Category: Community

One of the great things about an active startup community is that there’s no shortage of events to attend. Even with all the events there’s a gap in the market for CEOs and co-founders of fast growing startups to meet on a monthly basis in a small-to-medium sized group free of service providers. Service providers are a key part of the startup community but when entrepreneurs attend events it’s important to have a strong signal to noise ratio of entrepreneurs to service providers, and small group settings are much better served in an environment of strict non-solicitation.

Here are some ideas for this type of group of entrepreneurs that are committed to sharing ideas and growing their startup as fast and efficiently as possible:

• Meets monthly for two hours over lunch in a private room at a restaurant
• 8 – 15 technology entrepreneurs in a group
• Minimum $1 million in revenue or $3 million in funding raised, growing revenue much more than 10% per year, and at least 10 employees
• Simple round table discussion and format:
  45 minutes – what’s had the most impact on your startup in the past 30 days
  45 minutes – what’s the top priority for your startup right now
  30 minutes – open discussion

Organizations like EO and YPO have an awesome element called forum that’s a monthly group with a much greater level of commitment, isn’t exclusive to fast growing technology startups, and is focused on the complete person (family, personal, and business). The idea with this group is that it’s focused on fast growing startups so that entrepreneurs can minimize mistakes and maximize opportunities through peer-to-peer experience sharing and learning.

What else? What are your thoughts on this startup community idea for a monthly group for fast growing startups? Who’s interested?

Earlier today I had the opportunity to speak with eight startups at GigTank in Chattanooga. We started with a talk plus Q&A session followed by 15 minute individual sessions with each team. During the group-wide Q&A one of the questions was around things to do as an entrepreneur to continue learning. I talked about standard items like Twitter, Google Reader for RSS feeds, books, EO, YPO, and conversations with other entrepreneurs.

When it comes to entrepreneurs, there are two killer questions I like to ask:

• What two or three new things have had the most impact on your startup in the past 90 days?
• What are the top two or three things you are personally focused on in the next 90 days?

With these two simple questions you’ll get a wealth of insight, ideas for your startup, and opportunities to provide advice or recommendations. Of course, reciprocating with your own answers to these questions makes for a great conversation.

What else? What other killer entrepreneur questions do you like to ask for insight?

Tonight I had the opportunity to hear the final pitches at Atlanta Startup Weekend 2012 at Georgia Tech’s ATDC. The teams did a great job, especially considering they only had a weekend. With over 120 people, Atlanta Startup Weekend continues to be one of the largest annual startup events in town.

Here’s a summary of the different projects:

Wink (overall winner)
– winkandlink.co
– Meet friends of friends
– Dating site
– $2.1 billion industry, 1,500 dating sites
– Use Facebook social graph
– Matching through mutual friends
– Target U.S. young-to-middle age
– Freemium model
– Daily deal affiliates sales to make money

SceneFlow
– Way to turn an idea into a fleshed out screen play for movie
– Don’t worry about scripting formatting — it’s automated
– Subscription service on a per-user basis
– Collaborate with multiple people on the screen play
– Script, scenes with description, list of scenes, WYSIWYG editor for the scene, multiple people can work in editor at same time from different browsers
– Give me the script button generates a fully formatted Word Doc
– API already available

LoveBug
– Mobile app for couples to communicate in a romantic and fun way
– Communication is number one reason for breakup and divorce
– Pair launched and quickly reached 100,000 downloads
– Competitors: Facebook, Path, Pair
– Fun games like quizes, voice notes, recommendations for products based on pins/likes

SayRoom
– Social space for people to capture 10 second audio bites
– Serves the casual user as well as businesses to help share their short messages
– Audio is stronger than text
– iPhone app to record and broadcast audio
– Emotion driven alternative to texting and Twitter

Tuxedo
– Weddings are $40B annually
– Avg wedding is $25k
– Making weddings easy, fun, social, and memorable
– Text, images, audio
– iOS initially
– Stream view of the wedding

