The creator of a social media command centre for businesses has won the US$5,000 Pitchit5k competition held at the prestigious South-by-Southwest media festival in Texas by Irish seed-funding firm SeedUps.
The winner of the competition, Phil Campbell, established FibreCamp a few years ago as a drop-in centre for making media for the web.
“This money will help to build our first product from the studio to help our more mobile clients and local business that want our services at their own locations.”
This social media command centre is called Rattlr. “We can really take the studio and our services to the next level, and who knows, maybe in the next few years we will have our wish of having FibreCamps all across Europe and beyond.
“SeedUps are firmly on my radar as the go-to people for funding because of the things they stand for,” Campbell said.
SeedUps’ competition required people to submit a 60-second video pitch of why their companies deserved the money and then use their social networks to vote for the best pitch.
The SeedUps model
SeedUps, based in Derry, Letterkenny and Silicon Valley, matches early stage start-ups up with tech-savvy investors, and has attracted nearly 500 entrepreneurs since its launch in February of this year.
By using a unique combination of “micro-investments” from a crowd of investors, SeedUps offers a viable alternative to traditional financing models, and for investors it collates numerous attractive seed-stage investment opportunities in the one location.
The trip to SxSW in conjunction was one of a few early high points for the fledgling company; which also opened its first US office in March and was named as one of the Irish Echo Small Business 50.
“The competition was introduced as a means to show start-ups that we were ready to help them, and also highlight the services we provide,” SeedUps founder Michael Faulkner explained.
