Bull City Startups

Joystick Labs has been unveiled with an in depth article at the N&O.  Co-Founder Juan Benito also writes about the launch at ExitEvent.  The concept is a casual game incubator/accelerator located in Downtown Durham.  According to the article, Joystick Labs have raised over $500,000 to launch the concept.  The application is now on their site, with a deadline to apply of August 13.

Argyle Social is a local startup, currently in beta, that provides analytics and tracking of social media efforts.  They launched in December and received a grant from NC IDEA in January.  In the rather short amount of time since they have started, they have built a well-designed and useful product.  I recently emailed Founder Eric Boggs some questions to find out more about them and what they thought about being a part of the Durham startup community.

What are the benefits you see from basing out of Durham?

Entrepreneurs are hard-wired to seek out possibility and opportunity, so an emerging scene like Downtown Durham is a huge draw.  The cultural scene downtown is great and only getting better.

Plus, there are lots of interesting tech start-ups in town – Shoeboxed, ReverbNation, PocketGear, etc.  All great companies run by great people.  So it is nice to know that there are similar companies/teams close by.

Where would you be if not in Durham?  Where is your office located?

Ideally, somewhere on the Mediterranean coast.

Realistically, we could be anywhere.  My co-founder Adam and I both work out of our homes in the Southpoint area and our contractors are more or less remote, even though they also live in Durham.  We’ve become quite productive as a distributed organization.

That said, depending on how things shake out over the next couple months, we plan to move into a small Downtown Durham office this Summer/Fall.

What is NC IDEA and what was the NC IDEA process like?

NC IDEA is a not-for-profit economic development organization that fosters the growth of young, high-growth, technology companies in North Carolina through grant financing.  You can learn more at http://ncidea.org.

The application process was fairly straightforward.  We completed an online application, then a slightly more in-depth written application.  Then we were invited in to give a pitch to the NC IDEA board and several advisers.  In the days following the pitch, I think I had a few phone calls with Lister Delgado – one of the NC IDEA guys – to clarify some questions and discuss some of the details behind our business and technology.  And then we found out that we won. 

The most encouraging part of the process actually occurred after we had won the grant.  Adam and I met with Lister to set a budget for the grant and to determine the milestones that would reflect our progress.  It was very much a collaborative process then and has been since.

As a part of our grant, we meet with NC IDEA on a quarterly basis to update them on our efforts.  These meetings and the structure/deadlines they impose on Argyle are actually quite helpful for Adam and me!

Would you do NC IDEA again if you were starting over?

Absolutely – the grant from NC IDEA was like a jolt of adrenaline as far as product development goes.  Plus it was obviously extremely validating.  We’ve made enormous strides over the past 6 months, thanks in large part to the grant resources we’ve been able to put to work.

Any advice to future applicants?

Treat the grant process like a fundraising process – build your application around traction and social proof.  Make sure that you can clearly articulate how the grant will help you hit business/technology milestones.

What challenges have you faced in building your company and product?

Starting a company and building a product is extraordinarily difficult – so everything is a challenge.  The biggest challenge is actually deciding which challenges to take on.  Our collective to-do list is oppressively long and keeps growing by the day, so it takes enormous focus and discipline to do the right things, in the right order.

That said – some things are easy.  For example, both Adam and I love Chubby’s Tacos, so we never argue about where we’ll eat lunch.

Are you worried about Twitter’s coming analytics and shortened URLs?

Not at all – we would love to see Twitter build an analytics platform similar to Facebook Insights and YouTube Insights.  It would be great for their users and great for platforms like Argyle.

As far as the shortened URLs go, we’ve written about this on the Argyle Blog - http://www.argylesocial.com/blog/2010/6/8/twitters-new-url-shortener.html.  Google and Facebook have had similar frameworks in place for a while.  It makes perfect sense for Twitter to build similar functionality that will feed data into its ad platform and add relevance to its “Resonance” algorithm.

Plus – while URL redirects in Twitter are a fairly significant part of what Argyle does today, they’re actually a fairly small part of what we’ll be doing in the not-so-distant future…

What’s one thing you did while building your product that worked really well?

We released our product to alpha customers as early as possible.  As soon as Argyle was functional – and I mean bug-riddled, formless blob functional – we plopped it in front of a set of very patient users and started listening closely to their feedback.  The feedback/suggestions we’ve received and relationships we’ve developed with our alpha and beta customers have been a big win for us…and we think a big win for our customers, too!