Interview with Cory Hewett Host: Beau Billington Guest: Cory Hewett   Beau  00:00 Awesome! coming to where you live today. You’ll Find That Gears, my Podcast all about entrepreneurship for entrepreneurs. Today, we have Cory Hewett, founder of Gimme Vending, Corey, thanks so much for joining.   Cory  00:13 Yeah, happy to be here.   Beau  00:14 Awesome. So we’re in your studio. And this is a pretty new office space.   Cory  00:19 It’s a brand new office space for us. We’re down here in a conference Room in Trilith, Town. And a brand new podcast room when we saw the final invoice for this thing, it was eye popping, but there’s a guy who really believes in the vision of this town.   Beau  00:33 And that is you?   Cory  00:34 Oh no! Wow, I wish I could write a six figure check to make this room happen. Now that guy is actually Dan Cathy.   Beau  00:39 Okay, yes. Dan Cathy, founder of Chick-fil-A.   Cory  00:42 This is his legacy project, the Town in Trilith is his legacy project. He owns the movie studios across road trail studios. And so he’s building a whole brand new town to bring together entrepreneurs, storytellers, and makers. And so this podcast room is, I guess, one of the perks of being one of the founding members down here. And we’re excited to be here.   Beau  01:02 It’s pretty awesome. I need to look at some real estate down here myself as I’m in the entrepreneur game. Well listen, thanks so much for joining the show. Really appreciate it. Of course, we want to get deep on who you are, and how you got to where you are. But prior to talking about you and giving me vending, let’s talk a little bit about your journey. I mean, give me is obviously not your first startup. From what I can tell, maybe it’s your second, maybe it’s your third, you tell us. But it looks like you may have exited. We had a company called Crew Mobile. And can you tell us a little bit about how you got started with that, what you did? And did you exit or leave or close the business down to start Gimme like what was kind of the situation?   Cory  01:39 I guess you asked about how we got started. And my parents would probably tell a story of like, the quintessential entrepreneur story where you start with a lemonade stand. And I remember being out there literally nailing things together to start that lemonade stand in high school. It expanded a little bit though, and bought my first vending machine. And from there, bought a couple others and started to see what it was like to manage this growing enterprise.  I never made it super huge. I ended up with about 26 machines. But it was spread out enough that I needed to start to work with other people to help run the business. And that’s the first time that has happened for me, if you run a lemonade stand, in a middle schooler like you can handle it all by yourself, maybe your parents have to drive you to the store, but you can set the price and sell the product, deliver it.  This was the first time that I had to pay other people to help me acquire product service machines. So they were touching cash, they were interfacing with the customers on behalf of my brand, my company. And that was my first time running a proper business.   Beau  02:41 What age was this?   Cory  02:42 It was in high school that I started really working with vending machines.   Beau  02:46 So that’s crazy. I read a little about your bio. And I was just under the impression, there’s a sentence that I pulled out, “I bought my first vending machine when I was in middle school”. But it didn’t go on to talk about how you’ve had 26. I didn’t realize that your company actually may have started back in middle school in high school. And so these 26 machines, were they just distributed across a multitude of 26 different locations? Did you have some that were in clusters? Like how did you actually service these machines?   Cory  03:12 So Middle School is actually a bulk vending machine, it was a six foot tall, red spiral gumball machine. And that’s how I got into vending overall, it was high school and I moved into a proper vending machine with buttons and a bill validator and a coin acceptor. That 26 machines were distributed across, probably about 12 accounts or so. So like we had the county D fax office, as my very first vending accountant had a snack in a soda machine in it, then we got a couple of the larger churches, we got some auto repair stores, and other places like that. And those would usually have two machines or so, usually a drink and a snack.   Beau  03:56 Now how did you get these locations? Were you out there selling? Or was it kind of word of mouth? Are you just a little kid with a dream and everybody wants to give you an opportunity?   Cory  04:04 Oh man, I wish I had more than 20 machines. Now I was out there selling it hard. And there’s a lot of really great people in the community. I’d go to them and say, I want to run your vending machine. They’re like, “man, you’re in high school, and we kind of want to make sure that this is like a legitimate operation. Are you paying taxes?” And most importantly, like we’re getting this so that we don’t have to worry about it. And so maybe there’s some drama, maybe with the high school, I’m like, “No, definitely not no drama”. I got this figured out, or at least figured out enough to make sure that I can get Snicker bars to your boys.   Beau  04:34 That’s awesome. So how long did this kind of project go on? Is that fast forward to today? Is that kind of what we’ll talk about again Gimme and what you guys do is just a little bit different than owning machines. You handle the inventory and some of the back office software.  But how did you get from middle school to where we are today? Did you kind of put the project on hold as you end up kind of shutting it down and still in the machines like how did you get from being essentially a vendor of vending machines to a software provider?   Cory  05:02 In college, I was paying a former classmate to help me manage the machines. My college was in Boston, my first college was Boston. And I was paying other people to manage business for me to realize, I could probably just sell the whole thing and make some money, and I did. So if you hold my first exit, grow a small vending route, make it profitable, sell it, make some money, and then spend it all in school.   Beau  05:28 On school or in school?   Cory  05:30 Well, on school, in school. I chose an expensive Boston Business College, they built themselves as the number one entrepreneurship college in the world.   Beau  05:40 So it’s Babson.   Cory  05:42 So excited to go,see the only school I applied for. And it’s like, if I don’t go there, I don’t need to go. I’m going to be a lifer in this entrepreneurship gig. Got up there, great campus, great people, great instructors, great everything, except everybody they’re wanting to get a job.  