The Four Rules of #IM48 – We’re in week three of our 48-state road trip across America.

First off, let me tell you that this already has been amazing journey. Producing three events per week across three different states obviously isn’t easy, so we’ve had our fair share of dissapointment and even failures. But this has been an overwhelmingly amazing experience. There have been plenty of moments where I had to remind myself this is really happening.

Thank you all for who have supported us, without you this wouldn’t be possible.

While I am still not 100% convinced that this is possible, I wanted to share with you the four rules we try to live by every day. These are the rules and the values that keep us sane while hammering away on our Macbooks driving across (at least right this moment) Wyoming.

No Means Yay

We have about a week to pull together an event. That includes finding a venue, finding speakers, finding media partners, selling tickets and then putting on an awesome event. Three times per week. In order for this to all come together, we have to ask a lot of people to get involved. A lot of times people think we’re crazy when we’re trying to find a speaker for an event that’s five days out. A lot of times people will tell us "no."

But for us "no" has to mean "yay." Because if we’re not being turned down then we’re not trying hard enough. Being turned down is never fun, but it beats settling for less.

Only Collaborate With Excited

With everything we do, we only ask once. You’ll never find us hard selling. We are doing this, not to make a boatload of money, but rather to shine the light and get to know many of the awesome entrepreneurs and their communities all across America. So when people hang up on us, or don’t return our calls – we’re done trying. We’ll knock on a lot of doors, but we only collaborate with folks as excited about their startup communities as we are.

That’s why we did a last second change to our Salt Lake City event. While we managed to find an amazing group of speakers, we repeatedly got hung up on by various local organizations that supposededly exist to help entrepreneurs. So, we cancelled our planned event and instead invited all the local folks who did seem excited about us (our speakers, a local startup ambassador and our first ticket buyer) to dinner with us.

We don’t have enough time or energy to try and convince people that we’re not some kind of traveling ponzi scheme. If you think it’s ok to be rude to us, then I’m sorry. For you.

Good Beats Perfect

We’ll do whatever we can to make our events as awesome as possible. But sometimes/all the time we’ll be presented with challenges that will keep us from doing exactly what we might have planned or wanted to do. And that point, we just have to keep executing and get the job done. Nothing will kill this operation faster than us overthinking how to throw 50 perfect events. In Seattle we had 100 people in a 100F room with no AC. It was miserable. Will ran to Home Depot to buy fans. Our host started making little paper fans that we handed out. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than no event at all.

Good has to beat perfect any day for us.

Thank Loudly

We rely on the help of many people to make each event happen. Those are the people who are excited about what we’re doing. Those are the people we want to shine the light on. Those are the people we want to hang out with until the wee hours of the morning to talk about ideas and entrepreneurship. Those are the people we need to thank profusely and loudly.

Ps. Our dinner in Salt Lake City was amazing, and collectively we agreed that we’ll come back and give it another try – together with the folks who were excited about us in the first place. More on that to follow.

Follow the IdeaMensch team on their 48 state tour: http://im48.co/