It is customary to spend the tail end of every year reflecting on what has transpired over the past 12 months. Goal setting ensues once the 1st day of the new year arrives, with a focus on self improvement, elimination of vices and lofty milestones.
I’ve been terrible in consistently documenting efforts to grow our company. I hope to do a better job in the coming months, in addition to growing our business, increasing the traction we currently have and raising some capital. We’ll write more in the coming weeks about some new developments and directions, but for now, here’s an analysis of what has taken place over the last 12 months.
2011 was a year full of success and failure and galvanizing experiences that helped us grow GoodEatsFor.Me and better understand our business, our customers, ourselves and the challenges of startup life.
In January of 2011 we applied to TechStars Boston for the second time. Unlike the previous year, we had a product and some customer feedback and as such were selected to attend TechStars For A Day (#TS4AD) in Boston to meet the team and discuss our candidacy. Unfortunately, i was traveling outside of the US when we found out that we were asked to attend TS4AD. Lucky for me i have an awesome cofounder in Mike who got on the Acela from NYC, came down to Boston and represented us well (despite contracting a horrible case of food poisoning the night before - a story of epic proportions ). While we thought we made a compelling case for Techstars Boston in 2011, alas it was not to be.
We had applied to the New York University Stern School of Business New Venture competition (Mike’s alma mater) at the end of 2010 and were in the throes of competition around the same time we received our TechStars Boston rejection. Mike and I had applied to the competition in 2008 with our failed startup CoachAlly and progressed to the quarterfinals. Over the course of the next several months up through April 2011, Mike and I updated the competition committee on our progress and perfected our pitch deck. We steadily advanced throughout the competition to the semifinals, but after 9 months of competition, we didn’t make the finals and had to be content with being one of 30 semifinalists in competition from an original set of 230 teams.
In February, our application to the Foursquare app gallery was approved and we were included amongst all the other apps that use the Foursquare API. We recieved a lot of signups from our inclusion in the app gallery.
Around the same time we were negotiating our first marketing and distribution partnership with Managed Data Group, a Point-of-sale integrator who helps hospitality establishments normalize the point of sale data across multiple businesses. This partnership provided us with distribution, revenue and good customer feedback about our offering and where we needed to focus our efforts.
As this was the first time Mike and I needed to officially sign something, we needed to incorporate. Through the wonderful introduction of our friend and fellow entrepreneur Russell Wallace (CEO of CivicSponsor) I ended up connecting with Richard Hesp at the law firm Gunderson Dettmer. They got us incorporated, helped us negotiate the contract and supported us through the entrepreneurial process. They’ll be helpful to us and we hope to use their services a lot more over the coming months as we grow the business and raise our first round.
Press opportunities are always good and I was approached by my friend Mike Schneider at the end of March 2011 to talk about a new book he was coauthoring with Aaron Strout - location based marketing for dummies. We ended up submitting a writeup and were included in the book as ‘one of the management tools to use’. The book was published in August of 2011 and you can get your copy on Amazon here.
Mike and his colleague Eric Liest of Allen & Gerritsen were kind enough to interview me on their web show TechInterruption talking about the future of GoodEats and my thoughts on the industry at the end of April 2010.
In early May I also ended up representing GoodEatsFor.Me on a Tastybytes panel entitled “LBS - Not Just for Mayors” hosted by Compete.com.
We received some press mentions over the course of the year, including a mention in Xconomy in July, a mention in Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog in September and a nice piece in the Boston Business Journal in December of 2011.
We are excited about 2012 and are hard at work launching some new things that we hope will help our customers and the industry.
As of January 2012, we have over 100+ beta signups and are working on some big improvements to the site that should help merchants get more value out of GoodEatsFor.Me and help us open up the beta to anyone who wants to sign up to try out our service for free! A bunch of improvements are going to make GoodEatsFor.Me the easiest system to set up and monitor the social activity around your establishment and we are experimenting with a big new idea that should help both our fellow hospitality Startups and the merchants they service. We hope to announce more at the end of the month, so stay tuned and thank you for your support.
