2 Memphis Tech & Startup Ninjas Turn Farmer With BetterFed [SeedHatchery]

The story about how Scott Finney and his scientific outsourcing startup, IncreaseIf, pivoted to become BetterFed is a story that wouldn’t even fit here on the pages of nibletz. It’s actually a classic story of believing in the founder though and that’s what the team that vetted Seed Hatchery startups did. (disclosure I was on that team).

We knew that Scott Finney had a very well versed background in engineering. A graduate of Auburn University, and a regular attendee of the local Startup Meetup, Finney has had a slew of great ideas. IncreaseIf may not have been one of those, but his passion and technical expertise would drive him to his ultimate destiny which is BetterFed.

BetterFed is a startup that bridges farmers and local growers with people too busy to get to the farmers market but still want the freshness, benefits and healthy alternatives that come from real home grown food. To get from IncreaseIf to BetterFed, took a lot of pivoting, until Finney just blew everything up and solicited the help of Seed Hatchery alum Kenn Gibbs. Gibbs had taken his own edutainment startup, Knoco, through last year’s Seed Hatchery program.

At first Gibbs wasn’t sure if he would join Finney on the BetterFed journey. He was already knee deep in mentoring and offering technical advice to the other cohort teams. However without much poking and proding, Gibbs came around and now both young men are so into BetterFed that they created Twitter handles FarmerFinn and FarmerKenn. They’ve also been talking about opening up their own farm and becoming growersthemselves.

We got a chance to talk to Finney just before he went onstage here’s what he said:

What’s your startup, what do you do?

BetterFed connects customers to local food sources. We provide weekly food subscriptions that best fit your families eating habits.

Why did you apply to Seed Hatchery?

I was looking to get my MBA sometime soon. Speaking with some of the alum, I heard the benefits of Seed Hatchery outweighing a classroom experience.

What were you expecting?
I was expecting to be a technical co-founder for a team and ended up being a lone founder for the first month of the cohort.

Did you get what you were expecting?

Yes, I knew I was going to be forced out of my comfort zone, but didn’t know how much until now.

What was your big “A Ha Moment”?

The importance of taking action and realizing you can plan and assume all you want, but you won’t learn anything until you take action.

What are two big things you learned during the Accelerator Process?

Get a product out to your customers as soon as you can, and tell everyone about what you’re working on because you never know who can make an introduction to a valuable relationship.

What’s one thing you learned about yourself during the accelerator process?

The program required me to use skill sets I did not believe I had. In the past I would have let others handle sales and marketing, but I’m completely involved in those avenues.

What are you hoping for after Investor day?

We’re looking to continue our customer discovery to validate all that we’ve learned in the past couple weeks.

Tell us one of your mentors and what you learned from him or her?

Sarah Baker is a PR and communication expert and she’s helped us focus our message to our target audience.

And now check out their pitch video.

Find out more at BetterFed.co

We’ve got more Seed Hatchery startup stories for you here.

The Big Day Is Here For Memphis Startup ScrewPulp

Last week we were pleased to bring you the story of ScrewPulp’s launch. The new self publishing platform is helping authors and publishers with much needed traction and engagement through a different model.

Publishers/authors sign up for ScrewPulp which helps them market their books by giving away the first 25 copies in exchange for a social media mention, review or rating. From there, as books gain popularity they increase in price by $1.00 per level. This format gives authors/publishers, much needed exposure and the benefit of having ratings and reviews built in to their profile.

Publishers hold all the rights to their books. ScrewPulp takes a small percentage and leaves the author/publisher with no less than 75%. They only ask that submitted works stay on the site for 90 days.

Screw Pulp founder Richard Billings launched the startup at 48 Hour Launch in June of last year. From there he went on to take the top prize at Launch Memphis’ Global Entrepreneurship Week event, which included pitching in front of Federal Court Judge, John Fowlkes. The Seed Hatchery accelerator was the next natural step for the team.

