Mr. Wall via Twitter

Say you're a small business trying to figure out whether a deal with Groupon or ad on Yelp will bring customers to your door. That already-tricky marketing decision gets more complicated when you factor in fragmentation among daily deals sites and all the other publishers that could potentially host your ad. If you wanted, however, you could pay a New York-based startup called Signpost $99 a month to make the decision between a Google Offer, Living Social, or ad on Yelp for you based on the type of traffic you're trying to drive to your business. "Our quick pitch is we want to be a one stop marketing platform for local business," Signpost CEO and cofounder Stuart Wall told Betabeat.

Since late last year, Signpost has already signed up 3,500 small businesses, 93 percent of which renew with the service each month, said Mr. Wall. That might explain why Spark Capital just signed on to lead the startup's $3.75 million Series A round. Signpost had already raised $1.25 million in seed financing from Spark and Google Ventures back in 2010.

According to Mr. Wall, Signpost is also leaving the option of a $1 million follow-on round on the table from existing investors who have expressed interest, although no decision has yet been made. Mr. Wall said he's in a good position because Signpost works off the revenue it generates rather than investment, which will be used, in part, to boost its sales team. "The cost for us to acquire a customer, versus expected value is over 5.5 multiple from sales people," he said. "But you need a little bit of capital to fund that growth."

As part of the announcement, Signpost revealed that it will be bringing on Christopher DePatria, former head of sales at AOL’s Patch, to lead its sales force.

Of course, Signpost isn't the only New York startup going after online marketing for small businesses. Yext and Yodle, where Mr. DePatricia once worked, also help businesses show up in local search results and enhance their listings. But Mr. Wall says Signpost's special sauce is its focus on driving purchases over brand awareness. "Our view is brand advertising might make sense for Pepsi," said Mr. Wall. But for small businesses, they focus on offering deals to drive sales in the acquisition campaigns for volume, like a 50 percent off coupon on Google Offers, one of Signpost's 1,200 publishing partners, as well as utilization campaigns for filling slow periods or filling in a certain time of day. In the case of one Lasik eye surgeon, Mr. Wall says Signpost was able to generate $20,000 in sales in a week.

"There are so many platforms out there that to be on to be effective, it’s nearly impossible to do it by yourself," said Mr. Wall, who added that Signpost "white labels" content to make the experience seamless.

As for all those open sales positions, Mr. Wall said Signpost aggressively goes after hiring "passive candidates" among New York's young and hungry. So, in other words, poaching? "We tend not to do it with other startups as a rule," said Mr. Wall. Instead Signpost goes after, "Other companies where we don’t think it will hurt too much." Like AOL? "I don’t know if I feel like mentioning specific companies," he demurred.

Hook 'em! | U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Wikipedia)

HILL COUNTRY. Made in NY: Austin will celebrate New York based tech startups at South by Southwest on March 11 from 6 p.m. to 12 a.m. at the Fast Company Grill at Cedar Door in the Texas Capital. The event will be hosted by Gust, and the New York Tech Meetup and will be attended by over 250 NYC based startups. RSVP here. You might even be able to get there in a real NYC yellow taxi.

GroupMe is also heading to Austin for SXSW to keep you connected to your fellow conference-goers. Start a group on the GroupMe SXSW landing page and get exclusive updates, news and a chance to win prizes.

Be sure to RSVP for the GroupMe Major Rager end-of-the-weekend celebration at Cedar Street Courtyard featuring DJ sets from the likes of COMA and Nancy Whang of LCD Soundsystem.

Pixable is going to SXSW with a special section dedicated to the interactive conference based on what's happening, where you should be and what's most popular "#SXSW Live Feed" is a real time stream of all #SXSW tagged photos on Instagram and Twitter and "#SXSW Popular" is a showcase of the most shared and liked pics.

PIIIIIING. Sonar, the mobile app that shows hidden connections to the people around you based on the information you publicly post online, is going to SXSW with an Android App in beta. And that's not all—new features are also live including a people tab, to show users whose around no matter what the venue may be, Facebook and Twitter location data integration to show more people with more context and the entire app has been reengineered under the hood for improved speed and power.

GIRLS. GirlDevelopIt now has over 2,300 members and will be on hand at SXSW celebrating women in tech with a totally unofficial All Girl* Dev Brunch. The nerdettes also announced that classes in San Francisco are open for enrollment.

*Boys allowed.

ISPs 4 U AND ME. KeyWifi, the disruptive little startup spearheading the effort to bring Internet access to all by sharing hotspots, came out on top at the Silicon Alley Battlefield event at the New York Entrepreneurs Business Network. Betabeat believes uninhibited access to information is a good thing, so it's nice to see KeyWifi win with a refined pitch after struggling to connect with judges at last month's Common Pitch.

