Nashville Courting New Startup Accelerator,From Silicon Valley, Hattery!

Hattery,Entrepreneur Center, Michael Burcham,Nashville startup,startup,startup news

Hattery strategist, and Engine Advocacy co-founder Michael McGeary (photo: hattery.com)

Nashville’s Entrepreneur Centre Director, Michael Burcham, played host to Mike McGeary, a strategist with Silicon Valley innovation lab, Hattery.

Currently the Hattery has a west coast location in Silicon Valley and an east coast location in New York City. Hattery invests in early stage startups and helps the startups with support in design, engineering and business development.

If you think you’ve heard McGeary’s name before it’s because you probably have. In addition to being a strategist with Hattery, McGeary is also the co-founder and chief political strategist with Engine Advocacy a group connecting startup founders and entrepreneurs with government officials to create change in the entrepreneurial/startup space. They were recently intricate in a startup pilgrimage to congress. McGeary also worked with TuneIn and on two presidential campaigns.

Hattery is looking to take their unique model to another state and Nashville seems to have caught McGeary’s eye.

“There is a great energy here and I’ve read about it and heard about it because Nashville has been really good about talking about its success stories,” McGeary told the Nashville Business Journal during the Nashville Technology Council’s TechVille event. He continued; “It has been really fun and interesting to see the companies created here, how the community is being built in a really unique way. I think there is a lot of growth potential here.”

Burcham, who is one of Nashville’s biggest advocates for entrepreneurship and startups as well as the leader for Startup Tennessee, Startup America’s Tennessee region and the second region in the United States, characterized the possibility of Hattery relocating to Nashville as a “giant deal”.

“He already works with so many investors and organizations in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, so for us to have someone sitting here that has access to those places, that’s enormous,” Burcham said, who reached out to McGeary about three months ago via Twitter. “My goal is to turn that from a conversation into something real.”

Burcham is looking to overflow the new 22,000 square foot, multi million dollar entrepreneur center with as much programming and resources as possible. The Hattery program would add another great avenue for Tennessee startups to take advantage of. Although still under wraps,we do know that there are other nationally known accelerator brands looking to partner with the new entrepreneur center when it opens in June.

If anyone can sell Nashville’s startup and entrepreneurial community it’s Burcham. He’s a salesmans salesman and with his vast experience in the startup space, coupled with his down home Nashville personality, it’s hard to not fall in love with the guy and his passion.

The team behind the Hattery is filled with Silicon Valley success stories and they’re looking to spread the wealth across the country. Their portfolio includes; Bright Funds, Cloud Physics, Zubhium, and Hipiti.

Find out more about Hattery here and the Nashville Entrepreneur Center here.

Take a tour of the new multi-million dollar 22,000 square foot Entrepreneur Center here.

Never Miss Your Kids Game With RUA Sports, And Raise Money For Their School Too!

One thing that sucks about being on the “sneaker strapped startup road trip” is missing time with my kid. FaceTime makes it almost bearable, and home time is just that, home time. Now my daughter is going to start officially playing soccer in the fall and while I am going to try and schedule our road trip stops around the soccer schedule, inevitably I’m going to miss a few games.

Aaron Russell the founder of Jacksonville startup RUA Sport feels my pain, along with the pain of thousands of other parents who’s schedules dictate that they can’t be there for all the goals, home runs and triple doubles. Russell’s startup is also great for grandma’s and grandpa’s all over the country that want to keep up with their grandkids games.

RUA Sports is the creator of MyMobile Scoreboard. In essence this app crowdsources a network of users on-site at a youth sports event in a “play by play” style manner. You’ll never miss a goal, save or a triple play again.

Russell and the team at RUA Sports have also figured out a way to do some non-traditional fundraising for the schools that utilize the app and the social crowdsourcing play by play that it offers.

MyMobile Scoreboard costs $1.99 to download and RUA Sports will give back 50 cents of every download to the schools or youth sports organizations that download the app. Each organization will have it’s own mobile scoreboard so for example a high school could have a mobile scoreboard for their basketball program. Then the parents and others who want to keep up with the game can download the app and give back $.50 per download back to the school. For some schools with heritage and history this could prove to be a really good fundraiser.

Check out our interview video below with RUA Sports and for more info visit ruasports.com

Here are more awesome startups from OneSpark the World’s Crowdfunding Festival in Jacksonville.

