Dan Rockwell: Not your father's entrepreneur

On the west side of Columbus -- at the Panera Bread on Bethel Road, to be precise -- is the unofficial headquarters of Big Kitty Labs.

That's where CEO Dan Rockwell and partner Tushar Kulkarni often hash out new ideas for the next great iPhone app or web tool.

Ideas like ChumpDump, which debuted for iPhone and Google Android last summer. Each day, ChumpDump picks a name randomly from your friends list and scours through a month of tweets. It tells you how many times your friend sent you a direct message, how many times he or she retweeted your tweets, replied to your messages and other factors that enable you to answer this question:

"Save or dump?"

Within two weeks, 500 people were playing.

Or CueThat, a service Big Kitty launched in February that accumulated 1,000 users within the first two weeks. Why so popular? CueThat lets you right click on a web reference to a movie and immediately add it to your online Netflix queue.

Great ideas, right? Here's the rub: Neither has a revenue model.

Then there's Hoolykn, Dokushot, ParsePlz, SourceCow, Whisker, BORIS, Hashparty and Rightnow -- all Big Kitty projects that were developed, well, because they were interesting.

Even when working for paying clients like TiXiT, MobileXpeditions, or Brand Thunder, Big Kitty doesn't seem to be steaming intentionally toward that $2-million venture capital round.

But you know what? Rockwell is OK with that.

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Big Kitty Labs' claim to fame is its concept of "protobaking" -- a business-plan-be-damned-let's-get-something-built approach. It originated from a hard lesson learned.

In 2009, Rockwell left as CEO of Joe Metric, a Columbus startup designed to pay users cash for providing simple feedback to curious companies.

The idea leading to Joe Metric was one Rockwell had presented at a Columbus Startup Weekend in 2008, he says. Over the weekend, the idea grew legs. And before anybody had much time to think about it, people who had come together to flesh out a startup idea in three short days suddenly had a new company. A $50,000 grant from TechColumbus soon followed.

"And everything got more serious," Rockwell says. "We had to print business cards. We got one of the top-end lawyers in town. But along the way we sort of lost the essence of what the business was all about."

Rockwell acknowledges a falling out among those leading the company, but says the biggest reason he left was that by 2009, "the company still hadn't created a prototype. And that's one of the things I wanted to do -- to actualize it."

The result was Big Kitty, named after his wife's blue, short-haired cat.

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"The idea was just screw it, I'm going to take everything that people say I can't do and do it," Rockwell says.

For example, "one of the things we kept hearing when we formed Joe Metric was that any sort of development costs real dollars," he says. "That if you want to make an iPhone app it's going to cost you, minimum, eighty grand."

Instead, Big Kitty sought out creative overseas developers who could turn around quality work quickly and inexpensively.

Another idea Rockwell dispels is that successful ideas need loads of time to mature before launch.

"A lot of people go into business plan paralysis," he says. "They'll spend six, seven months, or a year working on a business plan. Nowadays, if you spend more than two months, three months, working on a business plan, your business is gone, in my opinion, because the market's just going to fly right by."

Big Kitty's protobaking approach, on which Rockwell often speaks at entrepreneurial events and startup gatherings, is based on the conviction that rapid development -- no more than three months from concept to launch -- is not only possible, but often desirable. That doesn't mean the product or service is launched in final form. But because it's there, it becomes real. And potential customers or investors have something to react to.

"You can spend time and money researching the crap out of it, which can work if you have the budget. But most (startups) don't have the budget. What they really need to do, in our opinion, is start building it."

Because most ideas ultimately fail anyway, Rockwell says, protobaking has the added benefit of allowing you to "fail faster," so energy can then be spent on the next idea.

Big Kitty built 18 concepts in 2009, its first year, providing eight of them to Lextant, a Columbus design research and user experience firm run by Rockwell's brother, Chris. Lextant is also where Dan Rockwell works his day job as a "senior insight translation associate."

"We went into the red the first year, probably pretty bad. But it was fun," Rockwell says.

It wasn't until Big Kitty started talking to Nick Seguin and Mike Figliuolo, founders of weBuild -- a Columbus accelerator that focuses on building companies as quickly as possible -- that the first real paid work came about, Rockwell says.

"They said, you seem to be making these things regardless of logic," Rockwell says. "Can you make our startup? They had a concept called TiXiT. So we said, sure. And we came to this exact Panera, talked about how it should work and then we went and built it. And that was our first paying gig, to build the website."

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Today, Big Kitty is working for both paying clients and for itself, launching internal projects like ChumpDump and CueThat when the spirit calls -- which is often. Rockwell admits that it's not the typical entrepreneurial model, but then, he doesn't consider himself an entrepreneur.

"To me, an entrepreneur has a ton of stress with figuring out how to get money so they can pay the rent. They're trying to figure out how to convince an investor to give them millions of dollars. I'm sort of changing that equation by saying I have a good job, and I like that job, but I also like experimenting."

Seguin, who now is manager of entrepreneurship at The Kauffman Foundation, says he and Rockwell have worked together both in a business capacity and as colleagues helping "to build the startup and digital culture in Columbus." He describes Rockwell as "one of the few in town who 'get it' when it comes to the consumer web startup space."

He also says he believes Big Kitty is doing some of the most important work in the region and the state.

"He's prototyping and learning rapidly," Seguin explains. "He's building community, culture and knowledge. He's an example of someone working 18 hours a day out of pure passion, not some state-funded mandate."

Rockwell acknowledges that, sure, eventually he'd like to see more of a financial payback. But in the meantime, each new project results in new knowledge. Knowledge about how to build new platforms and how consumers behave. Assets that he says can be leveraged in the next project, and the next.

"Their approach is actually the same approach that many large and innovative companies -- from HP to Apple -- have taken and do take," Seguin says. "It's contrary to the mentality of the Midwest -- work for a long time, perfect, pitch capital, deploy. Their approach is more akin to that of the (Silicon) Valley."