We just invested in Smore — a member of the TechStars Seattle class of 2011. If you’ve been following our investment activity for a while now, you’ll understand why.
Last spring I wrote a post titled “‘Platforms’ aren’t just for developers: accelerate your startup by empowering others.” As I said then:
“…any system that honestly seeks to makes life easier for passionate individual entrepreneurs to chase their vision and realize their dreams is nothing but goodness in my book.“
Smore is a commercial publishing platform that makes it easy and fun for non-technical people to create beautiful, functional “online flyers” — promotional webpages with a specific purpose, like selling a product, advertising a service or, promoting an event. Once you’ve published your flyer, Smore brings the same level of ease and user delight to tools for promoting your page (via email, social media and search engine marketing), and to understanding the effectiveness of your page as a marketing tool (via easy-to-read data visualizations).
In short, Smore turns every business owner that wants to be on the web and doesn’t know how into a design and online marketing rockstar. And if that isn’t empowering entrepreneurs I don’t know what is.
The founders — Gilad Avidan and Shlomi Atar — are what my friend (and fellow unicorn) Aviel Ginzburg likes to call “unicorns” : pixel-perfect design obsessives who also happen to be gifted full-stack developers. They came all the way from Israel to participate in TechStars Seattle and in three short months have lined up a stellar group of mentors and investors. We’re delighted to be in that group. Welcome, guys!