Global Nerdy

Sometimes the best apps simply take a tried-and-true manual process, automate it, and make it easy to use. That’s the general idea behind Hyve, the project that I’m working with my team at Startup Bus 2019.

The general principle behind Hyve: disposable email addresses

Hyve is based on a tried-and-true technique known as disposable email addresses. It’s a pretty simple idea — instead of connecting to everyone using just one email address, you use a different email address for each contact or purpose. For example, you’d use one email address for Amazon, a different one for your bank, a different one for your friends, a different one for the newsletter you subscribe to, and so on.

The power of disposable email addresses is that if a contact gets too spammy, all you have to do is simply close or stop using the email account associated with them.

Some people create disposable email addresses by creating a whole new Gmail or Hotmail email account for each purpose, but that means managing a number of email logins and inboxes. This approach gets pretty unwieldy very quickly.

The better approach is to create virtual disposable email addresses. These are things that behave like email addresses, but forward email sent to them to your real email address. If you have access to your mail server and some technical skill, you can configure your own. For the rest of us, there are virtual disposable email address services, but most are difficult to use and pay almost no attention to user-friendliness.

Hyve makes it easy

Click the diagram to see it at full size.

Hyve gives you the power of disposable email addresses, but without the tedious mail server configuration work or user-unfriendly interfaces. With Hyve, you can create a new virtual email address in seconds, and then use it to connect to whatever you want: an online store, a subscription service, or even a person.

Any email sent to one of your Hyve email addresses gets sent to your real email address. Hyve is a true double-blind system, which means that you can also use a Hyve email address to send mail that appears to come from your virtual email address.

If you want to keep communicating with someone via Hyve, you don’t have to do anything. If you need a temporary break from someone who’s linked to you via Hyve, you can mute them. And if you need to never, ever again hear from someone connected to you via Hyve, just delete the virtual email address. You’ll never hear from them again, and they’ll won’t be able to reach you.

Sign up for Hyve today!

Despite the fact that Hyve came into being over a three-day trip on a bus taking a zig-zag route through the southeast U.S., we have a working product that we’d love to have you try out! Come to our site, Hyve.email, and sign up for the cure to spam and other email bad actors.

This is one of a series of articles leading up to the 10th annual Startup Busevent, which takes place from Wednesday, July 24 though Sunday, July 28th. I’ll be on the Florida Startup Bus, where I’ll be a hustler with a group that will spend three days on a bus, building a software, a business model, and a pitch, all of which we’ll present before a panel of judges in New Orleans! I hope these articles convince people to join Startup Bus, inspire the “Buspreneurs” who will be participating, and get the rest of you to find out more.

The Startup Buses depart tomorrow! I’m going to be on the Florida bus, which departs from Tampa and after taking a not-very-direct route, arrives in New Orleans on Friday, with the judging happening on Saturday. Here are the last of my pre-event notes on Startup Bus — watch this space as I post from the road!

The lesson from my last hackathon

Click the photo to see the original article.

My big lesson from my win at “Makers Hustle Harder” hackathon in March 2017: Simple and working beats complex and non-functional.

In 2017, GM (yes, the auto manufacturer) held “Makers Hustle Harder” hackathons in a handful of cities to see what people could build on their NGI in-car console systems. They held one of them in Tampa, and I offered to help a friend work on his app idea. I did that for most of the day, and with a couple of hours left, I came up with a goofy idea that I could whip up in very little time.

The app I put together was simple: it was a timer for the game classically known as the “Chinese Fire Drill”:

• Four people get in the car, close the doors, and someone starts the app.
• When everyone’s ready, someone in the front presses the app’s start button on the console touch screen.
• If any of the doors are open when the start button is pressed, the players will be told to close all the doors first (the game makes use of the car’s door sensors).
• If all the doors are closed when the start button is pressed, the game begins.
• Players exit the car, run around it once, return to their original seat, and close their doors.
• The game ends when all four doors are closed, at which point the time it took them to complete the drill is displayed.

The app wasn’t pretty, but that’s not what hackathons are about — they’re about working code in the time allotted. If you’d like to see the code, I’ve put it in a repo on my GitHub account.

An hour later, I had working code, an available vehicle, three other people to playtest the game with me, and two camera operators to record video of a test runs. We played the game twice, and we were giggling all the time. In the end, I won the “Judges’ Fetish” prize!

That lesson again: simple and working beats complex and non-functional.

