As further proof that time flies, South by Southwest just announced it is open for business today.
That means you can register for the conference, which takes place next March 7 through March 16, but it’s going to cost you.
Badges to attend SXSW 2013 are $100 more than last year’s early bird prices for every type of badge. An interactive badge that entitles the holder to attend all the sessions, parties and other events related to the interactive conference costs $695 for 2013, up from $595 for 2012.
A platinum badge that provides access to the music, film and interactive conferences costs $1,195.
A few years ago, Ben Metcalfe reported in a post on his blog that he liked the price increase. In 2011, the price for an interactive badge rose 15 percent to $450 from $395. He argued that the price increase weeded out people who really weren’t serious about attending the event.
And despite the price increases in previous years, SXSW Interactive continues to have record breaking attendance every year. This year, conference organizers expect 40,000 people to attend the event. SXSW has become one of the most high-profile conferences for startup companies looking to gain the national spotlight. In years past, Foursquare and Twitter have found traction with the iPhone and iPad toting early adopter audience. But in the last few years, no clear app has emerged as the next big thing at the show.
SXSW’s mix of media, music and film has also made it one of the most entertaining high-tech conferences. Every year, the parties get bigger and better and have become an important part of the show. In recent years, the SXSW Interactive conference has focused heavily on the startup community with events like Startup Bus competition and the SXSW Interactive Accelerator competition.
So what do you think? Will the price hike lead to quality over quantity and a more manageable event?
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By Damon Clinkscales
Entrepreneurs: Connect with Amazing People to Start Companies/Projects With.
No, it’s not romantic. FounderDating (FD) is an invite-only, online network for entrepreneurs to connect with cofounders. What makes them different?
High Quality – members are carefully screened for quality and readiness (no recruiters, etc.) Applications and members’ identities are confidential, but a few of the folks who are part of the network are former founders or early employees from: stackmob, snapfish, Zynga, Loggly and Gilt just to name a few.
Balanced – 50% engineering & 50% non-engineering!
No Idea Necessary – FD is about the people, so you don’t need to have an idea, just be ready to work on a serious side project
Upcoming Rounds: Austin – apply by August 15th, Other deadlines in NYC, SF, Boston, and Seattle also approaching.
You can read more about FD here.
GE Aviation has acquired Austin Digital, an Austin-based supplier of flight operations data analysis.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“The acquisition of Austin Digital brings some of the best flight operations technology to GE Aviation’s Services business, further expanding our commitment to deliver results for our customers. We are delighted that Austin Digital is joining our team today,” Paul McElhinney, president & CEO, GE Aviation Services, said in a statement.
Austin Digital has approximately 40 employees. They will join the staff of GE Aviation, an operating unit of GE.
San Francisco-based Pole To Win America will establish a new Austin office next month to offer video game testing services.
Pole To Win America’s Austin office, which will focus on console and personal computer games, plans to hire 50 employees.
The company has more than 80 customers and plans to expand its North American presence with the new office.
Austin has the country’s third largest concentration of video game companies, according to the company.
AIGA Austin and BuildASign.com will host the 24 hour CreateAthon Austin starting Sept. 20 to bring volunteers together to help nonprofits with free marketing and creative services.
The nonprofit organizations chosen for CreateAthon Austin include: Austin Clubhouse, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Texas, Con MI MADRE, ECHO, Hope Alliance and Without Regrets Foundation. They were chosen from applications from area nonprofit organizations for 30 projects.
The nonprofit organizations chosen represent a variety of causes from mentoring children to helping the homeless and mental health awareness.
“The nonprofit selection has been the most difficult part of this project,” Dan Graham, Founder and CEO of BuildASign.com, said in a news release. “Every organization that applied was so deserving and does such great work in the community. We would love to be able to help them all.”
Now CreateAthon Austin needs volunteers with advertising, marketing, graphic design, public relations, web development, copywriting and other skills. To apply and find out more details, please visit the CreateAthon web site.
