I’m at Kansas City Startup Weekend. It’s Sunday. We’re down to the wire, but we’re doing well. Presentations start in less than three hours.

The most attractive pitch I saw on Friday night was a service to connect bicycle messengers to available work.  Surely, people have messages and parcels that need to be delivered - but Kansas City (and many cities) have no bike delivery services.  Why not create a network for them?

I got together with five other dudes, and we set to work. We came up with TreadEx.org.

It’s a dispatching service for bike messengers.  Basically, we cut out the middle man.   Messengers create profiles, and “check in” when they’re available for hire.

Senders visit the site, and click the “send a package now” button.

The site sends a text message to the first available messenger, asking them to accept the mission.  Once they accept, the site sends them a phone number.

Within minutes, the customer receives a call from the messenger, and the two of them will work out the details of pickup, delivery, and pricing.

It’s simple, and it cuts out the middle man.

TreadEx. A dispatching service for bike messengers.

I am very proud of our product! I designed the look and feel of the site.  Devin designed the logo (look familiar?), and Ryan did the Ruby on Rails backend, with the help of Zyon. Joey and David have teamed up on the business development side of things to work on our rockin’ plan.

My business partner at Mixed Media, Joshua Dieker, is working on Act2Go - a phone-banking application for smart phones. It’s also an exciting product!

Startup Weekend was stimulating and exciting, and I hope to attend another one.  Good luck to everyone on future endeavors!

Karl Fundenberger