Startup Stories Tyler Hilbert

TrashBot is an intelligent waste management system utilizing AI and robotics. CleanRobotics developed TrashBot as a solution to human-error introduced during recycling. This climate friendly robot separates recyclable waste from compostable waste with a 96% accuracy, a task that humans in crowded environments struggle to do with 50% accuracy.

 

Tanner Cook recalls his story of bringing TrashBot from just an idea into a fully built out and shipped tool. The idea was born out of their customer discovery interviews where they found frustration from the fact that people in crowded areas do a poor job recycling. These discussions led to a paid pilot with a Fortune 500 company in Pittsburgh.

 

As a company, CleanRobotics runs on Lean methodically. This means they are constantly focused on verifying that their functional requirements meet the needs of their customer. During customer discovery, CleanRobotics focused on validating their customers had the money for their solution, answering the question of where the money was coming from, and understanding what was going wrong that justified the customers paying for a solution.

 

At its core, TrashBot is a high-performance sorting machine. It can factor in the context of where it is to help improve the sorting performance.

 

Tanner leaves us with the final advice “make sure you’re building a solution to a problem instead of just building”

Jacob Bozarth is the founder of Resound, a podcast editing platform that automates the production process using AI. Resound was founded out of Jacob’s previous company, Resonate, after he identified the problem of long editing time decreasing the number of people who see their podcast past the first couple episodes. “Edit your podcast in minutes, not hours”, says the founder who has edited podcasts for over 35,000 podcasters and 13 Apple #1 podcasts.

Jacob also gives general advice about founding a startup. “You need to distill your company down to the main problem. If you focus on too many things you’ll be stretched too far and be OK at a bunch of things instead of the best at all”, he tells us. Jacob also encourages bootstrapping your company before taking venture funding. This will make it easier to raise and give you a higher valuation.

Jacob walks us through his experience testing with his first customer. Following a good market validation process, they put in the effort to scope out pain points and needs before building, so when they launched beta they knew it was going to be something podcasters needed. Filling up his beta waitlist was easy because he attended podcasting trade shows in addition to leveraging his network in the podcasting industry he had built up at his last company.

In this episode we chat with Mario Mazzone of Keyhorse Capital, an early-stage VC investor focusing on Kentucky based companies. Mario talks about some of the verticals he’s bullish on, but says he spends more time looking at who the founders are. Some of the specific things that stand out to him are: founders with solid understanding of their industry, how well they’ve hit current KPIs, the number of users they have, how engaged the users are with their platform, how the users were acquired, if there's a technical founder and what the burn rate is. Mario tells us that it is obvious when a founder is passionate about an idea, and that’s essential to achieving success.

 

Mario mentions Xena Intelligence as a great investment he’s made. The e-commerce company was founded by Akhil Suresh Nair, who has 4x the valuation in the past year. Xena is proudly a Techstars portfolio company and has won several regional awards. Another thing that stands out about Akhil is how well he keeps his investors updated.

 

Mario wraps it up by giving advice. He says know your industry, never be afraid to ask questions, and find an idea that you’re so passionate about you don’t want to stop thinking about it to sleep.

 

Special thanks to Resound for helping with post-production audio editing.

Welcome to Story of Entrepreneurs Q&A video featuring Chloe Fan, startup co-founder of Design with Frank. In this interview, Chloe shares her invaluable insights and experiences, offering viewers a glimpse into the world of entrepreneurship and architectural design. 

Design with Frank is a simple design tool for designing a dream home. You can think of it as Sims but for your real home. Their target first customer is single family houses. Chloe Fan, founder of Design with Frank, came up with this idea due to her being an architect. She found countless people wanted to design their dream home, but didn’t have the technical skills to do so.

Ben Simmons is the CEO and Cofounder of Table Needs, a restaurant technology startup. The business is focused on increasing diversity in their community by helping restaurants reach profitability.

Being the owner of 3 restaurants, he saw that the future of restaurant tech involved a single platform. This is proven since many of his customers started off using Clover or Square but found it didn’t meet their specific needs. Table Needs started alpha testing with a brewery just down the street. He remembers fixing bugs with their system right in front of customers. Their first customer was the result of a second-degree connection. Ben tells us that the best way to get a customer is to take them on The Hero’s Journey.

In this podcast we hear about the interesting journey of scaling from the first customer to $1M ARR. Table Needs started off as a custom QR menu solution, but pivoted into point of sales when they realized this was a tough spot. Ben had to invent a new method of acquiring customers, which is calls “The Sale of 15 Minutes”, due to nuances with having and SMB focused startup. Additionally, Ben talks about being in a Flyover state and the challenges that come with fundraising outside of SF. Finally, we hear about Ben’s experience working for a startup that made it to the famous reality TV show Shark Tank. He remembers how nervous they were, literally biting their nails hoping the website wouldn’t go down when the episode aired. He reassures us it was a positive experience though, even leading to spikes in website visits when the episode re-airs.

Bens final advice is as follows: Be coachable, ask for what you need and be willing to receive feedback, be willing to do the hard things you need to do for your startup to survive.


Thanks for listening.

In this Startup Stories podcast we interview Brett Calhoun, managing director and GP at Scale VC. The early-stage venture firm based out of Colombia Missouri runs both a venture fund and a venture studio. One thing they are proud of is the amount of help they provide by getting other successful founders in the area involved in their program.

Scale VC is collaborating with the University of Missouri to create an on-campus accelerator with the money they have raised in their most recent fund. This will bring new opportunities to both students and faculty members at the university.

In this episode Brett shares what Scale VC looks for in the entrepreneurs they invest in. This list includes, but is not limited to: motivation, previous success despite difficult constraints, domain experience, technical capabilities and ability to articulate idea.

Brett also talks about his experience co-founding CharlieMike, a startup empowering veteran to be homeowners by improving mortgage loan officers closing rates. They have helped over 900 veterans purchase homes.