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Shipping Rules for Holiday Packages

It’s the biggest time of year for many retailers, including startups. In 2012, Cyber Monday outpaced Black Friday in terms of products sold — expect the same to happen in 2013. If you don’t already have your sales strategies and your marketing in place for this big business day, it’s time to get planning.

Once your business reaps the benefits of Cyber Monday, you then have to deal with the harder aspect of the holiday season: shipping your products to customers. The way you handle shipping this year will determine how many sales you get next year. If products arrive late or broken, or if they are in any way disappointing to your customers, you’ll lose customer loyalty and your fledgling business will find its wings crippled.

With that in mind, here are the shipping rules for holiday packages:

1. The packages must arrive on time.

A lot of online retailers promise that packages will arrive “by Christmas.” That’s all very well and good, but keep in mind that many people travel. This year, the weekend before Christmas falls on December 21/22; that’s when people will start traveling to visit family. Don’t make them wonder if your package will arrive by then. If people order on Cyber Monday, you need to get them the packages within two weeks, or by December 9. As sales continue, you need to be ready to ship as fast as possible.

2. The packages must look great.

There are two moments this holiday season at which your package is unwrapped: one of them is of course at the moment when the recipient receives the gift, but the other is when the person who bought the gift receives your shipment.

Make sure your customer is just as happy to open your package. Invest in custom logo boxes to make your box stand out. Include little details to delight your customer, such as a personalized thank-you letter or a bonus gift. Adding a vinyl cling sticker or a cute inkpen to every package is an inexpensive way to build brand loyalty and make your customers smile.

3. The item must not break.

Packages get tossed around a lot, so make sure your product is securely wrapped. Items that arrive broken, especially right before a major holiday, cause a lot of additional headaches on the part of your customers.

Of course, you also have to be careful not to use too much packaging, lest your product end up on the front page of Overpackaging.com. Customers are very sensitive about companies that use large boxes to ship small items, or that fail to pack their products in recyclable materials.

4. Your return policy has to be easy to follow.

It goes without saying that your product should be described as accurately as possible, so customers know exactly what they’re getting. However, even when the product is exactly what they expected, people sometimes still need to return the item.

Make your return policy as easy to follow as possible. Include the padded return envelope in your packaging, along with a postage-included address label sticker. If customers don’t want to return your product, they can always use that padded envelope for something else — another win-win and another way to build customer loyalty.

5. You must be easy to contact.

If you don’t already have a customer service number on your website, now’s the time to add it. If possible, throw in a customer service chat option as well; a lot of people prefer asking their questions through online chat instead of over the phone. If you’re easy to contact, your customers are more likely to trust you for their holiday needs.

Use these five rules to get you started for the holiday season. You’ll be prepared to wow your customers and build loyalty, and set yourself up for great sales in the new year.

Founder Spotlight: Blake Miller Of Think Big Partners

Blake Miller, Partner of Think Big Partners, is passionate about helping entrepreneurs build, launch, and grow their companies. Follow him @imbmills.

Who is your hero?

Elon Musk.

What’s the single best piece of business advice that helped shape who you are as an entrepreneur today, and why?

I’ve been fortunate enough to have to phenomenal mentors (in addition to my partners at Think Big), who have taught me so much about business in general. But the best advice I’ve ever received from them is: Be a good partner, work like nobody else will, and being nice goes a long way.

There’s a reason why we are called Think Big Partners. We want to work with people who have a partnership mentality. Being a good partner can mean a lot of things, but one of my biggest takeaways is that you don’t have to win all the time. Give a little before you get.

My favorite quote and something I live by is, “Spend a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.”

What’s the biggest mistake you ever made in your business, and what did you learn from it that others can learn from too?

