from the crossroads of America in the Hoosier State of Indiana this is get in the podcast focuses on the unfolding stories and extraordinary Innovations happening right now in the Heartland I'm Matt Hunter CEO at powderkeg and I will be one of your hosts for today's conversation I am joined in Studio by co-host Nate spangle head of community at Powder Keg and on the show today is Angie stocklin a professor angel investor and former co-founder in coo at oneclick at that point in time we were getting over 50 percent of our traffic from organic search we got up one day and all 11 of our websites were gone from Google Gone Gone Angie Stockman was the CEO and co-founder at oneclick a company located in Greenwood Indiana that owned three different eyewear Brands after one click was acquired by Foster Grant and 2018 Angie became an angel investor calmness for the Indianapolis Business Journal and Entrepreneurship and Innovation lecturer at Purdue University in today's show we are going to cover professional transitions finding your niche in a career you love and I'm sure we're going to share more than a few startup stories that are sure to inspire Angie welcome to get in thank you so much for having me thanks for being here yes we've been so excited about this conversation and I'm eager to hear how everything is going with Angel Investing as well as teaching and writing you have so much knowledge to share but I figured we could at least share with our audience a little bit of the story you were mentioning just before we hit go on the podcast that it's been almost 20 years since you started almost 20 years it was 2005.
and do you remember it like it was yesterday or is that seem like a lifetime ago there are parts that still me oh those are the ones we want to talk about on the show today let's dig in take me all the way back to the early days before you were even Incorporated 2005 what was your life like in 2005 I was working as a school psychologist I had never thought about being an entrepreneur I loved psychology I actually really loved my job but I was married at the time to someone who was an entrepreneur in every bone of his body and so if you have met Randy which I know both of you have and if our podcast listeners have as well he's just an entrepreneur and so we always knew that he was going to do something we didn't quite know we were going to do it together but it was just a really natural fit so in our spare time we would nerd out on like building websites and trying to figure out like hey could we do something we don't know what it is let's do something we were not the entrepreneurs that were solving a world problem or had a problem of our own that we were going to solve it was a very different beginning but I think that beginning of this tinkering together allowed us to figure out like how we worked really well together in our skill set totally and so in the nights and weekends we came home we would build things we would try to make money and the very first thing we ever made money doing was a website called mail from Santa Claus yes I love that brand that's awesome yes it was 2005.
again give us the pitch yeah so if you had a child or grandchild who believed in Santa Claus because Santa Claus is real clearly if there are children listening yes we're not going to be the ones to break that news here I know what news yes exactly Santa Claus is real Santa he's very busy be Santa the Santa is busy and so there was a gentleman in Santa Claus Indiana that would help write his letters for him that's awesome and so you put in your child's age their name maybe a few things they wanted for Christmas and then they would get a letter from Santa Claus in the mail no way yes we were just an affiliate so we got five dollars for every letter that we sourced on behalf of the gentleman doing the letters so it was amazing there was no inventory to do we just got to build the site and focus on marketing and at the end of the first season we made two thousand dollars and we thought that was the best thing that had ever happened some good extra Christmas money right this place for our Christmas presents maybe we take a little vacation like this is really cool and then it was all over and life felt a little empty yeah and we were like let's see what else we can do a lot of seasonality to that product a lot of seasonality and could we continue working on it of course sure but in the meantime we decided to try something else yeah and after what felt like a year of searching but really was about six weeks we bought sunglasswarehouse.
com from a gentleman in Florida who had just had a baby his wife was ready for him to get rid of it how did you find that deal uh long story short is we became a little bit obsessed with sunglasses because we lost out on a deal yeah I know but we'll do it so we got outbid at the last minute we had been forty thousand dollars which was like that's a lot of letters from Santa yeah it was like double our savings account yeah and it ended up being the very best thing possible um because then we went and looked for a different sunglasses site selling something similar we love the margins we loved the opportunity because it's huge Market there's lots of room for people especially in 2005 2000 most people have eyes yes yeah yes and we most of us wear sunglasses right yeah yeah and most of us have multiple pairs that's true yeah and so we found a site for sale in Florida how it's 2005. like acquired.
com right or micro acquire that wasn't a thing was it there were some sites maybe Flippa we bought a lot of things from Biz Buy sell I remember Biz Buy sell yes I think it still exists yeah yeah cool um but in this case it was actually just looking up who owned the sites there was a whole list we went through like all the ones that existed and started emailing people and said would you be interested in selling what did you learn in that process of just looking at a bunch of different businesses and considering whether or not hey should we bid on this one should we buy what were some of the things you as as a cell Professor not full-blood entrepreneur or the things that you're gleaning from that experience first of all we noticed that there was a lot of I think differences in people's level of tech ability in 2006 like it was a lot harder to build a site but you guys had experience doing that we didn't know you haven't seen a letter how did you guys learn how to build sites Randy was a software engineer so that was helpful that is helpful yes yeah very helpful but otherwise the shopifies of the world didn't exist yet and so you were building from scratch or using Wordpress or Joomla or something like that yeah yeah and so it took a little bit of extra finesse to make things look nice and so one thing we noticed is there was a wide variety of how websites looked and how they functioned there was a wide variety of domains and in 2006 it was thought that you needed a keyword in a domain to be relevant and that was something that we were looking at as well but at the end of the day it was a lot of who's willing to sell and do we like this site well enough that we think we can rehab it and make it worthwhile and that's how we ended up with sunglass Warehouse how did you learn about valuing like you said you bid 40 000 like how did you learn about how to value a website in 2005 2006.
