Is Your Startup Launch Ready? Add These To Your Checklist

(photo: Floridatoday.com

For some the real joy in a startup comes from actually launching. Some startups spend a few months preparing for launch while others have taken up to two years (if not more). There are hundreds of things that can go onto your launch checklist.

Spencer Fry, a 28 year old serial entrepreneur who founded TypeFrag (2003), Carbonmade (2007) and Uncover (2012) has a lot of experience launching startups. He penned “Startup Launch Checklist” on his blog at spencerfry.com. Here are some of the highlights from his checklist.

Web and Marketing tips:

Complete Homepage copy: One of the pages we left for last – and I know many new startups do – is the copy for the homepage. You need to write about whatever you’re selling in a clear, concise and engaging way. If you can’t quickly capture the interest of a visitor to your service then you’re going to immediately fail. This leads to my next point.

Contact page copy: For us it’s a matter of making sure that we list all of the different ways visitors to our service can reach us. It’s not enough to simply provide an email address nowadays. Lots of customers want to reach you on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks.

Determine FAQ strategy and write it: One of the things I like to leave to the last minute is writing the Frequently Asked Questions. If you write it too early, then chances are your service will have changed and it’ll become outdated. Writing the FAQ will also help put you in the mind of a customer right before launch. It’s a great last-minute exercise in making sure your app is clear.

He has five more web marketing tips here.

Modeling

Model our potential revenue: You should never found a company without a good idea about how you plan on making money. Even better, you should project how your potential revenue stream will grow over time.

Set monetary/sales goals: After you’ve modeled out your potential revenue growth, setting sales goals will give you a better understanding of when you can raise money on good terms or quit your day job and bootstrap. It’s great to have numbers to work toward that aren’t arbitrary. Knowing exactly how many users you need over a projected time frame helps to determine whether you’re matching projections.

Launch Day

Add to various services around the Web: To help with SEO and to possibly get the word out, sign up your new app with Crunchbase, AngelList, StartupList, Listio and others.
Press Coverage: Every successful app has a great short term and long term press plan. However, right after launch you should ask yourself how much press you actually want. Do you want to reach out to blogs for coverage? Do you hope to get on Hacker News? Sometimes you might want to delay press coverage until you’ve had a chance to fix up the bugs.
Email friends and family: Last, but not least, you should email your friends and family about the new app you’ve built. Chances are that leading up to its release you’ve been so busy that you haven’t had time to update them. Now’s the time!

There are plenty more tips including 17 programming tips, sales tips and more here at spencerfry.com

We’re sneaker strapping again across the country and at SXSW13 Check this out

Bad Ass Startup Chicks: Jeannette Balleza Director, Ark Challenge

As you probably heard, women in startups played a big roll in the inaugural everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference. The conference which had over 1200 attendees on site featured panels like “Kick Ass Female Founders From Everywhere Else” and other panels which featured startup founders from everywhere else.

One of those bad ass startup chicks that was in the audience and networking all conference long was Jeannette Balleza the director of Ark Challenge, Arkansas’ premiere startup accelerator, and member of the Global Accelerator Network.

Balleza is no stranger to startups. After college she went straight to startup life launching her own company, Scribe Marketing. She is also the co-founding archivist of the award winning family history website DeadFred.

Balleza is a busy busy woman but always finds time to strengthen the Arkansas startup community every chance she gets.

She serves as a Board Member of the Northwest Arkansas Entrepreneurship Alliance, advises a number of small businesses and non-profit organizations and is part of the team spearheading the region’s first co-working space, The Iceberg. She is a member of The CEO Forums of Northwest Arkansas, and she coordinates the Professional Women’s Network Washington County. She was honored as one of Northwest Arkansas Business Journal‘s “40 Under 40” in 2008, and in 2009 she was selected as one of 135 U.S. entrepreneurs by British Airways to attend The Face of Opportunity Global Business Summit Conference in London.

We caught up with her, not in NorthWest Arkansas but rather in Central Arkansas for the ThinkBig Arkansas event and the kick off of Startup Arkansas. She provided a quick speech to attendees with an update about Ark Challenge and the exciting new Iceberg coworking space. Check out our interview below, the first of many to come in our series Bad Ass Startup Chicks.

