In about a week BowTie is entering the next phase of testing and development: public beta. We’re incredibly thankful for the ongoing support and feedback we received during our private beta, and we’re excited to share what’s next.

Today we’re launching Static Revival, a resource to help developers build new static websites and apps. Static-revival.com is a directory of tools, plugins, static site generators, and news about the static web.

There are some incredible agencies doing great work in the realm of digital marketing. On January 28th, HubSpot and Unbounce are producing a day of online presentation and community-run events. To celebrate Denver’s agencies and their hard work, BowTie is hosting Celebrate Denver - a happy hour and networking event at the end of Digital Agency Day.

If you’ve ever wanted to see a tech startup CEO ditch the hoodie and jeans to walk the runway, now’s your chance. Our CEO Scott Maloney will be participating in raising awareness for Girls on the Run, a charity focused on positively influencing girls through after-school running programs.

On Sunday, January 17th, you can catch co-Founder and CTO James Kassemi at an Elevated Soapbox event that touches on questions of career passion, community involvement, and our effects on the world around us.

With Jekyll being a pillar of our product, it’s no wonder BowTie teamed up with the Denver Jekyll Meetup group to sponsor and promote Denver’s static site scene. The year of events kicks off on Tuesday, January 12th, the BowTie team will be at Galvanize GT to dive into what makes Jekyll awesome.

In about a week BowTie is entering the next phase of testing and development: public beta. We’re incredibly thankful for the ongoing support and feedback we received during our private beta, and we’re excited to share what’s next.

When starting your own company, you know it’s going to be hard. There are going to be highs, lows, in-betweens, and no sleep. Absolutely no sleep. Our CEO Scott Maloney and CMO Chad Person sat down and talked with Mike Kilcoyne, the Denver-based 20-something founder of Embrace the Suck, a podcast focusing on how important it is to accept the highs, but also the lows of entrepreneurship.

BowTie was proud to sponsor and support two Startup Weekend events during Kauffman Foundation’s Global Entrepreneurship Week and GEW Startup Barttle 2015.

Hack the Dot is a two-hour hackathon backed by Name.com. The event is a unique mix of hacking, community building, and ridiculous fun.

Sometimes, the best way to learn something is to fall flat on your face in front of 500 people. If that’s true, next Wednesday’s ‘Founder F#ck Ups’ is sure to one of the most entertaining and insightful panels of Denver Startup Week.

DenverBeta selected BowTie as one of 10 hot and upcoming startups for their showcase at Denver Startup Week. We’ll be pitching and showing off our pre-release static hosting tool kit at the DSW kickoff bash on Monday night. Be sure to stop by, grab a tattoo and cast your vote for us!

Today’s Startup Landscape is more exciting, innovative, and yet more volatile than ever. The market is literally birthing new companies and organizations from both the successes and ashes of the startups that have come before them.

We just shipped a brand new integration to Zapier. Now you can connect your BowTie project to hundreds of other services and automate common tasks without writing a line of code.

We’re just a few weeks from our first Bootstrapped Brews competition, which means it’s time to bottle…

This past weekend, team RazorSite got their hands dirty IRL.

We’d like to thank the hundreds of people who helped us work through our closed MVP. That feedback has allowed up to ship a beta release we’re really proud of.

Ready to ship your side project? Toss it on RazorSite for a chance to present at SXSWi, win hosting, co-working space, legal help and other amazing prizes. Springboard 2015 is open for registration.

I have been grappling with describing the characteristics of a startup team or entrepreneur. Perhaps it is too many Fortune and TechCrunch articles all professing to have the top 10 “things” all startup founders need. Words and phrases often look like “self-starter,” “creative,” “customer focused,” “data-driven,” and on. I won’t put up much of a fight against how important these traits are, and the many others thrown out in popular publications and blogs. That said, I do believe that the inches these columns occupy are often at the expense of splitting the proverbial hairs of larger concepts such that new words and phrases can be printed. The end result is a collection of Nostradamus-esque claims as to how the new generation of entrepreneurs should think in order to assure success.

We have all seen startups with full sized arcade games, climbing walls, a strong selection of craft beers, video games, free food, and at one company I was a part of… a full size conference room that was a ball pit. Why do we do this? It might be for a little variety, to thumb one’s nose at the buttoned up firms that came before, or possibly to provide a smile and relaxation for employees. What it isn’t however, is a company’s culture.

What follows is a translation of the talk I gave BowTie’s Springboard* event into a blog-post. It’s a fast and loose translation that follows the talk kinda closely with additions where I feel fit. It is not a transcript but should follow the spirit of the talk well. You can find the my slides here: View Slides / Download PDF.

I was recently asked why I am an entrepreneur.  The questions were good-natured but ran along the lines of:

The world of tech, like many industries, is full of jargon. With the exception of “caffeine” whose place of honor is industry-agnostic, all of these pieces of lingo are specific, descriptive, and ever changing. Heard more frequently of late is API-First Development. We like this. We like this a lot. But before we dive deep I wanted to take a second to appreciate what this means to the industry.

On the set of Star Wars George Lucas was often bemoaned for only saying one thing after each take; “Faster, more intense!” This apparently became quite the joke among the rest of the production crew, so much so that when Lucas lost his voice, the crew gave him a single sign to hold up with just those three words on it.

It’s common to see some new tech startup featured in the news for their quirky office space. Startup spaces are rife with exposed brick, rickety tables, wires taped to walls, and more inflatable ten-foot tall dinosaurs than you ever thought existed. We see these stories and think about how cool that startup must be or how fun it is to work somewhere with concrete floors so you can skateboard to your next meeting. And yes, while at LivingSocial I was guilty of having conference rooms turned into ball pits or stairways that led to nowhere. But in all fairness, while things can be fun, that isn’t the end goal. The real goal is a work culture that prides itself on productivity.

I didn’t make a single New Year’s resolution. I learned a long time ago that if a calendar date was my motivation for self improvement, I was doomed to fail. Arbitrary motivation is too fragile and ephemeral to keep me moving. Instead, I try to leverage constant motion. Inertia is hard to slow down, and as suggested by some great recent literature you might even be able to turn that inertia into a lifelong habit. That said, I do enjoy the quiet of a holiday as an opportunity to reflect and organize my next moves.

⋈ BowTie is designed to help developers ship code and deliver market-ready software. As we build the RazorSite platform, we’re shipping a lot of code. We try to ship on a manageable schedule, with careful planning, and thorough testing. But, anyone who has shipped against a deadline knows that as you race to the finish, things don’t always go as planned.

In a few days, we’ll start sending exclusive invitations to join the RazorSite MVP. Some of the feedback we’ve received to date are:

There is no shortage of unsung players in the startup world. Some are there to support and enable the tremendous success of others. Some are unsung because they are working on their own song and are waiting to step onto the entrepreneurship stage. Others are enthusiastic supports and yet others are detractors. Finally some seem to fall in all these buckets due to their size, influence, or lack of focus. With an eye towards that last multi-headed group, I want to dive into the world of political policy and it’s impact on entrepreneurs. It is my contention that policy makers need to more closely examine the needs of startups and provide incentives that are relevant for companies at that stage (i.e. not the incentives commonly offered now).