Wow, Startup Riot 2012 was easily the best one yet. Almost all the startups were true seed-stage ventures with working prototypes and everything ran smoothly. This year had 30 presenting companies instead of 50 with three minute pitches followed by three minutes of questions from the four-judge panel.
On a personal note, I was able to give out over 400 copies of my new book Startup Upstart. Please leave a review of it on Amazon.com, if you liked it :-).
Here are notes from the Startup Riot 2012 Atlanta presenting companies:
- SaaS for HR
- $6b industry
- Only 1 in 3 fully engaged employees
- Trend of empowered employee
- Focus on employees as value centers
- Replacing SuccessFactors in a beta customer
- Target 20-1000 employee companies
- Mobile marketing and digital loyalty for retail locations
- Simple app, detailed reporting
- 100 different locations deployed
- Raising $500k
- From Scotland
- Capture data by forms, email, or API
- Data is centralized and secure
- A simple CRM
- Built-in nudges/reminders
- Between Wufoo and Salesforce.com
- Change academic research publishing
- Difficult to search research
- Tools to improve search of related papers and authors
- Launching today
- Scheduling is a big time suck
- Scheduling tools aren’t for ad hoc meetups
- Targeting adults 18-44 with smart phones
- Opportunity for reservations, deals, tickets, etc
- Give the gift of time
Body Boss
- Get lean and sexy without guess work
- App tells you what to do
- Personal fitness training system
- Android app but iPhone app eventually
- Place to encourage and motivate others to do their best
- Gamification of life initiatives
- Earn points and get rewards
- 1.8 million page views
- 100,000 accomplishments
- Users in over 100 countries
- Property management app
- SaaS app for landlords
- Property manager, vendor, tenant, property owner
- Manage work orders, vendors, bill pay
- Market opp: 40M rental properties and 100M tenants
- 7 employees
- Gaming studio
- Location based offer network
- First game is Plan X
- Free to play and then sell virtual goods
- $14 per player on average
- Huge smartphone market
- $30b year spent selling
- Scans Internet for data sales reps need to know
- Prospect ranking and customized alerts
- On the Salesforce.com AppExchange
- JobChangeAlerts.com free tool
- Winner of MAKE competition
- Location based ticket sales app for venues
- Helps fight scalper problem
- SEO for social
- Make the most of social feeds
- People pay attention to the stream and not ads
- Fans need to carry the conversation
- Help marketer increase engagement
- Raising $800k to make self service
- 52,000 badges served
- 20% response rate
- Making plans, made easy
- Calendaring, texting, and mapping
- Mobile calendar invite
- iPhone app
- Track calls from ads
- Uses Twilio
- Tracked 50,000 phone calls
- Local businesses need call tracking for their online ads
- Most small businesses use the phone to talk to prospects
- Sell through marketing agencies
- Woman’s sports content
- 88% of news for men’s athletics
- First online community for woman’s sports
- Raising $500k and looking for corporate sponsors
Donny’s List
- Categories of learning
- Profile pages of available tutoring
- Live video conferencing with an expert
- Collaborative whiteboard and chat
- 500 experts ready to go
- Build relationships with service provider like barrios to
- The experience of being a regular
- On iPhone plus HTML5
- Uses Foursquare API
- Check in and then thank the person
- Insider perks for loyal customers
- Online user testing videos
- Create a test in seconds
- Share a link or hire testers through Task Rabbit
- Hear and see the tester through a web cam
- Selling your car sucks
- 25M used cars sold last year
- When to sell app based on mileage, gas prices, new model introductions
- KBB info is often stale and doesn’t forecast
- Music licensing
- Millions of people create music and want to license it
- Existing services are poor
- Modern music marketplace
- Launched 45 days ago
- Want to buy tickets near friends for Linsanity
- Interactive seating charts and social sharing
- Tag seats for an event and share over social media
- Profile pages for users
- Raising seed round
- Launch in 5 weeks
- Parking lot management software
- Usually hard to change parking prices
- Customers aren’t served well
- Real-time information for providers
- Integrated platform as a service
- GetBoca.com
- Mouth in Spanish
- Mash up photos with voiceover
- Real estate agents can do voiceover on photos and turn into video
- White label and freemium model
- Raising angel round
- Video-based speed networking
- High interaction and high discovery
- Don’t invite people but rather tags
- Focused on corporate internal networking through video
- CEO worked at Accenture with 200,000 people and only met 100 after 10 years
- Kanj.us
- Digital loyalty marketing
- Punchcards are antiquated
- Smartphone loyalty program
- Incentives customers to be loyal and to share
- Charge fee per punch per location
- Give merchants a month to pay
- Raising seed round
Thru View
- Hard to program remote for your TV
- Custom app that uses smart phone video so that customer can show support the issues
- Help support agents see what the customer sees
- Target is telecom
- Save companies millions in fuel costs alone
- Grab a bike whenever you need one using your phone
- Won MIT clean energy prize
- Redesigned bike share by doing individual bike locks with GPS for tracking
- Everything managed in the cloud
- $80,000 through grants already
- Raising angel round
- HugeCity.us
- Goal is to be best events site online
- Ran into pack of zombies in Atlanta but didn’t know about it
- Site shows events as a list and on a map
- Working on event recommendation engine
- Raising $500k angel round
- Financial education for kids
- Earn, spend, donate, save
- Kids and parents have separate dashboards
- Partnered with BBVA
- Online piggy bank for kids
- Looking for friends and partners
Treasure Hunt
- Dealing with deal overload
- Finding a deal is rewarding
- Transform neighborhoods into augmented reality treasure hunts
- Win prizes from merchants, get points
- Merchants control offers on the fly
Via Cycle came in 1st place, SalesLoft in 2nd, and Driverly in 3rd. All teams did a good job.
Startup Riot 2012 was great and I highly recommend attending future events.
What else? What are your thoughts on the startups that pitched?
David Cummings on Startups 
The Viacycle guys are great examples of “relentlessly resourceful”. This is a well deserved win for them.
Thanks Aarjav! We really appreciate the kind words. David, thanks also for your excellent write-up and for the book. We’ve learned a lot from your writings.
Also, congratulations to SalesLoft. I had a chance to speak with Kyle several times this week, and came away impressed with the product and his game plan.