Switchyards Downtown Club opened in early 2016 as the consumer and design-focused startup community in Atlanta. The founders of Scoutmob bought a 90-year-old building in the heart of Downtown in 2015 and rehabbed it, serving as a “founder happy place” for those building the future design-focused brands of our city.

As the only space in the city solely dedicated to consumer startups, we host big monthly events like The Consumer Show and Made in Atlanta. We also host company offsites and meetings in our board rooms, conferences, tours, hack weekends, members-only programs, large social events, fundraisers, and occasionally 42nd birthday parties. Needless to say, we keep the place busy.

And that’s where you come in…

We’re looking for a person to join our team as Events Assistant

This person will help prepare for and execute our busy events schedule. From marketing to social to setting up the space to event execution and everything in between. You will be the point-person working with our community and representing our brand.

There’s a lot happening around here and we have a small team so this person needs to be able to seriously get shit done. We want someone who is great with people, well-organized, detailed-oriented and a hard worker. A roll-up-your sleeves type. This is ultimately a hospitality role.

You will be working directly with Kerry Gibson, our Chief of Staff.

This is a part-time, hourly role. Our big events are on Thursday nights and some others are at nights and on the weekends, so must be available for those.

How to apply

If this role sounds interesting to you, the application process is pretty simple.

Pick-up your phone and record a 60-second video. You can tell us whatever you want, but please include why this sounds interesting to you and some personal experiences that would make you successful in this role.

We won’t share any videos publicly…we just want to get a sense of your personality. Casual, authentic and un-rehearsed is what we’d prefer. Then just email your video to jobs@switchyards.com. If there’s a good fit, we’ll invite you down for a chat with the SDC team at W&A.

Super excited to hear from you!

Switchyards is Hiring an Events Assistant was originally published in Switchyards Downtown Club on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Switchyards Downtown Club opened in early 2016 as the consumer and design-focused startup community in Atlanta. The founders of Scoutmob bought a 90-year-old building in the heart of Downtown and renovated it, serving as a “founder happy place” for those building the future brands of our city.

We’re looking for a person to join our team as Office Manager. This person will help run the day-to-day of our team and community. This role will be heavily involved in the inner-workings of the SDC community. There’s a lot happening around here so this person needs to be able to seriously get shit done. This is a full-time, salaried role with benefits.

Some of the main responsibilities

• Point person for maintenance, janitorial, building ops, contractors & suppliers
• Onboard new members of the SDC team and community
• Schedule tours
• Work with members when they have loving nags
• Work with members when they lose their access cards
• Pay the bills
• Help keep the building in order
• Work with our coffee shop general manager and baristas to keep it running smoothly
• Schedule barista hours for events
• Emergency drip coffee maker when 4 other staff members are sick (on the same day)
• Order supplies and snacks
• Be above average on Amazon Prime
• Help organize events
• Be “the glue” of the SDC team
• Schedule meetings
• Run errands
• Run the payroll
• Run the jewels
• Be really good on Google Sheets and Docs
• Help organize the money for the bean counters
• Plan team activities

Ultimately, the Office Manager should be able to ensure the smooth running of the office and help to improve the team’s effectiveness and day-to-day operation.

Ideal background

Previous experience as an office manager would be great but not required. No need to be a startup founder (we have enough of those around here!) We use all the standard startup software tools so must be really good on them (most are pretty easy) — Slack, Google Docs, Gusto Payroll, Bench Accounting, Quickbooks, Stripe, Square, CRM, etc. The role is heavily office-based.

• Super detail-oriented — details make brands and brand matters a lot around here!
• Really good managing your time and multi-tasking — it’s busy around here!
• A supreme bias towards action
• Self-starter
• Problem solver
• Great communicator
• Someone who gets shit done
• Effective and efficient
• Really friendly and down-to-earth
• A creative mind with an ability to suggest improvements
• Coffee drinker
• Hustler

How to Apply

If this role sounds interesting to you, the application process is pretty simple.

Pick-up your smartphone and record a 60-second video. You can tell us whatever you want, but please include why this sounds interesting to you and some personal experiences that would make you successful in this role.

