Miguel Ramirez is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded mediotiempo.com, the largest sports site in Mexico and one of the most relevant Internet success stories in Latin America. The company was acquired in 2010 by Time Warner. Today, Miguel is co-founder and CEO of soccerly.com, which was launched in January 2013 with the ambitious plan of becoming “the online destination for soccer fans in the U.S.” Miguel is also a partner at kiwilimon.com, a leading food/community site. Follow him @mrlombana.
Who is your hero?
My grandpa.
What’s the single best piece of business advice that helped shape who you are as an entrepreneur today, and why?
It is important to be humble. Always remember the day you started and where you come from; no matter how successful you become, it is important to have both feet on the ground and keep on working hard at all times. Successes and failures are just life episodes and should not change the way you act.
Also, being a good listener is a must — be close to your team and think of them as family, not employees.
What’s the biggest mistake you ever made in your business, and what did you learn from it that others can learn from too?
One of the biggest mistakes I remember making is when my partners and I decided to sell our stake in a company because at that point, we did not have the necessary time to devote to it; even though we did consider several options, I guess we were not wise enough to make the best decision. At the end, it not only cost us money but also a good opportunity for the future that we regret today.
We should have asked for advice from other people (mentors, family, etc.) — that might have had helped us to act in a different way, but unfortunately we didn’t. But every learning experience is valuable, and without mistakes there are no successes.
What do you do during the first hour of your business day and why?
I check my agenda and my “to dos” to set the best road map for the day. I like to be well-organized and do as many things as possible every day, as the following day is always loaded with new stuff and more unexpected things. It is essential to have an organized way to work in order to achieve tasks and objectives.
Define your priorities and never leave for tomorrow what you could do today.
What’s your best financial or cash-flow related tip for entrepreneurs just getting started?
Resources are always scarce, and it is always easier spending than saving. Focus only on those things that will bring you to the next level and cut unnecessary expenditures — even if they’re minimal, they could hurt you in the long run. The best of you is always there, within you, so use your brain first and then your wallet.
Quick: What’s ONE thing you recommend ALL aspiring or current entrepreneurs do right now to take their biz to the next level?
Work only with the right partners. Take whatever time you need to be 100 percent convinced of the partners you are bringing to a venture; work only with people that add value, balance and commitment.
What’s your definition of success? How will you know when you’ve finally “succeeded” in your business?
Success is not only about money. It’s about achieving personal goals, fulfilling society’s needs, generating employment for lots of people, making users happy and seeing others using your product; when most of these “achievements” are done, you will be happy and can toast your success.
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.
A wife and husband founded startup in Seattle Washington is quickly becoming the goto place for everything, and anything having to do with your neighborhood. It’s a social networking platform that connects neighbors through anything and everything that relates to them.
LocalBlox already has over 77,000 neighborhoods listed in their platform which covers everything from getting to know your neighbors, to neighborhood events and even lost pets.
The company was founded by Sabia Arefin, a Duke MBA with a rich background in technology management and business analysis for Fortune 500 companies. Her cofounder is her husband, Ashfaq Arefin, a Microsoft Engineer who’s been the lead technologist for several companies ranging from startups to large corporations.
LocalBlox is a one stop shop for information about any given neighborhood. It’s like a mashup of Block Avenue, Patch, the Yellow Pages and the local community bulletin board. The feature rich platform has several uses including:
Discover your neighbors, Learn about a neighborhood, its residents and social vitality. Invite friends to the neighborhood. Know your neighbors from their social media profiles.
Explore what the neighbors say and like about the neighborhood. Connect & share with your neighbors (Neighborhood Wall, Neighborhood Ambassador).
Find out what’s going on around your neighborhood (events & announcements, news feed, neighborhood watch).
Neighborhood News Feed based on Resident activities, Neighborhood watch & alert.
Pet Alert : Is your Cat missing? Ask your Neighbors! Find out the neighbors and their children that your kid is playing with
Nearby amenities and services: Find out your neighbors’ recommendation. Rate goods and services around the hood.
Engage in social vitality around your neighborhood
Find a job close to home: babysitter, dog-walker, stylist, landscaper
Check nearby public transit stops
We got a chance to interview Sabira, check out the full interview below.
What is your startup, what does it do?
LocalBlox is a highly-scaled hyperlocal neighborhood platform that combines high-volume, high-value content aggregation, curation, real-time augmentation and updates, along with syndication, mapping and crowdsourcing with business and personal profile claiming services. To create a vibrant, interconnected social, local, mobile marketplace of content and tool sets, profile claiming, automatic mobile and web campaign content creation tools help local businesses and neighbors connect more efficiently. Proprietary scoring allows automatic Web and mobile campaign creation for local business owners and event organizers. We aspire to be “the Kayak” for neighborhoods & neighborhood businesses & more!
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
The company was founded by me and my husband, Ashfaq Rahman.
I did my MBA from Duke University and I have years of experience in technology management and business analysis in Fortune 500 companies
Ashfaq is a serial entrepreneur technologist. He founded revolutionary technology platforms for companies ranging from startups to multi-billion dollar companies. An engineer from Microsoft in Redmond, he held the founding and key technologist roles in a number of successful companies, masterminding key inventions. He attended graduate school in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Where are you based?
LocalBlox is based in Bellevue, WA.
What is the startup culture like where you are based?
The startup culture here is a strong and easily accessible, with regular events and meet-ups. There are a lot of really smart, educated and successful people here who help support startups and encourage entrepreneurs.
What problem does your startup solve?