We’ve chronicled the life of ScrewPulp from that very first pitch in June, consequently the same 48 Hour Launch event that attracted Nibletz to Memphis, through demo day. Check out more Screwpulp coverage here and watch Billings’ pitch video here:

Check out more of our Seed Hatchery coverage here.

Musistic Debuts At Seed Hatchery Demo Day, Finally A GitHub For Musicians

What do you get when you cross two musicians and two recording studio employees in Memphis one of the earliest cities in the world with a globally musical pulse? Musistic.

The Musistic team is made up of Justin Olita, Vince Rogers, Brian Wentzloff and Rachel Hurley (who joined them after leaving the soundstache team). The four of them together are pioneering a new collaborative music platform that allows musicians to collaborate in a meaningful way, similar to how programmers collaborate on GitHub.

Users can find others to collaborate on a song or album together via the Musistic platform. From there each musician can post their parts and tracks for the others to “pull down” and record on top of. The best part is that the Musistic platform is DAW friendly across many types of popular software.

Gone are the days when musicians need to upload enormous email attachments or figure out which drop box, box.net or other cloud account has enough space for their project.

Using Musistic they can easily find the parts they need, re-record, edit and get them back up for the collaborators to continue working on. This isa welcomed tool in the music community and it’s made from a team that is rich in their musical background.

To date they’ve secured a creative capital investment from Loaded For Bear equal to $100,000 per year for five years. They are also working on strategic partnerships with the Memphis Music Foundation and the Folk Alliance International. It also helps that Hurley, who leads marketing and business development, has deep relationships with hundreds of Memphis musicians.

To get a better idea of what Musistic is and where it’s going, check out the pitch video below.

You can find out more at musistic.com

We’ve got more Seed Hatchery coverage here.

Star & Micey’s Nick Redmond Pitches Soundstache At Seed Hatchery Investor Day

Memphians, and for that matter a lot of folks in Tennessee are familiar with the name Nick Redmond. Nick is the frontman for the very popular indie band, Star & Micey. It was through touring, singing, performing and engaging with fans that Redmond had this great idea for a startup and Soundstache was born.

Through fellow Memphian Rachel Hurley who is knee deep in the Memphis music scene through working with the Poplar Lounge and other Memphis music spots, and through being active in the Memphis startup community, Redmond got the opportunity to apply for Seed Hatchery.

Hurley says that it was actually at famous movie director and local Memphian, Craig Brewer’s birthday party where Redmond pitched the idea for an interactive app that worked both online and off line and connected fans to musicians. Soundstache is a geo-caching app/game that allows fans to search for “staches” that bands put out for them to find. They could be in plain sight or maybe tucked under a tree, in a set of stairs or attached to a sign post.

Bands plant staches for fans to find and the app directs them to it.

Never afraid a challenge, just days into the Seed Hatchery program Redmond decided to try SoundStache out at one of the biggest playgrounds in the music world, SXSW and there it was met a ton of positivity. Fans loved the exclusive nature of the prizes they were winning. Speaking of which, bands can give away whatever they want, a used drum stick, concert tickets, cd’s, demos whatever.

Most people know that indie music fans, real indie music fans not fake ass hipsters, go all in on their favorite bands and support them anyway they can. Soundstache gets them off the couch and out from behind the macbook, onto the street looking for “staches”.

In between his hard touring schedule Redmond just went through the Seed Hatchery accelerator program. Here’s their investor day pitch video.

Here are more SeedHatchery stories at nibletz.com The Voice Of Startups Everywhere Else.

Indiana Couple Pitches Their Startup, Boosterville, At Seed Hatchery Demo Day

Attracting great talent to an accelerator that doesn’t have the name Techstars or YCombinator in it can be a difficult task. Attracting great talent that’s already had success in the startup space can be even more daunting. That’s what happened in the case of Indiana startup Boosterville.