“Austin has some of the top creative talent around,” Erin Bender, President of AIGA Austin, said in a statement. “Whether you’re a designer, art director, developer, copywriter, or just interested in helping some amazing nonprofits, we’re excited to bring the community together to do our part in giving back.”
One of the keys to a successful high tech startup is the team backing the venture.
And solo-entrepreneurs can find it difficult finding a technical cofounder in central Texas where people with technical skills are in high demand. Other startup founders are looking for partners with different skills such as marketing, sales and business development.
A couple of events have arisen to help entrepreneurs find like-minded people who share their passion and are looking for a partner to spearhead their startup.
Tonight, a co-founder meetup will take place at Capital Factory and it’s full. More than 100 people, including a wait list of eight people, have signed up to pitch their company or simply network with other entrepreneurs. OnTechies, Capital Factory and HomeAway sponsor the event. Ricardo Sanchez organizes and runs the meetup.
The companies pitching tonight include:
• Amalgamii
• Escapaide
• GroupWink
• Taskbox
• Zaplings
• Eye in The Sky
• Eborhood
• Hobby Local
• MeatHeadz
• Pinfuse
And if you didn’t sign up in time to attend this co-founder meetup, Damon Clinkscales plans to host another FounderDating session on August 15. The last one was in May. You must apply to attend FounderDating. The organizers seek to get a balanced group made up of half engineering talent.
A startup software company, Jumpshot, has successful raised $98,255 on Kickstarter to create a software program to clean up the hard drive of PCs and combat malware and viruses.
Its Kickstarter program exceeded its $25,000 goal and still has more than 40 days to go.
The software comes on a really cute USB stick and once it’s inserted into a PC, the software goes to work cleaning up tracking cookies, killing viruses and fighting spyware and other unwanted programs.
The program gets smarter as more people use it, according to its founders David Endler and Pedram Amini, two former security research managers in HP’s TippingPoint division. They launched the company in mid-July with a Kickstarter campaign.
“We left our day jobs and created Jumpshot for a totally selfish reason.” co-founder David Endler said in a news release. “We were exhausted being PC tech consultants to our family and friends. Don’t get us wrong, we love to help. But we knew there had to be a better more enjoyable way to assist them. We truly wanted to build something that passed the Grandma test, a product we were proud to leave behind that also wouldn’t impact the quality of our holiday gifts.”
The company decided to launch Jumpshot on Kickstarter because its “a scrappy self-funded startup and we’ve gone pretty far on our own,” co-founder Pedram Amini said in a news release. “Our dream is to leverage the momentum and cash from our backers to truly ‘kick start’ Jumpshot into a viable standalone product. The money will feed directly into USB manufacturing, advancing the Jumpshot engine and driving future improvements. We also appreciate the fact that crowd funding will transform Jumpshot into a better product by listening to the feedback of our early adopters.”
Got a dream for the next big thing?
Then DreamIt Ventures has got an pre-seed stage accelerator program for you.
The Philadelphia-based incubator will launch its first accelerator program in Austin, which will kick off in mid-December and run through March.
The companies in the program will launch at South by Southwest Interactive.
DreamIt Ventures will begin accepting applications later on this summer. It gives entrepreneurs $25,000 in exchange for a 6 percent stake in the company. It also provides office space and all kinds of startup services including legal, accounting and marketing. Entrepreneurs from anywhere can apply, but they must relocate to Austin for the program.
DreamIt Managing Partner Kerry Rupp will run the Austin program.
DreamIT has already helped to launch 65 companies and has 45 more in its pipelines with plans to launch in the next year. Its companies include: Adaptly, Cloudmine, Mindsnacks, Notehall and others.
DreamIt ventures joins Josh Baer’s Capital Factory as one of the incubators for new tech startups in Austin.
In San Antonio, the TechStars Cloud will select its next class in the fall. Its program runs from January to April and Jason Seats is the managing director.