surprisingly enough there was already a lot of information online and so pretty much from that point until now like we taught ourselves everything that we needed to know by just like talking to other people and reading about like stories and advice yeah okay yeah so so you're there you guys get outfit at the last second and it leads you down to would you say sunglasswarehouse. com yep all right so how did you guys land on that one and and what was the kind of the the Genesis of what became eventually one click yeah so so I don't remember exactly how many people were willing to sell but I do remember we liked that domain the best and it was a really good price so we bought that for ten thousand dollars which was half of our savings account yeah and then we still had 10 000 left to spend on marketing and inventory so you're just buying the domain or there was already a business functioning there there was already a business function but we didn't want it yeah yeah it was like more like buying it for parts yep yep that's right so business was this guy in Florida had sunglasses had inventory and was shipping them out of his house yep interesting what did you guys know about sourcing like physical products nothing yes we learned everything online so we first found a wholesale wholesale that was selling online and we bought everything from this one pillar if we fast forward six months we went to a trade show in Las Vegas where we met a ton of other wholesalers and importers and we realized like one there's a lot more opportunity to save money get better margins get better product both from a quality standpoint and a fashion standpoint but at first we just started with one wholesaler really yeah we called him he helped us pick a nice variety to start and we just launched nice so talking about the launch what was that like was there a Big Marketing push or was it not a lot of fanfare if you press go and all of a sudden you made a million dollars year one right you did not know if I remember correctly we made a maybe 40 even in Revenue that first year which I think from zero to 40 is terrible right but again we were teaching ourselves everything along the way yeah and so I was trying to figure out like Inventory management and customer service and how do you ship an order and Brandy was working on hey let's make the website prettier and where do we get this logo made and where do we get the pictures and um like how do I Market this and so he was teaching himself everything on one side and I took the other and we just went for it so what was the why that was driving you to it was mostly about honestly in the beginning let's see if we can do it yeah yeah I think for Randy he was driven by wanting to be his own boss and own his own destiny I really like to figure things out I like challenges I like small challenges that you can see progress every day and I think I got caught up into that and then eventually like my why became a little bit different but we really wanted to see if we could figure it out as a now professor of Entrepreneurship but also a background in Psychology what do you think are the really important psychological factors that an entrepreneur needs to consider in those early days of starting up like you think it's going to and so having some level really a high level of resilience is really important can you cultivate that oh that's a great question I think Randy and I both naturally had some resilience just based on our childhood and like who we were as people and so when things didn't go as planned it just fueled us to try harder or try different um but I have seen entrepreneurs I think that don't have that resilience and that I do think it might be a hard thing to learn but TBD on whether you can cultivate it sure that might be a question for somebody else yeah okay I also think that you have to be driven by knowledge and you have to also understand like when it's outside of your realm and you need to ask for help or ask for guidance from people those are all really important factors whether you're building like an e-commerce business out of your house or like a high growth startup yeah and it seems like from your early early exposure and just you were very curious right you were learning about all of these things like you're in Psychology for a high school or a School Corporation side you're learning about operations and websites and mail from santa.
