MBA Startups: Turning Down J&J To Do Her Own Thing

After recognizing the opportunity, he decided he wanted to build a tool for business owners who were proficient marketers but not technical enough to deal with much of the minutiae that multi-outlet logistics can entail.

We met during our second semester in McCombs’ New Venture Creation class, the premise of which is to study the business plans of various startups before giving an opinion on whether or not you would invest. The end product of the course is that you write your own business plan after reviewing and critiquing several others.  The two of us and a third founder formed a team and ended up choosing the current CEO’s idea to develop. That idea ultimately became Ordoro.

Initially, we thought we might build a company around an inventory validation tool. During our class, we learned that inventory validation is a MUST for online shipping. During our initial research, however, we uncovered that the market could have cared less about optimizing their inventory. We knew that validation was something that everyone needed; but it was not what the market wanted.

What the marked DID want, we found, was a way to get their orders out of the door in a fast, efficient and accurate way that also allowed them to manage logistical processes for multiple retail outlets. Additionally, they wanted it without having to log into multiple places or know how to write or deal with server-side code.

Would-be entrepreneurs often overcomplicate their businesses because they feel that the market wants a sophisticated answer to a sophisticated problem. Usually, what the market is really looking for is a simple answer to a simple problem; and additional complexity doesn’t just generate more complex problems. It primarily generates lots of simple ones that need to be solved with new business ideas.

We eventually rounded out the Ordoro team with a fourth co-founder who is currently our CTO. We found him through Capital Factory, an Austin based networking organization that connects business people with technical talent for tech-based ventures.

During our first year of business, we bootstrapped from our personal coffers. We also declined taking a salary that year. We basically worked for free and put everything into the business. We got a lot of help from our school as well. We were enrolled in the Austin Technology Incubator (ATI), which is a part of the University of Texas at Austin.

Once we got a handful of paying customers and proved that our market existed, we were able to raise enough from angel investors to bring Ben (our CTO) aboard full time. We also hired an additional developer. Then in July of 2012 we raised $1.2 million during a series A from Emerge Capital, who found us through Angel List. Currently, we have a team of nine people and have acquired additional angel investors (though Emerge continues to be our primary source of angel funding).

Bootstrapping was not easy; but we were already used to living like poor students, so it was bearable.  We took out a good deal of school loans during our last semester at McCombs. Those served as additional sources of funds. I had a little help from family. My cofounders are married with wives that work. All of these factors contributed to us being able to make it through the beginning of our business until we secured funding.

Our loan burden was, of course, a concern. During our first year I was able to defer my own loans. Then after the funding came and we began to pull out salaries I was in a position to make my loan payments.

The landscape of challenges that we have faced during this journey has been interesting, to say the least. Challenges change literally at every stage of your business. When we first got started, we didn’t really have a product. We had a minimal viable piece of software and we had to reach out to merchants, recruit beta customers and make sales with what we had.

Our task at that time was extremely difficult; think chicken and the egg. We needed customers to tell us what they needed our product to be; yet, we were also recruiting customers before we really had much for them to use and give us feedback on—and we were charging them for it. We had to get our market interested enough in what we were doing before we really had anything for them to be interested in. To this day, that has been the biggest obstacle that we have overcome as a team.

Before McCombs, part of me thought that I’d work as a brand manager for a few years to gain marketing experience and pay off loans before starting my own company. Then, when I actually got to UT and met my co-founders and was offered with the opportunity to build Ordoro, I was forced to rethink my path.

I thought, “How long would I have to wait to be surrounded by such brilliant people, be blessed to be a part of such a fantastic team AND have my hands on such a novel idea WITH the right team to execute it again?” The stars had aligned and I just knew that it was the right time. I didn’t realize that everything would come together so quickly, but everyone else on my team was ready to go and I jumped at the chance to join in on the party.

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