Hublished started as a twinkle in the eye of a few college students, but has now received more than $150K in seed funding, part of which came from Lawrence Lenihan, partner at FirstMark Capital and an NYU professor.
Lenihan taught a class that Ben Borodach, Hublished co-founder, was enrolled in, and he treated the entrepreneurial class like a competition, the winner of which would walk home with his salary for the semester. That company ended up being Hublished, a webinar-focused startup that helps brands and publishers connect with their audience.
In terms of getting users on the platform, Hublished’s strategy is simple. “All brands already have customers,” said Nis Frome, the COO. “We are simply asking brands who come onto the platform to leverage their existing customer base to engage further on Hublished.”
The company was recently accepted into the NYC Seed Start accelerator, an enterprise-focused accelerator in New York.
“There’s no place to aggregate everything,” said Frome. “You have Quora to establish thought leadership, SlideShare to share your slides, Eventbrite to register attendees, and YouTube to show your video later, but nothing that brings together every piece. It’s time to have a site dedicated to the webinar lifecycle.”
The team hasn’t figured out the exact business model, but they have declared that experts going to Hublished looking for expert content will never pay to be on the site, and the site will never show advertising. Today, the company launches with five brands, from lawyers to universities to marketing firms.
If you want to check out the site, head on over to Hublished.com and sign up.