

My Startup (WindyCitizen) named one of Chicago's New Essentials - brandnewlow
http://chicago.timeout.com/articles/features/83158/chicago-new-essentials

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rms
Congrats! No obligation for you to answer, but have you raised any funding
yet? Would you be able to spend a lot of money to scale more rapidly or is
going more slowly a better strategy for you?

~~~
brandnewlow
Great question. Someone asked me about funding last night at the HN Chicago
meetup.

In all honesty, I haven't thought a whole lot about it. I reached out to
alumni entrepreneurs from my university when I was starting Windy Citizen to
get advice. One of them, a guy who works in VC in the energy field, pointed
out that I had no clue what I was doing, so:

a) Evaluating a technical partner would be extremely difficult. b) Evaluating
potential angel investors would be just as hard.

He offered to give me a call every Sunday for a year for advice and moral
support if I promised to go it alone for one year, build my own tech (tricky
considering I'm a decent designer but not a backend guy), and not take any
money from anyone.

That first year was miserable as I iterated through a few versions of the
product and lived on about $10k that I earned from freelance writing and
design gigs. The first idea was to build a big blog network for Chicago. I
found about 20 writers, but ran into two big problems:

1\. Drupal's content creation forms are not suitable for non-technical users
or people without special training. They have some WYSIWYG add-ons, but
they're frankly terrible compared to Wordpress/Squarespace/MT. This meant I
had to post up most of the blog posts myself and my writers were always
frustrated and demoralized. On my end, I lacked the skills to build a good
writing UI or the funds to hire someone to do it for me.

2\. With my time swallowed up by posting and editing stories, I had no time to
even worry about ad sales or recruit new writers. I think a local blog network
could work really well...if you had 2-3 guys. As a solo project, no dice.

So 9 months in, I switched to letting anyone join up and share links to their
favorite local news, blogs, and events. We've been doing that for the last 14
months. Midway through that, I picked up someone to handle ad-sales on
commission with some opportunity to earn equity in the business. Together
we've reached a healthy "ramen profitablity" position and are having a lot of
fun.

4 months ago, I scored a $35k grant from the Chicago Community Trust to invest
in our tech. We've spent a bit of it on performance improvements and are
looking to spend a bit more on FB/Twitter integration (if you're good at that
stuff, drop me a line!).

So I've been pursuing the slow growth strategy. All bootstrap so far. I
believe we're very close to "cracking the code" for doing this sort of thing
which then could change things a bit, but in the meantime we're working on
incremental improvements to our sales strategy and product.

~~~
nkh
Could you elaborate more on the process of getting the grant? That is an
avenue of funding I would love to hear more about.

Please don't give away any information that might hurt you or that you would
be uncomfortable sharing.

~~~
brandnewlow
I wish there was some magic to it. I've only applied for stuff that was aimed
at supporting new news-related ideas. So far I've applied for 7 grants and won
one of them. I have two applications in the hopper right now but both are
longshots.

For this grant in particular, the Chicago Community Trust announced it had
$500,000 and wanted to give it to Chicago-based, Chicago-focused, news-
oriented projects. About 70 people applied and they gave money to 12
applicants. I received a little less than half of what I requested but am
extremely grateful and excited to have some cash to play with. Considering the
criteria, I probably would have done something drastic had I not made the cut
for that one... :)

~~~
tbrooks
How do you hear about these grants? Are there any sites that specifically
focus on available grants?

------
brlewis
Congratulations! What are some good examples of feedback from HN that helped
you get there?

~~~
brandnewlow
HN has been my secret weapon from day one:

1\. You helped troubleshoot the first of my epic hosting/performance problems
and helped get me onto Slicehost <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=326012>

2\. You helped me find a dev to build a Twitter tracker for the special
election to replace Rahm Emmanuel in Congress
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466468>

3\. You helped introduce me to my biz-dev guy (an HN reader forwarded this
onto him) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=670204>

4\. And so on, and so on.

------
Jun8
Congratulations! I see GrubHub is there, too. It's great to see the increased
number of startups in Chicago, which is, you know, not a big startup hub.

~~~
brandnewlow
Yes indeed! Last night's HN Chicago meetup was a lot of fun. This is the third
or fourth one we've had. There's a great mix of bootstrappers, VC-types, CTO-
types, and gainfully employed devs looking to make the leap.

~~~
sachinag
Where the fuck were the gainfully employed devs looking to make the leap when
I was there? I didn't _want_ to move to Boston... And it's baseball season, to
boot. :(

~~~
brandnewlow
There's always a gap between what people tell you over beers and burgers at an
HN meetup and what they're actually willing to do...as you found firsthand...

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shafqat
This is awesome, congrats.

What really stands out is the way you engage this community, seek advice, and
give back with your honest response. Part of what makes HN great.

What can we help with? I have a dev team that might be able to spare some
bandwidth. If there's anything we can do, please let me know (email in the
profile). No strings attached.

~~~
brandnewlow
Thanks!

I'll drop you a line off HN.

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tptacek
Congratulations!

~~~
brandnewlow
Thanks man! Your advice and support have been a big boost. Been following your
suggestions about how to spend our cash so far. While it took 2-3 devs before
we found someone who wouldn't whine about working with a non-programmer on a
less-than-awesome codebase, we found a great guy and are getting stuff done in
bits and bursts.

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nlwhittemore
Congrats! I used to live in Chicago and would have loved this as a resource

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ryanb
The traffic growth is impressive. How did you first start getting traction?
What methods did you use to promote the site early on?

~~~
brandnewlow
A lot of that is the secret sauce. But direct e-mails to people who might be
interested in your content, and a lot of them, is really the only tool that's
worked.

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jpomerenke
How do you make sure that people are only posting news from Chicago?

~~~
brandnewlow
Thus far it's been security-via-obscurity plus aggressive moderation.

~~~
jpomerenke
How much time do you spend on moderation? Seems like it would be a lot of
work. Problems with spam?

~~~
brandnewlow
That's what interns and crowdsourcing is for. We've got a nifty "bury" feature
that lets you hide stories you don't like just like on a lot of these sites.

~~~
jpomerenke
Cool - Every major city should have one of these. Nice Job Man!

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kadavy
Great work, Brad!

~~~
brandnewlow
Thanks, man!

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kreem
Awesome!

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hockeybias
Good for you!!! (Go Blackhawks!)