We won’t share any videos publicly…we just want to get a sense of your personality. Casual, authentic and un-rehearsed is what we’d prefer. Then just email your video to jobs@switchyards.com. If there’s a good fit, we’ll invite you down for a chat with the SDC team at W&A.

Super excited to hear from you!

Switchyards is Hiring a Full-time Office Manager was originally published in Switchyards Downtown Club on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In late 2015, a few months before we opened the doors to Switchyards Downtown Club, we wrote a blog post called The Rise of the Atlanta Startup Hubs. We were seeing what was happening in Atlanta and other cities around the country, so we wanted to describe a new trend that was emerging in less mature startup towns…the best founders are moving into founder-led startup hubs and this is having a huge impact on local startups as well as the city as a whole.

Our belief is that these physical communities mimic the kind of startup density that causes other (more mature) startup cities to produce successful startups. Each physical community becomes the center of gravity for founders, team members and investors, greatly accelerating the progress of startups.

Today we are excited to announce another exciting example of this in Atlanta — Techstars has chosen two startups from Switchyards for their next batch. You can find the complete Techstars Atlanta announcement here.

By way of background, Techstars and Y Combinator are the top startup accelerators in the country. Last year Techstars launched an Atlanta office in partnership with Cox Enterprises. The local Techstars program does one program a year with ten startups at Ponce City Market. Generally speaking about half of the startups are from Atlanta and the other half are from other parts of the country and world.

This year four startups are from Atlanta and two of those startups call Switchyards home…

Bloveit (on the 3rd floor) helps you search and decide on the perfect date experience in minutes, based on date, mood, location and more.

Landing Lion (in the basement) is a platform that lets digital marketers quickly build landing pages (in 5 minutes!), A/B split test, and track leads and analytics.

And for those of you wondering, yes…Landing Lion is a B2B startup (amidst the B2C Switchyards mafia!) When we met Alan, their co-founder/CEO, he told us that Landing Lion had to be in Switchyards because brand and design is how they’ll win. Using a very MailChimp-like playbook, Alan and his team want to focus more on organic, inbound growth than traditional B2B outbound tactics, so they wanted to be in Atlanta’s main design-focused space.

Last year we were excited to have one startup chosen for Techstars. Needless to say, we couldn’t be more excited about having two this year.

If you are a startup founder in Atlanta, do your best to be involved in at least one of the founder-led startup communities. Only 1% of startups get any meaningful traction or outside funding — these startup hubs greatly increase those odds.

Congratulations to Techstars, Cox Enterprises and the ten startup selected for this year’s class in Atlanta. Efforts like this is what will put Atlanta on the national startup map!

Techstars Selects Two Switchyards Startups was originally published in Switchyards Downtown Club on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Switchyards Downtown Club started with a single mission…help create more B2C winners in Atlanta. This mission set in motion a series of decisions to lay the foundation to accomplish this goal.

Step #1 Buy a building

In the very beginning we noticed that something was happening in newer startup towns (like Atlanta) that was having a noticeable impact on local startup ecosystems across the country. This was the emergence of founder-led buildings & communities that were pulling in the best local startup founders and teams. The very best research on this topic has validated the impact of these entrepreneur-led efforts, so buying and renovating a building was the first step we took.

Step #2 Events

Once the building was open and good B2C founders were working at Switchyards, we began to launch a bunch of events. Some events (like Made in Atlanta) are open to the public and designed to communicate our mission citywide. Others (like Friends of Switchyards) are members-only and focused on giving our B2C founders actionable ways to help their businesses immediately.

Step #3 Switchyards Design & Development

Today we are super excited to announce the next step in our mission to help create more B2C winners in Atlanta. We are calling it Switchyards Design & Development.

Now that we are eighteen months into having an open building with lots of members and events, we are starting to see more clearly what other building blocks are needed for the B2C ecosystem and that led us to launch this effort.

Why was this the next step for Switchyards?

Over the past six months we’ve been working more closely with some startups and we’ve noticed three common hurdles that local B2C founders face at the very beginning.