I’ve learned that you need to write everything down. EVERYTHING. Proposals, statement of work, and small or large agreements. Even write down something as simple as when you’re in a meeting. Take a journal and take notes. Write down who was in the meeting, the date, and the key takeaways. It never ceases to amaze me how fluid memory is about what was agreed upon and what was expected. When someone “remembers something different,” you can respond with, “Nope, actually it was this, on this date, and this is exactly who was in the meeting.”

What do you do during the first hour of your business day and why?

I’m not a morning person at all. I’ve always been a night owl. Until recently, during the first hour or so of my day, if I’m not scheduled for a morning coffee I catch up on reading. I like to know what’s going on.

However, for the past month, I’ve been trying to change my habits and get something important done during the first part of my day. It’s been working well and helping to take pressure off of my day.

What’s your best financial or cash-flow related tip for entrepreneurs just getting started?

Sell something!

Start to create a solution to a problem people are willing to pay for. This helps so many things: product-market fit, cash flow, and traction. These things will also help you raise money from investors.

Quick: What’s ONE thing you recommend ALL aspiring or current entrepreneurs do right now to take their biz to the next level?

Learn at the very least the fundamentals of programming, even if it’s just HTML/CSS. Knowing how to use Word, Excel, etc. is not a skill anymore.

What’s your definition of success? How will you know when you’ve finally “succeeded” in your business?

Success means having a positive impact on a person, commerce, and a skyline. We are already seeing success in impacting people and commerce through the entrepreneurs we get to work with everyday.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

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.

gThrive Brings High-Tech To Growers

There are 7 billion people in the world today, and population estimates say we could reach 8 billion in about 10 years. (Check out this world population clock. The numbers are a little dizzying.)

We’re going to have to feed all those people, but as the population grows, farmland is disappearing rapidly.

Agriculture is ripe (get it?) for disruption, and gThrive is one of the companies providing it.

For those of us who are not growers, it can seem pretty simple. Stick a seed in the soil. Water it. Watch it grow. If we think hard about it, maybe we’ll consider potential pests or soil conditions, but for the most part it seems pretty cut and dry.

Yet, with large fields to manage, it is impossible for growers to know the condition of all of their soil. It’s also hard to gauge how much irrigation a certain patch might need, but water is expensive and can’t be wasted. Drones are increasingly being used to aid in farm work, but they can’t read these soil conditions from the sky.

That’s why Bruce Borden and his team came up with the gStake. The wireless, battery operated stakes boast sensors that read the soil information and transmit that data to web and phone apps.

Currently, the stakes work with Google maps. The location of each stake is noted with a color coordinated system that tells the grower how much water is in the soil,

Angel Capital Expo

if there’s enough fertilizer, and if the temperature varies too much.

Yet, the technology has proven difficult to create, and most of gThrive’s competitors are bigger, bulkier, more expensive systems. gStake is the first stake sensor that is inexpensive and movable, providing more value for the growers who can move them around the field.In our high-tech world, it seems like such a simple solution. Of course we should be able to read the ground like that, right?

Each gStake combines 5 different software systems, from the sensors to the transmitters to the apps that read it all. Yet the finished product looks simple and non-threatening, which is key to disrupting an entrenched industry like farming.

The stakes have already been through a prototype run and are now in some field trials in California. Borden sees possibility in the high-turnover, water-sensitive California crops like lettuce. For the average consumer, gStakes mean we can better predict the quality of the produce we buy. No more watery lettuce!

gThrive is presenting at the Angel Capital Expo on Thursday.

How An Online Platform Could Save Your Mental Health

According to a study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a full 20% of American adults experienced mental illness in the past year. Most often, these illnesses came in the form of depressive or anxiety disorders.

Yet, the stigma around mental disorders is still prevalent. In our startup culture, we champion the hard-headed, never-say-die entrepreneur. We glamorize the battle to start up and the sacrifices to health and family that many founders are willing to make. And, in the last year we saw not one but two high profile suicides.

Jonas Jones saw firsthand how mental illness affected behavior when he taught in south central LA and the bayous of Louisiana with Teach for America. After he left that organization, he volunteered his time leading groups for local youth.

