I don’t watch a lot of YouTube, but I go on occasional binges. Most of the people who are “YouTube famous” annoy the heck out of me, but I do have one favorite. It’s The Food Reviewer… he does “reviews on the YouTube… you never knew such a cool dude…” I have no idea why I enjoy watching a high school kid review packaged snack foods, but I do. Anyway, YouTube stars like The Food Reviewer (not sure if he’s a star yet with 17k followers) should do everything they can to capitalize on their fame. That’s where Victorious comes in. They’re a Santa Monica, CA based startup that is “motivated by the challenge of powering and uniting the world’s most creative communities.” In other words, they help digital stars build their own platforms so that they can make the most of the attention that they receive.
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When I think about potential new websites that I’d build, I usually look for underserved niches–gaps to fill. There are so many companies building large generalist sites that you really need to do something different to have a chance at building a real business. At least that’s my take. Emerge Media has a completely different philosophy. They are a Chicago, IL based company that is “taking on the essential roots of everyday tasks and breathing real life into the technology behind them.” They’ve been launching new sites in broad niches with a lot of competition. It seems crazy to me, but it might just work.
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Chances are that most of your communications with employers at this point are your submitting applications and their not responding. If you’re lucky, you may get a rejection letter… or even an invitation for an interview. Eventually it will get better and your communications will lead to the acceptance of a job offer. From there it will get boring–stuff like health insurance enrollment and reminders to clean up after yourself in the communal kitchen. While employee communications are often mundane, they’re an extremely important part of running a business. GuideSpark is a Menlo Park, CA based company that has built a “robust employee communications platform” that “allows HR executives to toss out the stacks of pamphlets and eliminate time-consuming seminars, and offers a new way to educate employees on complex HR topics like benefits, health care reform, and compensation programs.”
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The last time that Amy and I reserved a rental car, they didn’t have a car for us when we showed up. It was straight out of Seinfeld’s The Car Reservation, except the agent didn’t even try to help us. We ended up having to spend $250 on an Uber to get us to the wedding on time. I wish I could say that it’s the last time that I’ll ever use a rental car company, but it won’t be. However, I am tempted to try something new like RelayRides. They are a San Francisco, CA based company that connects “vehicle owners whose cars would otherwise be idle with people who need a car.” It’s a model that makes sense, even if it feels a little uncomfortable at first.
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One of the most amazing things about the surge in popularity of crowdfunding is that it has allowed many businesses to get off the ground with zero inventory. Instead of having to guess at how many of something you should make, they can pre-sell the product and it deliver it at some undetermined date in the future. While this is totally awesome for those who are able to take advantage of it, the large majority of businesses still have to hold inventory if they ever want to sell anything. The goal is to get “the right product in the right place at the right time at the right price,” but that often doesn’t go as planned. Optoro offers a fix. They are a Washington, DC based company that “unleashes hidden revenue for retailers and creates value for shoppers” by helping businesses with “reverse logistics.”
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Hiring the first few employees is one of the most exciting parts of starting a business. It means that you’re taking off, but it’s also a very scary responsibility. Every week or two you’re going to have to pay people who are depending on you for their livelihoods. What makes it even harder is that managing a payroll distracts from important activities that will actually help grow the business. That’s where ZenPayroll comes in. They’re a San Francisco, CA based company that has created “the easiest way to pay your employees.” It’s software-as-a-service that removes the need for “unnecessary layers of complexity, manual tasks and numerous fees.”
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It’s hard to feel any sympathy for software developers. They’re one of the most employable groups of people on Earth, and they can apply their skills to almost anything they want. However, they’re working in the technology industry which is defined by constant change. A piece of software that used to need to run on a single platform is now expected to work on all kinds of devices. Xamarin is the answer for developers who want their software to work for as many people as possible. The San Francisco, CA based company allows developers to write “apps entirely in C#, sharing the same code on iOS, Android, Windows and Mac.” Why do something four different ways when you can do it once?
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Every employer wants to get the most out of its people. Obviously their work product is the number one priority, but there are other objectives that a company might want to accomplish through their employees. I’m talking about things like zero waste initiatives, health and fitness goals, or retirement saving. Reaching goals usually requires behavior modification, and that’s a really hard thing to do (especially when it’s not tied to your compensation or reviews). WeSpire is a Boston, MA based company that provides “technology-based engagement programs to inspire employees for measurable impact.” It’s all about positive behavior change.