Common hurdle #1

The first hurdle is finding development talent locally. The B2C founders that we meet either aren’t able to find good developers or they pay way too much for them (in cash or equity). And even once a B2C founder is lucky enough to get a developer to say “yes,” these founders aren’t experienced at selecting developers, so oftentimes they choose poorly, or they aren’t experienced with managing developers, so the process takes way too long, costs way too much and too often the founder is unhappy with the final product. Other times B2C founders decide to skip all of this and hire development shops/agencies. With this route the build cycles are too long and the entire process is way too expensive because traditional agencies are structured to serve larger companies with longer timeframes and much larger budgets. Due to this local development mindfield, the vast majority of promising B2C ideas in Atlanta die. Startups fail at a high rate and there’s nothing you can do about this fact, but Atlanta won’t have great B2C successes until good founders can quickly get access to good developers (at a good price) from the very beginning.

Common hurdle #2

The second big hurdle is design talent. There aren’t many overlaps between the creative community in Atlanta and the startup community. Atlanta has great design talent, but — because Atlanta’s startup community hasn’t needed them historically — they are locked up in agencies working on projects for huge companies. As a result, designers are even more difficult to find than developers, so most founders end-up ignoring design and this significantly damages brand and at the early stages…something critically important in B2C startups gaining trust with early customers and investors.

Common hurdle #3

The third hurdle is less obvious, but maybe the most important one to get right. It’s not well-known locally, but there’s a well-worn B2C playbook that is known by founders in more active B2C startups hubs (eg San Francisco, Brooklyn). The best way to increase your odds of creating a great B2C company is to surround yourself with B2C founders and advisors who know this playbook. And, of course, the developers and designers working on your product need to have experience with this playbook as well to give your B2C startup the highest likelihood of success.

We believe that Switchyards Design & Development is the right next step for Switchyards, so that idea-stage B2C founders have a single source for design and development talent that’s curated, priced right and experienced at building B2C startups.

How will it work?

If you have an idea for a B2C startup and are ready to start building, drop us an email. We can meet-up and discuss working together.

At a high-level, some of the best design and development talent for B2C startups is located right here at Switchyards. We’ve created a partnership with them, so that their pricing and process works for local founders who want to get the right resources to validate their idea, but lack angel and seed capital that they might have in other startup cities around the country.

Once the resources, timeline and budget are in place, we’ll start building your product. And — since you’ll be working with resources located at Switchyards — you’ll get SDC membership, office space and parking as part of this program along with all the mentorship that goes along with working around the best B2C startup founders in the city.

Announcing an addition to our team

Lastly we are excited to announced today that Pete Bernardo has joined the Switchyards team to run Switchyards Design & Development.

Pete has two decades of product, design and strategy experience at a top agency in the southeast and now his efforts will be focused exclusively on supporting local B2C startups.

Please join us in welcoming Pete to the Switchyards team!

What do I do if I’m interested?

We aren’t folks with lots of processes. We are fellow founders who prefer to talk over coffee, so drop us an email and let’s meet-up to see if working together makes sense.

You can learn more about Switchyards Design & Development at www.switchyards.com or go directly to our site at “Founder Happy Place dot com.”

MWSA,

The Switchyards Team

Introducing Switchyards Design & Development was originally published in Switchyards Downtown Club on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One year ago we announced a program at The Switchyards Downtown Club called Friends of Switchyards. Because the goal of SDC is to help create more B2C winners in Atlanta, we knew we needed more programming than just our large monthly events (like this and this). Big events are great for the community, but they need to be balanced with sessions focused on actionable tactics that founders can put into practice immediately to help their startups.

So the goal of Friends of Switchyards was to provide very tactical/actionable guidance to B2C startup founders. Our playbook for this program was simple. First, we identified the areas where B2C founders need the most help. Then we found local experts in those areas. And lastly we got them to SDC for small roundtable sessions to dive deep into those topics every week.

B2C founders at SDC get the best guidance possible while the best local experts are constantly around the community.

