DigitalGroundUp Inc.

Codecademy for Digital Marketing
DigitalGroundUp is an interactive technology platform that teaches digital marketing to companies (and all those who wish to learn it) through interactive software that requires users to demonstrate their mastery of a concept before moving on to the next level. ...

Optyn

Small Business Marketing Made Simple
Optyn makes marketing simple for small businesses by providing easy, automated tools to acquire and engage their customers. Optyn’s marketing platform helps business owners decide what message to communicate and then enables them to create, schedule and send an ...

PointDrive

Smarter content sharing for sales professionals
PointDrive is a sales-oriented application that improves the way you share content with customers. It’s just as fast as sending an email, but it streamlines the information in a sophisticated, easy-to-absorb format. Simply import your LinkedIn profile, logo ...

Entrepreneurs Unpluggd

Events/media company who educates/inspires entrepreneurs through signature events, website

UpCity (formerly DIYSEO)

Self-Serve SEO and Inbound Marketing for Small Businesses
DIYSEO makes the complex world of search engine optimization (SEO) simpler and more attainable than ever for small businesses. The web-based solution helps small business marketers break down a previously complex undertaking into easy, bite-sized tasks, while step-by-step ...

rfpHunter

rfp/bid marketplace
There is an un-explored gap in the marketplace for small to mid-size businesses needing to find a partner to contract for specific solutions. Large organizations hire consultants to perform a lengthy analysis and manage an RFP process. Small/mid-size businesses ...

Leasabl

Book entire offices and storefronts on demand.
Leasabl helps businesses find, lease and outfit space as easy as booking a trip online. Our marketplace monetizes $80 billion worth of idle commercial real estate by allowing qualified businesses to book entire spaces on demand, from 1 day to 3 years.

ReviewTrackers

Online Review Monitoring and Reputation Management for Business
ReviewTrackers is the award-winning review monitoring and reputation management software platform trusted by tens of thousands of business locations across North America. Reliable, accurate, and easy-to-use, ReviewTrackers specializes in aggregating and analyzing ...

LocalLux

Discover unique local designer fashion.
LocalLux is currently refining their beta released online marketplace for shoppers to discover local unique designer fashion. Essentially the platform, which will be available on the web and all smartphones, specializing in curating a city’s top boutiques into ...

SpaceHQ

The Zenefits of workplace facility management.
SpaceHQ is an online platform that simplifies the process of creating, managing and optimizing workspaces so small and medium sized businesses can design the best environment to attract, retain and engage top talent. Our target customer has from 20-200 employees ...

LendSquare

Lend money to small businesses in your neighborhood
We help you lend money to small businesses in your neighborhood. If you are a small business owner, we help you grow and pay interest to your customers and neighbors instead of paying a credit card. Local credit is better credit: our interest rates are more ...

Kin

New Hire Onboarding and Employee Management
Kin manages new hire onboarding, employee files and data, and paid time-off for companies of 100 or fewer employees. It's free to try, there's nothing to install, and companies can be up and running in less than 2 minutes.

bizHive

Thumbtack for small biz marketing
bizHive is a marketing marketplace for Small Biz. We've created a secure online destination for Small Biz Buyers to learn about, shop & buy new media & new marketing products & services from "best fit" suppliers & resources - a safe haven to manage what's become ...

Blackmark-it

African American Groupon
Blackmark-it is a new deal site exclusively featuring black owned businesses in the Chicago area. We provide attainable advertising to small businesses and attractive discounts to shoppers. Our business model has reconstructed the formula of larger deal sites by ...

Belly

Belly is a universal loyalty program that customers can take with them anywhere! We're spreading the love to your favorite places, enabling you to earn rewards wherever you go. Whether it's your morning cup of Joe or late-night beard trim and hair cut, Belly is ...

ContactUs.com

Better Contact Forms + Better Lead Management Tools => More New Customers for SMBs
ContactUs.com is an all-in-one customer acquisition platform featuring a contact form builder and live chat plus tools for lead-generation, messaging, software integration, behavioral marketing and lead analytics to help SMBs generate more leads and sales from ...

walkby

Using mobile to connect local retailers to real-time consumer demand
walkby connects local retail to consumer demand. Local retailers use walkby Snap: In one post merchants post a buyable item to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Email and our consumer mobile app. Consumers use walkby App: Users enter a term they want to follow, broad ...

Bolstr

A marketplace where people can invest in emerging businesses
Bolstr is a marketplace where accredited investors can invest in emerging consumer, retail, and manufacturing businesses that they can fundamentally understand - think coffee roasters, craft gin distilleries, or other maker businesses. The minimum investment is ...