Ark Challenge is still accepting applications for their second cohort, click here for more info.

SXSW Virgins: Columbia MO Startup Digital Talent Agents

This week starts our 12th South By Southwest, the last four have been spent as a tech journalist and before that I attended the music portion during my radio career. SXSW can be intimidating for a first timer, especially a first time startup, that’s why we’re featuring some great SXSW Virgins, seek them out, find out more about them and help them out if you can.

Digital Talent Agents, a startup based in Columbia Missouri has a rockstar team all working on an awesome goal, to help build credibility for experts through thought leadership and content marketing by getting them consistently published in online reputable publications.

In addition to being an agency for credible content the crew at DTA are passionate about startups and often write themselves on things that matter most to startups. In fact it was DTA’s John Hall, who called everywhereelse.co a “Must Attend” startup conference at Forbes.com.

Kelsey Meyer, the company’s Senior Vice President, offered these tips on promoting your startup.

DTA is making their way across the country and networking with startups of all kinds every chance they get. They were in Memphis for everywhereelse.co and several events in between then and SXSW. This is their first time at SXSW.

1) What is you startup? Digital Talent Agents is an agency that builds your credibility through thought leadership and content marketing.

2) Where are you based? We’re headquartered out of Columbia, Missouri but have remote locations in St.Louis, Mo and Dallas, Tx.

3) What do you do? We help clients leverage their expertise by getting consistent content placed in reputable online publications through by-lined articles and interviews to build thought leadership and credibility for the client and the companies their representing.

4) Is this your first time to SXSW? Yes, its our first time.

5) What are your plans at SXSW? It’s always exciting to see what other startups, brands and varied artists are doing. It’ll be a great place for us to network, create relationships and see what cool things companies are doing. I can’t forget to mention the amazing parties and concerts that are being held at SXSW that I’m sure you’ll see several of our team members. :)

6) How can people connect:

Twitter: @DTAgents

Website: www.digitaltalentagents.com

Natalie Stezovsky (Vice President): natalie@digitaltalentagents.com

We’ve got even more SXSW13 coverage here at nibletz.com the voice of startups everywhere else.

Cincinnati Startup Nugg-it Raises $250,000 For Audio Nuggets

A Cincinnati startup called Nugg-it has created a new wearable technology that insures you won’t miss those spoken nuggets of wisdom you or your friends may utter at any moment.

The device, called the Nugg-it is designed to record audio continuously from a wearable device on your wrist. When someone says something note worth you just click a button and it’s automatically saved. These “nuggets” will be uploaded to socia media and preserved to compliment the current methods of social media and make your social media life more immersive.

“When you look at the whole social media landscape and what people are doing, pictures and video are extremely well covered in terms of people creating their own personal content. Audio we see as not well covered, and we felt (nugg-it) had a very good feel for the moments that people want to capture through audio and an intriguing way to do it,” said Douglas Groh, CincyTech’s entrepreneur-in-residence told Cincinnati.com.

Nugg-it raised $100,000 from Cincy Tech and another $150,000 from Design 2 Matter (D2M), the Silicon Valley based company that has developed the product. Nugg-it is hoping to close a $600,000 round in all and it looks like they shouldn’t have any trouble.

Mike Sarow, a former brand manager for Proctor & Gamble and Matthew Dooley, the founder of Dooley Media are the co-founders of Nugg-it.

Find out more at the source

Italian Startup FileRock, Protecting You In The Cloud

FileRock aims to bring complete security to cloud storage. Cloud storage is getting more and more popular since it can save a lot of money, but concerns about security are growing, particularly in the enterprise world. FileRock’s focus is the complete security of data, meaning both the confidentiality and the integrity of data. Our technology effectively allows individuals and enterprises to store files and databases in the cloud, while keeping security under their own control.

With FileRock, you can store data in the cloud without having to trust the cloud provider. Cloud providers cannot access your data, and if they delete or modify some of your data (by malfunction or deliberately) you will notice it immediately, before the data enters your business process. Bottom line: enterprises can save a lot of money by storing their data in the cloud, without having to worry about security.