In 2016 we did thirty two of these sessions. The topics ranged from Mobile Marketing Learned from Building a Gaming App with Jeff Hilimire to Product Design Through Storytelling with Mary Frances Jones. Every session sold-out. Then we took a break to refine the format and today we are announcing that Friends of Switchyards will start again on June 13th.

Validating, building & growing successful B2C startups is a very different process than validating, building and growing startups that sell to other types of customers (eg enterprises). Friends of Switchyards is focused on the specific areas that make B2C different.

Part of the re-think of this program involved recruiting a few SDC members to pitch-in to help with the project. We are excited to announce that Preston Attebery, Rashidi Barnett, Pete Bernardo & Chris Turner will be managing this weekly program for the community. If you have an idea for a session or expert, please shoot it over to one of them.

If you are a member (full-time or part-time) of SDC, please join us every Tuesday at noon for the most tactical and actionable programming that exists in Atlanta to increase the likelihood of your consumer-focused startup succeeding.

And if you aren’t yet a member, we’d love to give you a tour — just email us at hey@switchyards.com.

MWSA,

The Switchyards Team

Friends of Switchyards is back was originally published in Switchyards Downtown Club on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The response to this program exceeded all expectations and we’ve been heads down working with our new founders, so we’ve been slow to update the community. But we did want to take a minute to update everyone on it.

The Program

Our Founder-in-Residence program is a six-month role allowing our founders to work 50% on the Switchyards community and 50% on startup models that we believe are promising. We keep a publicly running list of our best ideas here.

In a city like Atlanta — without a long history of B2C startups — it’s a unique opportunity for a few people to be immersed in the startup community while founding a new startup shoulder-to-shoulder with experienced B2C founders.

The Founders

After going through lots of videos and meeting our top candidates, we are incredibly excited to announce our first two founders.

Greg Kawalek

Greg graduated from Ohio State University and worked at Deloitte for five years, most recently as a Tax Manager. Despite his career not trending towards startups, looking for a challenge and wanting to try something new, he applied and joined our program.

Jarrett Coger

Jarrett began his career at Morehouse College. Later on he was part of the team that launched General Assembly’s Atlanta location. And, most recently, has worked as a product designer while trying to launch a few of his own startup efforts.

Please join us in welcoming Greg & Jarrett to the Switchyards community!

The Startups

Greg choose to focus on the residential landscaping space because he has some experience in this area and believed in the model that we were exploring. We believe that consumers don’t know where to start when they think about home landscape design and we can create a business that really surprises & delights them.

Jarrett chose to focus on a space that we called “disconnected vacationing.” Our thoughts on this model have moved around a bunch, but we are closing in on a unique way to create a neighborhood hotel experience using existing residential inventory. Jarrett’s background as an Airbnb host caused him to be interested in this general area and we are excited about how the model is coming together.

What’s Next?

Over the next few months Jarrett & Greg will validate business models in these areas and launch these startups. Please talk with them if you are interested in one of these areas or you think you can help in any way.

We currently have them scheduled to present at our August Consumer Show if you want to join them to hear more. Finally — if they can create financially sustainable businesses — they will each spin-out these companies as founder/CEOs.

If you are interested in learning more about our B2C playbook, our startups or our Founder-in-Residence program, drop us an email. We love talking about this stuff.

Meet Our Very First Founders-in-Residence was originally published in Switchyards Downtown Club on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One year ago today we opened the doors to the Switchyards Downtown Club. We are founders…not real estate experts. We are artists…not business optimizers. We had a simple belief that Atlanta had enough talent and energy to support an entire community focused on creating startups for consumers…a clear weak spot in the local startup ecosystem.

There were many skeptics and no guarantees that this would work, but the time was right to give it a shot. Not to be the biggest or shiniest startup hub in town. Just a building where every person thought every day about how to create beautiful startups for consumers.

Today we are aflutter to announce the one year anniversary of Switchyards and we couldn’t be more excited!

To mark this occasion we worked with the in-house video team at Chil Creative to capture some of the magic that we experience every day at SDC.

We also worked with in-house designer Scott Fuller to create this Atlanta pennant to commemorate our anniversary and celebrate the town that we call home.

