Meetup – Thursday 12th June 2014
Creating a first business from a standing start is an intense learning experience whether it is successful or not. Much of the Lean Startup wisdom comes from the value of learning and its ability to reduce wasted work. Dan Conlon will be at the third meetup in June to pass on his experience and insight. Being there to listen may just save you some time and trouble as a result. Our June demo will come from Russ Huntington, founder of White Menu a Yorkshire based platform for the catering industry.
Riding the startup roller coaster with Dan Conlon
With two successful startup exits under his belt, Dan gives a frank account of the years of ups and downs before those Champagne moments. Dan analyses both what went well and the mistakes that prevented the businesses performing better, proposing general rules to be applied to any startup. Some common working practices inspired by the lean principles are challenged.
Bio:
Internet entrepreneur helping and investing in tech start-ups. Founded web host Donhost whilst at school and sold it to PIPEX Communications. After running PIPEX brands including 123-reg.co.uk, set-up cloud storage service Humyo. Humyo raised Angel and VC rounds and expanded internationally growing to 750k customers before its sale to Toyko listed Trend Micro in 2010.
A White Menu Product Demo from Russ Huntington
White Menu is a website builder for restaurants, bars and cafés. Our aim is to help small businesses grow by providing high-performance websites with mobile-friendly layouts and SEO best-practices. We banish the age-old problems of poor-performing and frustrating restaurant websites by removing PDF menus, flash intros and background music; instead focussing on optimal content structures for high discoverability.
Bio:
Russ has 10 years of experience working in the technology industry with a consistent focus towards building and delivering business critical solutions that provide an excellent user experience. Having started his career at Microsoft UK in a pre-sales role, Russ progressed into the financial services industry building high performance cloud-based financial planning and forecasting software. He then relocated to Toronto, Canada to work for Agility CMS – one of Canada’s leading providers of Cloud technology. During this time he worked on some of Agility’s highest profile implementations, as well as contributing to the corporate strategy and leading Partner Channel development. After returning to the UK, Russ has founded two profitable software-as-a-service based start-ups. HavilahCorp provides land management software to the mining industry in North America, and White Menu is a website builder for restaurants, bars and cafés. Follow his tweets at: @WhiteMenu
