At a glance
Company name: Grabachat LLC
Product: Video Web-chat service
Number of partners: Seven. They are: Zach Zuber, 20, a Ball State University sophomore; Anita Homco, 26, an Indiana Wesleyan University-Fort Wayne junior, and Scott Bon-Ami, 20, an Indiana University Purdue University-Indianapolis sophomore; all of Fort Wayne; Graham Bredemeyer, 18, IPFW freshman from Roanoke; Greg Savieo, 20, an Ivy Tech Community College sophomore from Yoder, and entrepreneurs Raymond Angel, 25, of Fort Wayne and James Northard, 24, of Indianapolis.
Target audience: People in their 20s and 30s
Projected annual sales: Undetermined
Student Venture Lab
The background: The Student Venture Lab, which is part of the Northeast Indiana Innovation Center, was founded in 2008.
The benefits: The program offers seed investment to selected student-owned technology ventures. Applicants who are admitted receive a cash investment, typically $2,500, and office space for six months at the center’s 3211 Stellhorn Road campus.
Source: www.niic.net
If her startup Web-chat business takes off like Facebook, Anita Homco has an actress in mind in case of a movie.
“I’d like Ellen Page to play me, but I think our movie would be a lot less dramatic than ‘The Social Network,’ ” Homco said, speaking of the film based on Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant.
Homco is head of public relations for Grabachat LLC.
“We’re trying to get ready for our launch, and everybody is really excited,” she said.
Homco is part of a seven-member team that came together through participation at the Northeast Indiana Innovation Center’s Student Venture Lab in Fort Wayne. The team took top honors at the Indianapolis Startup Weekend earlier this month. The competition featured 12 teams vying for $500 in paid legal services and a chance to pitch products to investors in coming weeks. James Northard was a last-minute addition to the team after hitting it off with Grabachat founders during the weekend event. He serves as a front-end developer for the company – pronounced Grab-a-chat. The online service is a video conferencing Web chat that links people with similar interests. Filters would ensure users are paired with the most compatible matches.
“That’s how we want it set up, but we don’t have a definite launch date yet,” said Zach Zuber, business development manager for the fledgling company. “Right now we’re in what I guess you would call the customer discovery stage.”
Zuber and his partners are visiting various social media outlets on the Internet to gauge what “people want to talk about.”
“I’d say our target audience is from 21 to 35,” he said. “People who are intellectual and want to converse about topics they’re passionate about are who we’re looking for.”
The team has a website prospective users can visit. “Enter your email address and we’ll let you know as soon as it’s ready” is the greeting visitors of Grabach.at receive.
“We’re not sure how billing will work yet,” Homco said. “We may charge a monthly user fee or make it free for a while and charge a fee later. It could be supported by advertising and be free to users. We’re still working that all out.”
Zuber said “competition was pretty fierce” at the Indianapolis contest, “so when we won it was pretty overwhelming.”
The team beat out Group-Lunch Indy, which aimed to reduce restaurant costs by having people at the same company place online orders together to receive discounts. “I thought their concept was really good,” Zuber said.
But the judges liked Grabachat better, said Lorraine Ball, an organizer of the competition and president of Roundpeg, a marketing firm in Indianapolis.
“What I liked most about what they did is their service allows you to have specific conversations with people that are interested in the same things you are,” she said. “It’s not a revolutionary idea, but they’ve done a lot of things to enhance the user experience. It takes away the randomness.”