So it’s like, how did I miss anything?I felt like being a little bit further, a little bit more experienced. It makes sense now. Great school, if you know where you’re going there for I guess it was my ignorance that misled me. Everybody there wanted to participate more at the institutional level. So you could be an investment banker, you could work at a venture capital firm, you could participate in the policies that could help entrepreneurship. And so entrepreneurship education is useful, but not designed, necessarily for like and now you’re going to start a business with it.   Beau  06:20 You could have exposure to entrepreneurship but you don’t have to be an entrepreneur.     Cory  06:35 There were some there that wanted to, but I didn’t have enough cash to be able to finish school with no debt. And so after I burned through my cash, built a business and burned through the cash, it said I can’t even bankrupt that student loan debt. So I want to be really careful. Before I got too much of this, and decided that I actually transitioned to engineering at Georgia Tech, it was an in-state school that got a HOPE Scholarship. The irony is, that’s where we ended up launching Gimme.  I went to engineering school, which I think a lot of people think about, you become an engineer to get a job. That’s why you go to engineering schools to get an engineering job. I went to entrepreneurship school, but I didn’t want to get a job.  So engineering school, to learn how to be an entrepreneur. So that’s where the idea for Gimme came from is seeing some of the struggles, seeing some of the challenges that some of the other people that I’ve met, in that space go through exposed that problem statement, and that is, in an all cash business, it’s difficult to keep track of product movement, inventory, and cash accountability.   Beau  07:42 So you suddenly sold your business adapts, and within Georgia Tech, and then just were pondering, what your next move was, and you came back to the vending machine space, essentially.  And so uncovered a challenge that everybody’s dealing with. And then when did you actually start developing? What is now Gimme, was that at Georgia Tech, was it after Georgia Tech? Was it a kind of passion side project? Or did you, “Hey, I’m all in I know, this space well, and this is a place in which I’ve uncovered a problem, I can solve the problem. And I can actually be an entrepreneur, again”.   Cory  08:14 It exposed that original idea. While I was there, I met a guy named Evan Jarecki, who’s now my business partner, and definitely my best friend. And we realized that we enjoyed it, we got a lot of energy out of trying to connect hardware and software together. And we saw that that typically left space in marketplaces, where hardware companies don’t want to do software, that’s their job. And vice versa. Software companies like, we don’t build physical things, we wait for it to exist, we buy it, then we interact with it. And it looked like with the vending challenge, it would be a good application for where natural energies were. And that was, how do we talk to an old machine on to new things, basically, how do you get a vending machine to talk to an iPhone, we wanted to “build the app for that”. And there was no app for that when you ran a vending machine company to know what was going on with your whole operation. So involve building a hardware component and a software component. That was the basis of the idea but at the time, we had nothing, there’s no hardware, no software, nothing. We just had this idea. And that’s when we found out about a program called Create X, at Georgia Tech, the whole program was, how do we take our engineers and teach them what they need to know about entrepreneurship, about raising money, about building a product, about doing customer discovery? And teach them how to create a startup.  So Evan and I entered that program, Create X were accepted into it, and then we spent months just doing customer discovery. And that led us on this journey.   Beau  09:40 I’ve been in that myself. It’s not the most enjoyable situation because you have this hypothesis, and then you start talking to customers, and at least in my case, my hypothesis was totally incorrect.   Cory  09:50 Better know that before you raise money and build something.   Beau  09:53 No, absolutely. It’s a necessary thing. But it’s not enjoyable because you just want to get what you want to create you want to get to market?   Cory  10:01 Yeah, exactly. And that’s the fun part, right? Like, can you please buy my product. But before you have a product, you can’t do that part yet. But we spent months working on customer discovery, it led us to talk to somebody there.   Beau  10:11 But you’re still in school at this point?   Cory  10:14 Still in school, Evan had just graduated. I was in my final semester before I graduated. And we got accepted in Create X, we started our customer discovery process, I put my last semester on hold so that we could finish this, we’re getting credit from the school, audit credit. So it didn’t count towards the degree. But it meant that I gotta stay a full time student in the process and I remember talking to several dozen operators who were like, “man, if somebody could just create the app for that, that would change my business”.  Like that’s really interesting. You know that you say that I’m not trying to lead the witness. I’m not trying to tell them what my idea is. I’m trying to listen to what works for them, what doesn’t work for them, credit cards, and vending machines were pretty new at that time. So we’re asking a lot of questions about that, maybe we should build a credit card machine for the vending machines.  And they led us back to this idea that “that’s great, it’s adding a lot of value”. But at the end of the day, if they can’t keep track of where their people are, when they’re taking cash from their machines, and how many products they’re putting back, they don’t have control over their business.  And that’s the part that keeps him up at night. And the most powerful interview came when somebody said, “Hey, I’d write a blank check today, if you could build a solution that basically is the app for that that would allow me to talk to my vending machines wirelessly and know what’s going on”. And so I wrote that down. And that was the last interview because I wrote that down, Evan and I did a little huddle afterward, a little bit of a huddle after that meeting, and decided, if he’s willing to write a blank check, maybe there really is a business here. Maybe it’s not just in our heads, maybe there’s something here.  