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.

Marketing Expert @ Spark Ideas – Boston or Remote

Jobs/Projects

Ed: What a great idea, crowdfunding via supply of skills.

Job Title Marketing Expert
Startup Name Spark Ideas
Location (city or remote) Remote- Boston Based
Job Description We are looking for a marketing expert with skills that can drive traffic to the site and increase the user base to join the team and take a piece of equity in the company.

Please email or call
What do you really need this person to deliver? Drive traffic and users to the site
What Skills & Experience are Non Negotiable? –
Your Website www.sparkideas.co
What does your Startup Do? (Elevator Pitch) Hello,My partner and I are looking for a marketing expert to join our startup www.sparkideas.co aimed at bringing ideas to life by matching entrepreneurs with developers willing to work for equity.
www.sparkideas.co

” Angel Investing without money”

For more information visit our site. www.sparkideas.co
Why Would They Work For Your Startup? The potential for Spark to be a massive company similar to Kick-starter/Elance is huge
Twitter Handle None
Salary & Equity (if applicable) 15-25% Equity and salary eventually
URL to Apply Email applications to mitchelltrulli at gmail.com
Your Name Mitchell Trulli
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RyteMeow – Video Serving Sharing App + Lesson On Advertising

Pitch your Startup, ,

Ed: I wonder if the horse has bolted on the video space, the three big Western players Youtube, Facebook and Twitter are all pushing video hard, and then all the micro players are very popular with their demographics, add to this the massive growth of real time streaming with Periscope and Meerkat and you wonder if the users might not be a little fatigued.

Im not sure there is a place for another video server and I don’t buy the value proposition that sharing video is overly broken and whilst it might be subject to some spam or incorrect labelling, its not clear to me that this is a huge issue for users.

It’s probably not enough of an issue for creators and consumers to move from Youtube and Facebook where all the content is across to a platform that has no content.

Pretty sure users prefer content which might be mislabelled in some cases to no content.

The comments about the pre-roll videos advertising are a little naive, the service has to be paid for somehow and unless they are building a completely different approach to monitisation which the world hasn’t used yet they will need to run video ads.

Online advertisers are used to spending their budget on buy banners and prerolls, sometimes sponsored stories or adwords.

Unless you feel you can build a completely new video service and a completely new advertising system, (adserving, reporting, payments, customer interface and a new ad format) and then get sufficient customers to use your new format/system then your startup will need to use an existing monetisation model.

Most startups struggle on executing on one of these objectives, very few can execute on all three.

 

Startup Name RyteMeow
What problem are you solving? We’re buildingRyteMeow to fill a huge need in the social sharing video space. To this point, the video sharing experience has been limited by 3 pain points:A glut of irrelevant or poorly constructed content tagged or titled as relevant, when it’s not (e.g. a YouTube video labeled “Austin Guitar Player” but has nothing to do with the title, the uploader merely wanted it to list in this category).
Inefficiency/Ineffectiveness of “local” designation. Viewers can’t always be sure the video being viewed is in the locale they choose, because of incorrect tagging of content is intentionally edited to contain a great deal of uploader’s ideas/thoughts/product sandwiched around a smaller amount of the searched-for content.
The pain of pre-roll adverts. You want 5 Seconds of rock, but you get 45 seconds of GEICO.
RyteMeow solves all of that in a dynamic, interactive platform that enables hyper-targeted, shared videos that are always relevant to what you want. And by maintaining a laser focus on user experience and quality of content, we eliminate the pitfalls that have befallen other “microshare” apps like Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc…

Users CANNOT simply upload a video and tag it to a geodefined area (like Austin) and have it show up for that area. Our algorithm ensures that won’t happen.
By maintaining a firm grip on the relevance of a user’s experience, we’ll avoid that dreaded “spam fatigue” that all other apps have experienced. Simply put, as a user, you’re creating your own highlight reel of your favorite experiences, and sharing with others.
What is your solution? Gives people a way to share and view videos the way they want, with hyper-local, hyper-relevant content, so they always find what they want and can connect with those who share that interest.
RyteMeow is like a search engine on overdrive for the best, most relevant videos, with social sharing built in.
Target Market blogger, writers, journalist, consumers
How will you make money? Subscriptions/Advertisement
Founders Names Todd McDougall
What type of funding has the company received? Bootstrap
Website http://rytemeow.com/
Twitter Handle @rytemeow
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Venux – Encrypted Comms Channels + Secure Storage

Pitch your Startup, ,

Regular readers will recall, I am keen for solutions which offer private citizens the option to protect themselves against hackers and their own Governments. Venux is offering both a person to person secure comms channel and secure file storage.

