Monica Selby - 10/16 - Serious Startups

The Gig City Launches National CO.STARTERS Program

Small business is the backbone of our economy.

We’ve all heard it. Over and over (and over) again. But is it true?

Earlier this fall a report from the Kauffmann Foundation suggested that it may not be. Tech companies do actually drive economic growth, so that’s good news for the startup ecosystem. But, we all know what a risky game starting up is, and we can’t always trust that tech companies will continue to grow like they have in recent years.

Still, startup founders and investors have learned a lot about developing businesses. Wouldn’t it be great if we could apply some of those lessons to other segments of the economy? The term “intrapreneur” defines employees of large corporations that push for innovation and change. Is there something similar for small businesses?

There will be soon, if the CO.STARTERS program in Chattanooga, TN has anything to say about it. Last month the program, based out of startup engine The Company Lab, announced a national expansion of their brand of small business development.

“There is a new approach to business in the high-growth startup world,” CO.STARTERS Director Enoch Elwell said in a statement. “Through CO.STARTERS we’ve adapted and applied those highly effective proven methods to micro-business, bringing together a community where these founders can thrive.”

Those of us in the startup world almost consider these techniques cliche now. Things like the lean startup method, customer-focused iteration, pivoting quickly to meet market demand–these things are so common they’re not even really debated any more. But that’s not true for the small business world, where entrepreneurs can labor for years before realizing they’ve missed the market.

With the national launch, CO.STARTERS is offering its curriculum in 3 different formats. The core curriculum covers the basics of business building, regardless of location. The urban and rural (coming soon) take that core curriculum and add in layers that will address the unique situations in each of those areas.

The CO.STARTERS program has already been adopted in cities around the country like Phoenix, Cincinnati, and Fort Wayne, Indiana. To find out more about CO.STARTERS check out their website.

TiqIQ, the Kayak for Ticket Sales, Launches On Mobile

Last week Rafat Ali posted on LinkedIn about “mediata” startups. Mediata startups combine data and media:

“What if data *is* media?” Ali asks.

New York-based TiqIQ has been operating along those lines since 2009. The company works as a ticket selling platform for live events around the country. TiqIQ aggregates the best prices across several secondary platforms like eBay, TicketsNow, Vivid Seats, ScorBig and primary sellers like Ticketmaster.

“Think Kayak.com for live events,” VP of Marketing Brett House told me over the phone. “We scour the web for the best tickets available so fans don’t have to. All they have to do is show up and have a good time!”

TiqIQ utilizes the ticket market pricing data to produce original content on events and fan-demand. They are able to see trends across the market, going back as far as 5 years. The articles are then published across their network of 1,500 fan blogs and websites, like this article on the crazy Iron Bowl that put Auburn in the SEC Championship game.

Their publishing partners are impressive, including Forbes.com, Bleacher Report, Grantland, Huffington Post, Village Voice Media (with 14 properties nationwide), and high affinity sites, like the largest SEC blog in the country: Saturday Down South.

TiqIQ has seen lots of growth since its inception and landed a $1.7 million Series A early last year. Now they’re looking to grow even more with the launch of a new mobile site.

Actually, the site launched quietly about 3 months ago. Since then, they’ve seen a 303% growth in the mobile conversion rate and double the overall traffic. In just 3 months.

I’d say that’s “high growth.”

The fully responsive mobile site is clean and simple. You can allow it to see your location and immediately pull up all the local events. Just like on the website, you can also personalize the mobile site so that you only see sports or events you’re actually interested in. (Yes to football games. No to basketball. Just for instance.)

Of course, it makes complete sense that mobile ticket sales would do well. Mobile shopping overall is having a year, and as consumers get more comfortable (and the experience gets better) TiqIQ can only expect that to grow.

Which is why in the next couple of months they’ll also add content to the mobile site. They are going for that extra “stickiness” that will keep fans on the site long enough to buy tickets after reading about how scarce they are to a particular event.

So now TiqIQ is not only a media/data company but also a content/commerce company. Two hot trends that find a pretty interesting home in live event ticket sales.

TiqIQ doesn’t have the name recognition of, say, StubHub, but the disdain in House’s voice as we talked about the competition indicates that they aren’t too worried about that.

