Introducing the TinySeed Accelerator Batch for Fall 2021

Rob Walling: We are live. Welcome everyone to our TinySeed fall 2021 batch announcement. I am Rob Walling. I'm the co-founder of TinySeed and we're trying something different this batch than in the past for the batch past three batches, we've prerecorded an announcement video and this time we wanted to try it as an interactive live stream. Tracy Osborn. You're here with me as well. Want to introduce yourself?. Tracy Osborn: Yeah, like you said, I'm Tracy Osborn, I am the Program Director of TinySeed, so I run the day to day management of the program and I interact a lot with the founders and it just it's fun running a live stream instead. We try to be pretty informal and down to earth and I feel this kind of helps get people to understand what we're like as TinySeed. Rob Walling: Yep. And the cool part about it is we can take questions. So it's not just me talking into a camera. So if you are watching this and you have questions for us really about kind of AMA about TinySeed, the new batch, whatever Chime in to the YouTube comments and we are @TinySeedFund on Twitter.

If you want to share the love and let us know that you are watching. As I said, we're going to run through the 18 companies that we are investing in and mentoring, and we're not only investing money, but a lot of time over the next year to work with them and help them get there faster. And so this is our fourth batch of companies that we're funding. The brings our total. I think it's 59. Is that actually correct? Tracy Osborn: I don't know. Rob Walling: I'm pretty sure it's 59. It's give or take like one. So it's 58 to 60. We can go count. Tracy Osborn: It's good. I guess I've just stopped counting at this point. Cause it's getting to the point now that we're backing so many startups, like we have two startups to excuse me, two accelerator rounds per year, starting this year. So this is our second batch this year. And then next year we're going to have we're going to start our new accelerator arm that's for European time zones. And so I stopped tracking how many starts we're backing already. Cause it's starting to accelerate quite quickly, which is really exciting.

It's really wonderful to be able to work with so many great people. Rob Walling: Yup. Yup. And I like numbers, like quantifying things. So I'm going to keep track, I'm going to keep going. But as you said for the first three batches of TinySeed, we we went once a year and we did one application process and we waited a full year to do the next and this batch, the fall batch is the first one where we did a six month gap. And as you're building a business, like TinySeed is a startup, it's not a SaaS startup, but it is a startup in the sense that we're still trying to figure things out. And I'll admit changing to every six months felt to me, like when I used to change pricing, on my on my SaaS apps, really stressed me out because: is this going to work? Like this could break the model. If we don't get enough quality applicants then this kind of challenges, the assumption that we can run two batches a year and I was pleasantly surprised, this is as strong a batch as we've ever had.

Tracy Osborn: It was so hard to narrow it down. We were as well, it's like good problems to have. But it was it made it tough for us because we had so many high quality applications, only six months after the last application round that As always, it takes us quite a few weeks to really narrow it down. And so we take a big chunk of the big chunk of applications that were there was no quality difference. There was no quality difference between previous batches to this one. And we narrowed it down to 18 folks in our fall 2021 batch. Rob Walling: And with that, let's dive in. 18 companies. If you have questions, please do post them in chat. Producer Xander will send them over to us. We're going to get, go run through the companies here. And we have locations and everything. This is cool. Tracy, you want to kick us off on the first one? Tracy Osborn: All right, we're going to go alphabetical or. So we have and we're going to say the name of the company and then go into their description. So first up is Activity Messenger to be a mass messenger was founded by Martin Drapeau and Olivier Rousseau.

