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JustDecide.com Startup Dilemma Of The Week #2 Should I Quit My Day Job

Startups, the Justdecide.com dilemma of the week is a feature here at nibletz.com where you can participate in an active discussion with other like-minded startups and founders to help a fellow startup with a dilemma. You can also submit your own dilemma to startups@nibletz.com if you’re having trouble making a decision about your startup you can crowdsource our community via justdecide.com

That’s exactly what Atlanta-based entrepreneur Aaron Gray did. Gray is the founder of the Legacy Movement, with a goal of becoming the go-to site for deals and to change the discussion about entrepreneurship and founding especially in regards to under-served communities of entrepreneurs and founders within the startup ecosystem. To that end Gray is trying to help all entrepreneurs and founders with an emphasis on black-owned, women-owned and latino-owned startups.

Gray has a dilemma though, and it stems from his strategy to build his user base and community base before focusing on funding. For Gray this is actually a great strategy, if he can build scale for his startup then it becomes more valuable in the eyes of the potential investor. Naturally with more funding he can do more for both aspects of his startup, the Legacy Movement.

Gray is still working a full-time job, which he needs to “pay the bills”. He knows at some point he’s going to need to leave his day job so that he can focus on his efforts with his startup. He’s come to the startup community to gauge their feedback and help him solve this dilemma.

His options include:

Continuing to work full-time while working on his startup in his spare time.

Negotiate a part-time agreement with his current employer

Leave his job

Raise an angel round of funding to subsidize his switch from full-time employment to full-time founder.

You can find out more about Gray’s back story here.

Each week we will present to you a startup dilemma of the week with our partner justdecide.com We would love it if you could take just a few minutes out of your day to weigh in on the discussion. The “Startup Dilemma Of The Week” is a free resource to any startup everywhere else, and you may need it some day.

Linkage:

Participate in this week’s dilemma

See last week’s dilemma

submit your own dilemma

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NY Startup BarkBox Raises $1.7M Almost By Accident

Matt Meeker has had a successful exit with MeetUp and has also served as the entrepreneur in residence at Polaris Ventures, it’s no wonder that his admitted “side project”, BarkBox has just raised $1.7 million dollars.

While the round itself was intentional, Meeker never really thought this business would create such momentum. Obviously he wasn’t familiar with his $53 billion dollar pet care industry. It was only natural with a subscription box available for everything from purses to shoes, to healthcare and wellness products to, “bro stuff” a subscription box for pet care products was a shoe in for a great business.

“We started thinking this would be a little side project, and a nice little cash flow business, and then we got such tremendous feedback about it we decided there’s a much bigger opportunity here,” he said.”If we want to do it right, we’re going to need some capital in the bank to go build a team and start building real relationships with suppliers and things like that, so we decided to go out and raise that money to do it.” betakit.com reported

This $1.7 million dollar round was led by Mike Hirschland of Resolute.vc, and included Lerer Ventures, RRE, Polaris Ventures, Bertelsmann and Dave McLure’s 500 startups.

Linkage:

Visit BarkBox here

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NY Startup: Emotish Lets You Share Pictures With Emotion INTERVIEW

Emotish is a new mobile app startup in New York City. They’ve taken a twist of the standard photo sharing app and added an element to it that makes this app special. The element is emotion.

With Emotish you take photos of yourself or you and your friends and you can tag it with what you’re feeling at the time and then share it via Facebook and Twitter. Users will soon be able to keep tabs on the photos and tags and see what feelings are trending, how everyone was feeling in a given area, favorite photos and contextual tags.

Emotions bring a whole new life into photo sharing. Instagram is great with it’s filters and likes but with Emotish not only will you see photos and a smile but you’ll have a better context of what the smiles about, or even what the long face or frown is about.

What makes Emotish even cooler is this isn’t just about great coders or a cool mobile app development startup. Emotish Co-Founder Ryan Wegner is actually a PhD candidate in the clinical psychology program at Columbia University. So like Smurks in Chicago, there is actual real psychology behind this app and what emotion brings to the table in people’s every day lives, in context and in photos.

