RT @SeattleEconomy: Tonight! Join us at the Ethiopian Community in Seattle for the #FutureFounders VR Demo & experience the Rainier Beach F….

RT @SeattleEconomy: Join us Friday 12/21 for the #FutureFounders VR Demo! The inaugural FutureFounders cohort learned VR design and coding….

Join millions who have switched to Grok.

RT @BECU: We’ve partnered with @UW’s @UWCoMotion to launch the BECU #Fintech Incubator. Financial tech startups can apply through 12/1 for….

Seattle startup Migo aims to give riders the power of comparison.

The Greater Seattle Technology Ecosystem: Study and Entrepreneur's Guide from Iinnovate Leadership Network and University of Washington Bothell School of Business also has some very useful info for Seattle startups

Finally, after multiple revisions, I created a full set of paper prototypes that would be used for further evaluation during the usability testing phase.

We update our non-exhaustive list of resources for startups once a quarter at What have been some helpful resources for you on your startup journey? #StartupSeattleStories

After creating multiple sketches, I moved on to translating these into paper prototypes. We went over each pathway to gain a better understanding of what was supposed to happen at each step. Here are a few images of my first iteration:

Here's a quote from a founder we spoke to recently ". because without the passion, you can't. I feel like you will stop at some point." Got passion? Was there ever a time when you had to decide whether or not to keep going, pivot, or shut down your startup? Tweet us your reply.

Once the feature set was finalized, I started to sketch different pathways to meet specific customer needs as shown in the images attached below. Let us know what your thoughts are!

Going into the prototyping phase, we created a feature set for our potential prototypes to make sure that they meet and take care of the needs of both founders and investors. Here's a screenshot of what we came up with:

Here's an interesting quote from an investor we spoke to ". now generally they [entrepreneurs] have to be excited and passionate about the idea themselves. If you don't believe in it then there's no way you're going to convince others to believe in it."

As votes trickled in over the course of a few days, the "Streamlined Guidance and Matchmaking" category of idea was the most popular, so we decided to concentrate on that concept for the prototyping phase of the project.

How would you describe your risk profile as a startup founder?.

Once we refined our ideas for each category, we opened up the ideation process to the rest of OED staff. We posted our research question, themes, personas, and sketches on an office wall, and asked our colleagues for feedback and votes for their top three ideas.

Where have your most useful skills as an entrepreneur come from?.

During the ideation phase, David and I came up with about 20 sketches related to the insights that we found from our research. After comparing and contrasting our sketches, we decided to create a second round of 10 sketches related to five categories that appeared in round 1.

Which stage best describes the current state for your company?.

After merging the common themes, what emerged were three key insights that we brought with us into the ideation phase:

We promised we'd update you on our progress for the #StartupSeattleStories project… during the research phase, David and I conducted over 2.5 hrs of interviews with founders and investors, transcribed the interviews, and each analyzed the text for common themes.