Bill Gates Geting Gangnam Style Over Polio

On Tuesday the big tech sites pointed out that Bill Gates and Psy, the artist behind YouTube breakout sensation “Gangnam Style” have become Twitter friends. Well that’s 100% true.

It turns out that Psy is getting behind a movement to end Polio, for which the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are big supporters. According to Business Insider, Bill Gates took to the Colbert Report earlier this year to announce that Polio would be eradicated in six years.

Psy’s involvement in ending Polio officially began in February when he became a celebrity spokesperson for Rotary’s “This Close” campaign.

On Sunday Gates tweeted out an advertisement that Psy appeared in as part of that campaign.

Later that evening Psy returned the favor with a retweet.

After Multiple Startup Competition Wins, Charlotte’s WeRx Launches

Over the summer, when nibletz.com was in Charlotte for the Democratic National Convention, as part of our sneaker-strapped startup road trip, we got a chance to interview Amir Khoshnevis the founder of WeRx.org.

WeRx.org had just won the Startup Rockon pitch contest as part of the Startup America DNC festivities.

WeRx.org is an innovative crowdsourcing platform that would definitely be considered in the social entrepreneurship space. Khoshnevis and his co-founders discovered that people are paying way too much for their medication. Of course we’ve known this for years but what the WeRx team found was something that will blow most people’s minds away.

Take Lipitor for example. In it’s generic form the WeRx team found some pharmacies sold the drug for $11 and on the high end, $180 and that’s right in the Charlotte metro area. The unfortunate reality is that most people who require medication may do a limited cost comparison, and if they do they check the few pharmacies close by. If they can’t afford the cost of the medication close by they often decide to not take it. This can ultimately lead to death.

As another example Khoshnevis and the WeRx team found that in West Charlotte diabetes medications cost two to three times as much as they do in the Ballentine suburb of Charlotte. Why? Because the demographics skew more diabetic in West Charlotte.

Prior to their launch today, WeRX also won the Distilled Intelligence startup competition as well as the Reboot America competition in Washington DC. Now all of their hard work is set to pay off as they’ve launched the platform to the world.

The official launch is a huge step toward connecting consumers to the prescription price information and savings they need,” Khoshnevis said. “We started this company after being doctors in the trenches for many years and watching patients suffer simply because they can’t afford their medications. This is one of the last industries where consumers have not had easy access to price comparison tools and we have changed that today.”

Kosnevis continued, “We have a lot of positive momentum and have been extremely pleased with the recognition but we are keeping our focus on solving the problem. 100 million Americans lack prescription coverage or are underinsured and are at risk of not being able to afford their medications. Our goal is to leverage the power of consumer choice to create a more fair, open and transparent system for prescription meds. We sincerely believe that by empowering consumers and doctors with pricing information, we can allow patients to stay on their medications and remain healthy.”

What the heck is a sneaker-strapped road trip?

Indianapolis Startup MileTrack GPS Makes Tracking Miles & Reimbursement A Breeze

Indianapolis based serial entrepreneur Andrew Westberg has shifted focus back to his hardware startup called MileTrack GPS. This GPS device combines wireless communications with GPS coordinates for the express reason of tracking your mileage.

The device, that plugs into your cars cigarette outlet adapter, is perfect for recording mileage and then getting reimbursed for it. It’s also perfect for companies that need to track the whereabouts of their field employees without systems that cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Now of course with smartphones and the latest stand alone GPS devices there are several ways of tracking mileage, but none are as easy or plug and play as MileTrack GPS. The compact device plugs into the car and then shakes hands with a wireless network. It’s doing this for almanac data, to get a better fixed GPS signal and then to dump data back to the cloud-based MileTrack GPS website.

Westberg’s demo video below, shows exactly how the device operates. You may notice in watching the video though, that it can be as easy as just putting in the car and letting it run. The device and website are doing all the work for you.

At the end of the month (or day, however you calculate your mileage) you can see all of the trips you’ve taken. You can label the trips you take most frequently and then you can notate next to the trip whether it was business or personal. The settings tab allows the user to input the reimbursement rates for business mileage and it has the ability to input different mileage for different businesses.

This is ideal for freelancers who bill clients by the mile at different rates. You can easily notate personal trips as well and take them out of the reimbursement calculations.

After all of the data parameters are set, the system just about runs itself. After the user has reconciled their mileage it gives an overall calculation for reimbursement that can then be printed off, along with a record of the miles actually driven. You can even go back in the MileTrack system and see where you went, what streets you were on and what places you stopped.

