Hatchery: Where presenters also learn how to present
NEW YORK–“The Hatchery: Are You Serious?” Meetup group has been holding startup presentations for eight years now, but sometimes this writer wonders if the question extends beyond the earnest question.
After all, it’s not easy to launch a successful startup let alone present in front of VCs. Host Yao Hui Huang has even brought in GK Training, which has one of its trainors in attendance to critique presentation styles—perhaps the only tech meetup group doing it regularly.
So when the startup fails to impress, either for its startup or presentation style, they get feedback from the VCs and the presentation trainors in attendance. It’s not meant to scare anyone, though, as much as the feedback are mostly constructive, helpful and a welcome addition to the tech meetup. It’s not too common to hear a perfect-pitch presentation, but the presenters come away from the experience better prepared for their next presentations.
Last May 28, The Hatchery presented four startups–Moving Analytics, Crowds Line, Mobiquire, Centrallo and Revenue Mantra at the Microsoft Building.
Increasing access to cardiac rehabilitation is the goal of Moving Analytics co-founder and COO Ade Adesanya, to address the issue of 3.5 million cardiac arrest dates each year. “We want to cut the risk of death. We are looking
For its go-to-market strategy, it is exploring direct sales, industry conferences and industry publications
For sports fans, The Crowd’s Line aims to create engagement, loyalty and revenue with its app featuring crowdsourced predictions.
CEO Anthony Lage said the app focuses on technical data than fundamental data from ESPN or Yahoo. “We are a contest-driven app. We provide market data and personal stats.”
Revenue Mantra’s Sam Swaminathan is in the business of ad tech, saying it is aiming at unifying platform ad needs of marketplaces and sellers. “We use data based on users’ product views and behavior online.”
A telling question was how is if it was performing, how it is performing better. An observation that could best explain what it aims to do came from one of the VCS: “So would you say it works like Google AdWords?”
Mobiquire is a mobile user acquisition platform. It’s supposed to help advertisers get quality downloads for their app.
“Advertisers pay only for the downloads they receive versus clicks or impressions,” said founder and CEO Aren Preymer.
It’s trying to solve the prohibitive cost of mobile user acquisition. Targeted and quality users are difficult to acquire, but clearly there’s a need to solve this problem, because many apps have poor user engagement and retention. Is Mobiquire the solution? That remains to be seen.
A question it needs to answer is how it actually find customers.
Centrallo’s Michael Sher offers a list and note-making personal productivity tool that also has Evernote as a competitor. Essentially, users create, organized evolution of lists and notes.
It seems undaunted by competition, as it Sher said 500 million people globally use productivity tools. It sees Centrallo as flexbile, habit-forming tool. It claims to have 13,000 users now.
VCs advised Sher to look into the competition and to understand how, say, Dropbox did it. “Find hierarchy, because it’s a crowded space.”
The VCs at the meetup were regular Jeff Neu of B2B ventures; Bill Reinisch of Paladin Capital Group and Sachin Jade of Klifer Capital. Dora Chomiak of 37 Angels was a good addition to the group. As always, Reinisch gives the most honest feedback among the group.