They're both in Montreal, Quebec, and they're an all-in-one solution for the sports and leisure industry. Rob Walling: Next up is CallScaler founded by Curran Van Waarde who's in San Diego California. CallScaler is an inbound call tracking platform, helping businesses track, which marketing campaigns make their phone. Tracy Osborn: Next is ChurnKey founded by Nick Fogle, Baird Hall, Scott Hurff and Rob Moore. These guys are in different places. So Baird and Nick are in Charleston. Scott is in Santa Monica, California. Rob Moore is in Maryland. ChurnKey offers personalized off-boarding experiences for subscription businesses. Rob Walling: And then we have a Civic Review, founded by John Reynolds out of Ogden, Utah. Civic Review increases local government efficiency by providing a platform to manage permits, licenses, and inspections. Tracy Osborn: And then Client Hub, founded by Judie McCarthy. She is in Ocala, Florida, Client Hub is designed specifically for cloud-based accounting and bookkeeping practices that are looking to build better client relationships for a more profitable firm.

Rob Walling: Next step is Keeping founded by Cody Duval. In Brooklyn, New York. Keeping as a help desk and shared inbox that works on top of gmail helping small and medium sized businesses manage inbound customer email without all the expense and complexity of a tool like Zendesk. Tracy Osborn: Next is KioskBuddy founded by Marvin Trajano and Lisa Tran in Irvine, California. KioskBuddy is an app that transforms a tablet into a self-service ordering kiosk. KioskBuddy, helps restaurants, food trucks, and other businesses with their staffing needs, allowing customers to place orders all on their own and freeing up employees for higher impact. Rob Walling: Then there's Martial Arts on Rails founded by Eran Galperin in Austin, Texas. Martial Arts on Rails provides modern management software to gyms and martial arts schools. Tracy Osborn: The next is Nestify founded by Rahul Nagare in Nashville, Tennessee and Vishal Deshpande in India.

Nestify provides scalable web hosting and technical support for WordPress and WooCommerce based businesses. Rob Walling: And we have OfferingTree, founded by Eddie Arpin, Alec Gorjestani. Alex Haley. And the three of them are in Twin Cities, Minneapolis. The fourth founder is Arvind Menon in San Diego, California. OfferingTree's all in one business software empowers wellness businesses to easily provide their services online so they can spend more time with their clients and less on technology. Tracy Osborn: The next up is PanelFox. PanelFox is founded by Michael Mukhin he's in California and is an all-in-one software for research recruiting. Rob Walling: And then we have RankBreeze founded by Kelvin Mah in Calgary. Alberta. RankBreeze helps Airbnb hosts improve their search rank pricing and market decisions. Tracy Osborn: And we have SignTracker founded by Joe Arenella in Austin, Texas, and Garrett Lancaster, and Keith Lancaster and Reno, Nevada.

SignTracker helps sign shops, operate and grow their businesses by providing online tools to quote, plan and manage their work. Rob Walling: Just a few more as we go through we're in the S. SkySnag is founded by Heba El Houjairy and Jad Aizarani, and they're in Dubai in the UAE. SkySnag protects organizations against email impersonation and phishing attacks. Tracy Osborn: Suggestion Ox is founded by Andrew Berkowitz and Wade Minter. Suggestion Ox makes it easy for HR leaders and managers to gather truly candid insights. Rob Walling: Then we have Tonomo. Is it Tonomo?. This is a thing. We know these founders, we know the companies, but we're still trying to figure out the exact, Tonomo, cause we said Tonomo yesterday. All right. So Tonomo is founded by John Zhao he's in Thailand. Tonomo streamlines booking, scheduling, and project management for real estate photography companies. Tracy Osborn: And second to last, we have Trendful, founded by Jackie de la Parte and Mailys Rabot from Tampa, Florida.

Trendful helps merchants acquire pre-owned inventory directly for their customers by automating pricing offers, shipping inventory and payouts. Rob Walling: And lastly, we have WayLit, founded by Raj Singh and Satya Mishra. They're in St. Louis, Missouri. WayLit is an immigration management platform for US and Canadian employers. I'm excited. It's a heck of a list. Yeah. Tracy Osborn: It's so many good startups in there. I'm just really excited to be working with everybody. I think it's 35 founders. Don't quote me on that. We have quite a few number of founders and a few businesses that have four founders, which I think is kind of fun. Rob Walling: Yep. So if you have questions, obviously drop them in the chat. We do. Obviously we want to thank and welcome all of our new, TinySeed batch members. We've already been in slack and kicking off onboarding calls this week. So we've been hanging out for a couple of days here on zoom and really want to thank everyone who has supported TinySeed and if you've applied. Thanks. A lot of folks that we fund are second or third time applicants.

