Comments Off on NMX 2013 Interview With Boston Startup UberVu0LikeLike 2,178
Boston startup Ubervu is a new social media dashboard startup. Sure there are a lot of startups in the space however what sets Ubervu apart is their intelligence layer.
Ubervu finds what people are saying about companies across the social web. They take that information and convert it into easy to understand usable data to get companies engaged with their customers.
Ubervu’s VP of Marketing Dragos Llinca tells nibletz in an interview:”People talk about companies and products online every day. We monitor and analyze those public conversations. We then use smart methodologies to come up with ways for brands to send more relevant messages to more relevant and influential people, at the most relevant time.”
We caught up with Ubervu’s social media marketing & community manager Elisabeth Michaud at NMX 2013. Check out our video interview here:
Comments Off on 3 Challenges, Besides Funding, Facing Startups Everywhere Else0LikeLike 1,734
When you make the bold move to take your idea and turn it into a startup, the cards are already stacked against you. Depending on what you read, some folks say 70% of startups fail, others say 80% of startups fail. Either way, those aren’t good percentages no matter what way you slice it. Couple that with the fact that you are trying to grow your startup outside of a major startup hub like Silicon Valley and many may believe that’s a recipe for doom.
Of course thats not the case for the nearly 2000 startups we’ve covered from “everywhere else” since launching nibletz.com the voice of startups “everywhere else”. So we circled back with some of our startups to find out what challenges they face, or more specifically, what was the biggest challenge they faced in starting up.
Most of these challenges facing these entrepreneurs aren’t unique to one certain geographic region, but rather encompass challenges faced by most.
Finding a Team & Resource (you thought we were going to start with funding didn’t ya?)
Many startups that we’ve interviewed have eluded to the fact that finding the right team was one of the toughest parts or challenges they faced as a startup. When you build your startup outside a centralized technology hub like Silicon Valley, Boston or even Washington DC, attracting top tier talent to work for next to nothing to get your idea off the ground can be challenging.
Even Kapture, a startup founded in Brooklyn had problems at first attracting a great team. Kapture’s co-founder Michael Szewczyk had actually made the decision to move back from Silicon Valley to Brooklyn to launch Kapture. That may have helped them attract a good team.
“The biggest challenge is being creative with the limited amount of resources you have.” Jumyo said in an interview.
In Seattle, story telling startup Jumyo is also plagued by the talent problem. Seattle has often been thought of as a hub for innovation yet they had trouble attracting a good team. Imagine if the problem is rampant in Seattle and Brooklyn, it’s gotta be a whole lot tougher in Boise and Providence.
Even a startup coming out of Dartmouth had a challenge with finding the best team.
“I think the hardest part for a software startup is finding a rock-solid team of devs, especially when the first founder is not technical, as is our case. It took quite a while before I found James and Sang and got them on board, but I feel incredibly lucky for the team that we have. Recently, we added another pemanent developer, who is actually located in Bulgaria, and so now the development process has been going really smoothly.” Square One Mail co-founder Branko Cerny told us in this interview.
Changing an age old industry
Some more innovative startups are taking problems that have existed for years in traditional industries and trying to solve them once an for all. Such is the case for New York startup Unpakt. Unpakt has taken the Expedia model and applied it to an industry where over billing and even fraud has run rampant for year. That industry is the moving industry. Unless you had a big enough house that you called one of the gigantic companies like Allied or Mayflower, you were faced with a lot of mom and pop or small regional companies.
No one knows when the time clock starts or stops. No one can remember how much furniture was originally allotted for the move. In the end the people being moved are either out more money or in some instances their belongings are held hostage for more money.
By making the process all but transparent through the Unpakt system this New York startup can help people who need to hire movers and honest movers as well. Unpakt’s problem was getting movers to buy in to the new:
“Convincing movers to see the benefit of an exact pricing system and operate within a larger network, instead of the historic autonomy of the industry. We’re demonstrating to movers that revealing their rates and exposing pricing is ok. To be successful in the online world, pricing needs to be readily available.” is what they told us in this interview
Launching
Launching a product is tough no matter where you are at. There are a lot of confusing methodologies out there especially for a new entrepreneur and a new startup.
For instance, if you just got into the startup world and went all hipster as soon as you did, you’re probably preaching the Lean startup methodology and “minimum viable product”.
On the other hand you may not want to show off your minimum viable product to anyone because it’s in complete and it looks like crap. A big worry for those entrepreneurs second guessing this method is that in showing an MVP they may actually have their idea ripped off when in fact they planned on a much grander idea in the first place.
Iterating can be a problem too. Some startups worry every time they think of a new feature that they need to add it to version 1.
Other startups like Vancouver based Perch, found that while their product technically worked, it’s a video product and they wanted it to be the best it could be. They would launch it and then pull back. They went through this process several times.
“Getting Perch out the door. We’ve come so close to launch numerous times, but because we’re dealing with video and very technical aspects of video, we’ve had to pull Perch off the shelf and back into development several times.” Perch told us in this interview.
