Once a week, as a part of Startup Reactor, Mark Hager will provide us with a working journal of what life has been like working on his startup, Age In Place. All feedback is greatly appreciated.

We’ve been in negotiations with another company on a strategic partnership about a project we’ve wanted to attempt since we launched. As excited as we were to begin down the path of our first strategic partnership, I can honestly say we were not prepared for the intricacies of contract negotiations.

The guys at the company we’re working on this with are really great, but when you interject money, responsibilities and legalities in a relationship, it can get hairy. We’ve made some really good headway and we’re to the stage of having the contract undergo legal review.

This week we made several new contacts through our social networking efforts. (You can find us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.) One worth mentioning is a very knowledgeable kitchen and bath designer who has recently has had aging in place specific designs built and published contacted us about working with her on articles for our site. Our editor is reviewing the information now and I’m expecting a few very high quality feature articles out of it.

We also we were able to connect with two national organizations in the areas of finance and healthcare this week that (we hope) will grow into working relationships. Both were very interested in what we are attempting and we are beyond introductions to discussing how we can help each other out. (I even got to introduce one of them to an organization we’ve already partnered with.)

One of the largest issue we have is the ability to maintain content on the site. Our model has been to provide content in two ways: original articles and commentary on relevant news items we find. The latter is the easiest to do, but the former is where we’d like to focus. Of course, time is the issue like it is for most everything else. (If we could only find three people who knew everything and everyone in the aging in place related industries who would write for free, we’d be golden.)

Work continues the first draft of our business plan, which is turning out to be a major ordeal. We started with an online service that walks you through the process of building one, but that wasn’t as helpful as we’d hoped. We finally found an example online that seemed to be the caliber of document we would like to produce and have referred to it many times. I’m a firm believer in outlining your work and creating a mission, but at the stage we’re at I’m not sure if it is the right time to create one. (When is the right time?)

Until next week…

(Images) (Startup Reactor)