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Yesterday the House of Blues teemed with investors, stakeholders, journalists and techies waiting on edge for Techstars Chicago to unveil what managing director Troy Henikoff and co-founder Sam Yagan call their “best class ever.”
Though the company CEOs and their well-rehearsed demos stole the spotlight yesterday, the thanks given to Techstars’ mentor network was endless. The 10 “Super Mentors" who worked with teams one-on-one this summer included: Amanda Lannert, Zach Kaplan, Jason Fried, Michael Burke, Chuck Templeton, Mark Achler, Carter Cast, Steve Sanger, Dan Cummings and Kate Walker.
Every CEO commented on these mentors’ tremendous help with the companies’ value propositions; the mentors challenged each team weekly, if not daily, with new business applications. Marcio Souza, CEO of Miami-based ed tech company Clutch, said these mentors were instrumental with Clutch’s branding and nailing down the right target customers. Daniela Bolzmann, co-founder of same-day delivery company WeDeliver, said the mentors were even supportive of the WeDeliver team doing something a Techstars company had never done before: launch a second product during the program.
"It's common for companies to pivot during Techstars, but we did something far different, we actually built a second product offering that integrates with the current WeDeliver platform,” Bolzmann said. “Techstars was extremely supportive throughout the process because this creates a moat around our business. Building this product called Locally for WeDeliver customers makes us defensible, different than any other on-demand delivery service.”
The class included six Chicago companies and a couple international startups like e-commerce company Tangiblee (which relocated from Israel). Here’s what the teams achieved this summer thanks to their mentors and to countless hours of nitty, gritty hard work.
Learn more about them at Techstars' Community Demo Day on September 9.
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Their pitch: 350 million people watched 5 billion gaming videos on YouTube in July alone; GameWisp helps the creators of these gaming videos, like gaming personality PewDiePie, monetize and engage their millions of viewers. It’s a hot market. Just consider the $1 billion acquisition of video game streaming site Twitch this week by Amazon - and you will realize that GameWisp is on to something.
What they accomplished this summer: The team brought on 10 gaming celebrities to host “Watchroom” events, online sessions where die-hard gaming video fans can watch and engage with gaming celebrities in real-time. Fans spent thousands of hours in the Watchroom this summer. GameWisp’s goal now is to exponentially increase that number by onboarding the top 2,000 gaming celebrities as hosts of Watchroom events.
Their pitch: Tangiblee allows online buyers of furniture, home decor, toys, accessories and luggage to visualize the size of the products before buying them. A Tangiblee-enhanced product page results in a happy customer and a double digit increase in sales for the e-commerce site.
What they did this summer: Tangiblee had relationships with shopping sites Gilt and Carat Lane before Techstars and they brought on roughly 10 more paid pilots during their time at Techstars. Gilt is now a paying customer. The team also has struck up conversations with Groupon and Nordstrom.
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Their pitch: If you are involved in the Chicago startup community you know that WeDeliver is all about helping local businesses grow by providing them with reliable, same-day delivery service. What you might not know is that they have now taken their business one step further with the launch of their second product, Locally. Locally, a one-stop online shop for all speciality local retailers, essentially digitally recreates Main Street and gives local merchants a competitive advantage to expand the reach of their business beyond their four walls.
What they did this summer: In addition to officially launching Locally yesterday, WeDeliver has been focused on growing fast. They have over 234 Chicago merchants and over 25,000 customers using the platform so far to get local products delivered fast. Over 300 delivery specialists make this happen.
Their pitch: There is an estimated 8 percent growth in multi-family properties each year for next five years and InRentive helps to rent out these properties. In a pilot, they brought in 4x the number of leases at 7 percent higher prices than traditional brokers and marketing sites. The platform also manages property’s inventory, availability and pricing for building managers, eliminating the need for a broker.
What they accomplished this summer: They brought on Riverstone Residential Group as a client and are working with three other clients now. Also, the InRentive API is now live, giving the company an opportunity to make millions in recurring revenue from the unit-specific data the platform collects.
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Their pitch: NexLP insists that "Big Text" is more important than “Big Data,” as 80 percent of a company's precious data is unstructured text. NexLP makes sense of this text with its web-based app that finds risks and opportunities inside corporate communications. It analyzes texts (often emails) like a human would (processing names, emotions, concepts), quickly giving companies a way to reduce potential fraud and IP infractions.
What they accomplished during Techstars: They went from a pilot stage to now having a paid client. They are focusing on clients in the legal vertical like government agencies and law firms. As of yesterday, the team also raised $2 million in funding from angels.
Their pitch: There are 18 million undergraduate college students in the US and Clutch has the ability to reach every one of them through its textbook-specific online tutoring classes. They started this idea back when they hosted in-person tutoring sessions at Florida International University; so far, the company has made $1.2 million in revenue to date with the high-quality content that college students need to excel in their courses.
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What they did this summer: With extremely low customer acquisition
costs (like Facebook ads) and campus representatives at 15 campuses so far, Clutch is quickly going after their huge market opportunity. Down the line, Clutch will expand by offering test prep and real-time online tutoring.
Their pitch: Essentially, spreadsheets suck. Excel is the best spreadsheet, but is not sharable. While Google Docs and other cloud solutions are sharable, but have subpar features. Data Everywhere lets users safely build applications in Excel by separating sharing of the data from the storing of the data. Users can query and report on the data that is stored in other spreadsheets, no matter where those spreadsheets are located.
What they accomplished during Techstars: They now have dozens of users including Morningstar, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Blue Bridge and 1871. They have also had clients request for them to eliminate spreadsheets altogether through Data Everywhere’s data distribution network.
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Their pitch: There are over 11 billion deliveries to homes and offices every year and those deliveries don't often make it the last 100 feet of their journey (from the front desk or lobby to recipients’ hands). PackageZen manages deliveries for mailrooms and desk staff with a simple app that makes sure the package is processed and safely delivered.
What they did this summer: With organizations with CBRE and Nasty Gal signed on to use Package Zen, the company has already processed 19,000 packages. Package Zen is starting its first paid residential trials next week.
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Their pitch: Telnyx is the next-generation telephony service company; the platform routes calls over the Internet and cuts out the intermediaries by obtaining data about where calls are actually going.
What they did during Techstars: Telnyx already processes a million and a half minutes a day on their network. They have generated $650,000 in revenue in the last quarter while bootstrapped. Now, they have brought on Corazon Capital, Chicago Ventures and Pritzker Group as investors.
Their pitch: Mobile e-commerce is expected to grow by 40x in next four years and MartMobi is on the forefront of that growth. Through a monthly SaaS subscription, existing online retailers use MartMobi to migrate their site to a usable, mobile e-commerce app and to access MartMobi’s marketing tool kit.
What they accomplished at Techstars: About 105 merchants are now using the MartMobi platform (up from eight merchants when they entered Techstars). They now have partnerships with BigCommerce, Shopify, Magenta and Yahoo.