TESTING 1-2-3. After over a year of beta testing, Broadcastr 2.0 is available in the iOS app store and in the Android Market. Broadcastr allows users to " find memories, insights, and enriching information about eclectic and everyday places on every continent on Earth." New features include imprived filtering options, a gallery view, curated story collections and more intuitive map browsing.

ADITUDE. Solve Media heard our prayers and has come up with a way around 30 second ads for online videos that are sometimes only half that length. With Solve Media's solution, viewers will be able to type a sponsor's message in a text box to bypass the commercial. Users will be less frustrated and sponsors will know that their message was heard instead of playing to nobody while the intended target is making a sandwich.

CHA-CHING. Covestor, an investment management company that basically lets users see the transactions of pro traders and copy their moves, is joining forces with SlashDeclare, a cooperative movement of financial services companies calling for fairness and transparency in financial markets.

Covestor’s Next Invest, a virtual conference, is set for March 20 and 21 where Charles Lewis Sizemore, of the Sizemore Investment Letter, will talk about "using content to build a money management practice."

LIFE COACH. "It is time for you to stop stalking your exes and start living your life!" proclaims LifeGunk, a startup that touts itself as "the world's first life-management network." LifeGunk allows you to maintain schedules, take notes, log goals on your calendar, and send yourself reminders. When you accomplish one of your goals you can even give yourself a checkmark. Sort of like Google Calendar—but more patronizing. LifeGunk is currently self funded. Investors—get in while you can.

45 RPM. Turntable.fm is rolling out new features including a private chat function, improved search and a guest list so you can see how else is is jimmying to your jams. Best of all, there's a new free iPhone app—gratuitous guitar solo goes here.

MAXIMIZE. Clickable just made some big expansions to their senior leadership team as they plan to continue their rapid growth as a platform that combines search and social across Facebook, Google, Twitter, Foursquare, Bing and LinkedIn. Dave Fall joins Clickable as COO, David O. Smith as CRO, Sanjay Gupta as senior director of engineering and Brian Tucker as the VP of agency sales.

WORK FOR CHANGE. Gawker is looking for a new creative director with coding proficiency. Apply Here. Hyperpublic needs a web developer who's comfy with MongoDB, Javascript and JQuery. Throw your hat into the ring. Betaworks wants a senior backend engineer and architect for contract or full-time. Expertise in Python, Mongo and AWS is preferred. Tell 'em why it should be you. GetGlue, the social network for entertainment, has an opening for a senior product manager with 3-5 years experience and a social media presence. Apply here. Signpost, the "Google AdSense of local commerce," is on the prowl for a new publisher development manager. Strong business acumen and three years of marketing/sales experience gives you a good shot. Shoot. Work Market, a labor and HR management platform, backed by Union Square Ventures, is looking for a back-end Java developer, operations engineer, community manager and many other positions. Check 'em out here. Foursquare has internships for young, budding techies on the software engineering and community fronts. They've also got more than a few job openings. Check it all out here. And last but not least, Boxee wants to pay an intern on their product team. If you're based in NYC apply here.

GENERAL ASSEMBLY DEMO NIGHT. Is tonight (and $10, why?)

NEW WORK CITY. Hit 100 members.

WEWORK LABS. Has an important announcement to make tonight about the future of the coworking space. (We hear it's good news.)

PARTIES PARTIES. Yext holiday party, December 12 at The Standard.

HIRING. Signpost seeks a chief miscellaneous officer, a publisher and channel relationships manager and a business development associate. Sageworks Capital, an interesting breed of investment firm, seeks a software developer and a biz dev associate. "Sageworks Capital’s cloud-based platform allows borrowers to increase their pool of prospective lenders from beyond traditional banks to include private and institutional investors. Sageworks Capital is a newly-formed subsidiary of Sageworks, Inc. and is based in New York City."

JUST SAYING HI. "I recently founded InsideDigs.com, a free peer-to-peer community for apartment hunters looking for rental information on apartments before they hit the market. The site launched in December 2010 for New York City and already has more than 2700 members."

FASHIONABLE CAPITAL. "FashInvest, Ltd., has released its list of companies that will be presenting at its Second Annual Capital Conference on Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.  After receiving a record amount of applications from companies vying to present at this year’s conference, the selection committee has carefully chosen a select group of innovative companies from the Fashion, Fashion Tech, Retail and Branded Goods consumer sectors to present their distinctive opportunities to an audience of venture capital, private equity, institutional and individual angel investors." The list of companies is here.