If you're still interested in the program it's, I'll say it's getting better each time Tracy Osborn: It's hard when we have, so we miss people, good people every round and we know we miss them and it's been really great to see people apply multiple times, even if they, if you know it, things didn't work out for an earlier round. If they reapply, we're able to see how they've evolved between applications and like you said, there's oftentimes companies that applied two, three, I wasn't sure if there was a fourth application person applied in every batch in this round , can't recall. There's definitely people who have applied three times beforehand received two rejections and then made it into a TinySeed. It got to the point where we couldn't say no. Definitely if you apply for TinySeed, we are totally happy to if you didn't make it in one round and you're still interested in TinySeed, please apply again. We're happy to reevaluate and see if we can work with you in a future. Rob Walling: Yes. And we do have a couple of questions that have come in before I do that. I wanted to mention two YouTube videos that I would recommend that you watch after this if you're interested in joining TinySeed, potentially applying, one is "MicroConf On Air: Joining a Remote Startup Accelerator with Tony Chan" and the other is a "TinySeed Fall 2021 SaaS Application Info Session".

I think we'll have some graphics for those in a bit, but we have two questions from Robin on YouTube. He said, what if I have an idea that requires the use of an undocumented private marketplace API, even though my potential product is certain to bring great value to people, I solve a problem. I had there. I would say a couple of things. If it's just an idea with no revenue, I wouldn't apply to TinySeed. On our application, we say we recommend a minimum of $500 in monthly recurring. But if you have revenue, I would, I always encourage if people are on the fence or you're unsure, just apply that the application process takes, what does it take Tracy, 20 minutes? Tracy Osborn: Yeah, it's really short. We try to keep it pretty short because for anyone who is a fit for TinySeed we'll do an introductory call with them and ask more questions and it's like application part two. So the actual written part of the of the application, there are some long form answers, but really we hope that it wouldn't take more than 15 or 20 minutes. Rob Walling: Yep. And it's one, those kinds of things.

Also, by the way, I should mention, we have a saving function in the application too, so you can start working on it, save it and re you know, come back to it. There's, it's a two week period and you just have to submit it by the end of the two weeks. And we'll can review. So it's not something you have. It's not like a Google form where you might lose your progress. There is like a saving function. Right. So again, if you have revenue, I would encourage you to apply. We would absolutely. I will absolutely ask you questions if we wind up talking on an application call about this risk, because what you have here is platform risk of an undocumented API. I have run a business that had platform risk on a Google undocumented API, and there are many challenges with it. It was great. It was a nice lifestyle business. I would be hesitant to build a seven or eight figure business on an undocumented API. These are things all have nuance, it depends on whose API it is. How long has it been around? Is it just undocumented or is it actually, is, do they even know it's there? Is it like accidentally API? Is it scraping? There's all that kind of stuff that, that, where there's no clear cut, you should absolutely not apply right.

Or absolutely should apply. It's yeah, it's pretty easy to apply. So I would say go ahead and do it. And we get into deeper conversations about all these issues because every business has pros and cons. And Robin's second question is how long is our program? Tracy Osborn: I'll take that one. So the Tennessee program is a year-long accelerator program as compared to some other accelerators out there that, that do a three-month program with a demo day at the end, TinySeed fills the we're in between we have our program for bootstrappers are generally B2B SaaS that might have that'd be growing a little, we don't have to have a demo day at the end. There's not like this big event after three months, a year allows us to really work with these businesses and see results based on the kind of education and the program that we have in place. So it is a year long program. We now do two applications per year, so there's gonna be one application. The next application is going to be in January and that's for the spring batch that starts in may. And that's going to be both for our America's time zone, as well as our new Europe time zone accelerator.

