Local founder and software developer Trey Hope has launched his latest endeavor to help you connect via shows & movies, through COVID & beyond.
Critic is a an app that features a social media feed of friends’ latest reviews of whatever movies and tv shows they’re watching now — think Twitter meets IMDB, Trey explained.
“In other movie databases, you don’t see reviews until you click on a movie,” he said. “In Critic, the reviews are prominent, so you can keep up with what your friends have been watching.”
The focus on connection is particularly valuable during a pandemic — Trey released Critic to the market late this summer, and early feedback has been positive, he said.
“We have users across the country currently trying it out, and we’re getting love from everybody,” he said. “I would love to take it global.”
With most move releases on hold during COVID, Trey is seeing a lot of tv reviews, both for new streaming shows, but also for nostalgic picks, like 90s cartoons, he said. He anticipates a spike in activity when new flicks and blockbusters begin to hit movie theaters again.
Critic isn’t Trey’s first app — the developer has coded several in recent years, both on his own and for area clients. But he hasn’t really worked to monetize one of his apps before — he believes now is the time.
“I really want to make this app something on the level of Twitter and Facebook, put it in front of investors,” he said. “I’ve never really looked at my own apps that way, but I think it’s time to start doing that, my goal for next year is to make Critic a household name.”
You can support Trey by downloading Critic, available on both Google Play and the Apple App Store.
“I’m seeking all the feedback I can get,” Trey said. “Check it out, leave a review, let me know how I can make a better app for you.”
See a demo of Critic here, then catch Trey on Facebook @TreyHope, Instagram @trey.codes or YouTube @TreyHope.
Te’Jal Cartwright, founder and powerhouse behind What’s The Biz, is launching a new initiative in 2021 — she’s working to feature 100 Black-owned businesses in 100 days across the What’s The Biz platforms.
“This is going to take a lot of work but we wanted to do something fun, creative, and different while acknowledging and showing love to the black entrepreneurs that are working HARD,” she wrote on social media.
What’s the Biz is a multi-faceted company that focuses on increasing black businesses’ customer bases by highlighting the stories of black business owners through a quirky web series and an intentional digital experience.
For the 100 Black-owned businesses in 100 days campaign, businesses can be featured four ways:
Te’Jal has also been exploring ways to support the Black economy outside of social media — stay tuned, she said.
Te’Jal is a graduate of the spring 2020 Early Risers Academy cohort. Early Risers Academy is a free, 10-week business-building bootcamp managed by Launch Dayton partner Parallax. Applications are currently open for 2021 cohorts, which will kick off in February, click here for more info.
Want to see your favorite Dayton startup snag the Soin Award for Innovation — & the associated $25K in funding — in 2021?
Encourage the founder you know to apply by 4 pm, Friday, Feb. 26, 2021!
The Soin Award is designed to identify, honor and financially assist a Dayton region company demonstrating the community’s historical innovative and entrepreneurial spirit. The award recipient will showcase a new or pending product or service with the ability to sustain longterm growth for the company, increase local employment and help create economic prosperity in the region.
The criteria:
• An organization or company operating for the purpose of the commercial production of a product or service.• The organization must be within the Dayton region.
• The organization does not have to be a member of the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce.
• Soin family-owned or operated companies are not eligible.
• New or redesigned product or service recently launched into the marketplace or ready to be launched in 2021.
• The innovation should be unique or fill a needed void in the market or industry in which it serves.
The award’s sponsors include Soin LLC, the Rajesh K. Soin family, the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce, CareWorks and Cox Media. The Soin family and the Chamber have partnered to offer the annual innovation award since 2007.
The Chamber’s Education and Public Improvement Foundation (EPI Foundation) will present the award in spring 2021.
“The Dayton area has a long history of innovation and discovery. We must continue to encourage our local entrepreneurs to build on this and create new enterprises, jobs and additional opportunities for this region,” Soin International Chariman and CEO Rajesh Soin said in a press release.
Last year, Dayton startup Arcani Coil Care won the 2020 Soin Award for Innovation. Arcani Coil Care creates black hair care products.
In 2019, Dayton startup Global Flyte Soin Award for Innovation for their commercially-developed mapping, imaging and smart phone technologies to provide emergency responders with a cloud-based service to cut through chaos and better coordinate emergency response.