So how do they do this?

“Our technology is implemented in two different products: FileRock Client, a backup/sync client (Dropbox-style, to be clear) aimed mainly to professionals and small-medium enterprises. And FileRock for Enterprise, a software layer to be integrated in enterprise software environments.” Daniele Arena CEO of FileRock told nibletz.com in an interview.

Bernardo Palazzi, Maurizio Pizzonia, and Giuseppe Di Battista round out the founding team hoping to ease the security concerns of everyone using cloud storage.

These Italian entrepreneurs are building FileRock in Rome a city associated with romance and not necessarily startups, but Arena tells us that’s changing:

“There’s quite a few things going on in the startup world in Italy. There are several startup events (we just participated to the 2013 final of TechGarage Roma, a showcase/competition of startups that has been held for several years) and a growing community of startuppers (the Facebook group Italian Startup Scene, for example, has more than 10,000 members). Obviously, we are not at the levels of Berlin or Silicon Valley: there are still limited options for startups to get funding. But the culture is growing: for young Italian graduates, a few years ago it would have been a crazy idea to get a job in a startup. Not anymore.”

So far FileRock has started a private beta and revealed the source code for the File Rock client at GitHub. Their hoping to get feedback from the user community on GitHub and they’d also like to see users customize FileRock for their specific needs.

So what’s next for FileRock?

“We are currently looking for a Series A Round of 1 million Euros, that we will use to radically scale operations, marketing and sales. We are also looking for partnerships with system integrators and software vendors who would be interested in integrating our technology in their solutions, both in the form of FileRock Client and FileRock for Enterprise. Meanwhile, we’re working hard on building traction and adding features to our software.”

Find out more about FileRock here

Nibletz is back on our sneaker strapped startup road trip, find out more here.

Vindicated: Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson Deleted Mailbox Too

Some say I went on a tirade yesterday morning when I published this story, “Am I The Only One On Earth Who Thinks Mailbox Sucks”. Despite putting up some pretty good arguments I received some hate mail and hate tweets, after all I was downing the latest app phenomena that all the hipsters absolutely love… Hipsters that don’t receive any real volume of email.

In that piece I couldn’t figure out how some of my more established journalistic brethren who must get more email than me, could actually stand the Mailbox app. I receive anywhere from 300-500 emails per day. I usually receive 500 emails each day Monday-Wednesday and then it tapers off to the much more manageable 300 per day.

My biggest problem with the Mailbox app was batch deleting and folders. Carlson, a writer for Business Insider, found the exact same thing to be problematic.

“There’s one reason why it didn’t work for me: Mailbox makes you deal with one email at a time. You have to open or swipe (to the left, further to the left, to the right, or further to the right) each individual email. I get several hundred emails a day. ” Carlson wrote.

He goes into the same detail that I do about batch deleting:

When I go through my email – which I do about 3 times per day – I go into the iPhone’s default mail app, tap “Edit” on the top right, and then quickly tap every email I don’t need to ever read (most of them) and then tap the bright red “archive” button.

It feels like one decision, an answer to a single question: “Are there any emails I need to see?”

Then I go back over the emails that remain and respond to the ones that need immediate attention. I flag the rest – emails I need to respond to, but not right away. I always get to them eventually.

When I’m doing email from my desktop, it’s the same process, but even better, because in Gmail I can shift-click to select multiple emails to archive or delete at once.

So I’m still not sure how much email you need to receive to get enjoyment out of the Mailbox app but if you figure it out please let me know in comments or on Twitter.

Read all of Carlson’s Business Insider Post here.

See my post from yesterday here

Kauffman Foundation Teams Up With AARP Proving You’re Never Too Old To Launch A Company

The Kauffman Foundation has teamed up with AARP to launch a new initiative that will hone the entrepreneurial skills of people over 50 years old. We’ve seen our share of these golden entrepreneurs, who have either retired or left the corporate world to start a new business venture.

