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After 54 hours of coffee-fueled designing, building and pitching over 100 Startup Weekend LA contestants put down their computers at 5 p.m. last night at Coloft in Santa Monica to present their remarkable results.
Startup Weekend has become an important event in the Los Angeles tech ecosystem. Winners from the past three years include some impressive Los Angeles based ventures like Zaarly.com, Look.io and SnazzyRoom.com. Within one week of winning Startup Weekend, Zaarly received $1 million from Ashton Kutcher and, within seven months of that closed $14 million in Series A from Kleiner Perkins. Look.io met similar success when it was acquired by LivePerson in June 2012. Given the viability of this year’s startups it is likely that there will be similar success.
The weekend’s runner-up Ring-a-Ling built a fully functional custom ring tone recorder and sender app. The founders imagine everyone from parents and children sharing family moments to teenage friends sharing obnoxious noises via the app. This was validated by the team’s extensive market research, which included an impressive list of interested consumers. The all accelerator judging panel was impressed by the execution of the app and the way Ring-a-Ling seamlessly worked with the call settings on the Android operating system.
Statistified won first place, two free months of Coloft membership and $2500 of Webranx services by convincing the judging panel of huge market potential. The app tracks statistics for sporting events in real-time and could potentially replace the inefficient two-man scoring and statistic setup common in most recreational and high school sports leagues. This mobile app can also be potentially synced with a scoreboard. Current statistic keeping software is hugely expensive and many recreational leagues and high school leagues still use pen and paper.
While only two teams were awarded prizes there were several other notable standouts. Team Grub Box built a packaged food subscription business focused on delivering unique and hard-to-find foreign food items to their consumers for $20 per month. Grub Box already has a fully functioning e-commerce website and is taking orders. Also, Classified Style built a community and e-commerce website for sneaker enthusiasts called Sneakerheads. Citing the clutter of eBay and the poor search engine of Craigslist, Classified Style wants to be a reliable place to search and fulfill orders for collectible sneakers; they were voted the crowd favorite.
All teams that participated in any Startup Weekend event nationwide over the past two weeks are eligible to apply to the larger Global Startup Battle via a video submission. The Global Startup Battle winners will be eligible for an impressive set of prizes including $20,000 in match funding for an Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign, a flight to San Francisco for an inspirational visit to Google headquarters and A-list mentorship opportunities.
Keep an eye out for these startups on the market soon. Startup Weekend LA shows that starting a great company may be only 54 hours away.
