flashstarts
FlashStarts operates a startup accelerator.
Mission = Change the world one startup at a time.
Mantra = “Get Create a job!”
Formula = 10 Teams x ($20k / 6%) + Mentors + ((Customers + Revenue) x Iterate).
You can Apply, Mentor, Sponsor, Invest, or Share.
Congratulations to RegulatoryBinder, which was awarded a grant of $25,000 by the Innovation Fund. The grant will support RegulatoryBinder as it scales its business.
The Innovation Fund, which was founded by the Lorain County Community College Foundation, is a Northeast Ohio-based pre-seed fund for technology startups. The Innovation Fund awards grants to six startups each quarter.
To learn more about RegulatoryBinder, visit www.regulatorybinder.com.
RegulatoryBinder has made an initial close on a round of funding, which will close completely within the next month.
We are proud to share that our FlashStarts Fund is providing the growing company with a follow-on investment that makes up a portion of the round.
RegulatoryBinder offers a web service for clinical study regulatory documentation. The software allows hospitals to exchange rooms full of binders of required paperwork for a single electronic record. This will prevent the losses of resources and opportunities to save lives that occur when studies are shut down due to paper-based mistakes.
CEO Rick Arlow raised this round of capital to start scaling and reach its next set of milestones.
Accredited investors who are interested in following RegulatoryBinder can contact CEO Rick Arlow at Rick@RegulatoryBinder.com. To learn more about the company, visit www.regulatorybinder.com.
The following post, written by CEO Charles Stack, originally appeared on Crowdfund Insider on November 26th, 2013. All photos are credited to Crowdfund Insider.
Angel investing involves accredited investors (millionaires) investing directly in the private stock of early stage companies. Millionaires are rare—they make up 1.5% of the world and 4% of the US. As most entrepreneurs quickly learn, angels are very, very rare. Only 3% of all accredited investors enjoy angel status. This is about to change.
The traditional angel model requires the almost serendipitous face-to-face meeting of a millionaire and a young startup entrepreneur (rather like The Prince and the Showgirl or a neutrino in a salt mine). Unless either party is actively and skillfully looking in the right places, these meetings are exceedingly difficult to accomplish. The two disparate groups simply don’t run in the same circles.
Angel groups, pitch nights, demo days, golf outings, and other entrepreneurial gatherings have been created throughout the 20th Century to increase the frequency of investor-entrepreneur collisions. These traditional methods were and are very time consuming, ineffective and inefficient process.
For the past year or so, it has been rare that one can have a conversation about marketing without hearing the phrases “content marketing” or “storytelling”. Some see it as a passing trend, others swear by it. We feel that telling your story is one of the most effective ways to promote your startup.
Monica Cowan, CEO of Curiosidy, believes in the power of storytelling as well. She describes how storytelling can benefit nonprofit organizations in a blog post for the Foundation Center.
Storytelling is the unsung hero of fundraising and stakeholder engagement. When your audience connects with your brand and initiative emotionally, they are more likely to support your vision and stay involved long after their initial contribution.
BOLD Guidance, one of our 10 recent graduates, is a finalist for the Mobileys National Mobile Competition.
The startup, which acts as a “Mobile Counselor” for students applying to college, is one of 10 finalists competing for the People’s Choice Award. Voting for the award opened yesterday and will continue until December 6th.
You can vote for your favorite app online.
BOLD Guidance CEO Nichelle McCall described her selection as a finalist for the Mobileys in an article by Fresh Water Cleveland that was published today. The article also summarized BOLD Guidance’s success and future direction.
Our Dynamic Downtown, a blog affiliated with the Downtown Cleveland Alliance (DCA), published an article that explains the problem Crowdentials aims to solve. The startup offers an online software to ensure small businesse’s and investors’ compliance while raising money or investing.
Crowdentials is a startup business with a very inclusive goal: to help other small businesses succeed. Downtown Cleveland-based Crowdentials’ marquee creation is an investor verification software, which helps small businesses verify that potential investors are accredited by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)…
“We would never want to see an individual get accused of a crime they didn’t even know existed. We figured the best thing to do to stop this from occurring was to create a software that solved the problem before it existed,” said Rich Rodman, chief executive office and co-founder of Crowdentials.
Flashstarts is now a Amazon Activate AWS Partner. All Flashstarts accelerator teams will receive $5,000 in AWS credits, plus free training, support, and other services.
This package of services will allow our portfolio companies to cost-effectively launch cloud-based computing services and further accelerate their development. Combined with our One Community partnership we are perfectly situated to support a wide range of high-bandwidth, big data startups.
Following our Demo Day, many of our startups have been pitching angels and VC’s for investment, and we’ve spent a lot of time discussing how to create compelling pitches. Much of what makes a pitch successful is the entrepreneur himself/herself and the chemistry with the investor, but the content is also important (and easier to coach).
Everyone has an opinion on what content to include – one we particularly like is this outline from One Match Ventures: http://slidesha.re/HuDZot.
This summary is a good starting point for startups to customize their own pitch decks.
Congratulations to BOLD Guidance for winning in the ‘Best Mobile App’ category of DigitalUndivided‘s FOCUS 100 tech conference!
DigitalUndivided, which offers programs to encourage the participation of urban communities and women in the digital space, held its annual three-day tech conference in New York City October 4th to October 6th. The conference featured a hackathon, mentorship workshop, symposium and pitch competition, where four finalists (including Nichelle McCall) pitched to a group of investors.
First one up @BOLDGuidance! #FOCUS100 pic.twitter.com/ZSxyRBQKjo
— digitalundivided (@DigUnDiv) October 5, 2013
We are excited to sponsor Kent State University’s hackathon “Kent Hack Enough 2013” this weekend. The event will be the largest hackathon in Ohio, with over 150 participants.
Students from all over the world are invited to hack and start projects from scratch at Kent this weekend, for the chance to win cash prizes and exposure to top companies (it’s free to participate, and tickets are still available!). The hackathon starts this Friday, October 18th at 6:00pm, and runs until 2:00pm on Sunday, October 20th.