You can purchase one for your very own wall here.

For those who have supported our community in some way (no matter how small), we thank you for helping startups in Atlanta. For those who haven’t experienced Switchyards yet, please schedule a tour by emailing hey@switchyards.com.

Our first year was about putting a good foundation in place. We began our second year by announcing a few big things (here and here and here) and this is only the start!

It’s been said that Atlanta can’t produce strong B2C startups, so local founders should focus their energy on high-tech or enterprise startups regardless of their passion or vision.

Those folks haven’t spent any time around these parts over the past year!

Switchyards Turns One! was originally published in Switchyards Downtown Club on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Starting today we are recruiting three people to join our full-time Founder-in-Residence program. This will be a six-month paid position for people interested in helping manage the main consumer startup hub in town along with founding a brand new startup.

Here’s the Deal

Building the foundation for a strong B2C community in Atlanta isn’t easy, so we’ve always thought of Switchyards Downtown Club as an intentionally step-by-step process.

Step #1…buy a building.

Step #2…fill that building with great people.

Step #3…do lots of events to foster learning & community.

Step #4…launch an official program to provide a deeper level of support.

Recently we hinted at our next step with a blog post describing the spaces that interest our team. Our goal is (and always will be) to start companies…either helping others or doing it ourselves.

As part of this we are incredibly excited to announce today our Founder-in-Residence program.

The program has two equal parts…Community and Founding.

Community

The Community half of the program is helping to manage the Switchyards community. The goal of this part of the program is to immerse the founder in the inner-workings of the SDC community. This could be anything from helping to organize an event to on-boarding new members. The founder will be a full-time member of the Switchyards staff. This type of startup exposure isn’t common in a city like Atlanta and is hugely educational for first-time founders.

Founding

The Founding half of the program will be dedicated to one space that interests the founder and the Switchyards team. Once a founder chooses a space, they will work with the Switchyards team to validate the business model through a process of customer discovery, brand creation and building product.

Once the business model is validated, the Founder-in-Residence will have the opportunity to spin-out the startup as a founder/CEO and their monthly stipend will become a full-time salary.

How to Apply

So if a paid full-time internship being immersed in a startup community while launching a startup sounds interesting to you, the application process is pretty simple.

Pickup your smartphone and record a 60-second video. You can tell us whatever you want, but please include why this sounds interesting to you and some personal experiences that would make you successful in this role.

We won’t share any videos publicly…we just want to get a sense of your personality. Casual, authentic and un-rehearsed is what we’d prefer. Then just email your video to founderinresidence@switchyards.com. If there’s a good fit, we’ll invite you down for a chat with the SDC team at W&A.

For the past year we’ve paid attention to the most creative ways that startup communities are writing new playbooks to develop, validate & launch new startup ideas. We are super excited to try something like this at SDC with our Founder-in-Residence program.

Everyone builds here.

Announcing the Switchyards Founder-in-Residence program was originally published in Switchyards Downtown Club on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• 001 / The Bitter Southerner (video)
• 002 / SweetWater Brewing
• 003 / King of Pops (video)
• 004 / Kat Cole
• 005 / Arden’s Garden
• 006 / Jamestown
• 007 / Hi-Rez Studios
• 008 / Sid & Ann Mashburn (video)
• 009 / Kate Atwood
• 010 / Third Rail Studios
• 011 / Ryan Gravel
• 012 / Federico Castellucci
• 013 / Mark Toro
• 014 / Hugh Acheson
• 015 / Kasim Reed (video)
• 016 / Jen Hidinger
• 017 / Atlanta Monster
• 018 / Atlanta BeltLine
• 019 / Atlanta Track Club
• 020 / Yik Yak founders
• 021 / StockX’s Josh Luber (video)
• 022 / Atlanta Downtown
• 023 / The Pease Brothers
• 024 / Mailchimp (video)
• 025 / Chubb Rock (video)
• 026 / Killer Mike (video)
• 027 / Love Beyond Walls
• 028 / Butter.ATL (video)

One of our goals at Switchyards Downtown Club is to collaborate. We collaborate with founders, designers, artists, writers, and anybody that’s like-minded in our mission and focus. So when Alternative Apparel shot us a note and expressed an interest in partnering on an event, we thought for about a third of a second and then said, “Yes, let’s meet.”

