Archive for the ‘launch’ Category

community-powered everything

Monday, November 24th, 2008

I write this from an empty bar named “The Muddy Charles” on the MIT campus. Serving pitchers of Bud and Sam has been my Monday afternoon routine for months now. Today is the first time I’ve had the bar all to myself.

It usually bustles with the likes of the 3 Peters: PB, PC, and P… something. There’s another guy who downs a pitcher while doing the Boston Globe crossword puzzle. Some do construction jobs on campus, others are MIT staff, and there is at least one emeritus professor, an old lovable man named Bernie who teaches astrophysics.

I like it here. It’s one of just a few hubs in the MIT community. Hubs are important to have, no matter what community you belong to, and if you’re somewhat of a binge networker like me, you try to infiltrate the leadership. It’s why I couldn’t just patronize this cozy little campus pub; I had to be a bartender! And as expected, the networking is great. Coincidentally, this picture of me in Variety magazine was taken at the Muddy. The fireplace in the background keeps us warm when it’s 30 degrees out.

Anyway, let me bring this back to Scripped. I set up a profile for Scripped in the VenCorps community, a new “community-powered capital” platform set up by a big-time venture capital company. Since they’re still in alpha, I can’t provide any links, but suffice to say we managed to get in pretty well with these folks too. Just today it was announced that Scripped took 3rd place in a “showdown” against 9 other other startups who made it into the finals. We’re very happy with that.

The irony of this is, of course, that Scripped is still a closed platform. We are aware of that and can’t wait to watch the networking that you’ll do when we blow the lid off this thing. Rest assured we’ll make sure it’s safe to do so and all the legalese is done properly. It’s mostly script and idea protection that is drawing the process out, but we’ll get there.

In the meantime, keep on writing…

Ryan

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Posted in Scripped, business model, entrepreneurship, launch, ryan, script frenzy | 7 Comments »

12 Days to go

Friday, December 28th, 2007
Turron

Hello again everyone - hope you’re having a nice night wherever you are. I took a picture of my favorite Spanish treat while I was visiting my sister in Barcelona a week ago - it’s called a “Turron.” The Turron pictured above is extremely special - not only is it very pricey (25 euros), but you have to special order it, and it is considered the best Turron in Barcelona. When you bite into it, it literally tastes like you’re eating pure sugar and Creme Brulee. Great combo - trust me on that one.

Twelve days to launch and it feels like I accomplished very little today. I started off the day by trying to contact publicists to get press for the upcoming launch event, but my emails yielded very little in the way of results. Fortunately, the event is basically full at this point, so we do not have to worry about showing up on the day-of and having an empty room.

Entrepreneurship is a strange thing - I talk to some of my business school friends about this from time-to-time, but you either ride on these incredible highs, or just feel like you accomplished nothing some days. That being said, I still feel like things will go well on the 8th….

One thing I did manage to accomplish was to delegate, and put other people to work. My girlfriend is a lot more thorough and organized than I am, and she has been helping me think of every possible detail that I could miss prior to the event. She’s super. My sister, and fam have also been reviewing the site thoroughly for copy errors and things of that nature. I’ve been trying to create instructional videos for the application itself, and I’ve been using this program called Camtasia Studio - I highly recommend it.

I managed to eat pretty well today. I’ve been eating well this entire break as a matter of fact. My whole goal has been to experiment by mixing different/new foods as much as possible. I ate liver for the first time every a week ago (without knowing it) and it actually tasted pretty good (until my brother-in-law told me it was liver).

Ok, back at Coffee Society and turning the focus back on…. It is absurdly loud in here today and there is a group of pretty annoying high-school kids talking about their exploits right next to me. One is wearing a Transformers T-Shirt and they are playing chess.

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Posted in launch, sunil | 2 Comments »

13 Days ‘Till Launch

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

Scripped Laptop

This is not an advertisement for Apple (you can barely tell that I’m using an Apple from the grainy image), nor is it an advertisement for http://www.scripped.com (the world’s first web-based, free screenwriting software), but it’s just a random blog site from an overworked business school student trying to launch a website. I’m at Coffee Society in Cupertino, CA trying to think of everything that could potentially go wrong with our official launch on January 8th, 2008. I am not making crazy New Year’s plans, had a pretty quiet Christmas, and actually worked pretty hard during my vacation in Spain this past week (except for the 6am night at the discotheque - yeesh).

Zak Freer (a former college classmate, USC Film School graduate, and recent winner of the Hollywood DV Short Film Festival for “Best Horror Short), Ryan Buckley (Harvard/MIT MPP/MBA student, hippie, former consultant and generally good guy) and I started Scripped a little over a year ago and we finally have a beta site. I can’t tell you how much we’ve learned over the past year about entrepreneurship, each other, and how optimism needs to be tempered with a good dose of realism. We thought we would have a full site with all of the bells and whistles 8 months ago, we’ve changed the business model at least a dozen times, and we thought we would be way further along than we would be at this time. That being said, we’re happy with where we are, what we’ve learned, and we appreciate all of the support that our friends, family, and classmates have provided over the past year-and-change.

We were fortunate enough, thanks to a classmate of mine at UCLA, to make a connection with the Writer’s Guild. After a couple of successful meetings, we were able to come up with a pretty good barter: the WGA Foundation, the not-for-profit arm of the guild, will send two writers to UCLA on the 8th of January, and we will plan the event. In exchange for filling all of the seats in the audience, and taking care of the logistics, Scripped Inc. gets full sponsorship of the event. I think that’s a great deal. This is a huge opportunity for us to get some publicity and network with the guild (and take business plan number 15 to the guild in hopes of getting support and goodwill). If you’re interested in attending the event, email me at sunil@scripped.com. The two writers are superstars - one was nominated for the Academy Award for Field of Dreams (which he also directed), and the other was the former chair of the screenwriting department at USC.

Tuesday Jan 8th, 6:00pm-8:00pm, UCLA Anderson campus, Panel Discussion about the strike. Come with your questions!

More to come tomorrow - I am too busy burning a hole in my stomach with all of the caffeine I’ve had here… Thanks for keeping up - I’ll post every night ’till the event (and the night of the event, though admittedly, I have a bottle of Absinthe which I brought from Spain and I plan on opening after the 8th is over).

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Posted in Scripped, launch, sunil | No Comments »