And let’s face it, with growth like that and more features to roll out, the guys at TiqIQ probably aren’t worried about too much these days.

Except maybe which bowl game to go.

The Sharing Economy Moves Into…Fashion?

Okay, here’s the nightmare scenario:

You’re traveling for work or to a high school reunion or whatever. The big event you’ve traveled for is in a few hours and you realize, “Holy shit! I forgot my (fill in important clothing item here).”

A couple of years ago that exact thing happened to Amrita Aviyente while she was in India for a high school reunion. She ended up buying really expensive shoes that she had very few occasions to wear after that trip.

The whole experience made her think, “Wouldn’t it be great if there was someone just down the street I could borrow shoes from?”

Back in Boston, she set to work on Date My Wardrobe, a peer-to-peer service that allows users to post their upscale wardrobe pieces online and rent them to other people. Aviyente calls it “AirBnB for high-end wardrobe items.”

She’s particularly excited about the social component that’s possible with Date My Wardrobe. You’re in a new city, need some shoes, and suddenly you find yourself meeting someone with your exact taste in fashion.

The team–which also includes Izi Aviyente and Chetan Chawla–piloted the beta during the Boston Lean Startup Challenge. They were in the top 5 teams in this year’s class, and are now busy working on the updates they want to make to the platform.

Those changes will be easy to implement quickly because two of the three founders have technical backgrounds. They are working on a payment platform (right now they use Square Cash) and hope to launch on mobile soon.

Competition, obviously, comes in the form of just buying something when you need it. However, there’s also New York-based Rent the Runway, which has an inventory of used designer items for rent. There’s also DC-based SnobSwap which works as an online marketplace that lets you buy, sell, or swap clothes.

Neither of those companies are strictly peer-to-peer like Date My Wardrobe, but some people will prefer that. While it’s fun to think about sharing clothes, it could potentially be a little creepy.

Of course, staying in someone’s home or getting a Lyft from a stranger could be creepy, too, and those things are doing all right at the moment. Buzz aside, the sharing economy is still in the early days, and there is plenty of room and time to grow.

Amrita and her team plan to be a part of that. They are looking to 2014 to be a big year for Date My Wardrobe.

Off Track Planet Raises $500,000 To Build Living Travel Guide

Off Track Planet started as a Brooklyn-based travel blog in 2009. Their first book Off Track Planet’s Travel Guide for the Young, Sexy, and Broke was released in 2012 and saw impressive distribution, including at Urban Outfitters stores. That year they also moved half of their startup to Cincinnati to participate in the Brandery.

Now, the hits just keep coming. Last week Off Track Planet announced a $500,000 seed round. CincyTech, the Brandery, and unnamed international angels all participated in the round. Off Track Planet will use their new capital infusion to build the world’s first “living travel guide.” The new app (which is currently in private beta) will aggregate users’ content from across all their social networks, organizing it by date, location, tags, and keywords into a single timeline. From that stream of images and updates, OTP will curate and add some editorial to create a cohesive, branded guide for a given place. Users will be incentivized to add more and better detail to create the richest guides possible. The “living” part comes in because each guide will change and grow as users contribute more and more content. Off Track Planet co-founder and CEO Freddy Pikovsky said in a statement:

“In order to build the most beautiful and intelligent travel guide, we needed to make it insanely easy and richer for people to share their experiences. Your travel stuff is scattered all over the place. We have pictures and bits of content fragmented on different social sites (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc), and there’s no easy way of putting it all together to tell your story.”

The app is currently in private beta while the company recruits “super-users,” meaning travel experts, local experts, photographers, and bloggers. The company plans to launch a public beta early next year, along with 3 city guides: Buenos Aires, Brooklyn, and Berlin. Off Track Planet is demo-ing the new app at two separate events tonight. Go here to sign up for the Cincinnati event and here for the Brooklyn event. You can also keep up with beta release on the Off Track Planet website.

Tech Companies Call For Government Reform–And It’s About Damn Time

Reform government surveillance

Last night a website called Reformed Government Surveillance went up, supposedly signed by the biggest names in our business.

