Startups In The Fastlane: Velocity Startup GreekPull

Crowdfunding is everywhere, there’s crowdfunding for your startup, crowdfunding for your movie, crowdfunding for the things you want and even crowdfunding for college money. Now, thanks to a San Diego startup that’s accelerating at Velocity in Indiana, there is crowdfunding for your fraternity or sorority.

Back in the olden days, before computers, internet, and crowdfunding, fraternities and sororities that were working on a project would have fundraisers, cash boxes, collection jars, and a treasurer to collect all the money. Then you had to trust that the treasurer didn’t spend the fraternity’s money on his own stash of brew and other college accoutrements.

GreekPull is working on a crowdfunding platform for fraternities and sororities that eliminates all these problems, makes it super easy for members to raise money for projects, and then securely collects the money so it can’t be squandered on the frivolous. Now when a sorority or a fraternity wants to hold a big clean-up project, restore a building, or buy toys for local needy kids the money is there. They can even use the funds for special events like spring formals and dances.

We got a chance to talk with AJ Agrawal about GreekPull and their team’s experience at Velocity. They’ll be graduating at the end of the month and think making the move from San Diego to Jeffersonville, Indiana was one of the best choices they’ve ever made. Check out the interview below.

What is the name of your startup?

GreekPull

What accelerator are you in?

Velocity Accelerator

When is demo day/investor day/graduation?

August 29th, 2013

Where is your startup originally from?

San Diego, CA

Tell us about your current team?

Eghosa Aihie- The Hustler: In charge of sales and marketing

AJ Agrawal- The Visionary: In charge of product development and investor relations

What does your startup do?

We’re a crowdfunding platform for Fraternities and Sororities

What are your goals for the accelerator program?

To complete our next seed round of $350,000

What’s one thing you’ve learned in the accelerator?

Never edit your product without talking to customers first, you’ll save a lot of time and money.

What’s the hardest piece of advice you’ve had to stomach so far?

Always being ready to pivot. It feels like your starting completely over when you pivot and sometimes it’s hard to stomach that it’s all part of the learning process.

What is your goal for the day after demo day?

To further conversation with potential investors and customers.

Why did you choose this accelerator?

Over half the National Fraternities and Sororities are located in Indianapolis, so we are in an ideal location to get customer feedback.

If you relocated for the accelerator are you staying in your new city?

Yes, however, we will most likely move a little closer to Indianapolis.

What’s one thing you learned about an accelerator that you didn’t know when you applied?

We’ve been amazed how nice the people in Jeffersonville have been to us. Coming from San Diego, we were unsure what to expect heading into Southern Indiana. Overall, the connections we have made has been priceless, and we look forward to staying in touch with all the people we have met.

Where can people find out more?

greekpull.com

Founder Spotlight: Miguel Ramirez, CEO Soccerly.com

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.

Beware the ill planned innovative rollout.

San Diego Startup Forward Metrics Is Strategic Planning Made Easy

San Diego startup ForwardMetrics is off to the races running. They specialize in simple, easy to understand strategic planning, but once you dive into ForwardMetrics it’s much more than just planning. The ForwardMetrics community is made up of entrepreneurs, c-level executives, executive and business coaches and people just starting out in the business world.

Last october at CTIA’s MobileCon event, ForwardMetrics founder Ozzie DiVinere told bnetTV.com that ForwardMetrics will become the goto place for anyone in business who wants to be successful.

Their enterprise class strategic planning software is based in the cloud and has two main products FM Navigator which any sized company can use to help brainstorm new strategies, hit goals and hold stakeholders accountable.

The other piece is Client Navigator which is a set of tools for executive and business coaches that offers new ways to work with clients.

Then they have the ForwardMetrics community which is designed to connect forward thinkers at any stage in their business lives, to ultimately become more successful.

We got a chance to talk with Andrew Hard the Marketing Director at ForwardMetrics. Check out the interview below:

What is your startup, what does it do?

Our startup is called ForwardMetrics, we have built enterprise-class strategic planning software that is based in the cloud. Companies can use our software (called FM Navigator) to brainstorm new strategies, hit their goals and hold stakeholders in key departments accountable.

We also have a Client Navigator product, a different version with a set of additional tools designed specifically for consultants and executive coaches that offers new ways to work with clients – along with powerful tools for acquisition, retention and revenue.

