It has been a few months since I provided an update on cavnessHR. I used to do these once a week and I need to get back to my weekly updates. So here I want to give an end of year update for cavnessHR.

Our previous CTO is no longer with us. His day job at the Air Force was becoming more and more demanding and his new promotion did not allow him to focus as much time as needed on cavnessHR.

Soon after this, I was able to bring on 2 co-founders. One to be the CTO or the hackster and one to be the hipster. This worked out great for a short while. However, the person doing the CTO role took on a full-time position that took up more time than he anticipated. So cavnessHR was once again without a CTO or anyone to take care of the tech part of cavnessHR.

I looked at several options to complete the rest of the cavnessHR platform. To include outsourcing to a company in Ukraine, using Toptal or Coding Ninjas and other options. I decided to use Thristysprout.  A software development company located out of WeWork Labs here in Seattle. They are going to cost a bit of money. But I have gone the intern, equity and friend route with really no luck. I felt I need to get the MVP done sooner than later to see if we have product-market fit.

A great thing about Thistysprout is they also provide a product developer to assist with the build-out of the platform. We are still looking for a UX/UI designer to join our team. Any introductions would be greatly appreciated.

We have a partnership set up with a company to do our background checks for our future customers. We also have a potential partnership with a payroll company to do payroll for future cavnessHR clients.

I was a guest speaker at Pierce College where I talked about entrepreneurship. We applied to Techstars anywhere and although we were not accepted. We had about 15 people write strong recommendations for us. So that was encouraging.  We also applied to the Seattle Angel Conference again and once again did not make it out of the first round. Even though the Angel Investor who reviewed our pitch deck said he believed we had a strong chance to advance deep in the contest. So this is probably the last time I apply for the Seattle Angel Conference.

Several people who were on the cavnessHR team have left. Either because they have full-time jobs that no longer allow them time to work on cavnessHR or I just have not heard anything from them.

We continue to use Dux-Soup to build out our LinkedIn connections. I have used this to increase my LinkedIn connections from around 3000 LinkedIn connections to over 17,000. Using this, I have been having about 4 meetings per day with people across the U.S. to talk about cavnessHR and other items. So we have been meeting with potential customers, potential investors and just people in general.

One outcome of this is we were invited to take part in the Northwest Event Trade show and we were given a free booth. We were able to meet lots of people at this event.

My CoFounder did a great job pitching cavnessHR at the Kirkland Sharks pitch event. Usually, I would do this. But on this same night, I had the Veterans in Residence Launch event at the 1411 4TH ave WeWork at WeWork Labs.

We now have someone helping with sales/marketing for cavnessHR. This person has great experience at the corporate level and will be able to take us to the next level. 

My CoFounder and one of the cavnessHR Board of Advisors took part in the Hacking Seattle Forum where the focus was on culture. 

Lots going on with cavnessHR and we are looking forward to taking our next steps in 2020.