com how important do you think curiosity is for an entrepreneur I personally think it's really important and we talk a lot about that actually in my classes at Purdue just being naturally curious about how things work it's I think there's one thing to sit and let somebody tell you how something is done but it's another to just seek out that knowledge and so we are brain and are both very curious people and I still find myself very curious when I stumble on something I'm like wait how does that work or how did that happen or what's going on and I find myself in deep Dives all the time oh I feel like especially if you're like naturally curious especially as an angel investor when you like ask a really probing like intellectual question to an entrepreneur and they're like oh my gosh this person cares about my idea and they want to learn about how it works yeah let's go one of the things that I'm thinking about right now is just you're a new mom newish mom a first couple first year first couple years first year he's nine months next week oh my gosh that's amazing coming up on the first year um I'm sure there will be some degree where he's just going to be learning curiosity by osmosis just by being around mom who's naturally curious person something I always reflect on is like a lot of this like resilience grit tenacity does come a lot of times with entrepreneurs from Early Childhood struggles and challenges that they had in their childhood development and I would imagine for an entrepreneur there's like this and as a parent there's this balance of I don't want my life my child's life to be as hard as mine was in some ways but at the same time I don't want to Rob them of resilience how do you think about that as the in as you think about how you're going to raise your child it's already a huge question so Jeff my current husband and I had talked about it a lot and we're even coming up with it already because I was telling Nate he was he's starting to pull up on everything and there's a nice balance between catching him when he falls and helping him learn that like when you hit the ground it hurts and so you need to be more careful yes and so we're already trying to balance that I don't want to raise especially if he's an only child only child with a really cushy lifestyle that never has to lift a finger yeah or do anything or solve a problem and I think especially parents these days we all run the risk of taking care of everything for our kids sure and not allowing them to solve their own problems and so I totally I agree especially looking back at my childhood at some of the the challenges that I was faced with I do think the tenacity and the resilience comes a lot from what we learned growing up yeah and it sounds like in a lot of ways to happen not necessarily manufacturing those moments but I guess you're manufacturing it by not necessarily like always catching yes when the fall is happening yeah you're just like I just brace for impact yes I try to let the Falls happen on the carpet for anyone that's listening yes yeah yeah it makes sense and and then once verbal processing is there you can have the debrief okay why did we fail at this thing how are we gonna go about skateboarding the next time or basketball next or whatever the the use case is that's really interesting appreciate you letting me probe and think about that the other thing that's really unique to me that has always stood out to me about your one click story is deciding to go into business with your life partner talk to me a little bit about that decision was that something you did eyes wide open or did it just happen organically honestly it happened organically were you worried about it at all no why I think because we had such complimentary skill sets and some from the very very beginning uh I trusted Randy to do his thing he trusted me to do mine obviously like we worked together on strategy and things like that but I never felt like he was like dancing in my portion of the business like neither one of us was telling each other what to do like we both trusted each other to do our own things and we had very separate responsibilities and I think that's the only way that it worked for so long were there things that he did to annoy you or that you did to annoy him I mean there were definitely as we like got team members and we grew the business sure and we had to learn how to not become emotional with each other in fights because obviously like I annoyed him and he annoyed me right because of course it's a co-founder he's a co-founder and a it's a co-founder and it's a partner so you've got like the house stuff I would imagine would seep into the business stuff 100 had to tear or down the oh let's take this outside conversation yeah our team members would start looking at each other like not in front of the kids in front of the kids do you have advice for other let's say husband wife whatever partners that might be going into business together of hey we might have done this the wrong way if I could go back I would do it this way or how just advice for them on growing a business together as partners that like one necessarily think that we did a great job of having any kind of separation between life and work and honestly like we didn't want it like we loved one click we loved growing our business that was my life and I felt like my life was my work but looking back and having five years to reflect on everything that happened I do think that our identities got so ingrained in the business that when the business was over I was left thinking okay what now who am I without this business I'm always an entrepreneur and I'll always be like the co-founder but I'm not an active co-founder and now what yeah and I do think like together too as a married couple we let that all slip away so I would say to make sure that you have that balance that you're looking for and that you're both on the same page about what that looks like yeah yeah would you have other advice for Founders that may have sold their business and are now in that identity crisis on like what does come next what you just hang out on the beach or it's no like there's like a spirit inside these people where they want to go out and Conquer more challenges like be curious yeah what kind of advice would you have for them so I've talked to several Founders that have sold businesses and some people want to jump right in and they already have their next idea and you know what and maybe that's what they need to do but I did find a lot of value in stopping to reflect I just I made like coffee meetings and lunches my new job and I connected with a bunch of people that I hadn't seen in a long time I was really curious about what the options were like should I be a consultant should I be a coach I made a I'm a nerd so I made a spreadsheet of all my options and what sounded interesting and that's how I ended up teaching at Purdue because education and at the like secondary level seemed really interesting to me and so I was like you know what if not now never so let's go try it yeah yeah I love it just taking a breath to pause reflect and figure out what's next I think that's commendable advice you speak to the tenacity it