The old rule that everyone wants to shop in a busy market or eat in an already crowded restaurant would seem to hold true for startups pitching to investors. They also want to pitch in a place where 30 other investor-startup couples are doing the same. At least that’s what I observed Thursday evening at Hatch Match 2013. While the decibel levels were comparable to certain Manhattan eating joints, Hatch Match 2013 delivered the goods: the chance to get the attention (for 5-minutes) of hyper-busy angels and investor firms. I didn’t see an empty table.
Thanks to the Hatchery folks, I had the best virtual seat in the house since I was allowed to hover around these ongoing conversations, and then chat with investors and start-uppers after their brief encounters. Overall, I got to see a few interesting startups, reconnect with old friends that I had been writing about, and gain a few investment insights. It was a good Manhattan-style evening.
Investors I spoke to pointed out–and this shouldn’t be news to anyone–that to get funding, your idea it will have to involve more than being another social media hangout. Which is to say that social is, alas, just a feature–an amusee bouche, if you will–that you’re supposed to have, but shouldn’t be the main course of your app or platform.
One other observation from an investor I spoke to: they’re seeing an uptick in healthcare and lifestyle related apps and services– HeyKiki and Fanlime were two among many such examples at Hatch Match. And based on my own small sample, there were also more than a few meat-and-potatoes business apps being shopped around–and that’s the last of my food metaphors
I’ll be writing more about some of these startups, but here’s a few that caught my attention.
eBreiva will read your legal documents–NLP courtesy of research done at Columbia University– and produce abstracts that get to the essence of the document, say for due diligence purposes. I’d love to see a demo of their para-legal-in-a-box software, and maybe I can eventually get it to take on some of my own grunt writing–just thinking out loud.
I’ve known about Meddle for awhile, but somehow dropped the ball on trying out this snippets-to-blog service for myself. I watched Cofounder/CEO Vidar Brekke give a very slick demo, and I was impressed. For corporate blogging, Meddle makes it easy for employees to grab, format, and publish content. Getting non-writers to contribute to social media is a huge problem, which I come across all the time in my day job. So I’m now motivated to finally experiment with Meddle for myself.
And in my day job I also write about data security compliance and regulations, and something called PII (personally identifiable information). I know more about the nitty-gritty of PII than I care to admit in public. So I was a little surprised when I overheard Dan Nelson, founder of a brand new startup called Kpass, mention these three initials in his pitch.
Nelson is addressing a problem related to COPPA, a federal privacy law that requires parental approval for minors under the age of 13 wishing to use a web service. Child-focused online services–think game and social sites– that want to be COPAA compliant find the administration difficult–i.e., having to get a validated email from a parent. Some sites, most notably Facebook, get around the problem altogether by asking subscribers to say they’re 13 and above. Of course, that would force kid-focused sites to pivot and market more to tweens and older.
Anyway, Nelson sees a big opportunity– as do I– in handling the back-end parental verification for true kids-only sites. As I’v noted previously, the problem of moppets sneaking into Facebook ends up coming back to haunt them in later years.