Meet Stacy Dam, Co-founder & CEO @ Set Your Sites

How would you describe the startup culture in Nebraska?

The startup culture in Nebraska is incredibly welcoming and interconnected. We are proud to be Nebraskans and be able to grow our business from home. When we decided to take Set Your Sites from concept to prototype, Dustin, my co-founder and husband, nudged me to take the Business Model Canvas course through UNL’s College of Business and NUtech Ventures.

Little did I know how important this first step would be in connecting me with supporters like Joy Eakin from NUtech Ventures and Josh Nichol-Caddy with Nebraska Business Development Center, who were instrumental in developing our beachhead market in I-Corps Customer Discovery. I was also introduced to Kathy Andersen with Lincoln Partnership for Economic Development (LPED) who has always kept us connected and been a part of conversations that have led to our next steps with NMotion and now raising a seed round. 

There are so many people willing to get coffee and lend their ideas to help. The important thing is to just jump into the ecosystem and from there that one connection will yield in multiples. 

How do you balance taking risks and making calculated decisions in pursuit of innovation?

Customer discovery along with staying informed of what new technology is out there is an important part of our balance. We live by the Henry Ford quote, “If I asked the people what they wanted they would have said faster horses.” The customer can’t be pushed too far too fast, and their opinions and feedback on what you are building are paramount. The onus is on us as the innovators to bring new ideas to the customer as we build. We talk them through how these new ideas can be applied to make their lives easier, efficient, cost-effective — whatever their goals may be. 

We are planning and iterating all the time with our campground customers and hearing from our campers through surveys or just being on-site asking them. We also want to take risks and push outdoor hospitality forward for the next-generation camper who wants self-service. This is a multilayered problem we are looking to solve, and we’re not solving it in the way we had originally planned. But by continually seeking information, applying new tech and talking to our customers, we’re building something great.

How do you define success and what metrics do you pay the most attention to?

Success in the beginning does not equal someone’s idea of how much revenue you should be making. New companies should focus on leading metrics that can prove their ability to provide steady growth into the future. We track the total number of happy campers, new happy campers, transactions processed, campsite count and sales pipeline metrics to name a few, along with revenue. 

The important part of this is there is a KPI picture that we are painting as we grow and are always adding relevant metrics. The definition of success changes day to day compared to month to month, and once we have our first year in the books, year two will be an evolving picture of our future growth. 

What are the top one or two challenges / opportunities Nebraska startups face?

Early-stage funding is a challenge. Many investors want a completely de-risked opportunity to fund, which can take years. When you are starting out, you need funding to dive in head first, full-time to help de-risk. We are thankful to the investors who are willing to have conversations about where we are headed and invest in our vision of the future of outdoor hospitality.

What is one emerging industry or technology that you believe will have a significant impact on the Nebraska startup ecosystem in the next few years?

You can’t talk tech without talking about AI right now. The important thing to stress about AI, and what might be concerning to Nebraskans, is the thought that jobs will go away. I don’t believe that is the case. With any new technology, the tech takes on the automated, repeatable work and is great at setting up frameworks but there will always be a need for people. AI is allowing us to spend more time on the “people” work. With Set Your Sites, the emerging tech we are excited about is bringing self-service that has been emerging in the hotel industry and bringing these concepts with a twist to outdoor hospitality.