Techstars Selects Two Switchyards Startups
In late 2015, a few months before we opened the doors to Switchyards Downtown Club, we wrote a blog post called The Rise of the Atlanta Startup Hubs. We were seeing what was happening in Atlanta and other cities around the country, so we wanted to describe a new trend that was emerging in less mature startup towns…the best founders are moving into founder-led startup hubs and this is having a huge impact on local startups as well as the city as a whole.
Our belief is that these physical communities mimic the kind of startup density that causes other (more mature) startup cities to produce successful startups. Each physical community becomes the center of gravity for founders, team members and investors, greatly accelerating the progress of startups.
Today we are excited to announce another exciting example of this in Atlanta — Techstars has chosen two startups from Switchyards for their next batch. You can find the complete Techstars Atlanta announcement here.
By way of background, Techstars and Y Combinator are the top startup accelerators in the country. Last year Techstars launched an Atlanta office in partnership with Cox Enterprises. The local Techstars program does one program a year with ten startups at Ponce City Market. Generally speaking about half of the startups are from Atlanta and the other half are from other parts of the country and world.
This year four startups are from Atlanta and two of those startups call Switchyards home…
Bloveit (on the 3rd floor) helps you search and decide on the perfect date experience in minutes, based on date, mood, location and more.
Landing Lion (in the basement) is a platform that lets digital marketers quickly build landing pages (in 5 minutes!), A/B split test, and track leads and analytics.
And for those of you wondering, yes…Landing Lion is a B2B startup (amidst the B2C Switchyards mafia!) When we met Alan, their co-founder/CEO, he told us that Landing Lion had to be in Switchyards because brand and design is how they’ll win. Using a very MailChimp-like playbook, Alan and his team want to focus more on organic, inbound growth than traditional B2B outbound tactics, so they wanted to be in Atlanta’s main design-focused space.
Last year we were excited to have one startup chosen for Techstars. Needless to say, we couldn’t be more excited about having two this year.
If you are a startup founder in Atlanta, do your best to be involved in at least one of the founder-led startup communities. Only 1% of startups get any meaningful traction or outside funding — these startup hubs greatly increase those odds.
Congratulations to Techstars, Cox Enterprises and the ten startup selected for this year’s class in Atlanta. Efforts like this is what will put Atlanta on the national startup map!
