Self-tracking, Personal Analytics & Quantified Self

For the past few weeks, I’ve been using the Fitbit device to track my activity and sleep and now I’m hooked on the idea of personal analytics. I've now added a few other products to my “wish list” which include Basis, Zeo Sleep Manager, and the Withings Scale. After I try out those devices, I think I’ll have a pretty good measure on most aspects of my health!

The larger appeal of self-tracking and self knowledge through analytics (“Quantified Self”) is the fact that in order to improve aspects of your life, you need to first be able to analyze your body’s trends and activities. I’ve been really interested in this idea since I started using Fitbit because not only can an app or device like this help me track my health, but it also motivates me to become a happier, healthier person. Since I got started using this device, I’ve come across several great articles about the “Quantified Self” movement:

• WSJ Article - The New Examined Life
• Economist Article - Counting Every Moment
• TechCrunch - The “So What” of the Quantified Self
• Technology Review - The Measured Life
• Financial Times - Invasion of the Body Hackers

VC, Tim Chang, who invests in several personal analytics and quantified self devices, sums up the reason why I enjoy tracking aspects of my life, “Numbers, presented with useful context, provide an immediate path to better control over my own life.”

If you're interested in experimenting with this idea, here are two very useful resources for anyone who wants to discover additional tools for self-tracking:

http://quantifiedself.com/guide/

http://personalinformatics.org/

Also, here is a list of some other ideas that I came across that I’ve been using to help with self-tracking:

-books I read/want to read: GoodReads
-movies I watch/want to watch: IMDb Watchlist
-restaurants I go to/want to go to: Foursquare and Restaurant Bucket List
-my happiness: Track Your Happiness

-my trips: TripIt

-my memories: MemoLane
-music I listen to: Last.fm
-my finances, investments and spending: Mint and Pageonce and Piggie (iPhone app)

-energy usage: WattzOn

-my mood: MoodScope

-my productivity and tasks: RescueTime, Producteev, and Google Tasks

-my contacts and relationships: Gist, FellowUp and Wisdom

-number of alcoholic beverages: Tipple (iPhone app)
-my runs: RunKeeper

-my goals: Accompl.sh

-Daily journaling: Daileez

-my favorite links: Evernote and Google Bookmarks

-blogs/news I read: Google Reader

-and for just about everything else: Daytum

I think the most fascinating website I came across while trying to learn more about personal analytics was the Feltron Report. Nicholas Feltron started creating personal annual reports back in 2005, which track just about all aspects of his life, a bit like a scrapbook, but replacing pictures with numbers, charts and graphs. It’s a really cool idea and something I would love to do if I ever found the time!

Technori Pitch – January 2012

Last Tuesday night I attended the January 2012 Technori pitch event where five new startups were pitching their companies and ideas to an auditorium packed with entrepreneurs, investors and tech enthusiasts. These pitch events are great networking opportunities to meet other people who share the same passion for entrepreneurship and new ventures. The five startups at last week’s event were: AttorneyFee.com, Phaxio, Moosejaw, Leap Year Project, and Georama. The two startups that really caught my attention were AttorneyFee.com and Leap Year Project.

AttorneyFee.com helps people find out the fair cost of legal work and they currently have a database of over 25,000 attorneys that list their fees. The unique aspect of the website is the ability to predict the price of any legal service in any location and the website also develops charts for you to see the distribution of attorney fees for your specific service and location. It seems to be a pretty well-funded startup, since they are ramping up with new hires and currently have over 20 million viewers a month, mostly through partnerships they have with other organizations and websites. There seem to be similar startups for the healthcare space in order to review different health services and procedures as well as doctors, but AttorneyFee.com claims to be the major player in the legal industry. Although I’ve never had the need for any legal services and hopefully won’t need to use the website to find any attorneys in the near future, it seems like a very valuable service for customers who might be overwhelmed with finding a local lawyer at a reasonable cost.