Two such entrepreneurs are 54 year old Elizabeth Van Sant and 68 year old Susan Jones, launched at Washington DC startup called Quad2Quad that serves as a platform providing much needed information to parents, families and students visiting colleges.

Kauffman Foundation, AARP, Quad 2 Quad, Accelerator,startup

The two baby boomer founders of quad2quad at everywhereelse.co 2013 (photo: Allie Fox for NMI 2013)

When we interviewed Jones last September, she proudly said that she was old enough to be Mark Zuckerberg’s mom. Although some may consider them too old to roll with today’s startup hipster, they’ve been touring the conference scene across the country with appearances in San Francisco at Appnation and at everywhereelse.co in Memphis.

Now, the Kauffman Foundation has announced a new program targeted to baby boomer entrepreneurs 50 and over.

Three pilot courses of FastTrac NewVenture™ for the Boomer Entrepreneur will be offered in 2013 by Kauffman FastTrac affiliates. Up to 20 qualified applicants will be accepted per course, and AARP scholarship funds will cover $500 of each participant’s course fees.

The three Kauffman FastTrac affiliates selected to participate in the baby boomer pilot are ProperoHCA, New York City; Tech Coast Venture Network, Irvine, Calif.; and the Miami Innovation Center for Entrepreneurship, Inc., Miami.

ProperoHCA has scheduled its weekly course for April 3-June 5. Tech Coast Venture Network plans to offer its Boomer course this summer. The Miami course, which will be taught in Spanish in an outreach to the region’s large Hispanic population, is also slated for a summer start.

“We look forward to partnering with Kauffman FastTrac to better serve our members interested in expanding their entrepreneurship business skills,” said Jody Holtzman, AARP’s senior vice president of thought leadership. “Through this coursework, they will acquire new insights and tools, explore available resources, and expand their networking opportunities to start and grow successful businesses.”

Content specific to baby boomers was recently added to the Kauffman FastTrac curriculum in recognition of changing U.S. demographics and research that finds a higher rate of entrepreneurial activity among Americans aged 55 to 64 than much younger age groups in recent years.

The initial 10-week baby boomer class was held in fall 2012 in Kansas City.

“We believe there is pent-up demand for entrepreneurship education among more mature audiences,” said Kauffman FastTrac president Alana Muller. “Whether they’re pursuing a lifelong passion, shoring up their retirement accounts, or utilizing skills and experience in a new way, boomer entrepreneurs make big contributions to our economy by creating new businesses and, in turn, new jobs.”

You can find out more about this program here

Don’t Launch At SXSW, Accelerate!

In the video above, Nashville Technology Council’s CTO of the Year Marcus Whitney candidly discusses the dumbest thing he’s ever done as an entrepreneur. What was it? Launching at SXSW.

His company MoonToast, has bounced back since that tragic sxsw launch and brought on huge clients for their social media and engagement platform, like Universal Music Group.

MoonToast actually has a great product but it’s not one for the masses of hipster startup junkees that are headed to Austin Texas in less than two weeks. It’s more of a B2C play with huge potential upside.

Moontoast lost over $100,000 dollars launching at SXSW. The real problem was the fact that prior to SXSW it appeared that they had all of their ducks in a row. They were ready to make a huge splash. Once they pulled the trigger though, they signed up three new users.

There are countless stories of startups that launch at SXSW simply because it’s the trendy thing to do. But even RackSpace’s celebrity statup guru Robert Scoble says not to launch at SXSW. In a piece on Quora that he originally published two years ago, and his since updated, he says don’t launch at SXSW, use it as an accelerant.

You want to launch ahead of sxsw and create an ear piercing buzz by reaching out to key influencers like Scoble, Leo Laporte, MG Siegler, Mike Arrington, or any of the other high profile journalists you can find on Scoble’s Twitter list or his Facebook list .

Scoble offers a great list of tips too for accelerating at SXSW and you can find that here on Quora (account required)

I’ve personally been to SXSW 16 different times. The first 12 years I attended the music festival during my radio career. The last four years have been as a tech journalist. I know how bad most startups want to launch at sxsw but unless you’ve got buckets and buckets of money that you’re willing to lose you may want to reconsider. Whitney humbly told us that going into their first investor meeting after sxsw was an experience he wouldn’t’ wish on anyone.