You can find out more about MileTrackGPS here

Or support them on Kickstarter here.

Florida Startup Stocktagon Another Great Research Tool For Your Portfolio’s Arsenal [video]

We got a chance to talk with Paul Irwin the founder of Florida based startup Stocktagon.

Stocktagon is a research tool that combs press releases, earnings call notes and other media and press information to help the user find relevant information about stocks. For instance, with the recent fertilizer crisis in Texas, you could use Stocktagon to research the word fertilizer and it would show you what publicly traded companies were mentioned in stories about fertilizer. It would also show you the context for which those stories mentioned your search terms.

While in beta now, Irwin hopes to offer Stocktagon to individuals, big brokerage houses and everything in between. Information has always been a powerful tool when stock and commodity trading, and tools like Stocktagon make it even easier to find that information.

Stocktagon was in the first batch of companies to go through The Factory accelerator in St. Augustine. The Factory was started by Vaughn’s software development company Feature[23] which gives them a unique position as they leverage the development side of Feature[23] to help build the accelerating startups.

With a 10 year background in finance, including a stint at Deutsche Bank, Vaughn is particularly bullish on Stocktagon. “I can’t wait to show it off to my friends in fiance” Vaughn said when we spoke with him at OneSpark. Vaughn plans on leveraging personal relationships in the finance community along with some of his connections to get Irwin and his team in front of the biggest financial companies in the world.

“Big companies can be leery of startups like Stocktagon and ProfileGorilla” Vaughn said. That’s typically because a large company would have to change the way they use another form of technology to incorporate a new startup. Many big companies are hesitant to do that because some fear that startups will run out of money, and won’t be able to pay development costs. With The Factory the development portion is already built in.

Stocktagon was one of seven startups housed at The Dalton Agency during OneSpark. We’ve already interviewed cohort mates RestroomAlert and ProfileGorilla.

Check out our video interview with Stocktagon below and for more info visit stocktagon.com

Here’s more startup coverage from OneSpark the world’s crowdfunding festival.

Traction Trumps Team When Going For The Million Dollar Round?

Raising Funds, Venture Hacks, AngelList,startup tips

(Photo: César Salazar of 500Startups)

Teams are great. A lot of people look at founders and teams, but of course the product has to be great too. That is unless you’re a founder with a track record for success, but all of that will be covered later.

Greg Kumparak is evidently back at TechCrunch. Kumparak was one of my favorite TechCrunch writers while I was “thedroidguy” we’d bump into each other all the time while I was on the mobile beat, Berlin, Barcelona and of course here at home. He left last year after the Arrington fiasco and apparently he’s back, writing about startups.

So let’s dive into the meat and potatoes of this post here, because that’s why you clicked on the link. We try and share whatever startup tips we can and one of the biggest things people want to know about is raising money. Specifically, startups in their earliest stages want to know how to raise millions of dollars so they can just “work” and not have to worry about where their next meal is coming from or how the rent will get paid.

Somewhere along the way though, $100,000 or even $500,000 was not enough. Everyone seems to be looking for that million dollar Series A round, or even more presumptuously they are looking for a million dollar seed round, or angel round. Regardless of the round, Ash Fontana, a venture hacker at AngelList, came up with the bullet points above when talking about raising a good million dollar round.

Like me, one of the first things Kumparak noticed in the slide is that product and team are crossed out. Traction is clearly circled. So now traction is the most important?

Perhaps this is right, but of course from the perspective of an AngelList venture hacker it’s absolutely right. AngelList thrives off traction. We actually learned that 500 Startups, startups, actually plan one startup a week that they will all follow on AngelList in unison. This way a 500 Startups, startup, is always trending on AngelList.

This real need for startup traction actually goes well beyond AngelList and can be a key performance indicator when your deal is being reviewed by investors.

In case you can’t clearly read the slide here are the key take-aways, things that your startup should already have before approaching that investor for your million dollar round:

– Enterprise startups need to have 1,000 seats at $10/seat/month

– Big enterprise startups need to have 2 pilot contracts with some $

– Social startups need 100,000 downloads and signups

– e-commerce “market place” startups need to have $50,000 in revenue per month

Fontana did disclose to Kumparak that these numbers are just rough estimates based on his insight and not actual numbers directly from the AngelList database.

