his vision, he successfully pivoted to Unlockable, a solution for turning commercials into games for unlocking free web content.

Although not a #lean discussion per se, Zach's talk on validating web service ideas without coding was chock-full of #leanstartup principles like #custdev, #MVP, #gettingoutofthebuilding and #validatedlearning.  I won't go into detail about Zach's lecture (you can see for yourself by following Zach & attending one of his classes).  Instead, here are a list of entrepreneurial nuggets that Zach dropped on us tonight:

The only way to learn to build a web product, is to build a web product (whiteboards, wireframes, crude UIs)

1st rule of product design is to limit features to exactly what you can & need to deliver

1st product failed because I didn't get out of the building

"I could've learned the same thing without coding and saved $20,000"

Convince yourself first of the idea - then family, mentors, teammates, customers, and lastly - investors

Your co-founder must bleed the same blood as you

You can't control collisions, but you can control spins - ie Build/Measure/Learn

Contributing without code requires passion, design visioning and selling

Don't overcomplicate the problem

Leverage existing platforms serving your market to niche down your product