Should non-coders join Startup Bus?

Yes, and if you don’t believe me, these links might help convince you:

• Harvard Business Review: Hackathons Aren’t Just for Coders
• Code Like a Girl: Hackathons: Coding optional, courage required.
• Cornell Tech: Hackathons Aren’t Just For Coders Anymore
• The C0de L1fe: Hackathons aren’t just for developers
• 18F: Hackathons: not just for folks who code
• Bringing the Hackathon Experience to the Non-Coder
• AT&T Developer Program: 5 Hackathon Roles That Have Nothing to Do with Coding
• Quora: How can a non-tech person participate in a hackathon?

How to brainstorm

A key part of hackathons is brainstorming. You may find these links helpful.

• Scott Berkun: How to run a brainstorming meeting and In defense of brainstorming
• Forbes: 4 Steps to Successful Brainstorming
• Zapier blog: Better Brainstorming: The Most Effective Ways to Generate More Ideas
• Fast Company: How to brainstorm like a Googler
• Hubspot blog: 15 Creative Exercises That Are Better Than Brainstorming
• BDC Canada: How to organize a successful brainstorming session
• UX Collective: Three Brainstorming Techniques for Designers
• Inc.: Here’s How to Be a Master of Brainstorming

 

 

Click the image to see it at full size.

Citations:

• Linus Torvalds: “I don’t like debuggers. Never have, probably never will.”
• Guido van Rossum: “…often the quickest way to debug a program is to add a few print statements to the source: the fast edit-test-debug cycle makes this simple approach very effective.”
• Robert C. “Uncle Bob” Martin: Debuggers a re wasteful timesink.

Found in a tweet by Katerina Borodina, found via Bernie Marger.

This is one of a series of articles leading up to the 10th annual Startup Busevent, which takes place from Wednesday, July 24 though Sunday, July 28th. I’ll be on the Florida Startup Bus, where I’ll be a hustler with a group that will spend three days on a bus, building a software, a business model, and a pitch, all of which we’ll present before a panel of judges in New Orleans! I hope these articles convince people to join Startup Bus, inspire the “Buspreneurs” who will be participating, and get the rest of you to find out more.

On Saturday, I pointed you to the StartUp podcast’s episodes on Startup Bus 2017 (and if you haven’t heard them yet, go listen now!). Today, I’m pointing you to another documentary on the bus — Coin’s series on Startup Bus 2013. There’s a lot to watch, what with about three hours of main content recorded during the event and an hour of follow-up interviews with the organizers.

Here’s episode 1:

Here’s a bonus episode, featuring the complete set of intro pitches:

Episode 2:

Episode 3:

Episode 4:

Episode 5:

Episode 6:

If those six episodes weren’t enough for you, there’s more: three episodes of the “round table”, where the Startup Bus conductors share their observations and opinions. For those of you who are from Tampa Bay, this features a couple of local heroes: Mitch Neff and Greg Ross-Munro (CEO of Sourcetoad):

This is one of a series of articles leading up to the 10th annual Startup Busevent, which takes place from Wednesday, July 24 though Sunday, July 28th. I’ll be on the Florida Startup Bus, where I’ll be a hustler with a group that will spend three days on a bus, building a software, a business model, and a pitch, all of which we’ll present before a panel of judges in New Orleans! I hope these articles convince people to join Startup Bus, inspire the “Buspreneurs” who will be participating, and get these rest of you to find out more.

In the previous post in this series, I pointed to the StartUp podcast’s series of podcasts covering the New York bus from Startup Bus 2017. The idea for the winner — Daisy, the app that helps people manage a funeral and all the attendant tasks involved — came up with the idea on the first morning, because she was thinking of her father who had cancer (he’s since gotten better). This brings up an important question for buspreneurs: How will you come up with your startup idea?

To assist my fellow buspreneurs, I’ve compiled a list of sources for ideas. I’m not making any promises or guarantees about the quality, practicality, or viability of the ideas from these sources, but they may serve as an excellent starting point for your brainstorming.