The other unique idea this month was a new non-profit organization called Leap Year Project. The goal of the organization is to convince individuals to take a risk this year in order to change their life, their community or the world for the better and share their experiences with the rest of the Leap Year Project community in order to inspire others to do the same. I think taking on this goal would be very rewarding for any individual, but my only suggestion is that it really shouldn’t be limited to just this year. This should be a goal that people should always have in their lives even if it is with smaller projects to help improve their lives and help the people around them. I still think it’s a great idea and I’ll be sure to read and follow the founder’s own Leap Year Project over the next few months.

Hosting Ohours Sessions

This past weekend I had the opportunity to host my first Ohours session (http://ohours.org/). In my Ohours profile, I mention that I'm willing to talk about a range of topics, which include: startups, finance, private equity, venture capital, investing, tech trends, non-profits and healthcare. Anyone can log onto the site and sign up to meet and chat about any topic, which provides a great way to meet new people who share the same interests.

This week I had the founder of an online fantasy sports league website sign up to go through his business plan as he is getting ready to pitch to angel investors. I was impressed with his story and how he got started and came up with the idea for his startup. As a corporate lawyer, he had followed and read about the new online gambling regulations that started to come out in 2006 and he noticed that one of the loop-holes in the law was related to Fantasy Sports leagues online. He waited a few years to see if the government would come in and add any new regulations after a few of the initial sites started to pop up. Today there are about a dozen websites that let you bet on fantast sports, but he has come out with a platform to extend fantasy sports leagues online to just about every type of sport including tennis and golf as well as college sports. The most interesting part of the platform will be its ability to extend betting between people outside of sports to reality television as well. This way people can also start to bet on events such as who will make it to the next round of American Idol or Dancing with the Stars and they will also be able to capture a target audience outside of just the adult male population.  The one thing to look out for will be the potential for the government to see how profitable these companies will become and then they may start to tax the revenue these companies are making, since right now there is really nothing in place for this industry. The other potential concern I would have as an investor would be the acquisition cost for each customer. Since there are several competitor sites, these companies may have to spend more and more on advertising online in order to capture additional active members. It's also still unclear how long active members remain members of these sites since the oldest site is still only two years old. Overall, it still seems to be a pretty convincing business model with a very scalable platform and low operating costs, so hopefully his idea will get some traction with the Chicago angel investors in the coming weeks.

CEC Startup Meeting

The CEO of the startup I am working with and I recently met with the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center (CEC ) to tell them more about our business and the people we have connected with in the community. When we told them we are looking to raise money soon and mentioned the amount we thought we needed in order to last us through another six months, the feedback we received actually encouraged us to think more about a 12 month runway for the amount we were looking to raise. For angel rounds, you typically want to be raising enough funds to last you for the next 9 to 12 months and for your Series A you should be looking at a runway of 15 to 18 months.

We were also told to strongly consider raising convertible debt since the terms can often be very entrepreneur friendly and most of the angel groups in the area are willing to do convertible debt deals. The key to meeting and working with a lot of the angel groups is to find internal ambassadors within the group to champion your deal. Also, it’s important to realize that each angel group is unlikely to do the whole deal themselves and they will often syndicate it with some of the VC firms who also do seed stage investing.

It’s also important to keep in mind that when you decide you want to raise money through angels and VCs, you want to make sure that your deal is not out in the market unfunded for too long (i.e. 3-4 months) because then investors get suspicious or worried about why nobody else was interested in investing or doing the deal.

One of the biggest pieces of advice that we learned from this initial meeting is that as you’re getting ready to reach out to the investor community, start to put together an online depository of all the information that the investors may ask for such as customer testimonials, good articles about your industry or target customers, your financial model, etc. Those of you familiar with investment banking and private equity know that this is very similar to a data room for your startup so that your potential investors can easily and quickly start their due diligence on your company. Getting this online data room organized in advance can really inspire additional confidence in your company.

