The Most Overused Startup Pitch Becomes A Super Rare Cards Against Humanity Card

“Let me tell you about my new startup. It’s basically [some popular startup] but for [some completely unrelated thing].”

If you’ve ever been to any startup event, you’ve probably heard it 14 thousand times.

Now it’s a Cards Against Humanity card. The bad news? You’ll probably never see the card in person, because it’s crazy rare.

In case you’ve somehow managed to go this long without playing it, Cards Against Humanity is a self-declared “party game for horrible people.” It began as a humble Kickstarter campaign, only to find a cult following that helped explode the game into a multi-million dollar company. Take the game Apples To Apples, boil it down to its most ridiculously offensive form, and ta-da! Cards Against Humanity.

The game and all four of its expansions have managed to absolutely dominate Amazon’s “Toys & Games” ranks for two years now.

At a panel at the PAX East conference this past weekend, the team behind the game turned to the audience for suggestions for new cards. Many of the ideas were tossed out on the spot; others were worked into something better; some became instant favorites.

At the end of the panel, though, there was a surprise twist: the ten best suggestions of the day were being turned into actual cards… but only for the few hundred people in attendance. An order was sent off to the company in New England that prints their cards before the panel had even wrapped, and each attendee was given a token (hidden under the seat) to let them pick up their set the next day.

Amongst those picked was the all-too-common pitch:

“Let me tell you about my new startup. It’s basically ___________, but for _________.”

Alas, since this card debuted in a way that intentionally makes it rare, it might not ever make its way into an official deck. And since only a few hundred sets were printed, most people will probably never actually see the card in person. You could always use one of the provided blank cards to make your own, but that’s not quite as neat. (“Let me tell you about my startup. It’s like CafePress, but for printing decent-looking custom Cards Against Humanity cards.”)

Other cards picked for printing during the panel include the white cards “What The Rock was really cooking”, “Stepping on a god damn friggin’ LEGO.”, “A floor that is literally made of lava.” and a few others that I probably shouldn’t print on TechCrunch.

Sets from the panel are (of course) already popping up on eBay for around 250 bucks a pop.

Freelancer Marketplace Ooomf Becomes Crew, Grabs $2.1 Million

Ooomf, the one-time app discovery startup which last year relaunched as a freelancer marketplace to connect mobile and web developers with projects that fit their skill set, is now changing its name to Crew, and announcing new funding. The company has raised an additional $2.1 million in a new round led by Fred Destin of Atlas Venture, investors in other marketplaces like Moo.com, Creative Market, CustomMade, and AngelList.

Also participating were Naval Ravikant, founder of AngelList; Real Ventures; iNovia Capital; Boldstart Venture Capital and others.

Before starting Crew, the founding team were independent developers and designers themselves, which is why their shift to this type of business made sense. Plus, as co-founder Mikael Cho explained last year, helping companies build quality apps is really the first and most important piece to app discoverability, anyway.

As of a year ago, Crew (then Ooomf), had burned through half of its earlier $500,000 in funding as it shifted its focus to the freelancer marketplace. The team went “super lean,” says Cho, and began connecting its creatives to temporary gigs using simple tools, like a Wufoo form and Mailchimp newsletter.

Though there are several other freelancer marketplaces, including services like Elance (now merged with oDesk) or Freelancer.com, for instance, what makes Crew different is its high bar in vetting quality developers and designers. Currently, there are 350 creatives available through Crew, and Cho says they’re only accepting around 1 in 20 applicants.

“In order to be accepted, you must have a personal portfolio, three examples of live projects, and what you’ve done on each project,” he explains. “For example, if you’re applying as a mobile developer or designer, you must have worked on an app that’s 4 stars or better and in the App Store.”

Mobile developers and designers are heavily requested on Crew, in fact, as around 60% of the projects on its site are mobile. Generally, these fall into two categories: those with websites who are trying to go mobile, and those with a native app on one platform who are trying to build for another (e.g. iOS app needing an Android version.)

In addition to vetting the talent, the projects themselves are vetted for quality, too, in order to make the line up of work appealing to the developers and designers using Crew. Today, the average project budget is about $8,000, which is around 10 times the size of many competitors, Cho claims. That’s because not only are businesses using the service paying higher for quality work, they’re also often longer-term projects – like building a mobile app from scratch – that can stretch out over a couple of months.