takes to be an entrepreneur and the resilience that you guys had to show take us back to that first year forty thousand dollars year one which is significant in my opinion like that's amazing but what was like how close in that first year two years were you like to folding it ah this just isn't it tell us about some of the challenges you guys faced early on surprisingly enough I don't think we ever had a conversation about folding it that's amazing yeah that's tenacity luckily enough for us I think that we were in a position where we could both keep our jobs and so the business itself was profitable almost immediately we didn't need a salary you've been paying yourself we were paying ourselves because we were still at our jobs um on the flip side of that because we had jobs every single minute that we were free was business related so we both came home from work it was immediately let's work on everything we would get up in the mornings and work in the business I would go to my car at lunch and make calls and we were in a type of business where if we weren't there to fill orders they didn't get done and so sometimes we were recruiting family and friends if we had like a wedding to go to or something where we couldn't be physically there for the day but for the most part we didn't watch TV we didn't watch the news I had no idea what was going on we didn't see our friends and family we were just heads down going for it in your relationship now with Jeff you you said you're trying to be more intentional about creating that work life separation balance you're still very busy you're writing for the Indianapolis Business Journal you're teaching entrepreneurship at Purdue you're Angel Investing you're raising a child how do you how are you now with Jeff creating space for that relationship what things do you both do intentionally because I would imagine our listeners a lot of them have primary relationships a lot of them have high demanding jobs and it would be curious I'd be curious to know what you're learning now in your relationship with Jeff and just cultivating more of that relationship outside of work yeah where we're able to work at jobs that we love and so we're not in the corporate race and the promotional ladder he works for agronovus which is a non-profit here in Indianapolis and he loves what he does shout out to Mitch who's been on the podcast Mitch Frazier is a great hi Mitch and he loves his job but it is a job that primarily gets to be done during the day yeah and my job is a job that I have to grade but primarily is done during the day and also during the school year and so we have both allowed ourselves to prioritize like our Hobbies our and our physical well-being we're both really good at exercising and keeping that up and then also having just time for ourselves which helps us have a better relationship with each other as well yeah time for self is a huge one I I'll share from my own experience of having a partner in alley because she worked at one click right out of school and just in the times where we were both doing the entrepreneurial thing in the early days especially when she was freelance writing it was very easy to just be around and I was running a lifestyle business too so didn't have a big team didn't didn't really have a schedule didn't have to be anywhere at any certain time and we found ourselves suspending all of our time together and you can't I can totally relate to even though we weren't working on a business together we were working on a business together in the sense that we were always just reflecting back what we were hearing giving a different perspective on each other's businesses and just learning to create those extracurriculars the for me it's music for Ali it's writing novel writing a novel instead of writing copy for Mastercard or whoever and writing things just for fun and having those separate things I can really relate to what you're saying on just like having that time for yourself yeah is almost as important as having the time together it is yes and we both have personal goals around our hobbies and we love to cycle together but Jeff is very he's much more serious about cycling and he has like personal goals that he sets every year and so it's really important for him to go out and be able to work on those goals by himself yeah yeah totally just to have that time as well this is the relationship Deep dive episode one day I'm going to come back and listen once you have a relationship one day one day invited somebody with a psychology background I'm here for this this is really valuable now this is just a nice marketing infomercial for Nate's on the market everybody yes let's use the podcast to get me a date this is really the master plan yeah that's why I started this whole thing I know two years ago when I joined the team at powder cake yes let's just psychologically dissect Nate now are you ready to transform your brand with award-winning video content that captures your vision and connects with your audience check out Alchemy the experts at building your brand using video from story driven social media Snippets that leave a lasting impression to compelling full-length documentaries they have got the expertise to take your brand to the next level Alchemy is actually our video partner here on get in and they do amazing work all the videos across social across YouTube all that is done by Alchemy and they're an amazing partner to work with reach out to me Nate at powderkeg or check out alchemyfilmco.
com to get connected with Alden and his team they will take care of all of your video needs talk to me about some of those pivotal moments at one click because it really does seem like from a very early stage you're always getting some positive momentum you're getting those dopamine hits along the way from a psychological perspective that are keeping you going inevitably in any founder Journey you're going to run into some roadblocks some dark moments changes in algorithms if you're an SEO traffic website what were some of those bigger ones that you remember at one click that almost stopped in your tracks yeah so there's a view that may not be one-click junkies like originally our business model was to purchase or start small websites and then flip them so the ones that we purchased we would flip them put a new coat of paint on it figure out the new marketing strategy maybe change the customer and then we would either keep that for cash once it was profitable or we would sell it and use the money to invest in something that we thought had more opportunity genius and so at one point I think we owned over 30 different web properties oh my gosh I didn't realize it was that many yeah it's a lot wow um I just remember like affordable scarves sunglass Warehouse of course Felix and Iris of course Felix and Iris you like the chip and Joanna Gaines of totally properties totally that's exactly right that's awesome maybe not that cool but that was that's the idea yeah and that was working really well for a while and then around 2012 these bigger Brands started figuring out digital marketing yeah so like the department stores and the best buys of the world and before that we really didn't have a