San Antonio Startup Weekend

If you stop by ForceXchange.com, you’ll see that Johnathan Ianotti and Jonathan Kelly have been pounding out the code today. They had to make up a lot of ground after some setbacks with off-the-shelf products; but they’ve done a great job of making up ground. We have put together a lot of the business process. We are finding that our business model currently bypasses a lot of the standard business plan line items.

For you business geeks, our business models currently have limited startup costs. Our biggest cost, to date, will be incorporation fees to the Texas Secretary of State; a total of $300. Then there is the $18 for the domain name. We have no payables, no payroll, no rent, no utilities, and a great many other items. I have the forms set up for our financials; but I find that we have extremely low costs for startup. We won’t start incurring serious costs until AFTER revenue has started coming in. Most of what would be business assets, normally, is already owned by the team. We all have computers, we all have phones, and so on. For me, it’s very strange to see financials with a lot of goose eggs on them. None of us expect to draw a salary or to incur costs that will break us. On the surface, it seems like it is all positive. Of course, time will tell. In the meantime, we’ll just enjoy the good vibes that the plan gives us.

Given time constraints, we have decided on a few key deliverables for tomorrow. There will be a soft launch of the service so that we can prove the concept works before making improvements to monetize. If we keep it small, we can expect that we can maintain the “free” costs until we are ready to deliver full production deliverables. In short, we have a small number of key deliverables for tomorrow to get us rolling. We are not expecting a full-blown business coming out of this; but we will have a damn good, workable start.

We’re winding down and may be leaving soon, maybe.