After leaving his hometown of Cincinnati for 15 years to work in the budding tech scene in Los Angeles, the growing startup community in Cincinnati coaxed Ryan Budke to leave West Coast tech behind.
“I was really really excited about the tech and entrepreneurial scene that was happening here in Cincinnati,” Budke said. “When I first came back the plan was to stick around for just a few months to see friends and family I hadn’t seen in a long time, but I stuck around longer and longer and started going to tech meetups.”
It was during these tech meetups that Budke met Sonya Fung, founder of the visual novel maker CloudNovel, and began coaching her on growing her startup. Budke also met Scott Griffith, a local marketing strategist, and connected him with Fung. Griffith and Budke continued to partner with more entrepreneurial clients, forming the new startup incubator Hamilton Labs, which moved into College Hill in April 2018.
“We wanted to do something in College Hill because it’s a neighborhood that is really starting to come about and revitalize itself,” Budke said. “We wanted to be a part of this community and that story.”
Aside from CloudNovel, Hamilton Labs is currently incubating six other startups, including:
- Wise & Trust, an automated service for trading complex cryptocurrencies and other digital assets
- Poor Man’s Miner, a veteran-owned operation that designs and fabricates modular computer workstations and cases
- Tre Treinador, a platform that uses AI and machine learning to connect athletes and fitness enthusiasts with the equipment and planning they need
- Promethean, which brings like-minded brands who have overlapping consumers together for events
- Alumnr, an online alumni network
- Cincinnati Broadcast Network, a podcasting organization
“This ain’t our first rodeo, especially when it comes to startups,” Budke said. “We started thinking about basic things every startup needs when they start growing. I’ve seen companies fail because they don’t know how to file their taxes properly. It’s rarely because they’re not passionate enough about what they do.”
Budke and Griffith team up with their technology partner Shawn Mummert to teach early stage startups the fundamental building blocks that every startup needs to succeed, but first-time entrepreneurs may be intimidated by because they have never done them before. These essentials include creating a website, finding a good lawyer or accountant, setting up an LLC, drawing up a partner agreement, early stage logo and branding, and —perhaps most importantly — creating a business plan to pitch to investors.
"We want to focus on the individual and the idea and the entrepreneur much more than the business and scalability and exit of it.”
Hamilton Labs also offers onsite coworking space and consulting to other local businesses. Consulting areas include online ads and analytics, website maintenance, e-commerce sites, online advertising, Google Analytics, project management, strategic marketing, design and branding.
The incubator program is six months long. During the six months, Hamilton Labs works to provide first-stage startups with whatever they need in order to get to the next stage of their business. At the end of the initial six months, Hamilton Labs will determine if the team wants to move forward by steps such as working to get the startup into an accelerator, taking the startup to an investor, starting a product launch or staying in the incubator for six more months.
Alternatively, if a startup isn’t quite working out as Hamilton Labs had hoped, they are invited to stay in the lab’s coworking space and access their resources through an open-door policy. A startup can then re-pitch to Hamilton Labs to be accepted back into the incubator.
The Hamilton Labs team says their goal is to be Cincinnati’s premier incubator. Most other resources available to startups in Cincinnati such as UpTech, The Brandery and Ocean are accelerators for the second stage of a business. Hamilton Labs is designed to be the a first-stage incubator to prepare startups for accelerators.
“There’s a lot more accelerators rather than incubators here in town,” Budke said. “An incubator should be slow and warm and comforting and help develop that early stage. An accelerator is designed to take you to the end as quickly as possible. We want to focus on the individual and the idea and the entrepreneur much more than the business and scalability and exit of it.”
Another goal of Hamilton Labs is to give back to the Cincinnati community that has been so generous to the three founders so far. They hope to do this by encouraging the promising talent graduating from local colleges to stay in Cincinnati to build their businesses.
Hamilton Labs will begin their first cohort in early 2019, which the incubator is currently fundraising for. The team would like to continue expanding their physical office space to include rentable meeting rooms.