whole lot of competition right and so it's pretty easy the golden years yeah it was the golden years it was a lot easier to just focus on the X's and O's of building a website and selling to customers yeah how are you driving traffic in the early days depends on the year in the business but primarily the main channel so SEO paid marketing email marketing there wasn't a lot of social media at that time like you couldn't just like turn on a hundred thousand dollars in Facebook ads at that point and it's like all of a sudden you have a million visitors that's correct no interesting yeah that's interesting it's funny that you mentioned algorithm updates you probably might remember this but in 2012 we got hit by one yeah penguin Panda I don't know and yeah one of the two yes and at that point in time we were getting over 50 of our traffic from organic search we got up one day and all 11 of our websites were gone from Google Gone Gone not even like a dip nope couldn't find them they were just gone wow yeah and to make matters worse it happened three days before we moved into our brand new building yeah what was that like how are you feeling it exactly like the face your websites are gone yeah they're just gone you've lost half your traffic overnight literally half our traffic and I think it was half of our Revenue which is gone I'm sure you just handled that totally mindfully took it in straight didn't Panic at all take us back what do you do yeah yeah so like the I don't remember I remember panicking of course of course right and then at the end of the day it took us about nine months to rectify the issue in the meantime there was like some days where Panic some days weren't it was all hands on deck we had people from the warehouse that were trying to let's cut to the chase we're removing links because we've been working on these businesses since 2006 and the rules of Google had changed had altered what was accepted or looked over suddenly wasn't okay anymore and so we had to go back and try to figure out what were we doing in 2006-789 and Undo It All and Google wasn't super helpful it's like you can call somebody and get customer service they weren't super helpful in helping us figure out what the problem was and so we were guessing you would guess and then resubmit guests and then resubmit guessing and so it took about nine months to get all of our sites back but that event right there helped us pivot and transition to the eyewear company that ended up selling to Foster Grant because we understood that this idea of building and rehabbing businesses and owning 11 or 20 properties wasn't really working anymore we had to build Brands and focus on customer service and figure out our value proposition and exactly how I would tell somebody to build a business today that's what we finally did that's not how we started what is your advice for entrepreneurs and executives for navigating choppy Waters for days and there were lots of days in this crisis and other crises that we had where I woke up and thought what are we doing I don't want to do this anymore but before you make any crazy decisions you need to take a breath take a walk go have coffee with somebody that's not really to your business go to sleep and then the next day I promise it's probably going to feel a little bit different and you're gonna be recharged and ready to go again and then you say okay right but we have 40 people or 50 people or whatever it was that work for us and they're relying on us to feed their families so I got to figure this out right but it's okay to take a breath and panic a little bit and then come back and figure it out yeah get just give yourself the space yeah yeah that's great advice would you say that you're good Under Pressure did you enjoy having the pressure of okay I you're it's not necessarily you're doing it for you but it's like when you get to 50 employees we got to figure this out so would you say that being good under pressure is like an essential skill for entrepreneurs I think it's very helpful yes yeah I really enjoy my life now where there's not a lot of pressure but to be honest I probably functioned the best at one click when it was like chaotic and there was a lot of things happening at once and I needed to be like rapid fire and it was interesting right so with you guys how many employees did you guys top out at 85 85 what was the mix between like digital marketers and software Engineers versus fulfillment hourly employees yeah so I was our largest team when we sold and I think we were probably like 60 operations which would be fulfillment customer service and Merchandising they were under my watch as well and then probably 40 would be like marketing and software engineers and finance so what did you learn about managing more of the hourly maybe it could be considered blue collar workers versus more like white collar workers it was challenging times because it's really hard to give a work week when they're hourly and so like things like summer Fridays which are really popular in the tech world or were at some time yeah they were a little bit more difficult because we still had to get our orders filled sure and when you have holidays and you have holiday sales like Memorial Day that's one of the biggest like sales in the United States is Memorial Day and Labor Day it's very hard to get people like a four day weekend because we had a lot of orders to fill yeah right and so we had to manage that with different types of expectations and different types of people and it wasn't always easy how did you get them on the same page where it's like they maybe like more of the warehouse staff understands respects works well with builds culture with the front office staff any good how much time do you have long story short we started um a program called open finance in 2011 um and that was pivotal in getting everybody on the same page tell us what that means so openbook Finance is essentially when you open your books up to the entire team and they can take responsibility for the company on their own shoulders and so we shared all finances with the company from gross revenue all the way down to cash the only thing we didn't share at the time was individual salaries but you could see individual departments budgets and we would share every single month where we were over or under how we were doing how are we doing tour metrics and then every single team in the company had their own metrics that kind of they didn't they led up to the company's goals as well and then each person's goals and objectives would align with the Department's objectives which aligned with the company's goals and objectives and so we would sit around in department meetings and fulfillment for example and we would talk about the metrics that they were working on if they were hitting goal and how that really related to the company's Mission and our company goals for the year and so that's how we created alignment and how they felt just as important as the marketing team or the software engineering team or the finance team because it would literally all of it was very important every single person's job was important to the health of the company and we showed them how it was