We bring a diverse array of information, resources, tool & technology together in one place, and make it meaningful and locally relevant. People don’t have to go to 10 different sites when it comes to finding information about their neighborhood. It’s all in one place and validated for higher relevancy and accuracy. We place information into a neighborhood context. The LocalBlox infrastructure consists of data acquisition, parsing and extraction engines aggregating content to 112,000 neighborhoods in the U.S.
We have a large aggregation of local businesses and local events with extremely rich data-points, generating boundaries of the top neighborhoods in the U.S., with unique features like hyperlocal news and neighborhood crime watch built on top of our aggregation engine. We created some disruptive self-serve offerings for local businesses to gain a targeted reach and build their profiles in a more efficient way. We’re leveraging these assets to build a sustainable business model.
We have the scale and use big data and technology strategically, leveraging them to build partnerships focusing on our key strengths. We are not just a social network or another local site. There is unique depth in each of the modules offered at LocalBlox, which makes it possible for us to build a lot of interesting business models revolving around interesting technologies, algorithms and big data.
What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in the startup process?
We realized that staying focused was critical and not to get distracted or diverted into multiple directions by different opportunities, as it would be deadly for our little startup. After the failure of sites such as Judy’s Book and EveryBlock, it was difficult to overcome the idea that another local neighborhood site was “absurd and not fundable.”
What are some of the milestones your startup has achieved?
LocalBlox is live in 112,000 neighborhoods with 23 million comprehensive business profiles, millions of aggregated local content, news and events, crime mapped into neighborhoods, with social integration and a Mobile SDK. We have over 200,000 claimed business profiles, over 200,000 Twitter followers and more than 60,000 Facebook fans. We have trademarks and patents for some of our core proprietary discovery, validation and mapping engines.
What are your next milestones?
We are redesigning our site for a better user experience and focusing on a couple of key strategic partnerships for revenue monetization.
Who are your mentors and role models?
Our advisors Merrill Brown, founding team member of MSNBC, and Dane Madsen, founder of Yellowpages.com, are very inspiring. They’ve been very kind and contributed much to our company. They serve on our advisory board and we’re very fortunate to learn from them. I am personally thankful to Dane Madsen and Rick Blair[SR1] for their constant encouragement.
What are some of the advantages/disadvantages growing your startup outside of Silicon Valley?
I really didn’t feel any advantage or disadvantage of being outside Silicon Valley, though I imagine it would be much harder for anyone in the Valley, where every other person has a startup. We have funded the startup ourselves, bootstrapped all the way and have a solid, viable revenue model. I feel we are very fortunate to be in Seattle. People here understand and appreciate the hard work and technical merit that goes behind a solid scalable product and value team & technology.
What’s next for your startup?
We are focusing our efforts in a few key areas, redesigning our site for a better and more user friendly experience, and exploring opportunities with a couple of key strategic partners to take our company to the next level.
Where can people find out more, and what is your Twitter username?
We’ve all been there, either a party where the keg is tapped dry way before it’s time, or trapsing through the bar district to find that bars are out of your favorite brew on tap. That’s how the story of SteadyServ actually started.
SteadyServ is an Indianapolis based startup founded by Steve Hershberger after a buddy came into town to visit him, only to find out their favorite kegs at their favorite spots were tapped dry. That got Hershberger’s entrepreneurial wheels turning. What he found out from bar owners and bartenders was that it’s very hard to monitor how much is left in a keg.
“He flies into town, and we go to Mass Ave,” Hershberger told the Indianapolis Business Journal. “We went to four bars, and they were all out. So we finally went back to the hotel and ordered one of the beers the bar had. It was just a beer he wasn’t really looking forward to having. His parting shot was, ‘Gee, Steve, you really let me down on this.’”
Sure if you’ve got one guy sitting by your keg all night and keeping track of the filled Red Solo Cups you may get a rough estimate but other than that it’s a shot in the dark. So what’s an entrepreneur to do? Put sensors and an app in the keg of course.
The heart of SteadyServ is a sensor laden device that monitors how much is left of the keg. When the keg is getting low it can alert customers, bartenders and bar management that the keg is running low. Sure we can all tell when last call is upon us, but imagine hanging out with buddies, drinking your favorite brew on tap and then getting a notification that the well is drying up. This will insure that you can get that one last glass before you have to switch brews.
So is this for real? Absolutely. Not only that but Hershberger reports that he’s already secured $1.5 million from investors to develop what’s being called the iKeg prototype.
In addition to the convenience the iKeg will provide to bars and their patrons, Hershberger has developed a data protocol within the iKeg that will provide valuable information on real time beer inventory control for bar owners on how customers are consuming beer. With the current keg inventory process so flawed, bar owners will quickly learn how fast their kegs are running out and they’ll be able to stop selling the beer that doesn’t sell and order more of the beer that does.
The data will also be valuable to distributors that SteadyServ will sell it too. As new bars and restaurants open up they ask the distributors what’s hot and what’s not. Now rather than base this information on what bars are really ordering they can base it on what customers are really drinking.
Hershberger already has some heavy hitters on his board of advisers including David Coors of Coors Brewing Company, the namesake family. Jeff Ready; CEO of Indianapolis-based Scale Computing Inc.; and Pat Canavan, former senior vice president of global governance for Motorola are also board members.
Most of their $1.5 million dollars came from angel investors however Indiana’s Elevate Ventures has committed $125, 000 to SteadyServ.