I actually met Pam Cooper the CEO and co-founder of Boosterville, while it was still called Sodbuster, on Brad Feld’s Hacker News alternative site, the startup hub. Pam and I quickly became friends. It was then I learned that she was a little more “seasoned” than other founders, having started a very successful small business in Indiana. Her quick wit and thought provoking questions made it easy to interact with her on an online platform.

Pam decided that despite a failed attempt at Indianapolis startup conference “Powder Keg” her and her co-founder/CTO husband, Tom Cooper, would make the trek to Memphis for everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference. At the same time we were accepting applications for Seed Hatchery and I quickly introduced her to the organizations leader, Eric Mathews, and they got in.

We learned through the vetting process that Tom was actually the founding CTO of question and answer site Cha-Cha. He also has a long resume of engineering work at several successful startups and companies. The Cooper’s have done well. They’ve got kids in college, a rather large home in Indiana, oh and Tom has his own plane as well. So why come all the way to Memphis for an accelerator?Great question, the answer: For the accelerator.

From day one both Pam and Tom dove head first into the curriculum, learning, sharing and development that is offered through the Seed Hatchery program. They took criticism like the best of them, often times from leaders and mentors that didn’t have even a fraction of the startup experience that Tom had. Both Cooper’s have said over and over again how much they’ve learned here in Memphis.

“I really didn’t know what to expect, so we went for it and Seed Hatchery was the best thing we’ve done for our company” Tom told us in an interview.

During the accelerator the coopers went through a name change, a huge pivot and even worked hand in hand with MBA students for discovery, and to help refine their product.

Boosterville combines digital wallet with loyalty and rewards and all for the benefit of schools and non profits. Using Dwolla, another midwest startup, as their mobile wallet conduit, users sign up for a school they want to donate to. From there they can see a list of merchants in their community that use the Boosterville platform. When they make a purchase at one of the establishments in the program, they check out using their phone, the merchant gets paid, the school gets a donation and Boosterville takes a small cut.

“Putting children who are now grown, through school I’ve seen my share of wrapping paper and World’s Finest Chocolate Bars”, Pam loves to tell anyone who will listen. Of course we all agree.

The company is a great mesh of Pam’s community minded nature and business savvy, with Tom’s over three decades of programming experience.

What’s next for Boosterville, well while Tom has an open invitation to return full time to his engineering job in Indiana, they are going to continue to raise money and bring Boosterville to live.

Check out their investor day pitch video below:

Find out more about Boosterville here at boosterville.com

We’ve got more Seed Hatchery coverage here.

Founder Spotlight: Ryan Buckley, Co-Founder & COO At Scripted.com

Ryan Buckley is Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Scripted.com. Ryan holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Still and always a Cal Bear, Ryan graduated from UC Berkeley with degrees in economics and environmental sciences. He likes to dabble in PHP, Python, Ruby, Quickbooks, and whatever else needs to be done at Scripted HQ. Follow him @rbucks.

Who is your hero?

Abraham Lincoln.

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

Focus. Early on, in the first iteration of our company, we were building screenwriting software to help screenwriters work their way up in Hollywood. It was a lofty goal. Our first version of the product did everything from writer profiles to contest submissions and screenplay filters for producers.

It was too much. An advisor came down on us and reminded us that on our small budget (we had raised $37,000, which really felt like a lot of money) we couldn’t boil the ocean. Not even close. So we focused on one feature we were most excited about: web-based screenplay editing. Google Docs for screenplays.

That decision allowed us to hit a point where we could pivot off of that business and start Scripted.com. The reminder to focus on one problem has stuck with us, and our investors and new advisors tell us that our focus on the writing vertical is what makes us attractive.

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

My biggest mistake was entering a market where my customers were short-term and broke. In retrospect, the business plan competition results were right: you can’t build a business around amateur screenwriters. Our first business model was having them pay subscriptions to use our product. Then we discovered reality and tried to move to a model where studios pay us to access our 100,000 scripts.

