Etsy Archive

At this nextNY event this evening, I met with the team from Postling. The founders of Postling all come from Etsy (another NYC startup). Postling was part of the Philadelphia-based DreamIT startup incubator class for 2009. ReadWriteWeb has a full review of the service from last month.

Postling offers a social media management tool which allows businesses to push content to a variety of social networks. The service is described as, “aim(ing) to be the best tool for small businesses to market, listen, and respond to their customers using social media.” One of the interesting things about Postling is that you can also post to blogs along with Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. This should help Postling gain traction as you can really manage the full cycle of media.

The service costs $9/month or $90/year. Here’s a quick video I grabbed with Postling CEO David Lifson (note: the audio is very loud).
Continue reading “Postling Offers a Social Media Management Tool for Businesses” »

During NY Entrepreneurship Week, I was in New Work City and two women came into New Work City (our coworking space) looking for Jeevan Padiyar (who is part of NYCENT) to confirm their business plan had gotten submitted. In the course of helping them resolve this issue, I learned about their company and efforts – and was intrigued by the two women, Nicole Basabe and Alma Sehovic, and their incredible energy. If every entrepreneur in NY had these ladies smarts and drive, I am certain NY Tech and Entrepreneurship will life NYC to new heights.

As Nicole told me, Tribal Societe is “a online global bazaar whose concept is as fashion forward and green as the company is socially responsible and its products are a la mode”. What I took from the “pitch” was that TS is a portal for creating another channel for entrepreneurs in other lands (in this case Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, South Africa to name a few) deliver natural accessory products to the US and international market.

Nicole, who was born in Manhattan, but raised in Ecuador and Miami, got an early start at entrepreneurship – starting and successfully growing her first trading company at age of 20. After spending 8 years on her business, she took someones “advice” and decided to get an MBA at NYU Stern, thinking that the financial sector was where it was at.

At Stern, Nicole met Alma, a former banker who was looking to become an entrepreneur. As the two of them spoke, Alma convinced Nicole to return to her entrepreneurial roots and launch TS.

Continue reading “Tribal Societe Offers a Global Online Bazaar” »

Last night at the NY Tech meeting, the companies who presented came back on stage for a 5-minute panel discussion. Below is a video of their advice for startups in NYC. The panelists included:

• AlleyCorp (Kevin Ryan, CEO)
• DailyCandy (Catherine Levene, COO)
• Etsy (Rob Kalin, CEO)
• Huffington Post (Betsy Morgan, CEO)
• IAC (Joey Levin, SVP/M&A)
• The Ladders (Marc Cenedella, CEO)
• Meetup (G.Whalin, CTO & M.Voskoboynikov, Lead)
• Mimeo (CEO Adam Slutsky)
• Thumbplay (VP/BD Chris Phenner)

Etsy CEO Rob Kalin presented last night at the NY Tech meeting. He began by flying a paper airplane in the air. Somehow I thought that was going to tie into his presentation, but it did not. In fact the airplane flew as far as the presentation went. Most of his presentation was actually speaking about the high oil prices and how these prices will seal off our borders and allow U.S. citizens to create products for other U.S. citizens and that Etsy will make the transactions possible. He also talked about family names for some reason.

He showed off a few of their tools – like the ability to select a color and see all of the products that they have available from their many thousand sellers using the Etsy platform. Kalin also noted that he doesn’t want Etsy to become as big as eBay.

He ended by talking about putting Walmart out of business or something – frankly the demo wasn’t impressive.

Etsy Demo from allen stern on Vimeo.