The year prior, Dayton startup Battle Sight Technologies won the 2018 Soin Award for Innovation for their chemiluminescent writing tool — essentially an infrared glow stick that writes like a crayon to enable soldiers to communicate on the battlefield via messages only visible through night vision goggles.
Other past award winners include Mound Laser and Photonics Center, Inc., IYA Technologies, Composite Advantage, Commuter Advertising, NanoSperse, UDECX, AAA Wastewater, NONA Composites, Redwall Technologies and Obi / DESiN LLC.
Representatives of the region’s business and academic leaders will join EPI Foundation board members on the selection committee.
Charlynda Scales, founder of Mutt’s Sauce, has been tapped for the 2021 Veterans in Residence cohort.
A partnership of WeWork and Bunker Labs, Veterans in Residence is a highly selective six-month startup incubator and leadership program that provides veteran and military family member entrepreneurs the community, business support, and workspace to help launch and grow their businesses.
“I’m excited to announce I’ve been accepted into the 6 month BunkerLabs + WeWork #VeteransinResidence business incubator program starting this January!,” Charlynda announced on LinkedIn. “2021 will be the year I take Mutt’s Sauce LLC to the next level!”
The 2021 cohort will be virtual and connect her with other veteran founders across the country, she said.
The veteran entrepreneur was stationed at Wright Patterson Air Force Base when she received her late grandfather’s secret sauce recipe in 2013. Charlie “Mutt” Ferrell Jr., namesake of Charlynda’s company, was also a veteran, serving in the Korean & Vietnam wars.
Charlynda launched Mutt’s Sauce after connecting with a mentor through the Dayton chapter of SCORE, a nonprofit organization that provides free services to small business owners and entrepreneurs.
Mutt’s Sauce was also the Grand Prize Winner of Bob Evan’s Farms’ 2017 Heroes to CEOs Contest, which connected Charlynda to Daymond John from television’s Shark Tank.
You can order Mutt’s Sauce online or find it on the shelves of about 60 stores in the Dayton & Cincinnati areas.
Congratulations, Charlynda!
Ten teams will advance in each of the two tracks in this year’s 2020-21 Flyer Pitch Competition.
Teams on the Greater West Dayton Social Venture Track will receive $250 to help move their ideas forward during the next round of the competition, and teams on the Start-Up Track will receive $500.
This year’s Flyer Pitch submissions were the most diverse yet, thanks to efforts of the new Greater West Dayton Incubator. Our of 60 submissions, half came from Dayton residents, nearly have from founders of color, and half from women.
Advancing in the Social Venture Track are:
Advancing in the Start-up Track are:
Congrats, founders!
Dayton-area startup Soil1 hopes to help feed the world with its new test kit to measure soil health.
Company founder Ben Hofecker recently completed the AgLaunch Bootcamp, market validating the groundbreaking soil test at one of the top agricultural accelerators in the world.
“There are no inexpensive tests on the market now that really measure soil health,” Hofecker said. “This test is creating a new space by treating soil like an ecosystem, a living, breathing organism, rather than just a collection of chemicals.”
Soil1’s new soil health test kit measures five highly-correlated soil parameters to give farmers a soil health score — and it does it in a fraction of the time and cost of traditional soil testing, Hofecker explains.
Today, a typical farmer tests his soil by taking samples, putting them in a bag, and mailing them off to a lab that charges about $20 per parameter, such as nitrogen, phosphorus & potassium. The turnaround time from the lab is two to three weeks — or, four to eight weeks, mid-COVID, Hofecker said.
Soil1’s new DIY field test costs about $1 per use, and the turn-around time for the soil health score is only 15 minutes.
The test measures active carbon, available nitrogen, aggregate stability, soil organic matter and microbial biomass. It gives farmers a score to truly measure their soil regeneration efforts, rather than a one-page readout listing your soil components, Hofecker said.
“It’s really important,” he said. “In next 30 years, there will be $700B invested from outside investors into this soil health, regenerative ag space, but there is really no simple, fast, in-field way of measuring it.”
Soil1 launched in 2018 and has been selling the soil test kit in beta form to get the product into Ohio fields. With connections made through AgLaunch, Soil1 will launch test plots in Tennessee in the near future, and will have three seasons of data when they push into the market early next year.