Signal

Marketing software that SMBs love
Integrated platform for mobile, social and email marketing. Solves a tough problem for SMB marketers in that they don't want to use many different systems to manage their marketing efforts and understand customer engagement. Acquired by BrightTag, Inc in 2014, ...

Sidewalk

Local intelligence layer
Sidewalk provides business intelligence for sales and marketing teams that enables them to close more deals faster with their dream SMB clients. Sidewalk scores SMBs from 0-100 to determine their social rank and interest in your product so you don't have to. ...

LineHop

Order Online Not In Line
LineHop is the easiest, lowest cost mobile ordering system for family entertainment centers. Our first product, SnackBar is built for the bowling industry where customers can order food and beverage from their phone. We collect customer demographic data and provided ...

Association of Fitness Studios

Business education and consultative services for fitness studios
AFS is a fitness industry organization dedicated solely to the business of fitness studios. Think of AFS as an online consulting agency but so much more! We're creating a community of studio owners by equipping them with the tools necessary to enhance management ...

WeDeliver

Same Day Delivery for Local Businesses
WeDeliver connects local businesses (small and medium sized) to their customers by providing same-day delivery of products and goods. We believe that our same-day on demand delivery technology will help local retailers gain a competitive edge against big box ...

ExpertBids

Yelp and Elance for Professional Services.
ExpertBids is an easier way for entrepreneurs and businesses to find the right professional service providers; specifically lawyers, accountants and consultants. Whether a business needs to be incorporated by a lawyer, their taxes done by a CPA, or marketing ...

Visual Information Technologies

DIY mobile rich media tools
Suite of mobile apps (MediaMakerPro) that equip small businesses, home businesses, and job hunters to produce and distribute high impact profiles and advertisements.

Occasion

E-commerce booking software for service-based businesses
Occasion helps businesses save time and money over the phone by allowing them to easily accept bookings and payments from all their digital channels - website, social media, email marketing and blogs. Occasion, with it's conversational-style checkout process, ...

Healthify My Team

In office fitness providers for small companies
Healthify My Team offers on site fitness and health based events to small and mid-sized companies through a managed services online platform. Our core offering will be focused around providing on site weekly fitness events and services to our customers. Companies ...

Firmology

Small business technology news
Firmology helps small businesses grow through technology and innovation. Firmology is a small business news and information media company with a variety of helpful resources including the latest information on new companies, products, services, and innovative ...

Quid Financial Services

Small Business Lending
Running a small business is hard, obtaining capital to grow your small business is next to impossible. Quid is a financial platform for small business with positive cash flow to easily and quickly get the funds they need to operate and grow their business. A qualified ...

LAUNLogistics

Platform for small businesses to manage their delivery fleet
We have a Shopify plugin which is a platform to help small businesses to manage their fleet

TidySurveys

TidySurveys is online survey software made simple, beautiful and mobile-friendly.

BrandOwner

Social Media Customer Service Platform
We help businesses manage digital & social customer relationships by compiling all digital/social customer compliments, complaints, feedback and interactions in one easy to use interface.

Mack Dryer Sheets

Dryer Sheets for the male population
My idea stems from being lazy in college. Simply put, I was always in a rush and never wanted to iron my clothes. I ALWAYS threw my shirt in the dryer for about 20 minutes before wearing it. Not only did I just like the feel, but I actually felt cleaner [even though ...

CloutReach

Sales and Marketing Automation for SMBs
The CloutReach mission: To help small and mid-sized businesses profitably grow revenues by improving their sales and marketing effectiveness through integrated marketing communication and the introduction of a new social channel. We offer: • Social media setup ...

Frespiration!

Bringing designers & clients together, a Facebook for designers!
Frespiration! is the home for the best hand-picked creative. It lets you organize your portfolio, resume, ideas and journal in a better way. We're currently preparing for the beta version and will select 500 best creative in different field to help us giving the ...

Feedback Sign

Observe your business through your customers eyes
A smart, simple, real-time customer feedback solution. FeedbackSign collects customers’ feedbacks in real time. Positive feedbacks are turned to ads on social networks. Negative feedbacks are submitted directly to you, protecting you from online negative reviews. ...

TalentHarness

TalentHarness is an easy to use yet powerful talent recruitment management application.
TalentHarness is an easy to use yet powerful talent recruitment management application. Easily advertise your job openings to millions of job seekers and collect applications and assessments through your branded job page. See your applicants in action as they record ...