Our very unique go-to-market strategy is not to sell directly to companies, but to license our software to consultants and executive coaches, who are the individuals that actually conduct strategic planning sessions at the vast majority of companies.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

The founders are our CEO Ozzie DiVinere and CSO Scott Warner, here are their brief backgrounds:

Ozzie DiVinere is CEO/Co-Founder of ForwardMetrics.com. He Co-Founded the company in 2011 with a vision to bring enterprise cloud-based technology to the strategic planning, performance management and project management space. DiVinere’s passion is to transform organizations by connecting them with executive coaches and strategic planners to adopt cloud technologies to help each one achieve success and grow their businesses. A win-win paradigm.

In his previous role as Senior Vice President of the Private Client Group at Altegris, which was acquired by the Fortune 250 Company Genworth, DiVinere was responsible for delivering strategic sales and support to Altegris’ wealthiest customers globally. In addition, DiVinere created a very successful toy company, Skate Monster, which had Walmart as its primary customer.

DiVinere received his B.S. in Business Administration, Marketing from San Diego State University.

Scott Warner serves as Chief Strategic Officer/Co-Founder. After Co-Founding the company in 2011, Warner provides the vision for the company and is the Chief Architect of the FM Navigator and Client Navigator platforms.Prior to founding ForwardMetrics he was the Founder, CEO and Chairman of AccuSoft Corporation, the leading imaging technology company, which was acquired in 2008. He is also the founder of several other companies in areas including fitness and real estate as well as an angel investor and adviser to numerous organizations in the area of strategic planning and growth.

Where are you based?

We are based in Encinitas, Calif. Encinitas is just north of downtown San Diego.

What is the startup culture like where you are based?

The culture is San Diego is very strong for startups, BioTech especially. The downtown San Diego area is extremely friendly for startups. Very friendly and very strong startup culture. There are a number of incubators and angel investors in the downtown area, a lot of venture capital floating around and a very strong entrepreneurial spirit.

The startup capitals in the area are in Carlsbad (biotech), Sorento Valley and downtown there are several business parks (nearby the Qualcomm campus, etc.) There are definitely pockets throughout the area – San Diego has a very unique startup culture, but there a very friendly atmosphere, resources and money to be invested.

Most San Diego-area startups are Biotech, consulting or chipmakers – ForwardMetrics is very unique for the area.

What problem does your startup solve?

Eighty percent of companies DO NOT HAVE a strategic plan – a ship without a rudder. The other 20 percent do not implement their plans properly.

Most often, a consultant will come in to an organization and conduct a lengthy and highly expensive sessions – at the end of which he hands the company their strategic plan for the next one to five years in the form of a static Excel spreadsheet. That static, print document is not dynamic and becomes old just weeks after the consultant walks out of the building – most often it ends up in a desk drawer and is looked at never or rarely, and then only by the executive team.

ForwardMetrics’ new cloud-based software lets consultants and coaches offer companies a dynamic, living strategic plan that can be tracked and implemented at an organization after they leave. The software tracks goals from the plan in different departments, making it so the company leadership can track progress and make sure that the company is performing as needed.

What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in the startup process?

We have overcome a number of obstacles. We’ve overcome the typical obstacles around raising money from investors, skepticism and reluctance to take risks. Round A of fundraising will end this coming week – after really starting the process a full year ago.

We’ve also faced the challenges that many area startups have dealt with – difficulties with finding the right outside development team, marketing/design agency and video vendors. There are many resources of this kind in the area – but many of these companies overcharge, underperform and care very little about their clients.

Shifting from a dev team in India, to our current team in the Ukraine – along with having many different remote employees — has caused all sorts of interesting communications problems.

We’ve also face the problems that a lot of startups deal with of being understaffed – people are wearing multiple hats and there is more to get done than we have resources and people to do them. Through all of that, we have managed to launch a solid, enterprise-class software app with an eager base of prospective clients and a solid social and PR presence.

What are some of the milestones your startup has achieved?

On May 15, we will launch game-changing new technology – which helps organizations change the paradigm and operate on a results-based approach. It is a revolutionary shift in how companies are run, changing the focus from managing activity to a focus only on results.

We also have a thriving community site that has grown to over 500 executive coaches, consultants and business leaders sharing content and making connections. The membership growth on this site has increased very rapidly in just the last few months – and the growth is only spiking even more.

We’ve also forged an impressive number of strategic partnerships with hundreds of consultants, executive coaches and strategic planners – generated a lot of interest from surprisingly large companies – and have also gotten some good press exposure.

What are your next milestones?

Our next milestones are to launch the product and grow to at least $2-4 million in revenue by the end of the year. We also intend to grow our community site well into the thousands by the end of the year, and of course growing our client base to several top consulting firms and prominent companies.

