Startup Competitors

In this episode, I talk with Christina York, founder and CEO of SpellBound, which sses augmented reality to improve the patient experience for children in hospitals. Spellbound makes the hospital experience less scary for patients, and it motivates them to participate in treatment and recovery. Christina shares ways in which a hospital delivers the products in small and large scale ways.

They have been in the market for 2 years, and currently, have about 25 hospitals around the globe using Spellbound. They do not currently sell in international markets, but have donated it or had hospitals try it out in those countries in order to learn more about those markets, with the plan to go international in three years. The current focus of Spellbound is pediatrics and any hospital that serves children. Within 3-4 years, the plan is to expand the technology to serve adults and go beyond the hospital to clinics and home health care.

Topics In This Episode:

Taking a failed idea and reinventing it to create Spellbound

How the technology is used in different departments within a hospital

Implementation within a hospital

Current status of Spellbound

Methods and importance of obtaining quantifiable data

Finding talent to work on and develop the technology

How to prioritize time spent working in the business, versus on the business

Contact Info:

Website: spellboundar.com

Social Media: spellboundar

[email protected]

In this episode, I talk with Kristen Cooper, founder and CEO of StartUp Ladies, a for-profit membership organization whose purpose is to increase the number of women who are starting up and scaling businesses. They do that by providing educational programs and creating a community for the next wave of startup investors: teaching them how to invest and connecting them to women and minority-owned businesses

Kristen shares the founding story of how she created a community of like-minded women who wanted to learn from each other. She made a list of the topics she wanted to learn more about and a list of people within that community that could teach on that topic. She shares the process of entrepreneurs and future investors use the online platform to ensure the funders are taking the necessary learning sessions in order to be prepared for conversations with investors.

Topics In This Episode:

How to create community in your space

Growing that community into a for-profit organization

The need for structure, consistency, and accountability

Importance of mental wellness for entrepreneurs

How to expand a physical community to other physical spaces

The kind of people you should have on your team in order to grow and expand

Missed opportunities for StartUp Ladies

Contact Info:

Visit the website: thestartupladies.org
Send me an email: [email protected]

In this episode, I talk with Mike Preuss, the founder, and CEO of Visible, a tool that helps privately held companies report data to their investors and provide qualitative updates alongside that data. Visible takes data from many different systems you use for your business and puts that into one central place for companies to visualize that data and provide updates to send to investors. One of their core product principles is that they did not want to create another app or system in which you could access data. Instead, they created a product in which anything you can build in Visible, can be rendered directly in the inbox of whoever is receiving it.

Mike shares how Visible is being used in ways that were never envisioned by the founders, but that has helped them grow the product out in ways that make them more versatile. They also use customer feedback and requests to grow new features, as well as enter new global markets. He discusses the differentiation between Visible and their competitors, and how they plan to focus in on a particular type of customer in regards to who they target in the market.

Topics In This Episode:

Monitoring competitors in the area of their services, blog content, and web traffic

Updating customer experience based on feedback

Global growth and integration

Referrals versus marketing

Content creation strategies

Updating the company mission and values

Product development and roadmap

QUOTE: Companies that are reporting data to their investors are much more likely to get follow-on funding are much more likely to have successful future raises, and we want to make sure we build tools that keep that in mind.

Contact Info:
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @mikepreuss

In this episode, I speak with Santiago Jaramillo, CEO and Co-Founder of Emplify, a tool used to give a single metric to understand the hearts and minds of their people, and how engaged they are at work. In the early stages, Emplify began as a tool within a suite of other tools, and during a time of great growth, there were many changes within the company. By utilizing their own service, they could see feedback that employee engagement had dropped over 50 percentile points. Once they received that feedback, they got specific insights on how to improve the engagement, and the score went back up. From that experience alone, the team at Emplify understood the importance of this service, and decided to go all in with it.

Emplify currently has about 65 full time employees, and just raised $7.5 million at the end of 2018 which they plan to use to grow their service. The next level of growth that they see for their company is to determine the best way to distribute the data to mid-level managers, on a large scale. Currently, this data is mostly limited to C-Suite executives, which are not typically involved in employee engagement. Santiago also shares other growth strategies, as well as an explanation of the market overall, and how they differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Topics In This Episode:

History of the market and where it currently stands

Difference between growth equity model and venture capital

The categories of competitors they face, and how they are different from each

How to interpret the data they obtain, and the next level steps they take to add value for their customers with that data

How to hone in on your customer base and understand them, in order to best market your service to them

Geo-centric targeting and the power of word of mouth

Online versus offline marketing strategies

To get in touch with Santiago:

Emplify.com

Twitter: @santiagojara

Book: Agile Engagement: How to Drive Lasting Results by Cultivating a Flexible, Responsive, and Collaborative Culture

In this episode, I chat with Ganesh Gandhieswaran, cofounder and CEO of ConverSight.AI. You can learn more about ConverSight.ai at: www.conversight.ai.

In this episode, I chat with Jennifer Williams, cofounder and Chief Cuddle Officer at Cuddle Clones. You can learn more about Cuddle Clones here: https://cuddleclones.com/

In this episode, I chat with Alli Truttmann, founder and CEO of Wicked Sheets. You can learn more about Wicked Sheets here: https://wickedsheets.com/