Announcing Neighborhood Studios
The best hyperlocal startups haven’t been created yet.
Today we are publicly announcing that we’ve launched the first hyperlocal startup studio.
We call it Neighborhood Studios.
Quick note…here is the coverage of our launch from Hypepotamus.
Why hyperlocal startups?
At Neighborhood Studios we focus exclusively on what is called “hyperlocal” startups.
Quick note…we define hyperlocal as any highly scalable startup business model where the supply and demand are in the same city — sometimes in the same neighborhood.
We wrote this blog post on why hyperlocal is our focus, but the summary is…
- Most people spend 90% of their time within 5 miles of their home, but technology hasn’t impacted our local lives yet.
- Founders of these types of startups mis-execute because there are many counterintuitive things about this type of startup.
- The product/market fit bar for hyperlocal is much higher than other types of startups and the vast majority of founders discount this difference.
Our contrarian belief is that we are entering an era where this is about to totally change. If you could see the home screen of your phone one decade from now, it would actually reflect how you live your daily life.
Why a startup studio?
Collectively the Neighborhood Studios team has founded six hyperlocal startups, so why not just go the traditional route — launch a single hyperlocal startup?
We decided to operate within the studio framework because it aligns extremely well with how hyperlocal startups should be launched.
The core thesis of Neighborhood Studios is that the most successful hyperlocal startups ever created all began in the exact same way — just a dozen users using an initial (very flimsy) product in a small geography (a single city or single neighborhood).
If this is true — and it is true — the studio framework is a perfect way to gauge the potential of a product with just a dozen households in a single neighborhood.
Another factor in our decision was the success of other studios over the past decade. Studios such as Atlanta Ventures Studio (one of our investors), Atomic, High Alpha, and Pioneer Square Labs have proven that studios can repeatedly co-found successful venture-scale startups with exceptional founders.
The studio model is a very capital-efficient way to take multiple shots-on-goal and only lean into the experiments that are successful.
We couldn’t be more excited about how well the studio model aligns with our thesis. The timing is right for a studio like Neighborhood Studios to create many of the hyperlocal winners of the next decade.
The Neighborhood Studios process
Over the last six months we’ve created a repeatable process to identify unique insights to hyperlocal problems, develop novel product entry points, de-risk our product approach, recruit exceptional founders / CEOs, and ultimately launch a few hyperlocal startups per year.
This process begins with research. We’ve divided our local lives into 250 parts. “Groceries,” as one example, is one part of your local life. Once the studio team decides to focus in an area, we go very deep to understand the history of the space as well as the most interesting startups that have tried to tackle the problem over the past few years. We publish much of this research on our Medium page.
Every calendar year we expect to see around 1,500 startup opportunities through our research process. Out of this process, we’ll decide to dive deep into about 24 areas.
Once we gain conviction that there’s opportunity in a hyperlocal space, we try to unearth a unique insight that indicates the first MVP product to build. In the studio we call this a “product mechanism.”
Once a month we try to connect strong conviction with a product mechanism. When this happens we run a neighborhood experiment to validate our product approach.
Out of these dozen experiments every year, we expect 2–4 of them will have venture-scale results. When this happens, we’ll…
- Spin off the business into a separate company.
- Recruit an exceptional founder/CEO as a co-founder.
- Fund the business with enough runway for the founder/CEO to grow the business to the point where they can raise a venture round.
If you are a founder considering a startup studio, here’s a great Harvard Business Review article on the subject.
You can learn more about our studio process on this page of the Neighborhood Studios website.
The team
When it comes to founding, advising, and investing in hyperlocal startups, we are a very experienced team.
Collectively we’ve worked for four hyperlocal startups (non-founder employees), expanded five hyperlocal startups geographically (city-to-city), founded six hyperlocal startups, invested in twenty-three hyperlocal startups, and casually mentored hundreds of hyperlocal startups over the past twenty years.
There’s not a better team to make this thesis a reality.
In addition to the core studio team, we were fortunate to raise funding from some of the best founders, operators, and investors in Atlanta. There are too many to name here, but you can find a list here.
Our first studio company
As part of our studio announcement, we are also announcing our very first studio company…
Homegrown is an investment platform that connects local investors with best-in-class businesses that are ready to expand.
Not only are we able to announce today that we’ve launched our very first studio company, but we are also very excited to announce that Overline — one of Atlanta’s top venture firms — is leading the pre-Seed round for this business.
You can read more about this in our Homegrown blog post.
We couldn’t be more excited about this business and our partnership with Overline.
And this is just the start!
A final thought
The internet hasn’t greatly impacted our local lives yet.
And, like many opportunities, this one is hiding in plain sight.
At Neighborhood Studios we believe that the best hyperlocal startups haven’t been created yet!
About Neighborhood Studios
Neighborhood Studios is a venture studio that partners with tenacious founders to build hyperlocal startups from the ground up.
If you are building a business in any hyperlocal space or if any of this really grabs you, we want to hear from you. Drop us a note at goodstuffnearby@neighborhoodstudios.com.
To follow more happenings at Neighborhood Studios, sign-up for our updates at the bottom of our homepage.
Only neighborhoods can save us!