So we went back to him a couple days later and said, Hey, you said he’d write a blank check. We don’t have a company yet. And we don’t have a product yet. But we want to do that. So was that like, “are you joking? Or is that real?” He said, “that’s real. I’ll write a check today”. And it’s a $5,000 Check. He knew that the product wasn’t really up. But he said, here’s a deposit for me to be your first customer, come back with a working version of this, and we’ll keep talking. So that’s the day that Evan and I said, “Okay, we’re doing this”.   Beau  12:16 Unbelievable. It was funny, you say that too, I feel like a lot of folks, when they get that feedback, you obviously had that lightbulb moment, but I feel like far too many people don’t necessarily have that. And also I’ve heard people say, well write your check and never believe them.   Cory  12:32 Just ask them to do it.   Beau  12:32 Yeah, it’s fantastic. You actually call this person to task, which then kind of takes you from one avenue to a totally different avenue. And so you get your first check, and he graduated college at this point.   Cory  12:45 I’m still one semester away.   Beau  12:47 You’re still one semester away?    Cory  12:49 I think that they call that a drop out at this point, because that was seven years ago.   Beau  12:52 Okay, so you haven’t finished yet?   Cory  12:54 Correct.   Beau  12:54 That is all. So that is the entrepreneurial life. I love it. So you got the $5,000 check. What did you do with that?   Cory  12:59 To build hardware was gonna cost way more than five grand, we estimated that we’d need 100 grand and that was wrong, we actually ended up needing a quarter million dollars to really be able to finish all the hardware to commercialize the product.  But it was enough to buy some component hardware to be able to. At the time, Radio Shack is going out of business. So to dive in there, bargain bins, buy a bunch of stuff and start using the Georgia Tech labs to solder different things together to kind of like hack together this hardware solution. Look, we bought this random Bluetooth thing. And we bought these random cables. And we plugged it into a vending machine. And it’s wireless now. And we’re able to show him, “here it is, it’s super ugly”. But like, we’re not foolish yet.   Beau  13:42 Was it like the size of a microwave?   Cory  13:43 It was probably bigger, if you took a part of the microwave and all the pieces were hanging out all strung together. That’s basically what it looked like.   Beau  13:50 Visually, where did this piece of hardware sit, on top of the vending machine?  behind it?   Cory  13:55 Well, we had to leave the door open. And those cables plugged in because the metal box of the vending machine was starting to interrupt some of the crude radios that we had for the Bluetooth signal. So it proved that we could do it, but it definitely was not sexy. You’ve got these cords hanging out of an open vending machine not practical for running it in real life. But proof of concept.   Beau  14:18 Awesome. So how long did that take you to actually build?   Cory  14:21 To go from? To get that proof of concept to go from there?   Beau  14:24 To get the POC?   Cory  14:26 Ah, let’s see, at the time, we’re innovating at the Georgia Tech library, the club Learning Center, the CLC. And they allowed us to use a vending machine in their basement, and we were allowed to only use it from 10pm till 5am When we’d be least in the way of other students trying to study and so we did probably 45, 10pm to 5am sessions, testing with that machine before we got that proof of concept month and a half or so. More than half of all nighters.   Beau  14:54 Oh man, that is definitely entrepreneurial life. Love that and so you get your POC I get you demoed it for your clients Yes, then what happened, ask for more money?   Cory  15:02 Had to, if this is legit, we’d really like to commercialize this, to turn these into components, we’re going to have to hire a professional engineering company just for that hardware side of things to help us take our design and make it so that you could build a bunch of these.   Beau  15:17 So this for you is inevitable, essentially overseeing the development piece, the development component, but you outsource?   Cory  15:22 Oh, not yet. At that point, I was just, we’re gonna have to find a fuel professional to help take this college project and an idea. At the time we had finished a patent for it, we were able to prove that this design works. But we needed to go and move that to something where the components were miniaturized, that we could get our board printed correctly, that we could get it all packaged correctly, that we could get approved.   Beau  15:45 It’s the size of a microwave. So let’s look at the patent process. Because I’ve thought about a patent before. I’ve looked into it, I looked into the cost, I’ve looked into the complexity. And honestly, I’m very impressed that two college kids or recent graduates were able to kind of get that through, obviously, you brought in some attorneys. But what was the patent process like?   Cory  16:08 Proving that what we had was defensively unique and non obvious. So the idea of just building like a Bluetooth thing for a vending machine wouldn’t have passed the muster. For something patentable, it’s not unique enough, because any reasonable person might have that idea. What made it interesting is that the only way to talk to a vending machine and this might get maybe a little geeky or technical or something, but there’s no like USB port on a vending machine, where he’s just gonna like, plug it in, bam, I don’t know why those guys were spending so much time on it.  It speaks in a really specific way called Dex. And Dex is a standard that doesn’t include power. So if you want to get information from a vending machine, you have to bring your own power. So if you want to connect something wirelessly, like Bluetooth, it also needs power to operate but the machine isn’t providing any power for that purpose.  So you have to start to get unique and how you can, if you will almost either trick the machine into giving you power by pretending that you’re something else that starts to delve into the non obvious component, not anybody could just randomly play or something and get it to work. Or you’d have to use something super, super long lasting that uses a tiny, tiny bit of power, so that you could get it to last for years, without needing to trick the machine that it has power but trick the machine that you didn’t leave something plugged into it, and trigger it to like shut down and protect itself.   Beau  17:30 I had no idea vending machines were so complex.   