“The iKeg solution is breaking into a $21 billion draft beer industry where there’s incredible potential,” Elevate CEO Steve Hourigan said in a prepared statement. “It’s exciting and gratifying to see a company like SteadyServ make its home in Indiana, and we’re proud to say that we support their team and the business they’re building.”
Customer relationship management, or CRM has been big business since the late 1980’s. Sure these days everyone is very aware of Salesforce the cloud based CRM solution, but before there were clouds, the internet, mobile devices and salesforce there was ACT. ACT was the standard in CRM solutions starting in 1987. There are thousands of companies that still use ACT today.
While the backbone of any CRM software is a robust database, by name and by virtue CRM software is designed to help manage relationships. How do you know somebody, what do you know about somebody, how is one person related to another. These are all things that effective sales people, marketers, managers, and entrepreneurs count on to help reach the bottom line.
Mike Muhney is one of the cofounders of the original ACT software and over the past year he’s been taking over 25 years of experience in customer relationship management and pouring it into VIPOrbit, barnone the best mobile CRM solution out there.
We first met Muhney last year at Chicago TechWeek where he was introducing the world to VIP Orbit. We spent a lot of time with him during techweek and learned so much about not just VIP Orbit but about effectively managing relationships. Stuff that hundreds of books have been written on since the introduction of ACT.
I remember in earlier parts of my worklife reading about CRM and using ACT. ACT and by proxy now, VIPOrbit, allow you to manage the littlest details that can result in so much more when applying that information down the road.
For instance back in the 90’s during my radio career as a Music Director and Program Director I had the chance to use ACT at various stations. I would keep my ACT up to date with little information about record reps that would call on me, what we could get from them, who they could help us out with and even kids names and birthdays. They would keep a lot of the same information on the radio people they called on. It would insure great birthday cards but in one instance I vaguely remember one rep that was courting me on a record who knew I loved Jerry’s Subs and Pizza from Washington DC. I had moved on to a station in North Carolina but that rep brought me down a steak and cheese on a visit. I asked him how he remembered and he said he put it in his ACT.
The same holds true today for me and my VIPOrbit database. It’s easy for me to keep track of who knows who in the startup world and where I met them. I even have notes about various gate keepers. You can charm your way past a gate keeper if you know the right information.
While the application is phenomenal, what Muhney can teach people about relationships and how to apply it them in the entrepreneurial world will really help in the long run. The amount of data you can find on the internet and then apply to your CRM solution can give anyone the cutting edge.
VIPOrbit will be set up in booth 8-9121 near the Bar TechWeek area during the conference. There you’ll be able to find out all about VIPOrtbit and how it can really help you manage your relationships. You can test drive the iPad and iPhone apps. You can also pick up a copy of Muhney’s book, “Who’s In Your Orbit, Beyond Facebook, Creating Relationships That Matter”.
More importantly Muhney is one of 23 top shelf speakers who will be speaking during TechWeek. His talk “The Business of Meaningful Relationships: Perils & Opportunities” will be presented at 10:30 am on Saturday June 29th. I highly suggest if you’re attending TechWeek you don’t miss it.
Some of the other great speakers include: Matthew Bellows ,founder & CEO of Yesware; Robin Chase, founder and CEO of Zipcar and now Buzzcar; Tony Conrad, founder of About.me; serial entrepreneur Adam Goldenberg; PJ Hyett founder of Github; Matt Jacobson VP at Battery Ventures, and many more.
Question and answer platforms aren’t new by any stretch. One of the most popular Q&A startups, Formspring, is on it’s last leg. A former Cha-Cha employee has told us that their platform, while at one time a huge hit, may have missed the boat on mobile. Quora is still popular, but mostly among the tech enthusiast set.
We recently interviewed Washington DC startup YoPine which is a great way for closed network polling. With them being situated in Washington DC it’s tough not to think they are destined to focus more on politics at some point.
Now, the general “ask everyone” question and answer format has a new platform in Panamanian startup Deciderr. With Deciderr users can ask anything their heart desires from “what color goes with mauve” to “are the Heat going to the NBA finals” and everything in between.
Since their iTunes debut in April the startup has amassed thousands of downloads and say their easy platform is taking off.
It seems that their strategy is do basic features well and people will flock to it since it’s so easy, and fun.
• Share your questions and follow the questions of your friends, family, and following;
• You can easily share your questions instantly on Facebook and Twitter;
• Make your questions better with uploaded pictures;
• Yes/No counters make tracking your question easy;
• You can comment on any question from anywhere in the world.
• You’ll receive instant notification when your question’s been answered.
“Just post the question and sit back; the answers you’re looking for will start rolling in just minutes after you’ve asked it.
Deciderr also creates a community that will help you make the right decision on the questions that matter to you, and you’ll receive the right answers.” co-founder Geoffrey Osorio told us in an interview.
Check out the rest of the interview with Osorio below:
What is Deciderr?
It’s a quick, easy, and fun way to ask your friends, family, and anyone else around the world important questions that can be answered with a simple YES or NO.
Want someone’s feedback to your question or decision?
Just post the question and sit back; the answers you’re looking for will start rolling in just minutes after you’ve asked it.
Deciderr also creates a community that will help you make the right decision on the questions that matter to you, and you’ll receive the right answers.
Imagine the world deciding for you. Imagine the world giving you the right answer…
In layman’s terms, how does it work? (In other words how would you explain it to your grandmother)
Deciderr its an app that lets you answer short questions with a simple YES or NO from people all around the world.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
Geoffrey Osorio
22 years old
Currently studying Dentistry, Entrepreneur.
Manuel Cabarcos
23 years old
Architect, Entrepreneur.
