Every startup accelerator everywhere else wishes they could have participation at demo day from their top industry leaders. While some of their leading companies may have a presence at demo day, the real influencers are often too busy to attend a four hour demo day. With this problem in mind, Tennessee had a great idea for their startups: bring them to those companies.
Ten accelerator graduates from across the state of Tennessee just completed a weeklong statewide roadshow. Each of the ten startups chosen to participate in the statewide master accelerator program were all graduates of one of Tennessee’s nine accelerator programs.
The master accelerator program, called The TENN, was put on by Launch Tennessee, the public/private partnership spearheading the accelerator efforts across Tennessee. Launch Tennessee partnered with the Blackstone Foundation to put the program on, as well as other key state sponsors.
Twenty accelerator graduates that wrapped up their programs by August of this year competed in a final pitch off in Nashville on August 27th. At that event a group of judges from outside of Tennessee had the daunting task of narrowing down those 20 to just 10 for the road show.
In addition to going on the road in a wrapped tour bus, each of the companies received $10,000 for their business and will have access to office space at their accelerator’s office space, or they will receive a subsidy for space they may already occupy.
The ten companies chosen were:
eClinic (Nashville)
Got You In (Nashville)
Gun.io (Nashville)
Hatponics (Knoxville)
Health & Bliss (Memphis)
Mobilizer (Memphis)
Screwpulp (Memphis)
Survature (Knoxville)
Vendor Registry (East Tennessee)
View Medical (Memphis)
Health & Bliss had to drop out of the roadshow due to a scheduling conflict. They were replaced by Chattanooga startup HutGrip.
The roadshow kicked off in the Tri-Cities area with stops at Eastman Chemical and AccelNow. On Tuesday the bus made its way to Knoxville, where they stopped at Scripps Networks and the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center. Wednesday the bus stopped in Chattanooga at Society of Work. Thursday the group traveled to Nashville and the Nashville Entrepreneur Center. The trip wrapped up in Memphis on Friday with stops at First Tennessee Bank and FedEx.
The ten companies will continue working on their businesses and with mentors and corporate leaders across the state.
You can find out more about The TENN at TheTENN.org
Cleveland startup accelerator Flashstarts will show off their first cohort in an investor demo day set for September 23. This date was chosen for its significance to startups across the country. It’s the same day that the SEC’s new regulations allowing general solicitation go into effect. It will be the first time in 80 years that startups can publicly fundraise beyond geographic boundaries, paving the way for crowdfunding for equity.
“In most communities, raising startup money has been a process stuck in the 19th century, limited to fundraising from friends and a few local angels,” said FlashStarts CEO and Co-founder Charles Stack. “With these new SEC changes, entrepreneurs can now use all modern marketing techniques to connect with the nearly nine million accredited investors across the U.S.”
The regulations will have a significant impact on startups by removing the geographic barriers to capital that have traditionally made it more difficult for startups outside areas like Silicon Valley, Boston, or New York to grow and succeed.
On signing the JOBS Act last year that enabled these new SEC regulations, President Obama said, “[S]tartups and small businesses will now have access to a big, new pool of potential investors — namely, the American people.”
“As capital is allowed to flow to ideas and entrepreneurs—regardless of distance and location—the country will enjoy a true national rebirth of capitalism, along with job and wealth creation,” said Stack.
One of the Flashstarts accelerator companies, Crowdentials, is deeply impacted by this change in the regulations. Crowdentials will provide a compliance platform to make sure those that use crowdfunding are doing it legally and within the regulations set forth by the SEC.
Here are the other nine startups graduating from Flashstarts on September 23rd.
AProofed allows writers and editors to collaborate with each other in a marketplace environment. The online cloud-based platform allows editors to become self-employed while improving writers’ academic performances.
BOLD Guidance navigates students through college applications and allows counselors and parents to view their progress. The online platform and app makes the college application process easier with step-by-step guides and automated deadlines, tasks and reminders specific to each application. www.boldguidance.com
The BranDR is committed to helping physicians create and maintain their personal brand identities online. Its mission is to revolutionize the way patients find, select and interact with their doctors, by allowing them to access personalized doctor profiles. www.thebrandr.com
Curiosidy is a new online platform for sharing and promoting life’s meaningful experiences. Users can write about experiences that have shaped them and draw inspiration and insights from a passionate, global community. curiosidy.com
LegalFunnel helps lawyers meet and engage with targeted clients through efficient lead generation and personalized online branding. www.legalfunnel.com
Ohio Independent Cinema strives to inspire an appreciation for independent films by making them more accessible for the general public. The company provides a new distribution option for independent filmmakers.
