I was lucky enough to be part of the myshelterhelper team, check it out! Serious props goes to GangPlank for everything you do to support start ups and Phoenix geeks :). Read the coverage from Tech Crunch- yep, its real!

It’s been some time since we last covered Startup Weekend, a series of events that bring a roomful of developers and entrepreneurs together to develop new startups in only 54 hours. When the program originally launched last year, each weekend was geared towards building a single application, of which every participating member was a cofounder. Since then the format has changed - multiple companies are created at each event, and they don’t have to incorporate at the end of the weekend. Here’s a handful of the companies founded at last weekend’s event, which was held in Phoenix (you can see the event’s blog here).

ReserveChute

With so much of our essential data making its way to the cloud, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to quickly make a local backup. Reserve Chute, an open source web app that will be available for use in the next few weeks, will automatically make backups of popular cloud based services including Gmail, Twitter, and Basecamp.

It’s unlikely that any of these services will be going out of business in the foreseeable future, and they almost certainly have redundant backup systems in place. But the prospect of having my entire photo collection or Email history wiped out is unnerving - having an easy way to back up these services would definitely give users some peace of mind, even if they never had to use it.

My Shelter Helper

My Shelter Helper is web page builder aimed to help animal shelters establish a presence on the web. Shelters can logon and after entering some basic information like their address and telephone number will be presented with a functional and good looking website. It’s a great idea, and I love the tagline: “Helping save animal’s lives.”

For now the service is generating some pretty barebones sites, but will introduce support for donations so that shelters can easily collect from benevolent animal lovers worldwide. I hope the team keeps working on this - anything that helps animals is a good thing, and plenty of people (like my mother, for example) would love to donate to their local animal shelter along with the national organizations.

Twittrratr

Awful domain name aside, the Twittrratr team has actually built a pretty cool Twitter site. After entering any keyword, Twittrratr will find related tweets and attempt to figure out if the subject is being spoke about in a positive or negative light. It’s a good idea but unfortunately it doesn’t work very well - oftentimes words that Twittrratr associates with a negative tweet aren’t being used to describe the keyword that was searched for. The team acknowledges that the system isn’t perfect and is open to suggestions (it’s still pretty impressive for 54 hours from conception to launch).

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[From 54 Hours To Build A Company: A Look At Startup Weekend Phoenix]

Individual Members: ○ Personal branding — get known within your industry. Networking with your peers isn’t something you should do just once or twice a year at conferences. The most successful professionals learn, grow, and connect all year round. ○ Learn and grow — Forums on which to learn and teach — nationwide or regionally specific. Engage with professionals within your industry. ○ In the know — Ready access to relevant industry events from various professional and for-profit organizations.

Professional Association Leaders:
○ Common Challenges:
1. Database/list management is a challenge for two tier (National/Chapter) organizations.
2. Every event requires significant marketing effort to generate awareness and interest.

○ Solution: Invite your membership and prospect list to join The Customer Care Network. Sustainable Marketing Vehicle: Online networking is the ‘new viral marketing’. Give people a reason engage and contribute and they will invite others. With a reason to engage on the site regularly, your events are where industry professionals will see them. Because the network is open, your events will be exposed to people who were previously unfamiliar with your organization. [From Why Join and Participate in “The Customer Care Network”]

 Customer experience is in their blood, and you will not find two people who get more keyed up about creating and perfecting customer experiences. Dawn and Kelly are dedicated to spreading the wealth of knowledge and expertise they have to hundreds of companies…maybe thousands! PlumSoup is positioned to provide the tools, knowledge and passion to enable their clients to focus on customers first in a scalable, repeatable and profitable way.     

PlumSoup’s target client’s are SaaS companies that are experiencing:

• —  High growth due to increase in sales, complexity and resource needs
• —  High change due to a shift in their business model
• —  Difficulty executing to the 2^nd “S” in SaaS
• —  Poor metrics (e.g. high-churn, high-acquisition costs, little to no profit margin, low up-sell)
• —  Pains around scalability, sustainability and predictability

Visit them at www.plumsoup.com to learn more about their services, and to read about the best of the best customer experiences (Perfectly Plum rated), and share your own favorite customer experience stories. You can also share your worst experiences and see if they make the “No soup for you” rating.