Here’s a list of articles on app ideas for 2019:

• Appfity: Top 15 Mobile App Ideas for 2019
• Arkenea: 15 Evergreen App Ideas (You Can Steal) To Launch Your Startup
• Buildfire: 7 Ways to Generate New App Ideas And 19 App Ideas You Can Steal
• DCI: Top 10 Innovative Mobile App Ideas To Fuel Your Startups In 2019
• Felgo: 49+ Mobile App Ideas and 12 Ways to Come Up with New Ideas in 2019
• Intelegain technologies: 50 Brilliant App Ideas for Startups to Launch in 2019
• Lvivity: 20+ Best Mobile App Ideas to Create in 2019
• Merehead: Mobile App Ideas 2019: 10 Popular Ideas for Business
• MindStudios: Stay Relevant: 16+ Great Ideas for Mobile Apps in 2019
• PixelCrayons: Top Mobile App ideas You Can’t Miss in 2019
• Quytech: Innovative Startup Mobile App Ideas in 2019
• SAG ipl: 111 mobile app ideas for 2019 that haven’t been made yet
• Startup Creator: NEW MOBILE APP IDEAS 2019 – THE TOP 7 LIST
• WebsOptimization: Top Mobile App Ideas 2019

If that list doesn’t help, perhaps these “idea warehouse” sites might:

• Creativity Pool
• Global Ideas Bank
• Halfbakery
• IdeasWatch’s list of startup ideas
• WhyNot? Idea Exchange

And failing that, here’s a list of “how to come up with ideas for your tech startup” articles:

• How to get startup ideas (Paul Graham, November 2012)
• 5 Places To Get Ideas For Starting Your Next Business (Forbes, October 2014)
• How to find the right startup idea (Jonathan Chan, May 2019)
• What are the best ways to think of ideas for a startup? (Quora)
• Starting a Business: The Idea Phase (Entrepreneur)
• Startup Ideas: How the Best Founders Get Them and Why Novelty Is Overrated (Capshare)
• How To Find An Idea For A New Startup (Mixergy)

This is one of a series of articles leading up to the 10th annual Startup Bus event, which takes place from Wednesday, July 24 though Sunday, July 28th. I’ll be on the Florida Startup Bus, where I’ll be a hustler with a group that will spend three days on a bus, building a software, a business model, and a pitch, all of which we’ll present before a panel of judges in New Orleans! I hope these articles convince people to join Startup Bus, inspire the “Buspreneurs” who will be participating, and get the rest of you to find out more.

If you check out only one of my Startup Bus articles, make it this one. This one contains the episodes of the podcast Startup that cover the Startup Bus team that departed from New York. These episodes contain insight and intel that will be valuable to Startup Bus participants. I’ve already listened to all of these twice, and plan to give them a couple more listens to make sure that I didn’t miss any important observations, hints, or clues.

For my own benefit and the benefit of my fellow Buspreneurs, I’m posting the episodes here, along with my notes — well, a small snippet of those notes, anyway. I’m keeping some of them for myself and my team (whoever they end up being!).

The intro

• This is the podcast episode that tells you that there will be more podcast episodes. You can safely skip this one; I’m including it only for the sake of being thorough.

Day 1: Coming up with the idea

Start with this one, in which some of the buspreneurs come up with an idea, pitch it to their fellow riders, and form teams. One of the buspreneurs’ ideas is a morbidly interesting one.

• If you’re going to be on the bus, please, for the love of all that’s holy, please observe this rule: “The number one rule on StartupBus is there’s no number two on the bus. You get what that means? Rule number one. No number two on the bus.”
• This is the episode in which we get to meet the people on the bus and get some of their back stories.
• There’s an interesting array of ideas being pitched: a funeral-planning app, an anti-phishing tool, and — of course — someone saying “we should build something based on blockchain!”
• The important lesson from this episode? “So every year, pretty much this happens a lot, is that you end up wasting so much time today trying to validate an idea that has already been invalidated, just now.”

Day 2:

The challenges begin.

