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Featured Founder: Mike McIntosh of Hipstr

Featured Founders

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3 min read · Oct 22

About The Author

Elina Omarova

Welcome to our Featured Founder series, where you’ll meet startup founders from Tampa-St. Petersburg who are building and scaling their ventures to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. We interviewed Mike McIntosh of Hipstr, a marketplace-as-a-service platform disrupting a $2.1 Trillion industry at the intersection of events, media, and experiential marketing with a highly scalable low-cost distribution model.

What inspired you to launch your company?

Before founding Hipstr, I, oddly enough, had an extensive background being on the executive team of Bowlero Corp, where I helped lead the integration of AMF bowling centers and Brunswick Bowling Centers into a rollout deal and spearheaded their modernization into hospitality venues with a focus on service, technology and a uniformed brand. This experience led to my “ah-ha” moment of seeing how critical in-person events were for Brands nationwide. This is where I noticed a gap in the market for branded social media content and the need to simplify the process of user-generated content at events and tracking the performance of that media.

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

Hipstr addresses the complex and outdated experience of event content creation by providing a seamless, tech-driven platform that captures user-generated content at events. The company is excited to redefine how brands interact with consumers in person, creating shareable and immersive moments.

Name the biggest challenge you faced in the process of launching the company. How did you overcome it?

One of the biggest challenges was scaling the business across 35 major markets and still maintaining our commitment to becoming a platform and not morphing into a service company. To overcome this, we had to do four initiatives simultaneously. Iniative one, we needed to reduce our equipment size to shrink from fitting in a mini-van into airplane-size check-in bag. Initiative two, we needed to increase demand by 2x in each of our markets to ensure we had enough demand to even keep a supply side interested. Initiative three, we need to build the technology platform to automate the booking, planning, and job acceptance for both our customers and the supply side. Lastly, we needed a fourth initiative that actually created a national campaign to recruit and launch our Hipstr® host program, where we found contractors interested to join the program and become gig-enabled by our platform.

Where do you see your company headed next?

Hipstr is going deeper to gain market share in each of it’s 35 markets, working on an AI enabled enterprise SaaS product, and preparing for a global expansion through franchising.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with another founder just starting out.

Do more, think less, and stay agile. Pivoting is part of the process. For Hipstr, transitioning from a service-based model to a marketplace with a scalable low-cost distribution model was essential to overcoming operational challenges and unlocking exponential growth. 

Why Tampa Bay?

Tampa Bay is one of the vibrant markets Hipstr serves, providing access to a growing economy and a diverse range of events, making it a strategic location for the company’s continued expansion.

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