Mecca Tartt
Hello and welcome back to the Atlanta Startup Podcast. My name is Mecca Tartt and I’m your host for this episode. I am the Executive Director of Startup Runway, the leading nonprofit connecting underrepresented founders to capital, as well as to investors. I’m excited today because I have three finalists in the studio with me today, who are all recent finalists of the 17th Startup Runway showcase that took place at the beautiful Woodruff Art Center. I want to go on ahead and get into it and have each of them introduce themselves as well as their company. We’ll kick it off with Kat with Can I Recycle This. Kat, welcome.
Katherine Shayne
Thanks, Mecca. Great to be here. It was really exciting being a finalist for Startup Runway, got to connect with several investment groups, and actually learn a little bit more about where we fit in the investment space. CIRT itself is a platform, we’re aggregating data about packaging and end-of-life for materials. You can think of us as the PitchBook for sustainable packaging. We help companies along the value chain, source, and then ultimately dispose correctly of different types of materials. It was interesting being there and being able to present because we got to learn about how we might fit into this regulatory compliance space that we hadn’t explored yet with investors. It was a really great experience.
Mecca Tartt
Thank you so much, Kat. Moving on to Anthony with Blooksy. Welcome, Anthony.
Anthony Joiner
Hello. Thank you, Mecca, for hosting this. My name is Anthony Joiner. I’m the founder of Blooksy. Blooksy is a software-as-a-service platform that helps creatives and industry experts write books. It helps scholars write academic articles and research papers, and uses artificial intelligence and custom-made templates to simplify and accelerate that process. Blooksy actually came to life during the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, I ran a traditional hybrid publishing company and during the pandemic, as everybody knows, people were getting sick, right? I had editors that were getting sick, I had book cover designers getting sick, and page layout people getting sick. One of my dear friends, we were publishing her book, and if you’re using multiple tools, as people who’ve written books know, using Microsoft Word and Google Drive and all these different tools. When you’re working on one asset, things tend to get mixed up. You have your document, its final draft number two, final draft number three, and final draft number four, well as fate would have it, we published the wrong version of someone’s book. Out of frustration, the author called me really upset, and rightfully so. I asked myself, why isn’t there a platform that allows all the people who work in one asset to share one document? How can we accelerate that process? We added artificial intelligence to create content, we added AI-powered voice to text to empower authors and creators to speak their stories into books, because it’s much easier to speak than it is to write. We also built in things like collaboration and sharing and other things to simplify that process. That’s how Blooksy was born. Some of our early authors were also professors. They let me know that AJ, we’re using this actually for our academic articles and research papers. We explored that then we created custom templates for the university space. And as they say, the rest is history. That is Blooksy in a nutshell. I really enjoyed the pitch competition because I got a chance to talk with investors, and get real-time feedback on some other go-to-market strategies that I had not thought about. I really, really enjoyed the pitch competition.
Mecca Tartt
Thank you so much for that Anthony. Robert Grant with Revealaroo. If you will tell us a little bit about your company.
Robert Grant
Sure. Thanks for having me. Revealaroo is a retail, at-home, prenatal genetic testing kit that we sell on all popular sales platforms like Amazon. Basically, what we do is allow parents to plan better for their little bundle of joy by giving them the option to do their genetic testing as early as eight weeks gestation. We have started our research into our product offering by just doing a gender test as that is sort of the easiest way and the least expensive way for us to get into this space. But ideally what we want to do is make laboratory testing more accessible by allowing people to do their laboratory testing at home. Our ultimate goal is to offer a full suite of laboratory testing and prenatal testing that you can do from the comfort of your own home, painlessly as well. How we sort of started was that my wife, who is a clinical scientist and the science behind all of what we do, is from the Democratic Republic of Congo. There is a huge gap in healthcare in general there. Her mother, a few years ago, passed away, sadly, because she had a stroke. The main reason that she passed away was that there was no easy access to laboratory testing so that the doctors could figure out exactly what was going on with her. She was actually treated for something that had nothing to do with what was going on with her. If she had that access, she would have gotten the correct treatment, and she might be here today. It’s all about increasing that access and our ultimate goal is to increase that access here and then take what we’ve learned here and then possibly use that to fund the same type of project in the third world and the developing world.