Red Cannonball

Online marketing for smbs. Designs websites, manages AdWords and social media
At Red Cannonball, we step in when business owners either lack the time or skills necessary to market their businesses online. We specialize in small to medium sized businesses that need to boost their online marketing presence by providing a website, Google AdWords ...

LawStud.io

We help businesses find affordable legal help
LawStud.io is the first and only online crowdsourcing platform for startups and small businesses to find affordable legal help. We allow businesses to post their legal needs online and lawyers to bid on the legal work through a closed bidding model. Once a business ...

Calculated Risk Advisors

Helps business understand risk.
High end risk management consulting and insurance brokerage services.

Rifird

Referral Marketing
Rifird is a tool that facilitates referral campaigns for merchants, distributing incentives to current and prospective customers.

Deal Umpire

Lending Tree for Daily Deals - Increases transparency and power for merchants
"Deal Umpire is not a deal site, not an aggregator, it's different." Deal Umpire puts power back into the hands of merchants by providing transparency into the offerings of daily deal sites. DU is an auction platform where merchants post a deal and the deal sites ...

DISCOUNT DAZZLE

MULTI MILLION DOLLAR PRODUCT
DISCOUNT DAZZLE. Connecting Merchants with 34+Million Consumers and counting!

ActiveCampaign

Email & marketing automation designed for small businesses.
ActiveCampaign is an email & marketing automation platform designed with small businesses in mind.

wisecanvas

we are the eventbrite of promotions.
wisecanvas is the easiest way to run an online promotion. Create a promotion of any kind using our campaign creator, promote it through email, social media, and Google search, and wisecanvas handles all the tracking and redemption.

SimpleVox Communications

Phone Platform for Modern Companies
SimpleVox is a phone platform for modern companies. Business has changed a lot in the last 40 years, it's time the phone system caught up. SimpleVox gives your company the enterprise phone system features you need to run a professional company without the cost, ...

thenext90

Business Planning in 90 Day Sprints
thenext90 is web based application that provides business leaders the most efficient and productive system for implementing business, strategic and sales plans. In most cases, plans either sit in a document on an executive's shelf or in a Excel or Word Document ...

Instant E-Training

Online Digital Marketing Training
Instant E-Training is an online Digital Marketing training provider with an online library of training videos (think Netflix) and online web conferences and certification programs. Our training programs help adult professionals acquire new skills in Social Media, ...

Talkroute

Google Voice for Business Owners
Talkroute turns any existing phone(s) and phone service provider(s) into a professional phone system with our virtual call management solution. Our service provides our customers with the freedom to go anywhere and stay connected to their business phone system, ...

Digital4Startups

A digital marketing consulting firm
What We Are: Digital4Startups is a digital marketing consulting firm founded in 2012 specializing in marketing strategy, search engine marketing, analytics, and SEO. We help companies use their marketing budgets more efficiently while providing education along ...

cThru.us

iBeacon and Augmented Reality for Retail
cThru.us allows any retail business to deliver promotions, merchandise, offers and customer service using iBeacons and Augmented Reality (AR) without any programming knowledge. Our out-of-the-box platform lets small business owners and their bigger counterparts ...

Quid Financial

Easier, faster loan applications for smal
Quid's first product is a painless, completely digital application for small business loans.  Gone are waiting 4-6 weeks for a bank to complete underwriting, we provide an answer - and funds, if approved - within 24 hours.   Follow on products will focus on helping ...

White Jean PR

music. entertainment. fashion. sports. community. PR.
White Jean is a boutique PR agency dedicated to the execution and maintenance of a positive image. We are PR Management because, YES, image really is everything. White Jean personnel are also avid bloggers of social news and our experiences of fly people, places, ...

Roselution

Digital Advertising Agency
Roselution is a consulting firm that discovers, creates and implements business tools to help businesses overcome adversity when connecting with consumer and expanding their growth. While others focus on the “What” we focus on the “Why”. We believe that our experiences ...

PhoneTender

Ending the Check Out Line
Ending the Check Out Line.

Accumi

Co-founder equity splitting
Co-founder equity splitting for early stage startups. Accumi helps startups track how much each founder has contributed and keeps the equity split in sync with the data. It is especially useful for teams where the level of participation from one founder to the ...

Chicago Belt Company

American made canvas and ribbon dring belts with Chicago and Great Lakes themes.
Chicago Belt Co. makes American made canvas and ribbon dring belts with Chicago and Great Lakes themes.

