Startup Interview Archives - Page 29 of 34

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:

Are Your Outside Sales People Really Working? Nashville Startup: CallProof Can Tell You

Anyone who owns or runs a business with an outside sales force has undoubtedly experienced cheating sales people. You know the type, the ones who come in for the sales meetings, report that they’ve seen a bunch of clients and that none of them were interested in your services. For all you know they could have been sitting at Starbucks all day, running around doing personal errands or even worse, at home sleeping.

Business owners and operators with outside sales forces have probably tried a few CRM solutions, but even those can be ineffective. Sales people forget to update them, or they fudge their entries just to prove they’re doing a great job.

Not all sales people are bad, of course you know your top producers, they’re out there making sales.

A startup in Nashville aims to help those with outside sales forces. CallProof keeps call logs and appointment records and can allow a manager to monitor the progress of their sales people, even if they’re using their own phone (with permission of course). This way you can see if your sales people are making a bunch of one minute phone calls or they’re actually going through the sales process.

With CallProof you can also see if your sales people are making appointments. CallProof isn’t just about the underperforming or lazy sales people. Managers can use the data provided by CallProof to help coach their sales people as well.

Robert Hartline the CEO and Co-Founder of the Nashville based startup, created out of necessity. He was actually one of those managers managing an outside sales force for a wireless company. He created CallProof to make sure that sales people were doing the necessary activity to actually produce results.

We got a chance to talk with Hartline in the interview below.

Atlanta Startup: TRAINlete Enters Into The Athlete/Private Coach Market

Over the past two years there’s been an explosion in startups looking to connect people with other professional services that they may need. Just this year alone we’ve seen Florida startup Coach Crowd along with Boston startup Coach Up offer a connection market place for parents of student athletes to connect with private coaches.

Prior to this new wave of services on the internet, it’s been tough for athletes and their parents to connect to coaches. Often times they would have to go by word of mouth recommendation from their normal team coach, high school coach or fellow athlete. There was also the bulletin board at the local Y and even the supermarket. Now there are a variety of online social networks and marketplaces to connect athletes with coaches.

Coming out of the gate Atlanta startup Trainlete knew that the space was just starting up but heating up quick. Although the team started working on the idea 15 months ago they elected not to open up shop until they were truly ready.

Even as a non athlete I was able to find the features that stand out on Trainlete. First off, Trainlete doesn’t take cut of the transaction between athlete and coach. They’re working off other revenue models such as advertising and sponsorship.

Trainlete also offers the opportunity to talk to correspond with the coach directly on or off their network. While Trainlete is far from a non-profit or charity organization, co-founders Jeremy Clouse, Eric Blumenthal and Blake Sandberg put the safety of their athlete clients as a top priority. It’s also important to them to connect coaches and athletes because of the great life building that can be involved in coaching.

That’s why they open up direct connection avenues and allow payment to be exchanged directly between the two parties. With those two options as key competitive advantages they should have no trouble building their community quickly and with that growth and scaling comes other revenue opportunities.

We got a chance to talk with Blumenthal in the interview below:

Des Moines Startup: Tikly Wants To Solve Ticket Shock, INTERVIEW

Des Moines Iowa startup Tikly wants to solve ticket shock. The startups 22 year old founder Emma Peterson experienced ticket shock first hand while touring for roughly a year with Iowa’s favorite American folk band, The Nadas. What she found while touring with them is that venues and artists feel ripped off and taken advantage of by the outrageous fees associated with the mainstream ticketing services (LiveNation/TicketMaster). So rather than trying to design some new platform to game the TicketMaster system Peterson set out to create a whole new ticketing system.

Tikly is that system. Peterson tells us in the interview below, that her fee structure is centered around easy to understand, low-cost, flat rate fees. This is obviously something that artists, venues and fans will love.

We’ve seen a lot of ticketing apps proposed, like one being accelerated at the Brandery in Cincinnati. That team is hoping to provide a platform for small group ticket sales to sporting events. Another ticketing platform Tikk.it, was presented last week in Chattanooga at the GigTank demo day. They hope to take on Ticketmaster as well.

