Checking in with Sam Schill, startup swag guru and budding entrepreneur

To categorize Sam Schill’s immersion into the world of tech startups using the lexicon of that land, the Ames businessman has quickly gone from just checking in to becoming a veritable super mayor. A little more than a year removed from making his first foray into the landscape of tech entrepreneurship — when he helped…

Sam Schill shows off Foursquare on his iPhone. Schill helped Sigler Companies broker a merchandising deal with Foursquare, the first of several startups with which Sigler has worked. Photo by Eric Rowley/Juice

To categorize Sam Schill’s immersion into the world of tech startups using the lexicon of that land, the Ames businessman has quickly gone from just checking in to becoming a veritable super mayor.

A little more than a year removed from making his first foray into the landscape of tech entrepreneurship — when he helped his firm, Sigler Companies, forge a relationship with Foursquare — Schill can’t seem to shake the startup scene, whether it’s in his role at Sigler or with his nascent side project, Shoplr.

“We’ve had quite a ride,” Schill, 30, said. “Basically 100 percent of my role (at Sigler) right now is almost specifically working with startups, which is a lot of fun also being able to have the opportunity to work on a startup myself on nights and weekends.”

Schill’s startup story began last spring, after some of his Sigler coworkers heard Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley speak at Big Omaha 2010 and registered Sigler facilities on the location-based social network.

“(Foursquare was) emailing people, calling people to verify their venues, and through that process emailed one of our web guys and said, ‘Hey, do you guys do printing and marketing communication stuff?’” Schill recalled, laughing. “About 30 seconds later I called them back.”

Soon, Sigler had brokered a merchandising agreement with Foursquare, which launched in 2009 and in June became the first location-based social network to hit 10 million users.

“That was really a launching point for us,” Schill said. “We hadn’t worked with any startup companies to that point. It almost, to a degree, fell out of the sky for us. But we were at the right time and the right place.”

Now, with Schill shuttling back and forth between Iowa and coastal tech hotbeds like San Francisco and New York City, Sigler is all over the place in the startup space. The company currently works with a few dozen tech companies, including Animoto, RunKeeper, MashableGroupMe and Startup Weekend.

Shane Reiser (left, photo from twitter.comof Startup Weekend, the not-for-profit that organizes events at which participants attempt to build a concept into a company over the course of a weekend, first met Schill at a networking event in Des Moines, but he soon heard the Sigler name popping up elsewhere.

“I traveled to New York a lot and got to know some players in the ecosystem up there,” said Reiser, who recently moved out of Des Moines, “and they were saying good things about Sigler and Innova. They’re picking up steam with startups.”

Before long, Schill will have an active startup of his own that he could add to Sigler’s client base. Schill started working last fall with Nathan Haila on Shoplr, a smartphone application for delivering customers real-time deals from nearby businesses.

“It’s a web-based tool that allows businesses to post offers themselves,” Schill said. “It puts the power in their hands.”

As of Aug. 1, Schill said Shoplr, which was in private beta, planned to launch its iPhone app in Ames “within the next 45 days” and in Des Moines by October. “Then,” he said, “we’ll carry on wherever people will allow us from there.”

Schill carves out time for Shoplr where he can between his work for Sigler and his duties as a husband and father of two. The story’s much the same for the other members of Shoplr’s core group — Haila (left, photo from twitter.com), Brian Anderson and Levi Figueira. But the community’s positive response to Shoplr has helped the team push on.

“We’re really stretching for time,” Schill said. “ But the feedback that we’ve gotten so far has been energizing, so we haven’t had a moment where we’ve been like, ‘Oh, should we be doing this?’ It’s been all good.”

 

Editor’s Note: This article also appears in this week’s issue of Juice magazine. To learn more about our partnership with Juice, see our post: “Announcing our partnership with Juice.”

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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