AOL
Facebook
Google
LinkedIn
Microsoft
Twitter
Yahoo

The big tech companies called for responsibility on the part of the government, outlining 5 principles that they think will keep the government accountable.

Limiting governments’ authority to collect users’ information
Oversight and accountability
Transparency about government demands
Respecting the free flow of information
Avoiding conflicts among governments

This matters to you as a user of all these networks, because while the government still claims to be looking for terrorists, it’s not hard to imagine a future in which it uses our information for other means. (Dystopian fiction, anyone?)

It also matters to the Nibletz community because we are a group of founders and investors that inherently aren’t a part of the big companies who signed this letter. As our startups grow, the government is likely to turn to our data just as it does to the companies listed above. If they–with their money and manpower–don’t have the political will to resist government intrusion, how will the young guys be able to do it?

But–there’s always a but, isn’t there?–let’s also remember that these are companies, not benevolent individuals. None of these companies, except maybe Twitter, are really considered “innocent” when it comes to users’ data, and plenty of people are skeptical of the amount of information profit-seeking entities have on ordinary citizens.

We all know it’s a part of 21st century life, but that doesn’t mean we blindly trust companies that make a very, very smart PR move.

It has been over a month since Google engineers gave a very public “Fuck you” to the NSA, and beyond some chatter, nothing else has been said. Users have been calling for this kind of action on the part of the tech companies–and more.

While we champion startups outside of Silicon Valley, we all recognize that the companies in this letter are the leaders in our field. We look to them for inspirational success stories, and most of our companies are built on technology and platforms they created.

The question now is, will they continue to lead, or will they stop with a letter on a website?

IPO Watchlist Features 11 Startups Outside Silicon Valley

Mattermark is bringing big data to venture capital, and their free daily newsletter is one of our favorite resources.

Last week, one of the daily newsletters included a list of 25 companies the Mattermark team thinks could file an S-1 or raise a final bridge round in 2014. There were some predictable names on the list, like Box, Uber, and Pinterest.

But, there were also lots of companies from outside of Silicon Valley. Eleven, to be exact. (Okay, 10 1/2. MongoDB has headquarters in both New York and Palo Alto.) So, in a list of 25, almost half the companies expected to IPO come from somewhere other than Silicon Valley.

New York has 4 startups on the list, making it the city outside the Valley with the most expected IPOs. International companies also had a strong showing, with startups based in New Delhi, Paris, and Beijing.

It’s true that no one area has the same concentration of tech startups as Silicon Valley, but the Mattermark list proves it’s probably time to stop saying you CAN’T build a tech company everywhere else.

Here are the startups from everywhere else that made Mattermark’s watch list:

MongoDB (New York/Palo Alto)–MongoDB provides database technology to help companies take advantage of big data, cloud, mobile, and social trends.
Fancy (New York)–Fancy is a crowd-curated catalog that keeps up with new trends in merchandise, travel, and goods. You can buy right from the platform, putting it one step ahead of Pinterest.
Snapdeal (New Delhi)–Snapdeal is the largest online marketplace in India. They boast products in categories from fashion to computers to toys.
Xiaomi Tech (Beijing)–Xiaomi Tech is only 3 years old, but their smartphone outsold the Galaxy S4 in the first half of this year. They also offer internet services like MiCloud, Xiaomi App Market, and Xiaomi Games.
Outbrain (New York)–You know the “from around the web” box you see on some big publishers’ sites? That service is provided by Outbrain, a startup that helps content get discovered.
Fotolia (New York)–Fotolia is a stock photography company that offers royalty-free images for creatives and designers.
Wayfair (Boston)–Wayfair is a popular shopping site that offers all kinds of goods from your home.
AirWatch (Atlanta)–AirWatch saw the mobile revolution coming, and they now provide solutions for the mobile workforce.
JustFab (Los Angeles)–JustFab is the celebrity-backed startup that allows you access to shoes and accessories picked especially for you by professional stylists.
Deezer (Paris)–Deezer is a European music streaming and discovery service.
MuleSoft (London, Buenos Aires, Sydney)–MuleSoft connects SaaS and enterprise applications in the cloud. (One of their customers, Box, is also expected to IPO in 2014.)

We’ll be keeping an eye on these companies in the coming year, and we’ll let you know when the S-1’s get filed.

