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.
Ed: Im not sure about Interactive Content Marketing, its had a painful birth. I guess maybe its time is coming, in the past most of these productions were primarily customer built, Flash based, pretty heavy and generally took a long time to load and yet not excellent once they loaded.
They used to be the preserve of the corporate advertiser, signed off by the Marketing Manager after being pitched after a feverish ideation session by some Hipster Creative Director with an expensive digital team that could beaver away in Flash for a few weeks.
But apparently you can do this yourself now and it builds responsive HTML web pages (vs Flash which is sort of dead).
Its very promising, smaller companies will be able to build their own Interactive Marketing, but the question is can they manage the creative process without the Fixie riding, beard wearing, chai sipping Ideation Team from LOUDNOISE * or whatever funny name they call themselves?
That remains to be seen.
* actually that’s a pretty good name I just made up. Hipsters the domain is for sale 🙂
Startup Name
PublishSoSimply
What problem are you solving?
The world has changed, but people still use pdf files to create guides, manuals, white papers, etc. PublishSoSimply is a fresh solution and a great alternative to static files.
What is your solution?
PublishSoSimply is a digital publishing platform for content marketing and inbound marketing strategy. It helps marketers create interactive and responsive docs like white papers, report, ebooks, presentations, guides, case studies, magazines, landing pages and others. Marketers can manage their content in 3 easy steps: – Create – use easy drag&drop visual creator, add texts, photos, videos, embed elements like Infogr.am charts, SlideShare presentations, Spotify playlists and more. – Publish & share – each project has its link so you can easily share with an audience. Embedded documents on any website. It’s responsive so you can read on all devices. – Analyze & convert – follow statistics, make the content better, gain more readers.
Ed: With 1.2 billion people and 13 million motorcycles/scooters sold this last year up from 5 million in 2010 estimates put the total number of motorcycles/scooters at 200 million in 2020, this is going to be a massive market at least in pure units.
All of a sudden US VCs are scouting for deals and opening offices in India.
PS They claim to be the first peer to peer platform, I have no way to really verify that but they certainly are very early.
Startup Name
Ridengine
What problem are you solving?
Ridengine belongs to the sharing economy movement, amidst other self driving rental services like Zoomcar and Carzonrent. We’re convinced that it’s vital to the growth of Indian economy to share cars, bikes and rides which is more efficient. Unlike existing market players, Ridengine does not own vehicles. Ridengine allows rental partners (vendors) and interested individuals by providing them a discovery platform while acting as a marketplace to allow car or bike owners and renters to connect in an easy and efficient way. Ridengine’s economic model complements the existing ecosystem, catering to the needs of all existing stakeholders.
What is your solution?
Ridengine is India’s first online peer-to-peer bike and car sharing platform that allows users to rent self-drive vehicles directly from vehicle owners.Ridengine serves as a rental discovery platform helping small businesses andindividual vehicle owners reach potential renters through an online marketplace.Ridengine strives to bring transparency to the existing vehicle rental marketplace by allowing owners retain full control over their vehicle rental – including availability and pricing. These features help potential renters get a curated list of self-drive vehicles within their proximity and price range. Rather than combing through Google searches and scattered online reviews, Customers can decide the best available option at one place.Ridengine simply is a smarter way to rent you next ride!
Target Market
Consumers
How will you make money?
Free to list vehicle / Rental price depends on vehicle type and rental duration
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity?
Founders: Dinesh Rao, Harish Chandramowli & Narayan Gowraj Johns Hopkins University AlumniRonald Reddy, Lead Developer Previously CTO at AdmitSchoolNeelesh Kumar Ch, Head Operations Previously Geo-Specialist at Google Maps, India
Ed: Great to see a hardware startup pitching and we would love to see more.
I wrote an article about the Defender about a year ago when they were first launching, I liked it then and I like it now, its a great idea to help protect women, very happy to see they have survived and are going strong.
Startup Name
Defender 24/7
What problem are you solving?
A violent crime occurs every 25.3 seconds in the US, with 67% of those crimes occurring outside of the home. Stress of a personal crime dramatically impacts the victims memory and ability to identify their attacker. Existing self-defense products are inadequate in providing total protection.
What is your solution?
We have developed a consumer electronics devices for personal protection. It combines a camera, siren, and pepper spray with a 24/7 security monitoring service for 911 response.
Target Market
61 million users Female Smart Phone Users
How will you make money?
We will sell a $99 device and our primary and scalable revenue will come from a recurring monthly service for security monitoring. We plan to launch with a 24 month minimum contract and $15/month. Our anticipated LVC is just $820 if we can retain them for 4 years on average. ($99 hardware + $720 in subscriptions at $15/month for 48 months)
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity?
