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Meet The eFactory business accelerator’s inaugural class

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The pilot light is lit at Missouri State University’s eFactory, and ideas are cooking for founders of four startups comprising the inaugural cohort of southwest Missouri’s first business accelerator program.

On day one, Aug. 1, participants got acclimated with each other and their space in the entrepreneurial center. But the intensity is due to ramp up, said Brian Kincaid, director of The eFactory and a program facilitator.

The entrepreneurs already are meeting with their lead mentors, establishing key performance indicators and practicing pitches in advance of an Aug. 10 open house, where they’ll unveil their stories to the public.

In the next three months, the companies will learn business-building topics each week, covering legal, investor relations, marketing, intellectual property, financial forecasting and scalability. The companies will work with over 50 seasoned coaches throughout the process.

“It’s an immediate network of contacts you wouldn’t have otherwise,” Kincaid said. “It’s a big value add.”

Also sweetening the pot is $30,000 in seed money for each participating business in exchange for 8 percent ownership equity held by a subsidiary of Springfield Innovation Inc.

Kincaid said four investors contributed to the program funds, which currently total $725,000. Missouri Technology Corp. made the biggest contribution of $350,000, which Gov. Jay Nixon announced in October. The Missouri State University Foundation and RMI Inc. each kicked in $150,000 and Springfield Business Development Corp. provided $75,000.

Fuel up
While all of the program businesses must be located within Missouri for at least 12 months – a requirement of MTC’s portion of the funding – the accelerator has drawn interest from entrepreneurs from other parts of the country. The ShopZeely co-founders have ties to Texas, California and North Carolina – but they’re choosing Springfield as the testing grounds for their product: an app that connects consumers with a personal shopper via video feed in real time and follows up with same-day delivery.

“We think that word-of-mouth will be viable for us in this market, spending less money on marketing and focusing more on building our customer base,” said Dominique Bookman, ShopZeely’s vice president of marketing.

“That small-town feel gives us the opportunity to engage with customers and get real feedback.”

The crew of Eagle Speak has some self-described “aggressive milestones” for their time spent in the accelerator space, which they have come to call “The Nest.” CEO Jason Arend said the collaborative communications platform is due for additional research and development and a semiprivate beta test with a handpicked customer – in addition to meeting the requirements of The eFactory program.

“Things don’t just end or change at the end of these three months,” Arend said of the startup’s goal for the final demonstration day in late October. “It’s really about building a solid foundation for our company while we’re here, so we can continue to grow.”

End goals
The accelerator participants range from those a few years old to those who are, in name, only a few weeks old.

“We’re not just accelerating our company, this is the founding of our company,” said Josh Willis of Mofin Labs. “It’s first steps for us. The good thing is we’ve got a product under our belts already, so we have the cart before the horse, in a way.”

Willis and co-founder Eric Ham built a secured statement platform for four Missouri credit unions – locally including CU Community Credit Union and Metro Credit Union. They hope to continue creating and integrating software for groups of financial institutions that lack the staff and resources to handle those operations internally.

For 2-year-old The Daily Scholar, a cloud-based educational software platform, the team wants to exit the accelerator with a third iteration, a business model, marketing campaigns and some investors on board.

“We are in what we call our product-to-business phase,” co-founder Andrew Goodall said.

The Daily Scholar has been through a few successful beta tests.

For the participants – some of whom maintain full-time day jobs – it already means long days, a lot of caffeine and pizza deliveries. Like most entrepreneurs, it’s all about the risk and the hustle.

Kincaid said they’d better be prepared for change – because new ideas and connections are sure to come up.

“We’ve baked in a lot of social networking opportunities,” he said.

Similarly, Kincaid and other facilitators seek to gain some knowledge of their own before the second planned cohort in February.

“We’re going to learn from the people going through it,” Kincaid said. “They get to have a voice for what this becomes.”

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