Mecca Tartt
Absolutely. I know for AJ, this was with your background, it was a natural transition for you during the pandemic because you saw this huge opportunity. Robert, for you, the pain of experiencing loss birthed a passion for you and your co-founder. Kat, you saw a huge need when it came to how companies are able to get rid of the extra waste and hold themselves accountable. My question to you all is, how exactly did you identify who your avatar was, and who your customer base was, and has that changed? How were you able to pivot over the years with your business?
Katherine Shayne
That’s a great question, Mecca, I can start. I was a researcher before starting CIRT. My co-founder and I, Dr. Jenna Jambeck, who’s still at the University of Georgia, we’re looking at mismanaged waste all around the world. A lot of it was plastic due to the durability and long lifetime of that material. How much of it was mismanaged in places all across the globe, including here in the US. We had companies that would come to us and say, hey, we want to know where our materials are accepted as far as recycling goes, composting, and if there are options for reuse. We do these big studies and come up with these reports. But as soon as we got done with a report, it would already be out of date, because there had been a law that had been changed, or there was a regulation that they said no, they were no longer accepting a certain material in that jurisdiction. We decided to put all that together in one place to make it accessible. We initially were targeting our customers in the government space.w We were looking at cities, municipalities, and counties that actually had to deal with all of the material. We quickly pivoted from that model because of timelines and budgets within the city infrastructures, to who else would be interested in the data. We started to do some customer discovery in the consumer packaged goods space and in large institutions and organizations that had multiple footprints, like hotels and airlines and things like that. We quickly identified that there was a real need there with increasing pressure from compliance and regulation. We’ve definitely had a big pivot from business to government to business to business, and really saw an opportunity to help with ESG reporting, scope three emissions, and reducing our impact through reducing our waste.
Robert Grant
For us, as I said, eventually we want to be offering a full suite of laboratory testing but that then makes who our customer is very broad and very hard to pin down. Part of the reason that we chose to go into this prenatal genetic testing is that it really narrows it down nearly to a pinpoint because now we’re only talking about women for the most part, and we’re only talking about women of a relatively small age demographic. And then, as far as their behaviors and from a marketing standpoint, when we want to geo-tag our ad campaigns, we also know where they are because we know where the OBGYN offices are. It made that customer part much, much easier so that we can figure out how to efficiently run a laboratory that has customers that are basically remote, making that process much cheaper, and much easier for us to actually pinpoint where our customers are. The one issue that we still kind of run into is that our customers are pregnant, but they’re not necessarily telling people that they’re pregnant. Trying to decipher their behaviors that are gonna let us know that they’re pregnant by like certain search terms, like how do I know if I’m pregnant? How dark does the test line need to be on a pregnancy test before I know that I’m pregnant? There’s still a little bit of difficulty and tweaking there but if nothing else, we’ve whittled it down to biological sex and an age that’s relatively narrow. And then as we add more things and obviously, we’re going to stir the pot again, but that’s kind of how we went about it and why we went about it.
Mecca Tartt
I am smiling over here, Robert, because many of you all know that I have a baby boy that just reached a year old. My thought process in hearing about your company was two things; I want to say that the current genetic testing is you have to be at the 21-week mark, right?
Robert Grant
The anatomy scan and ultrasounds, it’s 21 weeks. The genetic testing, typically, they wait until 10 to 12 weeks at the earliest. We do eight weeks and we’re working to reduce that to six right now.