important there's a really great resource on this another Indiana entrepreneur Scott Hill from perk recommended to me 15 years ago I think it's called open book management Jack Stack is that does that sound right it is it's the same thing it's been 10 years since I read it but yeah I've just mentioned that for the listeners if you want to have kind of a Playbook that's an awesome read that's exactly how we started Jack Stack yeah that's so cool so cool that you were able to do that with both kind of like the blue collar White Collar front office back office and still Implement that sort of cohesiveness yes across the entire team yes the other thing learned is that we couldn't necessarily just take somebody who was comfortable working at Amazon and plug them into our warehouse because what we needed we needed people that wanted to offer their input and suggestions and not just get their list of things to do and go home because it was we were still functioning as a team that we were trying to get better every single day so somebody that was used to a traditional Warehouse setting didn't necessarily feel comfortable in our environment because we were like what do you think what do you think should we try this let's experiment and so we did a little bit better with like moms that were returning to the workforce or retirees that wanted a part-time job yeah or people that were not traditional just like warehouse workers that makes a ton of sense yeah in that in the environment fast-paced environment of one click I meant I heard you mentioned wanting to spreadsheet things you're probably making a lot of decisions based on data and when you're doing those kinds of things there's really no end to how much analysis you could possibly do on the other end of the spectrum you could make all of your decisions just based off of gut instinct how do you find that balance between making decisions quickly and based on Instinct versus data and Analysis and making the best possible decision because you've researched it under different ways and this is probably the best choice yeah if you want to pick one or the other I would probably lean towards the data portion we definitely started out gut instinct because we didn't know any better sure like when it was just the two of us in our house and speed is everything when you're it's important right when you're small and we were testing and there wasn't a lot of risk because it was just us yeah and then when you have a team of people we eventually had business intelligence intelligent analyst Tim klausmeier was amazing he was the most important person at one click he was a bi guy and we relied on him very heavily to do analysis and tell us what the numbers were telling us and at some point in time we probably relied a little bit too much on the numbers too how did you know when that happened I think you have to step back and do use some common sense and that helps when you have a team a leadership team that has a different skill set so I think that at the end of the day my psychology background may have helped in those situations sure both Art and Science yeah yeah when you come out of like a from a finance perspective and then you have a people perspective and you maybe have a common sense perspective you just have to take a step back and look at it yeah it does sound like it's uh hey look at the data get as many inputs as possible but at the end of the day you have to trust yourself as an entrepreneur in what you're seeing in all the different aspects of the business yeah and then get the team on board with that decision yes do you think that e-commerce brands are even more specific so heavily data driven where it's like cost of margin traffic conversion like you just look at it and make sure your funnel lines up and that's what you look at and what you base decisions off of versus like what you seems to have learned was it's building brand and it's like how do you like you sell a brand not just website properties yeah I think that's one of the reasons it was really hard for us to transition to Brand building at first is because we were so used to being able to track every single thing that happened yeah and then when you're brand building and you want people to come direct to your site that's amazing but we don't know how they ended up direct to our site did a friend tell them did they see a commercial somewhere and so like you're then you're like wondering and guessing and so it was a little bit of a harder transition talk to me about investing and how that skill set has applied in Angel Investing because similarly it does seem like the best investors that I've met are the ones that take their people skills and understanding how to read an entrepreneur especially at the seed and pre-seed Stage like earliest stages of a startup and then balancing that with data can you give us a little insight into your process of vetting deals yeah so you're gonna have to check back with me in five to seven years sure sure to see if I'm any good at this because we haven't had any exits yet but I'm definitely a Founder first investor and it's a lot about the resilience and the tenacity that we were talking about early on like I need to see that in my Founders before I'm going to invest but I also really like to see like a financial plan and we all laugh about how Financial plans and never really come to fruition but it's about seeing how that founder thinks and seeing what's important and what's important is going to make the spreadsheet does it make sense is it outlandish all of those things are really important even if we never come close to hitting those numbers so it is a nice balance of figuring out do I like this founder do I want to work with them do I think they have the guts to do it and the brains to do it also and then also can I see their action plan on paper are you open about who you've invested in yes or any of the founder could you can you brag on a few of your Founders just like a quick who's doing cool things that we need to keep on our radar I think you guys know Darian and Devin from qualify sure I had them on the podcast of course right they're amazing yeah I also really love Conor and Krista Hitchcock from home field because obviously like their e-commerce as well yeah it kind of was a previous employee right Connor was yes yes I remember getting coffee with Connor three or four years ago when he was just getting started and hearing about everything that home field was doing and Matt are you familiar with home field no oh and you want to give the you want to give Connor's pitch for Matt yeah I'm probably not going to do him justice but he's Collegiate apparel okay um and so Connor and Krista started um targeting like D3 schools that didn't get a lot of representation with the big Brands craft moon on Belgian cough cough yes um and they have some like they have some like really fun shirts and fun designs and they're a little bit retro inspired at times and what they've done is created like a rabid fan base like they have a community of people so much so that when they were behind in fulfillment a few years ago because they had so many orders not because they didn't plan well their community of fans I.
