Incidentally, GiveLoop (one of DreamIt's graduates) looks like a great service. I would actually like to donate more money than I do, but I often don't precisely because this kind of transparency and feedback are typically absent.
Confusingly, "incidentally" isn't always used to describe an action as being incidental. Consider the following definition from a Google search of "define: incidentally":
Used when a person has something more to say, or is about to add a remark unconnected to the current subject; by the way
You're right, I guess it's not. I was thinking the story was more about there being a successful Philly-based incubator than the startups it graduated. Anyhoo, yeah. Cool-looking company.
Not a graduate, but I met one of the founders of Postling at PR Camp last year and he spoke very highly of the program. It was a while ago, but I think he was saying that compared to YC there was more of a focus on business advice, and there were more contact hours with the mentors. I'm not sure to what extent that is true, but it certainly seems like a quality program that was run this way would be useful to some founders. Obviously different founders have different levels of experience and skills, so there probably isn't one best model, at least from the perspective of the founders.
This is my second year as a Dreamit mentor, and I really like the program. All the startups work in one big room, which fosters collaboration. And the partners really try hard with the mentoring portion.
I'm a non-hacker founder who actually came to the Dreamit program through Startl (www.startl.org). I just realized I have no way to compare Dreamit or Startl to YC or TechStars - no one can compare unless you've been to both, so I say it's innaccurate for anyone to comment that Dreamit focuses more on "building a business." Every company I saw at Dreamit was in a different place and had different needs, and all I can say for sure is that Dreamit was really good about not forcing anyone to fit some "mold."
If anyone out there is shopping for an incubator, my question is, "Why are you waiting for an incubator?" Go build something and if along the way the stage of your product matches up with an incubator, think about applying, but don't think you NEED an incubator to succeed. As much value as Pocket Tales got out of the experience (and we're really grateful for everything), this wasn't life or death for us. It was a boost.
Just keep that in mind if you're an aspiring entrepreneur.
I was part of DreamIt Ventures last summer - it's an excellent program - certainly one of the top accelerators in the country, providing access to a tremendous amount of mentoring and connections / resources. The DreamIt partners put in a lot of effort and are very well connected in the area, meaning lots of useful, targeted introductions, mentors, and speakers. Philadelphia is also under-rated as a startup town - Philly Startup Leaders is extremely active with a wide range of entrepreneurs and there are a number of other meetups, as well. I'm clearly biased, as it was a great experience for our startup, but I would highly recommend the program.
I participated this year (Easel), and I had a great experience. I would agree with their focus on the business aspect, particularly biz dev, in which the partners are superstars.
Besides that, it's pretty awesome to work 24/7 alongside smart entrepreneurs dedicated to helping one another out - I would almost say I got more out of the fellow entrepreneurs than the DreamIt partners.
It definitely accelerated our company's development, both on product and business.
Just presented today.. and as a hacker/ entrepreneur.. the great thing about Dreamit is they do focus on the business. Its easy for all of us hackers to put out products but how do we get users, and turn that product into a real business.. and this is what the DreamIt program really helps with. Learned a lot, and was a great summer. The Philly tech/startup community is incredible. I highly recommend anyone to apply.
I'm interested to see AppNowGo (private beta, so I can't see it yet). That's something I've thought about building, but it seems like a very hard problem.
Any solution that's doesn't require programming is going to have constraints. So even if the platform is fine for building v1, if they keep adding to it, eventually they're going to hit a wall where they must add feature X, which is impossible to do with the programming-free platform. And then what? They'll have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch, I guess. And somehow get their data.
So I think you pretty much need to let them export their data. Better yet would be letting them export the actual app they've built where they get PHP or Rails code. But then you stop making money off of that person. I guess you could charge for the code export so that you at least get one last lump sum before they leave, but it seems dirty to charge people to leave your platform.
Another option would be to somehow allow programming as an advanced feature in such a way that they could do almost anything, but that would be pretty difficult to do, and you'd need some kind of sandbox to keep them from breaking your servers.
All good points here. In the short term we're focusing on servicing customers with simpler data-driven app needs, e.g. member directories, job listings, knowledge bases, recipe books, etc. Applications in this class don't require any custom programming to fulfill their requirements and most of the customer discovery we've done so far indicates these are the types of apps that most people are looking to build. It's the old 80/20.
Data exporting is going to be available at any time; you'll be able to export data from the application in a variety of formats (spreadsheet, csv, xml, etc) and even re-import it with new/updated data to update your apps. We've also kicked around the idea of exporting an application's entire schema in some sort of format that other "application builders" could presumably read. Openness and portability are important to us.
The front end of AppNowGo that you'd use to build your applications is built entirely on top of our APIs and we're dedicated to making them very powerful. It's possible a lot of the custom programming needs power users might have could be solved with some creative use of the APIs; if anyone would like to chat more about what they'd like to see along those lines I'd be happy to start a dialog.
If anyone in here would like to check out the beta, fill out the form here: http://appnowgo.com/beta-signup/ and mention hacker news; I'll make sure you get an invite ASAP. Also, please feel free to email me at mike-at-appnowgo.com with any questions or comments.
AppNowGo is stunningly amazing. I played around for about 15 minutes and built a simple app to keep track of my textbook sales. It's like Wufoo on steroids with a dash of Smartsheet.
Suggestion: add support for select APIs. For example, you could let creators add a button for submitting a book as an Amazon listing. You could also support the twitter api and let creators pull in tweets into their applications.