Smooth is a sophisticated, yet simple personal finance app currently in development. The program generates personalized recommendations that help users improve their standard of living and offers incentives for users to follow the recommendations. www.smoothplanner.com
Synthetic Intelligence sells Big Data cloud and consulting services. The company “makes Big Data go faster”.
RegulatoryBinder.com, a product of Trailhead CFR, is a web application for managing regulatory documents of physician-sponsored clinical trials. The app is the only platform that instantly enables physicians to coordinate a clinical trial without additional procedures or risk.
FlashStarts’ 2013 Demo Day will take place from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. EST on September 23, 2013. Guests can attend in-person at the NPR IdeaStream Westfield Theater in Cleveland, Ohio, or online via live Internet broadcast. In-person attendance is limited to 250 seats and virtual online attendance is limited to 2,500 viewers. To request a ticket or learn more, visit www.flashstarts.com/demoday.
The multi-faceted startup support organization, Think Big Partners in Kansas City is preparing for demo day for their accelerator program companies and other midwestern startups from across the Silicon Prairie area. ThinkBig is graduating their second cohort, but this is their first demo day.
This week, ThinkBig Parters is hosting a two day “PitchKamp,” which will be taught by the ThinkBig Partners and help prepare the teams pitching on the 28th for demo day in front of investors and media.
Here are the ThinkBig Accelerator startups pitching at demo day.
Fully: Fully is a kiosk-based mobile phone charging station that provides digital out-of-home targeted advertising to the consumer.
Kahootz: Kahootz is a consumer-focused online calendar platform that provides users with easier ways to combine, share and manage all obligations and profiles on one easy-to-maintain social-based platform.
Keyzio: Keyzio is a consumer-driven marketplace that connects people and helps them find, buy and sell real estate.
Phone2Action: Phone2Action makes a digital take action advocacy platform to power organizations and individuals to make change happen.
WeeJay: Weejay is a rewards-based social jukebox for bars, restaurants, and other businesses.
Here are the other regional startups pitching as part of the demo day festivities.
Katasi: Katasi provides an effective technological solution to the growing epidemic of texting while driving through partnerships with telecom providers.
Moblico: Moblico’s mobile engagement platform uniquely combines cloud based backend services for app developers with content, communication and loyalty management tools for application marketers.
PlanetReuse/InvenQuery: PlanetReuse is a consulting and brokering company focused on matching reclaimed building material with designers, builders and owners. InvenQuery provides technology to help retailers of unique merchandise handle inventory, point-of-sale and ecommerce.
“As a venture investor, there are increasingly more quality, early-stage investment opportunities that are emerging from the Midwest,” said Pat Doherty, Managing Member of St. Louis-based Saturday Capital. “I look forward to working more with groups like Think Big Partners, who have helped identify and support growing and innovative companies that are attractive investment opportunities.”
If you’re in the area and want to attend demo day you can register here.
Launch Tennessee, the private/public partnership that oversees 9 accelerators across the state, is running a “super accelerator” of sorts, appropriately called the TENN. The TENN starts off with a statewide demo day on August 27th in Nashville. At that event, 20 startups, announced on Thursday, will pitch their business.
A group of national investors and entrepreneurs will narrow that field from 20 to 10 at the statewide event. The demo day investor panel includes Sabeer Bhatia, chairman and CEO of Sabse/Jaxtr and founder and former CEO of Hotmail; John McIlwraith, managing partner at Cincinnati, Ohio-based Allos Ventures; John Greathouse, general partner at Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Rincon Venture Partners; Sig Mosley, managing partner at Atlanta, Ga.-based Mosley Ventures; Bob Crutchfield, partner at Birmingham, Ala.-based Harbert Ventures; and Mike Tatum, serial entrepreneur and CEO of Workbus. Governor Bill Haslam will announce the 10 companies that will comprise The TENN.
After the TENN is announced they will embark on a statewide bus tour, parading the startups in front of the state’s biggest companies and innovators. The TENN group will also have access to a master mentor network pulling from all nine accelerators. The TENN startups will also receive free office space, either at one of the regional accelerator headquarters or receive a subsidy for office space.