Cory  17:33 Basic stuff. But at the time, a brand new data standard had come out called Bluetooth low energy, we were able to invent a mechanism to misuse that data standard to be able to really power efficiently communicate with the machine.  So that was the basis of the patent being misused. And when I say misused, I don’t mean like in a nefarious way. I just mean, it’s supposed to operate under a certain set of ways we change it. So it operates way differently. There was some magic in that. That’s what allowed it to be patentable. So we could use this thing that didn’t fit to serve a purpose that we needed.   Beau  18:06 Got it. And not to go on a tangent path here. But you’ve got your patents, are you able to kind of block out all the competitors within your space?   Cory  18:15 Yeah.   Beau  18:16 Okay. Well,  we’ll circle back to that.   Cory  18:18 We ended up having to go to court over some of these things and were also issued a couple of copyrights for some of the unique code that went into enabling these hardware solutions. We didn’t have to defend it in court later on. And the courts have held that what we built was defensively unique, that it wasn’t something that a reasonable person could just stumbled across.  And were able to demonstrate that somebody had actually stolen our code included in their software hadn’t even bothered to comment out some of our manual comments in the code like, “Oh, Cory thinks this”. Like our names are still in their type of idea. So, I tried to rip off our code, including theirs to unlock their own stolen version of our stuff, and found it got a judge to agree with us and got it back. So for us a lot of stuff, not only did we get issued a patent, but the courts were able to uphold that what we built was unique and was dispensable.   Beau  19:11 So don’t come mess with us. Right?   Cory  19:12 So, don’t come mess with us.   Beau  19:13 So for the layman, myself included, how does somebody reverse engineer, your hardware and software. I mean, they literally have to go to the back of a vending machine, detach it, take it into a lab.   Cory  19:23 I think I would have been more flattered if that were the case. This is just good old fashioned, convince us to give it to them on the basis of creating a commercial agreement together. And then after you get all our stuff just goes to us.   Beau  19:35 Trip it off. Unbelievable. So circle back a little bit. So you’ve got your patent, you had your POC, and now you’re in the process of trying to kind of build out a team that can help you further commercialize your concept. So how did you go about finding a team? At this point you have your primary investor where other people will kind of like catching wind of what you’ve created.   Cory  19:57 So no investor at that point. We did have a first class earned. Revenue dollars are way better than investor dollars, you don’t dilute the company, there’s no obligation to a loan, you have an obligation to repay it with interest. With an investment, you sell part of your company on the basis like you will later make revenue. Revenue is awesome.  A customer is buying something from you. And we were trying to be as upstanding as possible. The customer was aware that we’re still working to build the product. So we weren’t trying to roll our electric truck down a hill and tell everyone that we had finished building it, we were saying, we have not finished building it, but we are taking orders so that we can finish building it.   Beau  20:35 To feed the machine.   Cory  20:36 Exactly. So we got the first several built. I remember Evan and I had a big whiteboard in our office, and we called it the deploy 42. Like we were spending months to get 42 of these miniaturized, commercialized installed into 42 vending machines, which is a tiny number.   Beau  20:52 How do you come up with the number 42 ?   Cory  20:54 Oh, that’s the number of machines that were at our first account.   Beau  20:57 Got it. So you wanted to essentially have your software and every single one of their vending machines.   Cory  21:02 In that one account. So, 42 just happened to be the number. So the deploy 42 plan. So we worked really hard, it took us like another six months to get those 42 machines set up, get the hardware working correctly, go through all the normal learning curves and demonstrate, now instead of just proving that it works on one machine, now we can prove that it works at the account level.  So then the customer is willing to write us another larger check. But this time, they’re more strings attached. Because the $1 size is getting bigger. Now a $5,000 check for a $50 million business is tiny. It’s big for us, it was meaningful for us, just tiny for them. They’re like it’s an insurance policy, and they figured out great if they don’t whatever. Then we got to an order of magnitude larger than that ticket, the 42 machines, when we proved it worked there, that’s when we’re like,  we need a six figure check to be able to deploy this across your whole operation.  That’s when they were like, these are big boy dollars. Now we need to make sure this is locked down. So we got our paperwork in order that would demonstrate that once we could prove that we had the capacity to handle their whole business, then they would write the check for it. And that was an opportunity where we needed to find an investor, somebody who believed in us and saw that not only could we scale at them, but we could scale to other customers.  That’s when we were introduced to a variety of angels around the Atlanta scene, but ultimately struck a great relationship with two early stage Atlanta investors, John Lally, and David Cummings, who ended up investing in our seed round, or we ultimately raised about three quarters of a million dollars, to finish out the hardware side of the business, make those first hires, and start scaling up our software, as well. So that we could expand to not only that first customers for business, but their friends as well, that customers friends, as well and start to expand in the whole industry.   Beau  22:43 That’s awesome. So a couple questions, as you’re building this 42, were you iterating with each different hardware and software that you’re deploying and getting better and better, more efficient? Or had you kind of standardized what you were putting out there in the machines at this point?   