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Chances are that you’ve been to a few McDonald’s restaurants in your life. You’ve probably noticed that most are generally the same, but occasionally you visit one that is exceptionally nice or exceptionally dumpy. A big reason for the variance is that 80% of the locations are franchises. Franchising is a great business model when it works, but it can present some pretty tough business problems. Square Root is an Austin, TX based company that solves many of these problems. They have developed “a single platform to improve operations and performance throughout franchise networks.” It’s designed to give employees and managers “the insight, focus, and confidence to work on the right things and drive your business forward.”
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Have you ever seen an article in the middle of the day explaining that a stock’s price was rising on specific news and then seen essentially the same article in the evening saying that the same piece of news caused the price to fall? There are rare occasions when it actually works out that way, but often it’s just lazy journalism. The truth is that it can be pretty hard to explain why a stock’s price moves up or down; however, we all know that specific products can have a huge impact on how a business performs. That’s why Trefis has developed a set of tools that “helps you understand how a company’s products impact its stock price.” The Boston, MA based company “was founded by MIT Engineers and former Wall Street analysts who realized that most people do not understand the seemingly familiar companies around them.”
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About this time last year, Amy and I were visiting my parents for Easter. Our wedding was a couple months away and preparations were going very smoothly. And then Amy had her one and only “bridezilla” moment. She realized that she was totally in love with a dress that she had once seen in a picture online, and had to find it. Without being able to look at any pictures because I wanted it to be a surprise, I helped her track down the exact dress at a store only 45 minutes from my parents house. She tried it on, loved it, and bought it. The only issue was that she had already spent a bunch on another dress. What do you do with a never worn, beautiful wedding dress? You put it on Tradesy. They’re a Santa Monica, CA based company that can help you “turn your closet into cash.” It’s a marketplace for new and gently used fashion.
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I’m not a big gamer, but when I do play games on my mobile devices, they’re usually pretty simplistic. Some people prefer a more immersive experience–they take mobile gaming seriously. Those people probably like the games from Gameloft. They’re a New York, NY based company that allows its “fans to play games anywhere, anytime, and on any digital platform.” In fact, more than one million Gameloft games are downloaded every single day. That’s what happens when you develop great games in-house while at the same time you’ve “built the world’s largest distribution network” (for games of course).
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It used to be that most websites were the same for everybody, but today almost everything seems to be personalized. Whether I log into Facebook, search on Google, or visit a jobs website, there’s a very good chance that my experience is being altered based on data that they’ve collected about me. Sites with this customization based on who is logged in used to be referred to (and maybe still are) as portals. Liferay Portal is free and open source software that allows anyone to build this kind of web experience. Liferay is a Diamond Bar, CA based company that was started in 2004 and “houses a professional services group that provides training, consulting and enterprise support services” focused on the Liferay Portal software.
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I barely shop in retail stores any more because I know that I can almost always find a better price online. Retailers have realized this and started getting much more aggressive about pricing merchandise competitively. The problem is that few people are willing to drive from store to store just to save a few bucks. That’s why you should do a little pre-shopping on Find&Save, a site run by Wanderful Media. The former seems to be the sole product of the latter at this point; however, the Los Gatos, CA based Wanderful Media is aiming “to transform the $4 billion business of traditional advertising circulars through digital innovation – just as joint media ventures such as CareerBuilder and Cars.com strengthened the industry’s position through the use of new technology.”
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As a job seeker you know that having a digital presence is essential. This obviously true for brands as well. If someone is going to do business with you, they’re probably going to check out your website at some point. One thing that frustrates me is when restaurants have no website or a website that won’t display properly on my iPhone. All I want to do is check your hours, look at the menu, and maybe make a reservation! Anyway, most restaurants need help with their digital presences, and that appears to be what TVI specializes in. While the New York, NY based “award winning digital agency that designs leading brand experiences” doesn’t say anything explicitly about restaurants, a lot of their clients seem to be in that industry.
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The original idea behind employer funded health insurance was that it was supposed to improve productivity by keeping employees healthy. That’s still generally the point, but today it seems that health insurance is mostly about fixing problems after they happen instead of prevention. Corporate wellness programs are the answer for employers who want to keep employees healthy (and lower insurance costs). Limeade is a Bellevue, WA based company that is aiming to “measurably improve well-being in the world through happy, healthy, high-performing workforces.” How do they do this? By offering software that makes rolling out a wellness program a snap for employers.
