Photos by Alexandra Scoville
Seed Spot’s Fall 2013 ventures pitched their business models to the public Wednesday at Demo Day in a nearly full Orpheum Theatre auditorium.
The event was the culmination of months of work between the ventures and Seed Spot, a Phoenix-based startup incubator. It featured 17 different ventures in industries including food, education, civic engagement and health.
The ventures were available for questions on the show floor before pitching their business ideas in the theatre’s auditorium.
Courtney Klein, co-founder and CEO of Seed Spot, said that attendance at Demo Day was the largest ever.
“We had 1,100 people registered,” Klein said. “We had 600 last year. Every year, more and more people come and so we hope that people come and see a venture that they want to support. Our dream is that this whole place is filled.”
Khayree Billingslea, co-founder of TourKidd, a platform that provides services to independent musicians, said that he and his partners have gained a lot of experience by working with Seed Spot.
“They taught us everything that we didn’t know,” Billingslea said. “We didn’t even know what questions to ask at first because we just didn’t know. Seed Spot helped us understand that there’s a big world out there and there’s a lot of opportunity there but it takes a lot of hard work.”
One of the things Seed Spot stresses to the ventures is to understand who their customers are and know if they are willing to pay, Klein said.
Chris Reina, co-founder of Heroes for Students, an evening venture that connects guest speakers to teachers with the hope of encouraging students, said that identifying the customer was a large step in developing the project.
“There was a lot of talking with our customers,” Reina said. “We’ve done a lot of talking with our teachers, asking, ‘What do you know makes the difference and how can we solve it?’ And they said that students need community role models in the class that engage them but that they don’t have an easy way of making that happen.”
Watching the ventures who participated in Seed Spot grow and develop was compelling, Klein said.
“They go through 14 weeks of defining if they have a viable business,” Klein said. “For us to see them on stage, publicly demonstrating that they do, and that they’ve thought through what their vision is, how they can make money and what kind of impact they’ll have on the world. It’s exciting to see them make so much progress.”
At the end of the pitches, the audience was able to vote on which ventures they liked the best. Several awards and prizes were given to ventures, including one to the winner of the audience vote.
Innovative HITECH Healthcare Solutions, Guardian NPX and Box Play for Kids took home cash prizes of $3,000, $2,000 and $1,000 respectively from ASU’s sustainability program. Xplore Box was given six months of free office space at Seed Spot and a trip to the Demo convention in San Francisco. S.O.U.N.D.S. received a web development package and TruVote was given a day of free consulting services with local-based web consulting company WebPT. Celebrate Autism was awarded a $25,000 prize for nonprofits. S.O.U.N.D.S. received $5,000 for winning the audience vote.
Kirk Johnson, founder of S.O.U.N.D.S., an organization that promotes and provides music education, said he was speechless from receiving the vote.
“It’s very humbling that the audience chose,” Johnson said. “You present your dream and people believe in your dream with you, so that’s great.”
Johnson said he had a good experience working with Seed Spot and gained several valuable skills.
“It’s been wonderful,” Johnson said. “Going there every day, listening and seeing all the presenters that teach us things, it’s great. I’ve been challenged. I had to figure out how to be efficient, how to reach the most amount of people.”
Phoenix’s environment and history makes it a strong location for new business ideas, Klein said.
“We’re based here and I’m a native and it was a ground that we wanted to prove we could do it,” Klein said. “We brought water to the desert, you’d think we could start up some really cool companies. People everywhere have ideas about changing the world, so why not Phoenix?”
Applications for Spring 2014 Seed Spot ventures also opened Wednesday and will close Jan. 24.
Check out Downtown Devil’s interactive Seed Spot graphic to learn more about the ventures.
Contact the reporter at travis.arbon@asu.edu
Editor’s note: Mauro Whiteman, executive editor for the Downtown Devil, serves as the creative director for Seed Spot venture The Manifesto Project. He did not contribute to the reporting of this article.