During that experience he saw for the first time a therapy called “parent child interaction therapy.” Rather than sit with a mental health professional, the parent and child would sit in a room together and the therapist would be behind a two way mirror. An earpiece allowed the therapist to coach the parent through the conversation, and over time helped rewire both the parent and the child for positive interaction.

Jones thought, “There has to be a way to scale this.”

He founded Tao Mountain Inc, a company devoted to building secure online platforms that provide reliable information on a variety of mental health issues. The platforms provide videos, articles, and public discussions around topics such as depression, trauma, eating disorders and more. Profiles are 100% secure, and no one can see what a member is searching for or reading up on.

The first platform is parentchildinteractive.com and focuses on helping parents help their children. Members have access to a wide array of licensed therapists and behavioral experts, all of whom are cleared by an advisory board.

The platform is free to members. Revenue for the company comes through the fees paid by the experts who post videos and facilitate the discussions. The use of an online platform helps these providers scale their own practices and help more people.

Tao Mountain is also able to do a “skin change” and offer branding for corporations that want to provide mental health services to its employees. The example Jones gave me was of the Honolulu police department. Before his company came along, mental health services were offered on a certain floor of a certain building and EVERYONE knew it. If you were seen there, well, obviously you had problem.

The online platform allows members of the force to get the help they need, in the security of their own homes.

Parentchildinteractive.com is fully launched and functional. In the coming months, Tao Mountain will also launch an adult mental health site and a special needs site with the same services.

Tao Mountain is one of the presenting companies at this year’s Angel Capital Expo.

The Next Step In The Sharing Economy Is…

In the summer of 2012 Jaclyn Baumgartner got separate calls from her two brothers, each saying the same thing.

“I think I’m going to have to sell the boat. It’s just too expensive to keep up.”

At first glance, this probably sounds like a rich guy problem. But Jaclyn’s brothers are like the majority of boat owners in America. They make less than $100,000, own a small boat, and only use the boats and average of 14 days a year.

“Just rent it,” Jaclyn told her brothers, which does seem like the obvious answer. Except that boat insurance doesn’t cover renters. Boat rental companies pay for a whole other class of insurance that would never make sense for the average boat owner.

So, with her background as a strategy consultant, Jaclyn did some research into the car-sharing industry, trying to find something that could be applied to boats.

The ultimate problem is that even small boats are expensive and relatively unused, even by the most avid boater. The ability to rent out the boat would help with costs and provide boaters with a wider range of craft to experience.

The solution was, obviously, an insurance policy that would allow for rentals.

That solution, obviously, proved more difficult that you would think.

Jaclyn recruited help and spent 9 months knocking on the doors of major and minor insurance providers. She tried to convince anyone who would listen that a peer-to-peer insurance policy would solve the problem and provide income for boat owners and, ultimately, insurance providers.

“It was like trying to get them to invest,” she told me.

Finally, she convinced a major insurance provider to set up a policy, and Cruzin was in business.

In the spring of this year, Cruzin did a test run at the WesTrec Marina in Fort Lauderdale, FL. By the end of the test run, 10% of the marina tenants were signed up

on the site. The company found that boat owners didn’t just rent their boats. They were also excited to try out other boats and are also some of the most frequent renters.

After such a successful test run, WesTrec was happy to open up all their marinas to Cruzin, and since the summer soft launch, the site has grown to include 27 states. They’ve kept their marketing focus on Florida, so the growth they’ve seen is almost completely organic.

It takes a lot of trust to allow someone to man your boat. Cruzin also prides itself on thorough background checks and vetting processes. Boat owners maintain the right to refuse to rent a boat to someone, and they can even set up a test run with the potential renter. Those measures–plus the $1 million insurance policy–eliminate a lot of the hesitancy owners may feel.

