Mike88

Mike Nicholls Australian Inventor + Entrepreneur working with a small team of engineers building prototypes from Inventions including two medical devices. Publishes Startup88.com and has assessed/reviewed +500 inventions and +200 startups in the last 3 years. Mentors Sydney Startups via Incubate and other incubators and helps members of the Australian Startup Community via the Startup88.com website with free publicity and advertising. Experience in numerous industries including Digital Publishing, Cloud Computing, Apps, Hardware, Aviation, Real Estate & Finance and Health/Medical Devices.

SiteGuru – Check your website for SEO & usability Issues

Startup Name: SiteGuru

Tagline: Check your website for SEO & usability Issues

Elevator Pitch: SiteGuru crawls your website and checks every page for issues. We look for broken links, slow pages, suboptimal meta tags, invalid HTML and much more.

This results in an actionable report that helps you improve your website in just a few minutes.

Besides that, weekly reports help you stay on top of your content. The result: happier users, and more SEO traffic.

Target Market: SEO specialists, Content marketers

How will you make money? Paid subscriptions

How much capital have you raised? 10-50k

Founder(s) Name: Rick van Haasteren

Website: https://www.siteguru.co

Twitter: @siteguruco

City/Country: Netherlands

Product HQ – Customer Driven Product Roadmap Software

Startup Name: Product HQ
Tagline: Customer Driven Product Roadmap Software
Elevator Pitch: Product HQ provides a unified solution for product managers to collect ideas from customers and team members, use data to prioritize those ideas and promote the best into features for the product.

Once a feature, product managers can then use a different set of objectives to prioritize features into those that will make the most impact for their business and promote the best features on to the product roadmap.
Target Market: Tech Startups, Small business owners, Founders
How will you make money? Product HQ offers a freemium and will charge for additional user license and feedback collection widgets.
How much capital have you raised? None
Founder(s) Name: David Zimmerman
Website: http://producthq.io
Twitter: @producthq_io
City/Country: Charlotte, NC, USA

Blended Admin – Software Development, Data Administration, Databases

Startup Name: Blended Admin
Tagline: Software Development, Data Administration, Databases
Elevator Pitch: Hey, I’m a software developer and I don’t like to waste time on repetitive tasks,
so I created Blended Admin.
Blended Admin creates an admin panel for your applications in an easy and fast
way, allowing you to fully focus on your customers’ needs.

Target Market: Anyone who creates a software.
How will you make money? The unique combination of the benefits of an “out of the box” application and the
flexibility of programming.

How much capital have you raised? 10-50k
Founder(s) Name:
Website: http://blendedadmin.com/
Twitter: @blendedadmin
City/Country: london

Snappykit – Snappykit is a new way of creating websites for mobile apps.

Startup Name: Snappykit
Tagline: Snappykit is a new way of creating websites for mobile apps.
Elevator Pitch: Amazing website proves your app’s legitimacy, increases conversion rate and connects users to an app in general. Therefore, it’s an important marketing element to take into consideration.

That’s why we’ve developed a unique service enabling mobile developers to create stunning, highly-functional, responsive app websites in minutes.
Target Market: mobile apps
How will you make money? subscription
How much capital have you raised? None
Founder(s) Name: Denis
Website: https://snappykit.com
Twitter: @snappykit
City/Country: Moscow, Russia

Kookaborrow – Share and Hire in your Local Area

Startup Name: Kookaborrow

Ed: As with most of these peer to peer businesses, building the app is the easy bit, actually getting enough people to download it, use it and actually complete a transaction is the challenge. Most successful new marketplaces (and therefore the only ones you hear about) in recent history have resorted to all manner of nefarious behaviour including faking users and inventory and comments/posts, manually processing transactions and using other more successful sites to poach users. I make no judgement on this except to say that they survived and most others didn’t.
What is it? A mobile application connecting users looking for a items in their local area with users who are willing to hire the item at a price they set.

Find everything from cars to electronics and tools. With new users and products available everyday.
All payments are processed through the app via stripe.

Target Market: Male and female aged 18-46

How will you make money? Kookaborrow will take a 5% transaction fee through the rental process.
Capital Raised? 50-100k
CEO: Steven Cluney

Website: http://www.kookaborrow.com.au

Basin Commerce – Modernizing the Bulk Commodity Supply Chain

Startup Name: Basin Commerce

Most people forget that Industrial England was built on a network of canals with tow paths before the advent of steam, parts of the UK still have extensive canals but I had never realised the USA has a huge network of 25,000 miles of navigable waterways all over the country and Basin Commerce is planning make them more efficient.

Tagline: Modernizing the Bulk Commodity Supply Chain
We are building an on-line market for the sourcing and buying of logistics services in the bulk freight industry. Think of Expedia or Travelocity for your travel bookings, but for of bulk materials. The market currently operates as it has for over 50 years.

We are focused initially on inland waterway system and will give shippers the ability to source service providers in trucking, trans-loading and barging.

How will you make money? We take a 2.9% transaction fee for services booked on the marketplace.
Capital Raised: 50-100k
CEO: Tom Venable
Twitter: @tvcommerce
Website: http://www.basincommerce.com
Target Market: Shippers of bulk freight and commodities. Providers of transportation services such as barge operators, river terminals and trucking firms.

Pagely – We help startups scale WordPress.

