A New York tech start­up, Rock­The­P­ost, is aim­ing to rev­o­lu­tion­ize seed fund­ing for oth­er tech star­tups. If it proves a suc­cess, the num­ber of vacan­cies for tech prod­uct man­agers in the Big Apple could expand significantly.

Online pitch­ing to mul­ti­ple investors

Launched in Octo­ber 2010 as a dona­tion-sup­port­ed crowd­fund­ing plat­form, Rock­The­P­ost cap­i­tal­ized on the imple­men­ta­tion of the Jump­start Our Busi­ness­es Start­up Act in March to remod­el itself as an equi­ty-based site. Essen­tial­ly, it lets up-and-com­ing New York tech firms pitch live online to a huge audi­ence of accred­it­ed investors. These dig­i­tal demo days are sched­uled on a month­ly basis, giv­ing ris­ing firms access to a raft of poten­tial investors in one fell swoop.

It’s a sim­ple but poten­tial­ly trans­for­ma­tive idea, and prod­uct man­agers and oth­ers seek­ing media jobs in the city’s bur­geon­ing tech sec­tor are like­ly to be amongst the ben­e­fi­cia­ries. The first dig­i­tal demo took place on Tues­day July 30^th, and the four firms select­ed to make a pitch before the assem­bled investors had com­mend­ed them­selves by trend­ing strong­ly on the startup’s invest­ment platform.

Tuesday’s investor line­up includ­ed a mix of angel funds and ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists, amongst them Bat­tery Ven­tures, Charles Riv­er Ven­tures and First­Mark Capital.

Instead of the tra­di­tion­al method of approach­ing investors one at a time, RockThePost’s plat­form promis­es to give up-and-com­ing firms a major leg-up in one go. The startup’s co-founder and CEO, Ale­jan­dro Cre­mades, explained:

“In the offline world, it takes, on aver­age, eight months to close a seed round. Now, the fundrais­ing process is being brought online and it is being stream­lined in a way that lets entre­pre­neurs get in front of hun­dreds of investors.”

Major suc­cess­es 

Prod­uct man­agers ambi­tious for their firm’s suc­cess will prob­a­bly feel a surge of grat­i­tude. One of the tech start­up CEOs pitch­ing on Tues­day, 39-year-old Matthew Tolin, said that he’d spent a vast amount of time to date rais­ing funds for his firm wireLawyer, which is based in New York’s Meat­pack­ing Dis­trict. It usu­al­ly involves “knock­ing on doors, email­ing and going through your net­work,” he said.

He was opti­mistic that he’d raise an addi­tion­al $300,000 on Tues­day, adding, “It’s def­i­nite­ly pos­si­ble with the cal­iber of investors they have put together.”

So far, for a month­ly fee of $99, Rock­The­P­ost has helped ten NY star­tups secure $44.1 million.

This idea has got wings.