Alternative Apparel is the kind of brand that we really admire. The company has a voice and an image that’s defined, consistent, and recognizable. It’s also a company that’s made in Atlanta. Thus, it’s one of our own B2C winners, and that’s the kind of friend that we love.

Over the last few months we’ve met and brainstormed with Alternative Apparel on a monthly event. We had a few ideas for topics, but we kept coming back to brand. That’s something that’s near and dear to both of us — a brand with soul.

And with that, we bring to you “Made in Atlanta” — a monthly event about the best brands that are made right here in Atlanta.

The night’s focus is on brand and Atlanta, and more specifically, we’ll encourage companies to talk about some of the topics and details that aren’t discussed often.

This is really an event about how brands are made, how they think, how they act. A look into their soul.

Now the cherry on top. There will be a unique, buttery soft Alternative Apparel shirt designed by Switchyards for each edition of Made in Atlanta. The first 100 people to RSVP will get the shirt, so get on your stallion and grab your spot and your shirt.

MWSA,

Switchyards

Made In Atlanta was originally published in Switchyards Downtown Club on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Now that both programs are up-and-running, here is our very first list.

These are spaces that interest the Switchyards team and spaces where we could imagine disruptive models happening in the next few years.

Switchyards will consider founders with any consumer-facing business model, but we did want to keep a running list of areas that interest the team to attract founders/experts/opinions in these areas.

When we update this list, we’ll tweet to let everyone know. If you’re working in one of these areas, you can email us here.

Better Outdoor Spaces

We believe that the outdoor spaces of single family homes are not being serviced well enough by current local providers. Many startups across the country are focused on standard “mow & blow,” but not many are treating outdoor spaces like interior designers treat indoor spaces. We believe there’s a big opportunity to surprise & delight consumers with the outdoor spaces of their homes.

Disconnected Vacationing

We are more connected than ever in modern life with social media, smartphones and notifications. Also, people aren’t good at vacationing as they work more and increasingly live in urban environments. Add to this mix the quickly growing trend of fractional home use via Airbnb and we think there’s an opportunity to create a brand around weekend vacations that are truly disconnected.

Self-Storage Done Better

People are moving back into cities. We have reached “peak stuff” — the idea that we as consumers have plateaued in our desire to constantly accumulate things. There is more than 2.4 billion square feet of self-storage in the U.S. This is a very established, conservative industry that we think can be disrupted. And once you are established in this industry, the business could expand into many other big adjacent areas (eg re-use of local goods, craigslist competitor). Brand can also be layered on for an unfair advantage.

Peer-to-Peer Food

Food is a huge space because everyone eats every day. There are many venture-backed startups going after real-time delivery in cities. These startups are having trouble being profitable when you add logistics and customer acquisition costs to already slim food margins. We think there’s an opportunity for hyper-local food preparation and delivery done in ways that currently don’t exist.

Q&A For Home Services

Everyone should be able to get real-time answers to basic questions around the home. How do you fix a toilet? How much light does this plant need? How do I get this stain out of my carpet? We believe these answers could be a great way to connect consumers with the best home service people in town.

Re-Use of Local Goods

With the rise of the peer-to-peer economy, startups like Uber and AirBnb have gotten consumers accustomed to sharing. Over the next decade we believe this type of sharing will expand into many other areas that are less obvious right now. The re-use of home goods (ie goods used monthly or quarterly around the home) is an area that we’d like to explore.

Interior Design for Everyone

Living in a thoughtful environment should be available to everyone…not just people with big budgets. Startups are starting to disrupt this space, but we think what’s out there is only the beginning. This could be anything from software to help professional designers share pictures with clients to two-sided marketplaces…and everything in between.

What spaces interest us at Switchyards (updated 5/13/17) was originally published in Switchyards Downtown Club on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.