Mecca Tartt
I think that is amazing. My thought process as a customer because you’re saying the person that probably is not announcing to the family yet or telling people is, I, as a reminder of my journey towards conceiving our baby boy or the ovulation trackers, that would be a great tool for you all because a woman that may not be pregnant yet, that is something that she’s using every single day to track, so I’m sure that’s something that you already use or have thought about. But that’s the first thing that came to mind. Just with my journey, but I think that I mean, obviously, that’s wonderful. But I sometimes share these on the podcast, but you know, still having a new baby, it’s definitely something that has piqued my interest. AJ, what about you?
Anthony Joiner
For us, we followed our users. When we built Blooksy initially it was for authors, creatives, and experts who are writing books. But very quickly, we found that some of our authors were using it in their profession as college professors. They were using it for their dissertations. They were using it for their academic articles. We even had people and professors that were using it to write grants. They have the same problems, right? There’s one document that they have to complete and multiple people working on the document, multiple versions, and things like that. The same software that we built fits perfectly and squarely into multiple users. We just follow the users. What we did is we created custom templates, because creating a dissertation has different sections than they do in a book, right? It was pretty straightforward for us and it opened up an entirely new market because as writers, they write books because they want professors to publish, and research, because they have to for tenure, right? We found a market of buyers. Then the other thing that we found is that professors and universities are wanted, there are no standards across universities. Multiple people in the same department, for example, follow different processes, go out, and they Google their own templates and things like that. We provided sort of a standardized template that they can use across universities. We’ve onboarded a few universities. They love it. As a matter of fact, we onboarded Morehouse School of Medicine yesterday. Pretty excited about that. We have Kennesaw State on board, we have the University of South Florida that’s using it. We have Concordia University. We’re seeing a lot of growth there and we are still spinning efforts focusing on our experts and our writers as well. We’re loving the process.
Mecca Tartt
That’s awesome. My husband is a Morehouse man. I know that Morehouse is an amazing school. I want to ask you all this question, how do you all stay optimistic? What keeps you gritty? What keeps you excited? How do you stay connected? Because right here when you get the idea and you know that it’s something much bigger than an idea written on a piece of paper, that it’s something that can grow, generating millions and millions of dollars, and possibly one day you’re able to exit out or have an exit, what keeps you focused on the vision and the goal, especially when there have been nos along the way, or you have that crushing moment? I want you to think about maybe before you answer an exact story or time that can help the listeners that are listening in for the Atlanta Startup podcast right now, where they can identify with that. Because I do believe there are times when individuals abandon their dreams and they abandon them right when they’re on the cusp of the win. Because I am a spiritual person, I also say that when you don’t fulfill your purpose, it will be reassigned to someone else, because it has to get done. Because there’s a mission behind it and a vision. How do you stay in tune? If you have an example or an experience that you can share with the listeners, please do.
Anthony Joiner
I’ll jump in on this one. What keeps me excited is the fact that we’re helping people share their stories. Just even last night, one of our authors, finished her book. She sent me a text message with crying emojis like, oh my god, I’ve been thinking about this for four years and I finally finished it. She shared her graphic on social media and we were able to share that and see her friends engaging with her posts on social media, and the journey that she has traversed to get to this point. That’s exciting. From a selfish perspective, one thing that’s exciting about what we’re doing is the other add-on services that we provide. Outside of just the monthly subscription of using the software to write their books, we offer things like publishing services, right? We can upsell those services, we offer coaching for people who want accountability. We have weekend kickstart boot camps that we can add on. Those revenue opportunities, keep us excited from a monetary perspective but the stories that we’re helping people share when we’re onboarding universities and they talk about how this is going to save them time on training students, how it’s going to streamline their process for research. Specifically, with Kennesaw State, they have a research framework that they’ve created being used by professors all over the world and now they want us to integrate with their framework, so that all their professors follow the same process that keeps us excited as well from a potential revenue perspective and also making it easy for professors all over the world. Those are some of the things both selfishly and organic caring about our users’ perspective.
