Just minutes after these three startups publicly launched their businesses in front of a room of investors and peers, we had the chance to do follow-up interviews. We had the chance to ask where the seed money they’ve already raised has come from, what they plan to do with the future seed money they receive, and delve deeper into their business plans.
TopThat
TopThat has built an online platform geared towards competitions – users can upload media illustrating a performance or a stunt and challenge their friends to see who can “top that.” The business play is to encourage businesses to engage in “participatory marketing” with its prospective customers and recruit brand ambassadors. The mobile-friendly platform creates competitions based on tags, which businesses can buy the rights to for customization purposes. CEO Brandon Caruana talks about his online competition platform minutes after pitching to a room full of investors.
Leaders for Non-profit
L4NP want to serve as an online talent recruitment and education platform for the non-profits industry. It will match talented volunteers with the right opportunities at non-profit organizations looking for skilled people. It will also certify volunteers for non-profit board positions with an online curriculum focusing on topics of governance, leadership, fundraising, marketing, finance, and operations. The business model is to charge non-profits for posting volunteer positions and to view detailed candidate information. The platform is currently in a beta phase with 100 users, planning to expand to 250 users. CEO Greg Vermeulen discusses his talent acquisition platform for non-profit organizaitons minutes after pitching to a room full of investors.
Videogami
Videogami wants to take all those how-to videos on YouTube and turn them into fully interactive lessons to teach hands-on skills. It will offer Web tools to build an online learning experience. The platform can fast-forward video to the most important scene, slow down the video at the critical parts, and breaking a video timeline down to step-by-step instructions. Customers are asked to pay $1 per lesson or subscribe for $10 to the catalog of lessons, or suppliers can pay to unlock the lessons for certain users. CEO Juan Gonzalez talks about launching Videogami moments after doing his pitch at Incubes Demo Day.
