Founder Friday is a weekly guest post written by a founder who is based in or hails from the Silicon Prairie. Each month, a topic relevant to startups is presented and founders share lessons learned or best practices utilized on that topic. May’s topic is knowing when to make a career move.
About the author: Adam Coomes is the co-founder of CouponCloud, founder of Salt and Keymesh.
These days, we’re trained to be analytical. Just look around you. We have fitness devices tracking our every step so we can analyze our habits. We use services like Google Analytics to analyze the results of our work. We use numbers for everything. Entrepreneurs especially are analytical by nature. We have to be. But in the process, we push aside our most basic decision-making powers: our instincts.
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I’m an instinct guy. I’ve always been. It’s helped me make tough life decisions. It’s helped me make difficult business decisions. And more often than not, it’s right. So I stopped doubting them. When my instincts tell me something, I go with it. Joining CouponCloud was one of those moments.
I met Matthew Simrell at 1WeekKC’s Startup Party last year. He introduced himself and started discussing an idea he was working on. He wanted to create a white-label app for grocery store retailers to have their own loyalty app but add value by automatically including coupons for the things you want to buy at the store. Then, you’d digitally redeem them at checkout. It sounded neat, so we met a few weeks later to discuss it further.
At the time, I was running Salt, focusing on technology consulting with startups and small businesses. I essentially took on projects just like these—ones I thought were exciting and could help create and add value to. A few weeks later, we sat down again to discuss how Salt could help. But I was blown away with what he had found.
Matthew discovered a glaring problem. One of the main features of his application—pulling in grocery coupons—wasn’t even possible. There was no digital database of manufacturer coupons. It didn’t exist. Why? 99 percent of the industry is entirely paper. When you redeem a coupon at the store, the retailer discounts the price, but then the manufacturer owes that retailer for the coupon’s value. So without a digital component, what happens? They take such a large volume of paper coupons that they have to then pack them up and ship them to Mexico to be hand sorted, processed and audited by thousands of people. To make things worse, retailers lose up to half of the value of every coupon to processing costs and there is so much fraud that the losses exceed $1 billion across the industry. I was absolutely blown away that something this archaic and awful still existed.
That was all I needed to hear. His neat idea lead him to discover the biggest problem I’ve ever come across in all of my time in the startup world. We sometimes forget that, as entrepreneurs, our job is to solve problems. And this was a hell of a problem. That was it. After just a short conversation, I was ready to join him as the co-founder of CouponCloud.
When I left Zaarly back in 2011, I needed some time to think about what I really wanted. I spent a lot of time thinking and considering. When you know something is right, you don’t need time to think. A majority of the most successful startups are the most obvious ideas. They are the companies that have become so ingrained in our world that you can’t imagine how life existed without it. If you believe that every problem has been solved, every industry has been disrupted, and every idea has been attempted, you haven’t dug deep enough.
When you look at the timeline of our existence, technology is still brand new. It is still an incredible time to build and create. I’ve been thinking about this lately. A hundred years from now, even a thousand years from now, people will be looking back on this time in history as a golden era for success and entrepreneurship because of technology. Opportunity is all around you. You just need to find it.