We also want to receive that crucial customer feedback and greatly enhance our products so that they can be integrated into literally thousands of businesses around the globe.

Who are your mentors and role models?

Mark Cuban, Marc Benioff, Larry Ellison, Jeffrey Immelt, Steve Jobs, Steven Covey

What are some of the advantages/disadvantages growing your startup outside of Silicon Valley?

Advantages: Top talent is extremely attracted to the San Diego area, both because of the city’s reputation and the natural beauty of the destination. Top talent in sales and marketing can also be found at extremely discounted prices in this area as opposed to L.A., New York, etc. There is also a large base of VC and angel investors, along with retired businessmen, in the San Diego area – so the region also helped with fund-raising as well. San Diego also offers an interested array of strategic business partners and marketing boutique-type resources.

Disadvantages: Finding good development resources is definitely a challenge – this might apply to a lot of places, it’s probably something you her somewhat frequently, but it’s very hard to know what you’re going to get and also get good work back for your dollar. Through everything, we have ended up with a very talented dev team that we’re able to work with very closely. Another great advantage of being in the Silicon Valley area is access to input from a wide array of technology companies – however, at ForwardMetrics we have had access to great input from professional strategic planning professionals and received extremely positive feedback even very recently.

What’s next for your startup?

The way we reach the market is very unique: Instead of going after companies, we work with consultants, executive coaches and strategic planners – who introduce the technology to their clients and continue to work with them to create and execute plans that achieve goals.

From there, we launch FM University to train and certify our partner coaches and consultants on the use of FM Navigator and our other cloud-based tools, and conduct extensive trainings and virtual events – along with a massive PR blitz! We will also be hiring on more staff including a much larger, more robust sales team and more in-house marketing resources, heck, maybe even an HR person!

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

To find out more, please visit www.forwardmetrics.com or visit our social: Our Twitter is @ForwardMetrics, our Facebook is facebook.com/ForwardMetrics and our LinkedIn page is http://www.linkedin.com/company/2537683.

Now check out Recruiting for Success: Tapping into Your Local University

Revestor Is Simplifying Real Estate For Investors On The Web And Mobile

If you’re in the market to buy or sell your home in a traditional way there are plenty of resources for you. When it comes to mobile we immediately think of Zillow. On the web there’s hundreds of websites that will easily access MLS listings for you and make it easier for you to do your own work on buying or selling your home before bringing a real estate agent into the mix.

For those looking to buy or sell real estate as investors though, the tools are quite limited.

San Diego startup Revestor is all about real estate from the investors perspective. The tools out there today allow investors to sift through hundreds of thousands of listings but they don’t take into consideration the important information for investors when it comes to looking for the best deals.

“Revestor is a multidimensional patent-pending real estate search engine that finds homes-for-sale by the highest potential cash flow based on the average rents in the area. Revestor can be accessed for free on the web or on the iPhone as a free App. Our goal in 2013 is to be the #1 ‘must have’ tool for real estate investors and real estate agents who work with real estate investors. Revestor solves one of the hardest problems in real estate investing: finding deals in the first place. Instead of spending hours sifting and sorting through multiple websites and archaic spreadsheets, Revestor does all the heavy lifting by presenting potential listings/opportunities to our users so they can go out and do their due-diligence. We simply give investors and agents a better place to start from. Users can expect User Profiles, Foreclosure Auctions, Advanced Searching, Alerts, and Advertising to be released in 2013.” Founder & CEO Bill Lyons told us in an interview.

We talked in depth with Lyons about Revestor, check out the interview below.

Startup Weekend Company Breadcrumbs, Lets You Know Where You’ve Been

A San Diego startup, called Breadcrumbs is helping people keep track of where they’ve been using their smartphone. It’s like automated checking in but could be more useful later on. Maybe you want to keep a journal of the places that you’ve been. Perhaps the next time you’re in a city or town you want to easily be able to recall a place you ventured into on your last trip. We travel so much around here that it’s easy to mistake some downtown areas with others.

Breadcrumbs is innovating at the EvoNexus incubator in San Diego, alongside other great startups like Nulu Languages, TomNod, Antengo, Barc, and Fashinoning Change. The company also received a $50,000 seed investment from Qualcomm Labs.

Breacrumbs is another success story out of Startup Weekend. Founder Joel Drotleff had pitched the original idea at San Diego Startup Weekend, citing the fact that he could never remember how long he spent at the dog park. The other co-founders joined him for the weekend project and now today they have a product in the Google Play store for Android and the iTunes App store.