Defender 24/7 is positioned between self-defense products, like Mace and Taser, and Home Security, like ADT and Vivant. Defender 24/7 is designed to extend home security to “Everywhere Security”. The market for IoT hardware is growing and unlike other hw products, we have a recurring revenue model that will sustain continued innovation and drive profits. Our founders are experienced entrepreneurs, Steven Allen and Ryan McManus. Steven invented Defender and Ryan came in to launch it. Ryan is actively developing startups in Columbus, Ohio with a focus on physical products and Internet of Things.
Ed: Im a sucker for a good dashboard, there is something really addictive about watching a business you created actually working.
I just love being able to watch the dials and graphs and flashing lights on a process or site you created ticking over as users interact with your site, even better if every uptick means money in the bank.
Startup Name
Magneticone e-Commerce Dashboard
What problem are you solving?
A lot of business decision making is in reality a guessing game. Companies are often spending valuable time tracking the wrong metrics that don’t provide any actionable insights. It is difficult to gather relevant data from multiple data sources.
What is your solution?
e-Commerce Dashboard is a BI tool that allows online merchants to gather, visualize, analyze and share their business data within a single solution. It encompasses all of the essential key performance indicators, delivered in an interactive and flexible format. The service aims to accelerate and improve the decision making process as well as help companies identify market trends and spot problems that need to be addressed before they come up.
Target Market
e-commerce
How will you make money?
The service is accessible through paid subscription
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity?
The e-commerce market is constantly growing and so is the need for high quality easily accessible data. e-Commerce Dashboard provides precisely the services allowing to track the business performance with ease and thus we believe that it will find it’s niche in the market.
A friend tells the story of a new staff member who arrived to start work Monday morning and no one told the Sydney team to expect him. No one had any idea what to do with him.
I personally have started at jobs it took me a week to get a phone, PC and everything organised to start work and they had know I was coming for a month.
Staff on-boarding is a serious task, which most companies pay no attention to and it costs them dearly. You can’t imagine a team member wanting to stay with a company that couldn’t be bothered to at least organise a welcome delegation and a desk and yet most companies are crap and don’t care.
We call this free points, you get an easy win with no competition if you just handle it a little smarter.
You were going to have to induct the new team member into the company anyway, wouldn’t it make sense to do a great job of it and win the employee over at the same time as getting them productive faster?
Startup Name
WorkBright
What problem are you solving?
Each year, US employers spend an astonishing $5.5 Billion on on-boarding expenses. The average on-boarding cost per employee is $103. For a huge company like Baskin Robbins, on-boarding comes at a whopping cost of $11 million per year.We know your pain. We know the long, tedious, and costly processes that go with employee on-boarding. We know because we’ve been there, too.
With WorkBright, you can: – Onboard an employee from home, even before their first day of work! – Automate form correction workflow – Eliminate data entry – Automate reminders – Eliminate virtually all costs related to new hire paperwork
WorkBright moves traditional employee on-boarding to a mobile first solution that workers complete before they arrive. We save you time and money on your on-boarding so you can get back to interacting with people, not pushing paper.
What is your solution?
For businesses that are rapidly, seasonally, or just plain constantly hiring, WorkBright takes the cumbersome and traditionally paper-heavy process of on-boarding and puts it all online. We make it possible for new employees to fill out their W4s, upload photos of licenses and certifications, sign digitally, and complete any and all paperwork from their laptop, tablet, or smartphone before they show up for their first day on the job.
Target Market
Businesses
How will you make money?
Priced based on number of employees hired per year
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity?
David Secunda – CEO & FounderDavid has led numerous organizations including Avid4 Adventure (Founder & President- outdoor adventure camps), PlanetOutdoors (Founder & CEO- online outdoor retailer), and the Outdoor Industry Association (President). He also worked as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Mobius Venture Capital and Sequel Venture Partners. He serves on the boards of Entrepreneur’s Organization Colorado and RMC Health, and is currently the Governor appointed Chairman of the Colorado Department of Human Services Licensing Advisory Committee.
Arthur Nisnevich – CTO & Founder
Arthur has been building software professionally for over 12 years. His background includes Web development, iOS and Android apps, systems architecture, and dev-ops. Arthur has been the technical co-founder at two previous startups and has helped numerous businesses and clients get products off the ground and into the marketplace. Arthur holds a B.S. of Computer Science from Purdue University.
Ed: We are witnessing the rise of the super niche DevOps service. Section.io is about as niche as you get, providing caching and CDN deployment as a service.
While building our soon to be launched News discovery engine I found I could piece together an entire application from pre-built APIs and web services except a couple of the really hard bits, the scalable crawler and the machine learning (which is where the magic is anyway so it should be difficult to replicate).
Having said that there were numerous Crawling and Machine Learning APIs available but the scale we are aiming (millions of sites in real time and 10000s of topics) they were not suitable from a cost perspective or the level of customisation so we had to build our own.
But this section of the stack is relatively easy to deploy as a 3rd party service.
I guess all these guys have to do build a real business is to convince a few hundred large corporates to use their services for their websites and they have a decent business, apparently they are well on their way.
If they can convince a thousand e-commerce sites, they will end up with $1 million + monthly run rate and its a very valuable business with very low churn which is relatively easy to manage compared to a lot of other web services.
