Going up: AngelCube’s class of 2013 headed to San Francisco to pitch for cash
A group of promising start-ups are fine-tuning their elevator pitches before heading to San Francisco.
Photo: iStock
Seven graduates of Melbourne-based start-up accelerator AngelCube pitched to investors in Sydney on Monday night, and will try their luck in San Francisco next month.
It is AngelCube’s third batch since running its first programme in 2011, and AngelCube co-founder Adrian Stone says it is the best group of start-ups he has seen so far.
“We went for teams first and worried about the ideas more secondarily,” Stone says. “That was seen with the start-ups pivoting, and some came up with totally new ideas through the AngelCube program.
“The feedback we got from some investors in the room was that the pitches were the clearest they had seen. They said what the problem was, the solution they were offering, what their business model was, and they were clear to the investors in the room to ask how much money they were looking for and why they needed it.”
He says around half the start-ups that have been through previous programs have raised $200,000 to $1 million within the next three to six months.
“A demo day pitch is like a calling card, it starts the conversation going.”
Their business pitches and some key statistics presented to investors are below.
OutTrippin
There are a lot of well-travelled people out there who want to make money while travelling, and also a lot of people who value good travel advice. OutTrippin aims to bring those two groups together. Co-founder and travel fanatic Kunal Kalro calls it a 99designs for the travel industry. People planning a trip – preferably cashed-up honeymooners planning a no-expenses-spared romantic getaway – submit a travel brief. “Travel insiders”, typically freelance travel writers, then put themselves forward to prepare them an itinerary. The site and the travel writer split the proceeds, which is an up-front payment of $159 for a two-week honeymoon.
C8 Apps
This games programming company has launched three fantasy sports apps that allow users to create imaginary sports teams and compete against each other. They have more than 30,000 users, are turning over around $18,000 in revenue a month and recently signed a $250,000 marketing deal with the Bauer Media Group, co-branding the product.
CoinJar
CoinJar is a secure cloud wallet for digital payments using bitcoins. It has amassed 1300 customers in less than two months of trading, and transacted almost $500,000 in payments. Founders include Ryan Zhou, who is prominent in the bitcoin community and a founder of bitcoin retailer SGitcoin. They plan to start taking salaries next month.
Etaskr
Founded by former KPMG consultants David Chung and Pat Owen, Etaskr provides private task marketplaces to corporations, similar to the service oDesk provides to the public. This enables people with too much to do in an organisation to put up tasks that under-utilised hands can complete, breaking down the silos.
Habit21
A goal-setting app that helps users form good habits like regular exercise, or get rid of bad ones like smoking. They hold themselves accountable by assigning friends as judges of their success, put up a nominated price that they lose if they fail. If they succeed, they get a portion of the money other fails have lost.
Ozirig
Provides camera and filming equipment at a much lower price than competing companies by cutting out the retail and distribution middle men. It has served 250 customers and sold around $250,000 worth of equipment.
Tablo
Founded by author Ash Davies, Tablo makes writing and publishing a book easy. Authors write books in the cloud, they are then formatted to work for iPad, iPhone, Kindle and other platforms. They can be published with a single click to global book platforms like Amazon and iBookstore, where they are assigned an ISBN. Tablo collects the sales revenue and distributes royalties quarterly. Tablo is currently turning over around $5000 a week.
Deloitte Private hosted the event, and partner Josh Tanchel, who is leading Deloitte’s Technology Fast50 program, said the most promising start-ups in his opinion were OutTrippin, Tablo and Etaskr.
“A number of them had pivoted their business models through the program, and it’s important for any start-up to pivot. With the research we’ve done with the Startup Genome Project, those that pivot two or three times are more likely to succeed than those that don’t pivot at all.”
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