Author Archives: Justin Thorp

Singer/Songwriter & Close Friend Benjamin Hofer Releasing His Debut Album “Family History”

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fhcoverSinger/songwriter and my long time friend Benjamin Hofer is releasing his debut solo album, “Family History” on April 6th.  A week ago, Ben gave me a pre-release stream of the album and I’ve been listening to it non-stop. Ben is an incredibly talented singer, songwriter, and musician.   His folk style fits right into that genre of music that I love to listen to all day long.

As the title would imply, the theme of the songs revolve around telling a family history.  I was emailing with Ben about the album.  He mentioned that the theme kind of emerged as he realized family was really apart of every song that he had written.   The last song on the album, “Huron, SD,” is based on the story of his paternal grandfather.

Head over to his website and hear his first single off the album “Man’s Own Heart.”

Ben funded the $5k to produce the album by doing a campaign on Kickstarter.  I’m so pumped to have been able to support Ben and the production of the album.  Ben’s been talking about wanting to do this album for a while. I’m so excited to see it come to fruition.

Previously, Ben had released an EP by himself called “Three Songs.”  You can download all three songs on his website.  Additionally, when he lived in Florida, he was part of band called the The Northernness, which released a self-titled album.

If you live in the Washington, DC area, I’d recommend checking out the “Family History” Album Release party at the Scooby Doo Mansion on Saturday, April 6th at 7:30pm.  There he’ll be accompanied by a full band, including special guests Wendell Kimbrough and David Parker, who are both featured on the album.  Tickets are only $10.

Mayor Vincent Gray Loves DC Tech

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Even though we don’t reside there anymore, I’m still super psyched and rooting for the DC tech & startup community. Over 7 years, it has been great to see DC Mayor Vince Gray really become a spokesman and advocate for the movement.

This year, he even went to SXSW to evangelize the region. Here’s an interview that he did with TechCocktail

Who’s in my community?

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Being a part of a community is so much fun because of the amazing things happen when you get a bunch of passionate people rallied around solving a particular problem or issue. When you’re starting out, one impediment to seeing the magic happen is discovering all the people that are in your community or who could be in your community.

When I lived in Washington, DC, even in the early days of the DC Tech/startup community, it was never that there weren’t a lot of tech or startup people in the area. It’s just that none of them knew that the others existed. Even to this day, I’m still hearing about new startups in the DC area that I’d never of before that had been there the entire time.

In DC, knowing who was in your community was especially hard because it just takes so stinking long to get to the different parts of the geographic area. Capitol Hill feels incredibly far from Dupont Circle. When you throw Tyson’s Corner into the mix, it feels like going to a different country all together. A good friend of mine lived in Bethesda that I never saw enough of because it was just hard to get up to Bethesda.

This is part of why we created the DC Tech Facebook Group. We needed a way for people to see who was who and what was going on, whether it was an event or company news. It was obvious that people just didn’t know what was going on or who was doing what. Facebook Groups allow for this a very crowd sourced manner, which has plusses & minuses.

In terms of the DC Tech community, one thing that’s helpful is now there are a handful of really great reporters (Bill Flook from the Washington Business Journal, Paul Sherman from the Potomac Tech Wire, and Steven Overly from the Washington Post) who are helping unearth and tell the stories of the interesting things that are happening in the community. There stories help the community figure out who’s who and who’s doing stuff that’s cool. But… you shouldn’t use that as your only source, otherwise you’ll miss out on a lot.

So, if you’re running a community group, what can you do to help get the stories out about who’s all in your community? How can you get folks talking about all the great things that they’re doing? How can you get people talking about all the great things that others are doing?

Once you figure this out, you’ll be seeing magic happening in your community at an accelerated rate.

Starbucks brings comfort through consistency

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So, yesterday my wife and I finished our trek across the country to our new home in Las Vegas, Nevada. Over the 4 days, we stopped in a lot of random towns to crash before we picked up and got on the road again.

When you’re in places you don’t know, it’s always nice to find things that look familiar. For example, Starbucks is amazing because it’s the same regardless of where you go. Starbucks is the same in DC as it is in Oklahoma City as it is in Las Vegas.