While Im keen on these solutions I wonder how a consumer assures themselves that the service they use is secure, merely using a service like this would seem to be like using a big honeypot where every hacker both private and State based would be trying to attack the users and the platform.

This sort of service is required, especially when constitutional protections or implied rights to privacy have no meaning anymore, we tend to think of hostile Governments being a developing world issue, but increasingly its a Western world problem as well.

If you want to understand why you need a service like this, look at the Fortinet World Threat Map and see the constant barrage of hacking attacks in real time.

Startup Name Venux
What problem are you solving? A big issue is the security and privacy of personal information. Reports of hack attacks and data breaches are constantly on the news. As the amount of digital data in the universe is growing, vulnerability of unencrypted data is growing. Another issue is the complexity of modern OS architecture which produces compatibility and stability issues, creates a loss in performance, and leaves systems vulnerable to attacks.
What is your solution? All of Venux’s products are based on their completely secure Venux Platform. Optimized to increase performance, the simple architecture makes it standards compliant, extremely efficient, lightweight, responsive and virus-free. The user interface design is intuitive and beautifully executed. The tools you use to browse the web, organize your files, play and share your media, communicate and collaborate have a simple, elegant and integrated look.
Target Market Venux will target anybody that does computing, with a particular focus on those who are seeking digital privacy. Anybody who communicates online, stores digital data, and shares information with others is always at risk, and therefore this segment will be the group that will benefit most from the company’s easy-to-use, all-in-one solution for daily computing.
How will you make money? We will employ the pay-as-you-go and add-on business models. Add-ons expand program functionality while bringing additional revenue streams. Our Add-ons are also competitively priced. The pay-as-you-go model gives users the freedom to make purchases only when they need to without any contracts. Customers can freely use the software and satisfied customers lead to word-of-mouth bringing in additional revenue.
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity? Venux doesn’t store user credentials or personal information and doesn’t use databases or servers. Venux will not have to store important information due to the Company’s proprietary technology, H.I.P.S.™. The Company’s unique encryption service hides information in plain sight, diminishing potential liabilities. Also, Venux offers AVPN (Anonymous Virtual Private Network) that serves competitive advantages in the market.
Founders Names Vlad Kruglyanky, Eugene Nosko
What type of funding has the company received? Angel
Website https://venux.com
Twitter Handle @venux_software
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The Developer Marketing Guide for Startups

Free Resources, , ,

Great idea, having built a few businesses and platforms, some moderately successful others total flameouts, I can tell you from hard won experience (I call it tuition fees) Marketing & customer acquisition is usually where most new apps and platforms fail, not tech and not funding initially.

Startup Name The Developer Marketing Guide
What problem are you solving? Marketing to developers is notoriously difficult, this guide features methods and tools from some of the most successful Developer Marketers in the industry.
What is your solution? The Developer Marketing Guide is an open collection of the best resources for developer marketing. We want to encourage a conversation about what works, what doesn’t, and why, and openly share that knowledge with the developer company community.
Target Market Developer Marketers, Marketers, Developer Companies, Developer Tools
How will you make money? Subscriptions/Advertisement
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity? Heavybit is a 9 month program for post-seed funded companies making developer-focused products.
Founders Names Ted Carstensen
What type of funding has the company received? Bootstrap
Website http://www.devmarketingguide.com/
Twitter Handle @heavybit
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Bullet News + Changes in Publishing + News & Content Discovery Is Broken

Pitch your Startup

Ed: Bullet News pitched their site to us which inspired this long rant, you can see their pitch at the bottom.