Pretty interesting, these guys provide a documented way to scale hosted WordPress using Amazon AWS and unlike most of the other players in this market provide the configurations and their methods they are selling.

A few years ago this site melted down when the guys from 4 short links at O’Reilly sent me thousands of visitors in a matter of minutes to a page that was a collection of over 100 IOT Startups all with images of the devices, my traditional WordPress hosting just melted, likewise I hear similar reports from startups that have suddenly had their Techcrunch moment and their traditional hosting couldn’t cope.

Its almost impossible to solve this problem on a traditional WordPress hosting platform in real time, you end up losing the traffic and if they notice your hosting company often will throttle the site. This is a good way to solve this problem.

 

Startup Name: Pagely

Tagline: We help startups scale WordPress.

Pagely created the Managed WordPress hosting space in 2009, and has been providing secure and reliable WP hosting services to companies like Facebook and NGINX with a focus on:

Performance: Opcode caching, full page caching, optimized PHP and Database setups are essentially platform defaults now instead of the customer trying to figure it out on their own with a mix of plugins and research. More sensible resource balancing on shared setups (old shared hosting providers were notorious for overselling). Collectively these things have made WordPress dramatically faster (vs. a default install) in most use cases.

Pagely Tech Stack

Security: Some level of malware/file scanning, hardened OS installs, least-privileged access, web application firewalls and DDoS mitigation may be defaults at most Managed WordPress providers now. You don’t hear about widespread security issues as we did in say the 2008-2011 period. Those that come up are mitigated quickly by the Core team (or the respective plugin author) and aided by rapidly deployed patches or firewall rules by the Managed hosts.

Tooling: Automating installs, code updates, and backups along with staging and deployment workflows enabled development teams to work faster and create more complex yet stable sites on WordPress.

Support: More knowledgeable support technicians that understand WordPress to a higher degree than a generic web host. Some providers are better than others but all seem to at least make an attempt to specialize in the unique support requirements of WordPress. Here at Pagely we take great pride in our quality over quantity approach to support ensuring that every agent is not only deeply skilled in WordPress but proficient in the core technical skills of DevOps and deployment management allowing them to address any performance or security issue that may arise.

What’s next for Pagely?
It’s odd to look at the landscape, this $1 Billion-channel we created (and of course others helped to grow) and reflect on where we fit in the picture going forward. For us, it’s fairly simple – do more of the things that have made us successful thus far: Investing in our people and focusing on the customer. It’s a recipe that wins over the long term.

Target Segment: Businesses

How will you make money? Monthly plans based on project size

Capital Raised? None

Founder: Joshua Strebel

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Pagely

Website: https://pagely.com

 

Nodio – Blockchain-powered wi-fi router platform for de-centralized applications

Ed: Really interesting product which could be described as the love child of a Router/Firewall and an Personal Security Application Server with failover and security features that can cost tens of thousands from Cisco.

They say the street always finds a use for your product often in ways you didn’t envisage. While Nodio seems to very focused on the blockchain app aspect of the device, as a former owner of a networking and ISP company the router seems like an ideal solution for small offices or individuals who require high levels of internet security and uptime, it has a failover/backup 4G/LTE connection as well as mesh networking between devices and an onramp to the TOR network, a battery backup that can be upgraded and support for multiple VPN methods.

So there is a pretty good chance it will stay connected even in case of a blackout and if you are the sort of person who has a high need for internet security (Journalists, Public Figures, Activists) this is a way that you might be able to stay hidden when you are travelling.

Even more interesting is their crowdfunding model, which could best be described as a combination of Blockchain based virtual shares and a SAFE convertible note. They are offering a share in the value of the company that is producing the Blockchain router. According to the website a virtual contract blockchain value they created called “Nods” which equates to 10% of the value of the company will be split between the funders and can be converted to shares after the closing, the conversion rate is dependant on the number of subscribers. This method allows the market to value the company with a floor on the share price and the company gets any upside. The FAQ states that the product has been prototyped and has a production plan with a target price of $200.

Earlier this year I mentored a startup that wanted to act as a blockchain based smart contract broker which replaces the traditional role of corporations and regulators based in a single country. The entrepreneur was an early member of a newish blockchain based currency and had deep domain knowledge in the area but we think he was too many years ahead of his time. It’s a super interesting topic which you have to keep an open mind about because a lot of these blockchain ideas sound crazy when you first hear them and you think that can’t happen due to regulation but then some of it does despite regulation.

The funny thing about these crypto currency people who will most likely be their customers is they seem to be very risk tolerant and willing to make a bet on ideas years before the rest of the world thinks its a good idea.

Nodio

nodio_07We are proud to announce Nodio — a blockchain-powered wi-fi router that serves as a platform for decentralized applications. Its purpose is to transform obscure technologies into simple solutions for everyday use. Nodio is much more than a regular router. It’s using blockchain for running Decentralized Applications and guarantees the highest level of privacy for every solution based on a device.

Just imagine a real peer-to-peer Internet with messengers, social media, and browsers immune to external threats and hacks, free from censorship and fear of being exposed.

Target Audience: People concerned about Internet privacy and blockchain enthusiasts

How will you make money? By selling our hardware solution
Funding: None (Crowdfunding campaign starts Nov 1st)
Twitter: @nodioproject
Website: nodio.net