Breadcrumb’s Sean Dominguez told nibletz in an interview:

“It’s a pretty cool story. We all met at Startup Weekend San Diego back in June when Joel, our CEO, pitched an idea for creating a self-tracking application since he never knew how long he was spending at the dog park. We all thought it was a cool idea, joined the team for the weekend, and ended up taking the Qualcomm sponsored prize that weekend – as well as another prize at Qualcomm’s event Uplinq two weeks later.”

Obviously they caught the most important eyes at Qualcomm who has continued to support the venture. We got a chance to have a more in-depth discussion with Dominguez check out the rest of the interview after the break.

San Diego Startup Expeerience Crowdsourced Event Photos For Everyone

There are a few startups out there vying for the position to be the platform that allows people at an event to all upload photos from the same event. San Diego startup Expeerience is one of those companies.

Expeerience allows users to share videos and photos at events. When individual Expeerience users upload their photos at any particular event they are put together with all of the photos and videos from other users at the same event. Essentially, Expeerience is crowdsourcing photos and videos from their users at events, creating one big gallery of event photos.

With many of the other photo sharing apps available today people take photos and videos and upload them to their existing social networks. If they’re at a big event there’s a good chance time lines will be filled with similar photos. However, as co-founder Stephen Boyd explains in an interview with nibletz, after the event everyone goes their separate ways. Social networks begin filling with the next big event.

Expeerience keeps an ongoing record in a “collection” with all the photos from the same event that users can go back to over and over again. Expeerience users can also save event photos from other users. At a small event like a wedding, users can easily save the bouquet toss and dancing photos from other users. They can do the same thing at a football game for big plays and touch downs.

Boyd compares Expeerience to a “Pinterest style Twitter”.

Check out our interview with Boyd below.

San Diego Startup: The Tip Network Is PayPal For Servers

Although restaurant and hospitality industry technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the years, one area where it still falls short is tipping. That’s where San Diego startup The Tip Network comes in.

With the economy the way it is these days restaurant owners and managers are mice-managing their shift schedules even more than they ever have before. Owners are managers are quick to make cuts to their wait staff the minute they can. This causes a major pain for servers. In a lot of restaurants servers either need to stick around after getting cut or at the end of their shift, come back at closing time or wait until the next day to reconcile their tips and tip out. This can be a major pain point for servers.

The Tip Network offers solutions for problems like that and other problems that plague proprietors of tip based businesses.

Tip Network is a cloud based tip management solution for independent and chain restaurants. We enable managers to easily track, allocate, and distribute tips digitally to their staffs Tip Network. Each staff member has their own unique Tip Network profile that allows them to (1) send money to any account, at any bank (2) send money to anyone in the network, (3) and many other things down the road .

Using the Tip Network, servers take ownership and management of their tips over, instantly. Now, from the comfort of their own home, or device they can tip out to support staff, move tips to their bank accounts even pay back loans to other servers. Like PayPal, with The Tip Network users get their own ID and can move their tips around anywhere in the network.

Founder Greg Crisci has first hand experience as a server and knows the pain that his startup hopes to solve. He’s busy these days looking for integration partners and preparing the implementation of his new tipping alternative. He did take a few minutes to talk to us though. Check out the interview below:

San Diego Startup: ScoreStream, CrowdSourced High School Scores

With the rise in online news sources and the decrease in old fashioned print journalists, most cities across the country don’t have a dedicated high school sports reporter. I remember back in the early 90’s growing up in the Baltimore area, the Sun and all the hyper local papers had one, if not a handful of full time reporters who’s beat it was to post the high school scores, details and results for track and field meets and anything that had to do with high school sports. As newspapers began cutting reporters, the high school beat drifted to the wayside.

There are a handful of high school sports sites on the internet but all of them seem to lack any decent box scores, or results from previous games. I remember looking up a high school score on the Sunday after a Friday opening game and it still hadn’t been updated.

This is the pain that Derrick Oien was looking to solve when he founded ScoreStream, a San Diego startup dedicated to high school sports.

ScoreStream can be found in the iOS app store and allows users to update high school sports teams in real time. From there they can post to Twitter, Facebook and ScoreStream’s own platform. ScoreStream encourages users who are actually at the game to post updates to that teams scores as the games go on. Oien has also baked a system into the backend of the website that uses GPS coordinates to tell if the person reporting the score is actually at the game.

