Just in time to close out the year, StartupSac is launching three new features; a directory of Sacramento area startups, a job board of jobs at Sacramento startups, and a podcast of interview and profiles with Sacramento founders and innovators. In the spirit of Lean Startup, each of these is essentially an MVP, so they’re not loaded with bells and whistles, but serve as a first prototypes that I expect will evolve and morph based on community feedback.
Sacramento Startup Directory
One feature I’ve been wanting to add for quite awhile is a directory of Sacramento area startups – something like a Crunchbase lite for startups in our region. But tracking down startups along with their info and keeping it up to date requires a lot of time and since this site started out as a side project/labor of love, I couldn’t rationalize putting the time into creating and populating a directory when it would take away from the pesky need to make money. But, fortunately the award of the City of Sacramento RAILS grant has enabled me to dedicate the time to create this.
What’s released today is a first draft of 100 Sacramento area startups with data I’ve entered mostly myself. But now it will be time to solicit the community to further crowdsource the data as well as to help validate the initial set of entries. So, check out the Sacramento Startup Directory. If you see your startup in there and see some information that needs to be edited or added, let me know. If you don’t see your startup listed you can submit it. These will be moderated entries so it won’t show up until I validate it. Listings are free. What qualifies as a startup vs a new business? For now, I’m using the Wikipedia definition of a startup so I won’t be including more mainstreet America small business listings like restaurants, hair and nail salons, retail stores, etc. unless they’re incorporating something truly innovative and disruptive in their product, service, or business plan.
Sacramento Startup Job Board
Another new functionality enabled by the RAILS grant is a free moderated job board for startup companies. This job board will feature jobs posted by Sacramento area startups. As with the directory, this initial version is fairly simple in its features and will likely evolve with feedback from the community. Without significant crowdsourcing the job board will take a lot of care and feeding to find and post jobs and monitor when the job postings expire. For now, I’ve input just a few myself and set each job posting to expire after 2 weeks. Check out the job board and if you are a startup that has job openings you’d like to post a job here.
StartupSac Podcast
Finally, there’s the podcast. After doing a phone interview with Brianna McGuire, founder of Foodfully, last week for another Sacramento startup profile, I was trying to figure out the best way to share it. Transcribing the 35 minute conversation would be tedious and prone to error. I could post it on YouTube with a static image, which I did. Or I could just share the audio file. And then it hit me. I have audio files of most of the interviews I’ve done so far so why not create a podcast so people can download the interviews and listen wherever and whenever they want. Turns out that creating a podcast is a lot easier than it used to be. So, yesterday I went live with the new StartupSac podcast. I’ve submitted it to iTunes, but it’s still being reviewed so it will be a few days before it’s available through the iTunes store.
So, all this new functionality is officially live and ready for the community to use. It will be interesting to see how each is received and what change requests come in. I’m open to constructive feedback and changes so let me know if you have any.
