Category: San Antonio (Page 61 of 62)
Dave Manzer started Austin-based PROverCoffee.com in 2010. He arranges monthly meet ups with members of the media and the business community.
This interview with Manzer is from Startup Week at the Austin Startup Bazaar. He recently launched MyLocalReporter to help companies in Austin, San Antonio, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth pitch their companies and products to the right local reporters. The service is primarily aimed at small businesses that might not have their own public relations representative or firm. It costs $89 for a basic pitch up to $189 for a professionally crafted pitch.
“Getting in the news, half the battle is knowing which news reporter to pitch to,” Manzer said. “We connect small business with the news media with hopes of getting more media exposure for small businesses.”
In 72 hours, a group of strangers met, brainstormed ideas and then built working prototypes for six companies.
The companies included Spear Guard, an e-mail security firm, Renew Couture, a recycled clothing line, Stride Sync, a music sharing app, Golf Average, a statistical analysis app to improve golf performance, SimpLingo, a browser plug-in to learn a foreign language and Approachab.ly, a professional networking app made for conference attendees.
The newfound entrepreneurs took part in 3 Day Startup weekend in San Antonio at Geekdom, a downtown co-working and collaborative workspace.
“This is the best one we’ve had in San Antonio by far,” said Cam Houser, one of the founders of 3DS. “The crop of ideas were really strong. The execution was just great.”
That’s impressive praise considering the last two 3DS weekends in San Antonio created at least two companies that are still running and that have received venture funding. One of those is FanDash, a site for band promotion and Console.FM, formerly known as HelloWorld.Im. Console.FM, created in the Spring of 2011, is now part of Dave McClure’s 500Startups incubator.
The 3DS weekend teaches students and young professionals about entrepreneurship and creates real ventures that go on to further develop their products and services, said Cristal Glangchai, a professor of entrepreneurship at Trinity and one of the organizers. Trinity, Rackspace, TechStars and Geekdom sponsored the event.
Successful entrepreneurs also lent their expertise to the various groups throughout the weekend. The mentors included Pat Condon, one of the founders of Rackspace, Ryan Kelly, founder of Pear Analytics, Jason Seats, founder of SliceHost, Nick Longo, founder of CoffeCup Software, Todd Morey, founder of Mosso, a cloud company within Rackspace and Alan Weinkrantz, a public relations expert who runs his own firm.
In addition, several members of 3DS, a nonprofit organization which puts on the events worldwide, helped. The next 3DS is next weekend in the Netherlands.
Throughout the weekend, participants experienced “a lot of extremes,” Houser said. Some entrepreneurs got their ideas extinguished early on. Others discovered, after a lot of work, that their idea wouldn’t work. One guy stayed up for 27 hours straight to work on programming a new site. Some people never left the building except to interview potential customers.
On Friday, the groups voted on the best ideas and decided who they wanted to work with to develop the idea into a company. But on Sunday, some of the original groups no longer existed like Hole in the Wall, a local restaurant review app. After doing some research, they decided the market was too saturated with similar apps so those team members went to work on other projects, Houser said.
And a new company emerged on Saturday.
Vyjayanthi Vadreavu originally pitched the idea for a documentary on homeless people and a recycled clothing line. Her idea did not get enough votes to make the final projects.
But Saturday morning, she found some people who wanted to work on it. She talked to Glangchai, one of the organizers of 3DS San Antonio, who encouraged her to pursue the idea, but with a different focus.
On Sunday, Vadreavu pitched Renew Couture with a new team. The group collects gently used clothing, delivers the items to student clothing designers at local universities and then sells the clothes made from recycled material.
An estimated four million tons of clothes get discarded every year, Vadreavu said. The opportunity to take some of the clothes and make them into new garments is huge, she said. The company would work with five local fashion schools to create the clothes.
“The clothes get a second life and the customer gets a one of a kind item,” she said.
This was the first time Vadreavu, 26, who works at Rackspace, participated in a 3DS. She plans to continue to work with her group to get the company launched and funded.
“I think it’s such a fantastic experience,” she said. “I wish I knew about it earlier in my career.”
Another woman-led venture, SimpLingo, started out as Babbling on Friday, but changed its name and refined its focus after doing a lot of research and talking with mentors, said Amando Wolf, a junior majoring in Chinese language studies at Trinity.
SimpLingo is a simple way to learn a foreign language, particularly Spanish. It’s a browser-based plug-in to translate portions of text online based on a person’s level of proficiency.
“You don’t have to deviate from your daily routine to learn the lingo,” Wolf said during her pitch.
SimpLingo was the only company to ask for money outright.
