It’s true. After two years in the awesomeness of The Box, we decided to create a new Box. Everybody knows moving sucks, so you may be wondering why we would move from a really awesome space in the heart of downtown. Well, creating new stuff is kinda what we’re about, but that’s not the only reason for the move. Here are a few more:

Bloomington’s B-Line Trail is changing the game.

Bloomington has just expanded its B-Line Trail to 3.1 miles and acquired the 55 acre McDoel Switchyard. The trail expansion sets the stage for a wave of redevelopment opportunities to the south. We’re part of one of the most prominent, with massive windows overlooking the trail and the switchyard, which will soon become Bloomington’s Central Park. Very Sprouty.

More concrete = better skating.

The old place had a little bit of exposed concrete, but not enough to really skate hard on.  3500+ square feet of concrete makes a pretty decent skate pad. It also makes a highly configurable work floor that can house a lot of startup activity.

Higher ceilings allow for more aggressive table tennis.

25 foot ceilings are pretty sweet. No more ping-pong do-overs because of interference from a drop ceiling. It also means that there’s great natural light and a second floor ready to house more Sprouts and more co-working space.

We got a better deal.

Way better,  in fact. The building that housed the old Box changed hands, and the new owner wanted way too much rent money. The new place costs literally a fraction of the old Box. Less money spent on rent means more money invested in startups. And that’s exactly what we’re about.

We’re still doing a lot of work to improve the space (after all, it is a RE-development), but we’re completely moved in and fully functional. If you’d like to come check it out, just let us know.

The new address is:

300 West Hillside Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

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When making an investment decision, our selection committee carefully considers each applicant on six key characteristics:

1. Low overhead.
2. Broad and easy-to-reach market.
3. Predictable recurring revenue model.
4. Dedicated quality founder(s).
5. Appeal as an acquisition target.
6. Development scope.

There’s plenty of information about these criteria on our website and in the FAQ section at http://sproutbox.com/apply, but this is really just the bare minimum. A business idea that fails to meet one of these criteria is almost sure to be rejected, but simply passing the initial test won’t guarantee selection either. I thought I’d share  a little more detail on what really makes an applicant stand out.

It’s a little cliche to say that we invest in people (as opposed to ideas), but it’s absolutely true. Your business plan reflected in your application is merely an indicator of your ability as an entrepreneur. A good application will convey not only your ideas, but also your ability to turn that idea into a successful business. When I read an application, I’m looking for words and numbers that will tell me what kind of entrepreneur you are. In particular, I’m looking for founders who have these characteristics:

Technical Savvy

This doesn’t mean that you must be a programmer. Certainly, founding teams with an accomplished programmer on board will be favored, but I want to see founders that understand both the underlying technology and the benefit it offers to customers. Even if you’ll never write a line of code, an understanding of the technology will help you make the right choices in hiring staff and finding the right partners for your business.

Ability to Raise Capital

SproutBox is an alternative to seed capital. Our investment will help you get a great product to the market, but that doesn’t mean you won’t need more capital to fund growth. Previous investment in your business, or interest from other investors will greatly improve your chances for selection.

Existing Revenue or User Base

We are happy to invest at ‘idea stage’ when we see a great opportunity, but nothing proves a concept better than customers. Great entrepreneurs find ways to engage customers before the product is ready. Maybe you have customers paying you on a consulting or service model. Maybe you’ve got potential customers reading your blog about innovation in your market. Anything that quantifies your ability to attract users will help your cause. The founder of our current Sprout had over ten years of experience and hundreds of paying customers before he ever pitched his concept for a product.

Resilience (aka Scrappiness)

Every startup will face challenges. There have been countless white papers, books, college texts, and articles written about the reasons startups fail, but no startup fails until the founders give up. I can’t tell you how many justifications I’ve heard for why a startup fails: “We were under-capitalized” or “We couldn’t compete with the big guys” or “The market wasn’t ready”. Every successful business found a way to overcome these challenges. Convince me that you have the guts to do the same.

The deadline is coming up 11:59pm Sunday May 8, 2011, so get over to http://sproutbox.com/apply now and show us what you’ve got.

BTW, we love to see applications from all over the place (our first two Sprouts were from California), but the midwest has been living up to expectations lately. Our last two were both from Indiana (myJibe from Indy and StoryAmp from Bloomington). I can’t wait to see where the best applications are born this time.

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Oh baby, you, you got what I need
but you say he’s just a friend
but you say he’s just a friend
-Biz Markie

Trying to get intimate
A couple weeks ago at the Startup Mixology speakers dinner I had a good conversation with Micah Baldwin about intimacy. Not the kind between the sheets, but the kind that perpetuates true friendship. It’s a topic that’s been rolling around in my head for a while, and I’m not the only one. Obviously, my acquaintance, Dave Morin has been thinking about it too. His new social network startup, Path, limits you to 50 friends. Zuck is taking a shot at intimacy as well, with Facebook’s renewed focus on one on one conversations and the new groups system.