These gigantic balloons were part of Trover’s presence at SXSW12 (photo: NMI)

We saw some great startups in 2011 and 2012. At least year’s SXSW we saw Trover, while they’re still in existence they dumped over $50,000 into street team promoters, gigantic orange balloons, real estate at the foodtruck village and Tequilla infused walking tours of Austin. Rain basically ruined most of their promotions. Today, most people I talk to have no idea what Trover is.

Make people talk about your product and talk about you. Do something to stand out but don’t be obnoxious. Don’t forget to put your big boy pants or your big girl pants on and realize that there’s thousands of people just like you competing for the exact same thing.

Read Scoble’s tips here.

Even Startup Chicks Love Bacon, Grit Design Introduces SizzlePig

It seems that there’s only one thing that goes wild for bacon more than the dogs in the bacon bits commercials, and that’s geeky startup founders. Bacon and pigs for that matter, isn’t just about dudes, the women have it too. A love, an attraction, to pigs and bacon.

Andrea Livingston, the co-founder of Grit Design, showed off their new SizzlePig product at the recent everywhereelse.co 2013 event. SizzlePig gets a double bonus because not only does it mention pigs, but it’s also a startup born out of an existing business’ tool like Xtrant and ShortStack.

So what is SizzlePig?

SizzlePig is the by product of Grit Design, a small Detroit based shop that specializes in web and mobile design. Over the past four years, Livingston along with her co-founders; Mark Stewart, Eric Livingston, Carrie Thorpe, Michelle Shoan and Brendan Colley, created SizzlePig to handle photos on web and mobile projects.

“We had to resize large numbers of images, over and over again. We’ve made tools for ourselves over the years and developed our own platform which we named Bacon (BCN – Basic Content Network). We decided to use Bacon to help us with the batch image resize issue. Our little tool worked better than we had expected. We thought, hmmmm, I bet others would want to use this…so we put a UI on it and began to test it out.

sizzelpig™ was born. sizzlepig™ is cloud based software (can also live client-side) that pulls an entire folder of images, and allows you to visually resize, crop, change compression to an unlimited amount of sizes for each image, all on the same page. We call it ‘fine-tuning’ the images – which is very helpful for sites that are built to be responsive. . One of the problems we have had in the past is that we couldn’t see our final edits until the scripts had finished running. This could take time – as in hours if the files were large.

We have seen a 70%+ decrease in time spent on initial resizing of batch images and over a 90%+ decrease on time spent for batch images to be re-worked. This literally equals hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars and that’s for each time folder with large amounts of images are processed.

We love how we can manipulate how each image will appear and it is very fast. There are no file size restrictions, so even original files coming from the photographer don’t need additional prep work before being processed.

This isn’t simply an alternative to scripts or other tools, this is a whole new wave of digital creation.” Livingston told nibletz.com in an interview.

She continued; “We didn’t make sizzlepig™ for the sake of launching a product, we made a tool to help us resize an entire folder of images to an unlimited number of sizes and fast. These images needed to be able to live in many places and on multiple screens, and, we wanted complete visual control over each crop and every last pixel. We needed a higher quality and faster solution and were tired of settling.”

Sure there are batch scripts available but what you get with SizzlePig is a way to move the images through faster. We’ve been using SizzlePig inhouse here at nibletz and the greatest thing about it is you can set up a blueprint for the way that you need photos. We need a small 150×150 thumbnail and a 280×280 photo for our stories. We can upload as many photos as we want and that blueprint resizes all the photos at the same time and spits them back out.

SizzlePig is perfect for photographers, brand managers, designers and enterprise. With it’s simple to use interface and wide variety of customers it’s no wonder that Killerstartups.com called SizzlePig a “game changer”

You can try SizzlePig for yourself here

Nibletz is back on our Sneaker Strapped Startup Road Trip Part Deux, you can support us here.

