My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials

http://chicago.timeout.com/articles/features/83158/chicago-new-essentials

by brandnewlow • 16 years ago

68 38 16 years ago

chicago.timeout.com

rms• 16 years ago

Congrats! No obligation for you to answer, but have you raised any funding yet? Would you be able to spend a lot of money to scale more rapidly or is going more slowly a better strategy for you?

brandnewlow15• 16 years ago

Great question. Someone asked me about funding last night at the HN Chicago meetup.

In all honesty, I haven't thought a whole lot about it. I reached out to alumni entrepreneurs from my university when I was starting Windy Citizen to get advice. One of them, a guy who works in VC in the energy field, pointed out that I had no clue what I was doing, so:

a) Evaluating a technical partner would be extremely difficult. b) Evaluating potential angel investors would be just as hard.

He offered to give me a call every Sunday for a year for advice and moral support if I promised to go it alone for one year, build my own tech (tricky considering I'm a decent designer but not a backend guy), and not take any money from anyone.

That first year was miserable as I iterated through a few versions of the product and lived on about $10k that I earned from freelance writing and design gigs. The first idea was to build a big blog network for Chicago. I found about 20 writers, but ran into two big problems:

1. Drupal's content creation forms are not suitable for non-technical users or people without special training. They have some WYSIWYG add-ons, but they're frankly terrible compared to Wordpress/Squarespace/MT. This meant I had to post up most of the blog posts myself and my writers were always frustrated and demoralized. On my end, I lacked the skills to build a good writing UI or the funds to hire someone to do it for me.

2. With my time swallowed up by posting and editing stories, I had no time to even worry about ad sales or recruit new writers. I think a local blog network could work really well...if you had 2-3 guys. As a solo project, no dice.

So 9 months in, I switched to letting anyone join up and share links to their favorite local news, blogs, and events. We've been doing that for the last 14 months. Midway through that, I picked up someone to handle ad-sales on commission with some opportunity to earn equity in the business. Together we've reached a healthy "ramen profitablity" position and are having a lot of fun.

4 months ago, I scored a $35k grant from the Chicago Community Trust to invest in our tech. We've spent a bit of it on performance improvements and are looking to spend a bit more on FB/Twitter integration (if you're good at that stuff, drop me a line!).

So I've been pursuing the slow growth strategy. All bootstrap so far. I believe we're very close to "cracking the code" for doing this sort of thing which then could change things a bit, but in the meantime we're working on incremental improvements to our sales strategy and product.

nkh• 16 years ago

Could you elaborate more on the process of getting the grant? That is an avenue of funding I would love to hear more about.

Please don't give away any information that might hurt you or that you would be uncomfortable sharing.

brandnewlow15• 16 years ago

Here's a great example of how our users feel about Windy Citizen: http://www.windycitizen.com/chicago/media/2010/02/25/windy-c...

<blockquote>The nice thing about Windy Citizen is that is embraces a diversity of views -- even allowing stray libertarians and organic conservatives on board -- along with the usual multitude of bloviating Chicago nanny state enthusiasts. I just wish that WC could get someone to work out all of the computer programming glitches.</blockquote>

pclark• 16 years ago

> He offered to give me a call every Sunday for a year for advice and moral support if I promised to go it alone for one year, build my own tech (tricky considering I'm a decent designer but not a backend guy), and not take any money from anyone.

sounds like a great guy, really good of him.

ashishk2• 16 years ago

Could you elaborate on your experiences of building out an ad sales program/team?

How much traffic did you have when you started selling ads? What type of CPM are you able to see?

The reason I ask is that I run a niche community site that gets a decent amount of pageviews but I'm not sure how much I could make by selling ads against it.

marcusestes• 16 years ago

How is Drupal working out for you as a platform?

brlewis• 16 years ago

Congratulations! What are some good examples of feedback from HN that helped you get there?

brandnewlow15• 16 years ago

HN has been my secret weapon from day one:

1. You helped troubleshoot the first of my epic hosting/performance problems and helped get me onto Slicehost http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=326012

2. You helped me find a dev to build a Twitter tracker for the special election to replace Rahm Emmanuel in Congress http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466468

3. You helped introduce me to my biz-dev guy (an HN reader forwarded this onto him) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=670204

4. And so on, and so on.

tptacek• 16 years ago

Congratulations!

brandnewlow15• 16 years ago

Thanks man! Your advice and support have been a big boost. Been following your suggestions about how to spend our cash so far. While it took 2-3 devs before we found someone who wouldn't whine about working with a non-programmer on a less-than-awesome codebase, we found a great guy and are getting stuff done in bits and bursts.

nlwhittemore• 16 years ago

Congrats! I used to live in Chicago and would have loved this as a resource

hockeybias• 16 years ago

Good for you!!! (Go Blackhawks!)

Jun82• 16 years ago

Congratulations! I see GrubHub is there, too. It's great to see the increased number of startups in Chicago, which is, you know, not a big startup hub.

brandnewlow15• 16 years ago

Yes indeed! Last night's HN Chicago meetup was a lot of fun. This is the third or fourth one we've had. There's a great mix of bootstrappers, VC-types, CTO-types, and gainfully employed devs looking to make the leap.

Jun82• 16 years ago

Shucks, I didn't know we had HN Chicago meetings. I joined the Google Group. Will be there next time.

sachinag• 16 years ago

Where the fuck were the gainfully employed devs looking to make the leap when I was there? I didn't want to move to Boston... And it's baseball season, to boot. :(

cpher• 16 years ago

Had a great time last night at the meetup. Didn't get a chance to meet you though! FYI, I'm in the latter group above.

kreem• 16 years ago

Awesome!

ryanb• 16 years ago

The traffic growth is impressive. How did you first start getting traction? What methods did you use to promote the site early on?

brandnewlow15• 16 years ago

A lot of that is the secret sauce. But direct e-mails to people who might be interested in your content, and a lot of them, is really the only tool that's worked.

kadavy• 16 years ago

Great work, Brad!

brandnewlow15• 16 years ago

Thanks, man!

jpomerenke3• 16 years ago

How do you make sure that people are only posting news from Chicago?

brandnewlow15• 16 years ago

Thus far it's been security-via-obscurity plus aggressive moderation.

jpomerenke3• 16 years ago

How much time do you spend on moderation? Seems like it would be a lot of work. Problems with spam?

shafqat• 16 years ago

This is awesome, congrats.

What really stands out is the way you engage this community, seek advice, and give back with your honest response. Part of what makes HN great.

What can we help with? I have a dev team that might be able to spare some bandwidth. If there's anything we can do, please let me know (email in the profile). No strings attached.

brandnewlow15• 16 years ago

Thanks!

I'll drop you a line off HN.

My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials

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