The State of Startups in StartupNash
Four business launches, one really BIG ask, and tons and tons of updates from your friends on StartupNash.
🏡 What’s happening on StartupNash
We've had four total business launches on StartupNash: Calendaristic, Predictability at Scale, greglees.co, and WiserID. Story below.
I created The State of Startups in 2023 and shared it with the group. More below in The Question of the Week.
StartupNash published our first monthly VIP membership. I added discounts from a few major products you might use as a founder, and I added a tier for sponsors. Check it out here. I wrote about more in the Announcement section.
We've added 17 total Britepeer experts, and made around 25 total connections between members to help you all find peers, mentors and services. I’m happy to say, Britepeer is working the way I intended the tool to work. Britepeer is a free tool for my community that helps us connect to each other by skill. Learn more about Britepeer here.
We created three new private groups: food-tech, a Product peer group (DM), and a Marketplace founder group (DM). If you want to be added to one of these small groups, DM me!
We've added around 20 new members in July.
New business launches
We have started to share new business and product launches on StartupNash. We actually had two notable ones last week, and four total this month. Let’s focus on the two most recent ones:
🚀 Chris Hefley launched Predictability at Scale. This new tool tracks things that stop work from being delivered, and gives your team more details about the blocker. “The who, why, and what can-be-done to minimize this and future delays.”
💡 How you know him:
- 2x Founder
- Previously CEO at LeanKit
- One Acquisition (LeanKit)
📁 About the business:
- Saas Product
- Business/Productivity
- B2B 🚀 Brian Dailey launched Calendaristic on Product Hunt! Calendaristic is a tool for managers to track trends and information about meetings: how often they happen, which companies you meet with the most, and trends over time.
💡 How you know him:
- 2x Founder
- Previously CTO at Stratasan
- One Acquisition (Stratasan)
📁 About the business:
- Saas Product
- Business/Productivity
- B2BWhat does this mean?
I always take notice when great things are happening for founders in Nashville. These launches feel important to me because of the area of interest (business productivity) and the founders’ similar status (2x founder from Nashville with an exit). It might just be a really fun coincidence, but I think it’s notable and maybe even shows a bit of momentum for our startup scene that these founders are ready to build another startup now. Even better, I get to call them members of our group. And because you’re a member, you can connect with them as well.
🌞Asks And Offers
Last week, I published The State of Startups in 2023. I went through all 250 folks in our group who tagged themselves as founders in our directory, and updated my list of active startups in our group.
Here’s a digest:
143 total active companies
52.8% Product, 37.3% Service, 9.9% Other
Most popular categories: Business Services, Healthcare Platform, Productivity Tool, Recruiting Agency
Four Acquisitions 🏆
What do we do with this information? Well, I think it’s possible we have a lot of interesting high-growth companies in Nashville that are flying under the radar, and I want to figure out how I can help. Which leads me to our next section.
Question of the week:
Peter Swan, John Lanahan and I have had a series of conversations about the local tech startup landscape, wondering why it hasn't really taken off in a way that feels sustained and visible (entirely possible we have blinders on, and recent news items make us feel hopeful: See above).
Some open questions we're trying to answer:
How many people are actively trying to start a high-growth, tech enabled startup in Nashville and greater TN?
Why are startups building in TN and do they plan to stay?
Are startups in TN looking for capital from TN investors?
Are there TN investors interested in investing in early-stage, high-growth/tech-enabled startups rather than something more familiar and less risky?
If the answer to all or most of these is yes, we're thinking it's probably worth dedicating some time and effort out of StartupNash to stitch these pieces together and build some momentum. If you can help us answer any of these questions--i.e. you're maybe building a high-growth/tech-enabled startup or you're maybe kinda interested in angel investing some day--we'd love to chat with you!
📣 Big announcement
StartUpNash launched a VIP paid membership
I created new paid membership on StartupNash. I want to focus today on sharing the Founding SUN membership with you and what it means.
🌞 Founding SUN membership is suited for anyone who has gotten value out of the group in the past and wants to give back to entrepreneurs who need it. This is a totally optional way to support the group and get very supportive help on something you are working on.
This tier is for:
Interest in helping startup communities
Wants to support open knowledge sharing
Interested in software discounts
Loves absolutely amazing stickers
I wanted to give you new ways to start highlighting your business, offers, updates and what you are working on to our community inside and out of Slack. Benefits to this tier include adding additional details of your startup to our directory, and sharing public milestones for people to read so they can keep up with your business.
🌞 New from Britepeer
Got a question or want to make a connection with StartupNash? Ask Britepeer. I use it to match members of our community by skill, completely free. Meet some of our newest peers below.
Newest Britepeers:
I served as CTO and co-founder of a startup in Nashville, growing the company to about 100 people. After a successful exit, I work with VC firms to do technical due diligence and advise other organizations on how to prepare for technical due diligence.
I run Nashville's longest-running digital agency, actively serving thousands of clients that range from nonprofits, startups, ecomm, all the way to Fortune 500.
I've been working in healthcare and finance technology for nearly 20 years, 10ish as a CTO/SVP Engineering. I love talking technology and enabling execution of complex ideas with simple solutions.
I measure the group's progress by meaningful connections. If you met someone that led to a job, a sale, an investment, or anything else, tell me anonymously here.
Celebrate good times: 🎉 We’ve had 21 weekly wins in July 🎉
See you on the brite side 🌞,
😎 Kelley
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