• Eric the narrator has a realization: “When I was growing up, my family was very into a particular kind of reality tv—competition shows… I thought I’d be reporting on a hackathon. I’d find one person, going through something interesting, and we’d just see how their week played out. Pretty simple. But when I woke up in a hotel in Raleigh, North Carolina that Tuesday morning, and I saw a giant “StartupBus” decal on the charter coach outside my window, I had this realization that would have thrilled my younger self to no end: “Holy shit. I’m not just reporting a story about a hackathon, I have landed inside a real life competition show.”
• “To get the day started, each team sends one person to the front of the bus to practice their pitch over the intercom. This is something that happens a lot on StartupBus—people are practicing their pitches constantly.”
• Startup Bus borrows a big trick from reality TV shows: surprise obstacles. When the bus pulls into Charlotte, North Carolina, the New York team finds out that they’ll be pitching against two other teams — Akron and Tampa.
• Introducing local heroes Robert Blacklidge and Trey Steinhoff! “Robert and Trey, very on top of things,” the narrator says approvingly, and he presciently sees that their idea — CourseAlign — has legs.
• “And the Ohio bus is impressive in its own way. It turns out they teamed up with some people from San Francisco, and they’re manufacturing physical products. So they have 3D printers and computer aided design software. The whole thing feels like that scene in “The Sandlot” when the other team shows up in their actual jerseys and matching converse sneakers, and all of a sudden you realize, ‘Oh… this is some real competition.’”
• Also: gender dynamics. On one team, there’s a good news/bad news thing going on because they’re electing one of the women to be CEO; the bad news is that it’s a job that none of them particularly want, and a lot of it will be about reining in unruly behavior. On another team, a “that’s just who I am” kind of guy butts head against a young woman on his team.

Day 3:

It’s like a reality TV show!

• “The thing about StartupBus is that it really is like a reality TV show. It’s so intense that every interaction, every personality can feel like a caricature of real life.”
• “Now, if you were to look at a map of this trip on StartupBus, you’d realize it’s a pretty insane route. It jogs and meanders. It’s nowhere near the quickest path to New Orleans. I mean, we spent a full 24 hours just in North Carolina.”
• We get to find out more about Ash.
• “Despite all their troubles—the personal dramas, the failed ad campaigns, the miscommunications—the teams all feel really good. They’ve overcome a lot. And they’ve built actual working products. In three days. On a bus.”
• They arrive in New Orleans!

Day 4:

The moment of truth: the teams arrive in New Orleans and make their pitches in front of the judges!

• Another appearance with Tampa-based Robert Blacklidge and Trey Steinhoff, and their startup, CourseAlign! Eric the narrator can’t stop gushing about how well Robert and Trey get along (of course, we in the Tampa tech community know how easy it is to get along with them).
• The sound system at the venue isn’t what it should be: “The setup for the pitches is, in a word, janky. There’s a microphone plugged into an old guitar amp, and it’s very prone to feedback. And given the size and concreteness of this room, the teams all sound like they’re pitching from the bottom of well.”
• An observation: “With 22 teams, it’s inevitably a mixed bag. Some of the ideas seem a little half-baked, others are good ideas with a lackluster pitch. Still others seems like they’ve really got it together.” One of the startup’s pitch people delivers her pitch with a song, dressed up as Marilyn Monroe, complete with iconic white dress and blonde wig.
• For most of the pitches, only some of the audience is paying attention while others are working away on their own projects. But when it’s Daisy’s turn and Colleen makes her pitch, “something remarkable happens. The room goes silent. People in the back shuffle their way forward to the stage. They pull out cell phones and start taking videos. She commands the room in a way no other team has managed.”
• Initially, when Eric asks to record the judges while they deliberate, they say “no”. Then they change their minds, and we get a look into their decision-making process.

Day 5:

As you’d expect, we find out who wins — and a surprise challenge.

• Eric the narrator and Colleen from Daisy go for a walk and talk about their lives and their families. Colleen reveals her approach to coming up with a startup idea: “My strategy for hackathons is I think of things that have been bugging me the past week. Like packing. So I thought of like something that I was worried about and I was like, “OK, death.” And there weren’t really that many death apps out there.”
• More love for Robert and Trey!
• There’s some controversy: Elias Bizannes, founder of Startup Bus, adds a sixth team made up of non-finalists, who now have less than a day to build a startup and present against the other finalists. There’s a great amount of concern about this last-minute addition. It turns out that it’s just another challenge: “It’s classic reality TV. They did it on “The Bachelor” just last season, when they brought back one of Nick’s former loves. It was just before the finale, and they were trying to resurface old feelings, to throw him off his game. StartupBus is meant to mimic what it’s like to start a company in real life. And it does. But it also mimics reality TV. And in every reality TV show, there are producers in the background pulling strings, creating drama. That string-pulling got the sixth team onto the stage, but it does not guarantee them a win.”
• “From the moment the pitches begin, it’s apparent. This is a very different level of competition than yesterday. The presentations are all well-crafted. Each of the products makes sense. You could imagine people making these pitches to actual investors.”
• And finally, the winner is announced, and from the “Grey Poupon” accent, it’s easy to tell that  person doing the announcing is another Tampa hero: Sourcetoad CEO Greg Ross-Munro!