Entrepreneur In Training

What Twitter has done for me

I was at a talk given by Guy Kawasaki tonight at the Houston Technology Center. He was great, it was free, and though there were no mind-altering revelations Guy did talk about things that I need to remember to do as I pursue my start-up dreams. One thing he talked about was how his latest venture alltop.com would not be possible without Twitter. He uses twitter to get ideas from the people that follow him as he builds out the top sources for new topics on alltop.

In the last few weeks Twitter has done quite a bit for me too. The first valuable connection I made was with the guys from Downtown Cartel. I had met Cody and Aaron at a Startup Houston event in January, exchanged cards, started following each other on Twitter and that was about it. As I was sorting through options of outsourcing development work and getting frustrated with the lack of interaction I saw the following from Cody late one night:

I responded back. told him what I was working on and it was on. We haven’t finalized the details but I think its going to be a good fit and we are both excited about the project.

The next connection I made on Twitter was with Peldi Guilizzoni. I was reading about a new method of pitching VCs with a twitpitch. Basically in 3 tweets you had to get this VCs attention. I searched on twitpitch and among many results I saw this one:

I clicked on the link to balsamiq and found exactly the tool I was looking for to better represent the idea I had so that Downtown Cartel could build it for me. Peldi has built a fabulous application called Balsamiq Mockups. I can’t speak highly enough about how useful and fun this tool is to use. You have to try it for yourself. Over the last week he and I have exchanged many emails and IMs about the product. Its the type of relationship I hope to build with my customers one day. Peldi and I have shared some thoughts about startups as well and I’m looking forward to continuing our conversations.

And finally I was reading some tweets from Jon Wheatley at IndieStartups.com. He had some logo work done that he was really happy with from a guy I only knew as @rsek. I contacted him and asked if he was interested in some more logo work and sent him some information on what I wanted. The first logo was off base but he quickly responded with something that was very close to what I wanted. About 4 iterations later I had what I wanted at a very good price. All of this took about 2 hours. I later found out a little bit more about @rsek. You can too by visiting his website and throwing him so logo and design work. Tom is a standup guy. I sent him a second logo I had to see if he had any ideas for improvement. He could have squeezed me for some money, but he told me he thought it was a solid logo. I love it when you find people that you would work without hesitation again and recommend to your friends. Tom is that guy. 

None of these relationships would have happened without Twitter. People can call it a waste of time or a distraction but I very much disagree. I think Guy would also. You will make connections, discover information and collaborate with people you never otherwise would have found. 

So up to now in my blog posts I have mentioned this mystery project. I have two actually but the one that has most of my attention is called Supplier View. I’ll be sharing more about this in the coming weeks but I’m pretty proud of the logo Tom did for me and wanted to share it now. It might give you a little indication of what Supplier View will become.