Nathan Levine walked into a Startup Weekend event early last month with an idea for a connected sensor device that could monitor changes in pH, temperature and salinity in a fish tank.
He left two days later with a name, FishBit, a functioning prototype and a mobile app.
In the nearly four weeks since winning the 54-hour Startup Weekend entrepreneurial event at 1871, Levine — by day a mobile developer at social monitoring startup Earshot — has built a team of seven, presented at a Technori pitch event and entertained talks with angel investors. He describes five lessons he has learned in that time.
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Don’t clutter your team
A team of seven, most of whom participated on the Startup Weekend team, devotes its nights and weekends to developing FishBit. Levine said he doesn’t currently need the marketing people who helped that weekend. “Their skills lie later on in the business,” Levine said. FishBit now needs engineering, front- and back-end development, designing and research. “We don’t need to start selling a product before we know what we’re selling,” he said. He hopes to add marketing roles down the line.
Set micro deadlines
“The idea’s been short-term goals that are slightly ambitious but manageable under our time constraints,” Levine said. From the start, Levine used looming opportunities to create mini deadlines for new iterations. When invited to speak at Technori a week and a half after the Startup Weekends victory, he challenged his team to create a functioning version of FishBit by then. His goal for that night was to integrate a graph representing historical data into the mobile app ahead of a demo at 1871 the following evening. Levine says he wants to be able to show something new at every event.
Cast a wide financing net
Component parts add much to the young company’s costs. Levine estimates the first version of the device may cost as much as $500 to build since the team, as part of the experimentation process, buys sensors off the shelf rather than in bulk. He’s aiming for the device to retail for about $149, so FishBit needs to raise outside funds to iterate and scale. Angel investments, grants, accelerators and crowdfunding are among the options, and Levine says the team is evaluating them all. “We’re doing a lot of this in parallel,” Levine said. “Ultimately, it doesn’t hurt to apply to all of them and have all of our options open. When we have those options available to us, we can make a decision.”
Wait to incorporate
Along with glory, the FishBit team won $1,500 worth of consultation from a lawyer. She helped the team determine that it should hold off on incorporating. Initially, team members thought it would quickly form an LLC. Then, they realized that taking angel investments would require a corporation structure and that some accelerators, a route FishBit might take, prefer unincorporated companies. “We don’t want to make an LLC to find out a week later that we need to change that to a corporation,” Levine said.
Keep things flexible
Levine said some “people with money” are interested in applying FishBit’s technology to other industries. He mentioned the devices could be adapted for anything from yogurt production to monitoring the health of a river. “It makes more sense for us to design this modularly than not and only have specific sensors that can go on it,” Levine said. Adaptability in design now will help the company create sensor devices for other industries in the future. Levine believes this will help with growth and attracting funding.