Oct8th2007
Well, it took longer than I wanted to get this together, but after wrestling with Ulead’s Video Studio 11+ for over a week, I have finally put together a template that makes it easy to output and upload videos. So here we go, the first of a few more videos that we have from the StartupWeekend event.
I was able to get Erica O’Grady to sit down for a few moments to tell me her take on what is going on within Houston’s startup scene, as well as what she liked about the Startup Weekend Houston experience. I think her feedback is great and shows that we still have a lot of work to do to continue to build up Houston’s startup community, but with events like Startup Weekend Houston, the Web Design Group’s Web Design Mayhem project, the upcoming Rice Alliance IT & Web 2.0 Venture Forum, Air Houston, and OpenCoffee Club, we are also making great progress.
http://www.vimeo.com/332817
Sep26th2007
I had the pleasure of meeting with the two founders of WHAMtext℠ this morning, Jeff Lerner and Matt Whitney. The company offers on demand text message coupons to users of their service. The premise here is that this is demand based so there is no “opt-in” requirements which will you get bombarded by SMS spam.
Here’s how it will work: just text a business name or product and a location (zip code or school code) to 469426 (GoWHAM) and a customized deal will be texted right back to you.
The initial launch plans will focus on college towns and college students, then growing their base in major metropolitan areas over time. To date, these guys have self funded, sought additional support from friends and family and now have the backing of angel investment, primarily out of Dallas.
Although the company is based in Houston, they have not found the support they were hoping for from this market. “If we invented a pipe fitting to go on an oil rig, we would have found funding very easily. However, there seems to be a lack of understanding about information technology and advertising models in Houston which made our search for capital difficult,” said Lerner. “We are committed to Houston and plan to stay here despite advice from others for us to relocate to Austin.”
Historically, their business has been providing discount and savings cards to college students through WHAMcard. “Moving towards an SMS-based model seemed to make sense now that the technology is there to leverage off of,” says Whitney. “Our competition is not consistent and acts more like SMS spam. We feel that we have a unique model that can scale very well.”
Sep14th2007
If you’ve been to an OpenCoffee event recently you may have met Misty Khan and learned about her new sales contact management software, Huntress Pro. If you are a networking fiend like I am and are tied to Microsoft Outlook, you will appreciate this new release that addresses the shortcomings of Outlook.
I had a chance to speak to Misty about this new release…here are some excerpts from our chat:
Josh: When did you get the “entrepreneurial bug” that led you to start Advena Artemis?
Misty: Entrepreneurialism is pretty much in my blood. Growing up and watching my parents and other family members sweat payroll and deal with all the other less glamorous issues that business owners deal with, I swore I wasn’t going that route. But eventually it sucks you in! During my attempt at being a stay at home mom (after trying it myself I have the deepest respect and appreciation for women who stay home with their children) I got a lot of offers to come back to work either in sales or as a sales consultant. My husband suggested that instead of working for someone else where I would likely have to travel or at least face a daily commute, I start my own business and market the system that I had created in Outlook to help manage my prospects (the precursor to HuntressPro). That was about 4 years ago.
Josh: So tell me about Huntress Pro and the product launch.
Misty: HuntressPro is a Microsoft Outlook add-in that provides contact management functionality such as call lists, referral source tracking and sales activity reporting. I began creating HuntressPro when I was a sales person to help me remember who I needed to talk to each day and what I needed to talk with them about. Our HuntressLite product addresses that need specifically because for some of my clients that don’t necessarily have business development responsibility, but do a lot of networking, that is all they need. As my needs evolved for things like sales activity reporting and referral source tracking, I continued exploring ways to meet them in Microsoft Outlook; those solutions eventually became HuntressPro. We also have a HuntressPro plug in that creates a sales pipeline as well as win and loss reports that help pin point which referral sources are providing the best ROI and which investments will pay for themselves. We are launching our HuntressPro.com site with those three products, but we expect our offerings to increase as we convert more of the industry specific functionality we have developed for custom software clients into additional HuntressPro plug ins.
Continue reading ‘Interview with Misty Khan of HuntressPro’
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