A look at what's happening in Buffalo's startups and technology scene.
Disrupting job posting industry
Most popular websites for job postings charge the employer for each click on their link.
A team from East Aurora wants to create a new revenue model, charging a flat fee only when someone is hired.
But the core innovation of Ourjob.app is tapping into the world of social media users through “shareable links.” Anyone can create their own custom link through Ourjob.app and then promote it on their social media channels. Those sharers get paid when someone who joined through their shareable link is hired; when an employer who joined through their shareable link hires someone; or when someone else else creates a link through the original shareable link which leads someone finding a job.
A percentage of money also gets directed to a charity of their choice.
“We are taking advantage of virality and social media,” said Matt Morgan, the company’s co-founder and CEO. “People are spending a lot of time advertising on Google, Instagram and Facebook, but what they don’t realize is everyone skips the ads. They want to watch what the content creators are doing.”
Ourjob.app launched earlier this month with a select group of social influencers. Morgan, who co-founded the company with his friend Jack Watson, said the launch was going well. The team has adopted the hashtag #paidtoshare.
Morgan said the Ourjob.app platform ultimately seeks to create a pool of interested job applicants, who are matched with the characteristics of their job search. The service is free until an actual hire is made.
“This eliminates the whole job posting market” as it’s known today, Morgan said. “You have all the candidates in front of you, and if one of them is the right person, you hire them and that’s that.”
RootedInBlk can finally ship
No way around it – this has been a brutal year for RootedInBlk.
Fee Scott-Bolden’s company had a moment of viral popularity in 2020 with its plant pots, which include messages about African-American contributions to history and popular culture.
They were so popular, in fact, that she sought out a wholesale vendor in China and ordered 10,000 of them. But it took months to get them made and shipped, then they sat at the Port of Los Angeles for many more months before they were finally sent to a FedEx warehouse in Buffalo, where a snafu prevented them from being fully delivered. The pots were instead sent to a third-party warehouse.
Thousands of dollars later, RootedInBlk finally has its inventory in stock. But Scott-Bolden believes the damage to her brand has been done, as skeptical customers flooded online forums in the interim with complaints about unshipped orders.
“Some thought we were scamming them, some were angry, and some of them were frankly just being petty,” she said.
RootedInBlk will get to work in the coming weeks fulfilling back orders – she pledged earlier this year not to make any new sales until her backlog was cleared – but in the long-term Scott-Bolden has some big changes in mind. That includes changing the company’s name and finding reliable manufacturing and shipping partners.
“I got to experience this year what happens when you go viral and you’re swept up by a tidal wave of demand,” she said. “It’s been hard but I’m still alive, and I’m not going to give up because I’m a true entrepreneur.”
Local attorney unveils patent pricing tool
Josh Mertzlufft left Hodgson Russ earlier this year to open his own boutique law firm specializing in intellectual property.
His entrepreneurial streak didn’t end there.
Mertzlufft – who earned a bachelor’s degree in applied physics and worked as a mechanical engineer before getting his law degree – recently unveiled a free tool that helps other innovators get visibility into the timing and price of the patent process.
How it works now: A patent quote usually takes weeks worth of scheduling and several meetings.
What the tool does: Poses many of the questions a patent attorney would ask, generating a price that captures “about 80%” of the traditional patent estimate process.
They can then proceed with that process with Mertzlufft’s firm, but that is not a requirement of getting a quote.
“The core of my firms’ mission is to educate and communicate regarding the patent process,” Mertzlufft said. “Even if the inventor isn’t looking to go with my firm they can use the firm to find out what they’re looking at in budgeting for a patent.”