Although studios have much deeper pockets, the sales cycle proved far too long and costly. The next pivot, to sell marketing content (not screenplays) to businesses (not studios) was the business decision that worked out.

Lesson learned: Make sure your customers can afford your product and it’s not too hard to sell to them.

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

I wake up at 7 a.m. and try very hard not to check email. By 7:30 I’m usually on the couch with my wife and watching Morning Joe (a terrific political morning show) with our coffee. Then I’ll either work from the couch for a bit or go straight to the office.

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

Spend as little as possible so you don’t have to stress about cash on a daily basis. Check your accounts monthly at least and always check your credit card bill for subscriptions you no longer need. Put off paying yourself for as long as possible too. It’ll make you appreciate and respect your business.

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

Subscribe to Fortune and Inc. And get a smartphone app to make it easy to read the blogs every day.

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

When we become a talent magnet, I’ll know we’ve made it.

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.

Startups: Is your PR strategy outdated?

Milan Startup Styloola Helps People Share Their Passion About Fashion

Imagine you’re a fashionista or a somewhat high profile fashion blogger and you have say 100,000 twitter followers and a very popular blog. Well how would that boutique store you just walked into know you’re there? That’s just one of the problems the founders of Milan based startup Styloola hope to fix.

Their social platform allows fashionistas and those who just love good fashion, to sync up over the things they love.

It’s like Pinterest for fashion, on crack with a purpose. You can upload your favorite fashions, pin fashions from others and even curate your own collection. Styloola can then share your collections with designers and boutiques to make owning your favorite fashions a reality.

Styloola also has a checkin twist that allows users to check in to their favorite fashions and stores.

There one of a handful of startups that we saw at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 that actually understand how to effectively bridge online and offline commerce. 3 Other Things also has a great social approach to drive traffic to brick and mortar stores.

The company received an angel round of funding last fall and officially launched the next phase of Styloola at TechCrunch Disrupt two weeks ago. Check out our video interview below and for more info visit Styloola.com

Over 50 more startup stories from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 can be found here at nibletz.com

London Startup 3dindustri.es Wants To Be The Search Engine For 3D

The 3d printing revolution is off to an amazing start. Within a year, 3d printers for the home have come down to an affordable level. Two years ago at TechCrunch Disrupt NY we saw the first 3d printer, MakerBot. This year at the same event there were several startups in the 3d space including, Cincinnati based 3DLT, a 99 designs for 3D templates, and 3dindustri.es.

3dindustri.es is hoping to become the go to search engine for 3d printing. They are very unique in that they don’t use search terns, keywords or typical algorithms. 3dindustri.es is all about geometry and shapes. 3dindustri.es, or 3DI as they’re affectionately known, is based in London.

“What Google did for words and text on the web, we aim to do for shapes and 3D models,” said Dr. Seena Rejal, the founder and CEO of 3DI in an interview with Forbes. “We are ordering the 3D world.”

That’s a tall order to fill with the rapid growth of 3d printing. That’s why the company has already inked partnerships with companies that will prove to be influencers in the 3d printing industry, like 4DLT.

We also got a chance to talk with Rejal. Check out our interview video below:

There’s more where that came from check out over 40 startup stories from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013.

The Pill Bottle Gets Reinvented By New York Startup AdhereTech

A New York startup called AdhereTech has created a sensor laden pill bottle.

The bottle looks just about the same as a regular pill bottle, with a little extra girth for both the sensor and a 3g radio chip. When the 3g radio chip is coupled with the sensors in the pill bottle it can provide information on dosage timing, how many pills are in the bottle and if the bottle is being opened and closed at the correct times.

The ability to communicate this data to a care provider and also to a health management app can be game-changing to people dependent on taking lots of medication.

We talked with the team at AdhereTech about taking multiple prescriptions,and multiple bottles in the same home will not cause any kind of conflict.