Cory  22:57 Definitely the former, I wish I could say we had standardized it, and it was all going great. Our first office was within the warehouse of that first customer. With these drivers that were using the unfinished version of the software, if they gave him a bad day, we’d know it ASAP. Because they would walk by our office on the way to drop off their stuff for the day. Like, “Hey, guys, can you talk like, oh, yeah, you found that bug, like, oh, yeah, it cost me you know, like all this, like an extra trip, I had a light soda up a flight of stairs. And then it turns out, I didn’t need them, you know, like, come on, guys get your stuff together”. So that was probably the fastest customer discovery iteration cycle we possibly could have had.   Beau  23:42 But it could have worked out any better because it’s trial by fire. And not only did you have somebody who was paying you, but you had a customer and you’re able to kind of work out some of the kinks within that one customer versus being, much larger commercial deployment and running into the situation.   Cory  23:55 Invaluable.   Beau  23:57 And so one of the software components looks like at that point is now you’ve got dashboards, and it’s pretty complex. But what did that look like? I mean, it was just like desk back in circa 85, or whatever that was.   Cory  24:10 Just see off the desk we were a pretty small team, even back then. And two of our full time hires were designers, UX designers, so we’re doing everything to understand what it was like in the field for the people who are actually touching the money and touching the product. Because everything that we’re doing was, if you remember, it was cash accountability, tracking product flow. If you can’t get that right, it can’t run the business.  So we’re obsessing over it. We had GoPro strapped to a driver’s chest into his head so we could watch where the head was pointed where the bodies pointed where the hands are going. And that’s where we started to try to mine to take out all the hidden insights that we could possibly have and make it work with the software better.   Beau  24:54 So focusing on the user experience, essentially.   Cory  24:56 Obsess on the user experience.   Beau  24:58 Obviously  Apple, everyone so they are, but that’s kind of like their Mantra.   Cory  25:03 Everybody can think about Apple. But Evan and I, where we met while we were still at Georgia Tech, was actually in the engineering department of Gulfstream. And they make private jets. And so we loved hanging out with the UX designers there. And we think, as consumers UX is pretty, it’s beautiful, but it’s maybe valueless? Or it’s difficult to understand why it would be valuable if a screen looks better than before. What does that even mean?  If you’re talking about human factors, or user experience for something complex, like driving a car, or flying an airplane, suddenly, I think it becomes easier to see if you make a mistake. If you shift into reverse, instead of driving and jam on that gas pedal, and you go the wrong direction, you could run over people behind you or something. And so you don’t want the drive and reverse buttons to get mixed up by the user. But that might hurt somebody, right? If you’re flying an airplane in 142 different configurations of buttons, and one of them sends fuel to the wrong engine or cuts fuel flow, and the engine stops running, then the plane crashes or might crash.  You don’t want users to accidentally do something like that. Same thing with cash, nobody’s gonna get hurt. But if you make it easy to make mistakes, then cash is going to go missing. Maybe somebody loses their job, because you look at this vending machine, and you’re like, “hey, where’s my 20 bucks in cash, I don’t know what you’re talking about”. They’re like, you’re fired. And maybe it was an honest mistake. So I don’t want to cost somebody whose career. Maybe label them accidentally as thieves. If they’re not, on the other hand, there is a lot of cash incentive to maybe slip a couple bills.  So we want to make it easy to do the right thing and hard to make a mistake, especially if somebody’s career, the reputation is on the line. So these UX decisions weren’t just for, “hey, we made their life in a way that’s really hard to measure 6% better”, what does a 6% Better life look like? I don’t know. But if we can make it so that mistakes are less common. And it’s 50% more clear to spot a thief versus not, then you can focus your attention in the right place, you can empower employees to do the right thing, and you can get rid of the bad apples faster.   Beau  27:14 And ultimately, you guys are adding more value as well. That makes you guys relevant. And I think there are far too many companies. And I could be wrong. But fortunately, companies don’t focus on the UI UX. On the front end, it’s more so around just getting a product up and running. And we’ll deal with that crap later.  But I like your story. And also if you can make the situation better for the drivers, they can be your biggest advocates which only going to make your job easier as it pertains to selling. So a couple more things here. So you got your two angel investors, you got your funding round. And so what are we doing now?    Cory  27:49 Now it’s time to try to grow the company.    Beau  27:53 So you’re building a better mousetrap? Are you investing in salespeople? Are you putting money towards marketing? What does that kind of look like?   Cory  28:00 We experimented all across the board? You know, we’re reading business books, we’re reading like, Hey, here’s how you pay for advertising. Here’s how you scale your sales team. Hiring SDRs BDR account executives, we’re trying to pull the typical SAS stuff.   Beau  28:11 Those stuff to sift through, right? It’s insane. I’ve run the game myself. SDRs advertising. And I feel like a mixture of all, is the right move. But you gotta know when to pull the levers at the right time.   Cory  28:23 I see OPR, like an engineering world, the more letters that you can use, the higher the score goes. So this is great. And especially being part of the portfolio companies in Atlanta, the other invested companies, there’s a group of us. And so I’m trying to pay attention to people who have built bigger businesses faster and figure out like, Hey, what did you do to scale? And how is this gonna work?  And none of those approaches work for us with our product in this industry. There are maybe 150 Vending operators that we’re targeting in the US. These are national operators currently. As we remember, we hired our first SDR and in like four days, they called All 150 of them.   Beau  29:11 Call me again?    Cory  29:17 So, there are certain things that work at scale. If you have like a target audience of 50 000, 500 000, 5 million, then you hire a roomful of these people. We learned that a lot of what we had to do to scale with these large LTVs are lifetime values for each customer. But long lead times and super high khaksar cost of acquiring a customer had less to do with trying to do things fast and more to do with how do we build a quality relationship?  