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We all have at least one friend who has a brilliant idea for an app or website, but no way of building it. They think that if they can just find some geek to develop it for “equity,” they’ll be instant millionaires. Building a digital business isn’t even close to that easy, and marketing/business talent is just as important as tech talent. Most people who want to start a company on the web need to either figure out how to do it themselves or pay a lot of money (not equity) to get someone to build it for them. Even then, most agencies are designed to help clients later in the game. That’s not true with Digital Intent. They’re a Chicago, IL based business that helps “clients identify products customers will pay for, design compelling user experiences to make customers happy, and rapidly build high performance products that scale.”
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Have you ever sat around and waited for a phone call? It sucks. Believe it or not, there are a lot of businesses in which you sit around and wait for customers to call you. A plumber is a great example, but there are much more sophisticated businesses that have the same problem. They can invest in marketing that drives more calls, but why do that when you can invest online and track every step of the conversion/sales process? Because people who pick up the phone are often much better leads than people who inquire online. That’s why Invoca is bringing online analytics to phone calls. They are based in Santa Barbara, CA, and their “inbound call marketing tools empower you to generate better leads, higher conversions, smarter spends and greater revenue.”
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Job searching comes with a lot of repetitive tasks. Imagine if you had the technical skills to automate the most annoying ones. You could focus on doing stuff that makes you more employable instead of wasting hours on mindless repetition. There are certainly some smart engineering types who build their own systems to automate their lives, but what about the rest of us? We can use IFTTT (If This Then That). They’re a San Francisco, CA based company that lets you “put the Internet to work for you.” The service plugs in to all of your favorite sites, so it’s not like you’re starting a new workflow from scratch.
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Non-profits typically exist to make the world a better place. What that means varies by organization, but our government recognizes that a wide variety of causes should be supported with tax-exempt status. By definition a non-profit’s goals are non-financial, but that doesn’t mean that finances don’t matter. GuideStar is a Williamsburg, VA and Washington, DC based organization that aims to “revolutionize philanthropy by providing information that advances transparency, enables users to make better decisions, and encourages charitable giving.” Unlike Charity Navigator, they don’t rate or rank non-profits. Instead, GuideStar “collects, organizes, and presents the information you want in an easy-to-understand format while remaining neutral.”
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I got my wife an Airport Express for Christmas. I’m not the typical male idiot portrayed on many American sitcoms–it was a good gift idea. The whole point was that I could hook up our wireless network to the fifteen-year-old wired speaker system that came with our apartment. The speakers were working when I started (I had the radio playing in all of the rooms), but after three hours of frustration, I ended up with the music from my iPhone playing in one room, and no music whatsoever in any of the other rooms. I’m going to have to find a way to fix this, and I think Sonos might be the answer. They are a Santa Barbara, CA and Cambridge, MA based company that set out in 2002 “to reinvent home audio for the digital age.” Their products certainly look a lot better than the circa 1997 sound system that my landlord left behind.
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I went grocery shopping yesterday at Whole Foods. Usually at 2 PM on a weekday, it’s a ghost town, but not during Thanksgiving week. I actually like grocery shopping, so it was fun to be a part of the madness, but I know a lot of people who hate it. Some use services like Fresh Direct or Peapod. I tried the latter once, but it feels like your groceries were picked out by a robot. That won’t cut it if you’re buying meat or produce. Instacart offers a different kind of grocery delivery service. They are a San Francisco, CA based startup that offers personal grocery shopping in a growing number of markets (Chicago and Bay Area right now), and sometimes they can get you your groceries within an hour.
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Health insurance. Need I say more? You already have your own associations with those words, and they’re probably negative. We all want to be healthy, and when we’re not, we want to know that doing whatever we can to get healthy won’t send us into financial ruin. That was the whole point of health insurance, but it seems that the opposite has happened. There’s a lot that needs to change, but where do we start? How about with insurers themselves. Take New York state for instance. They haven’t had a new commercial health insurer in a decade and a half–or at least they didn’t until Oscar came around. They are a New York, NY based startup that dubs itself “a new kind of health insurance company that is using technology to make insurance simple, intuitive, and human.”