People forget or don’t believe that industries change dramatically or disappear permanently. If you want a refresher, read the seminal Harvard Business School paper “Marketing Myopia” one of my favourite’s. I read it in my early 20s and had a permanent effect on the way I view industries and business.

Nothing is forever, all businesses die and no one realises they are dead until its too late.

The News industry is a really interesting study in business evolution, the dynamics are changing so quickly.

Traditional publisher metrics are being smashed by the Buzzfeed’s, Huffington Post’s and Business Insider’s who rapidly rehash stories from around the web, turning other people’s reporting, tweets and videos into bite sized stories with split tested and measured headlines and images optimised to maximise the click through rate.

I know we still have Newspapers (I saw one the other day) but as the medium shifts from paper to online the most important players in the newsroom are changing.

Once upon a time journalists and editors were a culture unto themselves, they were opinionated, unique, righteous, militant, the story mattered, the words, grammar, the facts, the investigation.

Great writing and opinion was celebrated, envied.

Competition to get on the front page of the paper was intense, people aspired to be writer who could consistently hit the front page or who had a loyal following.

Now everyone has a front page. Anyone can can launch their own page in 30 seconds at a dozen web service providers.

Inventory is unlimited. Getting traction is hard.

But anyone can become a journalist and publisher and tens of millions of people are every year.

Many people predicted the death of blogs, that blogging was started by many but continued by only a few, but due to new sites like Medium and Linkedin’s Influencer network blogging is actually growing significantly.

Interestingly while I write and publish this site I do not consider myself a journalist, Im sure most of you would agree.

The Newsroom Has Been Toppled

Producers, optimisation teams, data scientists and robotic writers are staging a coup.

Quality sites such as Wired are the last bastion of well written long form content in the technology space.

Almost everyone else is producing one page snippets of text with very little new information.

Very little journalistic skill required.

Lots of noise not much signal.

In the past what mattered was well written accurate investigative reporting, what matters now is page views.

Facts are less critical, entertainment is more important, it’s almost as if mass readers are ok with partially true stories, they would prefer the entertainment now than a factual well written piece tomorrow.

I’m ok with most of these changes except the dumbing down of content, the old world publishers held cities and countries to ransom controlling politics, opinion and trade for over a century.

I think the democratisation of news is fantastic, but it means a lot of changes and possibly destruction for existing players.

Mid-low level Journalists without their own audience are increasingly headed for replacement by robotic writers (and yes it works now for finance and sports and will work for other news soon) and even senior journalists will be forced into a life of freelancing for bit rate articles.

Most publishers pay their freelancers significantly lower rates for online articles vs articles published in a paper.

This cost cutting will continue for online publications. Most of the new age publishers get large amounts of their content for free by rehashing stories from other sites, social media or from content contributed for free by non journalists.

If content is nearly free, publishing is available to all, duplication abounds, where is the value, who makes the profit?

Only Celebrity Journalists Will Make A Living

Mid-low level Journalists without their own audience are increasingly headed for replacement by robotic writers or low level admin staff.

Software Robots are already writing finance and sports now and will increasingly write general news.

If cut, paste and rehash journalism is the future of driving page views and journalists wages are the key driver of costs, new entrants and existing management are figuring out you don’t need senior journalists to do cut and paste work.

With the exception of Celebrity Journalists and those who still have a job at traditional publishers, Journalists are being forced into a life of freelancing for bit rate articles.

In the future journalists will struggle to make a living or cease to exist unless they have two things.

Future Journalists need their own brand and product (ie column/show/podcast/blog) and their own large following of loyal readers.

Celebrity Journalists will bring their own crowd to the publication and get paid accordingly, or maybe they will just launch their own publication.

Mainstream Publishers Are Not Going to Escape Either

Publishers who simply republish newswire articles are going to struggle. The algorithms already know they are merely duplicating content with very little value add and soon the big traffic referrers such as Google and Facebook will cut the traffic they send.

Facebook initiatives such as Instant Articles continue to move value away from the publisher and I expect Facebook to continue to smother publishers and control their revenue.

If large social platforms are dragging publishers stories and readers away from the publishers website, the publisher is at the mercy of Facebook to monetise their content and we know who will get the best of that deal.