With a mission that rivals Eddie Veder’s campaign against TicketMaster in the 1990’s, Peterson is hoping that independent artists, and smaller venues will embrace Tikly and help her build scale for her ticketing startup. We think that by going to artists and small venues directly, rather than trying to rock the sports industry or game the concert market, Peterson has a more realistic plan for success.

Check out our interview with this young, innovative female entrepreneur from middle America below.

Buy,Sell,Swap Your Clothes With NY Startup ClosetDash INTERVIEW

Just yesterday we brought you the story of a new social e-commerce platform centered around the newest and latest fashions. With Ann Arbor startup HangTrend you can see the latest styles, talk about them with your friends and even purchase them direct from the designer. HangTrend is about the hot new clothes.

NY startup ClosetDash is about the buying, selling and swapping of gently used clothes. Face it there are tons of clothes in most people’s closets that they’ll never actually wear out in public again. For whatever reason, that great dress, or pair of slacks is hanging in the closet .Wouldn’t it be great if you could easily sell them, or swap them?

What if you’re looking for a way to affordably outfit a new wardrobe. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could go through someone else’s closet and find your next great outfit? Well with ClosetDash you can.

ClosetDash was created by Jennifer Lee, for exactly those things. The concept sounds a lot like Australian Y-Combinator startup 99dresses sans the virtual currency model (which in most cases is actually better).

Jennifer Lee goes into detail about how ClosetDash works in the interview below, but it’s basically this, you upload your closet and open it up to the ClosetDash community. You can sell clothes, swap clothes and buy clothes to put in your virtual ClosetDash closet and your actual closet at home.

Check out our interview with Lee below:

Swedish Startup: Jobylon Looks To Simplify The Job Search INTERVIEW

The job space is ripe for a good disruption. Monster has been one of the kings of the industry for quite some time. A new startup in Sweden is looking to innovate in the job space. Jobylon’s founders want to simplify the job seeking process while allowing job hunters more options to connect with employers over things that could matter when looking for their next career.

Jobylon integrates social media, job bounties, and the cultural component of the job search to become a “one stop shop” of sorts for job hunters.

We got to interview Jobylon CEO Aref Abedi who tells us how Jobylon is different than any other job site out there. He also talks to us about Sweden’s startup and entrepreneurial ecosystem. Check out the interview below:

Columbus OH Startup: Brand Thunder Connects Brands With Fans’ Browsers

As the smartphone gains popularity more and more smartphone users are making their phone more personal with themes, wall papers and skins. Sure you can change your computer wallpaper, and you’ve been able to forever, but with smartphones, themes became totally immersive. Now all of the sudden your favorite sports teams, celebrities and even brands took over.

A Columbus OH startup called Brand Thunder, is creating that experience for your web browser. Now a fan of just about anything can trick out their FireFox,Chrome or even Internet Explorer (people still use that?) browser. The background, buttons and just about every corner of your browser is transformed into the theme of your choice. The only browser they don’t currently support is Safari.

While Brand Thunder offers themes from most of the major sports teams, celebrities, news, and holidays, what they also offer is the ability to brand businesses in a new and immersive way. Now a really cool startup or company can use BrandThunder to make their own custom theme that doesn’t just turn the browser into a great advertising and branding vehicle, but it also allows end users to connect with information in a variety of ways for the brand.

We got a chance to interview Brand Thunder, check out the interview below:

Vote With Your Money With Kansas City Startup: Neighbor.ly INTERVIEW

Kansas City has some great startups. One of them is Neighbor.ly a new civic crowdfunding platform. Nieghborly encourages people to get involved in the civic projects that they are passionate about. By crowdfunding for civic projects people can decide if they want to support a new neighborhood beautification project, or getting manholes replaced. Literally, that’s how the idea for Neighborly came about.

