1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Susan Stone of Sierra Wasatch Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: But I think Mighty Network is not just for entrepreneurs. I’ve talked to Gina about this. It’s also about educators who want to run their own courses and they want conversations around certain topics that they are experts in. There’re are many use cases.

Susan Stone: You don’t have to use it to make money. If you’re a niche brand, you can use it to bring people together around your niche brand.

Sramana Mitra:  It’s a great brand marketing tool actually. Personal brand as well as any kind of brand. It’s a good marketing tool.

Sustan Stone: Absolutely. By the way, we think of all those people as entrepreneurs. All those people fit into our definition of entrepreneurs.

Sramana Mitra: So what else. You have three more companies in your investment platform.

Susan Stone: We’ll talk about Lawn Guru. It’s going to make me laugh because it doesn’t fit into the thesis at all. It was an early investment. It’s a company called Lawn Guru. These guys do on-demand lawn care. We can think of it as an Uber for lawn care and they’re based in Michigan. The reason we originally invested in them is because we were so taken by the way that they were using local media to promote their business.

It’s run by two entrepreneurs who were based in southern Michigan who grew up putting themselves through college mowing lawns. They built their own lawn mowing business and built their own software to route their trucks. They figured out that the software that they built was so good at optimizing the routes for these lawn care trucks that that was a business in itself. They took an action to 500 Startups.

They really understand the power of the local market and that is something that may not be directly tied to media. The difference between a national strategy and a local strategy is very near and dear to us. The people who spend a lot of time in media, particularly, have a background in newspaper. The dichotomy between the national newspaper and the local newspaper is really apparent to me. I just absolutely love that this business has gone deep into the market.

They’ve launched and really used the local media as markets to bring customers, to bring providers onto their platform, and to really serve that community in a successful way rather than going national and not having any depth in the marketplace and not having any real connection to the community.

Sramana Mitra: You bring up a good point. I know the lawn space a bit because we did a story called “Building a Two-sided marketplace: LawnStarter”. The CRO is Ryan Farley. You must know the company. I know this space because Ryan pitched me and told the story. Anyway, what else?

Susan Stone: That’s Lawn Guru, then we have Vertical Mass. Vertical Mass is a data company around celebrities. Starting out in music but also in sports, film, and entertainment. They have a very premium audience that’s all very clean with opt-in data that is GDPR-compliant. They have a very tight audience data on a lot of celebrities. I think the list is now over 400 celebrities worldwide that works with the company.

Vertical Mass helps them collect and understand their own audience data and helps them also to monetize it either by aggregating it or selling or licensing it directly. This example has virtually every female pop star that you could think of on the platform. There are a lot of brands who want to work with pop stars and who want to target the same kind of audience. Take the Beyoncé show for example. We’re able to provide the data about that audience so that those folks can be targeted by brands who want to reach them.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Susan Stone of Sierra Wasatch Capital
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