KoduCare co-founder Amitai Rottem and Variat co-founder Andrew Crowell are like a lot of startup entrepreneurs. They don’t have much money, or time.
That was especially case as the Seattle entrepreneurs participated in the 9Mile Labs accelerator, an intensive 4-month bootcamp which concluded yesterday with the Milestone9 Demo Day event.
So, what did these frantic entrepreneurs decide to do as they cranked out code on their own startups?
Well, of course, they built another startup.
The founding teams at KoduCare, Variat and Mowdo came together during the last week of the accelerator program to solve a burning problem faced by many cash-poor startups: How to find free food and drinks at events in Seattle?
The end result is a new site called FindMooch, which aggregates data about Seattle area events that have free food and booze.
“If you are a starving startup person and you want to know where to grab dinner tonight — maybe network as well — just go on it and hopefully a company is hosting,” said Rottem. At this point, the free food and drink options are just available for Seattle. At first check, the offerings are pretty limited, with just one event listed: A free wine and rum tasting tonight at Wine World.
The bare-bones site launched on Wednesday night — the day before the teams were to take the stage to pitch their concepts in front of more than 600 people at the Showbox Sodo.
Asked why they decided to spend their final hours at 9Mile building a new site, Crowell bluntly noted: “We just thought it was a really good idea.”
Rottem added that they were looking to “blow off steam” after an intensive 16 weeks.
“We each have got our own companies but we have these skills that we can merge together and do a fun project,” he said.
“It was like a break,” added Crowell, noting that the 9Mile cohort simply likes to spend their spare time “building other B2B companies.”
Who doesn’t love free food? Become a pro moocher on http://t.co/wUWA9wIPG7!
— Mooch (@findmooch) May 14, 2015
Previously on GeekWire: From lawn care to health care: Meet the startups that just emerged from the 9Mile Labs accelerator
