When a VC friend asked which young NYC startups I find exciting, I sent him a list of pre-funded companies that I’ve been watching. Afterwards I started writing them into a blog post. Well, I should have pressed publish sooner because as the post sat unfinished for the last week, several have since been funded! I’m including them anyway. Good times!

Here’s my short list of NYC startups I’m keeping my eye on:

JumpPost

Apartment hunting is broken.  JumpPost could be the fix.

JumpPost gives apartment hunters ‘first dibs’ on the best apartments. How do they get the best apartments?  JumpPost pays apartment dwellers $500 to add a listing to the site several months ahead of their actual move out date.  Sometimes it pays to plan ahead.

Jordan and his team is onto something big and they’ve already generated some good press (getting paid $500 for doing nothing is especially buzzable!).  I imagine they’ll need some product pivots before JumpPost truly takes off, but this one’s got potential. Personally I would add a social layer to the product and emulate AirBnB which has made finding places to stay fun, easy, and safe.  JumpPost can potentially bring that same user experience to apartment hunting.

SinglePlatform

SinglePlatform gives bars and restaurants a centralized tool to easily update multiple social media profiles: Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Citysearch, Myspace, and their own website. It’s the same core concept as Postling, except SinglePlatform seems to be executing better.  The founder, Wiley Cerilli, spent the last 10 years running sales at SeamlessWeb so the company clearly understands the market they’re serving — a point that becomes immediately clear browsing their site: “One of the most frequent phone calls to establishments is regarding what games they are playing. SinglePlatform allows you to select which TV packages and team affiliations you have and then posts those games automatically.”

SinglePlatform also seem to be quite good at selling their product at a comfortable price: $450 for a year.  That upfront payment (versus a monthly fee) should help the young company with cash flow issues and also make paying commissioned sales staff easier.  This six month old company seems to be quietly staffing up - LinkedIn already shows 11 employees.  Their aggressive sales force is hitting the pavement hard and closing deals left and right and the product is already being embraced by their customers.  And to top it off, the company is profitable.  This ones gonna be big…

ChallengePost

ChallengePost is a self-described “marketplace for challenges.”  Essentially, ChallengePost is home to dozens of competitions such as NYC’s BigApps which gave $20,000 to developers who built the best mobile apps using NYC datasets. Creative challenges help organizations harness the creativity of the masses to solve tough problems and generate ideas.  It’s a powerful concept that will increasingly become the norm among large organizations struggling to be innovative (also check out Hypios).  Recently, ChallengePost was named the official challenge platform of the US Government.

UPDATE: Sharp-eyed Danny Moon points out that in June 2009, ChallengePost raised an angel round of $500,000.

Kickstarter

Kickstarter is a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians etc. Essentially, it helps people raise funding to accomplish cool things.  Kickstarter handles the headache of accepting donations and also drives eyeballs to your project.  It also imposes some business logic to the process:  like a Groupon deal, buyers (donors) are only charged if the project raises the target amount of money. And fundraisers can associate rewards for different donation tiers (ie T-shirt if you donate $50)

Kickstarter benefitted from the PR buzz stirred up by Diaspora, an attempt by four NYU students to build a private decentralized Facebook.  In Diaspora’s efforts to raise $10,000 on the Kickstarter site, they unintentionally found themselves with $200,000 of donations - effectively an angel round of financing.

Yipit

Yipit makes it easy to find the best deals in your city.  Local daily deals sites like Groupon are hot right now.  But there are literally hundreds of them. Who wants to subscribe to a hundred email newsletters?! Yipit sits above them all, aggregating the fragmented marketplace into a single customized daily deal newsletter with the categories the user wishes to receive.  This puts Yipit in a position to charge a referral/lead-gen fee for each sale it drives to the deal sites. Brilliant.

UPDATE: On June 30, Yipit raised $1.3M.

Other honorable mentions:

-Shoutworthy: A social recommendation system built on Facebook. Think Linkedin’s recommendation tool.  Now imagine a much better version!

-TopGuest: A loyalty reward system built on top of foursquare/gowalla etc.  Formerly known as UDorse.

-Endor.se: A way to find talented freelancers, gauge availability, and built a portfolio of people whose work you endorse.

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