How do we get them to trust us? How do we get them to recognize us? And that’s what we started to invest our time and effort in. So instead of trying to hire a room full of people to make phone calls instead we’re investing a lot on our support side. So every time a customer called we would answer like in less than five rings, that was our goal less than five rings, we got down to during business hours, it was usually less than one ring, it was zero rings.     Beau  30:10 The Gimme guys are always available.   Cory  30:11 At least during specified hours, because if you had an issue and you needed to call us, it’s because you couldn’t do something that was interrupting your operation. So instead of investing in salespeople, we invest in supporting people and successful people. And that’s what we built our business on. And so that is maybe one of the differences between us and your “typical venture back SAS company.”   Beau  30:31 Sure, also you guys are extremely niched. I mean, no offense here, but vending machines are not, it’s not the sexiest business.   Cory  30:37 And it’s not really a sexiest business.   Beau  30:39 But you’ve carved out a niche, you guys are a known entity. And you’ve got some use cases. And I think if you can leverage that and provide a good story to the companies that you’re not working with, it makes it a hell of a lot easier for you to actually get in and acquire new customers.   Cory  30:53 And nobody was going to trust us with their whole operation, because we asked them to, they had to hear it from a friend and their friends were really going to talk about us as if we actually made a difference in their operation.   Beau  31:04 Sure. And also to I’m sure, 150 companies, everybody knows everybody. And so now that’s a great story. So you basically shifted away from SDR and like guerrilla warfare, sales development, if you will focus more on the customer experience. And as it pertains to the software, but picking up the phone, helping troubleshoot ensuring that the overall experience was a pleasant one, that you solve problems quickly.   Cory  31:29 There it is, if you’re looking for a job, because that was great.   Beau  31:32 Actually, we’ll see how my startup goes, so maybe they call in six months. And so, how did you leverage that to get into new accounts? Have you moved from maybe, are you working on the product? Are you focused on business development and growing relationships? Is that Evans job, how are you guys kind of splitting the workflow as it pertains to the growth of the company, which of course, is going to be revenue and sales related.   Cory  31:54 So that was all several years ago, that was kind of like the launch story. What happened since then, and I’ll go a little bit quicker. What’s happened since then is at the time, we were connecting directly to the vending machines, all the data that we were capturing, were being sent back to their warehouse management suite.  So then our customers started asking us, “Hey, when are you going to take over our warehouse management? all that great stuff you did to track cash and product in the field with our drivers? Could you do that at the warehouse level?” And really sure, it’s gonna be kind of hard. But yeah, we’ll like we’ll figure this out, we got this.  And that was about three years ago. So we raised a couple million dollars more, we told our customers, we’re going to build it, same idea, same customer discovery process, we’re not going to do this without customers who believe in us. And we don’t want to do without that first customer check. So we talked to this secret group of customers and told them, “Hey, if you want this, it doesn’t exist yet. You need to write a check, though, to pre purchase it. That’s how we’ll know that this is a legit opportunity. And you definitely want us to spend our time and effort to build it.”   Beau  32:57 So you got the investment dollars from maybe it gets another funding round. And then you approach your customers asking for them essentially to prepay for this future software.   Cory  33:05 Yeah. And we did one before the other, we did the customers first to prove it, that whole customer discovery process.   Beau  33:10 You can use that as leverage to then get the money because essentially IPOs.   Cory  33:14 There is. We’re able to demonstrate that there’s a clear market need for this. And how do we know while we can prove it, how can we prove it? Well, these people care enough that they’re willing to spend today’s dollars to buy a product that literally doesn’t exist, they know that it doesn’t exist yet. But that’s how important it is for their operation.  So we decided to build a whole stack of software for running a whole and it unattended retail business. So just vending machines whose operators typically operate large kitchens, commissaries, they operate micro markets. So these small unattended convenience stores operate vending machines.  And so we were growing from just connecting to vending machines to operating warehouse scheduling, routing, reporting, accounting exports, purchasing the product at the aggregate level, so buying enough to run the whole operation, which was usually multistate, plus tracking the personnel where they were where all the place machines were the accounts, commissions and tax reporting as well. So it was a huge, maturity growth for the company.   Beau  34:10 Did that increase your TAM as well? Because if you go to the city, there’s 150 customers and so now are you accessing an entire new pool of potential customers and buyers?   Cory  34:21 Much bigger TAM, it allows us to, again, no longer just exist in the bending vertical, but the micro market vertical, the office coffee vertical. The other thing it did is it exposed that there was an opportunity in the grocery space too. And so we started selling our hardware like we started in vending seven years ago, we started selling our hardware and some of our light software tools in the grocery space too. That was about three years ago that we started building the whole stack of software and selling our hardware solution into groceries.   Beau  34:52 So just for the folks who are listening. So what does that actually look like as it pertains to the grocery stores, is this within like The Dairy Aisle, like where does this hardware actually reside?   Cory  35:04 So the hardware exists at the back of a grocery store where people make deliveries of the food that you buy, typically the fresh food that can’t be warehoused. So like you said, dairy, produce, baked goods, beverages best served cold, those types of products aren’t warehouse first, they are delivered. And it’s not until that point of delivery that you know how many are going to show interest.  