Entrepreneur
Liverpool StartupBunker
Location: DoES Liverpool, UK
Date: May 18th–19th
Liverpool Startup Bunker is an opportunity to join other people who want to create something amazing. In 52 hours, attendees will build a team, pitch ideas, develop this into a business plan, and work with mentors to research market, income streams, and flesh out ideas into reality.
Invision, Referly, Skyscrpr, Sessions
Here are Sprouter’s hot startups for the week of May 18.
Invision is UI prototyping tool that lets you create fully interactive wireframes and prototypes. Design interactive prototypes, collaborate with other designers, and upload designs as a variety of common image formats. Invision also lets you build prototypes for the iPhone and iPad.
Referly is an online referral system for your social network. It tracks the links you share, and rewards you when your friends and followers act on your recommendations. Referly helps you become an expert by tracking the products and services you share, and rewarding your referrals.
Skyscrpr is a platform for bloggers to sell advertising space directly to advertisers. Create ad inventories quickly through their drag-and-drop interface, easily see snapshots of revenue through the Skyscrpr dashboard, and advertisers can purchase ads on your site via automated media kits.
Sessions is a personal health coach that helps you start leading a more active life right away. When you sign up for Sessions, you’re paired with a real-life health coach, who designs a plan that fits your life, and guides, motivates and supports you through the process.
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Safe port of entry still has its challenges
Becoming a franchisee is generally viewed as a safe port of entry into business ownership by joining an established brand. While the advantages are numerous, prospective franchisees should be aware of the many challenges they might encounter.
Franchising provides some form of a safety net in that the time and money to crystallize the brand’s goodwill have by and large already been invested by the franchisor. The trade-off is that to maintain a consistent chain of businesses offering consistent products and services, franchisees lose a substantial amount of control over their business operations. This surrender of control to a franchisor means that franchisees should expect to comply with formal standards, purchase from approved suppliers and receive regular inspections from head office.
Franchisees do sometimes take issue with the list of approved suppliers as they may feel that they can locate better prices for the same inventory elsewhere. Franchisors are entitled to receive volume rebates and discounts as a result of the group buying power it coordinates, so franchisees should be aware of this product purchase restriction.
Franchise agreements will also maintain a lengthy list of potential defaults by a franchisee of the franchise agreement which entitles the franchisor to penalize or terminate the franchisee. It is rare that the franchisee is granted reciprocal rights to terminate the agreement based on the actions of the franchisor.
In recognition of this imbalance of power, franchise law exists in several provinces to protect the franchisees from being abused by a franchisor. Franchisees should be sure to carefully review the rights and restrictions contained in the disclosure document to ensure they are making informed investment decisions and can survive within the franchisor’s standards.
Chad Finkelstein is a franchise lawyer at Dale & Lessmann LLP (www.dalelessmann.com) in Toronto and can be reached at cfinkelstein@dalelessmann.com or (416) 369-7883.
How Twitpic’s founder built on Twitter’s success
Twitpic founder Noah Everett is no stranger to start-ups. He founded his first startup in his late teens, a music site called Indiefy. “It was a way for independent artists to sell their music online.” Everett said in interview. “I built it, but I didn’t put a lot into getting it out there so it fizzled out.” His current startup, popular photo-sharing site Twitpic, was built out of his own personal need. “I wanted a way to share my own photos so I spent the weekend coding up the first version of Twitpic for me and my friends to use.”
Twitpic filled a niche that Twitter had not originally implemented – users could send 140 character messages to one another, and to the world, but there was no way to attach a photograph or media item to Tweets. Everett saw this gap in functionality, and created Twitpic in 2008 to solve it.
Aside from being used to share photos among friends, Twitpic has gone on to be a medium for some historical moments. Everett said the biggest highlights for him have been seeing Twitpic used in breaking news situations, like the January 15th, 2009 plane crash in the Hudson River. He believes the biggest milestone of Twitpic has been hitting 35 million users, and being revenue positive from day one, without taking on funding. Twitpic shares its space with other photo sharing tools like yFrog, which is owned by parent-company ImageShack. Twitter also announced in June of 2011 that it was adding photo-sharing to its native application.
His advice for entrepreneurs looking to bootstrap their company is two fold. “Get your core product out the door as quick as possible, your users will tell you where to go.” To cap it off, Everett believes in a “just do it” mentality for startups. Since starting Twitpic, Everett has raised no funding, and has relied on ad revenue to keep the service revenue positive. Everett has always been an advocate of keeping his business small, highlighting this on the Twitpic blog.
Twitpic ran as a one-person show for the first few months, but Everett found that eventually he simply couldn’t do it alone. “I couldn’t run it by myself anymore, my stress levels were through the roof and the company needed employees to grow.” Twitpic runs exclusively on user-submitted content, so making sure that this content is safe was a challenge. “It’s really amazing to see the cool things people upload…you get to see into their lives,” said Everett, adding that sometimes moderation is still necessary, “Users will upload anything … be prepared to remove bad content.”
Toronto-based Wave Accounting raises US$12M in series B funding
Wave Accounting Inc. has raised US$ 12-million in series B financing, bringing the total funding of the Toronto-based startup to more than $ 19-million.
The latest round was led by the Social+Capital Partnership, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capital fund, Wave said Wednesday.
Previous investors Boston and California-based Charles River Ventures and OMERS Ventures, the venture arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System pension fund, were also part of this round.
Wave, which was launched in November 2010, offers a free web-based accounting software and makes money through targeted advertising and group-buying opportunities.
Kirk Simpson, co-founder and chief executive of Wave, said the company has grown quickly since its series A funding (an infusion of $ 5-million announced last October), expanding from 25 to about 50 employees.
“We have broad ambitions about the opportunity that’s in front of us and we don’t want to be undercapitalized,” he said in an interview.
He said it is important to the company to have the flexibility to expand its product line or make strategic acquisitions for example.
Wave acquired Winnipeg-based Small Payroll last fall and rebranded that company’s product as Wave Payroll, an application it charges users a small fee for although its accounting software remains free.
OMERS Ventures was part of Wave’s $ 1.5-million seed round last June and Charles River Ventures led the series A, $ 5-million round.