Just a few months after launch, Cruzin is post-revenue, and Jaclyn knows they’ve proven the model. The company will present this week at the Angel Capital Expo, hoping to secure the capital that will help them scale in the coming year.

Find out more about Cruzin on their website.

Duck Dynasty, Getting Lost, & Startups

Tyler Matthews, a twenty-something whose beard is worthy of its own spot on Duck Dynasty, and I first bonded over the fact that we shared the same first name.

The second thing we found we had in common, though, was that, on occasion, we both had an extremely difficult time trying to physically find or meet people we were trying to find or meet up with.

Say your friend says something like, “Yeah! Meet me ________ at 7:00pm” before she hangs up the phone, but you couldn’t make out what she said because of the motorcycle engines in the background.

Or what if, on a trip to New York City, you wander through Central Park to feed your new pet pigeons? You need your boyfriend, who’s halfway across the city in his hotel room, to come pick you up. But how do you tell him where to meet you?

Tyler and his brother-in-law Ian Zink got to thinking: “There’s gotta be an app for that.” But there wasn’t – or, at least, not one that could actually do what they wanted it to do well.

Yougy was born.

If there was an ‘aha moment’ for Tyler and Ian with Yougy, it happened at the St. Louis Zoo.

“All we were trying to do was meet up with each other’s families. We were in one part and they were in another, so we were trying to describe to each other where we were. It’s super hot outside and we’re sweating; I’m waving my hands in the air. We’re sharing screenshots and pictures of what’s in front of us. Nothing was working.”

Tyler, who was finishing his MBA at the time of the zoo episode, was presented with a bit of a fork in the road. Tyler and Ian both had full time jobs, so the question became: “Are we going to do this or are we not?”

They had talked about a location-sharing app before the zoo, but that half hour of trying to find each other cemented the question of venturing into the world of startups or not.

So they dove in headfirst. Did they really know what they were getting themselves into? “I had no idea there was a full-blown startup scene out there,” Matthews said. So he started meeting with anybody and everybody he could meet with.

From there, Matthews says the ‘aha moments’ happened fairly regularly.

“At first, we would see other startups coming out of places like San Francisco and think, ‘These guys are going to do exactly what we want to do or they’re going to do it better because they’re in the Valley.”

But that wasn’t the case. “Every time we see one of our competitors add some kind of new feature onto their existing product we know we’re on the right track. At first, we might have been a little scared, but now we see how complicated and bloated these other products are becoming. We’re simple. None of them are solving the problem the way we think it should be solved.”

Learn more about and sign up for Yougy online http://signup.yougy.co/ and follow them on Twitter: @yougyapp.

Tyler Sondag is a startup connoisseur with a hand in anything and everything you could imagine. Hailing from the ever-developing Northwest Mississippi, an alum of Saint Louis University and currently a transplant to St. Louis, Missouri, one of his main missions in life is to get and keep young people engaged in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Follow him on Twitter: @MrSondag.

Photo Credit

Crowdsource Your Next Concert With Rabbl

One of my favorite things about covering startups is that I often discover problems I didn’t even know existed.

For example, I didn’t know what musicians went through to book concerts. It seems easy to me: call a venue, come play when they’re open anyway, go home.

It turns out I was pretty naive. Booking is actually a cumbersome process that puts a lot of financial pressure on artists who are already strapped. And that’s when they can get in touch with venues, which is hard to manage without connections. With hundreds of emails a day, venues are likely to just default to who they know, even when there isn’t as much demand for the artists.

Besides the issues with booking, there’s a disconnect between a music industry that says “it’s all about the fans” and the reality that fans rarely have a say in when or where their favorite bands play.

Rabbl–a concert crowdsourcing platform–looks to solve all these problems.

CEO and cofounder Wade Lagrone put it this way: “We are taking a marketplace that works on handshakes and back room deals and making it transparent and efficient.”

