It was in 2012 sitting on a plane, that the preliminary idea came to me. At that time Facebook and LinkedIn were still in their early years and other apps like Four Square were using new developing tech to interact with consumers and collaborate with business. There was a lot going on in life from a personal standpoint at this time, and I was young, inexperienced and did not know where to turn…so we will fast forward to Jan. 2017.
At this time, we kicked off the official brainstorming and market research for the App with Danny Becket Jr. and his company (Becket Industry’s) out of Grand Rapids MI. I and Danny along with his team of content writers and graphic designers began creating the look and feel of the App along with screen design, functionality, navigation and essential features. At that time everything was still just pictures, diagrams, excel templates, programming option plans and a whole bunch of hypotheticals. There was doubt early on, but as we dove deeper in the content, we really started to see how this product was great for our world!
I met Danny two years before as we collaborated on some marketing programs while I was working for OGIO. Danny had started an App called Swagtag to help brands like OGIO run social media contests, so when I had done enough soul searching, his name came to mind, and I made the call.
The words Startup, Silicon Valley, Incubators, Entrepreneurship were hot buttons in the tech space for sometime and we were living and developing something that was relevant to fitting in that space…that scared the S*#t out of me. Danny had lived in SV before and had been on a number of app dev teams so he consulted me through the early details. By July 2017 we had a pitch deck and functioning prototype to begin the next extremely unfamiliar exercise…fund raising…