This week’s 1 Million Cups at the Kauffman Foundation featured startups pitching a software solution for the construction industry and online investment help with 401(k) investing.

The guest panel of startup questioners consisted of Grant Gooding, CEO of Proof Positioning; Erik Wullschleger, director of LiveKC at Sporting Kansas City; and startup pitch coach Nathan Gold.

LaborChart at 1 Million Cups

Electrical contractor Ben Schultz, founder and president of LaborChart, began his presentation by explaining the struggle that operators of construction companies have with placing and managing field personnel. He said that the industry standard was to keep track of workers on either a whiteboard or a spreadsheet, both of which are “very outdated, very inefficient and very manual.”

“It’s just a constant struggle of communication,” Schultz said.

But with LaborChart’s calendar-driven software, he said, construction companies can eliminate the “avalanche and confusion” of scheduling by utilizing the cloud to set jobs for “all of your projects, all of your teams, all in one place.”

LaborChart launched in early October as a subscription service, with a sliding scale that depends on the size of the construction company.

“We’re doing well with family businesses right now,” Schultz said, because younger, second-generation members of those businesses are more receptive to LaborChart’s modern cloud solution and lobby to adopt it.

Blooom at 1 Million Cups

Next up was veteran investment and financial adviser Chris Costello, co-founder of blooom, which seeks to improve and simply 401(k) investments for the masses.

“Too many people are mismanaging 401(k)s,” Costello said.

That’s because the 88 million people investing in 401(k)s or similar retirement plans are “confused, intimidated or overwhelmed” by the process, he said, and they often leave too much of their money in money market funds earning next to nothing.

Costello’s online solution with blooom is to log into a customer’s 401(k) and extract investment data to suggest an ideal allocation of funds and offer pertinent advice. The subscription fee is $15 a month.

“And this is huge—blooom places the trades for the client,” Costello said. “We actually manage the 401(k).”

With “a couple hundred clients so far,” Costello said that blooom will dramatically ramp up to give everyone who wants it “a whole new way to 401(k).”

“To move the needle,” he said, “we really need to help millions of people.”