Jolt Demo Fest Showcases Six Startups: Hypejar, Stylekick, Flee, PUSH, Singspie, and FlyerFlo

The Winter 2013 cohort—Hypejar, Stylekick, Flee, PUSH, Singspiel and FlyerFlo—graduated from JOLT Accelerator on Tuesday, June 4.

Hosted by Steam Whistle Brewing, Demo Fest had graduates making impassioned pitches on who their founding team is, what their product does, which milestones they have and will hit, their proposed revenue model, and, of course, their “ask.” Following each presentation, a group of panelists then facilitated a brief but tough Q&A from the likes of Matt Golden, Managing Partner of Golden Venture Partners; Craig Miller, VP of Marketing & Growth of Shopify; Alex Bichara, an investor; and Ken Nickerson, CEO of iBinary LLC.

Here’s a recap of the six demos.

Kicking off the series of pitches was Grant Yim from Hypejar, a social platform for product-crazed futurists. Grant, who showed off their website’s new look, which has now adopted infinite scroll, stressed to investors that Hypejar will function as a driver of sales – which is an integral part of their new growth-focused platform.

Next up was Natalie Gray for Stylekick, a comparison and recommendation engine in the apparel e-commerce space. Despite being pitted against a number of competitors in the algorithmic category, Natalie demonstrated Stylekick’s staying power as a standalone tool, instead of being housed on a brand site.

In third was Byron Hawes for Flee, a travel recommendation app with a streamlined booking process and content that goes the curated vs. crowdsourced route. Along with sharing the website’s intuitive UI, Byron also emphasized that the Flee experience is focused on mobile optimization while larger travel sites are lagging behind.

Clayton Tso from mobile shopping platform FlyerFlo was next. Dubbed as the “one app to cover all brands,” Clayton shared with investors FlyerFlo’s highly mobile and social product, with impressive numbers such as 30K organic iOS installs and engaged user base of 70%, which actively reads through all their content.

Following was Ivan Cheung from Singspiel, which is an e-learning platform for the motivation of music students. Wanting to do what Coursera has done for math and literacy in the online education space, Ivan also announced Singspiel’s partnership with Cosmo School of Music, which is where weekly user testing is taking place.

Rounding out the presentations was Rami Alhamad from PUSH, which has created a weight training focused armband with the ability to track real metrics. Having already validated the product fit with 30 athletes and coaches, Rami also showed off PUSH’s stunning app and portal, which will empower weight training coaches by eliminating paper and whiteboards altogether.

Following the pitches, the opportunity to learn, connect and invest continued with the “Creators Gallery,” which is essentially a fair that features companies running the gamut of the startup spectrum. With booths featuring JOLT’s newest grads, other startups that you’ve definitely heard of such as Matterform (3D scanning) and Top Hat Monocle (education) were also there to demo their products.

In response, Kerri Golden, the General Partner for JOLT Fund LP, encouraged every attendee to do their part in support of innovation. “As you meet some of the companies in our Creators Gallery, I want everyone to think of one thing you can do to improve their business,” said Kerri. “By doing that, we all contribute to the startup community we have here in Toronto.”

Inspired and want to accelerate with JOLT? Applications for the Fall 2013 cohort are open until June 30.