MassInteract

15 in 1 Digital Marketing Package for Small Businesses
MassInteract is a full-service provider of social media, mobile, and web solutions for small businesses. We offer a high quality bundle of must haves for every business to make an impact in the online world for one low monthly price.

Products On White Photography

Professional Ecom Product Photography
At Products On White Photography (POW) we specialize in photographing products on a white background for ecommerce websites. We’ve made the process simple: 1. Our clients place their orders online with our easy to use website. 2. Send us the products from anywhere ...

LooseKeys

Upsize Chicago

Upsize Chicago is an angel investment group
Upsize Chicago is an angel investment group comprised of successful, serial entrepreneurs based in Chicagoland who are looking to fund local companies. The organization will work with applicants through one-on-one coaching to develop business growth plans and raise ...

Cordiant Technologies

The Digital Workplace For Your Business
Cordiant is your Digital Workplace with Purposeful Collaboration, Social Age Learning, Contextual Info Discovery and Zero Internal Email. The Pain-Point We Solve: Massive iWorker inefficiency at the Workplace where a typical Knowledge-worker spends 25% of her ...

DreamHighr

The Match.com for hiring managers and jobseekers.
My name is Corey Hubbard and my company is DreamHire. DreamHire will be a web-based enterprise recruiting software program that harnesses the power of social media, internal employee referrals and gathers information from databases on the Internet. Our target market ...

Ruben Digital Media

Building Homes in the Digital World
Every business today needs a strong web presence. It is no longer a luxury reserved for big companies. RDM pinpoints each client’s personality traits and company essence to replicate an in person experience on the web. My goal is to have customers connect with ...

Switchfast Technologies

Network Management

Hireology

Right Process, Right Person
Hireology’s cloud-based Selection Manager™ helps companies organize their hiring process and use data and smart tools to make better hiring choices. We help SMBs, Auto Dealerships, and large, multi-site operators such a franchise systems ensure a consistent hiring ...

Hackproof.com

SMB Security for Hacker & Malware Protection
Securing your business is not a luxury. It's a necessity. Hackproof.com empower companies with the skills, tools and knowledge to align security, protect sensitive information, maintain compliance, and instill customer confidence. We employ same industry-leading ...

Website Infinity

Limitless Digital Design
Custom website and mobile application development. Our target market is $10m-$50m+ companies that can afford our services for web and mobile development, with our price per project targets between $10,000-$50,000 Website Infinity's founder, Eric Stein, currently ...

REELFINATICS

Live To Fish. Share Your Passion.
Reelfinatics LLC is an interactive on-demand fishing entertainment platform for recreational fishermen and a totally unique directory for those providing fishing related services. Reelfinatics' directory platform is designed to give its affiliates unparalleled ...

pricerIQ.com

Price list management for small business
PricerIQ lets small and medium sized business manage their quotes and client-specific price lists in a better way. Key features: - prices available anytime on the web, in a mobile-responsive site. - intuitive interface made for non tech savvy users. - online ...

Cuddle Club Chicago

Professional Cuddling Destination
Cuddle Club Chicago is Chicago's first destination for professional cuddling. Offering human interaction, non-sexual touch and healing services in the convenience and comfort of a safe, boutique environment. Happy is only a hug away.

Performance-Built

CNBC's "The Profit" in real-life
If you've said to yourself, "Great, I've been funded. Now what?," then you've experienced the pain that 80% of business owners struggle with 24/7 - resource allocation and management. In other words, answering the question: "What the best way we can use what we ...

International Biomedical R&D Group

Next-Gen Medical Implants
Next-generation medical Implants using Additive Manufacturing which will increase quality and performance with a substantial low customer price. Health care is one of the most interesting and important fields in the world, there is a big room of improvement as ...

SupremeWebinar

Automated webinar delivery platform
SupremeWebinar allows marketers to deliver high quality and fully automated webinars. Marketers can deliver highly leveraged educational based marketing content to attract new prospects and customers to their businesses around the clock.

Squirrel & Company

The Squirrel Bank™ is the new generation Piggy Bank.
Squirrel & Company, the creator of the Squirrel Bank™, works to teach children the fundamentals of money through financial tools based on The Quadra-Banking System™. The Squirrel Bank™ consists of four individual banks that teach effective use of money by ...

Digital Bridge Solutions

Open source web development services
Digital Bridge Solutions helps emerging and mid-sized businesses maximize investments in the digital channel. Using open source tools like Drupal and Magento, we'll energize your company's online sales and marketing efforts without sinking your budget. We work ...