Editor’s note: The following on-the-ground report comes from Don Dodge, who blogs at The Next Big Thing and is a business development executive for Microsoft. He is in Boulder, Colorado today attending TechStars demo day. Much like Y Combinator (which had its own demo day last week) and LaunchBox (which also had a recent demo day), TechStars is a startup incubator that selects 10 teams and provides funding of about $15,000 per team, as well as free office space, operational support, and mentoring from former entrepreneurs and business leaders.
This is the second year for TechStars, and they have already had an acquisition. SocialThing was recently acquired by AOL. The teams presented today to about 100 VCs and Angel investors for the first time. These companies are three to six months old and have two or three founder employees. Here are Don’s notes on each of the ten startups to present at TechStars today.
Gyminee
Gyminee -A fitness social network for detailed tracking, online accountability, and motivation. With Gyminee, you can find workout programs and track your progress, track your food and nutrition, and set goals for whatever is important to you. On the social side of things, you can find GymBuddies to keep you accountable towards your goals and participate in fitness challenges. They already have over 35,000 users and over 1.2M page views. On the nutrition side they have a database of 50,000 food items complete with nutritional information that you would find on the label. You can track your diet, calories, and nutritional value. Freemium business model. Free service where you can upgrade to premium services for $5 per month. Looking to raise $300K in seed funding.
Ignighter
Ignighter - Wish dating could be as fun and easy as going out with your friends? Ignighter is group to group dating. Meet people the way you do in real life…like you did in college. Ignighter is about hooking you and your friends up with someone else and their friends. They believe group socializing is safer and less intimidating than one to one blind dating, and leads to personal dates. Ignighter has elements of Facebook for groups and Match.com for dates. They have an iPhone app that uses GPS to find other groups close to your current location. They have over 10,000 registered users. Business model; premium services like better search placement, and of course advertising. Looking to raise $300K.
Peoples Software
Peoples Software - WhozAround? from People’s Software takes the pain out of making plans with your friends with planning and scheduling tools that plug right into your Facebook account, your contact list, or your mobile phone directory. Lightweight and location-aware, WhozAround sorts your friends, makes plans with one click, and outputs your events into a clean feed that can go right to your calendar, email, or your phone.
Peoples Software founders are Susan Mernit formerly a VP at Yahoo and AOL, and Lisa Williams, a founder of several companies, and formerly at Boston.com. It is great to see two women founding a cool new startup. Business model; locally targeted advertising. They believe they can get $7 to$10 CPM rates because of the local targeting, and by partnering with regional media companies. They are seeking $225K in seed funding.
Devver
Devver - Takes the tools that developers already use on their desktops and turns them into cloud-based services. Currently focused on Ruby tools and testing suites. Strong emphasis on test suites. They will add PHP, Python, and Java later. They will also have an open API so that developers can add other languages.
By putting developer tools in the cloud, they can execute them more quickly, reduce setup and configuration time, enable easy scheduling, display rich reports, and make it simple to share data between team members. The dev tools and environment is set up once on a cloud based server, then team members can be added quickly and have all the same tools, projects, and code.
Business model; subscription fee of $100 per developer per month. Sales channel - seems to be word of mouth through the Ruby development community. Seeking $200K in seed funding.
The Highway Girl
The Highway Girl - is a traveling music show for the digital age. Hosted by singer songwriter Samantha Murphy, the show educates artists on how to manage their careers in the digital age while also giving fans a true behind the scenes look inside the life of a singer / songwriter on tour. It is initially based on Samantha Murphy, but soon will include other artists. TheHighwayGirl.com will sell exclusive content from the artists they feature, as well as act as a liaison between artist and fan on non-traditional transactions that connect them.
Samantha delivered one of the most unusual startup pitches I have seen. She sang a song about raising money and building a business. Wow! Samantha is an incredibly talented singer /songwriter. Business model; Exclusive content, tours, merchandise, and a traveling music tour called The Highway Girls. Also partnering with TopSpin. Seeking $500K in seed funding.
Application Experts
Application Experts provides Software as a Service (SaaS) to venture capital and private equity fund managers and to the pensions, endowments and other parties that invest in venture capital and private equity. Based in Denver, Boston, and Chicago. The founders were in private equity firms prior to founding the company.
The idea is to build a social network of private equity and venture capital investors to share best practices and information. They also provide a deal-tracking dashboard to help manage the pipeline of investment deals in progress.
Their target audience has plenty of money and is willing to pay. They charge $3k per person with a minimum of $15K.
Occipital
Occipital - Photography has evolved over the years, but the ways we interact with digital photos are still decidedly primitive. Occipital is using artificial intelligence to organize your photo stream, enabling vivid recollection with groundbreaking visualizations.
They can stitch photos together into a panorama, automatically label and tag photos, and construct 3D scenes from your photos. They can zoom in, fly over, step inside buildings…all based on simple photos stitched together into a 3D presentation. They find objects in your photos and link them to the same or similar objects in other photos and stitch them together. This is hard to explain with words, but the visual demo was amazing.