Silvrback Wants To Be The Medium For Writers

Some of the best startup stories begin with a personal itch–some problem that bugs the founder so much, he or she just goes out to fix it.

That’s basically the story of Tahoe-based Silvrback, a new blogging platform built by Damian Sowers. Sowers had used Medium a few times, but hated that the site always sent readers to someone else’s content at the end of his articles. WordPress and other full time blogging platforms proved complicated, with too many choices that made it easy to procrastinate the content part.

So, Sowers got to work.

The developer and consultant built Silvrback to look like Medium but allow writers to have more control over their brand and platform.

“Medium is great for readers but bad for writers,” it says on website. “Readers are steered away to other articles/authors after they are done reading your article. Moreover, the analytics of Medium are extremely basic and you have no idea how people found your article.You really shouldn’t use Medium if you want to build any kind of brand with your writing.”

With that in mind, Sowers made a list of things he personally wanted in a blogging platform and incorporated those into his final product. Things like a clean and modern UI, hosting, and Google analytics can all be found at Silvrback. The site is definitely well-designed, and Sowers incorporated much of what people love about Medium into it. In fact, you can probably think of it as a mashup of the good things about WordPress and the good things about Medium, all in one platform.

However, despite the tough talk, Sowers says he isn’t trying to compete with Medium. The bigger platform focuses on content discovery, but Silvrback focuses on providing a great platform for writers. Some of the changes to Medium announced last week back of Sowers’ theories on what matters to writers. Of course, it also makes them even more direct competitors.

Still, it stands to reason that writers will be happy to go where there’s a built-in audience, and Ev Williams and team have that at Medium. While the platform does steers readers towards other content, it’s not really that hard to find a writer you like and read everything they offer.

Many of Silvrback’s users have joined up from Hacker News, and that hacker/writer audience could prove to be the best niche for Silvrback to target.

If you’re sick of Medium (or your hosted blog) go check out Silvrback. You can get a 2 week free trial here.

Play It Raises $700k To Bring Mobile Games To Emerging Markets

Did you know there are 5 billion (yup, with a “b”) feature phones in the world? Oh, you remember feature phones. They were the things we had before our phones got “smart” just a few years ago.

In fact those good ol’ flip phones outnumber smartphones by 5:1, and most of those feature phones are in emerging markets. When we remember our old phones, we probably don’t think of gaming, but users around the world actually do play games on those phones.

Well, think 1990s desktop solitaire, not so much Candy Crush. At the moment most of those phones aren’t capable of mobile social gaming.

So, 5 billion feature phones. No mobile social or wagered gaming. Sound like an open market to you?

It certainly does to Calgary-based Play It Gaming.

The startup–a product of the Big Instincts Group–has raised $700 thousand to bring smartphone-like gaming to feature phones.

phone-mockup-game-01

Along with the raise, which was oversubscribed, Play It Gaming also announced a partnership with biNu, an Australian company that already has a platform to bringInternet services and apps to feature phones.

“We’re excited to be working with the Play It team,” biNu CEO Gour Lentell said in a statement. “The opportunity to bring social gaming experiences to mobile consumers in emerging markets is massive, and the combination of biNu’s mobile technology platform with Play It’s content, focus, and industry expertise is a sure winner.”

In 2014 Play It will launch the Game Center, a first of its kind social hub for gaming on feature phones. The Game Center will boast a leaderboard, a virtual currency, and a place for some good ol’ fashioned peer-to-peer smack talking. From the Game Center, users will be able to access cloud-based games.

Still, don’t envision Candy Crush. There are limitations to what can be developed, and the 200 different kinds of feature phones don’t help.

Instead, Play It Gaming has a few simple games in the works. Chess and checkers, trivia, and poker (wagered or social, depending on the country) all translate well to feature phones. The startup will also introduce local games to the mix. For example, mancala is huge in Africa, and before long people will be able to play it on their phones.

There are no plans to sell the games; they’ll be free like most smartphone games. However, the Game Center platform allows for in-app purchases.

Let’s be honest. Western companies often forget the emerging markets in favor of wealthier American and European ones. But, based on population size alone, companies seeking to serve emerging markets like Play It and biNu may be the big winners in the long run.