Mecca Tartt
Absolutely. I believe I know someone. I think Kim Ford actually went through your company Blooksy in order to publish her book. Robert, Kat, any thoughts about wanting to share with the listeners about how you stay gritty and how you stay focused on your vision, especially when you have that crushing moment or experience where someone has given you a no?
Robert Grant
I’ll hop in. Mine isn’t as warm and fuzzy as what keeps me motivated, but truthfully, Revealaroo is self-funded. We plan on keeping it that way. There’s really nothing about what we do that really requires a large outside investment, just by the nature of how laboratories and the equipment that we deal with and stuff works. What keeps me motivated is the fact that we always have a safety net. Us failing and what we’re doing right now isn’t a big deal because we can pivot like that and make a ton of money and come back to where we were. But like I was saying with the standard laboratory testing, it’s a matter of signing up with the insurance companies to get reimbursements into regular lab testing. We will keep the lights on and we will be just fine. It’s like what we’re doing right now, while it’s kind of the easier entry point, it’s the hard work because there’s a lot of research. We’re in genetic testing. I am not a geneticist. My wife, even though she’s a clinical scientist, is not a geneticist. We learned how to do genetic testing from YouTube videos and using peer review articles from our competitors and reverse-engineered their processes. If there comes a point where it’s just not working, we can do something else and we’ll be just fine. From the get-go, making sure that this is something. If we don’t sell anything, everyone hates this, if nothing else, I can personally float this business and keep our lights on at home and feed my son. I’m motivated because I know I’ve got a great safety net, which a lot of startups can’t really say that. This isn’t my first startup and some of those had a rocky, craggy bottom on them. But this one, I mean, I’ve got a TempurPedic mattress waiting for me to fall.
Mecca Tartt
I love that concept. Because we talked about you and your co-founder, who is your wife, you talked about really learning on the go, right? Going on YouTube, going on Google, and there are so many resources out there right now to really tap into your business. Kat, do you have any thoughts about that?
Katherine Shayne
For sure. This is my first venture. Coming from the research space, there are some similarities, but there are some massive differences, too. There isn’t, at least in my experience, there isn’t the safety net of academia behind me. If I don’t get a grant, that’s okay. I still have a salary, I still can do my research, and I can still teach. But in the case of running CIRT, there really isn’t a safety net for not getting a deal done or not having our pipeline filled. When we’re looking at staying sane, gritty, staying scrappy, making sure like for what drives me is making sure that my team feels fulfilled, feels like they have a purpose, like they’re working towards making the world a better place, making an impact. I’m very much a systems thinker. I’m thinking 20 steps ahead for the business, the vision, and where it could go, and how we could scale. My team’s like, we got to focus on the moment, so they keep me grounded. I think about my team, I think about what it means to them to see this succeed and that really keeps me grounded. But we have had our fair share of nos, the statistic kind of holds true, right? You’re gonna hear 90% of the time, we’re gonna hear no, and that 10%, or maybe even less than that is yes or maybe. Just as an example, we had an investor that we, essentially, got to the altar. We were about to get married, God forbid there were rings on our fingers, the deal fell through, and we were kind of planning on that investment to take us the next 6 to 12 months. That can be a real shocker.
Mecca Tartt
I think it’s important and critical at this moment to also dive into that, how did you all pivot? Because that is a crushing moment and going through that process, it really is, like, going through a marriage. You’re thinking that we’re about to walk down this and we’re about to exchange these rings, and then the deal fell through? How were you and your co-founder, able to pivot along with your team and still empower your team at that moment?