BuyPlayWin
BuyPlayWin.com - Combines online shopping with tournament games. Buy products, play games, win a refund for the product. Every shopper gets a chance to win full refunds for everything they purchase by playing fun games against other shoppers. For example, buy a $120 college text book. Compete with six other people who are also buying the book. Win the game and you get the book for free. They use the profit margin in the product to pay for the winners purchase. If a product has a 33% profit margin they need three players to break even. With 10 purchasers they make a very nice profit. They are seeking $400K in seed funding.
Foodzie
Foodzie - An online marketplace where consumers can discover and buy food directly from small artisan producers. The Foodzie technology makes it simple for small producers to sell their products online and aggregate all these products within a marketplace that makes it easy for “foodies” to discover the very best food. They focus on gourmet foods and organic health foods. These are high-end and high-margin products. Foodzie takes a 20% commission on every sale. Traditional retailers take 50% margin, while a distributor takes another 10%. The food supplier only ends up with 40%. So, with Foodzie the producers get to keep 80% of each sale. They are seeking $350K in seed funding.
Travelfli
Travelfli -Helps frequent flyers maximize the full potential of their loyalty programs and discover the value in this hidden currency. They help users manage their award programs in one centralized and secure place, find ways to get free travel using their miles, and book award travel online. TravelFli allows you to aggregate frequent flyer miles and hotel points from family members and keep track of all the various rewards programs. They help you keep track of when miles expire, or when there are special promotional programs for your miles.
There are over 120M people in frequent flyer programs, and trillions of frequent flyer miles that never get used. There are 17M elite flyers that account for 43% of all flights. These elite flyers are a very lucrative market for airlines, hotels, rental car agencies, etc.
Business model; commissions on all sales. Advertising - CPMs for travel are very high. They will also sell aggregate data on flights, hotels, and car rentals. They are seeking $500K in seed funding.
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“Looking to raise $300K in seed funding.” = busted by MA?
Ignighter - meh that would actually make things a lot more awkward. Since you end up making the fool of yourself not only in front of the girl, but your friends, and the friends of the girl
some good some bad
bad ? which ones … ?
I really like Gyminee. I like idea of people creating and sharing workouts, thats a cool idea and it motivates me to wanna pay the $5 because I spend 10x that a month easy just trying to keep variation in workouts and staying motivated. Being a creator could help motivate me more to be a continual participant in working out.
bodybuilding.com has offered all this for a long time
Ten more Web2.0 companies that will crash and burn at the beginning ofthebubble burst. Honestly, who in their right mind is investing in these sites that look like some middle school kid on a mac designed them ?
I am curious to see whether anyone funds “The Highway Girl”. That business model does not seem to scale well, unless I am missing something. Highway Girl, any comment on this?
UMapper - http://www.umapper.com
Gyminee looks very similar to http://traineo.com
Looks like they might have copied a lot of the concepts as well as the general UI/look-and-feel?
Holy cow batman! Not just the CSS, they even ripped off most of the copy written on traineo’s site (they just condensed it). Shameless.
I noticed that Gyminee had ripped off Traineo in so many ways as well.
Nothing like the fear of a site take down notice to give potential investors cold feet - Ctrl C, Ctrl V
Don’t worry the court of social media opinion will hand Gyminee a big Fail Whale to wear around its neck for a long time to come.
Ah!!! No wonder i find it so similar.
Hello everyone.
While I know that both Traineo and Gyminee use a similar color scheme and both have a “Web 2.0″ look, I think the similarities end there.
Gyminee is focused on much more detailed (and useful, IMO) tracking of both exercise and diet. We have a strong community aspect for accountability, but also offer much more in terms of fitness challenges.
I think if you dig into the content of the site and look past the home page you will see a lot of difference. I think the claims of ripping off CSS, etc. are not only untrue, but evident of you not really digging into the site.
We had a blast at TechStars and were very proud of the other teams that presented yesterday. It was a great experience for everyone involved.
Andy (Co-founder, Gyminee)
Seems like TheHighwayGirl is asking funding for the tours!!! Whats wrong with Techstars?
Getting sick and tired of announcements of crappy wrapper websites for ideas.
Check out: http://www.buyplaywin.com/bpw/welcome.htm
That is one shell of a website! With the exception of the Blog link in the footer the rest link to the homepage!
When will the madness stop?! When?!
Congrats to Samantha with Highway Girl.
I’m sure there is a content - sponsorship play that will work. All the hard work is paying off.
There are still people making money in the music business!
Cheers Victor! Without content, technology would have nothing to do.
unless they have a cure for cancer we dont need another website. time for the internet to get smaller, filtered and integrated. whoever does this best will win the game.
I like TravelFli. Any additional information on it? The buttons on the website are really working, can’t join. Thanks.
Hi Mike,
Please email me at krista{at}travelfli.com and we’ll get you an invite code to beta test the site. We are in a preview version right now for about another week and then will go into a beta. We’ll have a solid number of programs that you’ll be able to start monitoring immediately. Thanks so much for your interest!
