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Dear Friends,

It’s been an exciting journey and you are literally the first ones to learn about this.

I would like to share with what my friend Adrian and I have been working on.

It’s called “Huddle Metrics” and basically it let’s you safely share and compare the important numbers in your life with other people in a similar place.

To kick off with an example on how these “Huddles” can help you make better decisions, I’ve created one all around rent and roommates in Brooklyn.

I’ll explain it in detail below and I think you will like it:

Do you live with roommates in Brooklyn?

Do you spend a significant portion of your income on rent and utilities?

Would you like to know what’s market in your neighborhood?

This “Huddle” is a safe place to share and compare your own monthly rent with everyone else’s. All you need to do is provide your own rent and utilities anonymously. Then you get to see what everyone else is paying. Filter, slice and dice rent by square footage, the neighborhood, and how many roommates there are.

Why join? Having access to “real data” allows you to make better decisions for your next move. By joining this Huddle you’ll get a better understanding of the roommate rent market in Brooklyn. In particular, when enough people have joined, you’ll be able to learn what’s market in a neighborhood you’ve been maybe eyeing to move to.

So, here is what you need to do to get started if you would like to join:

* First, check out this demo to get an idea how this works. * Secondly, if you like what you’re seeing, you should sign up! * Lastly, the more people join, the more data you get. If you dig it, please share this link with your Brooklyn friends.

Happy Huddlin’!

Alexis

PS: Feedback, questions are absolutely welcome! Please feel free to comment here or send me an email to alexis.rondeau@gmail.com.

Dear Friend,

Today marks a pivotal day in my life.

Unfortunately (it seems unfortunate today, but only time will tell) we–A, D and I–have not gotten the successful responses from investors we had hoped for.

I must now shift gears and find a paying job to live. It is a hard pill to swallow. Of all things I have worked on and of all people, it has been an absolute pleasure.

In fact, if I had (all, or at least enough to live) the money in the world, I would work on this with A and D.

But I don’t. I have far extended my personal savings.

I have a runway of 1 month and it does not look like there is venture capital coming in in the coming 3-6 months.

Our startup “HM” has come a long way in the past 9 months.

I have learned so much in the process.

We started out in February with the idea for VA. “What if we worked with VCs and their portfolio to collect everyone’s salary, equity and bonus information, anonymize it in a private network and make it accessible and searchable for all participants?”

Within 2 months we already had 130 startups on board. In August it was twice that.

In total, as of today, this pilot system is tracking salaries, equities, bonuses, revenue, marketing costs and much more of companies that themselves have raised $2,270,000,000 in funding.

We account for more than $224,000,000 in salaries across 6,533 employees nationwide.

Well, that all sounds good, right? It gets even better!

2 months ago, around August, we sat down and really analyzed what we were “actually doing” here. We realized that our pilot successfully described what we have come to call a “Data Community.” A safe place for peers to share their most sensitive data at the benefit of everyone. You get to know what’s really market. You can use it make better decisions. For hiring. For allocating equity. For planning your next round. For running your business.

Since then, I have worked hard on creating a self-serve platform that allows any community (real or imaginary) to create “Data Communities” for themselves and their information.

It came out really, really nice.

First, I went ahead and made very rough sketches for the general use cases. There were 2 rounds of review with the team called M(ockup)1 and M2. Those led into developing the actual application prototypes P(rototype)1 and P2. P2 was the basis for V(ersion)1 which we softly released past Thursday.

As a team of 1 covering planning, specification, designing, modeling, testing, implementing and polishing I am proud. Work was focussed and fast enough to have something in our hands to play with and reason about.

On a technical level, it is a moderately complex data model with a few nice twists to it. There is the requirement of anonymity of data which we are solving well. There is the ability to basically create a collaborative, focussed spreadsheet with user-defined data types based on what they want the community to share. Similar to a survey data has to be stored in a specific, unconventional way. And we have to push it even further. The end-user experience is important, too. After all, if it’s clunky no one wants to use it.

But.

And here comes the big but.

Even with a polished, elegant and well-designed product and a potential array of markets we can go into, if there is no money to support ourselves, it’s impossible to continue full-time on it.

Which is where I find myself today.

Again, if I had enough money to support my basic needs (and maybe move into a nicer place where my room has a bed instead of a couch and a window) I would continue working on this and push the limits on what we can do with it.

Alas, that’s not happening today. Because, even though we’ve been working with VC funds in the past 9 months, none of them seem to be thoroughly interested in giving us money. Apparently they can see the value created by our Data Community software for their own portfolios but not beyond. And I understand that it is a stretch. But that’s where the Venture in Venture Capital should come in.

In the meantime, this means finding paid great work.

I am a creator.