Hutgrip
FwdHealth
HATponics
Vendor Registry
Survature
Renewable Algal Energy
Middle Tennessee (9) :
eClinicHealthCare
InCrowd Capital
Gun.io
Got You In
Newsbreak
Ecoviate
Green Dot Charging
March Fuels
Graphenics
West Tennessee (5):
ADVANCE Inventions
Mobilizer
ScrewPulp
Health & Bliss
View Medical
“These 20 startups are an exceptional representation of the innovative and promising ideas emerging from Tennessee’s accelerator programs,” said Launch Tennessee CEO Charlie Brock. “From the quality and diversity of applications submitted across the state, it is apparent that Tennessee’s network of accelerators, which is unique in the nation and Launch Tennessee helps fund, is working well.”
You can find out more about Launch Tennessee at LaunchTn.org
The day of reckoning is upon us and it appears that Bad Ass Startup Chick Brittany Fitzpatrick’s nerves have calmed a bit. After working tirelessly on a startup she originally pitched at the women’s 48 hour launch in Decemeber, Fitzpatrick is ready to show the world her answer to many of mentoring’s problems.
Community service and helping people have been what Brittany Fitzpatrick’s life’s work have been about. But what makes this Memphian even more amazing is that she left a position with one of the most prestigious, well known brands in the non-profit space, Ronald McDonald House Charities, to start something of her own, again in community service.
As the communications coordinator for Ronald McDonald House Charities of Memphis, Brittany took the passion and drive she’s had since high school and through college at Howard University and Memphis University, and combined it with the tools available in recent day to double the groups social media reach. Ronald McDonald House Charities of Memphis works with the most well known children’s research facility in the world, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Over the last six years, Brittany has been a mentor and helped other mentor’s in a variety of programs. Through her work with Ronald McDonald House Charities and other stops along the way, she found that mentorship was a great thing, but flawed in many ways.
When she first pitched the idea for her startup “Mentor Me” back in December at a women focused 48 Hour Launch, she revealed that most mentor orgranizations spend more money re-placing mentors and mentees than they do setting up original pairs. Brittanny quickly realized if someone could fix the initial matching proces than these programs could focus on their original goals and save a lot of money.
That’s where her startup Mentor Me comes in. Mentor Me is a mentor and mentee online matching service that uses a variety of information given from both parties and an algorithm to make more successful matches. While Brittany is hesitant about using the verbage “e-harmony for mentor”, at the core that’s what it is and that’s why it’s going to be so successful.
But the biggest factor in the success of Mentor Me is going to be a combination of the technology and the founder. Brittany is a dynamic young woman. Back in December, the prize for the 48 Hour Launch competition was a startup village booth at everywherelse.co. When Brittany came in second place she decided to crowdfund the people in the audience so that she too could have a booth for her startup. Within minutes her mission was successful.
After working for three months in the Seed Hatchery startup accelerator, Fitzpatrick unveiled MentorMe to the public at large Thursday in Memphis. Check out her pitch below:
But the biggest factor in the success of Mentor Me is going to be a combination of the technology and the founder. Brittany is a dynamic young woman. Back in December, the prize for the 48 Hour Launch competition was a startup village booth at everywherelse.co. When Brittany came in second place she decided to crowdfund the people in the audience so that she too could have a booth for her startup. Within minutes her mission was successful.
The story about how Scott Finney and his scientific outsourcing startup, IncreaseIf, pivoted to become BetterFed is a story that wouldn’t even fit here on the pages of nibletz. It’s actually a classic story of believing in the founder though and that’s what the team that vetted Seed Hatchery startups did. (disclosure I was on that team).
We knew that Scott Finney had a very well versed background in engineering. A graduate of Auburn University, and a regular attendee of the local Startup Meetup, Finney has had a slew of great ideas. IncreaseIf may not have been one of those, but his passion and technical expertise would drive him to his ultimate destiny which is BetterFed.
BetterFed is a startup that bridges farmers and local growers with people too busy to get to the farmers market but still want the freshness, benefits and healthy alternatives that come from real home grown food. To get from IncreaseIf to BetterFed, took a lot of pivoting, until Finney just blew everything up and solicited the help of Seed Hatchery alum Kenn Gibbs. Gibbs had taken his own edutainment startup, Knoco, through last year’s Seed Hatchery program.