Katherine Shayne
We had a plan B, plan C, and Plan D if something like that did happen. First of all, it was definitely crushing, not necessarily for our business, but just as a team, as we had gone so far, we had worked so hard. It’s something that we really felt someone taking a bet, they’re gonna be in this with us together, they’re gonna be a partner, and that doesn’t happen. So you start to question yourself, you start to doubt, will someone else want to do this? Will someone want to take that bet if they didn’t take it? Will someone get this far along with us again? We had to look at our pipeline, we had to look at who our next sales channel partnerships and direct sales were going to be with, and really plan our cash flow and say, what can we afford? We didn’t get this investment, we can’t hire the three people that we had slated. What are the things that we have to cut down on as a team and so we really just want to go back and say, what can we afford now? How can we build up our pipeline and our customers far enough out to support hiring those people in the next 12 months versus right now? Definitely, some internal, everyone in the same room for 24 hours kind of deal. That’s kind of the life of, or at least our startup right now anyway.
Robert Grant
I don’t know about you guys. I don’t know if we have any only children right now. I’m an only child. I wouldn’t say I have only child syndrome but do not tell me no. Because if you tell me no, all I can think about is proving you wrong. If I’m sitting here thinking like there has to be something. People telling me no with like my old startups, it’s actually a guy. He’s my mentor. He said, this is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard of and what drove me for two years after that, he said, it would never work. I took it personally that I was gonna say, I told you so. I get a little bit of that now with this startup.
Mecca Tartt
Robert, that actually makes me think about when you say that, I think about the journey at one point in my life. I competed as a bodybuilder, which is surprising to a lot of people, but I did. I remember telling a few of my girlfriends that I’m going to be an NPC competitor, I’m going to win on stage, and just the work that it took mentally, there were times when I was running on the treadmill, and I was so tired, so exhausted, my body was hurting from just working out nonstop, that I was crying on the treadmill, what people probably thought during my sprint sets that I was actually sweating, but it was actually tears. But I thought about the fact I was driven because of my own grit. But to your point, I had a girlfriend that was she said to me, she said, “Okay, we’ll see.” I don’t think you can do it. Sure enough, I got on that stage, and not only did I get on that stage, but I won and I won every single competition I was in. When you have someone that tells you no and you know that you can do it for yourself and you believe in your product and yourself, you believe in your company, there’s like no letting up. But you have to have that confidence. I think confidence is a big part of that, too. That has to be the inner self-work as well. One of the things you mentioned, which I kept hearing and kept coming up several times was a team. How do you build out or how have you gone about the process of building out your team, identifying individuals that believe in your vision, and identifying people that you can entrust with moving your business along? What has been your process with building your team?
Anthony Joiner
Well, I’ll start here. For me, it started with the authors that I was already working with. Fortunately, when the pandemic started, I took authors that I had worked with previous to the pandemic and I threw them all in a Facebook group. That was my early group of test users. Before even when it was an idea and I mapped it out on the wall, I shared the entire journey with them. I have videos going back to my very first sketch on the wall. People were really excited. When I finally launched my very ugly, ugly, ugly alpha version of the product, I had someone willing to swipe their card and pay 20 bucks. They became the first early advocates and team members. That’s where I found my first coach, my first employee or contractor rather, since then, the next hire was an operations person. I started out with a couple of VAs but then I hired an operations person so that we could document our procedures. I’m creative and more of a visionary, I needed someone to kind of solidify the processes so that when we brought people along, we’d have things in place. And my next hire, I have a call with him coming up today, is a salesperson who has over a decade of experience selling to universities. He also has relationships because organically, we have people that are signing up in the creative writing space, but to sell to universities, the pipeline, or the sales cycle, rather, what I’ve learned is it’s about six months, and that’s a long time. Fortunately, again, we have the creative side so that we can upsell those people on different services but my next hire was a salesperson in the space. One of the guys that I consider my advisor’s name is George. He sort of laid out his blueprint of hiring a salesperson, giving them equity so that they would be incentivized to go out and land bigger contracts. What we found in the university space is that they either fall under two categories, either they’re ready for innovation, or they’re thinking this is going to take my job, right? We’re targeting people who are ripe for innovation. Having a person who is all about sales and bottom line and not so creative, I’ll get on a call and talk about the product for an hour and a half to two people. But the salesperson, he’s all about bottom-line sales. I need to hire someone who could focus on numbers because I focus on how amazing the product is. That’s been my cycle. It’s people that were familiar with us than an operations person and now a salesperson for bringing in revenue.
