Startup Monday

Editor’s Note: Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

Asif Virani was a construction manager for 14 years, so when he wanted to remodel the kitchen of his Arlington Ridge home four years ago, he figured it would be easy.

After all, he was in construction, used to building office buildings and retail spaces. It’s not as if he wanted an industrial oven, or anything else too fancy, and the kitchen seemed like a simple project. Months later, he was confused, frustrated and looking for an easier solution.

“It was a challenge even for me,” he said. “So I thought, ‘what does someone who doesn’t have experience do?'”

That’s why Virani launched Renovisor, an online service that connects homeowners with consultants to get advice for every step of the renovating, remodeling and redecorating process. Virani said he did research on the market for similar products and came up empty handed.

“There wasn’t anything that could hold your hand and guide you through the process,” he said. “You could hire a construction consultant, but for someone doing a kitchen remodel, it just doesn’t make sense. We’ve got to give access for small to medium projects without breaking the bank.”

The Renovisor platform helps homeowners in two steps: first, it allows homeowners to upload pictures and videos of their current home and ask for advice on interior decorators and remodelers on which paths to take. Second, when homeowners accept bids from contractors, Renovisor connects them with consultants who can explain in plain English what each bid entails, and why the price estimates are so high or low.

Virani said one thing Renovisor doesn’t do is find contractors for homeowners. Since it’s a young site, he decided it would focus on those two areas first. Eventually, he hopes Renovisor can be a big part of every step of a home remodel or renovation.

“We want to expand our platform,” he said. “We want the customers to have turnkey solutions. We would be the online construction manager for the home from soup to nuts. We want to take away as many pain points as possible for the homeowner.”

Customers pay for the consultations, the costs of which Virani said are well below market rate. The consultants are typically retirees in the home construction, renovation or decorating fields, or stay-at-home parents looking for some extra work without a huge time commitment. Most of the fees go to the consultants, while Renovisor takes a small cut.

Virani started the company, which is still bootstrapped, as a part time job until he left to go full-time a year ago this week. He brought in outside designers and developers to help make his vision a reality. In the year since he left Renovisor full-time, he’s brought in another employee, has a two-man team of tech consultants and is readying to take on his first intern.

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Editor’s Note: Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

Hans Miller and Adam Tsao had a multi-million dollar deal signed with one of the world’s biggest credit card companies in 2010 that would have launched their fledgling startup into the stratosphere.

Three weeks later, the deal was dead, and it was back to the drawing board in Miller’s Arlington home on Lorcom Lane.

Such is life for startup founders trying to make an impact. Miller and Tsao are the cofounders of Airside Mobile, which develops mobile apps to make peoples’ lives easier in airports. The two worked at the Transportation Security Administration and were key members of the team that invented the mobile boarding pass before leaving the agency to start their own company in 2009.

Airside Mobile has already developed B4 You Board for Bethesda-based HMSHost, which operates restaurants in airports all over the country. B4 You Board allows users to order food delivered to their gate or place orders while in security to be picked up at the restaurant when they arrive. It’s already live in Chicago O’Hare International Airport as well as the international airports in Phoenix, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn., Sacramento, Calif., and Salt Lake City.

Miller, the CEO of Airside Mobile, and Tsao, the COO, met after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks while helping on security issues for the government. After eight years of working at TSA, the duo decided that while their work was rewarding and gratifying, they were ready to move on.

“Life in the TSA is tough,” Tsao said. “You’re ‘on’ 24/7. It takes a lot out of you. You’re constantly on guard.”

“There’s stuff going on in airports that would make your skin crawl,” Miller added. “It’s a tough, draining place to work, but it’s awesome. You have so many chances to impact people’s lives.”

When the two were reaching the decision, they sat down at a table and, as Tsao tells it, wrote down ideas on what to do next on a piece of paper and passed it back and forth. They “kept coming back” to the mobile boarding pass they helped invent. So they launched Airside Express, a mobile boarding pass for Apple’s App Store and the Android Market that allowed users to sort through passes from five different airlines.