The Geekdom Fund in San Antonio at Geekdom, a coworking and collaboration site at the Weston Centre downtown also offers $25,000 equity investments in startups. The companies must be a member of Geekdom and relocate to its offices there. It provides free office space and other startup services.
For more information on the DreamIt Ventures Austin program, read its press release or this TechCrunch story.
“Sign, Sign everywhere a sign” – Five Man Electrical Band
Dan Graham, CEO and Founder of BuildASign
That’s one of Dan Graham’s favorite signs.
The CEO of BuildASign occasionally goes into the company’s 60,000 square foot manufacturing and warehouse facilities to look in its sign bins to see customer orders.
“It’s never a dull time,” he said.
Graham clearly enjoys his work as the head of one of the country’s largest online sign printing companies.
And how he got there is one of Austin’s best bootstrapping entrepreneurial tales that has become legendary in the city’s startup community.
Graham, who has an undergraduate degree in computer science, ran a web development business with three friends: Blake Borgeson, Ty Barho and JR Kraft. He wanted to make extra money while he went to the University of Texas School of Law.
They built basic websites for companies and often tried to upsell them on more elaborate e-commerce platforms.
They created BuildASign.com as an optional website for a local graphics company. But the company didn’t want to pay $7,000 for it. The platform put the approval process for print jobs like custom designed signs in the customer’s hands online and eliminated expense and time.
“The sign shop market is very fragmented,” Graham said. Austin has about 150 sign shops and tens of thousands of others exist around the country, he said.
“We built out a prototype,” Graham said. “We went door to door trying to sell it. We were told the Internet wasn’t an appropriate place to sell signs.”
They presented it as a cost savings model and they decided to prove it out on the revenue side, Graham said.
“We took our prototype and launched it out there,” he said.
And they started getting orders online. But they needed somewhere to print the signs. They were just four guys in a ten foot by ten foot office with two computers and no manufacturing plant.
“We partnered with a local print shop,” Graham said. “We guaranteed a three day turnaround.”
The print shop started delivering BuildASign’s orders late. So Graham and his partners arranged to print their own signs in the shop after hours.
“We went to the print shop after it closed and worked until two or three or four in the morning to get our stuff out,” Graham said. “It wasn’t a great deal for us. We were paying for labor and we were doing the labor.”
In 2005, BuildASign leased 1,200 square feet of space and a printer and got into the sign making business.
“We had been pulled into it by necessity,” Graham said.
By the end of 2006, BuildASign had $3 million in revenue and $7.8 million the second year and then $10 million in 2008, $12 million in 2009, $20 million in 2010 and $30 million last year.
“This year, we’ll do $45 million to $50 million,” Graham said.
Graham graduated in the fall of 2005 from the University of Texas School of Law after two and a half years but he hasn’t taken the Texas Bar Exam yet.
“It’s not something that I need for the job that I have,” he said.
His parents were OK with his decision. His mom is now a retired librarian with the City of Austin’s Milwood branch and his dad served as deputy executive director of the Association of Texas Professional Educators.
“If they had been making the decisions for me they would have advised having a backup plan,” he said.
But instead of taking a high paying job right out of law school with a big firm, he really wanted to “give the entrepreneurship thing a go,” he said.
In the summer of 2005, Graham quit a legal internship once BuildASign started getting some sales.
The company turned a profit its first month.
To work full time, the partners needed to get paid. They quit their day jobs in two shifts and by the end of January 2006 they were all making a salary as full time employees.
“We haven’t taken any venture capital, loans or other investment,” Graham said. “That kind of bootstrap mentality has been with us since the beginning.”
The company operated “lean” with a little l, meaning they watched every penny that they spent. They also subscribed to what came to be known as Eric Ries’ Lean Startup movement, which means deploying a product quickly and adapting and changing to meet customers’ needs.
“We were able to build our customer acquisition tool with sweat equity,” Graham said.
BuildASign spread the word about its services through Google Adwords and it hired its employees from listings on Craigslist.
