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Interview By Elyse Ball  Shortly after graduating I-Corps, Matt Crowley and Bill Wichert were accepted to the prestigious Techstars Accelerator. Then, they made the bold move to pivot their startup, Signal Cortex, which is now an operations management platform for building and field service companies. Matt and Bill recently spoke with UARF's Elyse Ball about the high and lows of entrepreneurship, solving real customer problems, and the importance of having a group of entrepreneurs as friends. Elyse: Tell me a little about yourselves and your backgrounds. Matt: I was born and raised in Cleveland, went to Case Western for computer engineering, and worked at Microsoft as an engineer. Then, I discovered airports, which was awesome! I worked in the airport industry for six years. I was the CIO for Cleveland Hopkins and Philadelphia International Airports. Bill: I've lived in the Cleveland area my whole life. I went to Tri-C. Eventually, I figured out a good direction for myself, which was a cross between business and technology. After being at Case, I took on the role as a manager at the airport working for Matt, then took over as CIO when he left. When the opportunity presented itself, I went to Philadelphia International Airport to join up as the Innovation Program Manager. Elyse: How did the idea for Signal Cortex come about? Matt: When I joined the airport in Cleveland, I started to sense there was this big communication problem between managers and frontline employees. It wasn't because the frontline employees weren't good at their jobs. It wasn't because the managers didn't have big hearts and weren't trying to do it. It was this breakdown in communication between the customer, the manager and the frontline employee. One of the greatest examples: I was walking through the terminal and a dog pees on the floor. And I'm like, this is a spill hazard, it's in the middle of the walkway. So I ended up standing in front of this puddle of dog pee for two hours, because I made a phone call and it took that long for it to jump through the dispatcher to the shift manager to the frontline employee. I wouldn't say that was a breaking point, but it was very emblematic. It was one of those things where we said to ourselves, “We can improve this.” Elyse: You pivoted pretty significantly between the customer segment you started with in I-Corps and where you are today. Was that pivot a difficult decision to make, especially given your previous work experience at airports? Matt: I mention airports, because even going through I-Corps, we were focused on that. While we had all this great experience in airports, we decided to go learn about other markets and go on ride-alongs with people and figure out if there are other folks with similar problems. Bill: When we went through I-Corps, we used our interviews badly. We interviewed based on a structure of almost validating our own thoughts, not digging deep enough into the customer. So we got a lot of validation for what we had planned on doing and we thought, “Great. Look at all these people. They're saying we're right.” But when we went back to them and said, “Would you buy it?” They said, “Of course not.” So, we asked, “Wait, wait, wait. But you said this is the problem.” They responded with, “Yeah, but I'm not buying that. That won't fix my problem.” That was the start of the pivot. Once we got into Techstars, we started leaning into the Clayton Christensen “Jobs to be Done” model. You need to find the motivation for why a buyer is buying something and what their true internal processes are. As an example, one of the buying motivations of our first customer was that he was driving around at 2:00 o'clock in the morning, going to different states to address customer issues. He could no longer manage all the pieces of his business, and it was starting to eat into his family and personal time. When we figured that out, it was like we found the group that has the problem. And within three weeks we had our first customer. Elyse: One of the things that we frequently hear from new founders is that it’s challenging to transition from a customer discovery mode to a sales mode. How have you achieved that? Bill: We went into all these interviews honestly. We are trying to understand their problems. We are trying to understand the market. We are not trying to sell them anything. If you go too much into the sales role, they're not going to be as open. So, what we did instead was help them discover what the problem was. At the very end of the discussion, we’d say: “We're working on something. Could we come back to you later if we find something that fixes your problem?” In every case, they said, “Sure, absolutely.” When you come back, you're talking about sales in a more direct fashion, saying, “Here's what you said before. Here's how we tried to fix that.” But we never intended for sales to be merged within the interview process. They were two completely separate discussions. Matt: I wanted to jump in a little bit and share some of the struggles I had in my mind going through I-Corps and the start of Techstars. You hear these phrases like “problem-solution fit” and “product-market fit.” Now that I have a chance to step back and look at the last nine months, they ring true. But when you sit in I-Corps or Techstars, you ask yourself: “Who the hell would pay us money for a product that doesn't exist yet? Who would even do this?!?” But yes, someone will pay money as long as you find that problem-solution fit. This goes back to what Bill was saying before – I think part of the problem is everybody gets so caught up in their ideas and their thoughts; trying to validate something to themselves, and not validate a real problem for a real customer. We had to let the ego down, let the need for personal validation go away, and let go of our predispositions about certain industries or certain products. Just throw the raft in the river, jump in and let the current just take you. It's almost like we went back to the beginning of I-Corps and just re-interviewed. This is where we got to meet and work with Bob Moesta as part of Techstars and do a deep dive using “Jobs to be Done,” as well as doing Lean Canvas and all the tools that we learned in I-Corps. Bill: That's one of the things we've learned from the Techstars staff was that too often what they find is entrepreneurs believe that they're right. Basically, all other opinions be damned, I'm right. They believe that their gravitas can move the market based purely on their own belief. Those people fail at a much higher rate than people who actually listen to the market and integrate that data into their business.  