SANDUSKY, Ohio -- It's been said buying a guitar should be a lot like buying a coat. Pick one that fits your body and your personality.

That desire drives Colby Featherbottom's Custom Sound Machines, the winner of the 2014 Business Pitch Competition of COSE, the Council on Smaller Enterprises.

The Parma custom guitar maker was awarded $20,000 to develop a business model that rests, in part, on the eccentricities of guitar enthusiasts.

"We view the musician as a Jedi who has to have their own light sabre," company founder Ryan Schoeneman told me last year, when I met him at the Northeast Ohio Entrepreneurship Expo. "You draw it, we'll use robots to bring it to life."



Schoeneman is as interesting as his products. He's a doctoral candidate in ecology at Kent State University. Applying aquatic engineering to musicology, he and a small staff use CNC robotics to carve flattop, body shape guitars from wood.

They offer a 72-hour turnaround and a test run in friends' bands.

The guitars start at $1,250. Customers break out about evenly between "performance guitarists" with live gigs and collectors, he told me Monday. He's said he's hustling to keep up with orders.



The pitch contest kicked off COSE's annual Small Business Convention, held last week at Kalahari Resorts and Convention Center in Sandusky. Four young companies went home with $40,000 in prize money.

In addition to Colby Featherbottom, the winners included:

Brewnuts. Shelley Fasulko's Tremont doughnut shop, which combines the Cleveland staples of craft beer and donuts, won the Second Place award and $10,000. Her handmade doughnuts don't starve for attention. In May, USA Today named Brewnuts one of the 10 best doughnut shops in the USA.

Consult Mango. A pair of Case Western Reserve University fraternity brothers, Eric Vennaro and Kevin Wang, developed this online application designed to help university's recruit international students. Mango emerged from FlashStarts' accelerator in August and now has an additional $5,000, having tied for Third Place, to continue building the business.

The Digital Mosaic. Natalie Bauman's storytelling app is designed to help people tell their stories in short, bite-sized video clips using their smartphone. It's being used in a variety of settings, including assisted living facilities, to capture and preserve stories and memories. Bauman, a Bad Girl Ventures finalist this spring, tied for Third Place and took home $5,000.

Electrical charges strike the light sabre of Ian Charnas during a rehearsal of the Tesla Orchestra. Charnas will speak at TechPop.

TechPop? TechPint brings its popular networking series to campus

The reach of TechPint, a series of networking mixers for startup enthusiasts, has so far been restricted to people above the drinking age. As its name suggests, TechPint blends tech talk and beer.

That's going to change for one night, November 11, when Paul McAvinchey and his organizers bring the scene to campus.

The inaugural TechPop will unfold in the Jolly Scholar at Case Western Reserve University beginning at 6 p.m.

While the beverages will be soft, everything else is big league. Featured speakers include Ian Charnas, the manager of thinkbox, the campus' ever-expanding maker space, and creator of such art-tech spectacle as the Tesla Orchestra.

Aspiring entrepreneurs will also hear from Oleg Fridman, a CWRU graduate who co-founded ONOSYS, an online ordering company purchased by LivingSocial in 2012 and headquartered in the Warehouse District.

Admission to TechPop is free for students, $15 for everyone else. Learn more at www.techpint.org.