E customers started sending them food to the office to give them strength and energy to get their orders fulfilled that's amazing that's amazing and they do really cool drops and really so it's all licensed College apparel based on retro I'm like I'm a fan but I'm a rabbit fan yeah because you send food I'm not that big of a fan all right sorry so you're not really sure but they drop IU retro candy stripe whatever and it's a lot of it's limited so it's like you have to be very timely with it and they're they're growing something really cool and big influencers wear their stuff yeah a bunch of Just Sports enthusiasts I have home field apparel I love that it's really cool and it's right here very near in your neck of the woods again office in Broad Ripple or sober somewhere it's in Speedway now oh they moved to Speedway yeah well it was and you don't get much more Indiana than Speedway Indiana that's awesome I love it you teach entrepreneurship now too and of course as an investor a lot of times you have an opportunity to give feedback or coach in some situations what are some of your most common advice to entrepreneurs at the at Purdue or just in general I would say to plug into your community we re and I started building one click behind closed doors and I think that was okay in the sense that we had a lot to learn and teach ourselves before we probably announced it to the world but once we started plugging into the community like the community especially here in Indianapolis is so strong and so helpful and so if you are an entrepreneur and you're building something then I make a suggestion every time to just reach out because you'd be surprised how many people will take a coffee with you well you guys were like e-commerce right and I don't think Indiana or Indianapolis specifically is known as an e-commerce City so how were you Crossing Industries or verticals to make valuable connections there yeah so a lot of the problems of building a comp cultural perspective even times a marketing perspective could be the same channels but you'd be surprised how much of it is similar and how much you can learn you mentioned Scott Hill earlier Scott and Andy were huge and they were really pivotal in our beginnings they're some of the first people that we met and they were so helpful even though they have nothing to do with e-commerce and it's not even similar at all right I learned so much from them yeah yeah they're a great Duo here in town tell me a little bit more about teaching was that a hard transition to make it was an interesting transition I remember asking my boss I was like I don't even know is my experience relevant and she was like yes like I was like okay yeah diving up boss how different was that like now you you're a very accomplished entrepreneur and now listen you have a boss again yeah I would say if you don't want um to feel like you have a boss go work in higher ed because it's very they like trust you to do your thing and it's very hands-off which I appreciate that's nice yeah and so at Purdue at least they hand you like the general curriculum and then you get to come up with all the examples and teach it the way that you want to teach it which I think is super cool so I get to use my experience the experience of some of my investments we use current events um but it's been really interesting I definitely think that it's hard to teach entrepreneurship until you actually go out and do it my students have none of the risk yeah that a real entrepreneur has right but I also think that if somebody had walked me through the steps over a semester I we may have hit the ground running a little faster yeah yeah I was one of my Majors was entrepreneurship and corporate Innovation and I think there were a lot of things that I learned and took for granted but had to work with a number of people who didn't have that background to realize oh I guess I was absorbing a lot even though I was like in the classroom starting a business at the same time I'm half working on the business half paying attention to it to what was happening in class so it is one of those things where it's like maybe you're still going to make mistakes but like maybe you make them faster or not as badly yes because you know a little bit oh wait we talked about that exactly how many students would you say do you have that are in your classes that are actually working on a side hustle some type of business yeah so I have a i usually have about 120 students a semester and I would say I probably have at least 10 every semester that are working on something that tell me about it yeah okay there could be others sure and that's from everything from starting a physical product business to being an influencer to yeah like starting trying to do like a SAS company we have all kinds do you do you think that it's important so maybe you have students so you say 10 out of 120 and there might be students that don't talk about it do you think it's important to talk about all the ideas you have as like someone who's interested in entrepreneurship I'm working on this or should you do what you guys did and build until you have something you're proud of ready to show the world I don't think there's a risk in talking about it and I know a lot of my students are worried that someone's going to steal their idea and I keep telling them like there's not really new ideas guys like it's all about the execution and like when do you get to Market is it the right time to get to Market how fast do you get to Market who are your competition like you really don't need to worry about someone stealing your idea maybe on a rare occasion but I had a very humbling moment when I was down at IU and I went into office hours with my Venture Capital Professor Jerry Hayes who you might know and I went to office hours because someone had made an offer to purchase the business I had started and I had this kind of like Crossroads of do I go to the ore fellowship and sell my business or do I just keep working on my business and do entrepreneurship and I started the meeting by sliding over my NDA for him to sign it's like the classic I think every first time entrepreneur has to make this mistake and it's just like running into a wall and it's very embarrassing and humiliating and I'm so glad I did it with him because he was not enough to not just ghost a ghost me which is probably what would have happened if I'd done that over email to literally anyone in business or just tell me to f off he instead said I understand that probably one of your other professors said that this is a really important thing for you to do in entrepreneurship and I'm not going to say it's not important but I am going to tell you in the real world of Entrepreneurship people don't sign ndas just to hear about your ideas especially not in free office hours in free scenarios yeah and he explained why it is a risk for an investor for an advisor for anybody to sign an MDA because chances are someone else is working on that exact same idea as you it has a similar type of business problem and just the liability that it creates for the investor for the advisor is so high and just having him lay that out for me at the very beginning so I didn't go out into the business world and do that for a year until someone told me like why they were ghosting me was such a helpful lesson learned and it's really interesting that you call out I'm so afraid someone's gonna steal my idea yeah I just envisioned Matt just like slowly exactly who put that there I was totally in one of those like swivel office chairs and I'm of course like probably wearing like pleated khakis in a tucked in like button-down shirt trying to look professional and be businessy it was a great moment I think that leads me to a question I'm curious about how much of it is execution and how much of it is idea and right place like maybe a little bit of a frog Pace right place break time but execution versus idea so I am biased towards execution you will you could fill this seat 20 more times and you probably have a split and I know some other Angel Investors that are like idea first and if it's not the coolest idea they're not interested I don't necessarily I think it's more execution than idea execution and timing timing that's a big one timing and Market is everything yeah that's one of the things I I feel like I've seen through the Powder Keg community and previously Verge is like going back to predicting outcomes it's if I go back and I just look at the data of who the founder is I could predict it pretty accurately but when it comes down to what the idea is obviously the ones that pick the right idea in the market that's growing and has just huge Tailwinds those obviously have exceptional outcomes but it's also hard to predict you can get a little bit of data but you just never know when the world is going to shut down and all of a sudden remote work is going to really take off there are just a lot of things out of the control so like having the founder that can navigate those things and keep finding the Blue Waters rather than the Red Waters is it seems like it's the jam so in your personal investment thesis if you had to rank founder versus idea what do you choose I choose founder yes I love that yeah it's people person I am a people person yeah I love that and maybe because we didn't have a good idea hmm let's be honest right we were just no Santa lives pretty great come on we need to resurrect that business is that wait who owns that domain I have no idea what was it a mail from mail from Santa claus.
