This Saturday (27th July 2013), I participated in Startup Columbus ‘Startup Saturday‘ monthly meetup. I came to know about the event from meetup.com.
The event was hosted at the Dublin Entrepreneurial Center. There were 10 participants in the meeting. It was scheduled from 9.30 am to 12 pm (though it got extended to 3 pm). The meeting was presided by Alex Jonas, organizer at Startup Ohio and Ohio Games Incubator. We started off by giving a quick 2 min. intro about ourselves. All other participants were employed and from various age groups. All were in various stages of their entrepreneurial journey – there was a guy Tim who is successfully running 2 startups already and had come to discuss about his third startup (25+ years experience). Then there was Victoria who had lots of experience (17+) in all kinds of administrative and marketing tasks – she had helped with the operations for many early stage startups. There were also people who were simply interested in knowing more about entrepreneurship and had come for meeting up new people.
After the intro, we were each given the opportunity to ask about any specific problem/ assistance/guidance that we needed. The whole team would then discuss and come up with various solutions. Problems like pricing strategy, marketing strategy, increasing & retention of user-base etc. were discussed. A participant Chintan (possibly Indian) had come up with a project called Qlyer. He wanted advice on gaining more traction. Another participant Naina had an idea but didn’t know where to start. I personally didn’t have any problem to discuss. I told about the ideas and projects that I am part of. Everyone was really supportive and came up with lots of suggestions. Contrary to my expectation, the idea of DialBlood and TinyMail were well received. Another participant Ron, who had a Ph.D in Geography and is presently running his own mapping solution startup was interested in our project ‘SMS based vehicle locating system’. The team suggested that we should look into possibilities of future collaboration.
After the discussions, we were taken for a tour of the DEC by Alex. DEC presently houses 90+ startups. In the same building, there was also a data center. Alex explained the story behind some of the recent incubatees. After the tour, the meet up was officially over. (~ 12.30pm). A few of us stayed back and discussed about various startup related topics. I got the opportunity to talk to Alex in person for some 2 hours. It was a nice interaction – he told me about various initiatives that he had started, about the state of entrepreneurship in Columbus and Ohio in general, about upcoming events etc. He also agreed to introduce me to a few people who are part of TechColumbus, another incubator. I told him about Startup Village and inquired about possibilites of partnering SV with DEC or TechColumbus or other incubators here so that startups in both places can be mutually benefited. Alex was interested in the idea and told me that he’s consider the options.
Lastly, Dave another participant who was a linguistic expert as well as a Karate teacher (and ofcourse a startup enthusiast) was kind enough to drop me back home. That was especially helpful since public transport is less frequent in Ohio esp. in weekends – I had only a single bus for returning, that too once in an hour and the nearest bus stop was a half an hour walk.
To conclude, the meetup was a very enriching experience.
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