At first Gibbs wasn’t sure if he would join Finney on the BetterFed journey. He was already knee deep in mentoring and offering technical advice to the other cohort teams. However without much poking and proding, Gibbs came around and now both young men are so into BetterFed that they created Twitter handles FarmerFinn and FarmerKenn. They’ve also been talking about opening up their own farm and becoming growersthemselves.
We got a chance to talk to Finney just before he went onstage here’s what he said:
What’s your startup, what do you do?
BetterFed connects customers to local food sources. We provide weekly food subscriptions that best fit your families eating habits.
Why did you apply to Seed Hatchery?
I was looking to get my MBA sometime soon. Speaking with some of the alum, I heard the benefits of Seed Hatchery outweighing a classroom experience.
What were you expecting?
I was expecting to be a technical co-founder for a team and ended up being a lone founder for the first month of the cohort.
Did you get what you were expecting?
Yes, I knew I was going to be forced out of my comfort zone, but didn’t know how much until now.
What was your big “A Ha Moment”?
The importance of taking action and realizing you can plan and assume all you want, but you won’t learn anything until you take action.
What are two big things you learned during the Accelerator Process?
Get a product out to your customers as soon as you can, and tell everyone about what you’re working on because you never know who can make an introduction to a valuable relationship.
What’s one thing you learned about yourself during the accelerator process?
The program required me to use skill sets I did not believe I had. In the past I would have let others handle sales and marketing, but I’m completely involved in those avenues.
What are you hoping for after Investor day?
We’re looking to continue our customer discovery to validate all that we’ve learned in the past couple weeks.
Tell us one of your mentors and what you learned from him or her?
Sarah Baker is a PR and communication expert and she’s helped us focus our message to our target audience.
Last week we were pleased to bring you the story of ScrewPulp’s launch. The new self publishing platform is helping authors and publishers with much needed traction and engagement through a different model.
Publishers/authors sign up for ScrewPulp which helps them market their books by giving away the first 25 copies in exchange for a social media mention, review or rating. From there, as books gain popularity they increase in price by $1.00 per level. This format gives authors/publishers, much needed exposure and the benefit of having ratings and reviews built in to their profile.
Publishers hold all the rights to their books. ScrewPulp takes a small percentage and leaves the author/publisher with no less than 75%. They only ask that submitted works stay on the site for 90 days.
Screw Pulp founder Richard Billings launched the startup at 48 Hour Launch in June of last year. From there he went on to take the top prize at Launch Memphis’ Global Entrepreneurship Week event, which included pitching in front of Federal Court Judge, John Fowlkes. The Seed Hatchery accelerator was the next natural step for the team.
We’ve chronicled the life of ScrewPulp from that very first pitch in June, consequently the same 48 Hour Launch event that attracted Nibletz to Memphis, through demo day. Check out more Screwpulp coverage here and watch Billings’ pitch video here:
Comments Off on Musistic Debuts At Seed Hatchery Demo Day, Finally A GitHub For Musicians0LikeLike 2,509
What do you get when you cross two musicians and two recording studio employees in Memphis one of the earliest cities in the world with a globally musical pulse? Musistic.
The Musistic team is made up of Justin Olita, Vince Rogers, Brian Wentzloff and Rachel Hurley (who joined them after leaving the soundstache team). The four of them together are pioneering a new collaborative music platform that allows musicians to collaborate in a meaningful way, similar to how programmers collaborate on GitHub.
Users can find others to collaborate on a song or album together via the Musistic platform. From there each musician can post their parts and tracks for the others to “pull down” and record on top of. The best part is that the Musistic platform is DAW friendly across many types of popular software.
Gone are the days when musicians need to upload enormous email attachments or figure out which drop box, box.net or other cloud account has enough space for their project.
Using Musistic they can easily find the parts they need, re-record, edit and get them back up for the collaborators to continue working on. This isa welcomed tool in the music community and it’s made from a team that is rich in their musical background.
To date they’ve secured a creative capital investment from Loaded For Bear equal to $100,000 per year for five years. They are also working on strategic partnerships with the Memphis Music Foundation and the Folk Alliance International. It also helps that Hurley, who leads marketing and business development, has deep relationships with hundreds of Memphis musicians.
