The Highlights: Stack your team

If you want to know what's going on in Nashville's startup scene, check here for a bi-weekly report about founders, and what they are working on.

This is a long one! Stay with me! It’s packed full of events, upcoming events, founder updates and StartupNash updates.

This newsletter is powered by a collection of 850+ founders, funders and experts. We are part of a community called StartupNash, founders and funders who share peer knowledge about starting and growing businesses.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how StartupNash can do more than just connect you to community. What if it could help you build your team too? I am trying out a new way to find and hire the right expertise for the stage you're in. I'm running an experiment I'm calling "stacked" for now. Here's how it works:

Founders: stack your team

• Find or get matched with recommended experts (or potential fractional/FTE) folks by topic

• Choose to add or replace after initial consults

• Share your stack (help another founder by recommending great, founder friendly professionals)

Y'all want to try this? → https://form.typeform.com/to/zBd0OL30

It takes 45 seconds and gives me what I need to send you a curated list of people I actually trust — marketers, designers, legal minds, advisors, and builders.

📆 Fundraising Founders: You're invited to a brand new type of event from the Entrepreneur Center called Capital Sessions, to help founders become fundraising ready.

Sessions cover common topics on all of the considerations founders need to make before seeking investment, from understanding a valuation, to calculating their own unit economics, to creating a financial forecast.

I’m here as always, to help founders navigate the startup scene, and I’ve partnered with the EC to produce 10 sessions and 7 hands-on workshops featuring community capital partners. Partners include folks you know and love who participate in helping startups across the world raise capital and build businesses.

Our first session is called Capital 101 featuring Haley Zapolski (Zap), an entrepreneur in residence for capital coaching. Join us here: https://ec.spaces.nexudus.com/events/1415532565/arc-sessions-capital-101-navigating-the-fundraising-landscape

What happened this month in startups?

Two major things: Nashville Entrepreneur Day and Nashville AI Week.

• Dave Lane’s team at Twin Sun was at both events. Dave and his team are who I go to when I have product questions. They build apps and work with some major self-funded clients. They hosted a talk with us a few weeks ago called “Don’t build an App,” which is ultimately their advice to the vast majority of would-be customers. They’ve learned it’s best for a great client relationship to build when the market has validated the need.

• I ran into some great founder friends at Build in SE’s happy hour. HUGE Shoutout to Monique Villa, who is very generous with her time and her connections in Nashville’s startup ecosystem.

• Justin Gray is off to the races with Potluck, a consumer app for folks who plan ongoing events.

• Justin Gurette is working on Cohesive, an AI operating system for businesses.
  Think ChatGPT, but integrated with your entire tool stack - automatically pulling in context and executing workflows across your org. Things like logging meeting notes, updating CRM records, scheduling follow-ups, and drafting emails can all happen with a quick chat.

• After Entrepreneur Day, Glasshaus and Torch very kindly hosted a dinner for the EC staff and fintech and healthtech entrepreneurs. I met Chrissa McFarlane, founder of Patientory there. Patientory empowers you with control of your health data, so you can maximize your health and earn personalized reward based $PTOY token payments. I thought it was really innovative for healthtech and the business caught my attention because I believe owning your own health data should be easy.

• I saw Doug from Document Doctors at Nashville Entrepreneur Day. He’s worked with brands like Frito-Lay and PepsiCo on technical documentation. Organization is Doug’s superpower, and if you look at his own business, you’ll see why clients trust him to build the world that makes up the content infrastructure of a company.

• Ken Duggar just moved to Nashville to pursue a pet friendly solutions business: DUGGER VIP creates packages for pet friendly hotels (W Nashville, Hotel Fraye - we're in 10 other cities).

• Salim El Jai is building LinkedUp — a tool that helps automate networking. Think of it as a smart assistant that helps users go from profile discovery to optimized outreach. The product is bootstrapped and the team is looking for a technical partner (ideally full-stack + excited about AI or automation). If you or someone you know loves building scrappy tools and wants to co-create something meaningful in this space, join StartupNash to connect.

• During Nashville AI week I got to spend the day with my friend Jessica Murray. Jessica is an amazingly helpful participant in StartupNash. She founded

  https://www.hiempower.co/, and she’s a fractional COO, investor and friend to startups.

• Had a great chat with my friend Evan from Pilot.com. If you see Pilot everywhere in Nashville these days, it’s not by accident, Pilot is out there doing the work of answering tax/bookkeeping related questions for founders who participate in their office hours, no customer commitment required. I participated in their last office hours and it was really helpful.
  
  🌟 Have an ask or an offer? Join StartupNash. We are a group of founders and funders in Nashville. Our community focuses on using peer mentorship and the power of our collective network to help each other grow our businesses.
  
  There were so many more folks I saw and chatted with who I didn’t shoutout and I want you to know I see you and am cheering on what you are building.
  
  🌞 See you on the brite side :)