First Deal: Cladwell

We’d like to introduce you to Differential’s first client, Cladwell. A few months ago, we teamed up with Cladwell to bring a product to market. Since then, we’ve built out the app, have attracted paying customers, and on to bottlenecks delivering paid orders (this is a good thing), and along the way pumping out awesome clothing recommendations for men. They’ve locked down a CTO, and we’re excited to see them build capabilities to continue their journey without our full-time day-to-day involvement.

So let’s talk about some of our new, exciting ventures...

New Projects

We have a few new projects started already. These projects include products that are actively being developed as well as early stage products being validated. Here’s a brief rundown of our current list:

We're Actively Building:

• StudentSource
We’ve got a new idea for StudentSource that we’ll build and rollout over the next few months, and Differential will take an equity position in the company. Project codename: “Hail Mary” :)

• Earthineer

is a social network for people interested in sustainable living. We are taking an equity position in the company, which has an established, existing community. We will also help build some exciting new features, as well as improve current ones.

• Assistant.io
We’re building an internal product

, with the goal to eliminate the back-and-forth hassle that is involved when scheduling meetings. Let your virtual meeting assistant handle it for you.

Validation Stage:

• Liquid
We’re very excited about Liquid, which combines innovating how scientists collect field data, as well as a big vision which we’ve nicknamed “Github for Data.” We’re currently helping to refine the vision, conducting validation, and helping them raise seed funding. We’re excited to start building ASAP.

• Thriving with Stress
Thriving with Stress has existed as a successful in-person course to help companies help their employees thrive despite their stress. It’s a refreshing viewpoint on stress that we agree with, so we’re working to take the course online, and make it available to a much wider audience. This represents our first foray into building platform digital solutions for subject matter experts, and we’re now an equity partner in Thriving with Stress Digital.

• My Fear Zapper

helps children conquer and manage fear. We’re helping the company validate their idea, learn more about their target market, and discover whether there is an opportunity to build a repeatable and scalable business model.

• Gift for Coach

is exploring a way to improve the process of coordinating a group of parents to reward their children’s coach with an end of the season gift. We’re using the Lean Startup methodology to validate the idea, to see if there is a viable market.

Growing Team

Differential is excited to introduce the newest addition to the team, Adam Treister, who joins us as Entrepreneur-in-Residence this summer. Adam is the founder of Student Source.

Community

Cincinnati just had it’s 4th startup weekend and we’re happy to say Differential was very involved in it; helping to organize and sponsor the event. Ry Walker’s son, 14-year old Emerson, won the event. Find out more about Emerson and his product on Startup Weekend Cincinnati’s blog.

Differential was host to the first Meteor.js meetup on June 7th. Meteor is an exciting new javascript framework that we’re all very excited to be involved with.

Cincinnati’s Lean Startup Circle meets every second Thursday of the month and being such proponents of the lean startup methodology you’ll be sure to find some of the Differential team at the meetings.