To get a better idea of what Musistic is and where it’s going, check out the pitch video below.
Memphians, and for that matter a lot of folks in Tennessee are familiar with the name Nick Redmond. Nick is the frontman for the very popular indie band, Star & Micey. It was through touring, singing, performing and engaging with fans that Redmond had this great idea for a startup and Soundstache was born.
Through fellow Memphian Rachel Hurley who is knee deep in the Memphis music scene through working with the Poplar Lounge and other Memphis music spots, and through being active in the Memphis startup community, Redmond got the opportunity to apply for Seed Hatchery.
Hurley says that it was actually at famous movie director and local Memphian, Craig Brewer’s birthday party where Redmond pitched the idea for an interactive app that worked both online and off line and connected fans to musicians. Soundstache is a geo-caching app/game that allows fans to search for “staches” that bands put out for them to find. They could be in plain sight or maybe tucked under a tree, in a set of stairs or attached to a sign post.
Bands plant staches for fans to find and the app directs them to it.
Never afraid a challenge, just days into the Seed Hatchery program Redmond decided to try SoundStache out at one of the biggest playgrounds in the music world, SXSW and there it was met a ton of positivity. Fans loved the exclusive nature of the prizes they were winning. Speaking of which, bands can give away whatever they want, a used drum stick, concert tickets, cd’s, demos whatever.
Most people know that indie music fans, real indie music fans not fake ass hipsters, go all in on their favorite bands and support them anyway they can. Soundstache gets them off the couch and out from behind the macbook, onto the street looking for “staches”.
In between his hard touring schedule Redmond just went through the Seed Hatchery accelerator program. Here’s their investor day pitch video.
Attracting great talent to an accelerator that doesn’t have the name Techstars or YCombinator in it can be a difficult task. Attracting great talent that’s already had success in the startup space can be even more daunting. That’s what happened in the case of Indiana startup Boosterville.
I actually met Pam Cooper the CEO and co-founder of Boosterville, while it was still called Sodbuster, on Brad Feld’s Hacker News alternative site, the startup hub. Pam and I quickly became friends. It was then I learned that she was a little more “seasoned” than other founders, having started a very successful small business in Indiana. Her quick wit and thought provoking questions made it easy to interact with her on an online platform.
Pam decided that despite a failed attempt at Indianapolis startup conference “Powder Keg” her and her co-founder/CTO husband, Tom Cooper, would make the trek to Memphis for everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference. At the same time we were accepting applications for Seed Hatchery and I quickly introduced her to the organizations leader, Eric Mathews, and they got in.
We learned through the vetting process that Tom was actually the founding CTO of question and answer site Cha-Cha. He also has a long resume of engineering work at several successful startups and companies. The Cooper’s have done well. They’ve got kids in college, a rather large home in Indiana, oh and Tom has his own plane as well. So why come all the way to Memphis for an accelerator?Great question, the answer: For the accelerator.
From day one both Pam and Tom dove head first into the curriculum, learning, sharing and development that is offered through the Seed Hatchery program. They took criticism like the best of them, often times from leaders and mentors that didn’t have even a fraction of the startup experience that Tom had. Both Cooper’s have said over and over again how much they’ve learned here in Memphis.
“I really didn’t know what to expect, so we went for it and Seed Hatchery was the best thing we’ve done for our company” Tom told us in an interview.
During the accelerator the coopers went through a name change, a huge pivot and even worked hand in hand with MBA students for discovery, and to help refine their product.
Boosterville combines digital wallet with loyalty and rewards and all for the benefit of schools and non profits. Using Dwolla, another midwest startup, as their mobile wallet conduit, users sign up for a school they want to donate to. From there they can see a list of merchants in their community that use the Boosterville platform. When they make a purchase at one of the establishments in the program, they check out using their phone, the merchant gets paid, the school gets a donation and Boosterville takes a small cut.
“Putting children who are now grown, through school I’ve seen my share of wrapping paper and World’s Finest Chocolate Bars”, Pam loves to tell anyone who will listen. Of course we all agree.
The company is a great mesh of Pam’s community minded nature and business savvy, with Tom’s over three decades of programming experience.
What’s next for Boosterville, well while Tom has an open invitation to return full time to his engineering job in Indiana, they are going to continue to raise money and bring Boosterville to live.