Jase Wilson, Neigbor.ly’s CEO and Co-founder was eating at one of his local favorite spots with the startups advisor Patrick Hosty. They got into talking about a recent bond referendum and a woman in a neighboring seat chimed in on the conversation. The conversation got heated and the issues at hand were sewer repairs and zoo animals. The woman was in favor of the sewer repairs but the same bond deal included new animals at the zoo. The woman wasn’t interested in the animals at the zoo. Hosty enjoys taking his daughter to the zoo and wasn’t concerned with the sewer repairs.

A light went off in Wilson’s head, an idea that would allow Hosty to support the zoo animals and the woman could support the sewer repairs.

The civic crowdfunding model is successful in Europe where people don’t quite think the way we do here in the U.S. The downside to civic crowdfunding in the US is those people who are sticklers about feeling the government and taxes should just handle all of these types of projects.

Earth to the people, that model hasn’t worked for years. The biggest capital projects get done while the smaller ones like the sewers and the zoo animals get tabled, time and time again, year after year. Civic crowdfunding allows citizens to get involved and take ownership of civic projects.

We got a chance to talk with Wilson about Neighor.ly in the interview below.

Go Shopping Together Online With Ann Arbor Startup: HangTrend INTERVIEW

Leore Avidar has built a new social network/e-commerce hybrid platform immersed with fashion. As he tells us in the interview below, he started HangTrend, an Ann Arbor startup, when he couldn’t easily find a pair of driving moccasins. He had searched all of the usual sites to buy a pair online, but to no avail. Along the way he also realized that there wasn’t an easy way to interact with friends who may be shopping at the same time either.

Now a lot of shopping and e-commerce sites allow the user to share an item they like but no shopping site allows you to share a possible purchase online in real time to get feedback on a purchase. Just think about how often this scenario plays out in a brick and mortar world. You go to the mall with your buddies or girl friends and say do you like these shoes? Will this look good on me? Is this too much to pay? All of these questions could easily be asked online on a platform which allowed easy sharing, easy re-call and social feedback.

That’s exactly the concept behind HangTrend works. As more and more people take to the web for shopping on multiple screens, HangTrend is a natural evolution of the e-commerce space. Now only that but HangTrend has access to millions of products by tens of thousands of designers and of course you can ultimately buy the latest fashions, direct.

We got a chance to talk to Avidar in the interview below:

Interview With Colorado Startup Pixorial

Way before Viddy, SocialCam, and just about any other video app that you can think of, Pixorial was making waves in Englewood Colorado. Pixorial was somewhat ahead of the curve when it comes to video, online video editing, collaborative video editing, and sharing. Pixorial integrates all of that in a very simple and easy to use consumer facing interface.

They launched their first consumer facing product in 2009, again a couple of years before the video phenomenon.

Pixorial caught the eyes of the powers that be at Google as Pixorial was chosen as one of the inaugural 18 companies to partner with Google’s new Google Drive product. This partnership gives consumers access to the entire Pixorial tool to edit, collaborate, and share videos on Google Drive’s cloud based service.

Pixorial’s video product has the simplicity and ease of use of Apple’s iMovie HD in the cloud, providing a much more robust feature set then YouTube’s new video editor. In fact this year they’ve even added filters to their iPhone App.

We got a chance to talk with Pixorial in the interview below.

Syracuse Startup: Coursespree, An Online Marketplace For Students INTERVIEW

A clever new EdTech startup in Syracuse New York is providing access for students to tutors, help, class notes, study buddies and more. Coursespree.

Coursespree is hoping to provide college students a more practical way to succeed academically and earn a little income on the side. In effect Coursespree has two different EdTech avenues for college students on one site.

First, students can virtually connect to tutors anywhere in the world using the Coursespree platform. Whether they need help in math, engineering, English, biology or any other college subject, Coursespree can connect them to help for an assignment or on-going tutoring.

Students can actually make money by selling their class notes (read class notes, NOT homework). On Coursespree.com students can take the notes from their class, set a price and sell them to another student at the same school or hundreds of miles away.

