PartPic - Fixing EverythingAlexis Ohanian tours PartPic, a tech startup that allows you to take a photo of a broken machine part and find its replacement.
PartPic, founded in Atlanta, GA, offers visual search for replacement parts and is radically altering the industrial distribution market. So whenever the machine that builds your house-cleaning robot breaks, PartPic users can take a photo of the broken part and find out what it is and where to get it. For Small Empires, Alexis joins PartPic during their seed round of funding, as they seek venture capital investors to help them grow. He also meets one of their first potential customers, National Builder Supply.
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Open English - The $120M Bet On People-Powered Language LearningOpen English, a language-learning startup, uses human teachers instead of machines. Can it compete in today’s automated world?
Open English is a Miami based startup looking to reinvent the market for learning a language. Customers sign up from anywhere in the world and through the magic of the web, begin working one on one with a teacher. This can be a video session, or in the low-bandwidth areas the Open English reaches, simply a audio call.
The teacher walks the student through grammar, vocabulary, and most importantly, real live conversation. It's an alternative to the brick and mortar schools that require the extra work of getting to each lesson. Removing that overhead allows Open English to offer competitive pricing to a physical class, but for a one-on-one session.
The company has raised $120 million and scaled to more than twenty countries across the Americas. But it faces stiff competition from services like Rosetta Stone and DuoLingo, which don't have the overhead cost of hiring actual teachers to handle new customers. This episode is a deep dive into the classic startup conundrum: maybe software is eating the world, but what do you do when your business is built on the human element?
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Two Roads Brewery - The Future of BeerTwo Roads Brewing Co. doesn't just make booze. They provide a platform for any small craft beer to program their own flavors.
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Wattpad - DIY Writing EmpireStartup Wattpad has helped millions of people write and publish original stories for free. But now Amazon is entering the game.
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Vidyard - Behind a Startup Success StoryThis Waterloo company started out creating videos, but realized they were better at analyzing other people's clips.
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Before there was Vidyard, there was Redwoods Media, a small Canadian startup making marketing videos. Slowly but surely, the company, like so many startups, had to learn two lessons and has come to embrace them over time: being creative is difficult to scale, and they'e actually much better engineers than they are artists.
A lot of Redwood's clients were looking for ways to understand how their videos were performing and why. They wanted to be able to measure the ROI, return on investment, so they could justify the money being spent on these videos, and craft subsequent videos that would have more impact with their customers.
So Redwood began offering its clients a sort of guarantee. We'll help you track how people are watching, and if a certain number of people don't watch through to the end, we'll make your next video for free. As the company got better at helping their clients distribute and analyze what was happening with their videos, they realized the demand for that service was far outstripping demand for them to make new videos.
Instagram began as a way to check in to locations, before pivoting to photos and filters. Fab was a gay social network that became an e-commerce giant. Vidyard went on attend the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator and has been on a tear ever since. It even went through another milestone in the life of a successful startup, turning down acquisition offers from some of the biggest video platforms in the world. "I've learned so much, and we've had so much fun building this business that I don't think we would have had if we took that acquisition offer," said founder and CEO Michael Litt.
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August Smart Lock - Forget Your Keys? There's an App For ThatThe connected home is rapidly becoming a reality, and the August Smart Lock is at the forefront of a new era.
We've reached a stage where most consumers are familiar with the concept of a "smart home," full of "connected devices," that works, at least in the commercials, something like the futuristic home of The Jetsons. The problem is that unless you're building a home from scratch, most people are going to be adding these smart features in a piecemeal fashion. Each device has to justify its price tag over cheaper, more conventional appliances.
The August Smart Lock brings a couple of enticements to the table, starting with its design. Crafted by the legendary Yves Behar, the August lock is a gleaming, modernist beauty. More importantly, it's social. Because the "keys" to the lock are just some code executed by a phone, you can use the app to send "keys" to anyone you like. Having friends over but you're stuck in traffic and won't be there to let them in? You can use the August to send a temporary key that will get them into the house and self-destruct at your command.
Our host Alexis Ohanian sat down with August to discuss the challenge of taking a hardware startup from an idea, to a prototype, to a finished product at a store near you. The rise of crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo has helped to provide hardware startups with seed capital from curious consumers who don't mind dealing with products still in beta mode.
August decided to skip that step, raising venture capital the traditional way and relying on its well-known designer and a press tour to generate interest, awareness, and demand. After all, this wasn't a pain point that really needed explaining. "The past two years I've been working on this, if there is a phrase I've heard more than anything, it's 'I hate keys.'" That's how August co-founder and CEO Jason Johnson described the company's market research.
Speaking from personal experience, the struggle is real. As Johnson notes, in New York City alone, two million people per year get locked out of their own homes. Since my smartphone is basically welded to my hand at this point, perhaps it's time to try using it in place of an analog device I can't seem to help misplacing on a weekly basis.
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Sandwich - The Startup That Makes Your Startup Look CoolSandwich has become the most sought-after producer of videos for tech companies large and small.
Building and launching an app is actually cheaper and easier than ever. With free tutorials and open source toolkits, the barrier to entry is low. Much of the complex backend work can be offloaded to big providers like Amazon or Facebook, who handle cloud storage or identity. Getting people to actually notice your company among the throng of new startups launching every day, however, is very tough. Unless you're featured in an app store or make it into the top 10, it can be difficult to find your initial traction. That's where a viral video comes in.
Sandwich is a video production company that has found the perfect tone for the moment. Dry, self-deprecating, and hilarious, while simultaneously conveying lots of information and a sense of cool that comes from being a part of the near future. We've covered many of the companies they crafted videos for, from Casper to Coin to Push For Pizza.
The company is taking a unique approach to working with startups, many of whom don't have the cash on hand to afford a slick, professionally produced video. They are accepting equity in the young businesses that they work with, and they're sometimes negotiating a revenue share. That gives Sandwich the same kind of upside that a venture capitalist might enjoy if the startup they are working with becomes the next rocket ship headed for an IPO.
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Capitol Bells - Can an App Get Americans to Care About Government?Civic engagement is at its lowest point in 75 years. But startup Capitol Bells is looking to change that.
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