They moved temporarily to California to find developers and even took a meeting with Apple. The app launched, but the airlines, which included American, United and Delta, kept changing their boarding security procedures, making it impossible for such a small company to keep up. The app is now defunct, effectively killed off when Apple introduced their proprietary boarding pass app, Passbook.

“At any moment, it was like ‘we made it,'” Tsao said. “We’re up, and then we’re down. The highs in this business are dizzying, and the lows are depressing.”

The app flamed out, but Tsao and Miller kept plugging away. Because of its initial success, “folks within in the airport community liked the concept,” Miller said, which is how they linked up with HMSHost. B4 You Board will expand its footprint vastly across the country. “A hundred airports are in play,” Miller said.

They’re working on a Starbucks prototype that allows users to order their drink, customize it — with skim milk, an espresso extra shot, etc. — and have their phone’s GPS tell the baristas when to make it so it’s ready right when the user arrives.

Airside is also preparing to launch its biggest innovation yet: a mobile app that allows passengers to fill out customs forms on phones and tablets. Users will then have access to an express lane for going through U.S. Customs, a process that sometimes would otherwise take hours.

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Editor’s Note: Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

Shana Lawlor had already founded one Arlington business, Alainn Exporting, when she founded Arlington Small Business Day in 2012. Small Business Day grew and has led to her to start a new business: a shopping social network.

After growing up in a small town in Vermont, Lawlor wanted to experience a community of small businesses, where everyone knew each other and helped each other out.

“There wasn’t anything that met my needs,” she said. “I wanted businesses looking to cross-promote each other. I came up with holding an event, like a fair, where you can meet small businesses you haven’t been aware of. There are such a great number of small businesses here in Arlington, and it’s such a great community.”

After the first year was a deemed a success — 80 businesses participated, and President Obama shopped at one of the stores, One More Page Books — Lawlor, 36, saw an opening. Customers flooded businesses, but, once they were at their store of choice, they didn’t know where else to go. She set about fixing that by designing an app that allows customers to see small businesses in their area, discover who sells what, and even see promotions in real time.

She called the app MainST (pronounced Main Street), and started designing the prototype in May. The prototype is complete, and she expects to launch the beta app in April. Her exporting business, started in 2007, serves clients like Sony, Macy’s and Costco, but she left last month to work full-time on MainST after receiving an angel investment — after her first pitch meeting.

“Every startup founder needs to make the decision at some point to go full time,” she said. “It’s tough because I loved my business, my clients and the travel. It was rewarding building something from scratch. Arlington Small Business Day grew my connection with the community and the amount of awesome small businesses that are here. It’s fun to be able to walk in and know the owner and know that you’re supporting them.”

That’s the motivation behind MainST. It’s a way for those inclined to support small, local businesses in a social way. Lawlor designed the first prototype with the help of a developer she found on CoFoundersLab — she’s now looking for a marketer on the same site — and by using Arlington Economic Development’s Entrepreneur in Residence program, consulting with Will Fuentes and Cary Scott of Lemur Retail.

Lawlor took the initial prototype around to some Arlington businesses, which led to some changes. The app was originally designed so businesses fill out their information and do most of the work, but now the app derives most of its content from consumers.

“Now we’re a consumer-driven model,” Lawlor said. “We’re asking consumers who already support the small business to take it one step further by sharing with the MainST community. They can get on the app, find the business, share it with their friends and take pictures of the things they’ve seen.”

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Editor’s Note: Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

What would it look like if you could track your mood over the past year? What do you think you would see if every workout you’ve done were placed on a line graph? What if every beer you’ve drank were poured into a virtual swimming pool?

This is the concept behind Everylog, a “quantified self” web app founded by Joe Zaczyk. Users can log every aspect of their life and turn it into a data set, or compete against other users. The sound of tracking one’s every move may certainly not appeal to some, but Zaczyk says he doesn’t want those people to use Everylog.

