Summary
In 2000 I took the leap to join my first startup company, ProductFactory. After 3 years of struggle and debt, we found a dance partner who needed our product to fill out their offering. The successful exit made me willing to try again and eventually HotChalk also paid off. This kind of work is exhilarating and sometimes heartbreaking but for me it beats driving through bad weather and heavy traffic to an office 9 to 5 everyday and relying on forces beyond my control. The gallery below shows the companies I have been involved with. Maybe yours is the next one.
COMMUNITY WELLNESS
As the Covid-19 scare began to overtake healthcare as we knew it, a new way of delivering care began to emerge. Telehealth promised to supplement brick-and-mortar office visits for patients where face-to-face video or audio consultation was appropriate. Along with that, supplemental technology that could capture vital signs medication consumption, and survey responses to symptom questionnaires increased data capture and analytical support.
Clinics and hospital partnerships would benefit from the Community Wellness platform in several ways. First it would alleviate the in-office and Emergency Room bottlenecks. Second, by treating patients with chronic illness it would reduce hospitalizations and length of stay.
The interoperability via HL7/FHIR API’s also means that data can be extracted and sent to EHR’s or HIE’s.
HOTCHALK
Being ahead of your time can work both ways. HotChalk was one of the first Freemium SaaS Cloud Learning Management Systems before any of those terms had come into popular use. Free to teachers, it relied on advertising to pay for it. The acquisition of The Lesson Plans Page added an early traffic boost. The idea of providing students and teachers with tablets or small laptops was tried and then abandoned as was providing districts with wireless networks.
Early partnerships with NBC Universal and McGraw-Hill provided premium content for classroom use and professional development respectively. Videos from The Learning Channel, National Geographic, PBS, and NBC News as well as self produced videos call Off-Road Algebra added strong content value but little commercial success.
HotChalk would later morph into a Online Program Management (OPM) company with several university partnerships.
PRODUCTFACTORY
As enterprise software technology shifted from thick clients and in house servers to Internet, some visionaries saw the potential for global product development. With a few false starts and little investment, the ProductFactory team set out to connect engineers, program managers, quality assurance specialists, and data managers across the digital supply chain.
pfDeliver, the flagship product would create a shareable program plan and assign login roles through a thin client, a browser, using a java front end and commercial SQL databases. Steve's role was to provide the specifications and priorities to development, primarily in India, and test the releases as they came through.
It was not exactly a straight line to success but eventually we acquired three referenceable customers and an interested development partner. Using their sales force and a more polished version we began to finally see commercial success, so much so that the company was acquired.
CLOUD-TO-CLOUD BACKUP
Early phase startups struggle with defining their product strategy. As new technologies emerge, the product direction can change. In a freemium cloud SaaS platform, knowing which markets to serve and which features to release in what order can make or break you. We helped write the product plan and company strategy that would serve this company for years.
LOYALTY REWARDS MOBILE APP
There's no greater challenge for a startup than, well, getting started. You need the right combination of people, process and tools. ByProxie needed to get their product developed, add to their team, and build their processes for delivery, onboarding, and sales engagement. We helped select the outsource development partner, set up the development process and reporting, create product management deliverables - product roadmap and specifications, and competitive analysis
VENALYTICA
I founded Venalytica because I don't like the way you search for products on the Internet. I still believe I got the problem right and had a decent solution but timing and external factors kept me from being ultimately successful.