#startupbus2014

StartupBus North America is a 3-day hackathon with some of the brightest developers, designers, marketers, businessman around in North America. The entrepreneurs on the bus pitch their best ideas, form teams based off of them, and begin developing their startup so that they have something to pitch to well-known businessmen/businesswomen by the end of the 3rd day.

Our team was formed around the idea that we could solve a huge pain point that many online daters have: figuring out which combination of profile images, bios, status, taglines, etc. work the best to attract the most individuals.

We developed Plumer (a feather or arrangement of feathers, certain birds will take advantage of their feathers when mating… putting their “best feather forward") which helps singles show their best self by providing analytics for their online dating profiles. Essentially, we are just like Optimizely, except we allow you to A/B test your dating profiles, get analytics on which profiles work the best, and select the most optimized set so that you can increase the chances of attracting your potential partner in crime. Our focus is to help present yourself in the best, most “optimized” way to increase your chances of finding love. To quote Yo Gatti: "Women lie, men lie, numbers don’t!” 

Because our team has limited resources -- time, skill-sets, and people --we sought out freelancers on Elance’s marketplace.  Elance was not only kind enough to provide us Buspreneurs with “hackpacks” stuffed with goodies to keep our engines going, but also provide each team with $500 to use to hire top-talent freelancers to supplement the core projects we are working on.

So far, this has been more than enough! Our first hire was a designer who worked with us to create our logo. She was very professional when responding to our job proposal, seemed eager to help, and was very responsive to our suggestions for edits! Our current hire is a web designer who is bringing our wire frames to life. He sure was not scared to see phrases like “NEED ASAP” or “CRANKY HACKERS LOOKING FOR…” (okay, maybe that last phrase wasn’t included), and jumped on the opportunity to work with us, even volunteering to work late night with our team. Lastly, we are screening for researchers to help us track down influential bloggers and writers in our space so that we can grow on the marketing and PR front.

We’re extremely grateful to Elance and the freelancers helping us out; our team has very high ambitions to develop the NEXT BIG THING and we are well on our way with their help! Should we have the opportunity to move forward with our company, Elance with for sure be part of our growth plan.