Where is your startup headquartered? It’s a tough question for some entrepreneurs, especially ones that started during the Covid 19 pandemic.
Melanie Wertzberger, Shaka CEO
“Like yeah, so I pitched at 1 Million Cups – Kansas City a couple of weeks ago, and yes, that was because one of our initial Beta clients is there in the Kansas City area” Shaka CEO Melanie Wertzberger told the 4thEst8. “So we knew that our project would resonate with them… and it’s how I got introduced to 1 Million Cups while I was doing my undergraduate work… both me and my co-founder went to Kansas State University. So we’re definitely Midwesterners. But we are now operating out of Irvine, California.”
Wertzberger got a job with a tech startup right after graduation and went on what she calls a ‘world tour of their offices’ ending in Irvine. Seeing that tech startup struggle with scaling, and keeping a good work culture, is how she came up with the idea behind Shaka – a social network to help companies with multiple office locations (or a lot of remote workers) keep and build a sense of community through online ‘spaces’ where they can interact.
‘Spaces? What?
“I would consider this the ‘team collaboration software market’, but then you can drill into our more direct competitors, which are those softwares that are focused on boosting employee engagement. And I would say our closest competitor is called Espressa,” Wertzberger said. “They were founded in 2015; I think they’ve raised around $14 million.”
Shaka has a working Beta with 150 end users and is actively integrating a community feature into the software, in preparation for a commercial launch in late March. The two-person team got started in April of 2020, and were motivated because they saw pandemic work conditions as highlighting the need for their product. Their initial target is companies with 100 to 1000 employees, and a number of work locations – especially (but not limited to) tech companies experiencing high growth.
Meanwhile, Wertzberger entered a part-time Master’s of Entrepreneurship program at the University of California, Irvine – keeping her in California until graduation in May, 2022. But the connections she mad there landed Shaka a spot in the Blackstone Launchpad Fellowship – which is connecting her company to a ton of resources and comes with a $5,000 grant upon completion. (Something the bootstrapping entrepreneur values for the cash nearly as much as for the validation.)
