Everyone pulls up everyone by the bootstraps.
That was a theme of the Stirfry Startup incubation last weekend.
Stirfry Start Ups is a group of like minded individuals working to develop various projects, web-based and not, as a vehicle for success. While our individual projects vary from building a collaborative work space, selling information on the internet, lifestyle commentary, a yoga business, comic books and podcasting, etc, we all seem to enjoy building something that is our own, and seeing where we can take it.
Rowena hosted this weekend at her beautiful place on the hill above Dolores Park. In attendence were myself, Rowena, Dave, Walter, Sarah, and Ben.
I worked on my OnlyTheValiant website for my Valiant Comics podcast. I recently scrapped the old site and reinstalled a new site, based on WordPress instead of Drupal, which is what the old site was built with. WordPress is now the only CMS I use for sites.
One of the most fun, and helpful, portions of the weekend was when we took turns in the “hotseat”, and put our website up on a big monitor for everybody to critique. Questions came up about what the intended use of the site is, how to design the site to facilitate that intended use, how to convey quickly what the site is about, and how to make sites more readable and present better.
I received a lot of comments on OnlyTheValiant.com, and was able to create a pen and paper markup of how I want the site to look. If you look at the site now, it is functional and presentable. I got a lot of comments on how to emphasize what needs to be emphasized, and how to lay out the site to accomplish the goal for the website, which is to get people to listen and subscribe to the podcast.
I have a very clear idea of what changes will be made in the future, and in another week or two, I believe the site will be much better.
I also realized this weekend that I thoroughly enjoy thinking about, discussing, and implementing website design. It was as helpful and rewarding to offer advice and comments to others as it was to receive them.
This leads to the second major result of this weekend, the idea of the groupstrap. Stirfry startups is essentially a groupstrap idea. Instead of each of us pulling ourselves up by our boot straps, we pull each other up by each other’s bootstraps.
This is an interesting concept, and we saw this in practice over the weekend. Each of us has some relative expertise on something within the group, and we can share that with each other. In this way, each of us benefits from the abilities of each other, resulting in better ventures for all of us. It is mutual sharing, it is community as a service, and it works.
Tags: Stirfry Startups