Elyse: Tell me a little bit more about the Techstars Accelerator experience, what you did, and if there were any particularly unexpected experiences. Bill: It's tiring. It is exhausting. My wife is still mad that I was up until 4:00 o'clock in the morning almost every day. First, you get in, they get you organized and then you go right into “Mentor Madness.” You have five 30-minute calls back-to-back with mentors every day for two weeks, plus any additional mentors you think may be applicable to your business. You want to respect their time, so you want to make sure you've done your homework on them. And it just keeps going and going. I'll give one example. Amanda Lannert from Jellyvision was one of the mentors in our track Techstars and we talked to her midway through the process. She was very clear, “I don't get it. I don't understand what you guys are doing.” So, when we pivoted, we set up a meeting with her. After our pitch, she's smiling and she says, “I don't hate it.” TechstarsShe was thrilled that we had made such an amazing process in such a short time. The evolutionary process happens very quickly when you have to do something different every day, improve your company and pitch it and talk about it. Pitch it, talk about it, improve it, talk about it. It's a great process. It just is extremely taxing. Matt: I would encourage anyone if they can get into Y Combinator or Techstars to do it. For those who can't get in, the good thing about Techstars is all the materials are publicly available on their website. The things that you don't get are the kind of exclusive club pieces. If you get admitted you literally sign a document at the very beginning; they call it #GiveFirst. All the people who dedicated time to meet with us both in Techstars and post Techstars did not ask for anything in return, and I think that is the number one thing that we got out of it. And then number two was the level of networking and community. Even though it was 13 weeks of really intense ups and downs, what I did was make a bunch of friends for life. We all took a trip together after just on our own. So if I could suggest one thing, even if a startup is not going through an accelerator, is find other entrepreneurs that can become your best friends. Because you will need that social safety net with all the highs and lows that come with your business every day. You know there's some days I’m like, “Am I going to make payroll?” And then you have days where it's like, “Hey, we just got another $50K in investment today or we signed another customer. This is amazing!” Elyse: Will each of you talk about a high point and a low point from the business so far? Bill: The high was getting into Techstars. I can't tell you how overjoyed I was when we found out. It just felt like personal validation for all the work we had done up to that point. For the low point, as we indicated before, I need to improve my sales skills. Matt's got a thousand things he's trying to work on, and my job is to sell. It is not my strongest skill, but it is my role right now. I am reading books and talking to experts, but it is humbling. I have no doubt we will get to the repeatable sales process I want to build, but it also is very taxing psychologically to go through that. I think when people see a company and they see success, they're just like, “Oh great, it was successful.” They have no idea the ridiculous nature of how you get to that point of being successful, or the path you took to fail. People have no concept if they've never run through the gauntlet. Matt: I am going to say my high was signing that first customer, even though it was heavily discounted. We spent months lost (and that's my low, which I'll get to). We finally picked a target. Then, we’re having meetings until 2:00 in the morning. Like the dude was literally driving between states and we're talking. We were not there to sell. We were just learning and we made such a deep connection. We found that person who is willing to pay for a potential solution. To get that first contract signed was such a relief. It was a huge wow moment for us! Somebody really thinks we can help. So that was the high. You talk about the highs and lows. Between I-Corps and December 1st – a good three months – I was in this dissociative state where I was playing Call of Duty every night with Bill, because I didn't want to think about the fact that we were failing. And every time I would try and figure out what was going on, I couldn't solve the problem. We had no money coming in. We were just burning cash. We were working side jobs. I didn't see the light at the end of the tunnel at all. I think that every entrepreneur faces that in both short and long spurts. I don't want to belittle depression by saying it was depression, but it felt damn close. I just wasn't in a good place. And I think that, if we could get through something like that, I'm OK with failing, because at this point we were able to get through that kind of stuff. We're good. If we fail, that's going to set us up for building another business. Bill: We've been very honest about our experience. We've been very honest about our feelings and about our challenges. There is an element within entrepreneurship of not exposing that. Like, if I tell somebody that I'm not good at something or that we're not doing something well, that in some way minimizes me or minimizes our company. It's this disconnect that people have between reality and this fictional world of entrepreneurship. This fictional world of we're going to be flying first class all over and we're going to be making all this money. Yes, eventually that may happen, but you have to get through the really crappy, hard parts first.  Elyse: Is there anything else you’d like to share with new or aspiring entrepreneurs?
Matt: If anyone wants to talk to us, we're open. We've been working with a couple of local entrepreneurs recently that are interested in getting into Techstars. Everybody has different experiences. You're going to get advice from fifty million people. We’re just one of the cacophony of voices around. But you need that cacophony to filter out what's meaningful to you. We're here, we're around and we would encourage others to give back to the community. It's really important. Bill: One of the mentors that we talked to, I won't say who, had climbed Everest. It was like one of his big things: “I climbed Everest. I also failed at my startup.” He uses these amazing accomplishments and complete failures and says, “This is life. Get used to it.” Midwest thought is if you fail, you're bad, you're tainted, you've done something wrong. Whereas, on the West Coast, failure is a rite of passage to be successful. You don't just suddenly become successful. You've got to work at it and develop it. We need to get away from the idea that to fail makes you a failure. What can I learn to do it better? How can I improve and embrace those learning experiences? Improving yourself is what you're supposed to be doing every day.
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