Twitter is a lie
One thing Micah and I agreed on is that most social networks don’t really encourage you to be you. How many times have you started a tweet and then backed out? Not because you aren’t thinking what you typed, but because it’s not something appropriate to share with the world. Maybe it’s not relevant to everyone. Maybe it’s just too emo. Maybe it funny as hell, but could offend someone you care about. It’s not just about 50 friends vs 5000 friends. It’s about grandma vs Dave McClure.

I am not a private person. But while privacy isn’t a concern for me, respect for others is. I don’t curse in front of kids (usually). I don’t do shots at my parents house. I don’t rub it in that I had a good year financially to friends trying to make ends meet. This doesn’t make me inauthentic or non-transparent– It makes me not a douche bag.

Circles of friends
My social graph isn’t a thousand points of light. It’s not flat. It doesn’t look like some trippy exploding 3D dandelion either. I have an inner circle that I talk to almost every day– people I constantly bounce ideas off of (and still love me in the morning). I have friends that care what conferences I’m going to. I have acquaintances that may want to know what I think of my new XBOX 360 KINECT. I have announcements I want to get out to anyone who will listen, like that we’re hiring at SproutBox or that I’m throwing a conference.

Even though these same friendship levels exist for nearly everyone, they are largely ignored by social networks. It’s like each of us started up a radio station and then we’re surprised about the airwaves getting crowded. Facebook can’t tell the difference between my best friend at work (who incidentally I don’t interact with on Facebook much because, well, he is sitting next to me) and some over-requester  I accidentally added because we share 19 tech friends.

Users end up trying to model life by using different sites to segment their circles of friends. While it’s a pain to go to a bunch of different sites to update your status, the bigger problem lies in that people don’t use networks consistently. Some people use Facebook as a contact dump, others use LinkedIn for that. Some use foursquare for just their closest friends and some have 5000 foursquare friends.

Getting on the right Path
The just-launched “personal network,” Path, is attempting to identify the inner circle of your friends. The idea of a 50 friend limit has all the the right intentions. Segmenting your graph further, however, isn’t a solution–it’s part of the problem. Your friends change and having to remove one to add another is a not what a user wants. Granted, sometimes it isn’t what the user wants that matters, it’s what’s best for the collective that wins out (see 140 character limit in Twitter). But an arbitrary 50 friend limit isn’t good for anyone. If someone moves out of your inner circle, they are most likely still your friend. The last thing you want to do is indicate that: “Hey, you’re not in my inner circle anymore”. You probably still have a relationship with your former inner circle friend. You have photos you want to share with them, just maybe not the ones of your freaky new leg rash.

But Path is onto something big (at least for me). I want to decide who I’m sharing with when I post content. This isn’t new. Nearly all communication methods work this way. I can do a call with 1 or 100 people. I can send an email to 1 or 1000 people. I can mail a letter to 1 or 1,000,000. It’s up to me. As the creator of the content I control it’s reach. With status updates the problem is there is a lot of overhead in assembling lists to send to. No one wants to add recipients one at a time to a quick status update.

Your social circle
It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and bitch that someone else hasn’t solved your problem for you– So mostly that’s what I’m going to do. However, I do have a few half baked thoughts on a solution. It may be too complex for today’s non-power users. But it would work for me, so I hope someone builds something better.

What I want is a slider that I can quickly tweak when posting an update. The slider would have notches representing my inner circle all the way to up to a public post. When posting I could bump the slider up or down depending on my content and my intended audience.

I would define the rung of my social circle a particular connection falls into. These handful of rungs would correspond to a notch on the slider. Similar to friends, I could place web services at various rungs of the circle. So a post to Foursquare would be in ring 2 (among my friends), but a Twitter post would be at the public level (past my acquaintances). I’d post to public services like Twitter or Tumblr only when the slider was all the way up.

I could also see value in defining multiple social circles. So maybe a ‘Family’ circle would have my immediate family in the inner circle and extended family in tier 2, and family friends in tier 3.  A ‘Location’ circle could divide your friends up by how far they are away from you, etc.

Configuration overhead would be the biggest obstacle to adoption. You’d need a fun drag and drop interface to make initial sorting enjoyable. Categorizing a new friend would feel a little bit like building a game character. The process could be  jumpstarted by making recommendations for the default social circle based on interactions.

Obviously there’s a ton of flushing out to do– but the rewards could be meaningful. A system like this would have a significantly richer view of a users social graph. Widespread use would cut a lot of noise out of everyones feed– making some headway on solving the information overload many of us face daily.

I’m pretty sure the tools to do a proof of concept already exist in the privacy:allow fields of the Facebook social graph API. It’s just a matter of wrapping an interface around it. A social network with circle data at it’s core could use it to improve prioritization of messages, events, photos– essentiality any feed data.

One parting thought: Please, for the love of god, let’s never make a social circle public. The last thing we need is more MySpace Top Friends type drama among teenage girls.

Thanks to Kacey Martin for talking through this post with me.

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