If you’ve ever bought a home—you’re probably glad you’re no longer buying a home. It’s one of those activities that’s right up there with doing your taxes. And on top of the hassles are the expenses. Those commissions and fees can really add up, making it necessary to live in a house for years before its value materializes.

Johnny Hanna felt these frustrations personally when buying and selling homes. “It was so confusing...what should be part of the American dream was such a nightmare.” So he founded Homie, a technology company that streamlines real estate transactions to save customers time and money.

On this edition of UpTech Report, Johnny outlines the many problems his startup needed to solve, and how he came to understand how technology was only a part of the solution.

When a person comes into a field with an outside mindset, it can sometimes bring a new perspective on what is possible. This was the case with Gil Allouche, a software engineer working as a marketer. As he spent countless hours identifying targets, testing campaigns, and converting leads, he came to realize that much of the work could be automated. 

He founded Metadata to make it happen. It took some learning, though, to get the funding he needed. “I can just walk through my path and it will be all the things you should not do,” he says. But eventually he got it right, and Metadata is now helping major brands bring in millions in sales. In this edition of Founders Journey, Gil talks more about those things he shouldn’t have done and how he persevered.

There are plenty of items around the house we need daily—toothpaste, tissues, vitamins, soap. Or maybe we need them monthly. Or bimonthly. And that’s the problem for both consumers and sellers. Buying as we need can be a pain, but subscription services often give us too much or too little and at the wrong times. 

Kim Stiefel discovered this when she started her own subscription service. But instead of just solving the problem for herself, she decided to solve it for everyone. The result was Repeat, a company that offers an e-commerce platform designed to turn one-time buyers into repeat customers. 

In this edition of UpTech Report, Kim talks about how she came to identify this particular problem in the way we buy and sell certain products, and the technology she’s developed to give consumers a more reliable purchasing experience, while helping companies retain their customers.

Lindsay Tjepkema has drawn a straight line from A to B—to B2B. She’s spent her entire career in marketing. She has a Master’s degree in Integrated Marketing and has spent over fifteen years in B2B marketing, including leading the marketing teams at enterprise SaaS companies.   

It was in this role she discovered a lack of resources for B2B podcasting, so she set out to co-found her own company, Casted, a decision she doesn’t regret. “It's been a wild, amazing rocket ship journey,” she says. “And I wouldn't have it any other way.”   

In this edition of Founders Journey, she discusses her decision to leave a good corporate job to start her own company, the key steps she took developing the product, and how the most important part of being a founder is getting comfortable being uncomfortable.

As it is with many industries, staying competitive in construction means bringing supplies from overseas. And importing materials may keep costs down, but it heightens risk. It’s more difficult to be at the source, verify the integrity of the manufacturing process, and there are endless possibilities for problems en route to the destination. It can be a disorganized and chaotic process. 

This is why Shane Hodgkins co-founded Matrak, a company that offers cloud-based materials and progress tracking software that allows companies to track and share information on manufacturing, shipping, installation, and defects for construction projects. 

On this edition of UpTech Report, Shane discusses the challenges of building a tech startup in a space that is historically low-tech and how it’s also created tremendous opportunities.

Lodewijk Bogaards set himself a goal—he wanted to be the CTO of a cool tech startup in ten year’s time. Only one year later, he was the co-founder and CTO of StackState, a company that gives admins full observability on their systems, enabling them to quickly identify problems.

Like all founders, he’s encountered a few problems of his own along the way, including the balancing act of developing the best product while getting it to market quickly.

In this edition of Founder's Journey, Lodewijk discusses how he approached these problems and what he’d do differently. He also explains why he believes we’re heading toward a world of perfect software code.

The typical startup story begins with a vision for a product and a search for funding. Luke Freiler’s story, on the other hand, begins with being stranded in a prison town with his ex-girlfriend and screaming at the ocean. 

Things do get better, and eventually leads to Centercode, a company that helps some of the biggest brands in the world test their software and create deeper engagement opportunities for their customer base. 

In this edition of Founders Journey, Luke tells the distressing tale of his first venture and how he turned things around to create a thriving tech startup. He also offers an example of how bringing in the right talent led to hundreds-of-thousands in income he otherwise would have missed.

We often think of startups as the manifestation of a dream—an entrepreneur has a vision, they leave their job and spend a couple of hard years scraping together the players and the product with the hopes of someday succeeding. 

But startups can also be merely a vehicle to achieve a desired result. Large companies will found smaller companies to solve particular problems or advance an initiative. And in those cases, you probably don’t want to spend years putting a team together. That’s why Chris Cera started his company, Arcweb, to offer other startups the teams they need to move quickly. 

On this edition of UpTech Report, Chris discusses the various scenarios where outsourcing your startup team makes sense, and with the health industry being an active market for Arcweb, he explains how recent laws are opening up that sector for new opportunities.

Despite that so much technology has been developed to assist marketers with the complex task of assembling and processing data for the purpose of creating the most promising leads, and ultimately the most profitable conversions, there still exists enormous hurdles for marketers.   A CRM can help you organize your leads, but it usually won’t generate them. It can help you flag engagements for follow-up, but it won’t tell you which engagements are the most important.   

These were the issues Gil Allouche wanted to solve when he started Metadata, a service that automates target identification, campaign experimentation, and actionable lead creation. It’s an ambitious undertaking, but the results speak for themselves—their technology is used by major brands to generate millions in sales.  

In this edition of UpTech Report, Gil explains the details of how this technology works, and where he sees it going. 

You sometimes hear a story from tech startup founders—when they began, they knew little about running a business, and maybe they didn’t even know a lot about technology. Anand Kulkarni is the other story. 

As a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley with NSF funding, he worked at the bleeding edge of machine learning technologies. In graduate school, he founded his first startup, which he ran for six years. He later got the idea for his next startup, Crowdbotics, a company that lets anyone create React Native and Django apps without coding in its basic form. 

On this edition of Founders Journey, Anand walks us through his career and shares his perspective on the best way to get funded, his philosophy on building the right team, and some thorough insights on how to approach marketing.