The very young startup was founded in May 2012 and is currently incubating in the Sandbox in Syracuse.

We got a chance to talk with Danish Nadeem the founder and CEO of Coursespree, in the interview below:

This California Startup Says They Have The RightSignature INTERVIEW

As more and more smartphones and tablets make it into the hands of people worldwide, the need for easy to use document signing has grown. There are several startups in the document signing space like “Sign My Pad”, “Sign Later” and many others. Most of them import a pdf and allow you to draw on top, and sign.

RightSignature is a Santa Barbara California based startup that promises to be the all in one solution for getting documents filled out and signed online. RightSignature has a way to sign your documents on an iPad,iPhone, Android device or any web browser. They allow you to import any document locally or from the cloud.

For business users RightSignature allows the user to create templates for frequently used forms and other features to make the application easy to use and the documents legal. Long gone are the days of printing, signing and scanning, and of course waiting by a fax machine.

We got a chance to interview RightSignature co-founder and CEO Daryl Bernstein, check out the interview below:

Nashville Startup: PhotoRankr Prepares For JumpStart Foundry Demo Day INTERVIEW

It’s Demo Day month in Tennessee. Last week was Demo Day at the Gig Tank, Chattanooga Tennessee’s startup accelerator themed around the city’s one gigabit fiber optic network.

This week is Zero to 510’s Demo Day in Memphis Tennessee. Zero To 510 is the first cohort based medical device startup accelerator in the country. Their teams are preparing for this week’s big event with a series of rehearsals in Memphis this week. This makes the third big startup event in just as many months in the river city. 48 hour launch kicked off the summer, then there was Startup Weekend and Demo Day this Thursday.

200 miles east of Memphis the seven remaining teams in JumpStart Foundry are preparing for their Demo Day next week. Solidus Partner Vic Gatto told us last week that there were 10 teams originally but three teams couldn’t keep up with the rigorous training, working and perfecting their startup and dropped out of the program.

PhotoRankr is one of the seven startups preparing to present next week. They bill themselves as a community and a marketplace for passionate photographers. Of course right off the bat we noticed that PhotoRankr has an actual up and working product. The website for PhotoRankr is polished and aesthetically appealing to anyone, especially those photographers with a nose for design.

Within PhotoRankr members can get genuine feedback from fellow photographers. They can also find link minded photographers that they would want to learn from. They can find photographers based on portfolio, location or skill level which means the user can have role model photographers and peers to exchange experiences with.

PhotoRankr also offers a marketplace for their users own work. PhotoRankr members can sell their original work for whatever price they would like. It gives a much more creative and artistic source versus traditional stock photography sites.

In reading all of the profiles for next weeks startups it’s a tough call. We got a chance to talk to the PhotoRankr team in the interview below. Check out the interview and then after that hit the link and check out PhotoRankr yourself.

Boston Startup: HoursForEquity An Alternative Jobs Social Network INTERVIEW

Let’s face it, in the earliest stage of a startup many founders are looking for co-founders, and other team members that will work for equity rather than an actual paycheck. It’s a gamble for the employee, if the startup doesn’t get off the ground, all that hard work may not have paid off. On the other hand, if the startup catches on fire like say, Instagram, you may have just earned seven figures for six months of coding.

Finding workers, co-founders, designers,engineers etc, that are willing to work for equity is a challenge in itself. Some workers feel that working for equity is like volunteering, and with the statistics for startup success as low as they are it’s definitely a gamble. Some founders don’t like to advertise that they are looking for equity workers, and they don’t necessarily know how to find them.

That’s where Boston startup HoursForEquity comes in. HoursForEquity is exactly what the name suggests, it’s a web portal connecting folks that are willing to work for equity, to those willing to give up equity for their work.

Bill Lott, co-founder of HoursForEquity tells us that their platform allows employers and founders to search a database of local, national and global people willing to work for equity. This way you can find the perfect team with the skills you need to succeed.

We got a chance to interview Lott about HoursForEquity. Check out the interview below: