Startup Spotlight...

 

CrowdHall is a free online social platform built on the idea that public discourse with high-profile people & organizations doesn't have to be one-sided. It empowers the crowd to organize its thoughts, articulate its questions, and voice its perspective in a democratic way. Austin Hackett, co-founder of CrowdHall, answered a few questions we had for him about the company and why he chose the Brandery.

 

What inspired you to start CrowdHall?
 I was watching the early presidential debates and saw that they were trying to use twitter to get "real" questions from "real" people, but in reality, it was just some staff member picking a softball question from thousands of tweets. I saw the glaring inefficiencies in this process, but also saw the value in asking the general population for input, and in providing the "regular joe" access to high-profile people through social media. I started thinking about what could be a solution that would actually be representative of what people thought, and that led to CrowdHall. Why did you decide to come to the Brandery? The main reason we chose the Brandery was that Dave, JB, Mike, and Rob all seemed genuinely interested in what we were doing, and they all had cool ideas for how we could develop CrowdHall. We could tell they already had invested time in learning about the company and the team, and that they were excited about the possibilities they saw. After that, they each contacted me directly to offer support, advice, and connections. This was before we even committed to coming. That level of early support made the decision to come out here an easy one, because we knew we would be working with people who were personally invested in our success. What is the biggest surprise since you started at the Brandery? How much we love working 12 hour days. Nobody ever complains. What does a typical day look like for you?
 Wake up. Work. Sleep. Repeat. How can people test out your product? Go to crowdhall.com and sign up to be notified when we launch. We're doing an exclusive early launch in late August, so if you put in your email, we'll let you know the day you can get on and go at it. If you weren't a founder of your company what other Brandery company would you want to be a founder of? Either 360Pager or FlightCar. FlightCar because the guys are still teenagers and I could pick on them. 360Pager because the founders have both already been super successful in their careers, so I could just lurk around for a while and get a free ride to acquisition.

Follow crowdhall on Twitter at  https://twitter.com/CrowdHall