“We have a data base of high schools, colors, mascots and longitude and latitude, so we know if a user is posting from a game,” Oien told UT San Diego. “What we do on the back end for media companies is we look at the scores coming in and we look at where the user is. So I can verify where they are.”

It’s the crowdsourcing part of ScoreStream that sets the new startup apart from sites like MaxPreps and SportsNgin. Those two sites are used to feed scores to other media outlets but rely on the school itself or a regional person to report a bulk of scores at one time.

ScoreStream has already inked it’s first media partner. San Diego’s XX1090-AM uses the service to supply their high school sports scores to their website.

Not bad for a startup launched this past April.

Linkage:

Check out ScoreStream here

Check out this interview at TechCocktail

Source: UT San Diego

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

San Diego Startup: Cream Of The Crop San Diego Changes The Job Game With Transparency & More

Is there really a way to reinvent the jobs site? Sure there are plenty of startups out there that think they have the next monster.com on their hands but do they?

People on the jobhunt have dealt with the shortcomings of jobs sites for years because they’re usually in a position where they have no choice. Right now for instance, monster.com has so many vague ads you don’t know what you’re applying for and in some cases you don’t know who you are applying to. There is no way to separate the head hunters and the employment services from bonafide job openings at real companies.

While many website strive to get better and better every year, searching for a job on Craigslist gets worse and worse year over year. Sure I can understand getting 50 fake emails when listing an iPad or iPhone for sale on Craigslist, but the amount of scammy junk mail that’s coming in off Craigslist job boards is overwhelming as well. It seems that one in three Craigslist job ads are legitimate. It could be less.

One of the other big pains in the current job site model is the amount of money that sites charge companies for posting jobs. Sure they have to make money but the fees that monster.com and other job boards charge employers, almost guarantees that startups can’t afford to post in front of the masses.

This year we’ve seen a few good job platforms come across the pages here at nibletz.com; DC based Barrel of Jobs is definitely one of those as is hiredmyway a Detroit startup that has since moved to Chicago.

San Diego job site Cream of The Crop, joins that list. They offer free listings for employers. They also require transparency in posting jobs, they want the applicants to know who they are applying to and what they are applying for. Novel ideas, right?

We got a chance to talk with Cream Of The Crop’s Oscar Urteaga in the interview below:

Interview With San Diego Startup Recovery Brands, Disrupting The Addiction Treatment Space

The addiction treatment space is a $16 billion dollar industry. When you or a loved one needs an addiction treatment center, finding the right center can be an overwhelming experience, especially when coupled with helping the addict. Often times, it’s too late when you actually need the services of a treatment center, to do the mounds of research.

There are lots of factors that go into finding the right treatment center. Will my insurance cover it, how far is it from home, is it a lockdown program, can we visit, how much is it? Sure there are sites out there with directories of treatment centers and they are great. Many recommend getting treatment out of state.

Even with centers charging $25,000 to $50,000 per person per month, there are many treatment centers out there that aren’t reaching profitability. Some of the profitable centers aren’t reaching their desired goals for treatment. Through Rehab Brands services they hope to help treatment centers become more profitable, help rehabilitate more people who need it and educate addicts and their families in a better way. Some of the smaller centers are also being hurt by the fact that many recommend getting treatment out of state, and that is lost income as far as they are concerned.

This startup has a very interesting story and we were able to get more of it in the interview below.

San Diego Startup: TextaPet Is Picking Up Steam INTERVIEW

If you’re a pet lover you’re going to love this new innovative idea called TextaPet .It’s like a cross-breed (ya see what we did there) between Instagram, and Facebook for your pet.

TextaPet co-founder Matt Clevenger told Nibletz: “TextaPet is a fun, easy photo-sharing app for animal lovers. We created TextaPet to help make people’s relationship with the animals in their life even more meaningful and enjoyable. We also hope to use the technology to better connect new pet seekers with adoptable shelter pets! We see TextaPet saving thousands of precious lives each year.”

Sure there are plenty of ways to share your pet pics already but TexaPet is it’s own unique app and environment and it’s sure to be a huge hit with pet lovers. Although they haven’t released their user numbers, they’ve already created a good following on social media networks. They’ve amassed a following of 22,000 followers on Twitter already. Most of their reviews in the iTunes store echo the same thoughts, people have been waiting for an app like textapet.

Textapet’s other co-founder is Daniel Carpenter. The two met in their home town of Santa Cruz but they are in the process of relocating the company to San Diego. Both co-founders have entrepreneurial spirit in their blood and they both had started clothing lines in college.

More after the break
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