So they use the same data standard decks, to communicate to the grocery store, here’s how many I ultimately ended up dropping off in the grocery store responds to confirm that amount, so that person can prove to their boss like, I really did drop off, 100 loaves of bread to Kroger or whatever. And, I can get paid from that.  And so that happens on that same data standard, it’s running from an old computer running in the receiving dock. And they can plug in our hardware that used to be plugged into vending machines that can be plugged now into grocery stores to communicate how many products were dropped off.   Beau  35:59 Now is the approach for the grocery store side of the business still the same? Have you rehired SDRs and you were focusing on sales, or is it back to, again ensuring that there’s a phenomenal customer experience, which then will help you kind of ultimately grow your subscriber base?   Cory  36:13 So we went from 150, which felt like a really small number nationally, to like six, if like six possible customers, not really, but it’s on the order of about 10, we have about 10 possible customers in the grocery space. Because of how big the cheque sizes and groceries are, there’s these major resellers of solutions to the major chains.  So Kroger, for instance, wouldn’t work with us directly. And our soft drink manufacturers don’t work with us directly, they buy a package solution that includes our stuff from one of maybe 10 under resellers out there, we call them VARS, value added resellers, we’ve got those listed on our website, because like corporate HighJump are versatile. They buy a bunch of stuff packaged together and sell it and support it all at once to Kroger.   Beau  37:03 Which is great for you. Because ultimately, it’s just another sales channel.   Cory  37:05 It’s another sales channel. So we still don’t need a roomful of SDRs. We need a roomful of support people to make sure that when versatile is looking at how to bundle this into their solution, they can do things that they’ve never done before.  And like we said, we’ve got that defended patent. So we’ve been assertive and made sure that we’re extracting the value out of that intellectual property protection. So the only thing that competes with us right now is a cable. So you can cable into vending machines and grocery stores, or you can use our hardware and do it all wirelessly and instantly.   Beau  37:37 Unbelievable. So a few more questions here. We’ll be respectful of your time, fast forwarding from three years ago, to say, what’s the current state of Gimme?   Cory  37:46 We’ve got 10s of 1000s of trucks on the road that are using our hardware and software, whether it’s in vending markets, or grocery stores to make deliveries to manage invoices to get paid. And there these fresh food deliveries, regardless of the channel, are happening because of the software stack that we built in the hardware stack that we built to support it.  Now we’re looking to the future. And what does that look like? Well, we’ve been working on some computer vision tools that rely a little bit on AI and machine learning to detect things like “Hey, when are things sold out?” And are things placed in the right spot, and they are organized correctly and at the right price. And so we’re going to continue to invest in that area now, which for us, is the tech team super exciting for our customers, it’s just another game changing level of information that they can use to make better decisions on.   Beau  38:34 That’s awesome. Glad to hear. So a couple more questions here. Let’s get a little more tactical about you. So was there a time when you thought about hanging it up? With Gimme multiple times? I think any entrepreneur goes through that. I think I went through that about a month ago. It’s like I had this week from hell and literally like, why am I putting myself through this?   Cory  38:54 Maybe like anything else hard. Three years ago, I became a dad, that was super life changing.   Beau  39:01 I’ve got two girls, 7 1/2 and 5 1/2. And it’s amazing what it will do to your life. And it really changes your perspective. And everything you thought was important gets just brought down one level, which is just amazing.   Cory  39:14 I totally connect with what you’re saying. I’ve got a baby girl on the way probably in about a week. She’ll be here so we’re super excited about that, too. In those moments, I think it forces a reevaluation, what’s important, what’s not and why? Why are you doing this?  And even through that what kept Evan and I going isn’t, one day we just want to be rich or whatever. We were not doing it just to try to find the exit. What was really powerful for us was seeing how it changed how our customers did business.  They’re already profitable before we came around. They already had businesses before we came around, but sometimes people were stealing from them or sometimes you’d go to a vending machine and be empty. Their customers would get mad at them right away. And it felt great being able to improve that experience for the person shopping at a vending machine and for our customers who believed in us. And there were tons of sucky moments along the way. We’re like, this is terrible or stressful or overwhelming. One of those times that stands out is that a federal court case is over Fourth of July to fly away from all my friends. I’m being deposed, watching other people have fun, watching fireworks and I’m getting grilled for eight hours straight in this hot room by this opposing counsel’s attorney like this is not fun.   Beau  40:32 That’s also a big time, though. You know what I mean? Like, that’s a big time.   Cory  40:36 It doesn’t feel like it. If you go to a really great prison, maybe you’re notorious, but you like the experiences but still you’re in prison. So for this, you’re still being deposed by opposing counsel, and you still have to be grilled about why you deserve to keep what you spent your whole life, your whole professional life building and why that’s important. It’s no fun and stressful. So even in those moments, it’s good to be able to circle back to know why am I doing this? And that’s the part that has always kept us going, is it clear to us that we’ve made a difference to our customers. And that means a lot.   Beau  41:13 I think it comes down to purpose. What is your purpose? And I’ve been in that situation as well, where it’s like, again, why am I doing this? And then I think about the mission, what I’ve accomplished and where I’m going. And that kind of helps the fears and the anxiety subsided a little bit and keeps you focused on the mission.  