Nashville Startup Populr.Me Could Be A Game Changer

by Kyle in Everywhere Else, SouthernB, Startups, Tennessee
1 Comment 0 Like 1,845

Tennessee has some great startups. We saw a slew of them this past weekend during 48 Hour Launch, you can check out all of that coverage here.  Now we move our coverage of startups “everywhere else” east to Nashville.

There’s a startup in Nashville called Populr.me which is bubbling under the radar. Populr.me is a self publishing platform that the company dubs a “Personalized One Page” or pop. They were aiming for a Q1 release, right now they are currently doing a beta sign up on their home page.

From what we can tell Populr.me’s POP platform has a variety of uses. You can use it for your resume and include multimedia.  On the other end of that spectrum, companies can use it to build a one page for welcoming new employees, or a flier page for talking about a company event.

The company’s motto is “Richer than email and Faster than a website”. While there are plenty of self publishing platforms, Populr.me seems to offer simplicity and quickness as their top selling points. There isn’t a service out there that allows for this quick, one page publishing. Sure you can set up a Blogger blog or Word Press blog in just a few minutes but you have to fidget with themes, produce content, figure out what plugins you want for multimedia and then you can publish.


The Nashville based startup was founded by CEO Nicholas Holland and the rest of the team includes Jared Scheel (Chief Product Officer) and Daniel Nelson (Chief Technology Officer). A couple of weeks back the company tweeted that someone in their beta test had embedded a Starbucks gift card, pretty neat stuff.

Some folks around the web have compared Populr.me to popular site about.me. I think the concepts are inherently different. About.me is my one online destination site to link all my links in the world. Of course it can include my resume and other things, but it’s not the same. Populr.me is going to allow the user to make a resume page, or maybe a birthday party page, an invitation, all kinds of other easy to use tasks.

Nashville music and technology entrepreneur Mark Montgomery, is an investor in Populr.me because he feels that the service could be “a game changing venture that could boost Nashville’s position on the digital map” that according to Getahn Ward at the Tennessean.

Linkage:

Sign up for Populr.me mailing list and beta here

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” check out these stories from “everywhere else” (there’s a lot of Memphis in there right now)

 

 

Memphis Startup: ScrewPulp Final Pitch 48 Hour Launch

by Kyle in Everywhere Else, LaunchMemphis, Memphis, Startups
Comments Off on Memphis Startup: ScrewPulp Final Pitch 48 Hour Launch 0 Like 1,672

ScrewPulp is an idea that hasn’t been tackled in quite this way before. It’s a self publishing website that allows authors to publish their books to the site.  So what’s so unique about that?

Problem: More and more authors are turning to self publishing. Just look at 50 Shades of Gray for instance. According to the startups data there were over 200,000 self published books out of over 1.5 million books published with ISBN numbers.

Self published authors have a hard time garnering social network interest, ratings and reviews which can be the lifeline for a self published book.

Solution: ScrewPulp offers an innovative new platform for self publishers that builds the social network interest piece and the ratings and reviews piece as well. After a book is downloaded 100 times they will switch to $.99 for the next 1,000 copies. After that they’ll increase to $1.99 and so on.

The monetization plan is to take 25% of the sales from books that are selling on the site.

Screw Pulp will giveaway the authors first 100 copies in exchange for a social media share and a rating/review. Readers who love reading new books will be able to download one free book at a time. Once they share it across social media and provide a star rating and or review, they’ll be allowed to download their next free book.

As far as rights are concerned, Billings would like to require authors to hold their work on ScrewPulp for a year regardless of whether or not that author gets their book picked up from another publisher.

Founder Richard Billings said in the Q&A that ScrewPulp will start with novel sized books first and then expand to series and even short stories.  Billings also said he would like to use the format for indie artists as well and said we could expect a ScrewTapes out at some point as well.

Check out their Sunday pitch video below:

 

Linkage:

Check out ScrewPulp here at their website

Here’s more of Nibletz’ coverage of 48 Hour Launch in Memphis

Nibletz is the voice of startups everywhere else, here’s more stories from “everywhere else”