The Third Meetup

Last Tuesday was our third meetup for Chuck Eesley’s venture-lab.org. Instead of the Michigan Street Starbucks opposite to The Chicago Tribune, we pivoted to the Wormhole for this one. For any geek who has been to this place, knows what a riot it is. From “Back to the Future” time-machine retro-fitted on the ceiling, old atari cartridges as showpieces on the coffee-table, super typo-friendly wifi password, stopwatch controlled brewing, Starwars puppets, shopkeep.com app on ipad instead of cashbox – the bearded coffee masters had it all. Everything except a place to accommodate the thunderous 8 of Lake Effect Ventures.

Two hours of caffeine drenched brainstorming spitted out the following:

  1. I sketched out how the process might flow in two steps.  We are down to a pretty bare minimum concept build which is ideal both for this class and for getting something up quickly so that we can test it.
  2. I set up a Twitter account for Lake Effect Ventures so that we can tweet about progress we are making.
  3. Andy is going to jot up a positioning statement and beef up the business model canvas for the concept
  4. Leandre will use these to complete our 2-slide initial submission for our deliverable for the next deadline
  5. Leandre will also use this to start to craft a presentation deck
  6. Benn will be working on the copy for the landing page that I started.
  7. Benn will also be crafting a logo in Photoshop (Alex, Zak, Sidi if any one of you is good with design Benn would appreciate the assistance there)
  8. We need to think of a name for the concept as well

We think it is a bit premature to start on the user stories right now given that we have a good idea of what we are gonna build. Charles and me are gonna start on that and look to have something complete from a Version 1.0 standpoint by mid next week barring no setbacks. We will look to craft the user stories once we complete the MVP and use them as structure for testing features and functionality (Zak stay tuned on this)
Benn and Andy will also be working on putting together a more formal customer survey so that we structure the interviews we are having and start to compile meaningful data which we will need going forward.
Its getting exciting ….