Juan Carlos Noriega
27 years old
Lawyer, Event Producer, and Entrepreneur.
Raul Noriega
30 years old
Lawyer, Journalist and Entrepreneur.
Johan Guerra
27 years old
Electrical Engineer, Entrepreneur.
Carlos Andres Davila
28 years old
Logistics, Construction and Risk Management.
Where are you based?
We are based in Panama City, Panama.
What’s the startup scene/culture like where you’re based?
Panama City, Panama is one of the hottest (real state investments) and cosmopolitan (tourism) cities in the word, but the technological startup scene is non existant, so we are looking to become pioneers and explote the scene.
How did you come up with the idea for Deciderr?
Each day we ask ourselves hundreds of questions about everything. We thought that it would be really interesting if you could get plenty of opinions about these daily questions, and at the same time, get some help and advice on making decisions. It’s a whole new branch in social networking, its a decision network.
Why now?
It’s evident that Social Networks are taking control of people thoughts, ideas and decisions, so if we want to impact the future generations, this is where we should start.
What problem does Deciderr solve?
We figured that life revolves about decisions, no matter how old you are or where you come from. Thus, the fact that this tool could help millions of people and companies around the world, get a better understanding of what they really wants, made us pursue this quest.
What’s your secret sauce?
In the era of misinformation, our secret sauce or competitive advantage relies on simplicity (YES/NO) and two important things. 1. You have to vote to see the results or trends without being bias, and 2. You can see who voted YES or N0
Are you bootstrapped or funded?
We are currently bootstrapped and looking for funding.
What are some milestones you’ve achieved?
The first milestone we achieved was on April 1st, 2013 when we launched on the App Store, two weeks later we reached our first goal that was set on 1,000 downloads.
What’s your next milestone?
Our next milestone is to reach 100,000 downloads, by then we will launch our Android platform.
Where can people find out more?
You can find us at our webpage www.deciderr.com, Follow us in our twitter @DECIDERR and like us in our Facebook page www.facebook.com/trydeciderr.
One of the more interesting (but less sexy) startups that we saw in New York at TechCrunch Disrupt last month was Docurated. This New York company has launched a new platform that puts all of your content and all of your files at your fingertips with the easiest form of search possible.
Just about everyone in every profession is creating some kind of content all of the time. Chances are that you’re going to write one proposal or do one pitch deck some day that you need information from a previous pitch deck or other file. Cataloging all of your files, both locally and in the cloud, lets the Docurated system get to work.
Once all of your files are cataloged, and as you create new ones, updated automatically, they are now available whenever you need them.
What happens next just adds to the experience. When you call up a search of your files Docurated serves up the files and the specific piece of content, putting it next to all the other pieces of content that match the same criteria.
Now all of your documents are useable materials for anything from content dashboards to presentations, fliers, meetings, reports and more.
Docurated was created out of a real world need from a Fortune 100 company. Alex Grobansky along with cofounder Irene Tserkovny created Docurated after Tserkovny found herself and her colleagues at American Express’ “disruptive innovation” team were constantly searching for content they had previously created to add to new presentations rather than working on the next disruption.
There are several search options available but Docurated seems to address the needs of people working on real projects, and presentations who don’t have time to fumble with broken search tactics.
Watch the video interview below and for more information visit docurated.com
We’re not about to tell you the story of the latest spin on the All American Cookie Company, the Great Cookie or even Mrs. Fields. PresenceOrb is a startup based in London and they’ve developed a “virtual cookie” for the real world.
I’m hoping that it’s not too far reaching to expect readers of nibletz.com, the voice of startups everywhere else, to know what cookies are, at least in the internet sense of the word. Taking it back to internet 101 for those of you not in the know, cookies are the little tidbits of information transmitted from you, across the internet to other websites that help determine what you need to know.
It’s how the adservers on nibletz.com know to offer you an ad for kayak.com when the last website you visited was US Airways, that kind of thing.
Unarguably, having some kind of offline version of this very important tool would be amazing. Imagine if everyone that shopped at Old Navy went through some magic door that left some kind of radioactive film on you so that when you went to Abercrombie & Fitch, you could get some kind of message that says, “Come Back To Old Navy we’ll give you a discount right now”.
OK so it’s not that freaky, nor futuristic. However, PresenceOrb is that useful. The only thing you need to bring in the store with you to make this magic work is your smartphone.
Using the PresenceOrb app and your smartphone, if you walk into a business in the program your phone is “marked” or “noted” now that business can market to you in the best way possible. Using a profile you’ve completed and information locally at said business establishment, you’ll get relative, passive advertisements that may seem a little cray cray but actually it’s kind of fascinating.
For the sake of understanding, on the company’s video they show a customer with PresenceOrb activated on their phone. The customer walks into two different car dealerships, a Volkswagen dealer not using PresenceOrb and a Porsche dealer that is.
After taking a test drive at both dealerships the user ends up taking some time to think about it. Low and behold, he drives past a digital billboard also equipped with PresenceOrb and the billboard offers him a special price on that particular Porsche. Voila, it’s an offer the user can’t refuse and bam he’s driving a brand new Porsche.
When you dissect this form of targeted advertising it’s actually pretty amazing. The potential for real world advertising to be affected this way could lead to billions of dollars in sales.
We got a chance to talk with Thomas Sheppard the brilliant man behind this startup, check out the interview below.
What is Presenceorb?