For the upcoming year, we learned that the CEC has approximately 120 classes that they are planning for the exclusive group of pre-screened startups. We were just added to the mailing list, so we are looking forward to attending a few of the sessions on marketing, pitching, putting together the business plan and financial projections. Another great advantage of the CEC is that they help bring serial entrepreneurs, early stage investors, and C-level executives in as speakers, advisors and mentors to their group of startups, so this should hopefully be another great resource.

The Beginning of Advising Startups

Earlier this year I started advising startups during my free time and in the evenings after work. I started this after I was initially interested in learning more about the tech and early-stage healthcare scene in Chicago. I began by attending a few meetup events, tech pitches and startup accelerator events, where I met several very talented and passionate entrepreneurs that often had terrific ideas but were going after new businesses on their own and I noticed they could really benefit from the help of an outside, objective perspective. I expressed interest in helping out anyway I could and often kept in touch in the event they ever needed anything.

Now I enjoy providing feedback and guidance on business plans, pitches, financial projections, and introducing promising start-ups to investors and the VC community. I’m always on the lookout for new startups to work with and advise, so if you’re in the initial stages of starting your own company or building on your idea, feel free to reach out and we can discuss it further.

MedHost – A Health Tech Startup’s Story from Inception to Acquisition

The other week I had the opportunity to attend a Chicago Health 2.0 Meetup group event, where I was able to listen and learn from Patty Rioux, who was one of the first few employees at MedHost, a healthcare IT startup that recently got acquired.

It was really interesting to hear how the founder originally came up with the idea for MedHost. Apparently, he regularly went to a TGI Friday’s restaurant and one day he noticed that the restaurant was operating much more smoothly, with less wait time and the hostesses/waitresses were all much more organized. He asked the owner what had changed and he discovered a new software the restaurant was using to track tables and guests as they were coming into the restaurant. The founder of MedHost was a physician and once he learned about this new software, he realized there was a real need for something similar in emergency departments because just like a busy restaurant, a busy ER has limited beds and no idea who or when someone will walk in. Similar to restaurants, emergency rooms make the most money by turning over more beds. That’s when he decided to launch MedHost, an emergency department information system platform.

Patty then went on to discuss five mistakes her startup had made and five things they did really well. All of her suggestions are great advice for any healthcare IT startup so I’ve summarized them below:

Five Mistakes:

1. Don’t underestimate your sales cycle. MedHost had thought the company’s sales cycle would be 6 months, when in reality it turned out to be more like 9-24 months for a lot of these healthcare facilities, since there are so many people involved in the process. Longer sales cycles can really impact your business and limit your growth projections, so be sure to have a conservative estimate in mind when starting out.
2. Don’t overestimate the IT systems within hospitals. Through MedHost, Patty realized that trying to install the software and making sure that it fit in with all the hospital systems was a nightmare. These days with cloud computing, a lot of the programs are easier to install and get started, but don’t expect all facilities to be completely electronic already.
3. She mentioned that as marketers, her startup wanted to look more established and bigger, so they spent a lot of money trying to market that image by printing fancy brochures that nobody ended up reading. Most customers buy from demos, not expensive marketing materials. Many companies within healthcare and other industries now accept that innovation comes from the startup community.
4.  She reflected on a couple of key hires they missed. For example, it’s pretty important to hire a sales clinician early on to sit in on pitches and help close deals with the salesperson.
5. Try not to focus on personal decisions that aren’t necessarily best for the company as a whole. The example she provided here was that her startup actually kept three offices open even though it was costly, but the company wanted to accommodate the preferences of the employees. Often the culture of startups is to take care of each other, but try not to do it at a significant cost to the whole company.

