Startup Profile: Nectar - a fresh look at you
September 10, 2008
Quick Facts:
- Nectar is the hub for your personal brand online.
- Founded by Dave Onkels, Josiah Platt, Brett Tilford, Caleb White and Charles Williams
- Funding: Personal savings and sweat equity, no outside funding
- Business Model: users are charged a flat fee initially based on the design they choose and its exclusivity (each design is limited in the number of times it can be used), and then a monthly hosting fee that includes domain and email forwarding
- Anticipated Launch Date: October 13th 2008 12:00pm CST
I’ve been speaking with Dave about the project over the past few weeks and am excited to get a look at it when it launches. The Nectar team spent the past weekend in a 72 hour hackathon to give development a big boost. They have a great post over at their freshly launched Nectar Blog, outlining the effort. They also put together a great time-lapse video of the entire weekend, which I’ve included below.
Here is a quick Q & A I did over IM with Dave:
What is Nectar, really?
In the past, people used business cards, resumes, and word-of-mouth testimonials to define who they are and what they stand for – or said another way, to create their personal brand.
Fast-forward to now, where our activity on the Internet, to a great extent, establishes our reputation and is what delivers our first impression. Your brand is comprised of personal media in the form of web sites, blogs, photo galleries, videos, music, comments, reviews, chats, and shared items. Yet as personal as this media is, it’s spread across the Internet only to be found by the select users part of a similar community or through deep Google searches.
We believe you can shape your personal brand online to better define yourself, convey your personality, and share your talents. Nectar delivers exactly that solution by providing a personal brand hub created by the world’s best designers and communicated using the most elegant and simple of all interfaces.
Who will be the average Nectar customer?
For the next 12-18 months it will be medium to heavy social media users / bloggers / and freelancers outside of the design industry (assuming a professional designer won’t want a pre-designed site)
How did the Nectar team come together?
I had been recruiting writers for a content publishing project and was approached by Josiah - after doing some research on him I realized I needed to see if he’d be interested in talking with me about my vision for personal branding… we met and hit it off smashingly - he and I met with the rest of his Fuor agency team and got them on board with the project
We consummated the deal with a formal partnership / LLC last month.
I think the most fun was the mind-meld / absurd humor that came from late nights.
The least fun for Josiah and Caleb would be some of the initial development hurdles… they had to write some new javascript to implement the design the way we wanted.
I’ll have to quote Caleb on that one…
If you are working on a startup here in the metroplex, take a cue from these guys and get to work!