PresenceOrb is the cookie for the real world. POB allows retailers to cookie consumers as they visit brick and mortar stores. Retails gain analytics previously only seen in the online realm, Footfall, Bounce rate, return customers, new customers, linger time …. the list goes on. With this information and via our expanding advertising partner network retailers can then action these analytics by targeting consumers on the street through such outlets as digital out of home billboards.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
Thomas is the founder of Presence aware tech. He has worked as an engineer in banking producing financial markets software as well as for a number of technology companies producing consumer software for desktop and mobile for the past 11 years. Presence aware tech additionally has a North American partner company who provide development resource and are additionally POB’s largest customer.
Where are you based?
Presence aware tech is based within the Cisco office in North Greenwich, London. Having recently been awarded the Raptor SME grant for which Cisco is a key backer.
What’s the startup scene/culture like where you’re based?
The culture is fantastic. We are surrounded by like minded companies (Oprillo, AMBX, Lamppost, Prod designs, Crowd Vision) the majority of whom are also current or previous Raptor grant winners. We collaborate, disagree, challenge and encourage one another.It’s the sort of environment where you can lift your head and hear conversations covering twenty different industries.
How did you come up with the idea for Presenceorb?
Presence Orb was originally intended as a security device. After a startled wake-up at two am one night our founder thought someone was in his home. Thankfully it was just a bad dream which had forced him awake however it got him thinking. How could a home owner detect if someone was in the home, not just movement but be able to “cookie” someone and see if they where supposed to be present or not. From there he began to research how that could be done and then things got interesting. Thomas then went on to form Presence aware tech, we produced a prototype and pivoted our focus from security to analytics. We are now 8 months further on and the path from then to now has been astounding.
Why now?
The market is ready, hardware is now cheaper to make. People are familiar with the concept of cookies and the adjoining technology is available. In short the market has come to meet our vision.
What problem does Presenceorb solve?
Presence Orb levels the playing field between physical and online retailers. For years online retailers have had analytics software and marketing which has allowed them to analyse consumer wants, needs and actions. Online retailers can then adjust to these findings very quickly. Physical retailers have been hampered by an inability to gain such rapid feedback. Typical collection methods such as surveys, in store spotters and analysis took months if not more to conduct and collate. With Presence Orb retailers can gain these analytics instantly similar to Google analytics but for the brick and mortar stores.
Who are your competition?
There are others in this space doing similar things and we are aware of them however we don’t overly concern ourselves with competition. We have a vision and direction as to how we believe our product should function what features it should include and how we are going to do that. We can only concentrate on our own game, we leave everyone else to concentrate on there’s and the results will come out in the end.
And what’s your secret sauce?
It’s no secret that good people make great products. We make sure that our people have the drive to produce something truly amazing. It’s no secret it’s just what makes us produce a quality product is a desire to do exactly that.
Are you bootstrapped or funded?
Bootstrapped and proud. We would take funding when it’s needed but at the moment we can survive on our own resources and steam. We don’t charge for the hardware which can meet initial ourlay is high but our SAAS business model then takes over and will allow us to grow as we bring on more customers.
What are some milestones you’ve achieved?
We’ve recently been announced as Digital innovation finalists in the advertising space at Digital shoreditch London. We are one of 21 companies presenting in the final for 7 awards. This was a hugely proud moment for us.
To be accepted onto the Raptor SME program run in part by Cisco was another huge milestone for us. This fueled a number of conversations that without which we might never have begun or had the good fortune to be part of.
Our first enterprise level trial was another amazing milestone. We have deployed within a household recognizable location and it blows our mind every time we walk into the location to think …. we’re deployed here.
Our second enterprise level trial with a global chain…. i’ll say no more.
Honestly there are loads of milestones that as a team we are exceptionally proud of but our main focus is our product and perhaps the biggest milestone was our first customer feedback from a small Cafe in North Yorkshire telling us there takings are heading north in no small part because of Presence Orb they knew where to focus there marketing spend. That’s when we knew our product was making a difference.
What’s your next milestone?
Taking on the Digital Innovations final on May 20th. We want to wow the crowd with whats possible. And we will.
Who are some of your mentors and business role models?
We are in an incredibly privileged position to have not only people as mentors but also companies. Cisco provide us with one to one mentors and also business units will email from time to time giving advice. We are really thankful for that. We have advisers in the advertising space and even companies who have installed our product who we view as mentors. They provide feedback on what they like and don’t like so much about POB and ultimately that’s the best feedback and direction we can ask for.
Where can people find out more and what is your Twitter username?
It seems that more and more things we did as younger students are making their way to online platforms. Memphis startup Boosterville is disrupting the school fundraiser and bringing it online and to the mobile phone. Gradfly is helping students manage their online portfolio. Boston startup Abroad101 is the trip advisor for students studying abroad, and that’s just a few.
Now, a Chicago startup called ProjectTravel has launched their crowdfunding platform to the public.
ProjectTravel allows students that are going on educational trips to crowdfund that trip well beyond their tiny network of local family members who have been left holding the boot.
“We help students take an active role in affording their program when financial aid and scholarships aren’t enough,” said Jennifer Thomas, Project Travel Founder & CEO. “Financial barriers should not block a motivated person from having an educational travel experience.”
Project Travel partners with academic institutions, non-profit and third-party program providers to help more students and program participants go abroad, while directly advising them on how to successfully peer-fund and offering online international education resources. The fundraising platform launched its private beta in January 2013 and has been honing the online experience for travelers in preparation for its public launch. Taking advantage of current web design trends and online crowd-funding best practices, the platform offers a user-friendly way for Project Starters to connect with potential donors and supporters.
