Yesterday I had the opportunity to hear pitches from the Capital Factory Demo Day 2011 startups. Capital Factory has 20 mentors that each put in $5k and then invest $20k in five startups. Demo Day then has 300 attendees with 100+ being investors. Here are my notes:
Storymix Media – create stories from videos
- Few people share edited video
- Photo books solved problems for photos but nothing for videos
- 78 million photo books sold last year
- Video is harder even with iMovie
- Goal to make it easy, fast, and affordable
- Web-based video editing
- Starts at $99
- Focused on wedding videos
- $5k for good wedding video
- 98% of brides recommend a video after a wedding
- iPhone app to capture video on phone, upload to Facebook, then use Storymix
- Investing in customer acquisition
- Looking to raise $500k
HelpJuice – auto-updating FAQs
- Auto-updating help page for businesses
- Costs $1-$6 per email handled
- Get answers as typing question
- CC juicers@helpjuice.com to have the outsourced team update the FAQ
- Differentiation: search, juicers that manually update, kb
- Raising $150k
SpeakerMix – marketplace for speakers
- $10 billion market
- 70% is private events
- Marketplace of speakers for meeting planners
- 6,500 speakers and over $1MM booked
SwimTopia – swim team management
- Swim team management software
- Huge number of swimmers on a team – over 100 on avg
- 50 volunteers positions per meet
- MS Access product in 90s is most common app
- Launched this year
- $500 per team per season
- 2.6M swimmers
- 25,000 teams
- General sports market eventually
GroupCharger – fundraising platform
- AlumniCharger
- State budgets cut by 10%
- Only 5% of university alumni donate
- Oklahoma has 300k alumni and 8% give
- Finds alumni on social media, coordinates events, make intros
- 1.5 million clubs and chapters
- 55k alumni associations
- $125k annual marketing budgets
- Eight person startup
- Raising $200k with $75k committed
The startups did a great job and presented well. I hope to see them be successful.
What else? What are your thoughts on the five Capital Factory 2011 startups?
David Cummings on Startups 
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