What Rapt Media’s Erika Trautman Learned From Pitching 200 VCs

We expect a lot out of our content these days. We’re inundated with ads, articles, pictures, Tweets, status updates, email, and YouTube. And that’s just online.

It takes something special to really catch our attention, much less make us want to share the content with others.

Emmy-award winning producer Erika Trautman understood that when she decided to produce a video-based, gamified web series. As she and her husband–a game developer at NAMCO–played with the technology, they had an epiphany.

This could really help other people online, too.

So, the couple sold their Bay Area house, used the profits to move to Boulder, CO, and started Rapt Media. They hired their first engineer with personal money and no guarantee anything was going to work.

When Rapt Media was accepted to the 2011 class of Techstars Boulder, things began to look up. World class accelerators, great mentors. Surely the business would only be successful, right?

Well, except the Demo Day for that year’s batch happened to fall on the same day as the debt ceiling crisis.

“Investors were just getting up and leaving,” Trautman told me over the phone.

Despite the stressful Demo Day, Rapt Media ultimately raised all the money they needed, though it came in dribbles instead of one, fully subscribed seed round.

Trautman recently talked about her experiences raising capital as a woman in a post on Entrepreneur.com.

“I think there’s an inherent challenge for women telling the “Billion Dollars or Bust” story, or at least there was for me…Don’t get me wrong. I want nothing less than to reinvent online video to make it richly interactive. And I want Rapt Media to lead that billion-dollar expedition.

But the process of building a company is iterative and I focus on the next set of milestones and the next risks to be mitigated. If the guys are great at describing the view from the top of the mountain, then I’m the one focused on putting one foot in front of the other to get to the next ridge.”

Despite the challenges of raising capital as a woman, Trautman made it happen. She believed in her company and its ability to change how video is done.

I asked her if she ever felt nervous or uncomfortable, pitching a room full of male VCs who were used to hearing male CEOs tell those great stories. She laughed and referenced her background in journalism.

“No investor was a drug lord who could order a hit on me, so I would probably be okay.”

Rapt Media is a company that, by common wisdom, “shouldn’t” work. They moved from the Valley when so often companies move the other direction. They have a woman CEO in a male-dominated industry.

But with clients like NBC Universal, HBO/Cinemax, Maybelline, and One King’s Lane, they are working. And their innovative videos are proving valuable to clients, a feat other forms of video have never done.

While Trautman recognized that being a female CEO created some challenges, she has never really felt that it hindered her.

“It’s about taking your individual style and strengths and applying that to strategy,” she said.

And that’s true no matter your gender or location.

Alaska Startup Introduces Live Beauty Consultations

Okay. I have to admit when I got the pitch for makeoverly.com, I was pretty skeptical of the idea. Online makeup consultations? The best thing about Sephora is the personal touch of chatting with a new friend about pretty makeup AND trying it on right then.

Then I dug in. Makeoverly.com is run by Hannah Wright, a former staff member at Beauty.com. According to the website, their distributed makeup artists have already counseled 4,000 people, impressive traction since the August launch.

Here’s how it works:

Customers get on the website–which is gorgeous–and chat with a beauty consultant free for 15 minutes. You don’t even have to register. After that session, you can choose to add time for a small fee, or schedule a Skype session to talk face-to-face with a consultant. The company makes money from affiliate links when consumers buy recommended products.

I hopped on the site and asked the consultant a question I’ve known the answer to since I was 16: what’s the best color for green eyes? (Blues and purples, by the way.)

But, she surprised me with a long explanation of different shades of brown I could use, including a link to one of the products she liked.

Now, without the ability to try the products right away, I can’t confirm if her advice was good or not. Still, the novelty of a different answer is intriguing. She also recommended an eyeliner and offered a discount on a Skype session to end our chat.

Makeoverly.com is very new to the beauty startup scene, and they have a long road ahead of them. Chatting with a makeup artist is nice, but trying products (via Birchbox, for example) is pretty good, too. And, of course, any department store makeup counter can offer a similar service, with the added benefit of products right there.

“When you walk into a department store, the makeup artists are contracted out by specific beauty brands,” Hannah says, “whereas on makeoverly.com, our makeup artists can freely recommend any products and brands that they love. They aren’t limited to specific brands and are able to provide helpful links to products by any cosmetic lines.