Thomas has just completed an extensive beta test of the platform and sure enough there is wide interest. Now the “peer funding” site is launched and anyone who is raising money and support for educational travel experience through a school or organization can use the platform. To Project Travel, educational travel includes: studying abroad, volunteering, interning, teaching, service language, language and cultural exchanges and much more.
Project Travel vets all of the applicants before their projects show up on the site but they’ve left the criteria incredibly open ended so almost anyone can take advantage of it that has a legitimate educational travel mission planned.
“The classic VC role is that of an interrogator, trying to break you for a key secret. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Folks who watch the TV show “Shark Tank” know this feeling. Time after time, a well-rehearsed entrepreneur goes through his pitch, and everyone loves it. But the Sharks (VCs) keep poking at the startup until they finally find a hole. Maybe the company has zero revenue, a poor growth strategy or a weak CEO. Know your weaknesses better than your strengths. Before our first VC meetings, my team sat down and asked each other “gotcha” questions until we were all experts.”
“With proper due diligence and competitive analysis, you should be able to make a case for how you differ from other folks in the marketplace. How can you prove that you have a truly unique value proposition? What is it about your offering, your approach, your technology and your team that makes your company able to achieve and execute on this opportunity? ”
“The reason why determining the valuation of your company is so difficult is because there is no right answer. On the one hand, you need to be realistic, but on the other hand, you do not want to undervalue your company, as the VC may think something is wrong. The best way to handle this question, and most others that arise when negotiating with a VC, is to do all you can to have several VCs interested in your company. Like in most negotiations, if you have several interested parties, they may bid against each other, which will allow you to obtain the best terms for you and your company.”
“The best way to tackle this question is to show reasonable estimates for customer acquisition, using well-researched numbers and reasonable conversion rates. If you can’t explain how you are going to acquire customers for less than what you sell them on average, at a fundamental level, you have failed to explain your business.”
“There are many entrepreneurs with amazing ideas. Ideas are a dime a dozen, but execution is everything. Every investor will ask you when and how he will recoup his investment. What experience do you have? What is your track record? Before going into a meeting with a VC, make sure to tell him about your experience, your track record and, most importantly, how you will recoup his money. Lots of people pitch the idea before the finances. Pitch the finances and how the VC will make money; if he asks you a question, then you got him to bite — now it’s all about your elevator pitch. ”
Why Won’t a Huge Corporation Build Something Like This?
“VCs will ask, “Why won’t a huge corporation build something like this and use their existing customer base and capital to capture market share?” The best way to defend against this is to have technology and intellectual capital that the company will want to acquire, rather than destroy. ”
“Zaarly raised $14.1 million in a Series A in fall of 2011. But it was a question earlier that spring from Marc Andreessen in our pitch meeting that gave our founding team the most pause, “Why do you think this hasn’t worked in the past?” We didn’t have a great answer — more of a hunch really that mobile technology didn’t exist to allow distribution of information in real time previously. But the question forced us to examine our predecessors who had tried and failed to learn what landmines to avoid. Our lesson: Know your landscape and learn from prior failures and success. ”
How Do You Define Success for Yourself and Your Company?
“VCs want to invest in founders who are dedicated to “hitting a home run.” If you’re satisfied with building a small company, that’s a big red flag for VCs. As we’ve all heard, a number of founders have said yes to exits their VCs wanted them to say no to. Other founders have taken the middle ground by cashing out some of their shares to secure their personal finances, and then continued to go big. Either way, VCs want to invest in founders who are focused on a disruptive, game-changing product/idea. This is a vital point to keep in mind as you consider whether funding is right for you.”
“Anytime a VC throws out the name of a potential competitor that you don’t know or haven’t looked into, it can throw you off balance for a minute. The fact is, it may be a company that you don’t think is a viable competitor, so you don’t know much about it. The best way to tackle it: Tell them the truth, “We looked at our key competitors and that company did not meet the criteria. But we’ll look into it further after this meeting.” The key is to maintain control of the conversation because it shows you can handle a curveball. ”
“The most difficult thing to explain to an investor is your plan to grow. They want to know how you’ll outdo everything you’ve already done. Prep by picturing your future: What staffing or product creation will help you have the business you want to have?”
“The best way to handle that question is by not approaching VCs until you have achieved traction. Venture capital should be looked at as an accelerator for existing success, not as a runway extender to get it right.”
“Many investors will know going into a deal whether they want preferred stock or a convertible note. Sometimes, however, they will leave it up to the company. Angel investors, in particular are likely to leave it up to the company as the more sophisticated party. For the company, this is an opportunity to maximize the value of the investment, but they must also be wary of getting off on the wrong foot with the investor by being overly aggressive or appearing uninformed. A crash course in VC deals and a good deal lawyer will make sure you maximize the former and mitigate the latter. ”
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.
Alex Schiff is the founder and chief executive officer of Fetchnotes, which makes productivity as simple as a tweet. Prior to Fetchnotes, Alex was the vice president of Benzinga and a student at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Follow him @alexschiff.
Who is your hero?
Aaron Patzer is one of the entrepreneurs I look up to most.
What’s the single best piece of business advice that helped shape who you are as an entrepreneur today, and why?
Optimize for speed, not cost. Your entire organization should be structured around how you can accelerate progress and learning. That $20 a month here or $50 there is NOT going to mean anything in the grand scheme of things, but if it frees up a few hours of your life, then it’s worth it.
What’s the biggest mistake you ever made in your business, and what did you learn from it that others can learn from too?
