Zap's Wrap January 27th

hi friends,

Last week was super fun!

Met with a ton of founders- plenty of good stuff to check out below.

Found more desks and figured out creative ways to get phone booths 💡 (still in need of a couple more though).

Planned the first Nashville Startups Launch Team event that is happening TOMORROW at 10am. If you already signed up, you should have received an email from me. If you want to help a local startup launch with < 10 minutes of your time, sign up here and I’ll send you the details!!!

Startup stuff that’s cool

• I met Zul, a Vandy junior building Clab AI, a college admissions copilot. Her team has been running a profitable college admissions services company for the past several years and now they are using that experience to build a tech product for students and college counselors. The avg college counselor handles 402 students and Zul understands the struggle as a first-gen college student herself. The Clab team is already piloting their tech with 3 school districts! She is looking for more introductions to schools to use their tech.

• I had dinner with Claire, who launched Planned a couple weeks ago, a consumer app for meal planning and groceries. She was able to tap her social audience to already get over 1000 paying users and has a lot of plans for the product roadmap.

• I met Danny, a Vandy senior building Kaboo, an app for college students to save $ at local businesses. They captured 15% of Vandy’s student body in <6 weeks with 0 marketing spend. He’s now raising a preseed round and already has 1/3rd done in < 3 weeks as well as launching at college campuses around Middle TN and Georgia.

• I had dinner with Brooke, founder of Offload, the vertical saas for the overweight freight industry. She previously directed product at Built and launched their Built Marketplace. I am super honored to be an early investor in her company and am so pumped for 2025 for them! ❤️ 

• I caught up with James who is building Gumband, a saas platform for brands to understand their experiential marketing metrics. He’s raising their first outside round of capital and learning that you can oftentimes find great investors and partners in unlikely places and having a network really moves the needle.

• I ate sushi with Amy, founder of Mamaya, a tech-enabled services company for women’s maternal mental health that she’s bootstrapped to millions in annual revenue in < 6 years.

• I caught up with Joe, founder of Send-It Healthcare. You can read the recent article about his company in the Nashville Business Journal here.

• I caught up with Adam, founder of Rental-Guard. He recently brought on some sales help and is hoping to close a couple big contracts this quarter.

Events

• Wefunder is hosting an event at Framework, a sauna/cold plunge studio that just opened up and raised on the platform on Wednesday, Feb 12th at 8:30am. If you want to check it out + learn more about raising on Wefunder, hmu and I’ll send you the event details.

Personal stuff

HOUSE PARTY!!!

I hosted 30 founders Friday night at startup house and it was super fun to show so many folks for the first time or show them all the progress we’ve made in the past 3 weeks. I also have a comical amount of booze leftover because none of these folks drink much- too much work to do. 😂

While I’ve had a few founders working out of the house the entire time, it’s been a bit chaotic (writing this as a staple gun is going off in the other room lol).

That being said, I’m less than 2 weeks away from MVP. Just need to get a few more desks and phone booths built. I’m planning to have a grand opening once it gets warm in March!

to the moon,

zap