A Sack of Seattle

TechStars Leak and Launch Party Tickets!

1. Who’s in TechStars Seattle? 

Usually we test your patience and make you wait for Demo Day (November 3rd), but here’s a sneak peek at some of the companies and what they’re up to…

Beamit Mobile - Most convenient and cost effective way to transfer money overseas.

Bluebox Now - Creating an engaging loyalty platform with real rewards so companies can delight their customers.

Fireplace - Building the world’s best online page builder.

Flexminder - Unlocking 6 billion dollars from Flexible Spending Accounts.

Piratebird - Quora for dating.

Romotive - We make simple, universal, and affordable robotic platforms that interact with people in meaningful ways.

Vizify: helps people get hired by turning their resumes into beautiful, interactive infographics. 

2. Tickets to our Launch Party- TechStars is coming to Bloomberg TV!  

September 13th kicks off the TechStars reality TV show series.  We’re throwing a big launch party to celebrate! I'd really like to thank the Seattle tech start-up scene for helping TechStars support our local tech start-ups and invite you to come and join us! Space is limited, so the first 20 people to respond will receive tickets (full details below).  Those who come celebrate with us can expect to hang out with TechStars Founders from the 2011 and 2010 Seattle programs, our TechStars mentors and the movers and shakers in the Seattle tech scene.  

Take a sneak peak at what's in store: TechStars Trailer

For tickets, @ me on Twitter using #techstarslaunchparty and shoot me an email.  First come, first serve!

Am I a crazy or a smart investor? or both?

Response on Lighter Capital’s “explosive” promotion has been somewhere between “that’s totally awesome” and “that’s totally crazy” – which is exactly what I had wanted.

I want to give some insight to how we came onto this idea, and why people should expect more of the same from lighter capital soon.

Compared to more traditional funding sources like banks and venture capitalists, Lighter Capital's funding process is faster, our capital is less expensive, and we’re (hopefully) a lot more fun to interact and work with. So what's the best way to market that?

We’re fast, but not out-of-control fast

We were planning our new site and coming up with ideas for how we could showcase ourselves, and we thought we’d emphasize how “fast” we are. We thought – let’s fund a company in a week and have a daily-deal-like counter to add some time pressure to us and the applicant. Turns out, there are a lot of people who claim this. A search for “fast money” gets all these ads:

We may never be as fast as some of these guys, nor do we want to be like these guys -- Lighter Capital is a LOT more legitimate than these options –  we won’t break people’s knee-caps if they don’t pay. Maybe we’ll take an extra week to make a loan, but the terms should be a lot better for the borrower.

We’re definitely crazier

If the speed story wasn’t going to work, we know we’re a bit willing to admit that we are crazier than main-stream funding sources. “Let’s fund something nobody else would fund.” Dirty companies, messy companies, loud companies, stuff like that. we decided August would be the month to fund an EXPLOSIVE company – it’s good, has some mixed connotations so it raises eyebrows. We ultimately toned it down to focus on a company with explosive growth, but we’re still holding out hope that a company that sells or uses explosives may still apply. Call me crazy.

My accidental SEO strategy

Somewhat inspired by Rand's SEO talk on Wednesday - I checked out the google analytics on asack.typepad.com (i'm thinking of moving to a wordpress blog, but want to keep linkjuice, ANY ADVICE?) and was shocked to discover that I'm getting ~10 visits/month from people searching for "i ate a grape and i" (a quote from an snl sketch I referenced). Turns out I rank #1 on google's results - try it yourself. Not exactly an intentional SEO effort on my part, but nice to be #1 at something!

 

Startup SEO is both awesome and hard

This has been a crazy week for me - Lighter Capital launched our new site and our explosive capital countdown and Techstars kicked off our second Seattle program. 

Rand Fishkin from seoMoz gave an awesome talk to the Techstars group that got the my mind racing for how Lighter Capital could be better focused on SEO. A couple things he said I thought were particularly relevant:

1. SEO can be a great marketing tactic for startups to beat established businesses since it requires creativity and nimbleness instead of $$, which plays AGAINST the advantages of  big company. 

2. SEO can be really hard for startups that are introducing a new product that the market doesn't know they want - ie Lighter Capital's revenue-based loans are a type of hybrid between bank debt (which people know about) and VC equity (which people know about). So how does a startup like us get people who are searching for bank debt or VC to find Lighter Capital? 

Thanks for the insights, Rand.

BOOM! goes the dynamite

... and Lighter Capital's new funding promotion. Today Lighter Capital announced that in sync with our new site launch and rebranding, we're starting a countdown until the end of August and we're going to fund at least one EXPLOSIVE company that applies between now and then!

We've gotten some awesome press on Geekwire Techcrunch and others and feedback has been great. I'm really jazzed about the energy we're getting going - please tweet and spread the word about the promotion and what we're up to.

Hope you especially enjoy the semi-intentionally awkward promo video from Drew and Randall.

 

 

Lighter Capital's new site

(UPDATED: With functioning link to Lighter Capital)

We have a new site up at Lighter Capital, and I think it's a night and day difference. The team's been absolutely incredible getting this up and running, and I'm really excited to have a new look to show to the world.

Check it out - give us feedback - apply for a RevenueLoan. Expect more exciting news soon.