I had a great time at the MassChallenge one minute pitch last night. First of all, the space is unbelievable. These companies are going to have to be extremely successful to ever get another office with that kind of view. Here are some notes I had on some of the companies that either pitched or that I bumped into walking around the area:
This also involves an interesting experiment. I didn’t write down any names at the event. How many did I remember without having to go to the MassChallenge site? I will note either way.
ArtVenue (Remembered name without looking it up)
I bumped into ArtVenue walking around the cubes. ArtVenue is trying to connect artist with local venues that can show their art. They want to facilitate the discovery and booking of local sites that will display art. This is a great idea, and a wonderful example of a win/win idea– cafes and restaurants need art and artists need to show art. If they can execute, this could be a wonderful business. Tough parts ahead are getting the critical mass of venues in each target area to sign up. I think this is going to involve feet on the street going around and finding venues. This is tougher to scale for resource reasons. Maybe the solution is to recruit your artists as evangelists. Have artists find great places to display and arm them with the info to give to venue owners to get them to sign up. The other nice thing here is that you don’t need much of a critical mass to make this useful, and you can focus on single geographic areas at a time to validate the idea. Anyway, great idea waiting to be executed correctly. Nice job.
What I took away from this pitch was that Diffuse 5 was like an Angie’s List with a focus on businesses that are friendly and supportive of gay families. I loved the pitch. A problem that I believe in and a possible solution. There is a lot of stress and anxiety in bringing people into your house and for some reason there is always added stress of bringing in workers. I am sure there is much more added stress when you have a non-traditional family. I love the idea of a site that helps assure you that the person you are bringing in is both competent and has shown respect for families like yours.
I was a little confused after going to the site, as it appears it is more expansive than my understanding and I couldn’t actually find the AngiesList type stuff there. Maybe they are mid-pivot and don’t have that functionality there, yet. (EDIT: This is the case… see Ashley’s comment below.). Anyway, I loved the pitch and think its a great idea. I don’t know if anyone else does this, yet.
As far as challenges, there is the obvious tough road of building a social-based site and getting to critical mass. They will have to push hard to reach this. The second challenge is as they grow, some of the 800-pound gorillas may add features to their existing site to combat Diffuse5. That doesn’t always work, though, and there is certainly room for more focused sites if they can prove having special domain features is worth moving from the big sites.
SittingAround (Remembered name without looking it up)
SittingAround is a shared baby-sitting site that focuses on family-based sharing of child care. As far as my experience goes, parents have four main forms of child-care: family, child care facilities, paid babysitters and informal/semi-formal swapping with other families. Other than family, swapping with other trusted families is by far the best. They have kids around your kids’ age, you trust them, they are local, etc.
So, what are the challenges? The way this is handled now is extremely social. Usually one parent calls up another and chats and mentions that they would love to have little Billy over, or that they have a meeting and they would rather not call a sitter. Its a little bonding experience and not at all business like. It is also very free flowing where each side can talk about how Billy is doing, how he loves coming over. There is lots of thanking and talking about how little Sally can come over next week. I think SittingAround has to maintain this type of loving atmosphere. These are our kids we are talking about and that involves lots of emotions 
I do love this idea and think it has a lot of potential. It can grow coop by coop without the need for a larger critical mass. The big challenge is convincing people that they need this vs. the informal way they are doing it now. It goes without saying that they also need to make sure it works. If I try to work out sitting a couple times and the site doesn’t work out, I am not coming back.
Other Notes
There were a bunch of great bio and mechanical startups. Thing like a water filtration and a film that lower drag on boats (link). These are awesome-sounding, but not my area of expertise, so I have a hard time commenting. They sound excellent, though, and I really hope they succeed.
To all participants, feel free to drop me a line. I love talking startups, business plans and execution. I would love to sit down with any of you and just throw around ideas.