We got to interview them at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2013. They are also going to participate in the AARP/Live Pitch 2013 Health Innovation Conference in Las Vegas. Out of 100s of applications, AdhereTech was chosen as one of 10 to pitch their product on the main stage.

They aren’t the first health startup to add sensors to products patients use everyday. At CES 2013 earlier this year we met the team from Geckocap that has installed sensors on asthma inhalers which help track children’s albuterol treatments and gamifies the use of the inhaler for young patients to insure they take their inhaler medication.

Check out the video below and for more information visit adheretech.com.

Have you seen these startup stories from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013?

Indian Startup 3 Other Things Is Bridging The Gap Between Online and Offline Retail

UPDATE: 10:23am 5/14/2013

At TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 two weeks ago we got to spend some time with Minoj Shinde one of the three co-founders of 3 Other Things. Their Mumbai based startup is tackling the bridge between off-line and online shopping experiences, a nut many startups here and overseas are hoping to crack.

The divide between online and offline retail is much larger than we, as consumers in the United States, are led to believe. For instance, in India, where 3 Other Things is based, the divide is 97% off-line retail. In the U.S. it’s actually a whopping 80% offline retail. For retailers to be extremely effective, to drive more traffic to their brick and mortar sites, and their websites, they need to consider both customer subsets. Something that Shinde has been observing over the last 14 years.

By combining the powers of a social network, with a “wish list” feature and customer profile, retailers in the lifestyle, clothing and home decor categories will have one resource to work from that provides a robust snapshot of their customer base. Not only that but 3 Other Things will provide retailers with true customer data with the things that the customer wants and not just algorithmic fluff.

Shinde says that 3 Other Things really comes in handy in non urban centralized areas. For example, some of the stores his family likes to shop at are nearly an hour away from their home. Naturally, investing the time and money into traveling to the store just to find they are out of what they are looking for is a big turn off.

3 Other Things allows users to create a wish list of the products that they actually like. The user can than let the individual retailers know an approximate time of when they will be in their store and the store can come back and say whether or not they have that inventory. Unlike other systems in a similar space, a store clerk using 3 Other Things will physically find or locate an item to insure it’s correct, providing for another level of customer service, that’s often recognized by repeat business.

The social network portion of 3 other things allows likeminded users to share ideas and tips. For instance I like t-shirts with cool designs on them, while Shinde prefers more business casual dressier shirts. I can tell Shinde, using 3 other things, that I saw the perfect shirt for him at a specific retailer and then he can add that shirt to his wish list. The retailer can then market to both of us more effectively.

In the video below with Shinde, we talk a bit about Mumbai’s up and coming startup scene. Watch the video and check out the next disruption in off-line/online retail.

Now check out these other 35 startup stories from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013.

Techstars Boulder Announces Summer 2013 Class

While the spring season for startup accelerators is coming to close with a variety of demo days across the country, the summer season is warming up. In fact today we’ll be reporting on three startup accelerators kicking off their summer program. We start the day with Techstars Boulder.

Techstars is one of the most successful startup accelerator programs in the world. They yield thousands of applications every year and only a handful of the best startups get picked to build their products as Techstars branded startups.

Without further ado here are the startups that got into Techstars flagship program, the Summer 2013 session at Techstars Boulder, Colorado:

Hull is like Startup Weekend online. Their website claims that you can build social apps in a weekend rather than in weeks. Hull handles hosting,social mechanics, and services integration so the person creating the social app can focus on the features.

LeChat hails from Oakland California and promises to be the next revolutionary messaging app. Their website says they are “messaging for modern organizations” and support a host of features including search history, multiple chats on screen, integration with dev tools, native mobile apps and a price poing of $1 per user per month.

According to the Techstars website Augur is a platform that makes mobile and web personal by intelligently tailoring the experience of each user.

