When Your Partner Bails on Your World Record Attempt

If you love the Colorado Startup scene, please watch this 1 min video. Or, if you want to become a world record holder within 6 days of this post. 

View this today or x this video out forever:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZkk45P36ns

Tweet me if you're interested

Tip of the Week for Single Founders

I’m talking about the entrepreneurs that don’t have co-founders, not ones without a significant other. Nor am I promising a tip every single week.

Maintaining a killer personal brand separate from your business brand is essential for those looking to networking both on and offline.

​So if posting content consistently isn’t your problem, I’m going share what I did to keep my personal brand and business brand separate.

-With different profiles and passwords on both laptop & mobile, a growing problem for me was staying logged in and consistent with my business while maintaining my personal brand.

Tip of the Week: Buy a used iPod Touch or a dedicated smartphone that is exclusively for business accounts (Instagram, Twitter, and more).

Here’s why you need a dedicated device:

1. It holds you accountable for your business’s brand to be independent when your startup is at a young age.

2. It’s an easy device to pass off to a friend or part-time team member when you’re busy but want to be socially active (like when I was hosting Startup Denver).

3. When I hire another full-time employee, it’s cool that they get electronics with the new job. In fact, startups should just include cell phone accounts for their team members anyway.

Hope this helps! If you’re a first-time entrepreneur, ask me questions at Matt Holmes (@handshakin) | Twitter

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4 Things To Do After a Networking Event

Networking events are great for entrepreneurs and startups to get together. You can meet all kinds of new people that can advise or turn into clients. You can bounce ideas off of others. You can learn new things, increasing your bottom line.

Here are some action items you should do after a networking event when you are pumped up and excited about your business and all of the people that you have met.

• Write down all of the things that you learned at the event. It is important that you write down things that are important to you so you don’t forget anything that you wanted to remember. I prefer to step aside and tell Siri things like, “Remind me to research Online Jobs dot Ph for virtual assistants.”
  
• Write down information about all of the people that you met at the event. You can even do this on their business cards if that helps you to keep them straight. Even if it’s just one word.
  
• Send an email to everyone who you met at the event. However, it is important that you do this in the next day or two. Otherwise, you will forget to do this. It can be a simple email telling them that you were glad to meet them.
  
  Pro Tip: Ask people you talk to if they’re on LinkedIn, and then tell them you’ll find them. This is particularly powerful if you post a blog every week as it will ping all of them.
  
• Make sure that you are ready for your next event. Make sure that you have refuel your business card holder for your next networking event.

It is important to come home from a networking event and write down everything so you don’t forget it. You should also write down information about the people that you met! Then, email or add everyone in the next day or two so that they don’t forget you!
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Contact us to help you with your networking, both online and off!

Why I Abandoned Using Voicemail In 2016.

Just after Christmas 2015, I was driving from my hometown of Santa Fe, NM back to Handshakin’ Headquarters and my home base in Denver, Colorado. I dialed my google voice number to check voicemails because there was nothing else I could do to be productive while driving.

“You have 54 new voice messages.”

About 90% of them were obsolete because we had already dealt with the issue. Another 5% were low priority for me and ignored — I couldn’t write down anything while driving. (And honestly, who wants to write anything down. Just text me a number I can click to call.) The remaining 5% I would have liked to have gotten to sooner, but surely, months later it was too late.

So, what’s the next logical step after dealing with that bullshit?

Cut out the bullshit. I instantly made the decision to update my personal and business line voicemail message to say the following:

“Hi, you’ve reached Matt Holmes, Founder of the Handshakin Video Series. I don’t check voicemails more than once per year, so please shoot me a text message or email me at matt@handshakin.com. That’s handshakin’ without the ‘g’.”

Before I tell you what will happen moving forward, you should know about two tools I already had working to my advantage.

1. My personal voicemail box had been full for a while. It’s unprofessional. Don’t do that. However, one perk of that was that people would email me saying “Your VM was full, but I was just calling about XXXX.” This still accomplished my goal of obtaining information in the most convenient and efficient way for me.
2. My business line is actually just a Google Voice phone number — therefore it texted me automated transcriptions. I could usually get the picture of what the message was about. So I wasn’t 100% out of the loop with voicemail like I plan to be in 2016.

These two thing had helped, but weren’t enough and didn’t come across to the level of professionalism I hold myself accountable to today.

As my business grows I realize more and more that time and network are the most valuable resources. I do not want phone calls or voicemails that can be answered in literally 2 seconds via text message or email. Get straight to the point when you communicate with me, please. I’m sure a number of you out there feel the same way!

I’m working towards being a better communicator with everyone I interact with professionally and personally by setting expectations up front, even if it’s not traditional. I encourage you to do the same so your friends, for example, don’t text you when you never check your texts. Get crazy!  Oh, I’m also big on Twitter & Quora. So get at me there.

5 Tips for New Meetup Organizers

Many people have asked me how my meetup grew so fast. It had just over 100 members December 2014, and December 2015 it was just under 1,000 ‘movers and shakers.’

Over the last 12 months, I’ve actually been doing a little bit more on Meetup than organizing Startup Denver (PS Join us right now if you’re local). I’ve organized over 30 events, and that doesn’t include my other meetup groups. Startups Drink Local, Evolving Entreprenuers and Denver Podcasters.

Anyway, here are my top 5 tips for your new Meetup group.

Disclosure: This worked for me from 12/14 to 12/15 and for an entrepreneurial type of meetup. It isn’t guaranteed to work for yours. Be smart, take some or none of my advice and most importantly. Keep pushing forward.

1. Get consistent. Don’t do a millionaire different events at 10 different places at 2 different times. Make it were a newcomer can describe it to their friend in once sentence. “Yea, their pitch battles are the 4th Thurs of each month at Galvanize @ 6:30pm.”
2. Ignore almost all feedback. Don’t wait for feedback before planning. When you meet with co-organizers, make sure you are executing and not planning. Don’t listen to feedback until you can look at the last 6–9 months to analyze. Ignore what people tell you at the event unless they’ve come to every single event and have expressed an interest as co-organizer.
3. Be patient. Don’t be discouraged when 33 people RSVP and 6 show up like this event that we had. It takes time to build a group, and the faster they can describe it in 1 sentence the faster it will grow (or not, if there’s no demand).
4. Keep your event free. Help others first, and the money will come later. If you charge you’re never going to have a huge notable meetup group that actually matters in the larger community.
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5. Simple Reminders. Send emails 2 times: 7 days and 1 day in advance of each event. Keep them super short and STRAIGHT to the point. Include the date, time, and location even if you have that on the event. People don’t want to click your links.

If anybody has other suggestions please give your tips in the comments, would love to improve with you guys :) Check out my group Startup Denver and let me know any questions you have about how I grew it.

​-Matt Holmes
​@handshakin