For the second time in 85 days, Jordan Smith and I met Monday at Fred’s Café in Halifax. What a difference. In less than three months, the OneLobby CEO has raised $200,000, hired a `Dream Team’ of executives and attended SeedCamp New York.
When Smith and I first sat down in May, he was a bootstrapper’s bootstrapper. OneLobby was a simple system that offered a social network to conference organizers, so attendees could network online before, during and after a conference. Smith was operating out of Fred’s with a laptop and a cell phone, subsisting on $78,000 in grants.
But he had a gigantic vision for OneLobby, that it would amalgamate all the services offered by other conference-based SaaS providers, and more. In rapid succession, a series of events took place that are propelling him and OneLobby toward that vision.
In June, British angel Permjot Valia invested in the company, as did a host of other angels. Then OneLobby not only became the only Canadian company invited to SeedCamp New York, but one of 20 companies that made it through to the second round of the camp.
The game changer happened when he attended the Launch36 Demo Day in Dieppe in late June. There he met Brian Dunphy, who had been Employee No. 1 at the social media monitoring platform Radian6, and Todd Murphy, former
The two pillars of the New Brunswick tech community were looking for their next opportunity, and Jordan was looking for a
“It’s been quite a whirlwind,” said Smith yesterday, two days after OneLobby was profiled in the Financial Post. And that whirlwind isn’t losing any momentum.
In the next few weeks, Smith must move to the new corporate headquarters in Fredericton then, in mid-September, he and his new partners will fly to San Francisco to attend Dreamforce, the world’s largest tech conference. Then he’ll come back to Halifax because OneLobby is involved in three of the events at Innovation Week – DemoCamp, MentorCamp and Invest Atlantic.
But the big project that the trio has before them is a complete revamp of its technology. Dunphy and another technician are already at work on the new system, which will be a platform-as-a-service rather than the original SaaS offering.
“It was always made with the intention that once I got my first round it would have to go,” said Smith. “When you get your first car, it’s usually not a Ferrari. So now we’re making our Ferrari.”
As a first step, the team has ditched the original url onelobby.ca, and is switching to onelobby.com. Smith had tried to buy the dot-com url originally but a squatter wanted $11,000 for it. Over time, Smith was able to talk him down and ended up paying “a fraction of that” for the url.
OneLobby plans to launch its PaaS offering in the first quarter of 2013. As a platform, OneLobby aims to be able to allow conference organizers to use its apps, or even select those of its competitors.
“We’re using a lot of predictive analytics that will tell the attendee where to go next,” said Smith. That means that participants at one event at a conference will be told of other events that deal with complementary subjects. It can even tell attendees about upcoming conferences that could be of interest to them.
OneLobby is also working on what it calls an “attendee hit list”, which will allow users to assemble lists of people they want to meet at a conference. If a group of people from the same company is attending, they can share a hit list. They can even use the hit list to report to their boss on who they met.
One final item on Smith’s To Do list is the next round of funding. He’s looking for $500,000 in convertible notes, and has already begun discussions with potential investors, including a VC firm in Pittsburgh.
Smith said he’s been inspired by the success of GoInstant, the Halifax co-browsing company that just sold out to Salesforce.com for more than $70 million. He hopes to have similar success with OneLobby.
Judging by the past two months, he’s heading in the right direction.