We got a chance to talk to Wenger in between saving the world and developing great apps, check out the interview below:

New York Startup: DoGoodBuyUs Charity Made Products Marketplace INTERVIEW

Charitable organizations are producing products all the time with the idea to sell those products as fundraisers. Everything form tie-dyed t-shirts, bracelets, hats,ties, baskets, even custom fitted chair backs have all at one time or another been created for and by charities.

The problem was, until last year, that there wasn’t a central online marketplace to buy and sell these charitable goods. Sure churches, civic organizations, and social activist charities may have sold their wares on ebay, Craigslist or their own personal website, but that still meant only a finite number of people would actually see the products and the charities they support.

Enter Zack Rosenberg and DoGoodBuyUs. Last July when the site launched, Rosenberg told the mother nature network:

“Right now, nonprofts don’t have a central marketplace where they can congregate and maximize awareness,” says Co-founder Zack Rosenberg. “I’ve tried to find a functional ‘marketplace for social good’ out there for aggregating meaningful products, and there just aren’t any adequate commerce platforms for distinguishing nonprofits exclusively.”

DoGoodBuyUs organizes all of their charitable products by type of product and also charity. If you’re looking for something specific it’s easy to find, if you’re looking for a specific cause to support, that too is easy to find. They have a wide variety of products to choose from and an even wider amount of causes to back. One of the most interesting things we found was this hammock for every hammock someone buys, treated mosquito nets are given to families in Africa or a malaria research class is held.

With such an innovative socially conscious idea we had to interview Rosenberg. Check out the interview below the break:

New York Startup: Padcaster Turns Your iPad Into A Production Studio

While to most the iPad is a truly magical device, what makes the iPad even more magical is the amount of accessories available for it. The iPhone has equally as many (if not more currently) cool accessories as well.

You can turn your iPad into an arcade machine, amplifier, guitar teaching tool, midi throughput device, turntables and now an on the go video and photo production studio.

Josh Apter, founder and president of Union Square based Padcaster, created the Padcaster out of necessity.

The Padcaster is an invention born out of my own needs as a filmmaker. I was shooting interviews with an iPad 2 about a year ago and was frustrated that there was no way to mount it onto a tripod. That’s when I decided to build something myself,” said Josh Apter, founder and president, The Padcaster, LLC. “Now, just about a year later, we have the Padcaster. I’ve been testing the prototype and I have to say, I’m quite pleased with the results. Not only can I record high-quality footage right from the iPad, but I can also cut, add effects, and upload it to our Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo and blog feeds simultaneously – all from the same device, almost instantly.”

The Padcaster is house in an aluminum frame that allows itself to be mounted to after market lenses, microphones, and other accessories needed for great photographs and great videos. It also has a tripod mount on the bottom which means you can mount the secure Padcaster to any tripod, monopod or other device with a tripod mount.

Apter created an accessory called the Lenscaster that is sold separately from the Padcaster and allows the ability to hook the Padcaster up to cinema style lenses and other lenses that connect via a 35mm lens adapter (not included)

Both the Padcaster and the Lenscaster help move the iPad from consumer device to a more professional on the go photo and video studio.

Linkage:

Find out more about Padcaster here

Here’s a product tour of the Padcaster

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more stories from “everywhere else”

New York Startup: SinglePlatform Acquired By Constant Contact For $100M

Another New York startup has just had a really big exit. This time it was, web and mobile advertising specialists SinglePlatform. As the name implies, SinglePlatform is one centralized robust advertising platform that allows advertisers to update their advertising in one centralized location.

Our friends at tech.li report that SinglePlatform estimates their reach to be 200 million people every month. SinglePlatform allows the management of advertising space both big and small.

“SinglePlatform lets small businesses quickly distribute rich content so that consumers can find it at the very moment they are looking to make a purchase decision,” Constant Contact said in a press release. “The SinglePlatform offering complements the current Constant Contact suite of online engagement marketing tools by helping small businesses reach and engage their next customer even earlier in the customer lifecycle.”