Here’s how it works:

A band sets up a “rabbl” asking fans if they should play a certain town during a certain week at a certain ticket price. Fans vote YES with their credit card, to be charged only if the show gets booked. If the rabbl reaches its goal, bands look around for a venue, using the already-sold tickets as proof that they will draw a crowd. After the show happens, the band gets the ticket money from the rabbl.

As Lagrone explained, it helps touring artists and fans, but it also takes a lot of risk for the venues out of the process. These venues need to book shows, but whether or not the band will sell tickets can be pure guesswork.

Angel Capital Expo

Along with the consumer-facing portion, the platform signs up partner venues. These venues publish their guidelines for getting booked. For example, they can say an artist needs to sell 30 tickets through Rabbl at $8 a ticket. When a musician reaches that goal, they know they’ll be booked. Clear standards make a true marketplace, replacing the unclear booking process of yesteryear.

On-demand entertainment is the norm in our culture. Books, movies, TV shows–all of these we consume pretty much on our own terms now. Live shows are a holdout, and Rabbl is looking to change that.

Lagrone and cofounder Erik Needham are presenting at the Angel Capital Expo next Thursday. Check out Rabbl online and see if you can get your favorite band to come to your town.

BarTrendr Shows Off The Vibe Before You Get There

Let’s say you’re out one night, and you’re looking for the next good place to go. You could go to any number of bars, but at most of them, the atmosphere can be hit or miss. How do you decide where to go next?

Now, you can open up the Bartrendr app and look over the shoulder of people at the various bars in town. Bartrendr users will check in to a bar and tag a particular vibe to give an idea of the atmosphere that night. Is it loud and fun or more laid back and mellow? Through the Bartrendr app, you can know before you go.

Cofounder Devon Bergman described it almost like a chat room for each bar. A friend across the country can even pop into the app and ask what you’re drinking and how the night’s going. A stranger across the room notices you’re drinking the same thing, and there’s suddenly common ground.

Personally, what I love about Bartrendr is that it’s not just the next fun consumer app. To put it in Bergman’s words, “We’re not just young techies building a cool consumer product.”

Don’t get me wrong. Bartrendr IS a fun consumer app, and I definitely wanted to know when it’ll be available on Android. But, baked into the consumer side is a business model that offers a lot of benefit to everyone involved.

Alcoholic beverage companies spend more money marketing than any other industry in the world. Also, bars are the most checked-into (is that a word?!) places on Foursquare and Facebook. So, it makes a lot of sense to combine those two things and give beer, wine, and liquor companies access to the mood and vibe of any given bar at any given time.

Bergman assured me we’re not talking about obnoxious banner ads. Let’s say you’re meeting friends for drinks and you start with a martini. You mean to stop there, but soon more friends arrive and you order a second. As the night goes on, it’s probably wise to switch to something else.

At this point, a beer company can pop into the app with a fun quiz or trivia fact. Ideally, it’s unobtrusive, a fun addition to the night. But, it will also suggest the perfect beer to switch to, now that the time has come.

Bartrendr has a great team working on it, too. Bergman and his cofounder Francois Modarresse both worked at Dolby before leaving for their startup, and they’ve recruited a former design director from Facebook and a CTO whose previous accomplishments include building several major cloud-based music services.

Bartrendr soft launched in San Francisco over the summer and saw quick adoption rates. They’ve signed on some huge names in the beverage industry and are bringing more in.

Bartrendr is presenting at this year’s Angel Capital Expo. They will use those funds to finish building out their Android app and a few other engineering tasks.

They’re already adding zip codes, so check them out online or in the App Store.

Fetchnotes Makes Note-taking Social

With 3 kids, a husband, and a website to run, it’s safe to say my thoughts are pretty scattered. In any moment I could be thinking about a book to read to my kids, the startup I can’t wait to write about, or what’s for dinner. And, just as quickly as I think about those things, I forget them. Pen and paper are my normal note-taking tools, but after awhile it becomes hard to locate the notes I need to remember.

