Connect With Everywherelse.co Featured Speakers Using CrowdHall

Crowdhall, everwhereelse.co the startup conferenceCrowdHall, the virtual townhall startup, is geared up for everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference.

We’ve jam packed the content for the conference and unfortunately can’t do microphones in the aisles for the audience to answer questions. If you’ve ever been to a conference that used Twitter for questions, it can be effective but good questions can get lost in the shuffle.

That’s why we’re taking advantage of the next generation townhall platform. Using everywhereelse.co’s virtual town hall found here you can ask questions to our key speakers and panels using CrowdHall.

Get your questions together and head over to CrowdHall now. Don’t forget to select the feature to simultaneously tweet as well.

Here’s the link to everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference on Crowd Hall

Brandery Demo Day: Utah Startup CrowdHall PITCH VIDEO

Crowdhall,Brandery,Utah Startup,startup,startups,pitch videoWe’ve really liked CrowHall even before we found out they were going to be part of the 2012 class at the Brandery.  Their platform is a great way to let celebrities, public figures, politicians, bloggers and micro celebrities respond and interact with their following in a clean, branded manner that’s both organized and archivable.

The premise for the idea is great and they’ve been testing out the platform and in July they did a public test with “Bachelorette” winner Jef Holm. Holm sent out one tweet the day before the test saying that he would be taking questions on CrowdHall. He didn’t include a link to the site or the secret page that would hold his CrowdHall forum, but his fans were relentless, they went to the CrowdHall site, and founder the private page. The end result was that when Holm logged in for his CrowdHall session during the test he already had 29 questions waiting for him.

COO and co-founder Jordan Menzel pitched today at The Brandery’s Demo day at the Great American Ball Park.  Menzel was decked out in a yellow t-shirt and cutoff shorts which they explained before the pitch was a “cost cutting measure”. While they have money committed they used all of the seed money working on validating their concept, and buying caffeine for their developer Nick.

The product looks great and hopefully it will be a household word in the 2016 election. Check out the pitch video below:

Linkage:

See what CrowdHall is all about here

Check out The Brandery Here

Check out more of nibletz’ Brandery coverage

Got your ticket yet?

So What Does Brandery Startup CrowdHall Do On Startup Weekend?

CrowdHall is definitely one of the Brandery stand out startups. They are developing a unique and innovative platform for celebrities, politicians and popular bloggers, journalists and other people to effectively communicate with their crowd,fans and constituents. As you may imagine it’s in a town hall/crowd hall setting.

The premise for the idea is great and they’ve been testing out the platform and in fact last week they did a public test with “Bachelorette” winner Jef Holm. Holm sent out one tweet the day before the test saying that he would be taking questions on CrowdHall. He didn’t include a link to the site or the secret page that would hold his CrowdHall forum, but his fans were relentless, they went to the CrowdHall site, and founder the private page. The end result was that when Holm logged in for his CrowdHall session during the test he already had 29 questions waiting for him. Phenomenal.

All in all the results were a great success, you can see them here.

As we told you in our interview with Brandery co-founder Rob McDonald and their General Manager Mike Bott, the CrowdHall companies are very active participants in the Cincinnati tech scene. Bott explained in our video interview that all of the Brandery class was given free access to Startup Weekend and they came, helped mentor and build teams.

What does CrowdHall CEO Austin Hackett do on Startup Weekend? Well he starts another startup. His Startup Weekend startup was called “SportsGamr” it’s a fun virtual sports betting site. It gives those die-hard sports gamblers the ability to bet in a friendly manner with no actual money changing hands.


Players get virtual currency which they can use to bet against their friends or others on the website. Once they deplete that virtual currency, or just to make more virtual currency they can watch and engage in premium content video advertising. This video advertising is of course a great monetization strategy. It’s also great to know that if you come and have a bad day on the site you can still continue to play.

Hackett’s CrowdHall team worked all weekend, and even Hackett split his time between Startup Weekend and working on CrowdHall. He said he is definitely full speed ahead with CrowdHall which might mean his SportsGamr startup will have to wait. But it’s a great idea with an even better presentation.

Check out his pitch video from Sunday below:

Check out Hackett’s day job here

Here’s more of our coverage from Startup Weekend

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After First Full Week At Brandery, Startup CrowdHall Is Already Gaining Popularity In Cincinnati

The CrowdHall Team Won The TechBury Pitch Wars Friday (photo: CrowdHall)

We talked with Utah startup CrowdHall a few weeks back. They had been selected for the Brandery incubator in Cincinnati which is one of the most popular incubators in the United States. We got to talk with co-founder Jordan Menzel right before the crew packed it up to move east for three months.

The Brandery’s 2012 session started on July 2nd and last week was their first full week in. CrowdHall has agreed to check in periodically throughout their experience in Cincinnati and at the Brandery.  Their first check-in was a little late. Not only has the CrowdHall crew been working around the clock, but they were also busy competing in the BunBury festival’s TechBury pitch wars.

CrowdHall faced off against Brandery alumni VenturePax which we’ve also covered here at nibletz.com. The CrowdHall team rode their bikes through a seedy section of town at nearly midnight, back to their apartment with a $1,000 check,emerging as the winners of the pitch wars.

 

This is how we described CrowdHall earlier:

Imagine if you could mix a social network, reddit,crowdsourced answers and a town hall meeting into one platform that wasn’t an absolute train wreck. Now imagine if you could use that platform to host virtual conferences, discussions with elected officials, or even with your blog audience (yeah we can’t wait to try it). Now stop imagining because that’s what the founders of CrowdHall are doing.