“I did the last 3 Day Startup,” said Cassie Robinson, a sophomore at Trinity studying religion, entrepreneurship and business and a team member of SimpLingo. “One of the ideas that did really well, they asked for money.”
So Robinson put up a slide requesting $10,000 and provided a bank account and routing number.
The panel of judges liked the idea and the fact they asked for funding. The panel included Jay Campion, a venture capitalist, Sheridan Chambers, one of the founders of The Denim Group, Dirk Elmendorf, one of the founders of Rackspace, Suizo Mendler, a former Rackspace executive and now TechStars mentor and George Karutz, an investment banker.
SimLingo has a lot of potential, said Alex Butler, a senior majoring in engineering at Trinity and one of the team members. “It’s really scalable.”
After the pitches, the various groups worked the crowd to talk to potential investors.
Luke Carriere, head of Approachab.ly, started out pitching the app as a dating app and then switched to a professional networking app after researching the market.
“The problem was adoptability,” Carriere said. “Partnering with events organizers was a way to ensure there was a critical mass of users.”
Approachab.ly is planning a beta launch of its product in the Spring of 2012, said Carriere, a graduate business student at Fordham University who is doing a internship at the Austin Technology Incubator. He says he has $10,000 in funding from an angel investor to pursue the idea.
“It’s a way to reach out and meet new people at the same events,” Carriere said. “We think there is a market for that. And this is just the beginning.”
At 7 p.m., members of the 3 Day Startup San Antonio weekend will demonstrate their new companies and pitch to a group of investors.
The group, mostly students from a variety of universities, have been working all weekend to create their startups. They’ve rarely left the 11th floor of the Weston Centre downtown, home to Geekdom, a new co-working collaboration space aimed at technology companies.
For a peak at what they’ve been going through, check out Nick Longo’s Flickr stream. Longo, an entrepreneur who founded Coffeecup software, heads up the Geekdom and served as a mentor to the group.
Stayed tuned. I’ll be heading to Geekdom shortly to listen to the pitches and report on the new companies.
About 40 aspiring entrepreneurs gathered Friday afternoon at Geekdom downtown for 3 Day Startup San Antonio.
They brought sleeping bags, backpacks, computers and tents.
They had plenty of fuel to get them through the weekend with two refrigerators filled with Red Bull, sodas, gatorade, juice boxes, water, beer and fruit. An entire shelf held dozens of different kinds of snacks including Cheez-Its, Oreo cookies, Snickers bars and granola bars.
They spent an hour getting to know one another before breaking into eight color-coded groups to brainstorm ideas to create a new company. From 3:30 p.m. until 7:30 p.m. they worked in different offices hashing out their ideas on white boards. More than a dozen mentors and organizers also helped the participants formulate their ideas.
Luz Cristal Glangchai, associate director of Trinity University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, oversees the program.
Nick Longo, who founded Coffeecup Software, and now heads up the Geekdom, and Todd Morey, who helped create Rackspace’s cloud business, would pop in and out of the offices, offering advice.
Longo told the green team to keep in mind “what problem am I trying to solve? How large is my market? And can I execute it?”
He told them that there are a lot of sites like Prezi, Woofoo forms and Chargify that already exist that could help them mock up a website.
Morey told them to keep in mind the cost of acquiring customers.
“Going viral is not a strategy,” Longo said. “Google Ad words is not a strategy.”
The green group came up with an idea for putting a friendly face on a computer repair service targeted at the elderly and people with learning disabilities.
Longo recommended googling “The Pirate Metrics” on acquiring and retaining customers and to follow advice articulated by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup.
“If it takes too much money upfront it’s non-executable,” Longo said.
The yellow group listed a bunch of problems on a white board and then brainstormed solutions for them. They included a parking app to reserve a parking space, a grocery list helper app and a language app to help learn a foreign language.
Ryan Kelly, owner of Pear Analytics and a mentor, suggested the group gamify the language app.
“Make learning a language more fun,” he said.
Around 6 p.m., the groups broke for a catered dinner of Dicky’s barbecue brisket sandwiches, potato salad and beans. And then they went back to their offices to create powerpoint presentations and solidify their ideas.
At the pitch session, the groups presented their ideas on a giant screen. The pitches ranged from a dating app to cloud computing platform. The first pitch was for GolfAverage.com, an in-depth statistics site for golfers, which keeps track of a current game and past performance, followed by Penny for Your Thoughts, a documentary on homeless people and a sustainable clothing line.
