Author: flashstarts

We caught up with Nichelle McCall, CEO of BOLD Guidance, to discuss what she's working on and learn about her experience in our accelerator. Nichelle McCall with BOLD Guidance BOLD Guidance navigates students through college applications and allows counselors and parents to view their progress. The online platform and app makes the college application process easier with step-by-step guides and automated deadlines, tasks and reminders specific to each application. What attracted you to FlashStarts? Several mentors and advisors mentioned FlashStarts to me who were connected to accelerator community. I looked into it and talked Jen about the program. What I really…

Our “Food for Thought” lunch event today was with Jim D’Orazio, a marketing professor at Cleveland State University and the president of Practical Web Strategies, a company that helps businesses optimize their websites and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Jim is an expert on marketing (specifically web marketing), and talked with us about online marketing and lead generation. We (the teams and interns) all learned valuable information from his presentation. 

Congratulations to Dibyo Mukherjee, one of our software developer interns, who was chosen as the winner of the Northeast Ohio Council on Higher Education's (NOCHE) presentation competition at its 2013 Entrepreneurial Internship Fair on August 1st. FlashStarts was one of many startups that participated in NOCHE's 2013 summer internship program. Seventeen of our interns presented the accomplishments and experiences they gained from their time in our program. Dibyo Mukherjee assisted many of FlashStarts' accelerator companies with the development of their websites or apps, but primarily works to develop the back-end functionality of the BOLD Guidance app. FlashStarts Marketing intern Taylor Zorman was the…

This week we (the interns) were able to present at a NOCHE (Northeast Ohio Council on Higher Education) conference for entrepreneurship internships. We each presented about our summer at FlashStarts, the projects we worked on and what we learned from our internship. We also got to learn about other internships in entrepreneurship in Northeast Ohio.  We first presented in front of small groups, and then the judges picked two finalists to present to the entire group. The two finalists that the judges picked were two FlashStarts interns—Taylor and Dibyo! Dibyo won in the end and Taylor was the runner up.…

Position: Graphics Intern School: Ohio University, graduating winter 2013 Linkedin Profile My First and Favorite Internship Coming into this internship I had just finished my 4th year of school at OU with one semester left. To graduate, OU requires each student to complete an internship, and being a pretty shy person this was terrifying to me. I always got really nervous in interviews and was scared of “the real world.” The day I had my interview with Jodi, all of that fear went away. She explained what FlashStarts was (which I still didn’t completely understand) and what I would be doing…

Position: Business/Finance Intern School: Kent State University class of 2013 Linkedin Profile What do you do as a business developing/finance intern? As a business development/finance intern, I am creating revenue models and financial projections for most of the teams. Additionally, I am working to attain sponsorships for the demo day event in September.  How did you hear about FlashStarts? I heard about the internship through an email from Kent State’s career services office.  What attracted you to FlashStarts? I wanted to see how the startup community worked. I knew there was a growing community in Cleveland for startups and accelerators, so I…

Today’s event was “The Price is Right” - a pricing strategy workshop with Justin Bailey from Price for Profit. Justin is an expert on pricing and talked to us about how to approach pricing strategy, including best practices, overviews of various revenue models, and how to determine the perfect price point.  

About every week, one of the mentors supporting our teams will come to our office and give a presentation based off of their expertise during our lunch hour. Yesterday, we learned from Morris Wheeler, an entrepreneur, angel investor and founder of the investment management company Drummond Road Capital. Morris shared the "Top 10 Lessons" he's learned from his experience as an entrepreneur--we thought they were very thought-provoking and decided to summarize them in this post. 10. An idea is not a startup. A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model (Blank, Steven. "What's a…

Position: Graphic Design Intern School: Cuyahoga Community College, Class of 2013 Linkedin Profile We had a chance to sit down with Matt Gilson, one of our graphic design interns, to talk to him about his internship experience. Tell us about living/working in Cleveland. I love it here! I always wanted to live and work in a city, and now that I actually have that experience, I love it! I feel like this is what I should be doing and I want to do this forever—but we’ll see what happens in the future.  What has been your best experience working at FlashStarts?…

Last week, the SEC removed the 80 year-old ban on advertising for startups seeking equity funding. For the past 80 years, angel investing in startups has been limited to a 19th century-sized circle of family, friends and acquaintances. As a result, matching angels to startups resembled a very small dance floor in a very small town. The world of startup fundraising was totally divorced from the 20th Century media onslaught of radio, TV, Internet, modern advertising - the whole digital revolution. Nearly an entire century of communication progress has bypassed the angel/startup investment space. With the SEC’s ruling, startup capital…