Today's Entrepreneur is David Gritz, Co-founder and Chief Strategist at Hatch House. Hatch House Ventures is a live-work start-up incubator for seed entrepreneurs. Virtual Incubator Network is a spin-off company of Hatch House Ventures, is a software platform designed to enable community managers to more effectively engage and grow their communities. The Virtual Incubator Network enables managers to build effective mentorship programs, engage pre-members for higher conversion to membership, and engage the outside community. Utilizing this tool, community managers can reduce administrative costs and allow a broad ecosystem to grow organically with minimal staff time investment.
Gritz is an entrepreneur, real estate investor and a public speaker. His expertise lies in the intersection of business strategy, systems thinking, financial leverage, and technology. He helps companies and individuals to expand their performance by discovering new ways to use existing assets and to envision a future they never saw possible.
The Virtual Incubator Network self-categorizes in these areas: Education, Enterprise software, Software as a service.
Here's a little about Gritz:
Most frustrating: Knowing all of the next steps and plans ahead, but being in the speed you can move by your available capital, development cycle time, or sales cycle.
Most rewarding: Building an amazing product and recruiting an outstanding team
No. 1 mistake is failing to plan for the next level. Most entrepreneurs from my experience focus on the next step or their current order of magnitude but forget to plan for their distant future or next order of magnitude.
1. You make money when you buy - It goes without saying but if you pay to much for an asset or and opportunity, it is almost impossible to make it up later. Always take the time to evaluate the deal and do your due diligence up front.
2. Build it to scale - It is often easy to get something done because you know how to do it, but it is much hard to build a system to get things done for others that don't know how to do it
3. The quality of your co-founder is the quality of your company.
Full bio
David is the co-founder Hatch House Ventures, a live-work start-up incubator, and serial entrepreneur. Prior to Hatch House, David founded DG Homes, Perfect Burpee, and GoodSemester (now Squareknot). At DG Homes, David built a real estate portfolio to over a dozen homes and completed almost twenty renovation projects. At Perfect Burpee, he managed the product development and establishment of an international supply chain for a high intensity fitness mat. Perfect Burpee was one of the fastest funded fitness Kickstarters garnering national press in AskMen, Boston Globe, and Self Magazine. At GoodSemeter, David built an online learning platform for course information for students. Parallel to his entrepreneurial career, David also served four years at Computer Aid, a 4,000 person IT consulting business. At Computer Aid, he served as the Director of Business Partnerships where he built an alliance of IT companies representing over $2 Billion in turnover. David graduated from Lehigh University with a dual degree in Industrial Engineering and Business. He currently resides in Allentown, PA.
Virtual Incubator Network is competed in the Splash Spring. The top eight of the competition will pitch live on stage at Splash Spring on May 12 at Scottish Rite Center, Oakland. Register here.
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The Virtual Incubator Network, a spin-off company of Hatch House Ventures, is a software platform designed to enable community managers to more effectively engage and grow their communities.
The Virtual Incubator Network enables managers to build effective mentorship programs, engage pre-members for higher conversion to membership, and engage the outside community. Utilizing this tool, community managers can reduce administrative costs and allow a broad ecosystem to grow organically with minimal staff time investment.
The initial target markets for the software are college entrepreneurship programs, incubators and accelerators. Each of these institutions suffers from over-worked staff and is under constant pressure to grow and engage their communities, often with high stakes for failure. Future market opportunities represent over $1.1B in market potential and include government, professional associations, and community banks.
To date, there are four beta-customers who are funding the initial software build, serving the immediate need for pre-seed funding. Early-adopters include Penn State Lehigh Valley, University of Delaware, Rowan University, and Bucks County Community College.
The primary revenue source is sale of software licenses that range from $10k to $150k annually (based on the number of users). The software is projected to run at a high eighty percent gross margin that will enable the company to reinvest in growth via strategic hires, product development, and establishment of a world-class sales team.
As customers utilize the Virtual Incubator Network, the closed platform begins to grow organically and the software becomes a substantial source of recurring revenue, increasing with the number of users per network.
Joined Vator on
Co-founder of Hatch House, Real Estate Investor, and Public Speaker. Hatch House Ventures is a live-work start-up incubator for seed entrepreneurs. We are now building software to virtualize incubators and university entrepreneurship programs