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The Relenta Incubator

Posted by Dmitri | February 26th, 2009

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We’re giving away unlimited free accounts to qualified start-ups and socially innovative businesses. I believe that entrepreneurs are the key to economic salvation and hope that our modest contribution will help in some way, shape or form.

Eligibility

  1. Any start-up under that is under two years old is eligible. No preference is given for the line of business, funding or revenue status.
  2. A start-up must have already created at least two full-time salaried jobs, not including the founder(s).
  3. If your business is not a start-up, it must be a service, community project or organization, or any other entrepreneurial venture that exists to help others. No age limitation in this case.
  4. You must describe your business or project and its current communication and productivity problems. A horror story about not getting things done in a proper or timely manner will do the trick.
  5. You must describe how you will use Relenta to overcome challenges and change the world.
  6. Applications are accepted only in the form of comments to this post. We will use the email address you use to post to get in touch with you. In addition, you can also submit a form with your full contact details and personal message if you’d like.

Let’s change the world together!

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Viewing 13 Comments

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    • v
    Great article.. interesting idea.. I have been using Relenta for some time now and just recently updated to a paid monthly service. I have two part time employees and would like to add them to our account.
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    • v
    Pick me! Pick me!
    I am definitely in it for profit, however, as a commenter mentioned below, every single. dollar. counts. At this point, anyway. This is my baby: Desperately Seeking WordPress. I help anyone who wants to start a blog, whether or not they have any idea what it is. AND - we're cool about it. So cool. I have recently added a partner, and we work together to get the jobs complete. But! Ohmygosh. I had no idea how many emails I would get! And. Did you know about all the work that goes into a quote before the work is even started?? I have no papers. Nope. CLEAN desk.

    But - I have email to my personal desktop ap.
    Email to zoho.com.
    Email in gmail.
    Email from our site online, and in gmail, and in my home address.
    A CSV spreadsheet of my data from oprius.
    A busted server from uploading too many 'free' project managers. (Not to mention the fried brain cells.)
    And 6 - 7 hours PER day spent holding hands and providing information (which I LOVE to do by the way), and have NO idea if I have invoiced the last 3 clients I did work for today.

    And I think I talked to someone on the phone yesterday. Actually 2 people. But I was on the phone, not my laptop. So I have NO IDEA who they were.

    And that quote I gave last week? Had to ask the client to remind me what it was for!!!
    *Hanging head in shame*
    *but peaking up to see if my horror story worked*

    With baited breath,
    Cathy
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    • v
    Hi Dmitri,
    We started a company recently and are have been looking into a solution to manage our contacts. Right now we are using e-mails to provide hand-holding to our customers in getting them to use our software. However as a startup it is hard to manage every contact and we fear that loosing great contacts. Relenta seems to be the perfect solution. Is there anything that we need to do to join your incubator program?

    Thanks!

    Vineet
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    • v
    I'm the founder of Bizlightenment, a conscious business directory dedicated to advancing the cause of Conscious Business worldwide. I have been using Relenta for some time now and just recently updated to a paid monthly service. I have two part time employees and would like to add them to our account. Since our budget is so tight I would love to be able to add them to our existing account for the same monthly fee we are paying now.

    Thanks for your consideration and you might want to consider adding Relenta to our Business services category. It's free and I believe many of our members and visitors would appreciate your services.
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    • v
    Virtual Organization Management Institute is very much interested in seeing how it all works from a communication and productivity standpoint with admission applications, admission office replies, keeping track of applicants, scheduling of applicant interviews, and admission status notification.
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    • v
    I think the following case study will be most relevant to your situation:

    http://relenta.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=155
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    • v
    Hi Dmitri,

    I run a not-for-profit called Journeys for Change. We organise 10-day leadership development expeditions taking social innovators and leaders from the corporate, public and civil sectors to visit and learn from some of the world's most inspiring social entrepreneurs.

    We currently use a mixture of Excel, Highrise and SendBlaster to a) manage our 3,000+ contacts and b) manage our email marketing. However, it's far from perfect as our CRM is not fully integrated with our email marketing, which means we can't fully track emails against contacts and spend much longer on our contacts management and marketing than we would like to.

    After lengthy searching for an online system that a) integrates CRM & email marketing (I'm amazed at how few there are), b) is cost-effective and c) is easy-to-use, I came across Relenta this morning and immediately "felt" like, hey, this is the thing for us.