Forbes reports that the deal was structured as $65 million in cash, $5 million in cash and equity for retention purposes, and up to $30 million based on performance over the next two years, for a total of $100 million.

The company expects the deal to contribute $10 million in 2013 and adds that it should be accretive in late 2013 to early 2014.

Linkage:

Interview With New York Startup Spark Rebel

Social discovery is one of the hottest online and mobile crazes right now. There are social discovery sites for everything from restaurants, events, people, things, food and fashion. Spark Rebel is an amazing blend of social and discovery revolving around fashion that real women are wearing today. Sure it’s nice to be able to shop the top tier boutiques in Chelsea, Manhattan and Rodeo drive and Spark Rebel does have feature some high fashion, but the thick of this social discovery site for fashion is what everyday women are working to work, out on the town or for a relaxing evening.

As people’s lives got busier and busier and they began to take to online shopping over in store shopping, an entirely new way to discover things popped up. The problem with traditional online shopping sites is that you’re seeing what the stores want you to see. You’re seeing the fashions that the buyers are seeing and not necessarily what everyone’s wearing.

Then, you go about your busy day and see that awesome outfit a woman is wearing at Starbucks or you see a must have dress on a woman in the elevator with you, and then you never see it again.

Spark Rebel uses a mixture of social, discovery and recommendation to bring the hottest trends and fashions to their users.

Spark Rebel was born out of site for teenage girls, which is a segment even harder to curate than traditional women’s wear. We got a chance to interview Spark Rebel. Check out that interview after the break

Interview With NY Startup Edamam Becoming The Worlds Food Knowledge Base

Edamam founder and CEO Victor Penev has a lofty goal. He wants his company to become the goto place for food knowledge in the world. While the goal seems quite lofty as I am writing this right now, if you watch the video below you’ll see that Edamam may well be on their way to doing just that.

They launched their consumer facing product, a mobile app which pulls over one million recipes from different sources, at the DEMO conference in April in Santa Clara California. This isn’t just your run of the mill recipes.com app though, the UI is appealing, the navigation is a breeze and you can separate and search through recipes six ways to Sunday.

On the business side Edamam offers an intense, information packed widget for food blogs and websites to tap their vast knowledge base in the same ways as the mobile app and more. They are also offering an API for developer partners to tap that big food database.

In this interview with Edamam they talk about how they plan on being the goto place for food knowledge. In a few years time they hope that the end user will be able to go to the grocery store, by a piece of salmon and get a treasure trove of possibilities wrapped around Edamam information.

Off camera he admitted that he would love to see Edamam being tapped by the users smartphone in the grocery store, and then a smart refrigerator, stove, or other appliance that offers recipes, food guidance, wine recommendations, anything. We’re talking the Jetson’s Rosie in the big data era.

We’ve covered quite a few food startups here at Nibletz, this is the first time that a startup has such a clear path to the future. We really wish these guys well, and after you watch the video you’ll see they have their stuff together and could easily achieve that lofty goal.

Linkage:

Check out Edamam here at their website

See more of our TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 Coverage here

We’re on a sneaker-strapped, nationwide startup roadtrip, check it out here

NY Startup: LocalBonus Offers Extremely Simple Loyalty Rewards Program

After this years South By Southwest we quickly predicted that the “social discovery” space would become a thing of the past and that “Loyalty Rewards” would take it’s spot as the startup du jour. Now that loyalty and rewards is filling up faster than you can say Groupon, what’s going to set these startups apart is effect on the merchant and ease of use for the user.

NY startup LcoalBonus has both of those factors in check. LocalBonus is one of the easiest reward programs to set up. You simply add an existing credit card account to your LocalBonus account and you’re ready to earn rewards. In fact you can set up all of your credit cards if you choose.

LocalBonus plans a national rollout. They started out in New York and expanded last month into Seattle, Portland, Sacremento and Denver. LocalBonus founder and CEO Derek Webster told us that there are over 800 merchants in the program already.

More + video after the break
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We Talk With Sonar CEO Brett Martin One Year Later, Meet The Here Now Network.

