Startup ideas can come from every which way, but they usually come from direct experiences: Glove.ly started making their gloves because they were cold, Uber was created because its founders couldn’t find a ride. Jukebox.io founder Sairam Chilappagari based his company’s product off his personal experiences as well, but he drew from two seemingly disparate […]

Crowdskout collects and analyzes data. This is difficult, because the flow of data is infinite and the amount of noise it can make is vast. Many of its clients are involved in Washington D.C’s evergreen public policy and non-profit world, working to better the planet or at least making sure one specific part of it gets […]

Brian Lieberman doesn’t have a background in fashion, which makes him an odd choice to be the CEO of Twice as Warm, a fashion label based out Washington, D.C. He refers to its early days as a ‘project’, a three month time period he gave himself to see if he could actually make it work. “I recommend to anyone starting […]

The entire Artemis Ward team, all three of them, used to work at Weber Shandwick, a much larger ad agency. “We all resigned on the same day,” remembers Jackie Titus, who’s both a partner and head of strategy. “We had a going away party on a Tuesday and on Wednesday we signed a lease with WeWork, opened up our laptops and […]

When Glove.ly was just starting out, the model was simple: Oscar and Sol Hedaya would make warm, fashionable smartphone-friendly gloves in their spare time and drop off them off in a post box on the way to work. But then one day they ran into a problem: there were so many orders that they had […]

One time when Natalie Kathleen, the one-woman dynamo behind Sienna Ray, was working on handbags for a summer collection, she was using perforated leathers. She had given all the specs, worked out all the details, and when she opened the bags she expected to see perforated circles in all of the bags. Instead, she saw […]

You’ve got to know what your customers want, that’s step one for any business. How you get there can vary greatly. The easiest option is, of course, to simply know what’s best for your customers like Steve Jobs. If you’re not Steve Jobs, other options luckily remain. You could get consumer data from your past […]

For many startups, a human resources department can feel like a final frontier, a distraction, and a niggling detail in the way of their product. It hasn’t helped that, according to ZDNet, even “as the recession fades away and businesses have been rehiring, expanding and rediscovering their pre-recession chops, HR departments are still starved for […]

“There is no ShoutEm app,” says Viktor Marohnić. It’s an unexpected thing for him to say, considering how he is the CEO of ShoutEm, a company that launched a new app of their own dedicated to consumer loyalty. But part of ShoutEm’s mission has always been to be invisible, to create an experience so seamless […]