St.Louis Startup Archives - Page 3 of 3

St. Louis Startup: Passer.by Opens Donation Platform For Business

Last month we brought you an interview with Passer.by co-founder Todd Metheny about this new crowdfunding platform exclusive to the film industry. When we spoke with Metheny that hadn’t quite launched their donation platform.

They’ve now announced their launch and have three films that the public can donate to and help fund. If you’ve ever wanted to partake in the movie business, now’s your chance. This unique service allows ordinary people to invest in movies and independent films. Passer.by is a welcomed source of funding for independent film producers who typically bootstrap their projects, in a very competitive business.

The three films open for funding via passer.by are: The Lovely Passing Life by filmmaker Daniel Leeb, Mrs. Henderson’s Cat by filmmaker Will Pelligrini and Fit To Print by filmmaker Adam Chadwick. Leeb is seeking funds for production while Pelligrini and Chadwick are raising funds for post production.

To introduce the service Metheny told us last month that they are allowing filmmakers to pay them, “what they want”. Once the films reach their funding, they will hopefully pay Passer.by something for helping them raise funds. This promotion is available for the first 20 films that are funded by Passer.by’s crowdsourced funding platform.

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St.Louis Startup: BonFyre Brings Social Network Back To Campus, Attracts Square Co-Founder Jim McKelvey

Last month we brought you the story of LockerDome a social network for amateur athletes based in St.Louis. LockerDome was able to attract some key investors and advisors. One of those is St.Louis native Jim McKelvey who just happens to be the co-founder of the widely popular mobile payment startup, Square. McKelvey co-founded Square with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

Another social networking startup has also received backing and advice from McKelvey. McKelvey sits on the board of Off Campus Media LLC, the paurent company to the BonFyre app.

BonFyre was founded by Mark Sawyier, a graduate of Washington University. The app is a social media and location sharing app aimed at college students looking to plan what’s next with friends, find out what’s hot and save money around campus.

One of the main concepts behind Bonfyre is to take the social network back to students. We all remember the days when Facebook was exclusive to students with a college email address. While everyone wanted to join this exclusive club (and we all eventually did), the exclusive college nature of Facebook at the time, made it more about sharing social events with friends and then getting out and doing stuff together.

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St.Louis Startup: Busy Event Is A Complete Event Management Solution Designed By Industry Veterans

Let’s face it at this point in time event apps are a dime a dozen. There are good established event apps like Eventbrite and there are some new comers to the space that may prove to be disruptive. On the other side of the spectrum it seems that anyone who’s hosted a birthday party for their three year old has come up with an event app. BusyEvent is actually neither.

The St.Louis startup was founded by Brian Slawin and David Schenberg two St.Louis area event industry veterans with over 40 years of experience. There complete approach to events works off the idea that you need to do more than sell tickets and check people into the door in order to have a great event. BusyEvent is part of the Microsoft BizSpark program. They are more than just an event app. Slawin tells Nibletz.com:

“BusyEvent is a live events technology company. We have developed a mobile web app for event producers that helps make their events easier to manage and more profitable to produce. Our premier product, gomobile.pro, puts an entire tradeshow into your phone, making it easier to find and connect with the people, products and information event participants are interested in.”

We got a chance to interview Slawin about BusyEvent and here’s what he told us:

Who are the founders of BusyEvent and what are your backgrounds?

Brian Slawin: Since the mid-90s, Brian has been working in the events industry, designing, building and managing tradeshow programs and technology products for dozens of Fortune 1000 clients like Domino’s Pizza, HP, Ameriprise and H&R Block, Toyota AirSports and many others. A strong operational leader with a clear communication style, he has successfully managed cross-functional teams, has a demonstrated aptitude as a hands-on software engineer and managing the use of numerous technologies.

David Schenberg: David is a veteran of the events industry with 20 years of experience designing, managing and selling technology that motivates people to meet and do business together. He has experience with major brands like AB, HP, M&M Mars, Domino’s Pizza, H&R Block, Ameriprise Financial, Marriott and Ritz Carlton. He leads the way in the use of emerging technology and his clients trust him to help navigate the ever changing landscape.

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Is LockerDome St. Louis’ Groupon?

LockerDome is one hot startup coming out of St.Louis. It’s the first ever dedicated sports social network for youth and amateur sports. LockerDome has been likened to the Facebook or LinkedIn for athletes.

LockerDome allows individual sports organizations to develop their own sports networks, and most of the well known sports programs in the country have already joined and have thriving networks. The Dallas Texans, one of the top ranked soccer teams in the country has a LockerDome network, as does the East Coat Pro Showcase, a well known east coast event that’s made up of more than 100 of the 2011 Major League Baseball draft picks.

LockerDome and CEO Gabe Lozano aren’t just making a big name for themselves in the sports world, they’ve already chalked up a lot of funding. In December of 2011 they raised $750,000 in an angel round. Participants in the round include serial entrepreneurs Brian and Carol Matthews, co-founders of Primary Network and CDM Fantasy Sports; Capital Innovators, a St. Louis-based technology accelerator fund; Moosylvania Marketing, a nationally-recognized marketing agency; and Hal Gentry, co-founder of Capital Innovators and GridLogix, among more than a dozen other angel investors.

LockerDome also caught the eye of Square’s co-founder Jim McKelvey who invested and also took a seat on the company’s board of directors. But McKelvey wasn’t easily sold at first. He’s not the kind of investor that looks to pump money into a “flavor of the week” just to catch a big windfall he has three businesses that he’s started and still runs today, including Square which he founded with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

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St Louis Start Up Spotlight: Passer.by Now Anyone Can Invest In A Movie

Are you old enough to remember the days of HSX.com, before 9/11 it was the place to go to invest virtual money into real life actors, actresses and movie projects, called the Hollywood Stock Exchange. Now this wasn’t real you weren’t really investing money in a movie it was more of a game, kind of like fantasy baseball. If the movie did well the actors and actresses did well and then you made more virtual money.

Well shove all that aside because a St. Louis startup called passer.by is working on a crowdfunding website for real movies. Passer.by was founded by childhood friends Todd Metheny and Josh Clayton. Clayton has some experience in the film business but for Metheny it’s a new venture based on a love of movies.

Passer.by will be a way to get film projects off the ground with the help of many people, from friends and family. They have several funding options and plans they are working on. Metheny says they are riding out the “JOBS act” and the SEC to see if the entire crowdfunding model will be a go.

As for how much it costs for the film maker, right now they are launching the first 20 films with the film makers “paying what they choose”.

“It’s certainly a risk, but it’s exactly the kind of risk that we’re excited to take,” Passerby CEO
Todd Metheny said. “Some people will choose to pay nothing, but it’s a matter of trust. Our
mission is to be the crowdfunding option that puts filmmakers first, and to do that we need to
create a relationship with our users that is built on trust.”

CCO Josh Clayton is exciting to see how filmmakers react to the “pay what you choose”
option. “We’d love to be ‘pay what you choose’ forever, and we very well might be,” he
said. “We just need to make sure it’s possible to cover the expenses related to running the
platform at that level. We believe it’s a favorable experiment for the filmmaker.”

We spent some time talking with Metheny about passer.by check out the interview below the break.