In addition, there have been many articles lately regarding the germ concerns behind physical makeup counters. We give people the opportunity to instead receive their makeovers from the comfort of their own homes.”

The company has definitely done a lot in a short time, and it will be interesting to see how/if they scale. The Alaska location is a far cry–literally–from New York and Los Angeles, where these companies typically launch from.

I’d also like to see makeoverly.com branch out in the monetization strategy. Product links are a great start, but this market also presents a great opportunity for content. The expertise of so many beauty consultants would be great to leverage in building a loyal following. (Hannah did hint at such a strategy when she mentioned a quick start beauty guide that could be downloaded for a small fee.)

I’ll say it one more time: makeoverly.com is very, very young. They face all the same obstacles as early stage startups in every industry in every city do.

Still, in a couple of short hours, they convinced me they’re a company worth watching.

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Your New Mobile Wallet Should Be PAAY

Do you remember the last time you bought something from a new website? You’re not on Amazon, so the design is gorgeous, the products are awesome and ethical, and you’re super excited to be supporting a new startup.

You add the item(s) to your cart and click check out.

Boom. Great UX over. Because no matter how awesome the site is, they still have to ask you to fill out long forms with your address, credit card number, and a brief life history. The whole time you’re thinking, “Great. On the off-chance the NSA doesn’t already have this information, NOW they will.”

Yeah, Yitz Mendlowitz hates that, too.

When the problem grasped his attention, he was working on another startup, though that idea was winding down. When he would talk to people, his idea for a simplified system that uses your phone number to pay was the one they loved.

“Okay,” he finally thought. “I have something here.”

With the other startup ending, Yitz focused on the payments company. Then he met James Ruffer through an acquaintance. James had plenty of experience in startups and hacking, so Yitz pitched him the idea.

“It sucks,” James said, and proceeded to outline all the other areas the product could serve. With some extra effort, the company could also solve pain points for merchants and even for the credit card processing industry. What could be great for the consumer could also be great for the vendors, and that would be a real idea to pursue.

Naturally the two became cofounders.

The company has been working in stealth for almost a year, funded by two seed rounds that add up to $800k. With a shopping cart plugin, an iPhone app, and an Android app already in beta, they plan to launch in the next few months.

On the consumer side, PAAY is simple enough. You shop online, and when you’re ready to check out, you click the PAAY button. Rather than entering all of your information right then, you enter your phone number and a message is sent to your PAAY app. You approve the purchase in app and move on with your day.

“The only thing faster is Amazon one-click payments,” James told me.

As Internet consumers become more aware of fraud—but no less willing to shop online—the cool thing about PAAY is that your credit card number isn’t stored on the phone OR at the merchant’s website. It stays with the credit card processor, the same people that have it when you swipe at a store anyway.

And how exactly does PAAY help merchants?

For one thing, the plugin is free to them, too. (Credit card processors pick up the tab.) More importantly, because of the way credit cards work, it’s all too easy for customers to order something, but then tell the credit card company they didn’t make the purchase. Because there’s no signed receipt, Visa or Mastercard errs on the side of the customer and removes payment. Then the customer keeps the product but avoids paying for it.

With PAAY’s electronic signature, however, these chargebacks can’t be executed. The consent you give in the app, after giving your phone number, works as a signature. Merchants no longer have to worry about chargebacks, and they will be able to negotiate lower fees with the processing agencies.

Right now PAAY is focusing on the online space, but they hope to conquer the offline shopping experience, too.

Imagine all those times you got to checkout and realized you had left your card at home. When PAAY is in brick-and-mortar stores, all you’ll need is your phone. (And we know you never forget that!)

PAAY isn’t the only mobile wallet out there. Lots of people are trying to change the payments space. Dwolla, Google Wallet, and PayPal are all semi-competitors and have the benefit of pretty big head starts. While there is no product that does exactly what PAAY does, they still have to compete with the public’s general understanding about mobile wallets, payments, and credit cards.

Still, with Yitz’s sales backgrounds and James’s technical expertise—and both of their scrappy New York attitudes—I’m willing to bet we’ll all be clicking PAAY sooner rather than later.