I am Fetchnotes’ perfect user.

We’ve talked about Fetchnotes before. The note-taking app uses hashtags to allow you to build a system that works for you, instead of forcing you into a one-size-fits-all program. (Here’s looking at you, Evernote.) The whole interface is really simple and clean. In my case, I can open the app and hashtag #kidsbook, #startup, and #dinner in 3 different notes and go on about my day.

Since their launch last year, Fetchnotes has attracted 80,000 users who have used the app to keep over 1 million notes. As the product grew, the team realized that people needed a system that was both productive and social. Sometimes, you just need to share a note with someone.

So, Fetchnotes set to work on a product update that will do just that. Launching today, the new update (iOS only at this time) will allow users to @-tag someone in order to

send them a note. The person you need to communicate with not a Fetchnotes user? No problem! The new update also incorporates your address book, so a non-user will get a text with the note’s details.

“I can literally add something to my husband Chuck’s to do list, by mentioning his name in a note and adding #todo,” board member Lucy McQuilken said in the press release.

The new update is a big step for the note-taking app. They are reaching to become more than just a productivity app. Fetchnotes wants to become your default note-taking and social app.

“Fetchnotes always starts with keeping track of what you need to do and what you want to remember,” CEO Alex Schiff said. “But this release finally bridges the gap to the people those things actually involve. Who you recommend music to, who you share shopping lists with, who you delegate tasks to, and so on.”

The update is iOS only today, but the team plans to roll out web and Android versions soon.

Check out the Fetchnotes website for more information.

Set Me Up Proves That Dating Apps Are Still A Thing

I know what you’re thinking. “Another dating startup? Why?!”

The guys at Set Me Up already know how you feel. Cofounder Abhishek Jain told me there are already 1300-1500 dating apps or websites out there. You can find dating apps that help you hook up, arrange a marriage, or even meet people who love horses as much as you do. So, why do we need another one?

“We’re different!” Abhishek told me. Of course.

But, as I learned more about Set Me Up, I have to admit I was pretty intrigued. Jain and his cofounder Jay Wadhwani see a fundamental flaw in online dating as it currently is. Most sites look to match complete strangers around common interests, regions, or demographics. That method completely ignores the traditional way of meeting someone–through friends and family.

“Online dating today stands sharply in contrast to the fundamental values people believe in as they’re building relationships. People don’t fall in love with online dating profiles or ‘resumes,’ Jain told me. “What’s important is the experiences you share with your partner. Our goal is to kickstart those experiences in the most basic way possible–an introduction through a friend.”

How does it work?

As a user of Set Me Up, you can click on a friend’s Facebook profile and search through their connections. If someone catches your eye, one click will send a message to your friend asking to be introduced.

Besides utilizing social media to make connections, Set Me Up is proud of their privacy screens. Even though the app uses Facebook, the company promises to never post on your wall or otherwise use your profile to market the company. They are also committed to never sharing who is on the app. Despite the ubiquity of dating apps, there can often be a stigma around them, and Set Me Up wants to make the process as seamless as possible.

I wondered if the app was more of a hookup app a la Tinder or if marriage was the ultimate goal of most users.

“In the middle,” Jain said. It’s mostly a dating app, which in theory falls somewhere between hooking up and getting hitched.

So, how’s Set Me Up doing in a world full of dating apps? The company launched out of private beta on November 1 and claim to already have 3 million profiles signed up. Jain credits their integration with Facebook for the fast ramp up. The connection to social media speeds up the process of signing up, which makes it easier for people to try out.

Angel Capital Expo

The company also plans to launch a mobile app in January, and with more people using mobile for more things, they expect to see Set Me Up grow even more.

Set Me Up will be a presenting startup at this year’s Angel Capital Expo, put on by the Keiretsu Forum.

You can connect with the Set Me Up app over at their website and watch for a mobile app in 2014.

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.