Five Strengths:

1. MedHost used a per patient pricing model, which avoided being lumped in as the hospitals capital expenditures. This allowed the software to be in the healthcare facilities operating budget as opposed to the capital budget since it was billed to the customer monthly. It also represented a great recurring revenue stream, which the VCs love.
2. They had a very well defined alpha and beta process where they moved from small healthcare systems to larger systems in order to test out the product in a manageable and effective way.
3. On marketing, they did a great job of focusing on a lot of the influencers instead of decision makers in order to use them to impact sales. So they focused on getting real close to the nurse managers instead of the CIO or CTO level people because at the end of the day the nurses and nurse managers would be using the program and would really fight to have it.  In fact, it turned out that ~80% of the company’s sales were driven by nurse managers. They also interacted with all of the trade organizations in their industry and took advantage of everything they had to offer to market their product.
4. The company stopped responding to RFP requests because they discovered that if they were not a part of the process before the RFP, then the kill rate for the company was huge and the RFPs were just so painful and time consuming to fill out. Everyone would need to look at the RFP and the applications were typically 150-180 page responses that were a huge drain on resources, when that time could have been much better spent focusing on other relationships.
5. The best learning experiences for marketers are to sit next to the customers that will actually be using your system and see the issues or changes they want implemented. Often, the most creative and effective improvements come from those experiences where you are sitting next to your customer showing them how to use your product and listening to their concerns. No matter what industry you are in or what type of sales person you have, make sure that they sit down with your customer to really understand their daily pains.

November 2011 Technori pitch

Yesterday Technori hosted its November pitch event with 6 new startups: Grabio, Weatherist, DreamChamps, MentorMob, EditHuddle, and Restaurant Bucket List.

My quick first impressions of them are as follows:

Grabio (http://www.grabio.com/) – basically Craigslist combined with foursquare. Many people in the audience seemed concern about protecting their privacy when selling things using this app. The app doesn't show your exact location, but shows a pin on a map in your general area. I think the best feature of the app is that it can notify you if you’re ever close to someone selling something on your “wishlist.”

Weatherist.com (http://www.weatherist.com/) – claims to be one of the most accurate/probable sources for weather by tracking all the different weather forecasts in your city and using a proprietary calculation to average the most reliable forecasts for: high temperature, low temperature, chance of precipitation, and amount of precipitation. This seems like something I would use, especially if they come out with an iPhone app, since right now it's just web based. Right now, I check weather.com every morning, but I’m starting to use weatherist.com to compare and see how close the two sites are with their forecasts. The one big disadvantage is that weatherist.com doesn’t have an hourly forecast, which I care a lot about because during the week I’m usually only outside early in the morning and later in the evening during specific time periods and that’s when I would like to know how cold it will be or if it'll be raining around that time.

DreamChamps (http://dreamchamps.com/) – resource for recent grads and young professionals looking to join companies with strong cultures focused on the happiness of their employees. It basically lists companies that meet specific criteria that the founders think are important factors to consider in order to achieve happiness at work. The problem is that so far there are only a few companies listed and not many represented across a variety of industries. However, I did enjoy watching the demo video on their website and I would love to have all my friends find jobs that make them happy instead of settling for a job they don't like. I'm hoping they will be able to expand and spread the word on college campuses, but it will be hard to convince people to consider company culture over salary and compensation.

MentorMob (http://www.mentormob.com/) – think Khan Academy, but anyone can create lessons on any topic using any resource on the web. I love teaching myself new things and always have a running list of something new I want to learn how to do. I’ve already started going through the topics on the site and I've saved a few playlists I want to come back to. I can't speak to the quality of the playlists/lessons yet, but hopefully they are pretty reliable and helpful.

EditHuddle (http://edithuddle.com/) – a way for blog readers to point out errors or mistakes to the blog writers. The reader is able to notify the writer of the blog by sending them a message through the application in order to let them know that there might be an error. Even though I’m new to blog writing, I can see this as something that would be really helpful for blogs especially ones with lots of readers and those that aim to be a reliable news source. I’m actually going to look into including EditHuddle on my blog and I've signed up to receive a beta invite. Right now they are mainly on WordPress, but looking to expand to all types of blogs soon.