Given Goods blends social entrepreneurship with e-commerce in a beautiful website that only sells products that give back. Sometimes here at nibletz we call this “slacktivism”, think Toms and other products that make a difference in the community.

Local startup Elihuu has a funny name with a serious mission. Their platform allows product people to design beautiful products and they help take care of the manufacturing. Their website says: Democratizing the process of design, invention, and manufacturing. We believe new technologies change the thinking around the production of consumer products.

Brandfolder gives users the tools to build a brand book that would typically cost thousands of dollars from an agency, easily and from a web based platform. While they plan to offer a premium paid product later on, their website says their branding tools will always offer a free option.

According to the Techstars website Prediculous is building social sports games for all fans. It looks like this Boulder based startup is pivoting from a social prediction game to something worthy of a much larger audience. Find them online here.

This bay area startup offers tax monitoring tools that users can use all year long in hopes to help them have a “good April” Mitchell Fox, co-founder of GoodApril has penned guest posts on several startup focused sites about preparing for and being proactive about tax season. Check them out here

Ads native is an ad server for native content based advertising. Their website says that you can monetize without compromising user-experience. You can find them online here.

We met the guys from Snowshoe last year on the sneaker strapped road trip when we stopped in Madison Wisconsin. They seem to have pivoted a little bit since then, now using their original technology as an authentication layer for the internet of things.

Are you working on your pitch? Check out The Anatomy of a winning pitch deck.

Your Time Is Valuable, NY Startup GetAppRewards Rewards You For Using Apps & Playing Games

So this concept isn’t entirely new. This New York startup, GetAppRewards, wants to reward users for engaging with apps and games that are in their app network.

The more time you spend using the apps in the GetAppRewards network, or playing their games, you’ll earn points. Points can be redeemed for things like other games, electronics, clothing, gift cards and more. The hope is that by rewarding users, they will be more loyal to the apps that are in GetAppRewards network.

In it’s simplest for, GetAppRewards is a mobile advertising platform for app developers to get both more users and downloads as well as improve the time that a user engages with their app.

“GetAppRewards offers instant rewards to users for spending more time in your app, and viewing in-app advertisements. When we reward users like this, they will reward you with their time, attention and purchases. This is a simple and effective formula that helps you monetize your app to the fullest extent.” the company says on their Facebook page.

They also hope to improve in app purchases: “With us showering rewards on the users for launching your app, watching video ads and tapping any ads, it’s hard not to make in-app purchases.” they said.

There are other products out there like Junowallet for instance, that reward users for downloading apps. GetAppRewards secret sauce isn’t in just the downloads but also in the engagement and time spent.

Check out our interview below and for more info you can find them on Facebook here.

Have you seen these startup stories from TechCrunch Disrupt?

Create Your Own Flower Arrangement With Your iPhone Using NY Startup Fl3ur

H.Bloom is probably the most well known flower delivery app. They allow you to order flowers from your smartphone and have them delivered to that special someone for whatever occasion arises.

New York startup Fl3ur takes ordering flowers to an entirely new level. Using their proprietary mobile technology a user creates the arrangement they want on their iPhone and then, working with traditional brick and mortar florists, the arrangement is created in real life and delivered.

The big difference between the two is the customization. H.Bloom lets you customize to a degree however with Fl3ur (as you can see in the video) you start with a completely blank canvas. You can arrange whatever you want the way you want. The app also keeps track of the budget for you so you don’t break the bank with a $500 arrangement, unless of course you want to.

Fl3ur also allows you to send a screen shot of your arrangement via email, text or social media. You can also take a picture of yourself or the sender and place that virtual bouquet or arrangement in their hand to send as a virtual card. While they want you to use that virtual pic to show someone what’s coming in the real world, you don’t actually have to follow through with sending the order to a florist (but that’s the best part).

Fl3ur officially announced themselves to the world at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 two weeks ago in New York City. Check out our video interview below and for more info visit fl3ur.com

Yes as a matter of fact we have over 35 more startup stories & interviews from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 here.

