Startup Maturity Checklist Session Sun-Oct-4 1pm at SV Code Camp

Athol Foden‘s encouragement I have submitted the following session (links added) for this year’s

Silicon Valley Code Camp has now finalized the session schedule and my Software Startup Maturity Checklist session is set for Sunday, October 4 at 1pm in Room 5501. The description follows:

This session is for both aspiring and active entrepreneurs. We will walk through a 36 point checklist that covers Product Development, Customer Development, and Business Operations. You will leave with a better understanding of where you are today and what some logical next steps are for each of these stages:

• Idea/formation
• Open for business
• Early customers
• Finding your niche
• Scaling up

Primary focus is on bootstrapping, there will also some discussion of what is required for a business to deserve outside investment. If you are thinking about doing a startup or you are underway and looking for a quick diagnostic on what to focus on next, this session will offer practical guidance based on the specifics of your situation.

This session does not require but will build on Athol Foden’s session on “From Code to Complete Product to Brand.”

The Startup Maturity Checklist is the first module in our “Idea to Revenue” workshop, which is next offered in January 2010 (Sign up to be notified).

Code Camp takes place Saturday October 3 and Sunday October 4 at Foothill College 12345 El Monte Road (Parking Lot 5) Los Altos Hills, CA 94022

As the description indicated, my session is a companion to Athol’s “From Code to Complete Product to Brand” which also looks good:

Before you can go out and market your code, you need to productize it. Whether it is for a small downloadable utility or an enterprise application, software seldom sells itself. Even for Open Source, it has to be packaged, promoted and presented correctly… and that is the start of your branding for the long term. For startups, product and company may both be dependent on this proper execution. This overview session will give you the highlights and a check list to do a proper product packaging and launch. For startups, continue this subject with Sean Murphy’s startup checklist talk

Update Sep-30: I got an E-Mail this morning from Peter Kellner, the Silicon Valley Code Camp coordinator, which clarifies what registration means for a session:

We have gotten a lot of questions regarding what “Plan to Attend” means so I thought I’d take this opportunity to explain what that means to us.  First, we are very grateful to Foothill College for providing such a great facility for us.  They let us use about 20 rooms for every session time.  These rooms can handle from 35 to 120 people at a time.  We use the “Plan to Attend” information to allocate sessions to rooms at each time period.

For the past 3 code camps (this is v4), we have come close, but still, there have been some rooms that filled up and we had to turn people away to other sessions.  We have no reservation system so it’s first come first sit.

We are sorry if you can not attend a session you want, but are proud in that we have many other sessions people can go to.

So if you plan to attend please register for the session, you might be advised to arrive a few minutes early as well.Please note that it’s in Room 5501.