Startup Weekend Heads To Columbus In A Pre-SXSW Extravaganza

Startup Weekend is headed back to Columbus Ohio this weekend, as a pre festivity to the huge startup mega festival we all know and love, SXSWi. In fact, the Ohio area Startup Bus is leaving Sunday from Ohio.

This weekend will pit together entrepreneurs, startup founders, developers, designers and mentors to see what Columbus can hack together in just one weekend.

The Startup Weekend crew in Columbus is one of the most seasoned. We got to meet a few of them at Cincinnati’s startup weekend event last summer. This one is being organized by Startup Weekend veteran; Suzy Bureau, by day she does marketing & communications for Columbus startup Bringshare; Serial Entrepreneur Steve Gacka; and Brian Billingsley the Director of Strategic Business Development at Allaince Data Systems.

Startup Weekend Columbus holds events every six months and they always have great attendance. This weekend’s event will be held at TechColumbus (1275 Kinnear Road). It will kick off with registration at 6:30pm on Friday night and will end with final pitches on Sunday at 5:00pm. All is expected to be wrapped up by 9:00pm, and then the weekend is done (unless you’re heading down to sxsw).

Dan Rockwell, the cofounder of Big Kitty Labs and Program Manager of the software prototyping center at Ohio State is the featured speaker.

At around 7:30pm the “Friday Night” pitches will begin. We’ve covered a lot of startup weekends and you can see plenty of Friday night pitches here at nibletz.com.

The Friday night pitches are 60 seconds and hard timed by a Startup Weekend official. In that 60 seconds you need to sell the audience your idea and why it should be built over the next 53 hours. After everyone who wants to pitch has been given the opportunity, community voting will commence. It’s a rather diplomatic process. Usually the pitchers will hold up a sign with their startup name on it and attendees will put a sticker on the idea they like the best. At the end of the process, those with the most stickers will have their ideas developed.

Friday evening typically tops off with team selection and then some icebreaker time with the teams. From there the teams break off and start working on the startup idea.

Saturday, the community mentors come into play. These seasoned entrepreneurs and local business folks are there to help answer questions for each team and provide ideas and suggestions. The mentors for Startup Weekend Columbus are: Tanisha Robinson, co-founder of TicketFire; Nick Seguin, Partner at Dynamit; Patrick Pohler, Founder at Anecka; Brooke Paul, Founder at Founder’s Factory & Taivara; Alan Gilbert, Vice President of Engineering at CoverMyMeds; and Matt Scatland, co-founder at CoverMyMeds and President at Innova Partners.

We also have it on good authority that Kyle Sandler, Co-Founder and Content Director of Nibletz.com The Voice Of Startups Everywhere Else, and the founder of everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference, the largest startup conference in the world dedicated to entrepreneurship outside the valley, and Nick Tippmann the co-founder and CEO of nibletz.com will also be in attendance..hmmm.

Saturday is also the day that most teams take to the streets, the phones, the emails and the interwebs to get customer validation on their startup project. All the while designers, developers and coders are working on pitch decks, wire frames, prototypes and products.

Sunday is the day the teams put the finishing touches on both their products and their presentations. At 5:00pm and not a second later, the selected teams will have five minutes to pitch their idea and have a brief Q&A with the judges.

For more info on Startup Weekend Columbus or to register click here

Chicago Startup Hummingbird Is The Rotten Tomatos For Anime

Chicago startup Hummingbird has created a platform that anime fans have been looking for for years. The startup, founded by Josh Fabian and Vikhyat Korrapati is the first database and recommendation engine just for anime. “Think Rotten Tomatoes had a baby with Netflix’s recommendation engine, and that baby is a huge anime fan.” Fabian told nibletz.com in an interview.

“Users rate the titles they’ve seen in the past and, based on their tastes, Hummingbird gradually ‘learns’ what you like and don’t like, enabling it to make extremely accurate suggestions on what to watch next. Users are able to properly determine if the anime suggested is something they’d like to watch by making use of our comprehensive database featuring trailers, screenshots, plot summaries and much, much more for every anime you could imagine. Because some users lead very busy lives, we’ve also integrated a simple to use episode tracker to help keep you organized, no matter how many titles you may be watching at a time.” Fabian explained.

