#leanstartupmachine

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!

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April Peters

Strategic Partnerships Director

Our friends at Lean Startup Machine are looking for the an enthusiastic, friendly, and aggressive individual to lead their sponsorship effort.

The job responsibilities:

Ability to drive the sales process from plan to close—including stakeholder identification, customer influence, relationship building, and closing.

Create and manage a pipeline of potential sponsors – locally and globally

Train coordinators on how to properly position sponsorships

Manage warm and hot leads

Pitch and close deals and manage sponsor expectations

Renew existing business

Qualifications:

3-5 years sales or partnerships experience

Deep understanding of how to manage customer relationships

Clear communication both written and verbal

Proven ability to navigate through ambiguity

Strong leadership track record

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

This is a good morning! A little angst awaiting some news. Here's hoping. knowing that whatever happens, that's the plan. But really, truly, hoping and praying I demonstrated dedication, interest in helping their bottom line, had good enough questions, etc. all that stuff. Of course in hindsight my own analysis is that in that aspect off prep, I wish I'd done better in preparing questions to ask about them. I never feel quite like I'm nimble enough on my feet to wing that and looking back that is the one glaring omission from my prep time.

So, here's hoping that what I had prepared was enough. And that, with some help from fate, and the great people at the organization, that they'll give me the callback.

Theirs is a mission that is truly an inspiration, providing organizations, enterprises  and individuals the tools they need to transform, inspire and build a better world. Making waves around the world, being surrounded daily by those people, dedication to working hard, inspired by both the city around, the mentors and the motivation of absolutely loving the mission behind what you do.

It truly would be a dream. So here's hoping.