TechStars Launches 11 New Startups In Boulder | Hacker News Reader

TechStars Launches 11 New Startups In Boulder

techcrunch.com

44 pointstransburgh8 comments

My favourite out of the group is RentMonitor [1].

As a student I saw how much effort it takes managing a house with multiple tentants. This has a clearly defined market with customers who have money.

It's good to see many of them have business models baked in from step 1 and are not web consumers plays that I've frequently seen come out of Techstars.

1. http://www.rentmonitor.com/

I think AdStruc is a clear win. Billboards are a mess, but can be really effective (frighteningly effective considering most are viewed from cars).

The vacation home guys seem like they're on to something as well. That's a really nice business and they're touching on a bunch of pain points. Hell I'd like that service as a general property manager replacement for a full-time rental that I have.

It definitely looks cool (though the landing page main picture is too Microsoft Excel-y - as in not enough appeal). It struck me interesting how the TechStar startup is leveraging YC startup tech like Olark and will probably leverage WePay for payment solution. Throw in notifo support for rent notice alerts (http://www.rentmonitor.com/feature_tour), and heck host it on Heroku :-p

Regardless, this is a very good batch.

A lot of these look really good, much better than previous TechStars batches.

I was initially skeptical of ADstruc, probably because it was a market I know nothing about. I'm sold on it now...watch out - they are going to crush it this year.

I checked AdStruct out as well. I asked for a billboard in California: "no results found". Bad. So I said "give me a billboard anywhere". It came up with one result.

It's not great to launch a marketplace that is empty.

Lots of great ideas there. A few were a little too narrow for my tastes, but best of luck to everyone.

Is it just me, or does the cube "o" in gearbox's logo look exactly like Linode's blocks? Same shade of green and everything.

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