Fabian is based in Chicago while Korrapati is based in Hyderabad, India. Fabian says he loves the Chicago startup scene and has found that it’s extremely easy to get the help he needs in Chicago.

“It’s seems no matter where you turn in this city, there’s a community of designers, developers and entrepreneurs learning from each other, encouraging each other and giving a helping hand when you need it most. I can’t think of a better place to launch a business.” He said.

Hummingbird came to life after Fabian, a huge anime fan, found himself without something to watch next. “I hit a roadblock.. I had no idea what to watch next. All of the ‘popular’ choices that come to mind I had already seen, in some cases, multiple times. I did a lot of googling but after a lot of searching, I couldn’t find anything to completely solve my problem. ” So he created it.

Korrapati, a developer, saw Fabian’s first landing page for Hummingbird and reached out to help. “I can honestly say that without Vikhyat joining the team, Hummingbird wouldn’t be nearly as great of an idea as it is now”, Fabian said of his cofounder.

Fabian is bootstrapping it for now but has ambitious plans to try and get into YC or 500 startups. With Hummingbirds unique platform that may not be as difficult as it sounds.

They’ve been launched for about a month and have already picked up nearly 10,000 users. Their next goal is getting to a critical mass of at least 50,000 users but with no other recommendation engine for anime that shouldn’t be so tough. They were also named by TNW as a startup to watch.

You can find out more about Hummingbird here at humminbird.ly

Starter Pad Is A Collaborative Online Community To Build Startups

Lithuania has a bubbling startup community and Lukas Gediminas Sukys, the founder of Starter Pad, is hoping to broaden his reach way beyond his home country.

He bills his startup, Starter Pad, as a new way to build startups online. It’s a collaborative platform for entrepreneurs to reach other entrepreneurs, create ideas and then build them remotely.

“…I was thinking about ways to improve Startups building process and make new connections with entrepreneurs. After some tries to achieve these goals, I understood that Startup people using computer as main tool for building startups, so that means website would be ideal place to begin from” Lukas told nibletz.com in an interview.

For those new to starting up, Starter Pad has four main objectives to helping founders find each other and build.

Connect.

We bring all Startup specialists to one place with fully completed profiles. It’s so easy to find your CoFounder or research to hire these startup specialist. Just what you really need.

Learn.

You can learn from our community of specialists every day by watching their activity in groups, startups, questions page and other places. Give direct questions to them and ask for feedback.

Build.

If you have your startup idea, you can add it to our Startups list and begin to search for a cofounders, mentors, advisors or even investors at our Pad. StarterPad Advocates and our community are at your disposal to get the feedback you need.

Grow.

The final step after being successful of building your Startup: We help you to grow your business. get specialists which will help you to grow. Experts from every IT business role, working on the biggest StartUp hive-mind on the internet to help you grow responsibly.

Starter Pad also provides resources and ideas for legal issues, pitch development, marketing and business development.

Lukas, along with co-founder Joseph Martz, are hoping that Starter Pad can become an international place for startups to launch. As for Lithuania though, the startup scene is growing.

“Lithuania is a small Baltic country, with a population of about 3 million. Our entrepreneurial culture is relatively young: Lithuania has only 20 years out of the Soviet Union, so its a too short timeframe to have a strong entrepreneurial base. However, it seems to grow very fast. Here are based international startups like YPlan or GetJar. Lithuanians specialists are known because of their high productivity in addition to their technical skills, but our roots are a bit conservative” Lukas said.

Starter Pad isn’t alone in the collaborative, connect a founder space. There are other startups that we’ve written about here like LaunchTable, FounderSync and Cofounders Lab just to name a few.

To that end Lukas says; “Our secret sauce is to connect Startup people. There are a lot of specialists living in smaller cities and countries, who can’t attend to startup events easily. StarterPad gives an opportunity for them to connect with specialists from the biggest Startup stages and gather their experience. For Startup rockstars, it is a great way to find talents.”