ServicePunch
– Manage your services and products
– Avg household has 26 products that need regular maintenance
– Car servicing, oil changing, home A/C filter, etc
– Reminders by email, text, and voice

FinishBig
– Track, log, compare, and share your official race results
– Target is the running enthusiast = 2 million runners
– Runners want to track results plus more like weather, location, satisfaction, etc
– Data is super valuable
– Deliver recommendations for your own personal awesome sauce
– @finishbigapp on Twitter

OnSlyde
– Real time audience interaction
– @onslyde
– Presenter performance, audience engagement, detailed analytics on presentation
– Users include public speakers, sales professionals, professors

BeanStock
– Children’s educational game that teaches about money and financial management
– $300M market for education apps and kids games
– Gap in the market for kids learning about money
– 60% of children ages 4-8 use apps
– Targeting ages 5-9
– Freemium — free app with $.99 per additional stage

RealVision (came in 2nd place)
– Commercial real estate software to analyze cash flow and value of properties
– Argus is industry standard – $4,700/yr/computer – $90M revenue
– Argus is out-dated and Windows 3.1 like
– Idea is a cloud-based app with smart phone component for brokers, owners, and lenders
– Test cash flow assumptions, sensitivity analysis, etc
– http://www.getrealvision.co

Real Time Today
– Improve skills to get a better job
– Find best candidate in the market
– Current online recruitment sites have several issues
– Settings to better match candidates

Leave.im
– Developers occasionally have to put on IT hat and help people
– Fastest way to share files locally over WiFi
– Browsers can geo locate so you know where the file is left
– iOS mobile app ready
– Can share photos and or any type of file
– Files expire after an hour
– Paid accounts to have the files last longer

Splitango
– Splitting costs is difficult
– Trust is the main issue for co-ownership of property
– Splitango handles the legal side of sharing ownership of property
– People are interested in owning things with their friends
– Meetup meets Kickstarter

QuitFor
– Mobile app to help people quit smoking
– No comprehensive digital tools out there to help quit smoking
– Key learnings: ready to commit, anonymity required, physical and mental distraction needed
– Buttons: I smoked | I beat a craving

Trustable.com
– eBay reputation is a brilliant idea but it’s only on eBay
– Single site to get reputation from all your sites and centralize it
– Allows you to prove you say what you do
– People are worried others will cheat the system

Again, great job to the presenting teams.

The startup community is great because it’s both tight-nit and inviting. Every year a handful of startups break out of the noise and become the pretty startup at the party with heaps of attention pilled on. It’s an amazing feeling to be recognized, especially after all the hard work necessary to get things off the ground.

As an entrepreneur there are a few things to remember when you hit the limelight:

• External validation is great for PR and should magnified through social media, SEO, etc
• Winning an award does not equal more revenue from customers
• Requests for your time for coffees, lunches, etc will go up and can take away your most precious asset — time
• Don’t get a false sense of progress from recognition when happy customers are the true measure

Being the pretty startup at the party is great fun but be cognizant of the demands on time and what’s truly necessary to be successful.

What else? What are your thoughts on being the pretty startup at the party?

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:

CubeVibe

• 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

Getone Rewards

• Mobile marketing and digital loyalty for retail locations
• Simple app, detailed reporting
• 100 different locations deployed
• Raising $500k

Inquire.ly

• 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

Scholr.ly

• Change academic research publishing
• Difficult to search research
• Tools to improve search of related papers and authors
• Launching today

Synkup

• 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

Lifekraze

• 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

Rent Post

• 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

Extrafeet

• 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

SalesLoft

• $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

TicketStreet

• Winner of MAKE competition
• Location based ticket sales app for venues
• Helps fight scalper problem

Badgy

• 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

SynkMonkey

• Making plans, made easy
• Calendaring, texting, and mapping
• Mobile calendar invite
• iPhone app

CallRail

• 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

Team Fenom

• 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

We & Co

• 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

YouEye

• 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

Driverly

• 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

Tunefruit

• Music licensing
• Millions of people create music and want to license it
• Existing services are poor
• Modern music marketplace
• Launched 45 days ago

TagSeats

• 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

Passport Parking

• 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

Boca

• 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

Spindows

• 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

Kanjus

• 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

Via Cycle

• 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

Huge City

• 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

Agent Piggy

• 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?