Senate Hearings Aside, Is Bitcoin Going Mainstream?

The last couple of days have been good ones for Bitcoin, the digital currency that has grown in popularity in the last year. Which is good because last month saw the seizure of $28.5 million of bitcoins during the Silk Road shutdown. Plenty of people questioned the rise and ethics of bitcoin.

This week is a whole different story. The Senate conducted hearings on the legality and legitimacy of bitcoin, and in response, trading surged.

As Timothy Lee of the Washington Post said, “This Senate hearing is a Bitcoin lovefest.”

What does that mean for the average person?

From BitDazzle merchant Kiwi Avenue

Maybe nothing yet. But, last month saw the launch of BitDazzle, a marketplace for physical consumer goods that is the first of its kind to accept Bitcoin.

The site is the brainchild of Cashie Commerce, a company that helps users turn their sites into online stores, and Coinbase, a leading Bitcoin digital wallet. The companies are partnering to create an Etsy-like platform for small businesses trying sell products online, with the key differentiator being the acceptance of bitcoin.

I asked Cashie Commerce CEO Hieu Biu if it was really just a marketing scheme, and he insisted that it’s more than that. While the acceptance of bitcoin does help with marketing–especially this month–there is real benefit to merchants to accept bitcoin.

By nature, the cryptocurrency has a smaller transaction fee than credit cards: 2% as opposed to 7-9%. On Bitdazzle, Coinbase is waiving all transaction fees for the first $1 million a merchant brings in.

2% of $1 million is $20,000, right back in the pockets of smaller merchants across the country. That kind of money makes a real difference to small businesses.

I still have a hard time imagining using bitcoin for real, physical goods. The numbers and crypto-ness and all around digital nature trips me up, and I know I’m not alone.

“Don’t get too hung up on how it works,” Bui told me. “Just think of it as another form of payment.”

Coinbase is working to make it that easy. Similar to a PayPal account, you hook up Coinbase to your bank account. From there you can purchase bitcoins and spend them in the online marketplace.

Currently, somewhere around 90% of the transactions are done with bitcoin, a high early adoption ratio. For those customers on the fence about bitcoin, many merchants are offering discounts to buyers paying with the currency.

This isn’t the first bitcoin marketplace. Coingig and Bitcoinstore are both up and running, though they trend more towards electronics and gift cards and other goods that attract early adopters. And, of course, there was the less-savory Silk Road. How exactly is BitDazzle going to make the fairly large jump to the soccer mom market?

From Nela Ceramics Store

“Our goal is to be the kind of place my wife would tell her friends about,” Bui said. “We are working hard to keep it safe and secure.”

All merchants are screened and vetted before they are allowed to sell, and Bui assured me the first sign of illegal or unsavory activity will get a merchant booted from the site.

So, will Bitcoin become mainstream?

Despite the recent buzz, I think it’ll still be awhile before we can call it “mainstream,” but maybe not as long as you’d expect. Bui likens the current Bitcoin experience to the early days of PayPal: not always understandable, not always easy to use, but disruptive and gaining steam.

Before long my kids could be asking for Bitcoins instead of raiding the couch cushions for the old-fashioned metal kind.

Do Women-Only Initiatives Really Help Women?

Recently I’ve noticed an uptick in “women-focused” pitches in my inbox. It seems in the last year there has been a lot of momentum in the “women-focused” space. Women accelerators, women incubators, women crowdfunding sites, women angel funds.

We’ve covered some of those initiatives here and here at Nibletz, but I have to admit I’ve been a little ambivalent about doing so. Take this line from a recent pitch:

Women need all the help they can get.

Wait. What? I need all the help I can get just because I’m a woman? That’s news to me.

I’ve been told all my life that I can do anything I want to do, that nothing can hold me back except myself. I’ve been told that I’m smart and creative and most likely to succeed. And no one ever felt the need to add, “for a girl.”

Because here’s the thing, y’all:

Women in 21^st century American cities are the privileged of the privileged.

We are more educated than we’ve ever been in history and more so than many of our male counterparts.

Our mothers and grandmothers did the grunt work by forcing our inclusion in the workforce in general, and now we have the option to “opt out.”