Not focusing on one thing. At one point, I was working on three startups, working for another, and still in school full-time. They all suffered from my lack of attention. I learned that when you’re a founder you need to be thinking not “What do I need to do today?” but “What can I be doing to advance my business forward?”
The former has a finite amount of work; the latter is limitless.
What do you do during the first hour of your business day and why?
I take care of all the little things. Respond to email, complete quick tasks, etc. I actually purposefully put off anything that will take more than 30 minutes until after lunch because then I know I have the longest period of uninterrupted activity.
What’s your best financial or cash-flow related tip for entrepreneurs just getting started?
You can make money in weird ways. We offered to sing karaoke to any of our users who donated money.
Quick: What’s ONE thing you recommend ALL aspiring or current entrepreneurs do right now to take their biz to the next level?
The best part about being an entrepreneur is that you get to choose who you work with — don’t take that for granted!
What’s your definition of success? How will you know when you’ve finally “succeeded” in your business?
Honestly, I have no idea. There will always be a new mountain to climb.
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.
Michael Goldstein is the founder ofExhilarator, a startup accelerator that helps consumer Internet startups get traction and funding. He is a serial entrepreneur with 15 years of experience focused on e-commerce, online content, and subscription businesses. Michael’s passion is for growing startups, and he has been involved with multiple startup businesses as an advisor and mentor
The old formula for startup success is out. Instead of the traditional plan-pitch-present-sell method, successful startups increasingly use a more straightforward sink-or-swim approach. These entrepreneurs jump in right away with their ideas to test them with customers.
Many entrepreneurs take a more conservative approach to building their startups, believing an extensive business plan increases their chance of success. They develop a business plan and look for financing. Once their plan has been vetted by investors, they put together a team, introduce a product, and only then begin selling their product.
A business plan created without any real data or feedback from customers is ineffective. Moreover, this approach can take months or even years to go from idea to product. Meanwhile, technology races ahead.
The best path a startup can take is creating value for its customers as quickly as possible. Once you’ve developed a minimum viable product, you can use feedback to determine your startup’s business plan. A startup needs powerful internal motivation to get moving before external momentum kicks in.
Building a Lean Approach
Here are a few ways to increase your chance of survival in the startup world:
1. Create value. Prioritize value first, then revenue. Increasing the worth of services or products means creating something your customers need and want. People will appreciate you offering something truly valuable to them — and they’ll invest in it.
2. Get to revenue. Revenue follows value. Building revenue buys you time to come up with a good business model. The success of your startup depends on making money from your idea. Use your startup’s first steps to take your product to your customers.
3. Stay slim. Keep your startup’s business as lean as possible. It’s important to stay focused on a few high-value products, rather than many lower-value ones. We use leanlaunchlab.com, an online canvas with tools and advice for startups.
4. Find expert help. Good mentors significantly reduce the learning curve for startups. Mitigate risk by seeking guidance from more experienced entrepreneurs. Now, more than ever, experienced, successful people are willing to share their knowledge. Seek out a referral from someone you trust or leverage online resources to make connections.
5. Pay attention to details. Taxes, insurance, and compliance issues can quickly sink a business if they’re ignored. Be sure your startup has a business license, pays appropriate taxes, and buys adequate insurance coverage. These seemingly small issues can become costly if left unaddressed.
Breathing Life into a Struggling Startup
If you’ve already taken the business plan approach and are experiencing problems, don’t be discouraged. You’re never too far along to be unable to stop and take stock of your options. A great idea may need to be reworked, tweaked, or improved. If you find yourself in a rut, here are some ideas to get your startup back on track:
Regroup. Plan an offsite meeting with your team. Getting out of the office to focus on the bumps will invigorate your business and get new ideas flowing.
Ask your customers. Your product, delivery, or brand may need a readjustment.Survey target or current buyers to find out what they want and how you can improve. Sites like surveymonkey.com make this task easy and inexpensive.
Seek outside advice. Find an advisor. A more experienced entrepreneur or mentor will seek guidance to get things back on track.
Value, Revenue, Growth
The chances of success for any startup are slim. Research by Harvard Business School academics found recently that 75 percent of all new startups fail.
Those entrepreneurs who take the typical business plan approach may not be ready to jump in all the way. Entrepreneurs who work from a lean startup plan to create momentum have a higher likelihood of survival because their flexibility allows them to meet the ever-changing needs of their customers.
Not everyone is meant to be an entrepreneur. If you find yourself among those brave people who are passionate about an idea and can tolerate the rollercoaster of risk, be sure you’re keeping your priorities in order: value, revenue, and growth.
Michael Goldstein is the founder of Exhilarator, a startup accelerator that helps consumer Internet startups get traction and funding. He is a serial entrepreneur with 15 years of experience focused on e-commerce, online content, and subscription businesses. Michael’s passion is for growing startups, and he has been involved with multiple startup businesses as an advisor and mentor. Connect with Michael onTwitter andGoogle+. Because this article was published, one book will be donated to Reading Is Fundamental.
Owning and operating your own business is exhilarating. It’s a time to work as your own boss and create a successful path for yourself. Yet, starting a business is also quite daunting. While every business owner shouldn’t hold back in terms of goals or strategy, he or she should also take plenty of time to get a deep understanding of what having a business actually means. This includes all of the caveats, legal responsibilities and financial risks that come with it. Before launching your start-up, make these all-important decisions
When you have your own business, it’s tempting to simply write off everything and anything at tax time. Deciding ahead of time what to write off will eliminate any confusion from business owners and employees on what is a practical write-off, and in effect, reduce the chances of getting audited come April 15th.