While many investors talk about the importance of product and team it seems that when you get to the stage where you’re ready for a $1 million dollar investment (or more) the product and the team should already speak for themselves and the traction should tell their story.

Tell us what you think in the comments.

Source: TC

We Find Out What A Bumper Buzzer Is [startup][video][onespark]

Mark Foss spent most of his career in outside sales with technology companies. As an outside sales person he was constantly parking his car in new places. Finally he got fed up of bumping into curbs, and those annoying concrete things in parking lots that you can’t see over the hood.

So he did what any natural entrepreneur would do, he invented something.

That something is the Bumper Buzzer. A device that hooks to the front of the car and sends a signal by radio frequency to a receiver inside the car that alerts the driver to the fact that they are about to hit something.

Now a lot of newer cars have some kind of option for the car that may assist in situations like this, however that option is usually hundreds of dollars and doesn’t necessarily work all the time.

Foss hopes that the introductory price for the Bumper Buzzer will be in the neighborhood of $24.95 and the best part is that it’s completely user installable. A couple of screws and some automotive 3M adhesive that comes in the package, and you’re ready to go. Because the signal is operating via RF there is no need to run wires through the front of the car.

Foss is a lot further along with his startup than some that we saw at OneSpark. He has a prototype built and is already working on getting the Bumper Buzzer in front of Telebrands, the Pennsylvania based company that former Shark Tank shark Kevin Harrington runs, better known as “As Seen On TV”. Foss is convinced that with his easy set up and price point it’s a shoe-in for an infomercial.

And we concur.

Check out the video below and for more information you can visit bumperbuzzer.com

We have a ton more OneSpark startup coverage here at nibletz.com The Voice Of Startups Everywhere Else.

Whata.tv From Startup Weekend To Getting Our Vote At OneSpark [video]

There were over 500 creators at OneSpark, The World’s Crowdfunding Festival, in Jacksonville from Wednesday through Sunday. They reported that over 115,000 people had been through downtown Jacksonville for the event. With 500 creators and over 100 tech/science creators, inventors and startups, there were a lot of people clamoring for my vote.

I saw a lot of creators I really liked. I’ll be doing my top 5 OneSpark startups and creators in the next day or two. However, a little after midnight Sunday morning I cast my vote for Jose Fermin and his startup Whata.tv. I thought I’d share a little insight into what exactly whata.tv is and why I voted this way.

Whata.tv started with Fermin who is originally from Venezuela. He migrated to the United States with his family nine years ago. While in Venezuela, Fermin, who has two degrees in engineering, had a high profile position in satellite and communications, working with some of the biggest defense contractors in the world.

He wanted to move to the United States because he saw a land of opportunity so he did. However when he got to the US he realized quickly that he would have to start all over from scratch. Because of immigration laws and security clearances, Fermin, who worked with the likes of Lockhead Martin and Boeing in Venezuela, all of the sudden didn’t have the proper security clearance to work with the same exact people once he moved to the US.

He had one good prospect. He had a job offer in New York that paid very well, where he would serve as the International Director of satellite communications for a huge worldwide company. The problem was they needed him to go to Peru two days after he signed the contract, and he was still under his two week international travel waiting period from the immigration department. After the two weeks were up they didn’t have a spot for him.

Unscathed Fermin did anything and everything he could to provide for his family and not give up on his American dream. He painted houses, did roofing, general contract work and even worked at a dry cleaners. All the while he tinkered with side projects.

As the startup scene in Jacksvonille started to take shape he would go to meetups and Startup Weekend’s. Things weren’t what they were in Venezuela but he had his freedom and was living the American dream. Except for one thing that always bothered him.

Except for the World Cup, Fermin was unable to watch his Venezuelan soccer on American TV. He couldn’t even find the games online, just the scores.

Last winter, with Startup Weekend approaching, he decided to do something about it and created whata.tv. He was chosen to build at Startup Weekend and was able to do some of the preliminary leg work. He is relying on his connections and strengths in satellite and communications to help get this thing off the ground.

What is it?

whata.tv is a paid subscription model tv viewing service. It works on tablets, smartphones and the web. The difference this time? The customer pays just $2.99 for a monthly subscription to a channel.

When Fermin originally pitched whata.tv it was just about Venezuela but the other entrepreneurs quickly made him realize he was onto something. As the service nears launch Fermin is in negotiations with tv channels across the world to carry their signals on whata.tv.