And then there'll be a second application in fall, probably around August, for the accelerator that starts in November. And that will be only America. So long story short, the America's based one will have two per year. The Europe base will have one per year, but all of those programs are a year long program. Rob Walling: Very nice. And we're fully remote where we have three in-person retreats each batch year. And those are optional, encouraged, but optional. Tracy Osborn: And we can run them again because things are getting better. Rob Walling: I know. We were remote before, everyone's remote now. Because of COVID. I don't know if YC is going to go back in person, but we were the cool kids before the cool kids. Tracy Osborn: Yeah, a lot of people I say like with, when the pandemic happened, they're like what changes made to the program and largely nothing changed. The things that we set up in place was to allow founders who are all over the world. We've worked with founders from Thailand to Europe, Ukraine, Dubai, and allows us all to work on this program together remotely. The in-person, everything that we set up for in-person was going to be optional anyways.

Cause sometimes it's it's hard to ask the founder that's currently in Thailand to fly out for events. We did, we ran. The 20, 20 batch we had didn't have any in-person retreats, but the program, I know it was sad and there was a few people I haven't met in person yet, but we're going to fix that soon because now we were not only running some tiny, small in-person TinySeed retreats, again for our batches that are running right now. But we also have the MicroConf's You have the I'm not going to say much about that. That's your side of the business, but we do have, are running MicroConf's again, which is really awesome. It's the the conference series. Rob Walling: Yes, indeed. All right. I feel pretty good. I've got ahead. A few questions went through the companies. Tracy Osborn: We have a MicroConf Remote coming up, right? Rob Walling: Yes. MicroConf Remote is in early December. So if you had to microconfremote.com you can enter your email there to be notified in Remote is our virtual event. So we do it over three days. It's a give or take it's about 90 minutes a day and we break it up like that on purpose.

And if you get a ticket to it, you can attend live, or you get the videos after in case you do what I would probably do is just to watch him at two X speed. However, I will say that's because I am so introverted, I don't know for whatever reason but I will say that the community aspect of our last remote, especially. The hallway track was really good stuff. So if you do want to connect with other bootstrap, mostly bootstrap founders you know, SaaS founders specifically like this is a great way to do it. And to not just duck out because we are going to have interactivity last time we used, Gather.Town. And we are we might use Gather.Town, but we're also looking at some other platforms that are as cool or cooler in terms of having there be mix and mingled time with the attendees. Tracy Osborn: Yeah. And like the Remotes were planned pre-pandemic anyway. It wasn't like a new thing that we added because of the pandemic. It was the goal was to extend the, what, the really great in-person conferences that we have to the remote experience for people who can't make it.

And it's a really great conference and that will be happening in about a month. Rob Walling: Yep. I am excited. That again, that's, microconfremote.com. If you want to sign up to hear more about that. And if you're watching this, if you're not watching this on YouTube, we are putting out, I think it's what two, three videos, a month, high quality stuff that's helping founders get there faster. It's helping founders grow. So that's youtube.com.microconf. You should come. And as the kids say, smash that and subscribe button. That's how we do it. Yeah, but the subscribe, I mean, we've got, we were over 10,000 subscribers now and the pace is actually picking up. And I think the the value of the stuff we're providing is is speaking for itself at this point, Tracy Osborn: There's not only new things they're coming out often. There's also the recordings for the previous MicroConf's. And all of this information is still like the vast majority is still relevant. It's still useful. So you can just spend days just going through a previous recordings and getting all this great information that was on stage at MicroConf.

Rob Walling: Yep. Yep. So last couple of things before we wrap up I mentioned some other YouTube videos earlier. MicroConf On Air: Joining A Remote Startup Accelerator, TinySeed Fall 2021 SaaS Accelerator Info Session. Those are the names of those. Those are right here in this channel. Again, if you're interested in applying TinySeed.com/apply. Tracy Osborn: Get on our mailing list. Rob Walling: Thanks for joining us. A little song.