Restaurant Bucket List (http://www.restaurantbucketlist.com/) – this is a new facebook application that allows you to share the restaurants you want to check out with all your facebook friends, so that you can find out which of your friends also want to go to the same places. Most people I know keep a running list of the restaurants and bars that others recommend, so this app now allows you to share that list and find other friends who would want to go with you. I was really excited about the app after the pitch, but when I went on facebook to check it out, I was actually getting a lot of errors while I was trying to add restaurants to my "list." Granted the app just launched yesterday, it’s still a little frustrating that I’ve been having so many difficulties with it. Hopefully, they fix the bugs and more people I know start using the app, so that I can begin taking advantage of it. 

I'm already looking forward to the next event during the last week of January! It's worth looking into to see if there are any startup pitch events near you and find out when they take place because these are great opportunities to learn about the latest tech trends and meet innovative and passionate entrepreneurs.

Intro to Technori Pitches

I first heard about the Chicago Technori start-up pitch meetings on the Built in Chicago website and I had a chance to go to my first Technori meeting the last week in October. The event consisted of about a half hour to network with entrepreneurs, investors, and others interested in start-ups and then 7 founders presented pitches. Each person had five minutes to talk about their start-up and then another 5 minutes to answer questions. From the October Technori meeting, I thought the most promising start-ups were Utellit and JumpRope.

I thought Utellit presented an interesting way to keep in touch with friends. I’m always looking for new and better ways to do this – check out some of my favorite start-ups that help you keep track of your contacts and friends: Gist and FellowUp. Utellit aims to bring voice into our social media interactions, by allowing people to leave voice messages on friend’s facebook walls (i.e. instead of writing the usually “Happy Birthday!” on a friend’s wall, Utellit gives you the opportunity to leave a personal voice post instead). It also allows you to send voice text messages. Although, more recently, I’ve started to hear of a few other apps that are trying to bring voice into messaging as well like Voxer Walkie, which aims to turn your phone into a Walkie Talkie. At first I thought this was a great idea, until I started to think more about my own reaction to receiving voicemail. I rarely take the time to listen to my voice messages and instead I choose to either just call the person back and let them know I didn’t get a chance to listen to their message yet, but wanted to check what was going on, or I’ll check my email to see the Google Voice transcription. I signed up for Google Voice last year to get a 312 area code number, and now I love getting my voice messages transcribed (it also makes me laugh to see Google try to transcribe a message when it’s in a different language…). So this made me realize, if I don’t actually take the time to listen to my voicemail, what makes me think that my friends or I will take the time to click on every voice message on my Facebook wall to listen to it? It’s so much easier to just read a message and it's not as meaningful as receiving to an actual phone call from your friend instead. All in all, I thought it was an interesting idea but I questioned how much I would actually use the app.

The other interesting start-up that I learned about at the October pitch was JumpRope, which allows people at bars and clubs to skip to the front of the line by paying a specific amount of money up front to the venue through the app. A lot of the prices for some of the nicer clubs in Chicago ranged from $20-$30 to cut to the front of the line, which seems a little steep to me. I know females tend to have the advantage of getting into clubs relatively easily, but I can see how this app would be helpful for guys who have a little extra money to spend and don’t want to waste 30 minutes to an hour or more waiting in line. I can also see JumpRope really catching on in a city like New York where the club culture is big and more people like to show off their status by getting into exclusive places or buying bottle service. And for people interested in buying bottle service, they can actually buy the bottle through the app as well. Although I actually think this is a bit of a disadvantage because often times you can cut to the front of the line anyway when you tell the bouncer you’re buying a bottle or some club owners will negotiate on the price of bottles so buying one through the app might not be the best way to go about it. So far, I’ve really only used the app to get a sense of places to go out in Chicago and it's given me an idea of what clubs/bars tend to be more crowded or popular. I don’t actually see myself trying to pay to cut to the front of the line though.

Overall, I had a really great experience at my first start-up pitch event and I decided that I would try to go to these events more regularly, which is why I decided to go to the November pitch event as well...