While we think they should be paying him for the added eyeballs, Fermin is giving them a percentage of every monthly subscription. In addition he plans on marketing his own advertising; including pre-roll on the channels as well as customized demographic advertising. He explained it to me like this: “Say you have a popular comedian coming to Orlando from Mexico. whata.tv will know how many people in Orlando subscribe to Mexican tv channels on the service and we could market the comedians ad specifically to them.”

The service is also great for military serving abroad to watch the U.S. channels that they are missing. The same goes for business people who travel all of the time. He is hoping to provide full streams of the channel including things like local news, something you can’t get a la carte from sites like hulu.

So why my vote?

Well I really couldn’t in good conscious vote for DJ Mercy, I was after all covering the startup angle (just kidding).

In voting for whata.tv it was as much about Fermin as it was about whata.tv and the disruption coming to the tv industry. While we shot this footage on Saturday afternoon, I had actually gone by their space on Thursday morning. That’s where I met Fermin’s high school aged daughter who gave just as good an interview, as her dad did a pitch.

Fermin called me on Saturday morning to make sure I wouldn’t miss the pitch, rain or shine he would be pitching. Fermin is also a startup community leader in Jacksonville. With the luck he had, first starting out in the US, it’s refreshing to meet someone like this.

And of course, in the wake of recent events, with everyone waving the “immigration reform” flag this week, Fermin and his family are a great reminder that great people come to the US from other countries all of the time.

We’ll be tracking whata.tv.

Here’s that pitch:

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Anonymous Customer Feedback Via Text, Check Out AlertTheBoss [video][onespark]

On Friday we brought you an interview with Florida startup restroomalert. This startup, that accelerated at The Factory in St. Augustine, provides anonymous feedback about bathroom conditions to businesses big and small across the country. They also provide a huge analytics dashboard to their business customers.

Evan Diamond and his Jacksonville startup are taking a similar idea and approach, using text messages to alert those in charge at establishments when their are customer complaints, or even compliments.

Through a unique text code, a customer can send a text message to the business which has a greater chance of being read quicker. According to Diamond, 95% of text messages get read.

There were some privacy concerns about where the anonymous text numbers are stored with restroomalert and the same would hold true for AlertTheBoss. Diamond explained that all of their information is being held in a private, secure database that the businesses don”t have access too.

The problem is, that on the AlertTheBoss OneSpark profile it clearly says that a component of the startup is the ability to aggregate the texting numbers and use them for marketing. Unless AlertTheBoss plans to become an outbound text based marketing company, that seems near impossible to hold the numbers so privately.

While we really liked restroomalert for obvious reasons we wrote about here, it seems to me that there are some privacy concerns with AlertTheBoss.

The other thing to consider; with the move to mobile apps and native mobile apps in particular, the ability to SMS through mobile app seems much more effective. We’ll watch this one to see where it goes.

In the meantime check out our video interview with Diamond below:

Have you seen these startup stories from OneSpark The World’s Crowdfunding Festival?

ooWorldcoop (Our Own World Cooperative) Wants To Be The First Online Social Market Place Co-Op [video]

ooWorldcoop is testing the waters in a new space in the social marketplace realm. Founder Anthony Tyson, has created the first ever social online market place co-op. Like any other co-op that means that the user base or membership will actually own the co-op together. While Tyson will always be the “founder” or “creator” he won’t be the owner, everyone will.

Co-Op models have been around for many years. Group buying co-ops are the most popular kinds of co-ops that still exist in the offline world today. Most cities have a grocery store or local produce store co-op. In that case, the members vote on what kind of items to buy and at what prices. They also dictate buying power with strength in numbers. The biggest benefit for the overall business in this case is that vendors know exactly what the buyers will buy.

In the case of the online co-op, after operating expenses, members will vote on where the co-op can spend its money. Profits will be reinvested, with member guidance, to offer more and better services to members.

A co-op also means that the accounting will be transparent to any co-op member.

Membership is free and comes with an easy to design and customize ooWorld.coop account/profile.

While ooWorld.coop may accept direct donations, most of the cooperative’s revenues will come from service/transaction fees and advertising. Surplus revenues will be used for various member programs such as affiliate commissions, education grants, micro and mini grants, and other programs voted on by the membership. We hope these will include affordable, renewable energy sources, affordable housing programs, and access to healthy food and clean water.