A couple more questions. What do you think is the number one trait of those entrepreneurs that find success versus those that don’t? Again, this podcast about finding that next gear? And personally and not trying to influence you, I think it’s all about perseverance. I think that’s resilience. That’s really the difference between those that do and those that don’t. But what’s your take?   Cory  41:50 I’d agree with that. I think that resilience is a big part of it. I think that optimism, not for the sake of being naive, but for realizing there is a possibility of a better future out there. And there are things that I can do that take me there that take our team there that take our customers here that take our industry there.  And for us, it’s been that sense of like, we know why we’re doing this. And we’re going to stay at it until either all our customers tell us like, you’re not the ones to do it anymore. Or we get there. And so that’s kept us going. It’s that sense of optimism and resilience.   Beau  42:24 Love it. If you go back and give yourself one piece of advice prior to starting this company, what would it be? Just one.   Cory  42:31 That’s possible. Keep focused on the big stuff. And don’t get sidetracked by shiny objects, or the little things along the way, just keep your head up. And if the mission is to change the way that people buy things from a vending machine, stay focused on that.   Beau  42:48 I love that I’ve get shiny object syndrome. And so for me, I need to really keep myself grounded and focused on 3 things versus 30. And it’s a challenge, it’s a struggle,   Cory  42:59 It’s a huge challenge.   Beau  43:00 I totally get it.   Cory  43:01 So the way that we work to address that in our group is every day we all have a team to stand up for all of us. And we go through what we call our MIT, our most important thing. So instead of asking people for a big task list, it’s been our philosophy that if everybody knows what’s most important for them, for the company, as a whole, what’s most important for the company today, and individually, what’s the most important way we can contribute to that just pick one thing for the day.  And we do that for the quarter as well. But every day I am what’s our MIT, we all share that together? The belief being that if we always focus first on the single most important thing and knock that out before the day starts, the company’s moving forward on these big picture goals. And then of course, the day will fill up with this, that and the other. But we always try to move that one most important thing every day.   Beau  43:50 Everybody has an agile, agile approach. I say just day by day.   Cory  43:53 Exactly.   Beau  43:54 Yes. It’s funny, just recently, it’s about a month ago, on Mondays, every Monday at 10am. I’ve got a calendar reminder. It says “What’s that one big thing this week?” So I haven’t done micro goals where it’s one thing or MIT I should say, every day, but it’s one big thing this week. And that’s really been very helpful to me personally, and so is phenomenal. I may try to kind of up the ante a little bit and have it so that I do it once a day, but I love that and that mirrors kind of what I’m trying to accomplish as well. All right, lightning round, quick answers, quick questions, favorite aspect of being your own boss?   Cory  44:26 The least favorite part of being my own boss?   Beau  44:29 That’s the next question.   Cory  44:31 I mean, the favorite part about being your own boss is having the ability to shape your own destiny.   Beau  44:35 Love it. That’s awesome. Couldn’t agree more. Least favorite part about being your own boss?   Cory  44:40 Lack of accountability. If you have a boss, he tells you what to do, or she tells you what to do. And as long as you do it you’re doing a good job. If you’re the boss and you say, company, the most important thing is we do this and then everybody does it and you realize that’s the wrong thing.   Beau  44:53 I totally agree. So, one thing that I don’t wanna say I struggle with but I think about often is, Am I doing the right things? And I think that’s the toughest part because I literally to your point, accountability is one thing, but I don’t have somebody providing structure, guidance, support and what’s next. And so I totally agree. What would you say is your biggest success with maybe just entrepreneurship in general taking Gimme aside?   Cory  45:16 Watching the team, so I’ve been able to watch our team do some pretty amazing things as individuals. And as groups, I’ve watched some of our team members be named 30 under 30, 40 under 40. I’ve watched them be named a pro to know for the whole industry, I’ve watched them, in some cases, get promoted quickly within my group and then get offered just unimaginably prestigious jobs at other places. And that hurts. But at the same time, it’s like, wow, watching people get hired by Porsche, and specifically because they saw the portfolio of what they’ve been able to do here. Things like that mean a lot.   Beau  45:49 That’s awesome. I think you guys and gals that don’t have to be the one wearing the cape, that I can actually take joy by seeing somebody grow is awesome. So kudos to you. Last question. What would you say your biggest failure is and your entrepreneur journey, we all have them. I feel like, I feel weekly.   Cory  46:09 Probably the failure to set appropriate expectations. I mentioned that we endeavored on that really big project at the time we told those initial customers, we’re going to build this thing. We did so with hubris, too much pride. I got everybody to believe in us that we’re gonna be able to do it in 12 backup plans, 18 months it took us 37, took us 37 months to finish it and their operations were waiting for it. They believed in us, they believed in me, the plan and that not setting expectations correctly there and having a little bit too much pride. So hubris, that’s probably my biggest failure so far. We have a lot to learn. I have a lot to learn.   Beau  46:42 But that’s the toughest part to setting expectations properly. Because a lot it’s always speculation. It’s always gambling, and how do you do that appropriately? It’s a challenge. And I think a lot of people could benefit from doing a better job across life, not just business.   That’s why I’m doing this podcast. But where can people find your company and where can they find you?   Cory  47:05 They can find us all online. The easiest way to find us in the vending space is vending.ai and the grocery space, it’s dsd.ai. That’s the best way to find us.   Beau  47:19 Awesome. Well, Cory, I really appreciate the time sincerely. Thanks for joining. Best of luck with your continued growth plans. You’ve carved out a hell of a niche. Congratulations.   Cory  47:30 Thanks so much.