Early on a Thursday, Beeso Studio founder John Bunting is typing a quick email while apologizing for not having his webcam on. This interview, by his estimate, is already his fourth or fifth meeting of the day.
Bunting has been busy working out a deal that involves hiring a new team by the following Monday, and while he’s probably more than presentable by pandemic-era standards, he doesn’t feel camera-ready. The work of shepherding multiple new businesses while guiding them toward investors probably leaves one a little windswept. That’s the price you pay when you launch a startup studio.
“It’s a little nuts,” he quipped.
Named after the Navajo word for money, Beeso Studio strives to help both tech startups and enterprise projects succeed.
Billing itself as the only full-service startup studio in the Silicon Prairie, Beeso partners with founders and takes equity in their companies in exchange for providing services at a break-even cost and connecting them with investors.
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Those services include software development, marketing, sales, business development, fundraising and financial forecasting. In other words, all the stuff investors are looking for.
“We expect founders to have a team, but we’re sort of filling the gaps within that team,” Bunting said. “So if a founder comes on board and they’re like, ‘I’ve got business development handled but I need help with actually building the product and doing the software development,’ that’s where we would come in.”
Though based in Omaha, the studio joins forces with founders around the world. Beeso’s current roster includes six startups in the U.S., one in Canada and two in London.
“With our model, we’re able to support and scale startups regardless of where they’re located,” Bunting said.
Beeso’s startup partners are all in different phases. Three have launched (Loophire, Ebb Pass and Atlas Lab Safety); one will launch in the coming weeks (the Omaha-based Zeal); two have secured pre-seed funding; and the rest are in development. Within the next couple of months, Beeso expects to bring on four to six more startups, with 15 – 20 in the pipeline.
Not bad for a studio that launched in January 2019.
Bunting said he’s pleased with Beeso’s rapid growth, which has exceeded his expectations.
“To be frank, it’s a little overwhelming,” he said. “We’re fast and furious.”
He believes that growth arises from Beeso’s active approach to business development. The studio goes out and recruits new startups instead of waiting for founders to contact them. It’s a strategy born out of lessons learned from a previous venture.
Before moving to Omaha for a corporate job in 2017, Bunting had co-founded and worked as CTO for a startup studio in Las Vegas. That studio, he said, operated on more of a “fixed-cost” model, providing cost estimates that had been established at the outset rather than tailored to the needs of each startup. Bunting admits this approach was not as situation-responsive as it should’ve been, and the Las Vegas studio ultimately lost its funding.
Beeso does things differently, customizing its tactics to the unique situation of each business rather than executing a one-size-fits-all strategy.
“When you do a startup, it’s very organic,” Bunting said. “It’s very much a process, and you’re learning and growing and validating as you move along.”
Unlike startup accelerators and incubators, which are based more on a programmatic approach of taking a founding team from early stages to launch, Beeso is in it for the long haul.
Bunting likened the approach of other models to dropping founders off a cliff and wishing them good luck.
“We don’t do that,” he said. “We partner with startups and we will continue working with that startup. It’s either do or die in our mind.”
