I founded H.ME to explore the future of shared living in cities. I built a world class team, raised over $1M from a Fortune 500 Company, and spent 2+ years leading the development of cutting-edge physical and digital products.
Once I single-handily built a peer-to-peer supper sharing platform from scratch. In 8 weeks I designed the platform and learned Ruby on Rails to engineer it. It operated for 2 years before eventually being acquired.
I was hired as a Creative Director for a user acquisition platform, used by millions, to update their brand. What they really needed was a new platform and a team to build it. I helped acquire the team and together we updated the brand and built the new platform.
I learned agile product design and development while engineering a social gifting app and an e-commerce platform. My foray into technology was building web-based tools to help the City of San Francisco and the State of California manage communications for multiple large scale public works projects.
Sometimes I consult with ad agencies to help brands like Google, Starbucks and Jay-z connect with their communities by creatively leveraging technology.
Read more on LinkedIn...
I love to help badass entrepreneurs achieve their goals while I work towards mine. If you think I can help you or anyone in your network feel free to email me at iam@scottblew.com.
Urban living can be isolating, overpriced and disconnected from the local culture. H.ME was a startup venture with the mission to develop more affordable and social housing. We secured a strategic partnership with Hyatt Hotels, raised $1.3M, built an executive advisory board and a multiple disciplinary team with experience in real estate development, architecture, technology, hospitality, and housing.
Together we spent 3 years researching, designing, prototyping and testing both digital and physical products. Our efforts produced 2 entirely new products from the ground up. We made it in BuzzFeed and I was fortunate enough to contribute to the 2016 ULI Spring Meeting panel on "Development Opportunities in Share Space".
After extensive R&D we evolved our original concept and developed Collide. A membership based community that offers flexible living, working and travel accommodations for people looking to expand their social and professional networks. Each floor of a Collide development was a unique community made up of private guest rooms with ensuite bathrooms, a shared gourmet kitchen, coworking space, enclosed gathering room and entertainment area.
The membership provided access to the physical and digital community via the Collide app. The app was designed to allow members to book a room based on realtime social metrics of a community. Want to stay in a community of designers or digital nomads? Once on site, members could self check-in and access the community host, events, and member profiles.
C Suites was the second, and final, evolution or our product. While developing Collide we discovered a unique opportunity in corporate travel. We learned, it is inefficient, stressful and not designed for groups. C Suites combined lodging, work and wellness spaces to create high-functioning, inherently collaborative and cost effective accommodations for mobile workforces. In addition to adaptable spaces, C Suites provided services and technologies that reduce isolation and simplify the unnecessary rituals of modern business travel.
Our business model allowed us to offer a better service and private white label accommodations for what companies were already spending. Google, Apple, Deloitte and the GSA all agreed that C Suites was an ideal solution for their travel accommodations and corporate housing needs. You can learn more about the concept here.
View the retrospective here.
Responsible for the vision, product offering, overall design and user experience. Also responsible for developing, prototyping, and testing all physical and digital products.
SupperShare is a peer-to-peer platform that connects hosts with guests who want to experience local food. The platform allows hosts to share meals at their homes and enables guests to contribute to the cost of the meal. For every meal served a dollar is donated to a cause of the host's choosing.
Responsible for the architecture, design and development of the entire SupperShare product from the ground up. The platform utilized Ruby on Rails with Stripe integration and allowed users to create accounts, list their kitchens, manage and attend suppers, manage guests and charity partners, message each other, and send and receive donations.
LaunchRock is a website builder platform dedicated to early customer acquisition. The platform helps startups design, deploy and share viral pre-launch pages that help them expand their user base quickly and organically. The platform allows users to create accounts, design, build and preview, both web and mobile optimized, pre-launch pages and then easily deploy and share them.
Responsible for the initial redesign of Launchrock 2.0 and owned all front-end development for the ground up rebuild, including all launch page themes, as well as additional crowdfunding products.
Giftiki was a collaborative gifting platform powered by micro-donations that made group gifting fun and easy. The platform allowed users to connect via Facebook to create an account where they could send and receive payments as gifts, track their progress and easily share within their network. Additionally, the MyWant product allowed users to create stand alone pages that friends could help fund the purchase of a specific wish list item.
We also created a viral guerrilla marketing campaign to crowdfund our SXSW Decentralized Dance Party using Giftiki’s MyWant. It was so "insanely fun" that Business Insider wrote about it.
Responsible for front-end development. Worked with an amazing team of engineers to continuously develop and deploy changes to the platform as well as developing entirely new products.
View the case study here.
Janum was an e-commerce platform with the mission to bring transparency to commerce, pride to production, and to empower consumers to make informed purchasing decisions. The platform showed consumers how each product was made, who made it, what was in it, and its environmental impact.
Responsible for designing and developing the entire, highly visual and media rich, Janum platform which allowed us to list and sell multiple goods. Also responsible for copywriting, marketing and video production.
View the archived site here.
Words Pictures Ideas was a communications company that helped non-profit and for-profit initiatives with integrated marketing solutions for public systems, transportation, healthcare, education, communities, safety and the arts. Projects included campaigns for SF Park and The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
Responsible for the web design, development and management of many highly customized Content Management Systems.
"Over the past year, I have had the pleasure of working with Scott as an advisor to his business ventures. He has impressed me with his business savvy, creativity and intuitive approach to creating value. Scott fuses digital and physical innovation to generate compelling solutions for customers.
