Premoney 25: Isthmus & URfeed

Welcome to week 25! I’m aware that I missed last week…my apologies for those of you who’s schedule was thrown off due to lack of a Premoney email in your inbox 😉. Hope you enjoy this weeks list nonetheless!

🎉 Swapstack Updates 🎉

As I mentioned two weeks ago, I’ve been building a company called Swapstack, a brokered marketplace between Brands and Newsletter writers (eventually all creator types), with Jake Singer, the founder of The Flywheel. Our goal is to be every creators sales team. We’re very much in build-mode, and are looking to expand our initial user-base. If you have folks you think would be interested in being a writer or brand on the network, send them our way! Our value props:

Writers:

• Meet 200+ other writers

• Work with some of our sponsors (60+ and growing)

• Monetize your passion project!

Brands:

• Market your product or service to readers who opt-in to read related content.

• Enjoy the highest content-adjacency you can find!

• Drive low cost acquisition!

This weeks’ Premoney companies

Company: Isthmus App

Founders: Carley Lake, Tanya Dastyar

Verticals: Community, Consumer Social, Sustainability, Marketplace

Business Model: Subscription

Stage: Bootstrapped to-date. Raising a pre-seed of $750,000 (6 checks committed). Focused on angels & investors passionate about community, marketplaces, and/or sustainability.

1-Liner: Isthmus App is a community platform that makes it easy and fun for people to discover, connect, and share clothing with their like-minded groups.

Description: 

The secondhand clothing market is exploding with $28B in sales in the US last year.

500 million+ people prefer trading clothes within online communities vs. on online secondhand marketplaces. The platforms they use, however are not built for these purposes, and they're failing group leaders and members.

It's time for a better way to buy, sell, and trade together…and time for group leaders to finally earn for all they do to create vibrant, curated, and trusted sharing communities.

Traction:

• We launched our Alpha with the leaders in the sustainable fashion community, who represent 60K+ people:

  • Patagonia Buy/Sell/Trade Facebook Group (27K+ members)

  • @selltradeslowfashion: The largest slow fashion resale Instagram community (24K+ followers on Instagram); 

  • Baltimore's largest clothing swap community

• 10+ communities ready to onboard to our Beta product (coming mid-year)

• $0 CAC

Company: URfeed

Founder: Abhinav Gaur

Vertical: Social Media, Social Networking

Business Model: Revenue Share

Stage: Raising a $2M seed round

1-Liner: Video community revolution through asynchronous video messaging.

Description: 

1. Online communities are the glue that holds the internet together…but online discourse is broken.

2. People seek connection…but all they find is ‘tribal warfare’ in every comments section.

3. Video is becoming the way to communicate online and is the only medium where nothing is ‘lost in translation’.but community platforms are all text-first stuck looking like Facebook groups, Discord servers or subReddit communities.

URfeed is a Video First Community platform that works through asynchronous short video messages. This means users can have high quality group conversations… that are 'face to face', without the high energy/attention tax that comes with attending video calls.Traction (since launch on Nov 9th):

• Raised $300k pre-seed to launch iOS & Andrioid app on Nov 9th

• 2,400+ app downloads, 2,800+ video conversations started

• 105 hours of video recorded (aka 9+ seasons of Money Heist)

• ‘Firestarters,’ a virtual festival of conversation, will be run on URfeed.

👩🏽‍🎓👨🏼‍🎓 Celebrating Student Founders

As a continuation from earlier this month…. In partnership with the Envision Accelerator, I’ll be periodically featuring highly impressive student-led companies over the coming weeks.

Vitruvian | 3-sister team: Ileana, Andrea, & Catalina Del Risco

Waitlist API | Bani Singh

Thats all for this week!

See you next time,

Jake