“I know that it’s not for everyone,” Zaczyk says. “It’s for ‘Type A’ organized people. I want to cater to the people who need this. I want to help those people.”

A decade ago, Zacyck was working for Deloitte and felt out of place. A self-described “hippie” who “made my own clothes,” working for a giant corporation and following strict instructions didn’t feel right. Ten years ago, he joined up with CustomInk, a custom T-shirt company now based in McLean, as an accountant.

At the time, only about a dozen people worked at the startup, and the attitude around it — casual, loose and ambitious — spoke more to Zaczyk’s personality he said. Today, he’s CustomInk’s controller and the company is approaching 1,000 employees and $200 million in revenue and just took in a major round of investment from Ted Leonsis and former AOL CEO Steve Case.

“I was charged with a lot of responsibility and handling everything with the business,” he said. “It was fun building things the way I wanted to build it. It’s fun to be thrown into something and trying to figure it out.”

It was when Zaczyk went home for the holidays when the seed of the idea that would become Everylog was planted. His father puts a line of masking tape on everything, and writes down every time he uses it to gauge if it was worth the purchase. Zaczyk said that was when the lightbulb went off.

“I’ve always wanted to track and quantify all the things in my life,” he said. He went to Quantified Self conferences and discovered like-minded people and ideas, but nothing that touched on exactly what he wanted. “There’s a universe of people out there that want to do this.”

He incorporated Everylog in 2010 out of his apartment near Shirlington, but has run into several roadblocks. He hired a developer to help him build the initial product, but “had to fire him” eight months later, so the project sat on the shelf for a while. Eventually, he brought on a co-founder, Joey Merz, who helped him finish with the technology, but Merz left the company in May this year.

Outside of personnel, Zaczyk also made a decision with the business he now regrets: building a website — which went live in November 2012 — instead of a mobile app.

“In retrospect, we should have gone mobile first,” he said. “This needs to be mobile, but hindsight is 20/20.”

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Editor’s Note: Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

John K. Hart didn’t really want to start his own company.

The former software engineer, U.S. Army Reserve infantry officer and world geography teacher at Swanson Middle School was in charge of I.T. learning for Marriott International when he came up with the idea for a travel site that lets customers search for prices at hotels without having to enter a date.

Hart told a coworker about the idea the next day. He says she came to him the day after with eyes red, telling him, “I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about your idea.” He told other coworkers, all agreeing that it was an idea to hold on to. Hart told his wife, expecting to be shot down. She encouraged him to go for it.

He told his family, which gathered and told him they would support him financially. Hart told a friend who was a graphic designer; she was on board. He told another coworker at Marriott who could help build the technology; sign me up, he said.

“I was looking for people to tell me it was a bad idea,” Hart said. “I didn’t have the courage to initiate. Eventually, I was too scared not to do it. I was thinking ‘I’m going to regret this for the rest of my life.'”

In July 2012, Hart and his cofounders — Kathy Carbonetti, the graphic designer, Tim Kosmider, now the company’s “cloud architect,” Humberto Chacon and Andy Stewart — incorporated Imagine If. Last Monday, they publicly launched StayAtHand, the travel app they think will revolutionize the hotel-booking industry.

The app — available only on iPhones and iPads for the moment — allows users to search rates for cities without having to enter a date. They can also select a rate for a particular hotel and have the app notify them when a room comes available at the rate, even when the user is offline.

“We’re your eye in the sky,” Hart said. “We’re checking for you.”

The app is just one-third of Imagine If’s business. Another third is the cloud infrastructure largely build by Kosmider, which fuels the app as well as Imagine If’s third — and potentially most intriguing — component, from a business standpoint: a design browser.

Those offline user price requests will soon be “aggregated and anonymized” and shown to hotels, the only customers who can access the demand browsers. Hotels can, for a flat fee, look through the demand browser to see exactly how much customers are willing to pay for a room in a city, or even their hotel specifically.

“The demand browser at the hotel level is the really exciting part,” Hart said. “We think the whole product can go really big. We’re going for the moonshot by building the space station first.”

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