-Krista
Hi Krista,
I would be interested in joining the beta too if I could get an invite. Please let me know.
Best regards,
Rono
Congrats to the TechStars class of 2008 - make us proud!
I like Gyminee.
The rest? Pfft.
In case you hadn’t noticed, Gyminee ripped off the look, feel, concept, and messaging of http://traineo.com.
I don’t like working out or anything healthy, but this complete copying of another site/ service should be discouraged strongly.
Awesome companies… can’t wait to use travelfly…. more startups here… http://www.gothamtechminute.blogspot.com
Holy Moly, I was just catching up with all the social book mark sites! I don’t think thats possible anymore. But I still love them! I’m looking up clone technology right now.
Im really surprised at some of the things they fund, I went down there for techStars 1 day thing and they seemed like they only fund things that had already started and seemed like they already knew people in mind who they were going to pick, i tried talking to one of directors, just blew me off. After I left I knew it wasn’t for me.
Hey Andrei.
The business consists of 3 parts:the website, the show and the tour. Multiple revenue streams, some obvious now, some not. Hope you’ll check out the show!
What % of the business do investors usually take for say a $300K investment? How much does it vary?
Congratulations to all the companies that presented. The feedback has been fantastic.
Thanks Don for writing this up! We will have video of all the pitches soon.
Check out http://myfitbuddy.com. It’s similar to Gyminee, but has been around longer, has a great community, includes detailed instructions for each exercise, and videos of exercise form from YouTube.
A native iPhone app that syncs with the site is also on its way.
Congrats to all the TechStars presenters! I honestly don’t care if any of them succeed. I’m just glad TechStars is able to attract all this awesome talent to Boulder with so little investment.
I think Foodzie could be uniquely positioned because Boulder is a center for artisan/organic foods, so they could build a pretty broad marketplace quickly just by handing out fliers at the local farmers’ market. Plus, in my experience talking to local producers, they are not very good at tech and would probably love to outsource the online store component.
not only is gyminee a copy of traineo, but other new sites are copies of http://www.fitsync.com that’s been around for 6 years or more. Being the first, they even have a patent for a handheld workout tracker. Do these incubators, investors, vc’s even do a patent check?
Good luck with that patent!
and how much did RIM pay out on their patent infringement? if i had a great idea I’d definitely patent it
Congrats to all the startups that presented. Everyone did very good.
As I attended the show, here are notes on what I liked:
Gyminee - I think they have a very good approach to a problem / service that has been tried many times before. Their feature set, and the way that they tackled the problem of fitness tracking was very impressive.
Devver - a good idea, that should make some programmers more productive. The entry seems steep to me, so I would make sure there is a lengthly trial (30-60) days to get people using it, liking it, and willing to pay for it.
The Highway Girl - Yep she does want investor money for a tour. But also for a internet based show, and website. It is an interesting departure from the norm. Check it out.
Occipital - Very impressive technology. Amazing really! As Don pointed out it is hard to describe in words, but it could be an amazing service tied to a desktop app. I know that they are still working on the details of how to make money off the technology, but once they have that all ready I will be excited to use it.
Foodzie - Nice idea, the farmers market of the web. Boulder is a great place for them to pickup some traction in the local food market. I think they will go far.
TravelFli - Well done. The flight uniforms were a nice touch. A very solid idea, one that I would like to try out as soon as it is available. I mean who wants to lose out on free miles, and to track that all in one place even better.
Good job Everyone!
Mick
Thanks, Mick! Please email me at krista{at}travelfli.com and I will get you an invite to get on the beta Travelfli site. We are launching it soon and we’d love your feedback. You’ll be able to track all of the major loyalty programs within a couple of weeks.
- Krista, co-founder Travelfli
Cheers for the props Mick!
Part 2 of my interview with Aimee Mann launched today on The Highway Girl! http://www.thehighwaygirl.com
Thanks Mick!
Here’s the essence of our complicated business strategy:
Step 1. Get the technology out the door.
Hope you’ll be one of our first testers.
Jeff
Occipital
In my opinion Web 2.0/3.0 are just terms - I don’t think Facebook and MySpace & Twitter is the end of the social networking, may be the term will change to social portal or whatever…
Out of the every 100 or 200 launch there has to be couple of winners. I think Techcrunch did a wonderful job providing a platform for presenting, whether they will become deadpool or stay with livepool; time will prove.
http://mydatingtree.blogspot.com/
Thanks for the kind words about Foodzie. Our team is really passionate about what we’re doing and look forward to creating the best place to discover and buy artisan food.
I rock and all the companies in the world suck and should go out of biz! (wait, we are commenting on a techcrunch post right?)
Good luck to all the teams, your hard work has just begun…
TechStars, you guys are really superstars for giving motivated people a chance at launching their ideas. I have subscribed to your RSS feeds, so I can keep up with your great stories!
Wishing all the best for the entrepreneurs of the startups and their employees.
Just do it. Turn your idea into a success.