No longer expected to pop out babies every year, we are having children later and later. Or never.

In a recent interview with PandoDaily CEO Sarah Lacy, she told me, “People get mad at me for saying this, but I don’t believe Silicon Valley is inherently sexist. I raised $3 million, brought my baby to meetings, and didn’t have a cofounder.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s true for everywhere else now, too. Are there sexist and biased individuals out there? Of course. Are there systems still in place from a sexist past that need to be revamped? Sure, and the flood of educated, successful women will eventually take care of that.

But there’s something wrong when we treat half the population like a minority or special interest group. Women don’t need all the help we can get because we’re women.

Just like the men around us, our intelligence and creativity and hard work earn us the right to ask for the help we need.

However Niels Bohr was right when he said, “The opposite of a great truth is also true.” While women as a whole may not need focused efforts, there are subsets of women that can benefit from programs that reach them specifically.

One interesting take on the women-focused front is a group called Bella Minds. They are currently running a crowdfunding campaign, and they are interesting because they focus education efforts on women in rural areas.

Women in these areas are watching their way of life die around them, and without immediate connections to big cities, they may not be aware of their options. Bella Minds hopes to offer the kind of mentorship and education urban women take for granted, a specific mission that will open options up to women who are smart enough and driven enough to take them.

Another subset of women that could benefit from focused attention is entrepreneurial women in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. These women are fighting years of cultural oppression and live in societies that are truly patriarchal. They are still the outliers in their cultures, and any support they can get will help drive both them and entrepreneurship in general.

It’s a nuanced issue, for sure, and a blog post will never solve the world’s problems. Ultimately, there are situations in which special help for women is actually needed.

But based on my inbox alone, I fear those initiatives are getting lost in the noise.

Agriculture Startups Can Be Lean, Too

Want to see the definition of a lean startup?

Check out Phytelligence, an innovative agriculture startup out of Washington State University. (Yup, it’s farm day at Nibletz. )

Several years ago, as part of his research at the university, Dr. Amit Dhingra began interviewing local nurseries. He asked the same questions any good startup founder would ask:

What problems do you see over and over again?

What would you like to see research done on?

How could we make your life easier?

After getting that initial customer discovery, Dr. Dhingra set to work with his research team. After a few years, they had a solution that they believed could become a product. Plants that were free from disease and guaranteed to be the exact genetic specimen a grower ordered.

Then, 3 years ago, WSU entrepreneur-in-residence Chris Leyerle got involved.

Now, the company is independent of Washington State, and they have big plans. For now, they are targeting their products to commercial nurseries. Through these partners, they are able to get more exposure to growers and aren’t hindered by growing seasons. Nurseries are less seasonal than growers.

These nursery partnerships have been easy to get because, remember, Dr. Dhingra asked them years ago what they needed and set to work supplying it.

In addition to selling their plantlets, Phytelligence has found a market for their genetic testing abilities.

When growers order plants, they can often get completely wrong specimens. In the case of plants like trees, it could be a few years before they realize the mistake.

Phytelligence genetic analysis is able to quickly test every single plant, even in a large order, to guarantee it’s what the grower ordered. Obviously, this saves growers enormous amounts of time and money.

During their research, the Phytelligence scientists also uncovered an organic ripening compound that could change the way fruit is delivered. Think about the last time you bought a pear. Unlike it was from a farm stand during peak season, it was probably hard and unripe. You bring it home, set it on the counter, but it never ripens.

This problem is the result of current commercial storage compounds used when picking and shipping fruit. The Phytelligence team has found an organic formula that grocery stores can apply to fruit, pears especially, and restart the ripening process.

Phytelligence has been able to do all of this work on a small amount of investor money, and they are already post-revenue. Besides modeling a lean startup model, they also prove the benefit of local universities feeding the startup ecosystem.

This week Phytelligence is showing off at the Angel Capital Expo. Find out more about them at their website.

An earlier version of this article misspelled Dr. Dhingra’s name, as well as misquoted the number of years it can take a grower to identify a wrong specimen and said that nurseries buy all year round.

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Women in 21st century American cities are the privileged of the privileged.

Women in 21^st century American cities are the privileged of the privileged.