Last year at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC we were out in full force to support Ocean City Maryland native Brett Martin. I city I practically grew up in and lived in for nearly 8 years of my formative years. Aside from that Sonar was the first of true social discovery apps and it was very cool then, and even cooler now after todays announcements.

We were totally stoked when Martin and the Sonar team made it to the finals where they came in as a runner up to high end peer to peer car rental startup, Get Around.

We wanted to know what it was like for the last year for the Sonar team. They didn’t win the cup last year but it seems that being a finalist was just as good.

They tripled their office size from 3-9 and they’ve added a whole new suite of features. They also launched an Android beta, which Martin assures me will be released to the public shortly.

Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 it was all about the Here Now Network. Back in March on a phone call with Martin I expressed some worry over the initial Sonar concept. It was fresh and new in May 2011 but by March 2012 there were apps like Highlight, Banjo and Glancee in the space. Martin kept telling me that they were working on things on their back end that he couldn’t talk about but they would blow me away.

Those things Martin showed off today at Disrupt, the Here Now Network, move Sonar far ahead of the competition again.

Sure there are plenty of apps that do discovery and proximity based discovery but Sonar and the Here Now Network are all about your own personal network of people who are here now. Your closest friends, business associates and family members who are in your immediate area are what matters most.

Martin describes some great use cases in the video below. For example when he steps off the subway on his way into work he checks in. He leaves a status “Just got off the subway, headed to Starbucks does anyone want anything”. That message is broadcast to the Sonar team (his coworkers) as soon as he passes by the office door just down the street from Starbucks. Now he can pick up coffee and bagels for everyone without picking up his phone any more than just checking in and looking at the order.

Another example he gives is that his team likes to go out to an outdoor food court sometimes. They all get different items from different vendors and if one of them finds a table they just check in and say “I found a spot in the shade, southeast corner”. The message is broadcast to his teammates.

There are endless things you can do with that feature.

Check out our talk with Brett Martin on the new features, life for the past year and where he and Sonar are going. We recently saw social discovery exit Glancee take an early exit to Facebook. Martin tells us he’s in it for the long haul.

We Check Out NY Startup Knodes Social Context API At TechCrunch Disrupt

Ron Williams, the co-founder of SnapGoods and Knodes, caught our eye on the second day of TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012. Knodes is a social data driven context API. You’ve probably heard the term SaaS before (Software as a service), Knodes is a BadasS startup (Big Data As A Service) according to Williams.

Now we’re accustomed to getting pitches. We receive hundred of pitches a week via email, Twitter, Facebook, Google plus and in person. We know what to look for and how to cut through the pitch clutter that most entrepreneurs have to use to get noticed and talk the talk. We’re 100% guilty of doing the same thing. However, Williams is a show me person, so today he showed me an amazing API.

Knodes takes social data form all the major social networks. We’re not just talking profiles, likes or interests, we’re talking about all of that and actual conversation data too, to find the relevant people pertaining to whatever it is you’re looking for.

At Nibletz I’m the Content Director. We decided we didn’t want an Editor in Chief and content directing, procuring and writing is what I do among a million other things. There are a few Content Directors out there but that’s the title on my personal Twitter profile. For the demonstration of Knodes Williams typed Content Director in the box and I was the second result listed.

I thought, wouldn’t it be great for startups to be able to use the Knodes tool. If they wanted to make a pitch for coverage they could simply check the word Editor, and of course it served up hundreds of editors, and notably, the ones that were closest to us first.

Williams sees Knodes as a very valuable tool and service for developers, publishers and many more. The foundation for it is solid and it’s very fast. Williams says it was born out of a need to better search things in his other successful startup SnapGoods. SnapGoods was one of the first peer to peer rental sites in the space. Many are copying his model.

Coincidently Williams shared with me the crazy story about how they came up with SnapGoods too. Since it’s not in the video I’ll tell you.

Williams had started dating his now fiancé, back in 2009. He wanted to impress her by taking her out for a motorcycle ride. The problem was he didn’t own a motorcycle, and you can’t rent them anywhere. Sure you can rent a Vespa but if you’ve met Williams a Vespa really isn’t his style. He wanted a hog.