I remember, when Lauren and I were on our honeymoon in Europe, we had just taken the train from Venice up to Munich. We had some time to kill in the Munich train station and were elated to find a Starbucks. We enjoyed a latte, blueberry scones, and free wifi. :)

I know that its cool to be down on national food/coffee chains (i love me a good indie coffee shop) but sometimes when you’re in the process of a lot of change, it’s nice to have things exactly the same.

We’re moving to Las Vegas!

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vegasI have some exciting news.  Lauren and I are moving to Las Vegas, Nevada on Saturday.

There’s an incredibly vibrant tech/startup community in Downtown Vegas that’s being built up by Zappos’ CEO, Tony Hsieh, his team, and dozens of tech startups that are relocating there from around the country and even world.

Lauren’s startup, Umba Box, has been asked to be a part of the Vegas Tech community (we’ll be able to share more specific details about what this means at a later date), which is what’s initiating the move for us.

Friday is also my last day at HelloWallet.  I’ll be talking more about what’s next for me job-wise soon.

I’m really excited for this new season of our lives and what God has planned for us in Las Vegas.    I’ll be just as active on social media (including writing more for this blog) so, if you’re interested, it’ll be easy to keep track of our comings and goings.

While I’m excited for this new opportunity, it’s definitely hard to leave a city that I’ve called home for almost 7 years now.   There are so many people who I’ve met over the years that have been such an incredible blessing to me and Lauren.  I can’t do or say enough to repay how thankful I am for how much you’ve contributed to our lives.

Also… can’t leave without saying how so incredibly proud I am of all that’s happened during my brief tenure in DC with the local tech community.  I remember when Social Media Club was one of the only meetups and Peter Corbett, Joe Price, and I would sit around a conference table with 10 other people pontificating about the future.  Now the DC Tech Meetup commands an audience of 1200.   I remember when I could count all the startups  on one hand.  Now there’s new ones popping up everyday.   I’m excited for the future of the DC Tech community and I’ll be actively tracking its progress.

I’ll definitely be posting more about what’s happening in Vegas.  If you have any questions feel free to post a comment to the blog or drop me an email – jthorp@gmail.com

And if you’re ever in Vegas, holla.  Would love to meetup.  :)  XO!

Monetize your sawdust

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Back in 2009, I attended the Ryan Carson produced Future of Web Apps conference in Miami, Florida. There 37signals co-founder Jason Fried spoke an interesting truth that’s resonated with me ever since.  He told everyone to “monetize your sawdust.“

When a lumber company creates wood boards, there’s sawdust that falls to the factory floor.  That sawdust gets swept up and used in the creation of other products.  The lumber company is monetizing their sawdust.

He challenged everyone to look at the by-products of the work that they’re doing for their business and look at ways they could potentially make money or generate new opportunity off of them.   For 37signals, the examples were the programming framework Ruby on Rails and a book that was essentially a group of their past blog posts.

When I was at Clearspring (now called AddThis), we were working on getting our sharing tools on every website we could.  Over my tenure we saw the usage grow from 200,000 domains to over 11 million (and its even higher now).  While data about a specific publisher was never made public because it was private to that publisher, we realized we had all this interesting aggregate data about where and what people were sharing and searching for online.

That aggregate data was incredibly marketable.  We took the aggregate data about the state of the different social & sharing services on the market and went to the tech media.  They wrote about it and the story always talked about how the data came from AddThis. Initially, we were just taking screenshots from Microsoft Excel charts.  Eventually, I got our creative director looped in and he started making us super sexy infographics, which the media ate up even more.

I didn’t have a marketing budget.  I wasn’t trying to arbitrage Google or Facebook ads in order to drive traffic.   I was monetizing our sawdust.  Our aggregate data was a view on the world that no one else had.  It was great.  We’d do a data-related announcement during the lull between product announcements. We wanted everyone talking and thinking about us all the time.   And, it worked.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with and mentoring a number of different startups.  One of the most common pieces of advice that I give is to “monetize your sawdust.”  Look at the by-products that are created from the production of your core product.   There’s probably something there that you can sell or use to generate excitement/awareness which will help make you more money.