Comments Off on NIbletz Says Thanks! There’s Still A Little Time0LikeLike 1,482
Thank you first off for being readers of nibletz.com the “voice of startups everywhere else”. If our rapid increase in traffic on our website and social media channels are any indication, it seems we’re doing a good, or at least decent job.
We wanted to also say thank you to all of those people who contributed to our indiegogo campaign for phase Deux of our sneaker strapped nationwide startup road trip. We’ve committed ourselves to staying on the road 75% of every month through September 2013. During this time we’re going to be visiting startup focused events, startup weekends, hackathons, incubators, accelerators, startup offices and everywhere else we can pick up the vibe and report on the growing ecosystem of startups “everywhere else”
Before we get too long winded here is the link to our indiegogo page, the video is great our good friend Sean, voice to hundreds of radio and tv stations voiced it (as he does all of our videos) and it’s great. Please check out the video, donate $2 (or more) and share it across social media. The campaign ends at midnight tonight (Eastern time) here’s the link again
About “everywhere else”
We launched nibletz.com last Spring (2011) We were invited to cover TechCrunch Disrupt in New York for our other site and we became so mesmerized by everything there, and all of the passionate startup founders that we created a site to offload those posts off our mobile focused web brand.
We also took on the tag line “small crunchy bytes from the tech and startup scene”. We had a business plan that included becoming a compliment in capsulated form to TechCrunch (hence the crunch and the bytes), we took to Twitter and it was determined in a landslide that “Nibletz” were small crunchy bytes.
Well like every trying, startup we pivoted. We began to notice that startups “everywhere else” weren’t getting the coverage they needed and deserved. We launched the “everywhere else” concept at the new year and ran wild with it at South By Southwest. The response thus far has been phenomenal.
With our media backgrounds we’ve been involved in the tech scene and even researching and scoping startups for a number of years, but we took the blinders off to the rest of the country and WOW is the word that comes to mind.
Let it be known that we have nothing against the valley. San Francisco is an awesome place to visit, the valley is a tech geeks heaven as far as vacations go. Yes our founders have all ridden the bikes on the Google campus, dined at Facebook and even tweeted from Twitter. We’ve got great friends in the Valley and silent advisors who would probably shock some of our readers.
The startups “everywhere else” are like an elephant in the room. Everyone knows that we’re out there but no one is giving them coverage, not like this.
Cameron ran some great statistics this week and we found out that since January we’ve featured over 375 startups from “everywhere else” and the momentum, amount of content and features just increases month over month.
That’s all because of you.
Whether you’re in Boise Idaho, Memphis TN, Florida, Arizona or any of our great 50 states, or London, Israel and even a few countries we’ve never heard of, we’ve got your back. We’ve never purposely turned down any startup who pitches us for coverage at startups@nibletz.com unless of course you’re in the not “everywhere else” part.
We’ve got some really exciting things coming up in the next month or two including a really cool interactive that will help startups like yourselves, and us, crowd source the startup “everywhere else” community to help with their dilemmas, so keep an eye out for that.
We’ve started forging great friendships across the country and around the world and we thank you for that and your support.
We wanted to say thanks to everyone who donated anything on indiegogo from $2 on up. We actually received a donation Thursday that asked to remain anonymous of $1000 you know who you are and we thank you so much.
We also wanted to thank those of you who couldn’t donate but donated your time and your social media space by tweeting about us. We’re a startup ourselves, it’s hard. I could tell you the story about getting coins out of the couch, the seats in the car and off the washing machine to give my daughter $10 for a field trip, it’s real we know it.
Which is actually the reason that we’ve turned down to angel investors and plan to continue to not seek traditional angel and venture funding. We want to stay true to our core of everywhere else and we want to keep our ethics inline as journalists. That’s why crowd funding is so important for us.
We also wanted to point out that there are three other sites that we really like (and there in no particular order) that also cover startups outside of the traditional cities and they are, tech.li , TechCocktail and Beatabeat. So please add them to your readers as well if they’re not already there.
Again thank you so much for reading, contributing and helping out nibletz, the voice of startups “Everywhere Else”
Comments Off on Mark Cuban: There’s A Bubble In SiliconValley…Nowhere Else0LikeLike 3,636
Self made billionaire, ABC Shark Tank Shark and Dallas Maverick owners Mark Cuban recently spent some time with the Wall Street Cheat Sheeet’s, Damien Hoffman. Of course the wonderful “Bubble 2.0” question came up, and Cuban’s response will be a-ok with the target audience of Nibletz, the voice of startups everywhere else.
“There is a bubble only in tech investing in Silicon Valley. Nowhere else in the U.S.” Cuban said in the interview. All of Cuban’s most recent interviews have suggested that valuations in the Valley are way over-hyped. Our West Coast Editor (and co-founder) Brent Fishman has no problem talking abut the wild and crazy valuation of Pinterest. Fishman loves to point out that Pinterest has no actual “business model” in place.
One of the things about Cuban’s assessment being so true for startups “everywhere else” is the fact that even if the playing field in the venture capitalist arena was marginally fair, startups everywhere else already have to work twice as hard from everything else.
Kyle
Boston startup Ubervu is a new social media dashboard startup. Sure there are a lot of startups in the space however what sets Ubervu apart is their intelligence layer.
Nibletz