News & Content Discovery Is Broken

With so much duplication and so much great new writing from non news sources, News & Content Discovery in real time is a non trivial multi dimensional problem, 10,000s of topics and millions of sites producing great content regularly but a the same time massive duplication at the heavy traffic sites.

Google News includes an estimated 50,000 news sites. Given that most news sites republish major stories from newswire services there is a high amount of duplication and original stories are mostly localised and factual.

Many of the stories could in fact be written by a robot (and will be).

Google and the other large players largely ignore the 50,000,000 blogs powered by WordPress, Tumbler and other micro services and the live reports coming from Twitter, Periscope and Meerkat.

In my opinion the worlds best writers on any given topic are blogging on WordPress sites and the worlds freshest real news is on Twitter and Periscope but neither are created by Journalists or TV Reporters and neither are being widely distributed on Google News, Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter.

For 10 years Google has made very few outwardly noticeable changes to develop Google News. Despite billions of visitors and stories, its trapped in 2000s.

None of the major news aggregators give you any level of control over the stories you see beyond picking the standard 20 categories.

None of the online platforms are not going wide enough or deep enough to find the worlds best writers on specific topics.

  • Twitter is too noisy and impossible to get a regular stream of the topics you want to read.
  • Linkedin is full of self promoters and is not organised by topic.
  • Facebook mostly won’t show you the content you want to read unless the content producer pays to get into your newsfeed.
  • Google Search results are so stale, you will not see real time updates from them on topics you want, nor is there a structured way to receive new updates in real time.
  • Yahoo and Microsoft are like Google News except worse.
  • Most of the new apps such as Nuzzel, Quibb, Inside.com, MediaREDEF and the new Apple News are all human curated and mostly limited to particular industries.

But human curation is only as good as your network of people who can discover and share content. If your network doesn’t search and share, you won’t find the content you are interested in.

Social discovery and curation is very important but it cannot find the diamonds in the 50,000,000 blogs in any meaningful scalable way.

It cannot reliably find new stories on the micro topics that you want to read.

And yet despite 20 years of work algorithmic curators are still very immature. Most of the work in the space is going on in the big companies or in Universities, compared to the rest of the server and platform space AI & Machine Learning feels like its trapped in the 80s.

What’s Missing?

If most of the worlds most interesting writers are publishing on stories on 50,000,000 blogs about 10s of thousands of topic you need a News Discovery Engine that can parse 1,000,000s of sites in real time and sort them into micro topics for each reader.

And processing and classifying 1,000,000 blogs and news sites in real time is the experiment behind Startup88’s side project Newscloud.io.

As for Bullet News, I like their format and I wish them well, but their product is limited in scope and their current model will keep it that way.

Bullet is currently limited to summarising the stories of a handful of publishers. Normally this would be copyright infringement but they have negotiated agreements with all of the publishers they include.

This model is not scalable they will struggle if they have to individually sign up every publisher, the team at the now original and defunct Newscloud.com tried this and despite great funding and actually being owned by the group of publishers could not penetrate the publishers legal armies, there is a good article on their attempts here.

Once you understand how challenging this problem is, you understand that Bullet is a nice reading format, but its limited by the very model it seeks to replace.

Newscloud.io is still very much an alpha product, it’s crawling 10s of thousands of sites, its sorting into categories and tagging but it remains a work in progress which we hope we can form into a great way to find content on the topics you are really interested in.

Love to hear your feedback on the Newscloud.io platform.

 

Startup Name Bullet News
What problem are you solving? Providing Fast & Reliable News Updates for busy People.
What is your solution? Short Bullet Point News Articles easy to digest while on the GO..
Target Market 24-45 Male /Female
How will you make money? Advertising
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity? 1 of Our Major Competitors has just gone out of business (Circa) . This gives us the opportunity to become market leaders in this type of news publications.Our Founder Julia wurz has many years experience working in media & journalism.
Founders Names Julia Wurz
What type of funding has the company received? Series A VC
Website https://bulletnews.net/
Twitter Handle @Bullet_News
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Revlio – Social Media E-commerce Platform

Pitch your Startup

Ed: If you are in the business of selling product and your product images are being spread far and wide by social media, traditional e-commerce shopping carts are not the most efficient way to close potential sales and in many cases directing views to a standard e-commerce site would probably kill the sale.

