LinkedIn can be a great way to make connections with other professionals, but it's not exactly a social network designed to help you do business. If you're looking for a consultant, a broker or a recruiter, your network might provide some answers, but it's not as definitive as you need it to be.
That's what VentureApp does. The Boston startup launched its on-demand business concierge service for startups over the weekend. (It had been providing the service manually, via email, since July.) It doubles as a private social network that helps connect users with various products and services they need to do business.
VentureApp, founded by three co-founders of BostInno parent company Streetwise Media and two co-founders of DailyBreak, has opened the service to about 100 venture-backed startups—including Drizly and Crayon—and more than 100 vendors so far are paying to reach those startups, from American Airlines and UPS to HourlyNerd and WorldPay.
VentureApp is starting as a service for startups, but co-founder Chase Garbarino told me that's just the beginning. The long game is small business, which gives the startup a much larger pool of users as it plans to expand.
"We’re starting with startups partially because its an interesting segment of B2B commerce," Garbarino said. "It’s a world that we've known, and when you look at how every network has been built online—whether it's Facebook, which started out primarily for college students, and LinkedIn, which was primarily for professionals—you have to start with a small segment of the audience rather than be everything to everyone."
That's what VentureApp is doing, for now. While the service's online platform just officially launched, the startup has been facilitating connections between startups and solutions providers since July. Here's how many requests it's received and how many it's handled since then:
VentureApp's business model currently works by charging service providers a monthly fee between $250 and $5,000 to gain access to startups on the network, depending on their industry, size and the locations they want to target. However, Garbarino said revenue is not the focus right now as the startup continues to build out the service and add more users on both sides.
The founders believe VentureApp can be just as useful to small businesses as it can be for startups.
"The amount of things that small business owners deal with on a day-to-day basis is pretty significant, so being able to log into an app and say, 'hey, I need help'—that’s a pretty valuable proposition," Garbarino said.
