Entries Tagged 'startup' ↓

The Challenge

Last night, I attended the first, introductory, seminar hosted by The Chinook Entrepreneur Challenge.

The Chinook Entrepreneur Challenge is the first business planning competition of its kind in Canada to be held in a non-metropolitan setting.

The challenge is designed and targeted toward individuals, new and existing businesses (agriculture and non-agriculture), and post-secondary students (college and university) who have a sustainable business idea.

Basically, The Chinook Entrepreneur Challenge offers participants eight free seminars to get help on business plan preparation.

The Prize

After the seminars are over, you can enter your business plan for the actual competition. The prizes for the winners are as follows:

1. 1st place = $15,000
2. 2nd place = $ 7,500

Money, money, money. Money!

In addition The Chinook Entrepreneur Challenge can find mentors for participants (not just the winners) to assist them in launching and running the business.

My friend, Dennis Kamitomo, informed me about this competition and I joined right away. I want to write a concrete business plan for GizmoBooks and win $15,000!

Not sure if you can still join, but I would try! You can register here and also checkout their blog.

The Best Part

The best part of yesterday’s seminar was at the end when the seminar was over. How so? Well, talking to Craig Milner, a professor at the U of L — saying “a professor” doesn’t do Craig justice because he’s an amazing professor — and owner of East Side Mario’s who shared his experience and expertise at the seminar, I found out that he had heard about GizmoBooks and had seen my ad on the student newspaper, The Meliorist! Then Daniel Feiguth, the business analyst from Community Futures Lethbridge jumped in and said that he had heard of GizmoBooks and needed to sell some books! I was ecstatic!

Anyway, I’ll post the ‘racy’ ad here soon as well as the press release that got published in the Meliorist.

No, the title makes no reference to labour and I hope you’re not reading this while you’re in labour, if you are though, please leave a comment, fact that even women in labour read my blog will look awfully good on my resume!

Anyway, the title refers to an analogy that I came across in Ready, Fire, Aim.

Getting a business (or new product) started is like moving a stopped train. It takes a lot of energy to break it free from its stationary physics, but once it is put in motion it accelerates with relative ease.

Keep this metaphor in mind when you begin your entrepreneurial venture. Imagine your challenge as an immense train, sitting dead still on a set of shiny new tracks that lead directly–and with a slight downward slope–to a Golden City. That city is waiting to welcome you as its newest citizen and shower you with its golden benefits.

You just have to get it moving.

Shiny train track.

As for my train, GizmoBooks, it’s moving very slowly. One user registration here, one there and pretty soon will be moving full speed, إن شاء الل (God Willing).

Update: I’m getting way too many spam comments from this post for some reason. Therefore, disabling comments just for this post.

I started attending the University of Lethbridge in September 2004. In my first year I took some courses, and I only managed to find one used textbook–by luck–in the bulletin boards.

Can’t find textbooks!

After that first semester, I haven’t really been able to find cheap, or used textbooks. The reason is that the bulletin boards are chaotic at best and ’searching’ for information in them is, well, madness.

Covered up

Textbook Revolution?!!!

That’s right, textbook revolution . So, after sitting and doing absolutely nothing about this issue (except for complain about book prices), I decided to do something about it.

I was taking a database class and it had a project component. I proposed the idea of a book exchange site to the professor and he seemed to like it. For the next couple of months I went to work creating mockups and then the back end and of course, what’s a site without animation these days–who wants to look amateur!

The deadline came looming and the site, well, wasn’t where I wanted it to be, therefore I only got 13/15 on the project. Not to worry as I wasn’t really doing this for the class…the marks were a bonus! I kept working and working and on January 08, 2009, I release the first ‘version’ of the site which became ulethbooks.ca.

After introducing this idea to the university community and friends, feedback was phenomenal and it got me excited! Then I went working on GizmoBooks.com — The Textbook Revolution! I wanted to have this easy to use site accessable to students across North America and, although not sure about the concept, even outside North America!

Anyway, that’s my little story of how The Textbook Revolution came to be and I would love to hear from you with your ideas, feedback and comments.

Until next post!

Compete with that!