Here Are The 10 Startups Taking The Spotlight Today At Founders Den: Screenleap, AnyPerk, And More
Founders Den, the “clubhouse for entrepreneurs” (it’s like a co-working space, but classier) based in San Francisco’s startup-heavy SoMa neighborhood, just kicked off its third demo day.
Ten startups are giving presentations to impress reporters and investors. As with other demo days, several of the startups have already launched — this even isn’t the first demo day for a few of them, since they’re graduates of Y Combinator. But it still seems worthwhile to bring everything together in one post. I started out with the information that’s already available online, then I updated with anything interesting from their presentations. Here they are, in the order of their presentations:
From the presentation: Screenleap has now powered nearly 100,000 screenshares, and usage is growing 19 percent week-over-week. The company is also launching an API allowing other products to incorporate its screensharing.
From the presentation: AnyPerks says that 90 percent of the $5 billion employee-perks industry consists of startups and other small companies, but it’s largely unserved because the existing providers can’t figure out a scalable way to serve those companies. AnyPerks, on the other hand, is starting with smaller customers and plans to eventually move into the enterprise market. More than 2,000 companies have already signed up.
From the presentation: Cselle hinted that this is just a fun side project before the company launches its real “billion-dollar idea.” He actually quoted his TechCrunch coverage on-stage, specifically the headline calling DrawChat “silly” and “frivolous,” to which he responded, “Mission accomplished.” (Illustrated, naturally, with the famous image of George W. Bush.)
From the presentation: The company argues that analytics is currently divided into two different markets — there are custom products built for large enterprises, and there are out-of-the-box solutions like Google Analytics. BitDeli tries to serve the middle, namely businesses whose needs aren’t being met on the lower end but can’t afford the products on the higher end. To illustrate how easy it is to create a custom dashboard, it showed off something that was created in less than 30 minutes and consisted of fewer than 100 lines of Python code.
From the presentation: It kicked off with a hilarious video (seriously, I was giggling) showing off in-game avatars with real-life photos pasted onto their heads. The company launched its own proof-of-concept game, ZombieFace, and it found that when users actually used their friends’ faces (as opposed to generic faces), there was a 65 percent next-day retention rate, and a 20 percent 30-day retention rate.
From the presentation: The company elaborated on the idea that salespeople are left behind — specifically, SocialPandas says that the team that is the most social and is interacting with customers is using “the least social tools.” So far, the company has received around 1,000 requests for access to the preview version, and it plans to launch in 2013.
From the presentation: Streak says that the user base has been growing steadily, while usage has been growing exponentially — in other words, existing users are also doing more and more with the service. Streak is also launching a backend API so that customers can integrate it with their other systems.
The content of the final three presentations is off-the-record, but the fact that they’re presenting isn’t, so here are some bare-bones descriptions provided by the companies:
Rescale — A cloud simulation platform.
MeCommerce — Trying to build “the next generation apparel brand.” (One thing I can share from the presentation: Apparently MeCommerce currently has the largest team trying to squeeze into a Founders Den office.)
Peek — Travel startup promising to help “discover and book amazing travel experiences.”