Today I had the opportunity to independently talk with two different entrepreneurs at my office. Coincidentally, both are working on B2C web app startups, whereas most I talk to are working on B2B startups. Each entrepreneur, late in the conversation, volunteered that they’ve found B2C startups in the Southeast few and far between. When it comes to angel investors, they’ve had even more difficulties as investors in the region prefer to see a clear revenue model.

I believe there are a number of B2C startups in the area, but since it is the minority compared to B2B startups, the sense of community has been more difficult to foster. In addition, B2C startups, all things being equal, have a more difficult time achieving success compared to B2B startups. Here are a few reasons why B2C can be more difficult than B2B in the Southeast:

• B2C startups often require an even slicker, more polished interface than business apps and good designers are hard to come by (outsourcing opportunity?)
• B2C startups often need to achieve a significantly greater number of users since the revenue per user is often very low (e.g. $.50 CPMs on advertisements requires a huge amount of traffic to generate a million in revenue)
• B2C startups, when raising money, have fewer local success stories and exits, to draw from
• B2C startups need a way to acquire customers in a low-cost manner through viral mechanisms, SEO, and more to achieve economies of scale, and it’s difficult to make that work

I hope to see a robust B2C startup community develop as there are a number of talented people working on those types of startups.

What else? What are your thoughts on B2C startups in the Southeast?

Last week I was at a brainstorming session for Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute initiative called Tech Connect. Tech Connect is attempting to address the gap in the market for “technology teenagers”, defined as growing companies between $1 million and $50 million in revenue with established products and services. The thinking is that startups trying to get off the ground have strong programs via the ATDC and large companies, especially ones considering relocating, are well supported by the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and regional economic development initiatives. Technology teenagers, which are somewhat successful, have already created jobs, and are most likely to create more jobs aren’t part of the conversation. Arguably, technology teenagers are the most important economic development engine, and the most neglected.

At the TechConnect event I sat next to Steve McGraw, CEO of Compliance 360, which was just acquired for $42.3 million by SAI Global last month. Steve and I talked about the shortage of software engineers, with a rumored negative unemployment rate of 4 to 1 (e.g. there are four software development jobs in Atlanta for every one software developer looking to change jobs). There’s a talent war going on right now for smart people with programming skills.

Why the acute shortage of skilled developers? Open source software, cloud computing, iPhones, and more have opened up a whole new world of opportunities that weren’t available 10 years ago. And we’re just getting started.

As an aside, note that IT skills and software development skills are two different things. IT skills, like a MCSE Certification to manage Microsoft networks are plentiful. Software development skills from people that meet the smart and get things done criteria are what’s in need. It’s the reason New York City is betting big on an engineering school to the tune of $100 million. Only, Atlanta already has that school in Georgia Tech, and it’s worth billions.

Georgia Tech is Atlanta’s 10 year startup opportunity. More specifically, we need a concerted effort to infuse startups into the campus culture and stimulate more GA Tech seniors to pursue jobs with startups. Unfortunately, companies like Google and Facebook get the attention at campus recruiting events.

There are 1,000 undergrads in the GA Tech College of Computing. Assume 250 graduate each year, what percentage join a startup in the Atlanta area? 15? 20? Imagine if that number was 50 or 75 per year. The more graduates that join startups each year the more people that add to the momentum of the Atlanta startup community. More engineers in the community create more opportunities for future startups — they are the future founders and leaders.

A talent war is going on right now and Atlanta is in the middle of it. Georgia Tech is the largest engineering school in the country, and produces incredible software engineers. Atlanta’s 10 year startup opportunity is unique in that the talent is already here — already drawn to Georgia Tech, in Atlanta, in the heart of the city. Significantly increasing the number of Georgia Tech seniors that join local startups should be priority number one for the long-term growth of the startup community.