Launching a Startup in 2014? Ooomf Wants to Help You (For Free)

It’s been about two years since Ooomf cofounder Mikael Cho went through the FounderFuel accelerator program in Montreal. Since then from running a company, with all the highs and lows that such a position entails, “it’s been like light-speed learning, the fastest I’ve ever learned.”

Naturally, he and his team want to help others looking to start a startup in 2014, by passing on their extensive knowledge as well as the knowledge of proven startup veterans. They’ve unveiled Launch This Year 2014, and 20,000 other soon-t0-be potential business founders have already signed up. BetaKit readers can sign up with a special invitation here.

Ooomf is an invite-only platform that serves as a kind of match-maker for people who need projects completed, by enlisting the services of a handpicked network of developers and designers. The startup actually launched a similar initiative last year, aptly titled “Launch This Year 2013”, which was meant to help people launch a mobile app by the end of the year.

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“What we saw a lot is that people had troubles in several different areas in business, like ‘how do I raise money?,’ ‘how do I hire people?,’ ‘how do I build a team?.'” said Cho. “So there’s all these questions that you face and there’s so much information. So what we wanted to do is create a super-curated place of all of the best tools and resources that the best people have actually referred to and used.”

One lesson is projected to come out a week until 2015, numbering 52 lessons. Each lesson will feature helpful content focused on a new subject, complete with quality tools, articles, and interviews that have helped entrepreneurs. They’ve signed on some pretty well-known curators for these lessons as well: AngelList cofounder (and Twitter and Uber investor) Naval Ravikant, KISSmetrics founder Hiten Shah, GoInstant’s Ben Yoskovitz, Bay area entrepreneur and writer Andrew Chen, and more.

The first lesson, entitled “Getting Started: Basics of Online Business” is curated by web designer and author Paul Jarvis. Other lessons planned include “Lessons in Bootstrapping” and “Building Your Product”.

Ooomf, meanwhile, has been doing quite well since I last spoke to Cho. Back in April of last year the startup relaunched to the app and mobile marketplace it is today. In a ten-month period since, the startup processed close to $2 million worth of project-based transactions. It takes a 15 percent fee from each transaction.

Launch This Year 2014, just like last year’s initiative, is completely free for users. Cho said his motivation stems from the time since he graduated FounderFuel and now, where he learned so much. For many others, that kind of experience and knowledge can be accessed so easily.

“I’m just trying to go back to that time in a really effective way and I’m trying to answer all of those questions in an efficient way that’s easy to grasp,” he said. “We’re not going to overload you with tons of information, you’re going to get one thing a week, it’s very simple to understand and there’s going to be a key take away from everything.”

It won’t be easy, and people won’t have their hand held for them. “It’s going to be beautiful and it’s going to work as a product, but to define your success and what you want it to be, you’ll be putting some work into that and we just wanted to show you a guide. Here’s sort of your compass that you can follow,” said Cho.

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