Check out their investor day pitch video below:
Find out more about Boosterville here at boosterville.com
It’s accelerator graduation season for Spring 2013 accelerator classes. That means it’s a good time to talk about pitch decks. Our good friends at investorpitches.com have put together “The Anatomy Of A Winning Pitch Deck” in a great, easy to follow infographic.
There seems to be a lot of different ways to build a pitch deck. We’ve seen over 25 accelerator demo days in the last year and for the most part each accelerator has a different way of teaching startup teams how to build the pitch deck. For the most part, what you’ll notice is that all of the startup teams at each accelerator follow the same model, but each accelerators model is different.
investorpitches.com has assembled their best practices for building pitch decks that work for investors. Of course they warn “include all the pieces you need, and none that you don’t”.
The biggest part of the pitch deck is to make sure you combine story telling and selling to connect the mind and the heart. No one wants to see any founder stand up on stage and just read a bunch of slides. Most people in the audience are capable of reading the slides themselves. What the person pitching needs to do is narrate the slides and we’ve them together.
In working with some of the teams in the Seed Hatchery accelerator this week, it brought me to one of my biggest tips when helping people prepare for the actual investor day pitch. “The confidence monitor can help you or kill you”. The confidence monitor is a great thing for getting your place in your pitch and reminding you what’s on the screen. But you can very quickly turn that into just reading the monitor and forget the story telling.
Chances are you wrote your pitch out, printed it out, practiced it with the print out, and then for the last week or two you’ve been practicing without the printout. Nothing changes on stage. Don’t let the confidence monitor kill your confidence.
The other big thing to remember in all of this is that investors aren’t there to evaluate your ability to put together a Keynote or Power Point presentation. They are there to evaluate your startup, it’s traction, it’s success and it’s potential. Above all, don’t forget to build a product.
Check out the infographic below for what should go into your pitch deck.
Since starting our nibletz sneaker strapped startup road trip last year we’ve seen hundreds of startups pitch at countless demo days. Nick and I were finally relaxing with one of our advisors, Patrick Woods’ with a>m ventures, on the last night of SXSW and we had counted over 65 startups that we saw pitch through a variety of demo events at the annual festival.
We’ve also seen countless accelerator demo days and with it being May and most of the spring accelerators graduating this month, we’re on track to enjoy another dozen or so before we get to the thick of the summer. Speaking of summer, last August their were three accelerator demo days in Tennessee alone.
Startup community members and leaders are constantly debating “the rise of the accelerator” and where accelerators should focus their resources. Is the best accelerator model general tech and cohort based? Or vertical and rolling? Who knows, it will take several more iterations until each community finds the accelerator model that works best for them.
But what about demo day?
On Friday Business Insider ran this piece which references an indepth article about YCombinator and it’s historic demo day from the New York Times. In it, author Nathaniel Rich, quotes an investor saying that YC’s demo day, often thought of as the super bowl of demo days, “used to be a can’t-miss event, but that’s not so anymore. It’s a different vibe. Some major investors are starting to skip it.”
Rich points out that one investor said that YC Demo Day used to be a feeding frenzy for deal flow and it’s just not anymore.
Of course YC’s demo day is all the way at one end of the spectrum. Y combinator is said to take the best of the best and with hits like DropBox and Airbnb, the newer teams know they can set their valuations and standards higher, pricing a lot of smaller VC firms out of the deal. This either leaves VC’s empty handed or startups empty handed.
“The only way for a company to be overvalued is if there’s someone willing to pay that price,” Graham told the NYT. “So what they’re saying is: Going through Y.C. causes companies to raise money on better terms than they would have otherwise. We wouldn’t have the barefacedness to make that claim ourselves!”
Graham acknowledges that YC does take some bad startups though, saying sometimes investors can’t pick out the good startups; “Well, it’s not because the good start-ups look bad,” Graham says. “It’s because the bad start-ups look good! Which means we’re doing our job.”
Business Insider recently shared some of Mark Suster’s, a VC with GRP Partners and the founder of LaunchPad LA, best and worst sources of deal flow from his personal blog.
Surprisingly, blogging was revealed to be the best source of deal flow available. “The sheer number of relationships I’ve built through being public, transparent and being willing to engage in comments and through social media has enabled me to get to know entrepreneurs even before they launch their next company,” Suster said on his blog.
