Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Kevin Leneway
I like a blog with ambition. When I decided to start my first blog last year, I wanted it to be big. So I came up with the boldest, most audacious, and in hindsight, most spectacularly stupid name I could think of – A Startup A Day. Do you have any idea how hard it is to come up with good startup ideas every once in a while, let alone on a consistent, daily basis? Trust me, it’s hard.
There were two things that I did have going for me. First, at least I didn’t call it “A Good Startup A Day”, which gave me the wiggle room I needed on those many muse-less evenings. And believe me, there were some real bombs. One of my personal least favorites was Startup #31: Things That Look Like Stuff . The premise was, and I swear I am not making this up, a site where you can post pictures of grilled cheese that look like the Virgin Mary.
Of course, it really didn’t matter if the ideas were good or not because no one was reading it. At first I chalked it up to the fact that I was just starting out and it would take a while for my future fan base to find me. After a few months of single-digit daily readers, I decided to buy my way to fame. In honor of my 50th idea, I posted several domain names and offered up $50 for the person who came up with the best startup for any of these names. I posted details of the contest to all the big social news sites and waited for the readers to start pouring in. A few days later, to my extreme embarrassment, not one single person had entered the contest. I mean, come on! $50, no strings attached, for maybe 60 seconds worth of work.
But I kept at it, if not posting every day then pretty darn close to it. I embraced my position as the ultimate Z-list blogger. Who cares if no one outside of my gene pool knew that I was spending an hour or two each day carefully crafting each post? The challenge kept me going, and even though I’ve managed to post 152 ideas in the past year, I still feel a little pang of guilt each night that I fall asleep without living up to my promise of posting a new idea each day.
When Marcelo asked me to join the team here at the Seattle 2.0 blog, I decided that instead of just doing a few random posts about some of the new and interesting startups in Seattle, I wanted to, once again, go big. And just like I did on the first day of my personal blog, I wanted to get it down in writing from day one, so that every time I put out a new post I have to live up to the huge challenge I laid out for myself from the beginning.
So here it is – my goal is to ensure that every single person on the planet knows that Seattle is hands-down the best place in the world to start a startup. They will know what I know, that the Seattle startup community is full of some of the most ridiculously talented, ambitious, world-altering people you will ever meet. It is the place where great ideas are brought to life, magical applications that allow the musically-illiterate compose a song , force the lazy to get back to work , and let my mom build a website as easily as she can get an Email address. It is a community that shares the wisdom of those who have been there before with the energy of next generation of amazing entrepreneurs .
We’ve got some work to do, but come on Seattle – it’s about time. Forget The Valley, it’s time for The Square to take it’s rightful place in the international spotlight. I’ll be posting about some of the startups and people that I know and admire, but if we don’t yet know each other, please take a minute to introduce yourself and tell me what you’re working on. You can Email me at kleneway@hotmail.com or shoot me a tweet over on Twitter ( astartupaday ). Thanks for reading, and looking forward to working with you to turn all these bold claims into reality.