Shortly after launching the marketplace last year, the team had around $120,000 worth of projects on its site, but as of today the company has matched over $3 million in paid projects. Now growing at 30% month-over-month, Crew has signed up developers and designers who have worked on apps like Path, Mailbox, and who have done work for Facebook and Google. On the customer side, companies like Eventbrite, IDEO and others the company can’t disclose due to NDA’s, have used its service to find talent.

The company takes a 15% fee to generate revenue, and of its approved projects on the site, around 50% of those are approved and filled right away.

Meanwhile, Crew has a member waiting list of around 4,000, but is waiting for there to be enough work in the pipeline to invite others in. Quality Android developers would probably have a good shot, though. “We’ve noticed it’s pretty hard to find the right fit sometimes – with Android, we’ve seen a lot in terms of both development and design,” says Cho.

Going forward, the new funding gives the company another 18 months in runway, and will allow it to double its team of 4 to 8. Crew’s next big focus will be on automating its matching technology – something which currently requires more of a human touch, but as its collection of data grows, could be done more algorithmically.

And yes, Crew will be going mobile itself, but likely not until year-end.

When Your Carrier Becomes Your Bank

I write to you from my vacation, meaning, this time, the dusty port town of Kaolack in sunny Senegal. (What, your vacations don’t involve long hours spent riding in–or, sometimes, on–overcrowded West African inter-city public transit? Weirdo.)

The day I arrived I picked up an Orange SIM card, which cost me 1000 francs (US $2) and came with 1000 francs of credit, and then got my phone’s APN configured for some sweet 3G Internet. So far so standard, nowadays. But then my cab driver kind of blew my mind.

I apologize for getting all Thomas Friedman on you here. But still. I mean, I knew mobile money was big-verging-on-ubiquitous in East Africa, though M-Pesa–which, incidentally, has just expanded into Europe–but I hadn’t realized that it has grown so commonplace here in the West that it is used by cab drivers at gas stations. You can use “Orange Money” for both payments and transfers, here in Senegal, and even internationally to Mali and Burkina Faso.

In fact, across the developing world, where the vast majority of the population doesn’t have bank accounts per se, mobile-phone carriers have, or will, basically become their nations’ dominant banks. Oh, they’re not lending money–yet–but if you allow your customers to withdraw, deposit, pay, and transfer money, then you have basically become, for most intents and purposes, a retail bank. I don’t know how I didn’t notice until now that while software was eating the world it incidentally already pretty much ate most retail banking across a huge swathe of Earth.

Unfortunately, its next meal here may be slow to arrive.

The smartphone revolution is already en route, of course. On Tuesday I took a sept-place from Dakar to Saint-Louis; one driver and seven passengers crowded into an ancient Peugeot station wagon for five hours, upper-tier public transit but public transit nonetheless. The woman to my left kept tapping at her dual-SIM Samsung Galace SQ; the man in front of me had a T-Mobile branded Galaxy S, presumably secondhand from some European nation. (T-Mobile isn’t active here.)

But new phones remain pricey — the cheapest Orange offered was the Galaxy Pocket, for US$120–and worst yet, data is crazy-expensive. I am currently paying Orange twice as much per megabyte than I pay T-Mobile back in the USA, where I’m not on an unlimited plan. (By contrast, in India three years ago, 1GB cost me $1.) Alicia Levine recently wrote a terrific piece on how Facebook and Google are fighting for the next five billion customers both with their phone/balloon Internet plans and their “Facebook Zero” and “Google Zero” zero-cost-to-access-our-site initiatives. Advantage Facebook, here and now, as per this screen shot from my Nexus 4:

but as much as I’m sure they’d love to have everyone on the planet walled within their garden, the Internet isn’t particularly useful if its free content consists entirely of Facebook — and/or Google, Wikipedia, Twitter — and everything else remains oppressively expensive. In the long run, now that the carriers here are also the banks, it’s probably to their own benefit to cut data access costs and reap the long-term economic rewards. Let’s hope they see that too.

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Image credit: yours truly, Flickr.

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Irrelevant footnote: I have now posted to TechCrunch from no fewer than a dozen different nations, mapped here via World66. (Canada, USA, the UK, France, Turkey, Senegal, Ethiopia, Kenya, India, Myanmar, Cambodia, the Philippines.) Do I win a prize? I bet John Biggs has me beat cold, though.