From the Certificate of Formation of ooWorld.coop, ‘… The purposes for organizing ooWorld.coop are, but are not limited to, to empower, support and encourage individuals to improve their quality of life and increase their earning potential; to promote, encourage and support the growth of micro-businesses and other business opportunities; to promote other worthy human endeavors including, but not limited to, arts and culture, scientific research, education, and human rights; to boost local communities while building a global community based on cooperation, collaboration and sharing; and to lessen the burdens of government. Tyson said on their OneSpark profile page.

How did people respond to this new kind of startup? Well out a crowd-funding festival they loved it. Although they didn’t finish in the top three when all was said and done on Sunday, ooWorldcoop was the biggest mover on Saturday.

We ran into Tyson’s partner Seth who filled us in, check out the video below and for more info visit ooWorldcoop.com

Check out more OneSpark coverage here.

New York Startup Rentenna Gives You The Score On Apartments In 16 Major Cities

If you’ve ever been apartment shopping online, you know what a pain in the ass it can be. You’re browser usually has 99 tabs open and your going back and forth trying to get as much info as possible. If you’re organized, perhaps you made a spread sheet or kept notes. Well New York startup Rentenna is making lives easier for those shopping for apartments and rentals in New York City, Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Tacoma and Washington DC. They’re expanding at lightning speed so if you’re city isn’t available now it should be soon.

Between the three cities Rentenna have over 100,000 buildings listed in their platform. From there everything you would ever want to know about the apartment building is rated into one simple score 1-99 so you can quickly find the best bang for your buck.

Rentenna offers information open rental units from a variety of rental partners,giving users options for available listings. They also offer in depth reviews from their partner Block Avenue.

The startup was co-founded by a powerhouse team including Alicia Scwartz a young serial entrepreneur who’s credits include thecareerproject.org and howtorentinNYC.com. She is also a former New York Times rental expert. We got a chance to talk with Schwartz about Rentenna. Check out the interview below.

What is your startup, what does it do?

Rentenna’s data-driven rental search is the fastest & most beautiful way to find an apartment you’ll love. Our technology analyzes millions of data points on buildings and neighborhoods, and then compresses that information into a Rentenna Score of 0-100 to help you quickly sort through available listings and decide if a rental building is someplace you’d like to live.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds

Alicia Schwartz is a former rental broker, former New York Times Rental Expert, and a digital marketing consultant to the real estate industry.

A. Kayvon Bina studied Human-Computer Interaction at Stanford University before advising technology & media companies on Wall Street and then co-founding his first successful startup, FranchiseHelp.com.

Sandeep Kella studied engineering at UMichigan, was a Private Equity investor, and has co-founded 2 successful startups (including FranchiseHelp.com w/ Kayvon).

Kevin Dolan, Rentenna’s CTO, studied Computer Science at Cornell. Before Rentenna, Kevin built the search product at Workday (NYSE: WDAY).

Where are you based?

Rentenna is based in the WeWork Labs incubator space in SoHo, New York City.

What is the startup culture like where you are based?

New York overall has a thriving startup culture, with an ecosystem that’s benefited immensely from successful NYC entrepreneurs paying it forward by subsequently becoming mentors and investors to local startups. Our incubator space specifically (WeWork Labs) is an amazing launching pad from which to build a technology company many of our most important contacts and partnerships have emerged from the informal network fostered in the halls at WeWork.

What problem does your startup solve?

Rental search today is an awful experience. Current sites are no better than skimming through classifieds in the paper — line after line of basically identical listings, with no guidance or information to help you find the apartments you might actually want to live in. We use the power of data — data on buildings, on landlords, on rent prices, on neighborhoods, on local bars/restaurants, and more — to help you quickly find the rentals that best match your priorities as a renter.

What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in the startup process?

Whenever you’re addressing a major consumer pain point, you’re sure to get an endless stream of (often totally contradictory) feature requests that users believe would solve their problems. If you’re too reactive to that kind of feedback, you’ll end up building an unwieldy product that doesn’t really solve anyone’s problems particularly well. We’ve been disciplined from the very beginning about using qualitative feedback to identify users’ biggest pain points while using a rigorous A/B testing framework to select the solutions (features) that best solve those problems.

What are some of the milestones your startup has achieved?

We’ve built a massive database of over 100,000 buildings indexed, nearly a million listings processed, and over 70 million discrete data points analyzed — all powering a beautiful site that was just recognized as a 2013 Webby Awards Honoree in the Real Estate category!