Investment bankers were said to be bad sources of deal flow, but the worst? Demo Day.
“Getting excited about a company at a conference and investing is a sucker’s bet,” Suster writes. “Entrepreneurs raising at prices not normally supported by progress face risks downstream when they have to raise more capital. And that fund raising is part of the job of being an entrepreneur – not something that gets in the way of your doing your job.”
Startup accelerators everywhere else are having a hard enough time getting investors in the door for demo day as it is. One accelerator participant in the middle of the country told us “outside of the investors that had a stake already in the cohort, no investors came to our demo day last year.” That can be hard to swallow.
As to the blogging, we have a handful of angels and VC’s that email us from time to time to get the vibe on some startup we wrote about. We also get thank you cards in the mail from startups that have gone on to raise money after getting their first piece of press from nibletz. To that end, we live off of our crowdfunding so to help out the everywhere else cause, click here.
Community service and helping people have been what Brittany Fitzpatrick’s life’s work have been about. But what makes this Memphian even more amazing is that she left a position with one of the most prestigious, well known brands in the non-profit space, Ronald McDonald House Charities, to start something of her own, again in community service.
As the communications coordinator for Ronald McDonald House Charities of Memphis, Brittany took the passion and drive she’s had since high school and through college at Howard University and Memphis University, and combined it with the tools available in recent day to double the groups social media reach. Ronald McDonald House Charities of Memphis works with the most well known children’s research facility in the world, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Over the last six years, Brittany has been a mentor and helped other mentor’s in a variety of programs. Through her work with Ronald McDonald House Charities and other stops along the way, she found that mentorship was a great thing, but flawed in many ways.
(Brittany’s first pitch at 48 Hour Launch)
When she first pitched the idea for her startup “Mentor Me” back in December at a women focused 48 Hour Launch, she revealed that most mentor orgranizations spend more money re-placing mentors and mentees than they do setting up original pairs. Brittanny quickly realized if someone could fix the initial matching proces than these programs could focus on their original goals and save a lot of money.
That’s where her startup Mentor Me comes in. Mentor Me is a mentor and mentee online matching service that uses a variety of information given from both parties and an algorithm to make more successful matches. While Brittany is hesitant about using the verbage “e-harmony for mentor”, at the core that’s what it is and that’s why it’s going to be so successful.
(Here’s Brittany’s second pitch from 48 Hour Launch)
But the biggest factor in the success of Mentor Me is going to be a combination of the technology and the founder. Brittany is a dynamic young woman. Back in December, the prize for the 48 Hour Launch competition was a startup village booth at everywherelse.co. When Brittany came in second place she decided to crowdfund the people in the audience so that she too could have a booth for her startup. Within minutes her mission was successful.
We got to interview Brittany as she prepares for demo day at SeedHatchery, where she tells us about her latest venture into crowdfunding and what she’s learning at the Memphis startup accelerator:
So tell us what is Mentor Me?
There are 3 million kids in the U.S. being mentored. Yet, there are another 15 million waiting for mentors. Sadly, half of all matches between mentors and youth end within months – which does more harm than no mentoring at all. One of the top reasons for these pairs falling apart is poor matching.
Mentor Me provides cloud-based mentor matching and management tools that make mentoring more efficient and effective for both programs and mentors.
How did you come up with the idea?
The idea came from my own experiences as a mentor. I’ve been mentoring for 6 years now and have been through the process of getting matched with a mentee several times. Through these experiences, I’ve learned just how much of an impact mentoring can have for both the kids who are being mentored and for the mentors themselves. But, as with any process, there are things that can be improved and there are ways to use technology to make the process better for everyone.
Who else is on the team?
My Co-Founder and CTO is Sean Lissner.
Sean has a Bachelor’s Degree in both Mathematical and Computer Science from the University of Memphis. Sean’s specialties include: mobile applications, web applications, web services, distributed computing, embedded systems, cloud architecture, machine learning, and wireless sensor networks.
Before joining the Mentor Me team, Sean worked with large-scale, enterprise level application development projects, including FedEx’s Android mobile application. In addition to his passion for improving communities, Sean brings more than a decade of coding experience and a usability-centered design focus to the Mentor Me team.