The most important thing I learned in college.

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When I went to the Rochester Institute of Technology, I took all kinds of interesting classes. I was brimming with knowledge from classes on Java programming to legislative process to the wines of the world.

But the most important thing I learned in college wasn’t how to start a method in Java or the differences between oaked and unoaked Chardonnay. I learned how to learn. I learned how much fun learning was. My intellectual curiosity was more than reinforced. It was a cultural norm amongst everyone who attended (and survived.)

In one of my classes, we had the project of learning a new programming language (or Web technology) and teaching it to the class in 2 weeks.  What?!? My partner and I showed the class how to build something in XForms.  Heh!  Oh Web technologies that no one use anymore. :)

In today’s technology age, things are constantly changing.  Everyday there’s something new popping up that solves a problem more effectively than what existed in the market before.   To survive, you have to be ready and willing to adapt.

A big part of my career thus far has been helping to evangelize how the different innovations can be used to help solve existing business problems.   I was just showing some colleagues the other day how to do something and they wanted to know how to do this other thing.  I think they were surprised when I said I didn’t know how.  I just hadn’t spent time to figure it out yet but left the room challenging them to jump into the unknown, try it.

Don’t let what you don’t know or haven’t experienced scare you? Life is one big ever-changing learning experience.  Embrace it.   Never stop asking questions.

I always want to be learning, growing, and being put into situations that are uncomfortable and I want to be around people the feel the same.  Otherwise, things just get boring.

Don’t use your smartphone in a movie theater, during the movie.

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Last night, Lauren and I went to go see the new movie Identity Thief with Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy.  It’s HILARIOUS.  We had a great time.

The one blip on the evening was these 3 teenagers sitting in the very front of the movie theater that were playing on their smart phones the entire time.  At one point, they were evening taking photos of each other with the flash on, during the  middle of the movie.   It was infuriating.

I’m the biggest fan of technology, especially smartphones.  This was just a complete lack of consideration for anyone around them, for how their actions were affecting us.

I’m not saying we should get crazy and ban smart phones in movie theaters.   We just need to be better about making certain actions strongly cultural unacceptable.

At the very least, from now on, I’m going to be super self-conscious about pulling out my smart phone at a movie theater.

More universities should promote careers in startups

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So there was a story in TechCrunch about a partner at Sequoia Capital who said that Ivy League universities should be encouraging more of their students to go to startups. Students go to large companies because that’s what you do. It’s what everyone does.

I didn’t go to one of the Ivy’s. I went to the Rochester Institute of Technology and I completely relate. Startups were never talked about. Everyone talked about wanting to go work for Google, Microsoft, or IBM and that’s what most of us did.

It’s funny. I’ve gotten together with friends who graduated around the same time I did and got to startups one way or another. The resounding opinion was, why didn’t someone tell us about how much fun startups are?

If more of us would have known, I think we would have been launching businesses in our college dorm rooms.

The iPad Mini is My Desert Island Device Too

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ipadminiIn December of last year, New York Times technology columnist Nick Bilton wrote that Apple iPad mini was his desert island device.   Meaning that if he had to pick one consumer electronics device to take to a desert island, he’d take his iPad mini.

Well, for a Christmas present, my wife and mother-in-law got me an iPad mini and I have to say that I 100% agree with Nick.   It has all what’s great about an iPad tablet but it’s extra portable because of its size.    It has the power of an iPad with the size of a Kindle.

I take the iPad mini with me everywhere.  I use it to read the news when I get up in the morning and before I go to bed.  I leave my laptop at my desk and take the iPad mini with me to meetings.

One use case I was running into was standing on the subway where I have to hold on to a pole with one hand and couldn’t hold on the iPad with the other because it was too heavy.   The iPad mini is the perfect weight.

I’m really surprised that I don’t see more iPad mini’s out in the market.  Maybe the bigger iPad has gotten so much traction that folks don’t see it to be worth it?

If you’ve been holding out on getting a tablet, I’d recommend the iPad mini.