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Pitching ideas
By Chelsea Miller
Photo
Panelist Tony DeAscentis, second from right, CEO of Via680, gives feedback to Chris Ostoich, an entrepreneur from Cincinnati, about Ostoich’s pitch at the Youngstown Business Incubator for a nonpassive music program. The Youngstown Business Incubator hosted the Ohio Startup Bus, a bus of 30 entrepreneurs traveling to the South By Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. The entrepreneurs pitched their ideas for a start-up business to a panel of YBI judges.
Youngstown
Thirty budding entrepreneurs pitched their start-up business ideas to the Youngstown Business Incubator on Tuesday morning.
The group was composed of working professionals and college students of all ages, who traveled from Cincinnati to Youngstown on the Ohio Startup Bus.
Each year, buses are awarded to various cities in the U.S. and Mexico through a competitive-bidding process. This year, Cincinnati was selected, as were 30 developers, designers and businesspeople to board the bus.
Those selected presented their ideas to a panel of YBI judges who helped them refine their pitch during a critique session.
The goal is for the participants’ pitches to be selected at the bus’s last stop — the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas.
Will Kesling, 35, from Cleveland, pitched his team’s idea for an online zombie game.
The game would feature check-ins at local venues, similar to Foursquare, and use Twitter and application programming interface to allow users to interact online.
Kesling, who is an in-house designer for Vitamix, a blender company, said he participated in the Startup Bus to meet and work with other entrepreneurs.
“It’s fun, but we’re doing it for the networking,” he said. “To have 10 buses from 10 different cities, that’s 300 entrepreneurs that you’re actually going to get to interact with, talk with, bounce ideas off of. A lot of people get jobs from these things.”
There hasn’t been anyone that has developed their pitches, said Greg Svitak, conductor of the Cincinnati Startup Bus. Instead, he said, many participants have started companies with people they’ve met on the bus.
“You’re getting access to all these budding entrepreneurs that you would need to start a company, so it’s really about the networking that you get out of this,” he said. “We have 25 men that are really great friends because of this.”
Svitak rode on the Cleveland bus last year. He selected Youngstown as a stop because of YBI’s reputation of jump-starting businesses.
“It’s showing that even though Youngstown has kind of a down reputation, in the middle of downtown Youngstown, you have this great facility, great support, and you have the ability to connect nationally,” he said of YBI.
The Youngstown Business Incubator began operations in 1995 as a “mixed use” incubation facility in downtown Youngstown, providing shared services and equipment to its tenants. Now, the nonprofit corporation has evolved to provide facilities, equipment, resource networks, entrepreneurial counseling and networking opportunities to fledgling technology-based companies.
Rose Shaffer, employee of YBI, said the company has more than 42 companies that it works with, both tenants of the building and online-based.
In 2009, Youngstown was named by Entrepreneur magazine as one of the 10 best cities to start a business.
Shaffer said YBI has played a part in the city’s new business development.
“The Youngstown area is highly regarded for start-ups, especially at the Youngstown Business Incubator,” she said. “It’s very exciting to us that we’re being recognized with this honor of having the bus come to our building.”