    So, I (and the rest of my team) would just be over the moon to get a free account and would happily dance a jig and sing your praises everywhere we went!

    Looking forward to hearing from you,

    Richard (Director).
    • ^
    • v
    I've just set up a free account for a non-profit organization I'm part of. Its called Bronzeville Area Residents & Commerce Council (BARCC). We are on the south side of Chicago. We have speakers and sponsor events designed to improve the community - everything from dealing with issues of crime and safety, condo issues, how to bring more commercial development to the area, to historic home tours and bike tours. We have been in operation for about 4 years. This area has been a low-income area with a predominantly African-American population that is undergoing regentrification. There's a lot of history in the area and a lot of great old homes.

    We have probably about 500-600 contacts in our database and we've been communicating via Constant Contact. This isn't working too well though, except for announcing big events. We've had no good way of segmenting the database and being able to send quick emails to all or segments of the contacts. I recently started using Relenta for my own residential real estate business (Bronzeville Properties), with email address pamdempsey@msn.com. I love the service and realized it would work well for BARCC. Then I saw that there was the potential for a free or reduced cost account for non-profits, so I thought I would ask about that. I've just set up a portion of our contacts in the free version of Relenta for BARCC. I would like to download all our contacts in it and start using it. We would probably have 2 or 3 users for now, although we could just set up with one user ID that we share. We need to start sending quick email communications to let folks know about meetings and events in the area, to alert them to criminal activity in their areas so we can get more calls to 911 and more police coverage, to get people to come out to events like cleaning up their block, etc. Our big push right now is to tackle issues of crime in the area (drug dealing, loitering, and prostitution being the big ones) and to tackle issues that a lot of our condo owners have (first time buyers with developer issues, turnover issues, problems with delinquent assessments, and problems with foreclosures in their buildings). Relenta would be a huge help with our communications.

    Please let me know if we (BARCC) would qualify for a free account.

    Thanks!
    Pam Dempsey, Treasurer
    BARCC
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    • v
    Dear Sir,
    I am a pastor of a church, I am also an idependent counsellor, coach and arts therapist. I manage our church website and handle a lot of the paperwork and communications by email. My mail bos is ALWAYS overloaded. Yet it is imperitive that I notice the gems, so I am unable to just blindly delete things. If I had done that, I would not have noticd your email in my box. So not all info is spam. But even the good stuff can go on for pages. Each time I open something to read be it a website, a report, a link, a video, an email, blogs, PDFs, etc there just seems to be pages and pages to read. It would be so lovely if people could cut down on the sales talk and just list the main points of their communication. I have taken to skimming over things, but even that is hard work, so yes any help with information overload that works would be highly appreciated. Don't get m,e wrong I love reading, but there are only so many hours in a day I can read, no matter how much great information is available on any given subject. So, how do I home in on the most relevant?

    Regards
    Pastor Bola
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    • v
    I'm the half-time director of a non-profit educational technology organization. I help schools implement technology in the classroom, develop standardized technology policies, write grants, get bulk purchases of software for the members, etc.

    I work out of two offices on a regular basis. I have contact information on the web and in two applications on my computer. I'm trying to use iGTD and have related information on a Palm Pilot, an iPhone and a desktop calendar. I need a solution that is purely cloud-based. Like Relenta. I think I might be a lot more efficient if everything were always available, up-to-date and in the same place. How's that for an advertisement for Relenta?
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    • v
    Thank you for making these options possible. Not everyone is a large corporation, yet many small groups can use the help!!
    • ^
    • v
    Nice idea, very similar to the Microsoft BizSpark approach btw. When you create a company from scratch each single dollars counts. The first years are usually quite tough in terms of cash flows, but no one lends you any money precisely because you don't have any track record.
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    • v
    Interesting idea, but I guess I am too new a startup to benefit as I don't have any employees, I guess I could fake a few employees but that seems rather ridiculous to do.

    Also since I don't use Relenta because I am a startup there really is no way for me to say how I would use it to over come any challenges, I would try it based on why YOU think it would over come my problems of email over load but there is no way for me to state those at this time. If I did I would feel rather unethical about it.

    Interesting idea, but I am excluded which is too bad I may have really been keen to use such a membership to grow my business and hire those two employees you mentioned.

    Nice concept though.
 
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