Below is an excerpt from the DC Inno Beat, a daily newsletter covering local startups, technology and innovation. To receive the Beat in your inbox every afternoon, sign up here.
Being in tech media, you get a lot of pitches from startups that are just not ready for press, whether it's a company with little traction, an incomplete product, or simply an interesting back-of-napkin concept.
And that's fine. Entrepreneurs are inherently passionate about their business/ideas, often crazily so. (If you're not, you're in trouble). It's only natural for a founder to assume that the media and its audience will care as much as they do. We don't, sorry. But keep pitching!
Now, it's rare - and exciting - when the complete opposite comes around - a pitch from a quiet, under-the-radar startup that should have been much louder months, even years ago.
This week, Visme reached out to me, a few weeks after emerging from five years in stealth mode. The startup is an advanced presentation tool (think PowerPoint on steroids) that weaves a number of design capabilities and features into its platform.
While the Rockville company has been testing and refining its technology, it has already amassed 1.3M users from over 100 countries, including Fortune 500 companies like IBM, WorkDay and Sony.
The company is also unique in that it has been entirely bootstrapped ("by choice and not by necessity," the company says), achieving profitability within six months of launching its first paid product.
Explained founder Payman Taei, "I’ve always believed content creation should be simple and quick but it should also provide a balance between ease of use and flexibility. This is one of the reasons why it’s taken so long for Visme to get to where it is today. To accomplish both at the same time without drastically affecting user experience has not been easy; in fact, it’s been damn hard!”
Now that they're out in the open, Visme is definitely a local company to watch.