What are your next milestones

Over the coming months we’ll be identifying and incorporating additional city-specific data sources, testing a bevy of new features, and releasing our mobile app / tablet experience.

Who are your mentors and role models?

Each of the founders at Rentenna has been lucky to work with tremendous mentors throughout his/her career. While there are many successful entrepreneurs whom we admire and turn to for advice on Rentenna, it’s the people we’ve worked with throughout our careers who have shaped us most.

What are some of the advantages/disadvantages growing your startup outside of Silicon Valley.

The advantage of growing outside Silicon Valley is being in New York, a city we love and which happens to have a startup and investor community that fits well with Rentenna’s business model.

The disadvantage of growing outside Silicon Valley is missing out on those serendipitous connections that get made every day there thanks to the area’s sheer concentration of successful tech entrepreneurs, investors, and advisors. Plus, it means Kayvon doesn’t get to go back to Stanford and stroll down Palm Drive nearly as often as he’d like.

What’s next for your startup?

We’re new, but we’ve resonated with consumers because we’re offering a product that’s unlike any the rental search category has seen before. Our next challenge is to expose Rentenna to as broad an audience as possible, so every apartment-hunter can have the fast & beautiful apartment search experience we think they deserve.

Where can people find out more, and what is your Twitter username?

People can use the site now at Rentenna.com. We are on Facebook and Twitter

Michael Dixon Is Turning Trash Into Records, Interview At OneSpark [video]

We saw plenty of types of upcycling this week in Jacksonville Florida at OneSpark. Earlier this week we brought you an interview with Burro Bags on their new Impakt line which is taking used promotional banners and turning them into shopping bags, handbags, totebags, laptop bags and other gear. We also saw a pretty cool startup turning used electronic equipment into energy (interview coming).

What Dixon is doing is something that any vinyl music fan, and musician will think is amazing. Dixon can take just about anything flat , plastic, plexiglass or vinyl and turn it into a record that actually plays music.

Dixon is the founder of a record label called, People In A Position To Know, or PIAPTK for short. They are a mico indie record label, and of course they press the music onto limited edition vinyl and handmade artifacts. He also has another site lathecuts.com for his record cutting business.

During OneSpark Dixon used his space in the Jacksonville Landing to press records for any musician, poet or rapper. During the festival he was using remnants from a local plastics manufacturer cut into 5″ squares. The records remain square but of course the grooves are round.

By night Dixon was downtown in the OneSpark Entertainment District at Underbelly. During the evenings performances he tapped into the soundboard and created records on the spot for artists playing on the clubs stage.

Dixon is passionate about cutting records and loves trying to cut them on just about anything. In the video below he admits to making a record out of chocolate.

Check out this unique way of recording music in the video and for more visit lathecuts.com

See more startup stories from this amazing crowdfunding festival and startup event here at nibletz.com

ProfileGorilla Shows Off Their Complete Business Management Software Startup At OneSpark

The Factory, St. Augustine Florida’s accelerator program, housed all of their startups at the Dalton Agency venue during the OneSpark crowdfunding festival in Jacksonville this week. They were also one of the first startups (creators) to pitch the crowd on the Community First Pitch Deck (stage) on Wednesday at the festival.

ProfileGorilla takes most aspects of a businesses administrative operations, that are currently performed across a multitude of software products and combines them into one collaborative suite of tools. While that may seem like a daunting task, they’ve just made life much easier for the people running the back end of a business.

Not only that, but ProfileGorilla is a collaborative tool which allows businesses to let their third party vendors and other folks that need access to their operations, to access them through their Profile Gorilla account.

While this is an enterprise software solution, co-founder Ed Baldwin is quick to point out that the scalable solution is perfect for any size enterprise at any stage in their development. Meaning that if you are with a legacy enterprise company with 700 employees, ProfileGorilla brings a huge advantage to your back office. If you’re a startup with two employees, it also brings a huge advantage to your back office.

With that, Baldwin is recruiting business clients of all sizes and invited startups at OneSpark to set up a free account.

One of the biggest advantages to ProfileGorilla is that it’s scalable in nature on the user size. It’s the perfect business management system for that one or two person startup and as the company grows, ProfileGorilla grows with it.

Check out our video interview with Baldwin below and go sign up for ProfileGorilla here at profilegorilla.com

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