One of Scott’s key strengths is his ability to ask the right questions, probe deeply and iterate aggressively. He relishes challenging the status quo, and seeks to understand how service offerings could be better. In the hospitality sector, Scott envisioned cost-effectively developing lodgings that offer a stronger sense of community and engagement between guests, aimed initially at Millennial generation, based on the insight that these consumers were dissatisfied with existing offerings. As the concept evolved, Scott tapped into the fact that there was a larger, underserved business traveler market that could benefit from this type of approach. Scott then synthesized the best aspects of using physical space to create community and collaboration with the core need for privacy and efficiency desired by seasoned business travelers. Critically, Scott did not allow the physical limitations of buildings constrict the idea: he creatively solved for combining the essential need for privacy with open common areas, basically allowing the best of both worlds. Scott’s digital savvy also came heavily into play, as he looked to extend the community spirit and ease-of-use with an app-based tool to plan, book and pay for stays that brought the experience into the customer’s hand.
Without question, Scott has the skills needed to drive business innovation and success. He is a holistic thinker who can solve complex problems by boiling them down to exactly what matters most. He seeks and responds well to feedback, and practices continuous improvement. Importantly, Scott also has strong resiliency, and does not allow set-backs to deter his vision.
I will look forward to watching Scott blaze a successful path!"
"Scott’s a joyous genius. And by that I mean he’s whipsmart and a prize-worthy pleasure to work with. He knows so much about so much and shares it all, welcoming you fully into the idea so together you can explore it. And just as important, he’s equally open-armed to everyone’s thoughts and views and hopes and fears. I came on board to help imagine the story of Scott's new venture, H.ME, and right away, his humanity ruled. There was no pretense in the room, only utter goodness and utterly good collaboration. The positivity never flagged, and the work just kept getting better and better. Just like you want it to. Scott, please bring me along on your next adventure."
"After serving as an advisor to Scott and his team at H.ME for over a year I gained a great appreciation for his abilities on many levels. He is a great combination of intelligence, curiosity, openness to new experience, and work ethic.
Scott has the advantage of design education that allows him to rapidly see human behavior patterns and then translate them into opportunities for consideration.
Beyond, design, Scott combines rapid learning ability with a listening and knowledge seeking approach. He was able to understand, probe, and negotiate on multiple levels including operational issues, capital strategies, and legal issues. Scott is also pro-active, he listens, debates, reflects and then decides. He keeps things moving and keeps his field of view wide.
Scott can keep the necessary nucleus of an idea intact. Agile environments can sometimes be a balance between rapidity and quality. Compromise can be valuable but done poorly can water down the most exciting parts of an initiative. I was very impressed at how Scott could push to achieve the sublime while considering numerous alternatives and maintaining speed.
Scott truly drove an amazing journey at H.ME. I would partner with him again and know he will be successful at whatever opportunity he applies himself."
"Scott and I collaborated on the Collide and C-Suites lodging concepts at H.ME, where Scott was founder and CEO. Scott’s leadership shines bright in his collaborative process of defining a vision, communicating that in an inspiring way, and as he steadfastly steers the teams toward its vision in the face of challenges. A rare trait among leaders, Scott stands his ground when it comes to core principles, but takes care in considering others’ point of view and adjusts when necessary.
At the heart of what makes Scott thrive is his curiosity. His curiosity enables him to quickly dive deeply into what may have previously been an uncharted territory for him. The best example is his ability to quickly grasp the economic and financial concepts needed to understand the viability of his visions. Scott doesn’t have a background in finance, but I never had to explain a new concept to him twice. Without fail, there is nothing Scott couldn’t grasp fluently after he asks all the right questions.
The time I worked with Scott was a time of personal and interpersonal growth. He doesn’t see the pursuit of greatness as a path one merely attempts alone, but one that is best pursued alongside like minded individuals who make each other greater. Scott and I often had meaningful conversations that expanded the possibilities for abundance beyond the superficiality of the task-at-hand. I hope Scott and I have the opportunity to team-up again, and know success will follow him."
"Scott is a highly passionate and creative thinker who is always seeking to improve an experience or product. His intuition and knowledge give Scott the ability to quickly adjust his ideas and elevate his understanding of a problem to create a better solution. He has the personality to give directions but also take them. As the CEO of H.ME, Scott quickly became a natural leader and was able to coordinate with multiple teams and projects in parallel while still building the company. He is very forthright and listens to all ideas before making any decisions. He gives everything he has towards an idea a team is pursuing and is eager to always innovate."
"Scott, without doubt is one of the most talented people I’ve ever had the privilege to work with. We previously teamed up together in Chicago at H.ME developing a unique hybrid hotel/housing product. While there, he lead our diversely talented team by example - graciously sharing his endless knowledge and passion for technology, innovation, and design in collaboration with absolute devotion to ‘make it right’ all combined with his great sense of compassion. It’s safe to say those superior qualities and his tireless dedication translated into motivation for everyone involved in all facets of our work. Scott instinctively has abilities to extract solutions from any challenge in unprecedented fashion - getting it done and doing so with contagious enthusiasm. I am incredibly grateful for the experience I had working with him. Scott is everything that defines a true entrepreneur and naturally continues to be an inspiration for me."