So the idea of being able to buy the beautiful product you just liked with a click of a link or by sending an SMS from a Instagram or Pinterest photo is a great way to turn social media interest into sales.

Very convincing story on their website.

Startup Name Revlio
What problem are you solving? Whether it be in print, on TV, a product, or on Instagram; we bridge the gap from discovery to instant access or purchase. We bypass the clutter and distractions a user endures when attempting to search or instantly access / purchase an item they see in their daily routine.
What is your solution? Revlio is a cutting edge network that turns mobile phones into shopping carts and more. Now, as long as it’s legal, people can instantly buy anything they see on Instagram, the visual web, in magazines, on TV & in their daily life. No apps, no searching, no URL’s or words to type. Just tap or text to experience the power of Revlio.Mission: Develop a simple, elegant way for a consumer to instantly buy or explore the items they see in their daily lives, with little to no friction and, to provide retailers an instant increase in sales and better consumer data with the opportunity to instantly engage with the customer at any time throughout the process or in the future.
Target Market Retailers, Manufacturers, People Selling On Instagram, Chain Restaurants, Car Dealers, Real Estate Agents etc
How will you make money? Subscriptions/Advertisement
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity? Todd Weider is an American entrepreneur, investor, and visionary. He is best known for his tenure in the luxury yacht industry where he excelled as a Captain operating and building large yachts, and traveling the seven seas of the world, for aperiod of 14 years.He later found Pelorus Holdings which consults luxury yacht owners, marine businesses and professionals in the industry and was heavily weighted in real-estate development thru 2006.

In 2006 Pelorus Holdings looked to technology where he developed his first startup “Splashvision” and sold it in 2008. He currently has a 100% controlling stake in SaltHub, a social portal for the Luxury Yacht and Marine industry and also has 100% controlling stake in Revlio, a new startup that bypasses the clutter and distractions a user endures when attempting to search or instantly access / purchase an item they see in their daily routine.
Founders Names Todd Weider
What type of funding has the company received? Bootstrap
Website http://revlio.com/
Twitter Handle @TWeider
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Slicing Pie Event Tonight – How To Split Startup Equity Between Founders

Pitch your Startup

SlicingPie-BookGuest Post by Mike Moyer: Mike is the inventor of the Slicing Pie model, a universal method for creating a perfect equity split in a bootstrapped startup company. Mike is an author and entrepreneur who started a number of companies including Bananagraphics, Moondog, Vicarious Communication and Cappex.com, a site that helps students find the right college.

Today he runs Lake Shark Ventures, LLC, an early-stage and growth-stage consulting and investment firm and teaches entrepreneurship at Northwestern University and the University Of Chicago Booth School Of Business. He has written eight books with a focus on business and entrepreneurship.

Mike and Founder Institute are running a workshop tonight: Thursday 25th June – Meet at 6.00pm for a 6:30pm sharp start. 8.30pm close.

Where? Proudly hosted by Deloitte Sydney – Level 9, 225 George Street

IMPORTANT: You must bring a Laptop and Pen/Paper to participate in the Slicing Pie Grunt Fund workshop exercises

Tickets are normally $40, and I’ve set up a discount code to make it $30 with code STARTUP88. (This is the same price of the ebook which is included in the ticket price.) Book your tickets here

How to Split Startup Equity

You and a partner go in “50/50” on a new business. You do all the work, they own half the company.

What follows is a series of buyout negotiation and fights that will likely cause the company to fail. This all-to-common occurrence is due to the nature of most equity splits.

They are known as fixed-splits and they are both unfair and inflexible. Fixed splits are created when founders dole out equity at the outset of the venture in anticipation of future contributions.

Because the allocations are made in advance of work being done, the model isn’t fair if the work actually done doesn’t match the original expectations.

When this occurs, the founder’s must renegotiate their holdings.

Now what?