Other ideas included BookZingo.com, a marketplace for college students to sell their textbooks, Transparent Mortgages, a site for first time homebuyers and those with credit issues, Clan, an app for music sharing, Spear Phishing, a virus and malware prevention platform, Hole in the wall, a local restaurant review site, Approachab.ly, a dating app, Kudotree, a personal recommendation site and Babbling, a program to learn a foreign language intuitively.
In the end, the group voted by putting their heads down with closed eyes and raising their hands for the idea with the greatest chance of success and the idea that they most wanted to work on. Each member had two votes.
Ideas around the hot trends of mobile, social and location garnered the most interest. The final five ideas with the most votes included GolfAverage.com, Approachab.ly, Babbling, Clan and Spear Phishing. The group leader stood before the crowd and told them what kinds of skills were needed to build out the company and then people decided whether they wanted to work for them. The largest groups formed around Approachab.ly and Babbling. Around 10 p.m. they headed for offices to get back to work. Meanwhile, Clan bit the dust. And Hole in the Wall re-emerged as a company with five people wanting to work for the idea.
“That’s going to happen,” said Rachit Shah, one of the original founders of 3DS.
“Another company will probably fail before the night’s over,” said Cam Houser, another original founder of 3DS. Four University of Texas graduate students in business, computer science, engineering and law started 3 Day Startup in 2008 and now they run it full time as a nonprofit organization.
“It’s an entrepreneurship education program for university students,” Houser said. “We were grad students and didn’t feel like the student potential for entrepreneurship was being met. More could be done to help students start ventures.”
The idea is a popular one. 3DS has put on programs around the world including China and Germany.
“You have to apply, submit a resume, pitch an idea and get interviewed,” Houser said. “Most of the people who want to participate in a 3DS are pretty passionate.”
The San Antonio program was the 17th 3DS.
“It’s free to participants,” Houser said. “We’re giving them a scholarship.” It costs around $500 per person which includes catered meals, snacks and drinks and place to hold the event. Corporate sponsors contribute the bulk of the money.
“The only time they leave the building is to talk to customers,” Houser said. “On Sunday, their eyes are bloodshot and they smell bad but they’re really fired up.”
The 3DS organizers do have rules. They don’t let pre-existing companies pitch and they don’t allow anyone to pitch porn sites.
“It ranges from an idea on a napkin, up to they’ve done a lot of market research and they have a site in mind,” Houser said. “We provide an exciting and high energy environment that resembles a startup with long hours and overlaying order onto chaos.
So far, 16 companies have spun out of 3Ds that have raised $4 million, Houser said. They include Hoot.me, FanDash, Console.FM and Famigo.
FanDash, formerly BandDemand.com, is one of the startups to spin out of the San Antonio 3DS program.
The founder of Hurricane Party pitched his idea but no one wanted to do it, Houser said. But he did meet five of his six members of his team at 3DS, he said. The company is now called Foreca.st and is doing well.
Christian Salmagne from Aachen, Germany, brought 3DS startup to his hometown last summer. Forty students met at the RWTH Aachen University and at least one of the companies is still up and running, Salmagne said. The company is Tamyca.de, which stands for Take My Car. It’s a peer to peer personal car sharing site.
Salmagne attended the San Antonio 3DS. He’s currently doing a three month fellowship at the Austin Technology Incubator to learn about entrepreneurship so he can take his knowledge back to his hometown to help with Germay’s startup community.
“I’m helping people and observing,” Salmagne said. “I like to experience this energy. You get addicted to it.”
For three days, 40 people will meet, brainstorm and create companies during San Antonio’s Three Day Startup Weekend.
The action takes place this Friday at the Geekdom at the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio.
Luz Cristal Glangchai, associate director of Trinity University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, oversees the program. She held a bootcamp last night at Trinity for the participants to brief them on what to expect during the weekend and what to bring with them.
The weekend kicks off at 2:30 p.m. on Friday and concludes with the newly-formed companies pitching their ventures to funders and others on Sunday. That portion is open to the public, but the rest is closed.
About half the participants are students from Trinity, the University of Texas at Austin and at San Antonio, St. Mary’s and even as far away as Rice and Iowa State.
“It’s really about education,” Glangchai said. “It’s kind of a really intense hands on lesson in entrepreneurship.”
This is the third Three Day Startup Weekend in San Antonio. The first took place at the Molina Healthcare building last November, followed by another one at Rackspace in May, Glangchai said.
Three Day Startup Weekend, fashioned after the original Startup Weekend, took place in Austin. Some University of Texas students held the first one in 2008. Since then, companies spin out of the Austin startup weekends have raised $4 million. Some of them include Famigo and Forecast.
The biggest success story in San Antonio is BandDemand, Glangchai said.
Vid Luther started ZippyKid, which hosts and services WordPress websites.