What else can we expect from Starter Pad? “Our focus now is to make Startup building process more social. So we are planing to make feed for every startup, where you can post what your team is working on. We think this will engage to check StarterPad every day to see progress of Startups you are following.

“For Startup teams, it should give more motivation to build things. Community responses always trying to help to stay motivated and choose the right way for your Startup.”

You can find out more about Starter Pad here.

Working On Your Pitch Deck? You Gotta See This Pop!

Populr.me is a platform that allows anyone to create all in one pages on the internet. They can be used for a wide variety of things and it’s a lot better than trying to turn to tumblr or creating a word press blog for just one page.

For instance you could use it for a media kit, to brag about your favorite team, to keep people abreast of your schedule or to make a page for a yardsale. Businesses can use pop’s to show off business tips, circulate company wide information, or create all in one self contained pages.

Nick Holland, CEO and founder of populr.me is a Nashville startup leader and also the founder of CentreSource. To demonstrate the uses of the populr.me platform he created pops that Baker Donelson used to explain the legal necessities when launching a startup for the last cohort at Jumpstart Foundry.

Holland is currently working on his Series A round for populr.me and in doing that he started researching the best pitch decks. While he was doing his research he created this amazing pop highlighting some of the best pitch decks and other resources for startups that are looking to pitch.

As you can see from the screenshot above this pop is full of great information for any startup. (Just to note, Holland has a long career in web development and design and this particular pop wasn’t designed for design it was designed in less than an hour and to provide as much content as possible.).

When you hit the link below you can see Facebook’s first pitch deck, Color’s pitch deck, seedcamp’s deck and much more. We highly suggest you go over and check it out.

Click here to see the Pop: The Best Startup Pitch Decks

SouthernAlpha’s Spark Nashville A Success RECAP

Southernalpha.com co-founder and Editor In Chief Walker Duncan, speaks to a capacity crowd at Spark Nashville (photo: NMI 2013)

We visited Southernalpha.com’s Spark Nashville as part of our next 50 stop leg on our sneaker-strapped startup road trip. One of the biggest key’s to our success has been getting out in the trenches with startups everywhere else.

Southernalpha.com was founded by Nashville serial entrepreneur Marcus Whitney and Walker Duncan who serves as the sites Editor in Chief. They cater to “High Growth Technology for the South East” specifically Nashville and New Orleans.

Armed with a seed investment of $150,000 from Duncan’s father’s venture capital firm Solidus, they’ve ramped up nicely and attracted a couple hundred local startups, entrepreneurs and power players to 3rd and Lindsley in Nashville last Thursday.

Whitney, Nashville Technology Council’s CTO of the Year, serves as a visionary and advisor. At the event Whitney credited Duncan and Southernalpha’s Marketing Director Kelley Boothe with the great turn out that saw 11 startups from across Tennessee pitch in a competition for $1000 dollars and an iPad.

Southernalpha.com launched during the late summer. Despite the early investment the site is struggling to gain traction outside of it’s inner circle.

Duncan is no stranger to journalism. He left his post as the Health Care, Manufacturing, Technology and Tourism Reporter for the Nashville Post, a publication also owned by the elder Duncan’s investment firm, to start SouthernAlpha.

As for the event itself, it was alive with startups, entrerpeneurs and investors. It kicked off with a fireside chat between Duncan, Whitney and Nick Holland the founder of CentreSource and now Populr.me.

The discussion was great, highlighting why Nashville has such a strong startup community and many lessons Whitney and Holland learned growing their businesses in Nashville immediately following the first dotcom bubble burst.

Holland and Whitney talked about being inspiring and the yes mentality. They also shared the dumbest thing they’ve done as an entrepreneur with the audience.

After the pitches there was more time for networking and people stuck around well into the night.

For more coverage of this great event click here. We’ll be in Lexington KY, Cincinnati, Columbus, DC, Austin, Kansas City and even Silicon Valley, all in the next 5 weeks on our sneaker-strapped startup road trip.

Were you one of the 1287 people at everywhereelse 2013? Don’t miss everywhereelse 2014 with a stronger lineup, more panels, even better parties oh and free breakfast and lunch, click here.