Here’s what the team has to say after being at the Brandery since July 2

So give us a little insight how was your first full week at the Brandery?

We’re kids in a candy store. As a startup, you learn to get by with limited support, limited resources, and having to fight for mentors’ time. So when we showed up to the Brandery, we were able to turn on fire hose and start drinking. We’ve loved being around the fellow startups, working with fascinating mentors, and of course taking advantage of the nitty gritty legal help. The collaborative office space is great too, and is a vast improvement to our last corporate office (the public library). We’ve quickly seen that workshops, pitches, BBQ’s, ball games, late nights of coding, and 14 hour work days will be our lives for the next few months.

Now that you’re finally at the Brandery what’s one thing that has surprised you guys about CrowdHall?

We are all blown away with how much more we can get done when we are all working in the same space. Early in our development, our team was in DC, NYC, and San Diego. With us all together, the increase in productivity and turn-around is insane. After having worked for government agencies and big companies, nothing is more fun than having an idea in the morning, a team brainstorming session on it over lunch, and testing it out live on the site at night, with no layers of bureaucracy in between.

What’s the best piece of honest feedback you’ve received from either the Brandery folks or a mentor?

With the technology we’ve built, there are literally a hundred different applications and features that we have brainstormed. In addition, every time we talk to somebody new they get excited about some new way they can see themselves using the platform.

When we sat down with our mentor Tim Schigel (Founder of ShareThis and Head of Digital Strategy for the Republican Party), he really pushed us to focus in on one application at a time, and prioritize the development based on working out one functionality, then going to market with that. We can’t try to do everything at once.

Have you pivoted yet?

There is a lot of grey area in that question. We have always been aware of various applications for our large audience moderating features and have generally had a clear strategy on which applications we wanted to focus on first. However, now that we have
met with mentors from Twitter, Anaheiser Busch, ShareThis etc…. we have definitely taken a step back to revisit our development priorities. But in terms of the core product, we are still about allowing crowds to communicate in a democratic and organized manner. Talk to us next week, we’ll probably give you a totally different answer.

What’s on the agenda for next week?

Organization!! With new interns, new mentors, new ideas, and new resources, we are about to dive into improving our teams structure and flow. Nick, our developer, is probably tired of getting pulled away from the code with every single thought/idea/recommendation. While it’s fun to be all in the space, it’s not always the most efficient.

In terms of our product, we are getting ready for a pretty sweet soft beta launch coming up soon so keep an eye on Twitter and Facebook to see what we are scheming.

Is there anything the public can help you guys with?

CrowdHall is coming! Sign up for our beta launch at www.crowdhall.com. Once we launch, you’ll be able to communicate with those already on the site, and also recommend any people/organizations of interest you’d like to have a conversation with. We’ll reach out to them to join CrowdHall as your recommendations draw support.

Has your experience at the Brandery been what you expected so far? Harder? Easier?

It has been more all-consuming than we expected, but in a way, it’s actually easier. We are so excited to be working on the company and seeing how much it progresses with the time we put in, that none of us wants to be doing anything else. So even though the commitment is crazy, it’s only like that because that’s the way we want it. One hilarious experience was competing in the Techbury Pitch Wars at the Bunbury Music Festival, after 5 rounds of pitching against great companies we were stoked to have won, and that meant biking home with a giant novelty check and an unnecessarily large trophy.

Linkage:

See what the talk is all about at CrowdHall’s site here

Here are more Brandery stories from nibletz.com

We really need help with the next leg of the sneaker-strapped startup road trip you can help here

Utah Startup: CrowdHall Moving To Cincinnati For The Brandery INTERVIEW

Imagine if you could mix a social network, reddit,crowdsourced answers and a town hall meeting into one platform that wasn’t an absolute train wreck. Now imagine if you could use that platform to host virtual conferences, discussions with elected officials, or even with your blog audience (yeah we can’t wait to try it). Now stop imagining because that’s what the founders of CrowdHall are doing.

The founders hail from “everywhere else” As you’ll see in the interview there we could credit this startup to Salt Lake City, San Diego, Washington DC and now Cincinnati, as CrowdHall was selected for the 2012 class at the Brandery.

At the Brandery CrowdHall will refine their product and make a go of a truly unique startup.

CrowdHall works like this:

Say you’re an active citizen and you noticed in your neighborhood all the playground equipment was getting old and dangerous. You would probably write city hall or call city hall and get back some kind of form response that says they’ll look into it. You may try again and get the same answer. Heck you could even go to the city hall meeting and get the same answer, they’ll look into it.

Now with CrowdHall you may be able to find your local City Councilman. You could ask the City Councilman about the playground equipment. Then you could tell your friends that you asked on CrowdHall and they could in turn, come and vote up your question. Now your Councilman sees that you have a very valid issue. He can answer you and all the other neighbors you recruited in a one on one way but in a public facing setting where the other could also comment.

Now if the Councilman agrees with you, he could help get the playground equipment issue resolved, voila!

This can also be used for bloggers to source questions in a similar way and discussion format, even rock stars, entertainers, business speakers, and just about anyone who has a “crowd” could benefit from CrowdHall.

As the CrowdHall team prepares to move to Cincinnati next week for this session of the Brandery, we got a chance to talk with Jordan Menzel, Co-Founder and COO of CrowdHall. Check that interview out, after the break
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