Travel, cell phone use, home office, rent and business supplies are all popular write-offs, but the important thing is to decide on a policy, and understand the regulations, up front. Preparing your taxes at the end of a new business’s first fiscal year is no joke and making the right preparations months in advance is crucial in helping owners avoid financial issues down the road.
How will you structure your business?
In the beginning stages, a decision about business structure has to be made. Ask yourself these important questions about how you’ll structure your start-up business:
Do you want to have a business partner?
How much liability do you want to have personally versus liability for your business?
Do you want yourself, and any partners, to have a lot of flexibility in the handling of the business?
How many tax liabilities do you want to be responsible for?
Depending on the answers to these questions, you might be looking at forming a Limited Liability Company, a Standard Corporation, a S-Corporation, a Professional Limited Liability Company, or something similar. Each option incurs different taxes and has its own caveats and structures. It is wise to consult professional help to see exactly which structure is right for your business.
Which banking option is for you?
In the time leading up to starting a business, it’s important to create a cushion for yourself. After all, many start-up businesses fail and it’s important to have a back-up plan or exit strategy should your business model go south. Start off by looking into the rates, yields, minimums and other options for different banking accounts. Setting up the right type of banking option can make help to alleviate some of the financial risks that come with launching a new business.
Each bank offers its own set of advantages for business owners. For example, those who choose to do online banking at Discover Bank can opt-in for various rewards and cash bonuses for making businesses expenses. By establishing a financial cushion and working with companies you trust is one of the most sure-fire ways to stay afloat in the awkward launch process.
Who will you employ?
After deciding on the industry of your business and going through the preliminary steps, it’s time to decide who you’ll hire and what those individuals will be doing. It’s a very delicate line when trying to hiring a proper amount of people to complete all tasks.
Hire too little and you risk exposing your team to over-extension leading to faster burnout and lower employee retention. Hire too many and you run the risk of confusion over responsibilities and a bloated payroll you can’t justify. The best course is to find qualified individuals for the job who you know you can trust. A few bad eggs can take down companies with even the most sound business models.
Even though launching a start-up isn’t the easiest of tasks, especially among the new information and rules that need to be learned and understood, decisions made ahead of time will make the process as simple as possible. Tasking yourself with making these important decisions from the beginning will help you draw a navigable path into the future.
About the author
DJ Miller is a graduate student at the University of Tampa. He is an avid gadget geek who spends most his time writing on anything tech related. In his spare time he likes to travel, play soccer, and watch movies. You can follow him on twitter @MillerHeWrote
As entrepreneurs we’ve been hammered over the head with the idea, that ideas are worthless without execution and follow through. But how do we know if our ideas are even good enough to pursue.
If you’ve vetted your idea and you think it may be a great startup idea, but you don’t have a team, one of the best places that you can go to vet the idea and get started is a Startup Weekend event. So how do you get to that point?
Founder Institute Founder and CEO Adeo Ressi has a structured approach to analyzing ideas. He shares it at most of the Founder Institute events across the country. Well now the Founder Institute has made that wisdom available to everyone via this infographic checklist below.
Passion, simplicity, revenue, customer knowledge, market knowledge, market size, secret sauce, vetting and killing and sharing your idea are all part of this important approach. You can dive more into these ideas below.
Cliff McKinney and Brad Montgomery, the Memphis based startup team behind WorkForPie have been working on a new product called Kufikia for the past few months. McKinney explained to nibletz that Kufikia loosely means “to achieve” with that they have come up with a learning platform for advanced software developers.
With a new innovative approach, combining cohort based learning, typically found in an accelerator program, with mentoring, and early stage job placement, they were able to get selected as one of the first 20 startups in the Startup Village at the Southland conference in Nashville Tennessee next month. We revealed the entire list of 20 startups earlier today.
Kufikia participants will get the “3 S’s” out of the program according to McKinney. Those three S’s are; structure (a 9 week long curriculum), study buddies (cohorts of 10 students going through the program together), and support coming from the platforms sponsors. Each cohort will have three company sponsors that will alternate in three week intervals throughout the course of the program.
McKinney and Montgomery plan on starting the first cohort in late June. For the first program they are targeting participants in Silicon Valley, the Pacific Northwest, New York and Nashville. Actually four cohorts will run simultaneously. Although this is an online program they want the students and company resources to be in close proximity to each other.
Kufikia has already attracted some heavyweight sponsors for their platform, which they aren’t identifying just yet.
The sponsors will benefit by working closely with the students in the program and hopefully converting them to new employees. McKinney says that most companies spend upwards of $15,000 providing internships to potential employees that may not work out. By working with the students over the nine week period the company sponsors will develop relationships with them and hopefully hire them on.
The sponsors participating will have jobs to fill, and hopefully with those students. McKinney and Montgomery are making a bold bet on the success of the program. Sponsors are under an agreement to provide mentoring and coaching to the cohort but don’t make a financial commitment to Kufikia until they actually hire someone.
Both Montgomery and McKinney are looking forward to showing off this new product to the attendees at Southland including over 41 venture capital and angel firms that have committed to attend.
Guest
Miguel Ramirez is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded mediotiempo.com, the largest sports site in Mexico and one of the most relevant Internet success stories in Latin America. The company was acquired in 2010 by Time Warner. Today, Miguel is co-founder and CEO of soccerly.com, which was launched in January 2013 with the ambitious plan of becoming “the online destination for soccer fans in the U.S.” Miguel is also a partner at kiwilimon.com, a leading food/community site. Follow him @mrlombana.
Kyle
DJ Miller
