Not Only Luck.
An essay by John Melonakos

Atlanta Startup Village #5

Another great Atlanta Startup Village tonight at Monday Night Brewery. I love hearing the raw stories of new startups in the area. Always things to be learned from how others are rocking their markets, even if it has nothing to do with technical or high-performance computing.

Here are my notes from tonight’s event:

Bettercloud

  • Just raised $5m
  • Born out of Cloud Sherpas; broke off in 2011
  • 20 partners now, looking to get above 1,000 partners by end of year
  • 5.5 million users in 15,000 companies so far (7 months since launch), targeting 17 million users in 50,000 companies by end of year
  • Flashpanel Product:  A GUI and usability interface for google apps management; all about user experience
  • Google passed on them for an acquisition, but Google’s competitors will need this tool and their reseller relationships

Sideqik

  • Marketing platform for social media for fostering co-marketing relationships and tracking
  • Today, partners know each other beforehand and jointly agree to use Sideqik
  • In future, will do matchmaking
  • Points system for rewards on social actions

Monday Night Brewery

  • Not a tech startup
  • Started at a Friday morning Bible study
  • Brewed beer one monday night
  • Became a habit
  • Far too much beer for one Bible study to consume
  • Got 30-50 ppl coming on Monday nights
  • Took 5 years to start
  • First to market doesn’t matter, quality matters a lot
  • Been open for 3 weeks
  • Chose from among 6 distributors, took 18 months to decide
  • Not allowed to sell directly to restaurants
  • Fundraising in 2 rounds, one for first business model, one for second; all friends and family; no quick returns for investors in the brewery business

Contigly

  • Founders have day job with Preparis, along with mandate to explore this spinoff
  • Really early conceptualization phase
  • Basically it’s Preparis for cross organizations, so that you can know your neighbors emergencies and they can know yours

Zoompf

  • Website performance improvement tool
  • Knowledge base of 400 performance checks
  • You don’t have to be a performance expert
  • Per website per year pricing
  • Doesn’t analyze SQL backend queries
  • zoompf.com/free – for a Free assessment
  • Competitor: Whyslow;  30 rules and no web crawler
  • Other Player: Rigor; does load testing and performance monitoring

There was a moment at the beginning where you could tell Jon Birdsong was proud/humbled to have such a big turnout. Event planning can be a mini startup itself and this one’s got traction.

What did you learn at tonight’s event?

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From the conversation

Comments preserved from the original post.

PatM

Hi John,

Great summation. Can I share it to my contacts on LinkedIn? I think technology companies across the US need to know what’s happening in Atlanta. 

Thanks.