Slicing Pie outlines a simple method for dividing equity in an early stage company that tells you exactly the right number of shares for each participant.

All other methods of dividing up equity create problems- all of them. Slicing Pie gives you a way to acquire the things you need to build your business without cash.

However, many people are discovering the benefits of a dynamic equity split which allocates equity over time based on the actual contributions from individuals. A well-organized dynamic split allows entrepreneurs to calculate exactly the right number of shares each participant deserves.

Using a dynamic split program shares are calculated using a function of the fair market value of the inputs and risk. Inputs can include time, ideas, seed funding, equipment, supplies and anything else that a person can contribute to a growing business.

At any moment the individual’s ownership is determined by dividing the value of the individual’s contributions by the total contributions of all participants.

This provides a very accurate calculation of the individual’s contribution relative to the contributions of others. Using this method, for example, the person who makes 20% of the contributions to a company should receive 20% of the equity.

The model changes over time to keep it fair.

“When someone invests time or money into a startup company they are taking risk,” says Mike Moyer, inventor of a dynamic split model called Slicing Pie, “the amount of that risk is equal to the fair market value of the contribution. This provides the basis for a perfectly fair equity calculation.”

Dynamic models are growing in popularity among early-stage companies that may be strapped for cash. Using the dynamic model, equity becomes a flexible currency that can be used to acquire the things company’s need to succeed.

When fixed models are used, founders run the risk of making costly mistakes that are difficult, if not impossible, to undo later on. “Nothing beats cash when starting a company,” said Moyer, “but, when you don’t have cash equity is the next best thing as long as you are fair to everyone involved.”

Workshop

SlicingPieWebsiteAttendees to the Slicing Pie workshop will learn how to implement a dynamic equity split in their own company. The model includes two parts.

The Allocation Framework that tells managers how much equity each person deserves. And, the Recovery Framework which determines the fair buyout price (if any) when people separate from the company.

The workshop will cover frameworks as well as basic legal and investment issues companies face.

Additionally, an interactive Slicing Pie game simulates a startup company’s evolution and helps people apply the model and see how it compares to traditional methods.

This is the perfect seminar for anyone who wants to start their own company and struggles with early-stage equity negotiations.

Thursday 25th June – Meet at 6.00pm for a 6:30pm sharp start. 8.30pm close.

Where? Proudly hosted by Deloitte Sydney – Level 9, 225 George Street

IMPORTANT: You must bring a Laptop and Pen/Paper to participate in the Slicing Pie Grunt Fund workshop exercises

Tickets are normally $40, and I’ve set up a discount code to make it $30 with code STARTUP88. (This is the same price of the ebook which is included in the ticket price.) Book your tickets here

BillingEngine – Slick Billing System For Freelancers

Pitch your Startup, , ,

Ed: Had a few of these billing systems recently, when you see a category start to get lots of replication it gets a bit boring (after the 10th Uber for X App I usually stop publishing them) but this billing system looked super slick so decided it deserved a shot.

Startup Name BillingEngine
What problem are you solving? It provides freelancers with the opportunity to save all their invoices, clients, and projects in one place, without the need to store files on their local computers.Invoices can be converted into professional looking PDFs at the click of a button. Received payments are totalled and displayed as bar charts, giving the user more control over his finances.

BillingEngine is the only browser-based invoicing app that is 100% responsive, i.e. works on any screen size.
What is your solution? BillingEngine is the cloud invoicing solution for the international freelancer. It helps small businesses keep track of their clients, projects, invoices, and payments. It supports multiple languages and currencies out of the box.
Target Market Freelancers, SMEs, entrepreneurs
How will you make money? Subscriptions/Advertisement
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity? Timo Kleemann who was born and raised in Germany is holding a degree in International Business from the University of Brighton, UK, and a Masters degree in Information Technology from Queen Mary University of London. In 2006 he founded DesignBits, a web design agency based in Hamburg, Germany. In this spare time he enjoys travelling and playing tennis.
Founders Names Timo Kleemann
What type of funding has the company received? Bootstrap
Website http://www.billingengine.com/
Twitter Handle @BillingEngine
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