AgLaunch is a business accelerator in Tennessee that specifically focuses on agtech startups, facilitating the development of new agriculture and food value-chains and building collaborative farmer networks, with a commitment to intentional inclusion.
The accelerator is a 6-week intensive bootcamp, running agtech founders through everything from business formation to marketing to sales. It usually operates regionally, but when COVID hit, it took its accelerator virtual, enabling Hofecker to attend.
“The first day we told AgLaunch what we were doing, they wanted to get us into the field right away,” Hofecker recalled. “They identified something they could do for everyone over the 6 weeks, and they made every company that came through stronger.”
Soil1 is a portfolio company of The Entrepreneurs Center’s ESP program.
“The biggest driver was the need. We’d done a lot of other work in drones that’s fun, but this was about feeding the world,” he recalled. “Democratizing agriculture is about long-term sustainability for soil, providing food for increasing population, much more rewarding space.”
Soil1’s soil test kit is currently available online at soil1.com. In early 2021, Soil1 will be reaching out to soil & conservation districts across the country and pursuing grant opportunities to get the kits into the hands of more farmers and soil health professionals.
There are 12 episodes slated for Cold Storage’s first season, and they will feature a slew of local talent. The nine cast members are all from southwest Ohio, the podcast’s music is composed by Dayton musician ISICLE, and the cover art was created by Dayton artists Tyler Mackey. The genre is part sci-fi mystery/suspense & part workplace humor.
The Kickstarter was hit hard when COVID shut down businesses in March. Savannah developed COVID, further slowing the initial momentum for the fundraising campaign.
COVID also impacted production — the team also intended to rehearse remotely, but the actual recording day required additional safety measures including masks, separate booths for the actors, staggered recording times and lots of hand sanitizer, Savannah said.
“But we are so glad that we are able to get at least three episodes recorded and released this year. We had a great time reuniting with our cast and crew and recorded some amazing content,” she said. “We are relying on our listeners’ generous support to get the remaining nine episodes recorded and released in 2021.”
The team is working to raise an additional $850+ to fun the next three episodes. The bulk of the money raised goes to pay the cast, Savannah said. Kofi makes it easy to make a one-time or continuous donation to the project, and the team also has a shop where they’re are selling mugs and stickers.
To listen, visit https://cold-storage.captivate.fm/ or download Cold Storage wherever you listen to podcasts. Episode 2 will drop on Dec. 9, and episode 3 will drop on Dec. 23.
Savannah has been editing audio for about two years. Currently, the bulk of her work is with business and organizations offering interview-style content. She hopes producing Cold Storage will open some new doors.
“This is closer to what I want to be doing,” she said. “It’s awesome to get to do something creative & fun. I hope it will lead to more projects like this in the future.”
Her collaborators come from the network she has developed within the Launch Dayton community.
“They’re people I kept seeing at events,” she said. “I was impressed with their work, so I hired them.”
Visit the Cold Storage Ko-fi here to support the project. You can also keep up with Cold Storage on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram.
A new environmentally-friendly garden product is harnessing the power of light to kill weeds.
Created by Dayton startup Global Neighbor, WeedErase uses proprietary technology to blend & direct specific lightwaves so homeowners can safely “erase” weeds without the use of harmful chemicals.
“With today’s technology, there is no reason homeowners should have to continue using so many harmful herbicides to maintain their yard,” founder Jon Jackson said. “WeedErase was created so home gardeners can easily and organically eliminate weeds around their house and in areas where they may be apprehensive to use chemicals.”
WeedErase’s patented technology utilizes a recipe of high intensity, short-duration light in a controlled area. When activated, WeedErase begins killing weeds in a matter of seconds, from the leaves to the roots. The weed immediately begins to decay and is fully eliminated in as little as 10 days.
Because the product is chemical-free, users can be comfortable using WeedErase in spaces where children and pets play, as well as in vegetable gardens, Jackson said. Unlike commonly-used herbicides, the device’s blend of directed light cannot be over-applied or drift, making it pet- and wildlife-friendly.
“It’s an extremely simple grab-and-go tool,” Jon said. “Just point the light at any weed and zap! There’s no need to worry about expiration dates, spillage, or wind affecting accuracy. WeedErase also doesn’t stain or discolor concrete paver stones, like chemicals often do.”
There are currently two versions of the product. The electric version weighs 2 pounds. The battery-powered device weighs 4.5 pounds. Both are shaped like a wand, so users don’t have to get down or bend over to use them.