Mecca Tartt
Now do any of you all, because there are some individuals like you mentioned, AJ, that you’re more of a creator, right? You’re the visionary behind the product but there’s also a talent that it takes to actually identify good individuals to work for you and work for your vision and your company. That’s a talent in itself. Or if not, what happens is you keep hiring the wrong people. That brings me to my question about mentorship. What is your mentoring journey look like? How have you been able to go out and seek mentors, because there are some mentors that might be with you when you first started out but then there’s an elevation that happens as you continue to grow, and you have to reach higher, what has been your process for identifying the right mentors for where you are right now or where you’ve been in the past?
Robert Grant
I can take that. For me, my mentors kind of came to me a little bit. In my first sort of stint in entrepreneurship, I had no clue what I was doing and mentorship wasn’t even a word that was in my vocabulary. It just kind of happened. I’m so grateful, it isn’t even really the word, but I kind of had people that from a success standpoint, were where I wanted it to be. By kind of observing them in their interactions and learning about how they think and how they view the world was really the most beneficial thing to me. Because as a person, like my umbrella LLC is called Left Field Ventures, because everything I do doesn’t make any sense and it’s completely unrelated. Me being all over the place, finding a mentor, and looking back on it, now me finding a mentor would probably be pretty difficult, or they would just be sick of me because I’m all over the place but it was more about the how to think like an entrepreneur how to put the business and take the emotion away from business and to look at things objectively and to learn how to do that efficiently. Right now, I’m in a business that is rife with emotion, while also keeping the emotion almost compartmentalized. It doesn’t blind me to doing what I need to do to be successful. For the people that I coach now with ATDC, one of the things I do when they’re looking for mentors I tell them, is there somebody out there that you work with that thinks like you want to, that thinks in a way that you want to think, that that’s kind of like a shortcoming for you? And then also, are they where you want to be? There’s a lot of I deal with this, you’re running a nonprofit incubator, where the mentors aren’t any better off than the mentee. There’s always something to learn, but you need to be talking to people that are where you want to be so that they can help guide you along that path. Identify if you are on that entrepreneurial path, and you’re walking side by side. Is that person your mentor or are you just having a conversation with a peer?
Mecca Tartt
Absolutely. That takes me to a quote that a lot of people mentioned, which is, if you’re the smartest person in your circle, then your circle is entirely too small. You have to reach out. Kat, what are your thoughts?
Katherine Shayne
I think that this is definitely a theme that I’m hearing and something that I learned very early on, is just being self-aware. Robert, you’re alluding to that, knowing what you’re good at and then finding people who can help you fill the gaps around that. Because that was really hard for me early on. My background is in engineering so I was like, I can do all of this. I am creative, I can do the marketing, I can do the sales, and that was like so wrong. I had to bring people in that were relationship builders. I have someone on my team who is an incredible networker. I mean, he could talk to a wall and be happy, right? He was someone that I was like, “I know I need you.” Because I’m not going to go do this, I’m in the data. I want to stay in this space, which eventually I had to break out of, because investment and raising capital, it requires that out of a CEO, but he initially was one who could bring in people and identify talent in areas where we had gaps. But that first took me identifying where I wasn’t going to be able to fill those gaps. He brought in creative, and marketing, and then now we have a great B2B SaaS salesperson who has been in the industry and actually started off as a mentor. He was an advisor and mentor and then was like, “I want to help y’all. I want to come on the team and really ramp sales.” I think that being software, understanding where the gaps are, not being the smartest person in the room, and not thinking you can do everything really is key to building a good team and surrounding yourself with advisors and mentors that can help you along the way.
