StartupBus Day 2: Asylum

Day two has been aptly named Asylum, not because of the absence of Wi-Fi, or the fact that most us us are working on three hours of sleep, or even that we are on a bus with 20 unique personalities 16 hours a day — those are not the things making us crazy. No, its because we literally stayed in an asylum last night in New Orleans. 

The St. Vincent Hostile was so welcoming to our group of 100+ busprenuers who all slept on floors, couches or malfunctioning bunk beds. St. Vincent has a rich history, straight from the pages of American Horror Story. St. Vincent opened its doors more than 100 years ago, and it started as an orphanage and asylum (lovely), before converting to a community hospital. Needless to say, when the bed fell out from under me in the middle of the night, I was cursing every Japanese horror film I have ever watched. 

Back to the theme of insanity. Day two was insane! Our company Storedrobe, launched its social media channels on Facebook (www.facebook.com/storedrobe), Twitter (www.twitter.com/storedrobe), Pinterest (www.pinterest.com/storedrobe) and Instagram. So please, like, follow, pin and tag us!

So what is Storedrobe? Im glad you asked. Storedrobe is the solution to the everyday frustration of “I have nothing to wear!” The app catalogues, stores and manages your current wardrobe while improving your future purchasing experience through its suggest, match and influence functions. Storedrobe is the first platform that connects fashion interactions from designers, brands, retailers, bloggers and your most trusted friends and family all in one iPhone-based community. We're encouraging the world to thread better, one outfit at a time. 

Based on our projections, we will have a working app ready for our pitch tomorrow and would be able to take it public within three months after the conference in Austin. Our team is also so committed to our idea, we plan to finish the app and launch with or without winning the startup competition. 

As Storedrobe's co-founder and creative director, my focus has been pretty heavy on working with our Elance and Nickel Communications Creative team. I have also been incredibly focused on getting our pitch perfected. We have 10 hours to Texas, and I think this will be at least a 20 hour day to get all the elements together for tomorrow's first round of elimination. 

In addition to building and launching the product (thank our lucky stars for Travis Miller), we have to have a large social networking buy-in just to get us to the semi-finals. Then we have to have one impressive business plan that includes a TAM (Total Addressable Market), shared-equity agreement, return-on-investment plan and marketing communications plan. These elements are all being researched and articulated by our other two co-founders, Sheena Koshy and Austin Allbritton. Oh and did I mention a video??? 

Last night, we all had the opportunity to get a glimpse of our competition as we met up with the StartupBuses from New York and Chicago. Celebrations and idea sharing went well into the wee hours of the night on Bourbon Street. 
 
Since our team is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed today, it looks like we will be fairing well against our competitors. Happy hour is when we win! 

This is Lindsey Nickel-de la O, rolling into the future on the StartupBus. 

Follow Lindsey's journey via Instagram @lindseydelao

Bio:
Lindsey Nickel-de la O is the Creative Director and Partner at Nickel Communications. She wakes up every day saying “Today will be Awesome!” Her mission and passion is to work across all communication disciplines - advertising, creative, media, digital, public relations and more - to ensure that her client's brand interacts and engages its audience in a strategic, fun and organic way.  Lindsey made her way on the StartupBus with pure determination and a lot of help from the Economic Development Investment Fund and the Business Observer.