Viral Loops, Gratification Loops, OODA Loops, Froot Loops - which one of these doesn’t belong?  If you’ve guessed Froot Loops, congrats.  However, this crappy analogy encapsulates exactly how I feel after being catapulted into startup land – that we didn’t really belong at first.

This is more or less my long overdue post of my acceptance into Extreme University, the startup accelerator I mentioned three months ago, and A LOT has changed since then.

It’s funny that the little old blog “Cheap Date Ideas!” is growing up and maturing into simply  ”Date Ideas” and maybe even another name, but I digress.

Now that Team Date Ideas is almost done the program, I’ve never been more exhilarated in my entire life to be doing and creating something I eat, sleep, breathe, think and grind away day after day.

Besides feeling loopy about learning about all these different types of “loops” for execution, user growth, and retention, terms like minimum viable product, mininum desirable product, customer development, agile development, lean startup, convertible debt, and all of this stuff I really had no idea about until I stepped foot into “Extreme University” learning the good old fashioned way - hands on and at an *ahem* “Extreme” pace.

A year ago, I never would have imagined that I’d be in a program like this.  I only learned about Y-Combinator when I started watching Mixergy religiously back in late 2009 and reading Paul Graham’s essays.

To be a part of Canada’s answer to Y-Combinator providing seed funding and weekly speaker series from the who’s who of Canadian tech entrepreneurs, Extreme University has been an absolute blast and privilege to be amongst some of the top entrepreneurial minds in Canada and dare I say the world.

The weekly speakers series was most valuable in that they spoke quite candidly about their experiences, their failures and how they came to be the people they are today has been so inspirational and humbling.  In addition to that, there is nothing like getting personalized feedback from these people.  Even to the extent of being encouraged to ask questions and contact them through their personal emails and phone numbers.

Date Ideas is in the company of our 2010 “classmates”, two other startups – SunRank and PopHire, where you’ll soon find out more about them on Demo Day, which is October 6^th from what I remember.

Hope to see some of my friends and “Dateizens” out there :)