New TLD’s Are Making It A Jungle Out There, For That There’s Prague Startup Jungle Navigator

Last year ICANN and the powers that be with the internets announced that we were finally going to get some more “Top Level Domains” (TLD’s). For those not quite sure a TLD is an extension like .com, .co, .net etc.

Companies across the globe paid outrageous application fees in hopes that their top level domain names would be selected. The TLD’s applied for ranged anywhere form .llc and .corp to .porn.

As these new TLD’s come online there is room for a new category of startup to navigate through the jungle of TLD’s. In fact the founder of Portland startup AboutUs, has founded Top Level Design (yes also TLD) to hopefully become a registrar for several new TLD’s including one’s the company owns like .blog, .gay, .photography and .wiki.

Mirek Sekera, a Microsoft technologies programmer turned entrepreneur and startup founder in Prague has created Jungle Navigator to help people access information about the new TLD’s and connect them to what they need to get going. Jungle Navigator hopes to provide one stop access to everything related to these new TLDs. New top level domains are big money, in fact, as Sekera points out in an interview, some of the applications for these new TLD’s were upwards of $180,000. That’s just to apply.

We got a chance to talk with Sekera, check out the Czech entrepreneurs interview below.

What is Jungle Navigator?

It is a portal on new domain name extensions (new generic top-level domains – new gTLDs) which were recently introduced by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – the organization that controls all the TLDs).

Jungle Navigator’s purpose is to provide information about those new gTLDs. It is available at http://www.junglenavigator.com/ .

The portal is operated through my company Glueo, s.r.o., which I set-up couple of years ago because of my previous project, which wasn’t successful.

In layman’s terms, how does it work? (In other words how would you explain it to your grandmother)

The website is all about domains. Domain is the leftmost part of a web page address, for http://twitter.com/junglenavigator the domain name is twitter.com. The second-level domain is twitter. The top-level domain is .com.

At the time, there is a TLD for each country (country code top level domain – ccTLD) like .us for United States or .uk for United Kingdom.

There is also about 20 generic top level domains (gTLDs), the most common are .com, .net or .org.

The situation about the gTLDs is going to change dramatically: ICANN (the organization that manages all the TLDs) recently introduced a program that allows any company or organization to come up with their own gTLD.

In the mid of 2012, ICANN revealed more than thousand such domains that almost two thousands companies and organizations applied for. They came with their company names (.google, .microsoft or .canon), city names (.nyc or .barcelona) or just common words like .blog, .app, .free or even .lol or .wtf. It is expected that the company-name gTLDs (brand gTLDs) will remain closed while most of the others will be open for (second-level domain) registration soon.

Jungle Navigator is a website that aims to help people to orientate in this jungle of the new gTLDs. It focuses to people and companies who do not want miss an opportunity to catch the best (second level) domains under the new gTLDs.

It provides information about them like:

– categorization and search;

– syndicated gTLD news from tech blogs and web-zines;

– information about pre-registration;

– general gTLD information and related links;

– discussion.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Currently, it is just one-man show, operated by me, Miroslav Sekera, I am a Microsoft technologies programmer (.Net,C#,SQL) with about 10 years of experience and also have some graphic-design skills.

I have friends annoyed with their jobs and I hope I will take some as co-founders soon :-)

Where are you based?

In Prague, capital city of the Czech Republic, famous for architecture and beer with very good quality/price ratio :-)

What’s the startup scene/culture like where you’re based?

There were opened some nice incubators and accelerators in the couple of the last years.

My company is member of one – Czech Technical University’s incubator called Inovacentrum.

Quite often there are startup or startup friendly conferences, workshops or “movie nights”. Recently I was on BarCamp Prague conference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcamp).

If you are any kind of startup person, go to Prague, everyone will want to talk to you as most people here want to be global and get in touch with anyone from outside of the Czech Republic.

How did you come up with the idea for Jungle Navigator?

I have read about the new gTLDs last year, and realized this is a big thing. Big companies like Google are investing huge money and effort into it. Cost for one gTLD application is $185k, and that’s just the beginning (they have other expenses like infrastructure, etc…).

I thought there will be required some place which will provide easy and simple access to all the related and required info, so I created the website.

Why now?

It’s just the highest time – this year, first gTLDs are expected to be operable – first startups will be launching with the domain names ending with the new gTLDs, and first corporations will be switching their websites to their corporate gTLDs. Then IMHO the big rush is going to come and Jungle Navigator must be ready to this.

Who are your competition?

There is one really handy encyclopedia, called ICANNWiki at http://icannwiki.com/ , which (among others) also provides info about almost each new gTLD. I’m not really sure if it is competition, I am massively linking it from my website :-)

Another interesting site is .nxt http://dot-nxt.com/

When listing other new gTLD information resources, I should not omit the official ICANN’s site dedicated to the new gTLDs at http://newgtlds.icann.org/

All the mentioned sites are targeted to domain name experts – while Jungle Navigator tries to provide information to anyone.

And what’s your secret sauce?

I try to watch what the others are saying and doing, but doing things my way.

I am fully aware that it is a cliche, but in my opinion, there many people around startups that are “cargo-cult followers” (http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/avoiding-the-cargo-cult-and-getting-the-trans-atlantic-startup-model-right/), they are just doing things because they saw other successful people doing it. And they think they only need to mimic them to be successful as well.

People asked me why I don’t make the homepage a bit simpler. They said: “Look at Google, how their homepage is simple. And they are a hundred-billion dollar company”. Why there is so much stuff on your homepage? Google was, IMHO, successful because of the pagerank, not because of the simplicity of homepage. I am saying that because I remember when I started to use Google instead of AltaVista – because it was giving far better results. Perhaps even their oversimplified homepage is just their kind of style, part of their brand’s “personality” for which people remembers them – I don’t know. Or perhaps it is really better for most of their users.

I am just saying I don’t understand why also my homepage should be that simple. I put there quite a lot of information so that users can see most without clicking.

On the other hand, I don’t insist on that style of homepage. Once I have a reason (perhaps some kind of A/B testing) the homepage should look different, I would think about changing it.

Are you bootstrapped or funded?

Bootstrapped. Working from quite old desktop PC and my biggest expenses are food & coffee, I probably spend more than other people on that :-) But not too much more :-)

What are some milestones you’ve achieved?

– I have managed to get my project up and running.

– On Twitter, Jungle Navigator has some nice followers from the industry, like people from ICANN and also registries (operators) of new or classic TLDs.

What’s your next milestone?

Currently, my product is quite ready, now I need to let people know about it.

In the terms of the product development, I would need to do some usability testing – to find out what kind and what structure of information people need.

Who are some of your mentors and business role models?

Lately, I read book called “Unsinkable Entrepreneur” from Irish entrepreneur Enda O’Coinneen who is currently living in Prague. He is convinced that the entrepreneurship is kind of art, rather than science. I share such opinion. I don’t believe that success in business can be algorithmized and replicated without putting something else into it.

In the book Enda also writes about his grand-grand-father who went to Alaska in 19th century when there was a gold rush. He noticed that the most successful people there weren’t only the most lucky gold-diggers, but also people who were selling equipment and providing services to the gold-diggers. That’s the approach I like – when there is a kind of some hype or rush, it’s good to be part of it, but it’s also good to start thinking if there isn’t something better to do than the most obvious thing everyone else does.

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

Jungle Navigator homepage: http://www.junglenavigator.com/

Frequently asked questions: http://www.junglenavigator.com/faq/

Further gTLD resources: http://www.junglenavigator.com/links/

Jungle Navigator’s Twitter: http://twitter.com/junglenavigator

What the hell is sneaker strapping?