“It’s extremely simple to use,” WeedErase customer Ben Edwards said. “I’m located in Florida, so I am constantly working to control the weeds in my yard and paver bricks. I just grab the tool and go whenever the mood strikes.”
Launch Dayton partner org The Entrepreneurs Center has been key to Global Neighbor’s early success, Jon said.
“The Entrepreneurs Center has been involved in every stage of our development,” he said. “They provide consistent expertise, meaningful connections, and have even helped us file our foreign patent. We are very thankful to have TEC as a partner and a mentor.”
The Entrepreneurs Center runs the region’s Entrepreneurial Services Provider (ESP) program. Backed by Ohio Third Frontier, ESP provides entrepreneurs with private and public funding, as well as assistance to grow their technology-based startup companies.
Jon has also pitched Global Neighbor products at Early Risers, a monthly pitch event for early-stage startup cos coordinated by Launch Dayton partner Parallax Advanced Research. Early Risers helps founders with scalable companies connect to key individuals who can help move their business forward.
The Global Neighbor team is currently developing a Weed Seed Destroyer system using the same proprietary light-directing tech. The Weed Seed Destroyer will attach to the back of a combine, and as the combine separates the cash crop from straw, weeds, and other waste, the Weed Seed Destroyer will blast the chaff with the appropriate lightwaves so the weed seeds that blow back into the fields are not viable.
“Every country’s greatest GDP product is ag in some way, right? Everyone has to eat,” Jon said. “Killing weeds in ag so the farming community doesn’t have to use chemicals and all the problems associated with them, we think is just the most stunning & exciting application we could come up with.”
Learn more about Global Neighbor and how you can support the work here.
Thursday night, Anikka Masey, founder of New Season Wellness, won her Early Risers Academy cohort’s virtual pitch night, taking home $1K.
New Season Wellness is an alternative online health store providing convenience, ease and affordability of a one stop shop for all things CBD.
“My prayers were answered when I was accepted to be a part of the Early Risers Academy cohort. I had a business idea and wanted some guidance on creating a stable foundation first before jumping in with both feet,” Anikka said. “Going back to school wasn’t an option, so finding a free 10-week business class was right on time.”
Early Risers Academy was fast-paced, but well worth it, she continued.
“It takes you step by step through the process of structuring your business, it makes you niche down your idea to find out who your target customer is, it sparked a conversation with my spouse and I about our commitment level regarding what kind of financial sacrifices we were willing to make, and it brings to the forefront who should be on your team, as well as how to manage all the moving parts of your operation,” she said.
The fall 2020 cohort was the first all-women, all-minority cohort.
“Ladies, you all did amazing,” Anikka said after the pitch wrapped. “I’m so proud to know you and so glad to have new group of sisters to add to my circle.”
Early Risers Academy is a free, 10-week, pre-accelerator program designed to take participants from business idea to business launch. It is run by a team from Launch Dayton partner Parallax Advanced Research.
Participants complete Kauffman FastTrac coursework from the nationally-renowned Kauffman Foundation, receive pitch coaching and hands-on mentoring, weekly discussions with successful entrepreneurs and experts, & access to Dayton’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
These workshops can also be valuable for founders early in their small business journey, or who jumped right into their business without formally developing the plans behind it and are now discovering they need some of that paperwork in place to grow.
Other summer cohort graduates included:
• Rachel Blanks, founder of Simply Savory by Rachel, a premier line of complete seasoning blends designed to separate a boring dish from a memorable one;
• Rachel Roebuck-Howard, founder of Live Arts Transformation, offering events from stage plays to concerts, children’s competitions to mental health workshops, all dedicated to bringing a ray of hope to those who need it.
• Sierra Leone, founder of Acacia Health and Wellness, an energy clearing and cleaning sage spray and hand-blended essentials oils businessintended to support holistic health, healing, and wellness through the use of our specially formulated and curated sprays and oils.
• Courtney Wilbur, founder of Just Cakin It Mobile Cakery + Dessert Lab, providing custom gourmet treats with a twist of chemistry to create a fun experience at the convenience of your front door.
“Early Risers Academy is designed for aspiring founders in any industry,” Project Manager KeAnna Daniels said. “We’re particularly excited to work with more women and minority founders.”
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