Robert Grant
And I think, also, it means kind of being self-aware, but also being honest about where you are with your business and where you are with your experience level as an entrepreneur. I see so many people with these illusions, like, grandiose or something like that, where basically you’ve lied to yourself to think you’re a lot better at what you’re doing than you really are. Illusions of grandeur. That’s just it.
It’s something that I see a lot where they’re like I’m doing this and that, and that, and I’m like, “Well, you haven’t made a sale yet. You don’t have a recurring model yet.” You’ve made some random sales to people. You’ve got a hobby, you don’t have a business yet. I tell folks all the time, people can’t help you, if they don’t know where you need help because you’re out here acting like, you’ve got things figured out that you really don’t.
Mecca Tartt
I love that, Robert, because I do believe that in any business, you should always be open to being curious. Being an avid learner, right? Because no one knows everything. The minute that you stopped learning, especially on your craft, is the minute that there is someone who’s hungry, that has the same passion, same focus, same craft, and they’ll take all the business and I’ve seen it time and time again. You can’t take that opportunity or even your business for granted. I love that one of the questions that I have for you, and I love asking this question because it sheds a light into your world. It also allows me to highlight your wins but I wanted to know what has been one of your biggest wins to date. Maybe it was a contract or deal? How did you go about the preparation to secure it? It might just be numbers that you all were able to hit before the end of the year or a big goal that you were able to attain.
Anthony Joiner
Mine wasn’t a number. Mine was more validation. I mentioned earlier that I was sort of following the rabbit down the hole of professors that were using Blooksy for their academic writing, and their research. I had a call with a librarian at the University of South Florida. That call was a 30-minute sort of discovery call and it turned into a three-and-a-half-hour call because she was so excited. She actually contacted other professors while we were on the call and before the call is out, I don’t know what took over my body with some sort of salesperson who jumped into my body. And she said, “Well, AJ, listen. I will organize a meeting but it will probably take six to eight weeks before for me to get everybody together.” And I said to her I’m going to be in Tampa in two weeks anyway, if you can just get a few people in the room, that would be awesome. And she said, well, I’ll tell you what, if you’re going to be here in two weeks, then I will organize as many people as I can in two weeks. I said thank you very much. I hung up the call with her and I bought a ticket to Tampa. That was a win and then when I flew down to Tampa, I walked into her office, she had already purchased a license on her own. Other professors at the University of South Florida had purchased licenses and she showed me the communication they had about our software using Teams that they were communicating back and forth about how helpful it was. They were really excited. It was more than validation that people in the target market that I was targeting, would swipe their cards without a lot of persuasions for me. I was able to get video testimonials from her and other professors using the software before I actually had sold it to them. That was a big sort of feather in my cap for me.
Mecca Tartt
Absolutely. Especially with you having that salesperson just take over your body and it happened.
Robert Grant
I don’t know if this sounds silly or not but for mine, it was actually renewing the lease on our lab. Part of the problem that we had was that due to regulations and things, you have to have a certain type of facility. I’m in Macon, Georgia, by the way, not in Atlanta. I don’t know how Atlanta is with a commercial property but landlords are very cliquey. I would show up and say, hey, I want to start this lab where people can send us their blood samples to find out if they’re having a boy or girl and you know, given the whole rundown, then they just wouldn’t rent to me. I had a couple that just wouldn’t even call me back and return my phone calls. I had one come on my Facebook and publicly say they were holding out for someone with better references. It was a whole ordeal, but then I found the right landlord, then he was like, you know what, I just like you. Just go for it. He got us in there, we got our lease, and he allowed us to do a one-year lease, which can be unheard of with commercial property. All of the other properties that I looked at, by the end of that year, had all turned over every last one of them. I was sitting in his office renewing our lease for two years and it was just something about that moment that I was just like, here’s this person that didn’t have to believe in what we were doing. But they just took that chance and that chance paid off. Had some of these other people listened to me, then they wouldn’t be searching for new tenants.