“Our business, just in its nature, is a lot more conducive to bootstrapping,” Graham said. “You’ve got to have a gradual and scalable model to bootstrap your business. So that you are funding yourself as you move forward.’’
Most of BuildASign’s growth has come organically. It has bought a few companies, but acquisitions make up a small percentage of its revenue growth, Graham said.
“When we do acquire companies we’re looking for companies that fit into our existing business model,” he said.
Philanthropy is a big part of BuildASign’s company culture
BuildASign offers other products in addition to signs: bumper stickers, business cards, magnets, license plates and flags.
A couple of years ago, BuildASign began selling into Canada. A year later, the company expanded into the U.K. and six months ago, it entered the German market. Still, international sales make up less than 5 percent of revenue.
BuildASign’s largest market is serving small businesses with the real estate industry making up the largest segment.
Consumers order everything form novelty license plates to dorm room signs.
But business isn’t just about making a buck.
“Philanthropy has been a part of our business since the beginning,” Graham said.
BuildASign donates cash or signs to nonprofit organizations. It has given away $450,000 to more than 400 nonprofit organizations. Seven employees spend their time focused on the giving program.
In July of 2008, BuildASign started a program to give away 10,000 welcome home banners to families of returning military. They sold out in a week and a half.
“Ultimately we made more than 250,000 banners worth $7.8 million,” Graham said. “That’s been a fantastic program from all accounts.”
Graham doesn’t just donate money and goods. He donates his time. He stays actively involved in the Austin community.
“I was born here. I’ve a got a nine month old daughter. She’s going to grow up here,” he said. “We have an opportunity we shouldn’t pass up to make a difference.”
Austin Under 40 selected Graham as “Austinite of the Year” last March.
“Dan is a strong community leader who contributes his time to a variety of non-profit and City of Austin development boards,” Lance Parisher, Austin Under 40 co-chair, said in a statement. “He also mentors young professionals and emerging entrepreneurs in the hope that they can learn from his success.”
Kevin Koym, founder of Tech Ranch Austin, said Graham serves as a mentor to “many, many, many entrepreneurs.”
He’s successful because he’s very focused, Koym said.
“He experiments as he did with BuildASign by trying it out as a consulting project,” Koym said. “Then he focused in on something that was working. As we say in Lean Startup practices, he found a product market fit and he just grew the hell out of it.”
Graham’s personality is also a great asset, he said.
“He’s really approachable and very friendly and because of that people naturally want to support him and he deserves it,” Koym said.
Graham serves as a great example to other entrepreneurs, he said.
“He can teach other entrepreneurs that good guys really can be successful,” Koym said. “If you’re focused and a great guy helping other people and things like that then you can really be successful.”
Out of the four founders, three are still owners and only Graham and J.R. Kraft are still active in the business. Kraft serves as the company’s president.
BuildASign has grown from just four employees initially to 230 employees and is currently hiring 10 more.
Four months ago, BuildASign expanded into 22,000 square feet of office space and another 60,000 square feet of manufacturing and warehouse space in North Austin.
Venture Capitalists and Private Equity firms approach Graham all the time about investing, but he isn’t interested.
“We’re doing very well,” Graham said. “We don’t need to take money from anyone. We’ve been profitable since our first month in business. We think there’s a huge opportunity in the market in front of us.”
Will Tweet or Facebook post for school supplies.
That’s the idea behind a social charity program spearheaded by Austin tech startup Sparefoot, which puts consumers in touch with storage facilities.
Sparefoot will donate $3 worth of basic school supplies for every Facebook share and Tweet about what memento they’ve stored since grade school. The donations will go to a school supply drive for Communities In Schools of Central Texas, a nonprofit focused on dropout-prevention.
“We launched this company while I was still in school myself,” Chuck Gordon, Sparefoot Founder and CEO, said in a news release. “Our goal with Supply Memories is to give other students a similar opportunity to succeed, no matter their circumstances.
To participate, visit Sparefoot on Facebook or visit Supply Memories to learn more about the Twitter program.