Starting at $20 a month, San Antonio-based Zippykid provides fast and secure hosting on Rackspace’s servers.
Ten Questions with Luther, founder and CEO of ZippyKid.
1Q. Where did you come up with the idea for Zippy Kid?
A. Basically the idea came about because I was getting a lot of customers calling me and asking for help.
2Q, When did Zippy Kid launch?
A. The first version of ZippyKid launched in 2009. It wasn’t called that. It was called PSD2Live
3Q. Where did you get the ZippyKid name?
A. Wes Wilson runs a site called Brandstack and he put up weekly posts of the top domain names on the site. I saw ZippyKid and it reminded me of a customer comment. They said “my website is so zippy now I love it.” So the name seemed perfect.
4Q. What does ZippyKid do?
A. We are a WordPress hosting company. We only do WordPress as a content management system targeting 60 million users. We make sure your website is stable. We make sure your website doesn’t get hacked. People want a secure website. Lately, the number one thing people come to us for is speed. If your page loads slower than two seconds, you’re going to lose customers.
5Q. How many customers does ZippyKid have?
A. We have 1,000 from all over. We’re getting a lot customers from Europe. We’ve got customers from Australia and India. (Only 20 customers are from the local area)
6Q. Who are your customers?
A. We’ve got large enterprise customers and small individual bloggers and journalists. Virginia Tech is a customer. Anyone who is making money on the Internet they host with us. They don’t want to spend time managing their server.
7Q. What is your relationship with Rackspace?
A. We’re a partner with Rackspace. We handle all the server stuff for you. We do everything for you so that you can focus on your content rather than your server. Our slogan is “You post, we host.”
8Q. Who is your competition?
A. WPEngine in Austin and some others. But overall, Godaddy is my competition.
9Q. How do you market ZippyKid?
A. Our number one customer driver is actually word of mouth. We’re doing a lot of search engine optimization for when people are looking for WordPress solutions. We’re like a drug, people try us out and they get hooked. They can’t get enough.
10Q. What was the hardest part about launching ZippyKid?
A. Deciding to do it. Deciding to stop being passive aggressive and just go ahead and do it. If it fails, it fails.
ZippyKid has partnerships with other companies like Torbit. For $60 a month plan, ZippyKid’s customers get Torbit included. It also has partnerships with GravityForms, Woothemes and Backup Buddy. ZippyKid has six employees and is based at Geekdom. Luther applied for the TechStars Cloud program. That’s John Gray, ZippyKid’s Chief Technology Officer, sitting across from Luther.
Nicholas Longo, director of Geekdom
But now a new place, smack dab in the middle of downtown at the Weston Centre, might be able to do that with a collaborative workspace called Geekdom.
Geekdom is a nonprofit organization that will host technology workshops, lectures and events. It also provides office space to startups and desks to other technology workers through an application process. The center has an outreach effort to local high school and college students. Rackspace Chairman Graham Weston has put up the money to get the center established.
The desks will cost about $125 a month to rent and will come with a parking space. The community membership will cost around $50 and does not come with a dedicated space, Longo said. The offices will be open around the clock and members will have access codes and keys to get in to the building after hours.
“It’s like a gym membership for geeks,” he said.
Some people want to hang out all the time and write code, while others will want to just pop in and out from time to time, Longo said. The space hasn’t officially opened yet but one guy comes there every night after his regular job to code until midnight, he said.
Longo plans to have a strategic layout for assigning desks by putting “coders” next to “creatives” so that different groups get to network. And all residents (people who have desks) must give one hour of their time a week to help others, Longo said. Or they can put on a workshop once a month on programming languages, design or marketing. The idea is to create a collaborative environment, Longo said.
“Mentorship is the new classroom,” Longo said.
The Geekdom is nice. The 11th floor of the Weston Centre formerly housed a law firm. Large windows provide a panoramic view of downtown. Red, black and white decor pay homage to Rackspace, which is a sponsor of the site. The 15,000 square foot space includes a pool table, some arcade video game machines, a kitchen area with a couple of refrigerators stocked with beer and soda.In addition to the offices, Longo wants to set up rooms for people to make things, ranging from painting to soldering metal to sculpture, robotics, Legos and more. It’s all about the Maker’s movement, Longo said, fashioned after Maker Faire and Make Magazine, which encourages people to build stuff from scratch.
Two weeks ago, the Geekdom hosted its first big event Startup Ignite’s all night Hack-a-thon, which garnered praise from its participants. It plans do another Hack-a-Thon on Nov. 18th at Geekdom.
Starting this Friday, San Antonio’s latest three day startup weekend takes place there.