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Early in the wedding planning process I proposed that we try to do as much online as possible. I quickly lost that battle, and I must say that our custom designed paper goods turned out amazingly well. I’m just glad that I wasn’t paying for them. If only there was a way to get beautiful, custom designed paper goods for a reasonable price. That’s exactly what Minted offers. They are a San Francisco, CA based company that aims “to find exceptional artists and designers all over the world and bring their work to consumers who appreciate great design.” They were early to the crowdsourcing model in 2008, and since then they’ve grown into a place where consumers can find great designers and great designers can get exposure that will help them build their careers.
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InvestmentNews is our sponsor this week, and they would like to tell you about their NextGen Virtual Career Fair on November 8th. It’s an awesome opportunity for students and interns to network and find finance jobs on the spot.
When you visit most websites, you’re paying for access even though you probably don’t realize it. You’re paying with your attention to advertisements. It’s a terrible model, but it’s pretty much the best idea that we’ve had so far. It’s the reason that Google is one of the most successful companies in the history of the world. Ideally we’d pay the content creators directly on the sites that we like, but managing subscriptions can be a nightmare for both site owners and their visitors. Tinypass has a solution that just might usurp advertising as the preferred way to monetize an audience. They’re based in New York, NY and they enable sites to collect micro payments to access content. They “believe that bloggers, magazines, newspapers, and all creators shouldn’t have so much trouble making money online.”
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When I was in elementary school, Christopher Columbus was a hero. Today people don’t even complain about going to work on a holiday named after him. That tells you just how ugly the true story is. Still, you have to give Columbus credit for sailing across the Atlantic with no idea where he was going (and making it back, and then doing it again three more times). Today we have technology that enables us to always know where we are. Rand McNally is a Skokie, IL based company that played a big part in getting us to this point. They were founded in 1856, and since then they’ve been specializing “in maps, navigation, road travel, and trip planning.”
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About a year ago I woke up to a loud chirp. It wasn’t a bird (though we did have two birds fly down our chimney in two days around the same time). It was the smoke alarm. This wasn’t the “OH MY GOD THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE” alarm. It was the “let’s wake you up in the middle of the night so that you can change the battery” alarm. I ignored it… until it went off again five minutes later… and again… and again. So I’m in my underwear standing on a chair trying to disable this thing. It’s 3 AM and the smoke alarm is just out of my reach. I am at the point where I’ll do anything to go back to sleep, and there’s a baseball bat in the nearby closet…. and then I’m finally able to disable the alarm. I understand that smoke alarms with dead batteries can’t save lives, but there has to be a better way (especially considering that climbing on a chair when you’re sleep-deprived is pretty dangerous). Nest agrees. They’re a Palo Alto, CA based company that “takes the unloved products in your home and makes simple, beautiful, thoughtful things.” Their first product was a thermostat, and now they’ve just announced a smoke and carbon monoxide alarm.
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A couple months ago I was raving to you about our web host WP Engine. While I’m still generally happy with them, they had a pretty big screw up a couple weeks ago. I worked with their support team, and we were able to find a resolution (though it took much longer than I would have hoped). All of the communications ran through Zendesk, which is “beautifully simple customer service software.” It’s basically a platform for managing all of the back and forth that is typically a part of delivering good customer service. Zendesk is based in San Francisco, CA, though they were originally founded in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2007 (they made the move in 2009).
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When I was in high school, it was the golden age of free music. High speed Internet connections were becoming commonplace, and file sharers weren’t really being prosecuted yet. You could have (permanently) almost any music you wanted for free. Those days have long passed, but we’re in another period of at least semi-free music access. Thanks to companies like Spotify, you can listen to what you want when you want to… as long as you’re willing to put up with some ads. F# is a New York, NY based company behind many of those ads–they connect “brands to consumers through the power of music in purposeful ads.” Brands know that music is a great way to connect with consumers. And that means ad-supported online music services provide an amazing opportunity.
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I like skiing (even if I’ve only done it twice), but I like fishing, volleyball, walking my dog, and staying out of the hospital more. I can’t get over the fear that I’ll injure myself skiing and keep myself from doing all of the things that I truly love to do. I’m sure for a lot of skiers, they have the opposite apprehension (like my buddy Jason who used a ski trip to describe Quality Events in our Job Search Prep course). The only other bad thing about skiing is that once you get over the fear of injury, you have to get over the price of lift tickets. Or you did. Liftopia is a San Francisco, CA based company that aims to “help skiers and snowboarders get out on the slopes more often, and help alpine resorts generate incremental revenue.”
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