Startup Name
Section.io
What problem are you solving?
Developed by a team of web engineers that have seen a gap in the market for a self-managed product for controlling caching. Currently most of our users are using section.io for:- Magento and e-Commerce Caching – Instantly Deploy, Test and Real-Time Stats on Caching – For projects which require caching separate from the application/project
What is your solution?
section.io provides a simple way to spin up and manage a complete Varnish Cache solution for your web application in just a few minutes.
Target Market
Developers, Dev-Ops
How will you make money?
Subscriptions/Advertisement
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity?
The expenses app market has been around for a while now and there are a few established solutions like Expensify. Frankly I really don’t want to have to launch an App and record details of the expense so I like the idea of being able to email the receipt with a tag and have the app auto-categorise the expense.
I thought the pitch supplied below was a little off beat, humour and analogies rarely translate well in business writing and often confuse the reader leading them off on the wrong path, stay focused people.
Startup Name
Receiptron
What problem are you solving?
Running a small business is already hard enough. Nobody who puts themselves through that much hard work and spends that much time on chasing their dream and paying their bills wants to have the receipts for those bills suddenly disappear on them because they left the window open during a storm.Conversely, there are already plenty of apps out there that target bigger businesses and help employees deliver expense reports. These systems can work for saving and organizing receipts for small businesses, but it’s like Cinderella’s sisters trying to force their feet into the glass slipper. You can jam yourself in there, but it’s uncomfortable and you run the risk of seriously hurting yourself.
Receiptron is meant to be simple, safe, and single-purpose. If you want the easiest way to store your receipts for later, well that’s what we’re aiming for.
What is your solution?
Instead of trusting a shoebox full of physical paper receipts, save your receipts online! Just take a picture of your receipt with your cellphone camera, then email it toReceiptron with a descriptive subject. Our helpful robot will save and categorize it for you, so that your tax time is as painless and profitable as possible! Save receipts from your inbox the same way – justforward them on to us, and we’ll put them in the same place as the others.Receiptron can be a boon to any small business owner, artist, or entrepreneur who wants an easier way to keep track of their receipts for an easier tax time.
Target Market
Businesses
How will you make money?
30 day free trial, then $5/month or $50 a year.
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity?
Right now, it’s a one-man show, or if you’re into bad puns, a one-Dan show. I’m Dan Hulton, and I’m in charge around here.I’ve been programming and developing web apps for well over a dozen years now, with a focus on clean, maintainable code that makes it easy to quickly respond to client requests and market focus.I’ve also spent plenty of time in the front lines of customer service, which means I know exactly how you feel when something doesn’t work right. I’ve experienced the righteous anger of a customer burned by a bad product. I work tirelessly to ensure that something like that doesn’t happen in the first place, and when something inevitably does happen, that I’m on top of it as fast as possible.
Ed: Todays pitch is a fundamentally great idea, however the thing that would scare the hell out of me if I were one of the target customers is the fact that you just can’t know if a provider and their app really has the security smarts they claim.
While this level of security in the hands of individuals may be used for nefarious business, there is also a legitimate use case to evade malicious Nation States who would seek to repress reporters and activists.
I guess what qualifies as a Malicious Nation State is actually just a matter of perspective, all States are malicious to someone.
Encrypting voice calls is in fact the ultimate mission critical security application for a reporter or political activist, if you get this wrong a knock at the door will come in the middle of the night.
Normally the first rule in security is don’t let anyone know anything about how your security strategy, technology and end points, however for marketing purposes this team has chosen to publicise the encryption and security methods they use.
I guess keeping quiet about their security stack isn’t going to help them in the case of a persistent attack from a nation state however I find it a little disturbing that they think this is a good idea to be very specific about their methods.
I note a few weird things about the company, it has both an English and German site, but is located in Monkok in Hong Kong and interesting location given the proximity to China and the fact that there is no constitutional or rule of law certainties.
Also the English is not fantastic on the page, there are spelling and grammar errors.
It gets a little more disturbing, they list the use of 521 bit encryption (this is an odd/strange number, you would normally expect a multiple of 8 ie 512 bit) which as far as I could tell was not one of the listed key sizes on the Wikipedia entry for AES256.
Not to say that this isn’t a legitimate company and product, but I have to say that if the web copy is sloppy or factually incorrect there is no way I would trust my life to these guys and their security.
Startup Name
CallProtector
What problem are you solving?
Companies/journalists can communicate worldwide over their phones without being scared of someone listening to them.
What is your solution?
We are encrypting your voice data with an algorithm for top secret military communication. Be safe on iOS and Android.
Target Market
Companies, journalists
How will you make money?
Subscriptions/Advertisement
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity?
We are a young team of 2 developers from Austria who are normally developing enterprise applications for big companies. While developing for them we often got asked how to securely communicate on their iOS or Android devices. There was no good solution so we decided to develop one and 3 years later we are here.
