Hark, the Little Rock digital media startup, has launched an IndieGoGo campaign to help fund its Summer Tour 2015.
The tour is taking Hark CEO Tim Freeman and team members across the South to meet with local entrepreneurs and record their stories. Hark is seeking $5,000 to help cover travel expenses.
“We want to hit as many communities and connect with as many people as possible during August and September,” Freeman said.
The Hark team currently is in Memphis with plans to head to Nashville later this week.
The tour, announced last month, will take them to at least 13 cities across the South as they develop content for Hark’s original programming, which includes “Off Script,” a mixed media series of conversations between entrepreneurs, and “Local Ingredients,” a long-form video series telling the stories of restauranteurs in the context of community.
Tour sponsors are Ink Custom Tees and Startup Junkie Consulting of Fayetteville.
It’s been a busy summer for Hark. Since June, it’s brought on board former Windstream manager Scott Davis as CTO, launched the tour and partnered with Fayetteville’s Go Rogue podcast.
Plus, Freeman presided over Little Rock’s first TEDx event July 24 at the Ron Robinson Theater.
Freeman envisions Hark as a sort of Mashable for the entrepreneurial and creative communities of the South.
“Chalk it up to stereotypes, negative history, etc., but despite the incredible amount of reporting on emerging technology, the ‘startup economy’ and those new rock stars, the overwhelming majority of media coverage of entrepreneurship in the United States is hyper-focused on the coasts, and all but ignores the South,” Freeman says on the IndieGoGo page. “This is inexplicable, and unacceptable. There are 87 million people in the Southeast, and since 1996 those people and their efforts have consistently outpaced every region of the country not called Silicon Valley in startup creation. Well, if no one else is willing to step up to the plate to tell these stories, we’ll do it ourselves.”
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