Relief for the Coordination Headache

Managing groups is a necessity. You have to collaborate on a project. You’re planning an event. Mom’s organizing the parent carpool. You are forced, consistently through life, to interact with people and coordinate things. But organizing groups are hard. People have conflicting schedules, emails quickly become synonymous with chaos, and, once the smoke clears, you’re just praying to never lay your bloodshot eyes on another spreadsheet again.

Wheedu, a startup launched  last week out of Atlanta, was created as a way to relieve that collective stress. Designed with communities and collaboration in mind, Wheedu is a free technology platform (with 3,000 current users) that allows groups to communicate and work together in a simpler and more efficient way. We were able to get some more information about the new startup and how they’re revitalizing group work.

Year/Date Founded: 
2013

Number of Employees: 
3

Founders/Execs: 
Chris Hackney, CEO/Co-Founder; Jason Rhoades, CTO/Co-Founder

Funding or bootstrapped:
Bootstrapped, $400K

Your Pitch:
Wheedu is the first platform built to bring community groups together to collaborate – a true community collaboration network. It combines productivity tools with a familiar social approach to eliminate annoying email strings and fragmented single purpose web tools.

How’d You Get The Idea For It: 
From our collective experience both in the social space and personally running and participating in different community groups in Atlanta (professional organizations, school groups, spiritual groups and charitable efforts).  All of these groups are suffering from a lack of technology built to help them manage their day-to-day efforts, and it often leads to fatigue by those on both sides (the organizer of the group and those taking part in it).

Revenue Model: 
A combination of a freemium model with an advertising network overlay designed to take local content generated by groups and translate that into highly targetable advertising inventory for programmatic buyers.

Who are your competitors and how do you stand out: 
Largely legacy systems like email and spreadsheets.  Like Evernote, the hardest part of adoption is to break users out of the systems they use today that are insufficient but known.

How does ATL weave into your story? 
Our entire team is experienced technology leaders in the Atlanta area. We started this venture as a way to combine our expertise in technology solutions with our passion for the community groups we’re a part of across Atlanta.  Our mission is to get people to ‘Love Being Involved’ in their communities, and we want to start by delivering against that mission in our hometown.

If you could have one mulligan (do-over) in the process of launching and running this startup what would it be? 
Great question.  We don’t spend a lot of time looking back (there’s just too much to still get done), but we’d have to say that starting on the funding cultivation front would be something we would have worked on earlier. Funding always takes longer than you expect and it’s always good to start as early as possible building those relationships and your profile with the investment community.

What kind of mentor could you use the most right now: 
More mentors who have successfully had a hand in consumer-oriented technology launches in the Atlanta area.  It’s exciting to see the recent success of ventures like YikYak, but Atlanta’s track record leans more to the B2B side than the consumer side. That shows in the experienced network you can lean on in the area.

Is there anything else you need that money can’t buy? 
(1) Time; (2) Time.

[Photo Credit]