So on a whim, Williams took to Craigslist and was able to rent a motorcycle from a complete stranger for $250. After he did that he decided more people good do things like that. It’s more experience driven than needs. As SnapGoods grew, Williams needed to build a better search and that’s where the original idea for Knodes came about.

Enough of that, check out the video below:

Linkage:

Find out more about Knodes here at knod.es (developers especially)

For more of our TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 coverage click here

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Video Interview With Diego Saez Gil Founder Of wehostels.com (formerly inbed.me)

Back in March we reported on a world traveler turned entrepreneur, Diego Saez Gil and his startup inbed.me. Inbed.me is a service that connects travelers to hostels across the world. In addition for finding, booking and discovering hostels, it has a back bone social network that helps users recommend hostels, suggest things to do and meet up while traveling.

Inbed.me was Diego’s second startup. His first startup was called Off Track Planet, the ultimate backpackers online guide to travel.

Diego recently changed the name of inbed.me to we hostels.com because it’s a little more politically correct. Inbed.me has some risky connotations.

Wehostels.com is exhibiting in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 check out our video interview below:

TechCrunch Disrupt: I Shot A 50 Caliber Rifle At A Fax Machine, Thanks To Twake

Twake, a new big data startup, had a great attention grabber at their booth at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC’s Startup Alley. Twake hired a man in a wooded area in a remote location with an arsenal of high-caliber fire arms and a junk pile of computer gear. Old cpus, monitors, fax machines, radios and other electronics were put in the pile for the man with the guns.

Meanwhile back at TechCrunch Disrupt Twake had an iPad app where passerby’s could choose a device they wanted to shoot, and the gun they wanted to shoot with. After they made their selections they would hit a button labeled “fire” which sent a signal back to the man with the guns to go ahead a fire away at the old computer junk.

This was very reminiscent of Tommy Jordan, the laptop shooting dad in North Carolina. Now even though I didn’t get to fire the gun myself, I could feel the thrill and satisfaction of popping a cap in that fax machines ass. The boys from Office Space would be proud.

So what kind of company goes through this much promotion to attract people to their booth? That would be Twake, a recently launched big data startup.

Twake is a secure, agnostic, scalable recommendation service. In their own words they describe Twake as:

“Twake’s cloud-based service maps anonymous referential data on customers, products and services with behaviors such as view, like, buy, and comment along with the sentiment and significance of each. Our wave propagation and interaction algorithms analyze patterns, recognize highly relevant items that are far removed from the source and synthesize recommendations that resonate”

We would say it’s a predictive recommendation engine. The idea of being able to recommend what a customer may buy next is often the competitive edge companies need, provided the data is right.

Twake’s platform is scalable to most industries. Their unique adaptive recommendation engine can handle e-commerce, app discovery, deep personalization, restaurant suggestions, smart pre-fetching, sentiment analysis, genome research, social discovery, travel planning, business intelligence, and network planning.

Is that too many verticals? Twake is so new that we’ll have to wait and see how it all comes together. It will be great to see what developers can do using Twakes API’s.

Check out the video here:

TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Interview With NY Startup hoppit

We got a chance to talk with the founder of hoppit at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2012. Hoppit was the winner of the best “Big Data” startup at the recent NY Tech Day.

So what is hoppit? Well hoppit is a discovery platform that lets you discover places completely based on atmosphere. Yelp, Urban Spoon and other restaurant recommendation sites use reviews that focus on cuisine to attract customers. With hoppit their engine takes into consideration keyword phrases that describe ambiance.

For instance, hoppit looks for multiple instances of groups of words like “romantic dinner” from there it would be able to dig deeper and determine that a restaurant is smaller and more intimate. This may be exactly what someone is looking for.

Right now hoppit lets you choose from eight different vibes; classy & upscale, hipster, watering hole, romantic, cozy & quaint, mad men,swanky & posh, trendy & chic, vintage & old world, and chill & relaxed.

After a long work week you know what you want and hoppit will help you find it. Check out our interview Steve Dziedzic below:

See more of our Disrupt coverage here