Mecca Tartt
Absolutely. That is called hovering, as well as a favor. Kat, what are your thoughts?
Katherine Shayne
We’ve recently finished a couple of pilots and one of them was with AB InBev. AB InBev is a parent company to Anheuser Busch and a bunch of other beverage brands. Our pilot was successful. They’re taking us to the rest of their craft brands. To give you some perspective, AB InBev has 500 brands under its umbrella. We’re getting into a subset of those to pitch our technology and hopefully, that will lead to growth within the organization to upselling, which was a huge win for us. Pilots can be hit or miss with corporates. We were really fortunate that this went really well with their brand and they want to upsell us. We’re really excited to do that in 2023.
Mecca Tartt
That’s awesome. That is awesome. Congratulations. This has been amazing. I have enjoyed just having the time to sit with you all and have this discussion. I hope that those of you who are listening in that you’ve been able to take just some different jewels and tips from the founders that have joined us today. Before we close it out, Kat, Robert, and Anthony, how can they find you? How can they support you? How can VCs get in contact with you, if that’s something that you’re interested in? Just looking for your 30 to 60-second elevator pitch on whatever you want to leave the audience with.
Katherine Shayne
Great, yeah, I’ll start. You can find CIRT, Can I Recycle This and myself on LinkedIn. I’m on there as Katherine Shayne. We’re also available on Twitter and Instagram as well. We also have a contact form on our website and our website is www.cirt.tech, and we look forward to hearing from any interested groups and I love to talk to entrepreneurs who are just starting off because it was really difficult for me not knowing the space and not knowing what to expect. I love to give out resources and ATDC is one of them, Startup Runway being another. Please reach out to me.
Robert Grant
You can find us at https://www.revealaroo.com/. That’s our website. But we’re actually shut down at the moment because we just had a baby, ironically enough. While we gear back up to get back going, we can actually be contacted through the website if anyone would like to learn more about what we’re doing and where we’re headed. I’m on LinkedIn. Robert Grant is probably the most common name ever but if you type in Robert Grant Macon, I’m the guy with the backward hat sitting on a motorcycle.
Mecca Tartt
I love it. Congratulations, Robert, to you and your wife. All right, AJ?
Anthony Joiner
I don’t have a motorcycle but I am on LinkedIn. You can look up Anthony AJ Joiner. https://www.blooksy.com. We have a contact form there or you can send me an email blooksy@blooksy.com. I’m actually active on Instagram and my personal Instagram more so than business. That’s just AJ Joiner.
Mecca Tartt
All right. Thank you so much again for joining us for another episode of the Atlanta Startup podcast. We look forward to seeing you soon. Make sure that you apply for the upcoming showcase or to attend. It’ll be Thursday, February 23. This one is virtual. You can find out information at startuprunway.org. See you next time.
Lisa Calhoun
We’re thrilled to have you as an Atlanta Startup Podcast listener to help you get the most out of the experience. Let me invite you to three insider opportunities from our host Valor Ventures. First, want to be a guest on this amazing show. Reach out to our booking team at atlantastartuppodcast.com. Click on booking, It’s a no-brainer from there. Are you raising a seed round? Valor definitely wants to hear from you. Share your startup story at valor.vc/pitch. Are you a woman or minority-led startup valor sister program? The Startup Runway Foundation gives away grants to promising startups led by underrepresented founders. The mission of the Startup Runway Foundation is connecting underrepresented founders to their first investors. Startup runway finalists have raised over $40 million. See if you qualify for one of these amazing grants at startuprunway.org. You can also sign up for our next showcase for free there. Let me let you go today with a shout-out to Startup Runway presenting sponsor Cox Enterprises and to our founding partners, American Family Institute, Truist, Georgia Power, Avanta Ventures, and Innovators Legal. These great organizations make Startup Runway possible. Thanks for listening today and see you back next week.
