SXSnippets: Building a business on a bus

Day 3 of StartupBus was a lesson in endurance. Many of us started the morning after logging just slightly more than four hours of sleep for the week. We gathered our gear and loaded the bus for our final leg into San Antonio/Austin. Today would be the day that the world would get to know…

Blake Miller of Think Big Partners wrote this guest post about his experience Thursday on the Las Vegas StartupBus. For more about Miller and SXSnippets, see the note following this post. 


 

Blake Miller of Think Big Partners boarded the StartupBus from Las Vegas on Tuesday and worked to build a business on the trip eastward to Austin.  

Day 3 of StartupBus was a lesson in endurance. Many of us started the morning after logging just slightly more than four hours of sleep for the week. We gathered our gear and loaded the bus for our final leg into San Antonio/Austin. Today would be the day that the world would get to know GetWished.com. GetWished is Gifting Re-imagined.

9:15 a.m. – Depart a Super 8 somewhere in West Texas — we never said it was the most glamourous of trips! This departure time was actually the latest of the entire trip. It was welcomed though because it gave us the time to finish hacking together our invite system and get it launched. Jesse (Our Wizard Hacker) pushed live just as we hit the road.

11:45 a.m. – Holy cow, We have a couple hundred people already signing up!! All from just a few tweets from awesome Silicon Prairie Supporters. You know who you are and THANK YOU!

1:30 p.m. – Finally lunch time! Otherwise known on the StartupBus as finally get off the bus time! (Below: StartupBus partcipants plug away at their projects on the road to SXSW.)

6 p.m. – Arrive in San Antonio and head straight to Geekdom. This co-work facility in San Antonio was great. Not only was it an extremely cool place but there was just some flat out incredible people there. There were several TechStars companies in the building who couldn’t have been more welcoming. Thanks guys for the hospitality! After a quick tour our team found an empty room and got right back at it. Our team has an amazing dynamic, everyone simply has their eye on the prize. As you might guess, Grinding on a bus is pretty difficult, so any time we aren’t moving is a commodity. We stayed here through dinner until the San Francisco bus met up with us.

9:30 p.m. – So the ongoing mantra of this entire trip has been “there are no rules” except apparently this little mandatory party to meet all of the other BusPreneurs from across the country. Don’t get me wrong, I was pumped to meet them and take a short break from work, but our team is here for one thing. TO WIN.. We snuck out early and got back at it!

1:43 a.m. – “Hey, we should make that video right now.” Yea, because that’s a normal project to start in the middle of the night. We got to work on a promo video for our new site. In true hustler spirit I decided to trade an Effing Gear T-shirt to one of our Aussie videographers in exchange for a free professional video shoot. Although Effing Gear is awesome, I think we came out on top on that deal!

4:16 a.m. – I promised myself I was going to get at least four hours of sleep tonight. But as the team got on a roll we just kept going and going and going. Needless to say, it’s probably another all-nighter before we depart for a start-studded affair at the Rackspace headquarters bright an early at 8 a.m.

Tomorrow is a day full of pitch prepping and hustling.

Can’t WAIT!

Credits: Photos from StartupBus courtesy of Blake Miller. Photo of Miller from thinkbigpartners.com.


About the author: Blake Miller is a partner at Kansas City, Mo.-based Think Big Partners, where he works directly with portfolio and client companies on innovation and company creation. Miller participated in this year’s StartupBus that traveled to South By Southwest from Las Vegas. On the StartupBus, Miller was part of the team that built social gifting platform getwished.com

About SXSnippets: SXSnippets are journal-style posts from residents of the Silicon Prairie chronicling 24 hours of their experience at South By Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas.

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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