Our advisors are: Austin Baker, President and Chairman of the Board of HRO Partners and Co-Founder of the University of Memphis MILE Mentoring Program; Jenny Koltnow, Executive Director of the Memphis Grizzlies Charitable Foundation; Emily Yellin, Customer Experience Consultant
What made you decide to apply for an accelerator?
I knew that going through Seed Hatchery would give me the best chance for success. With accelerators, you’re given a strong network of support through the staff and through the network of entrepreneurs who have gone through the program before you. The support of one’s fellow cohort-members is also invaluable. And of course the fact that they are mentor-driven is also innately appealing to me.
What have been your three biggest take-aways so far from Seed Hatchery?
My three biggest take-aways from Seed Hatchery thus far have been:
The importance of investing in yourself: I left my job right before Seed Hatchery to go all-in on my startup
You have to practice how you play.
Iteration trumps perfection
While some accelerator startups just sit around and wait for investor day, you’re out there fundraising now, tell us a little bit about your crowdfunding?
We kicked off a crowdfunding campaign to match our $15,000 investment by May 16. We’re about 10% of the way there. Our crowdfunding page is at www.gofundme.com/MentorMe.
What’s the reaction to Mentor Me been so far?
The reaction thus far has been positive. We already have our first paying customer and we’re in the process of getting more organizations on board for our beta test this summer.
One thing you learned about yourself in the accelerator?
I’ve learned so much about myself through this process. I think above all I’ve learned how to push myself outside of my comfort zone. I actually look for those types of opportunities now.
What happens May 17th?
The grind continues. Investor Day is just the beginning.
Memphis’ Seed Hatchery accelerator is less than a month away from demo day for their third cohort of startups. This years class has some major standouts and Boosterville is one of them.
Boosterville was founded as Sodbuster by married couple Pam and Tom Cooper. The Cooper’s hale from Indianapolis Indiana and they are the only “out of town” team for this years Seed Hatchery class. I met Pam Cooper on Brad Feld’s alternative to Hacker News, the Startup Revolution Hub. Meeting woman entrepreneurs is nothing new these days however Pam and Tom admittedly have adult children, sometimes older than the other founders on the Startup Revolution Hub, and the other founders at Seed Hatchery.
I quickly struck up an online friendship with Pam that resulted in her presenting at the startup conference and facilitated an introduction into the Seed Hatchery program.
What makes the Coopers even more interesting is that Tom is the founding CTO of Cha-Cha and has been a distinguished CTO for the last 30 years. While I wouldn’t call them “startup rich” the Cooper’s have done well. Pam founded a successful cleaning business. Tom has hit a few doubles and triples in his career. Tom enjoys flying his prop plane when he can pull away from the computer screen.
That’s what makes Cooper’s truly unique. They aren’t in the Seed Hatchery program for the seed investment (which of course helps any startup, Boosterville included), they are in it for the grit and grind and the whirlwind business training that happens during a three month, intensive accelerator program.
While Pam sometimes jokes about being the “class mom” with this year’s Seed Hatchery, they work with the best of them, until late hours of the night and back again first thing in the morning. Tom made arrangements with his development job in Indianapolis to work from Memphis every morning before working on Boosterville.
So what is Boosterville?
It’s a new platform that combines the mobile wallet with a loyalty and rewards type program that benefits local schools. Pam and Tom grew tired of neighborhood kids hitting them up with the same popcorn tins, wrapping paper and World’s Finest Chocolate bars. The school fundraiser was destined for a disruption.
Boosterville has partnered with Peabody Elementary in mid-town Memphis and merchants in the Overton Square and Cooper Young neighborhoods for their beta testing.
The Boosterville mobile app is tied in with local merchants and local schools who have agreed to give a kickback to the school of the user’s choice when they checkout with the Boosterville mobile wallet. The Cooper’s live on the cusp of new technology, and to that end, where others have used Paypal or Google Wallet for checkout, Boosterville uses fellow midwestern startup Dwolla as it’s wallet back bone.
Dwolla’s founder Ben Milne knows Tom well and is very enthusiastic about what Boosterville is doing.
Despite their age, and experience, Boosterville is treated the same way every other startup in the Seed Hatchery class is treated. They’ve been going up and down in the weekly rankings like every other startup and they went through a name change and a couple pivots during the past two months.
Boosterville will graduate from the Seed Hatchery program on demo day which is May 16th and will coincide with the Memphis in May festivities. For more info on Boosterville visit boosterville.com.