com we're gonna do we'll link it up in the show yeah someone's gonna get a couple extra letters definitely uh I think it's about that time Angie it is about the time for my favorite part of the podcast okay and that is called the lightning round okay the lightning round quick answers off the top of your head I'm gonna have four questions today I have a an interesting one I'm gonna slide a new one in to start okay so you are the first person to answer this one no wrong answers no whatever comes to your mind wrong answers okay you ready for this is the new one you really building up the anticipation okay if you had to start a business tomorrow what would you do I would own a bookstore money why I love books I love reading I also love the idea of starting something that you don't feel the pressure to grow exponentially every single day I think that'd be Ally's answer too that's hilarious a bookstore the wine bar coffee shop bookstore okay classic amazing phrase ship yes I love that that's a great answer a bookstore totally maybe not in I love Indianapolis but we already have some good bookstores I was just at one on my way over here a tomorrow bookstore but yeah Jake and Julia yeah Jake Butler shout out yeah I don't read any books oh no I do read books but I buy them on Amazon or listen to them audibly you gotta support local man that's fair honestly I should you're your co-host of the get in all right we're gonna link up a bookstore in the show notes and I'm gonna go buy a book from a real store okay all right I will do that tomorrow bookstore tomorrow bookstore where's it at Mass Ave all right I'm in I will go to tomorrow okay yeah do it you need the receipts to prove it I will have them on there we will have a picture with the receipts okay here we go outside of the amazing entrepreneurial ecosystem what is Indiana known for racing racing that's a great answer May in Indianapolis you can't beat it what is one Hidden Gem in Indiana a Hidden Gem I'm not very good at lightning rounds I don't know how hidden it is but I feel like the Patachou foundation and the Patachou restaurants are like really gym worthy I I couldn't agree more okay we would love to get Martha Hoover on the podcast yeah to help subtle plug if anybody knows make an intro there I thought you were gonna pull from your Southern Indiana Roots I know a Hidden Gem I did think about it really quick and nothing came to mind fair okay who is someone that we need to keep on our radar someone doing big things can I go back and say Connor Hitchcock again yes yeah okay we can double click that one okay let's double click it Connor and Krista Hitchcock if you haven't checked out home field apparel this is just like a oh just a promotion podcast because they're doing great stuff you gotta check out their gear they have some IU gear back I think we should probably get them on the podcast I will we will get Connor on the podcast it'll be a good one yeah he can tell you the x's and o's in marketing we should probably have them be part of our we wear your shirt yes this brings us back okay so for all the listeners out there if you want your startup or organization represented on the get in podcast send three larges to 16 Tech address to Powder Keg Nate and we will wear your startup tee and give you a 60 second ad slide where we will just talk about your startup so uh today we're talking about Powder Keg and powder cake is great and we're hosting the get-in podcast but get your startup t-shirts sent to 16 Tech and we will brag about your company Nate needs a new wardrobe I do so I can land SEC Nate needs a new wardrobe yes yes exactly yep we will wear your shirt we'll shout it out and I think we need to tee up tomorrow bookstore on the next show boom let's do it Angie this was awesome thank you so much for being here and sharing some of your story I'm sure we'll have you back again and here how some of those Investments are playing out thank you guys it was really fun yeah we had a blast too thanks thanks Angie this has been get in a powder kick production in partnership with Elevate Ventures and we want to hear from you if you have suggestions for a guest or a segment reach out to Matt or Nate on LinkedIn or on email to discover top tier tech companies outside of Silicon Valley in hubs like Indiana check out our newsletter at powderkeg.
com newsletter and to apply for membership to the powder cake executive Community Check out powderkick. com premium we'll catch you next time and next week as we continue to help the world get in since you just listened to this podcast you might be thinking about starting one for your company lucky for you our partners over at casted have you covered cassid is the first and only podcast in video marketing platform made specifically for B2B Brands I love this about them the platform makes it possible to publish Syndicate amplify and measure the value of your podcast and video content in fact we use it for our podcast here at Powder Keg and if you're a startup you should listen up because cassid for startups is definitely for you they are offering exclusive deep discounts of up to 82 percent off retail price for qualifying startups connect with casted at casted. us slash powderkeg
