TROOPS, DAN REICH: The Hercules of Hustle

Ever wondered if your high school tendencies have left you as you approach adulthood? Worry not, we’re not judging because as it turns out, the traits you picked up in your pre-mature years can help you power through life. Or in Dan Reich’s case, help you build 10 companies like a strong-minded, entrepreneurial Hercules.

Yes, you heard it right! Dan Reich, now Co-founder of Troops, has built nine companies before, all while answering to a specific need in the market. Today, his goal is to support businesses to work better through smarter technology.

We came across Dan’s story through our feature on Tula, a company he co-founded as QVC’s first digital beauty brand. Little did we know that Dan embarked on his entrepreneurial adventure in high school. And because no two businesses are the same, here’s a quick summary of Dan’s ventures, followed by what he has learned from years of hustling (and making it!).

“I remember when my high school friends saw me sell bouncy balls to students in high school and thought, ‘Damn, he’s a hustler.’”

Dan’s first business was probably every high school student’s dream come true. Thanks to eBay that had recently hit the World Wide Web, Dan was able to purchase bouncy balls in wholesale and then sell them to fellow classmates at school. “Margins were great! I had a locker and backpack filled with them and by the time break came around, you would see an anarchy and chaos of bouncy balls flying around.” Unsurprisingly, he was caught, got detention and stopped selling them. 

From there on, it was a snowballing effect. Dan’s business ventures ranged from starting The Fashion Passion in 2002 with a friend selling wholesale clothing from the likes of Sean John and Rocawear, an events production company, Runaway Productions, at University of Wisconsin, that was later franchised to many college campuses, Thecampusatlas.com (a student information website that was rolled out to seven colleges), Lotame (a company he helped grow from 0 to 80 employees), Spinback (a social commerce and analytics platform he co-founded and later sold to Buddy Media and then to Salesforce) and finally, Tula (a probiotic skincare line).

The Aha Moment

If you think starting and closing businesses was Dan’s forté, you’re wrong. Because while running a few of these businesses, he was also enrolled in Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Wisconsin. No sleep for the wicked is the perfect encapsulation of his experience in college – work hard at night, study hard by day and hustle anytime in between.

Which brings us to Troops. “There was a common denominator in business development – the importance of managing the CRM category as a process within tech companies. We wanted to make work easier by bringing in all the intelligence, workflow, notes, etc. together and build upon what they were already using, such as Slack.” Basically, Troops allows you to chat with an artificially intelligent assistant instead of updating field forms, buttons and boxes while "getting things done," thanks to artificial intelligence!

Why the Name?

If you haven’t figured it out already, Troops is meant to represent the sales people who are (literally) at the front lines, taking (not so literally) bullets for their customers.

How It Works

The profession of sales is the #1 profession in the world. As a result, there are a lot of players, Salesforce being the largest one, trying to introduce easier customer solutions. "The old way of doing things is bolting messaging on to software. The new and right way is having messaging as the core with software and workflow built in and around the messaging interface."

This shift, as Dan compares it, can be better explained with an analogy of a time when we used horses and buggies. “It comes to a point when the horses can’t get any faster or the buggies can’t get any bigger. You must change the paradigm.” And, Troops has successfully done this by procuring 700 companies as its clients in less than 2 years and raising close to $10M in Series A funding.

“Sunday night comes around and most of my friends are like,  f***!
I actually get excited to go in on Monday because of the people I work with.”

Having focused on both B2C and B2B companies during his lifetime as a business owner, Dan has learned a thing or two. His advice?

• Focus on the problem, not the solution. If you are a B2B company, you have something that your client’s company needs. They have a problem and you will help them solve it. Many companies make the mistake of getting lost in finding solutions to problems that don’t even exist.

• People always come first. At the end of the day, you can only control the controllables but what you can control is who you spend your time with. Building a business is an eventful journey so make sure you are choosing the right crusaders to follow along.

Think your business can benefit from this? Sign up here and get Troopin’!

Photo courtesy of Troops.

RARE CARAT, AJAY ANAND: The Diamond Miner

They say a diamond is a girl’s best friend. As for the man, well, it might just be his worst retail experience yet. Cut, color, clarity and carat are the four C’s that could drive any man crazy. Rihanna might have said shine bright like a diamond, but what if you had no idea how much shine constituted for a good diamond? Founder, Ajay Anand reflected on his frustrating ring hunt and ended up creating the Kayak of diamonds known as Rare Carat.

If you are like most men out there, you wouldn’t know a thing about diamonds until those bells start ringing in your head. You found her! She is the one! Good luck on that ring, bad boy. Three paychecks down the drain, yup, all in one go. Start saving. Let the research begin!

Born to entrepreneurial Indian parents, Ajay Anand grew up in Michigan. With no real passions at that time, he described himself as someone who “used to play hockey and had no idea what I wanted to do nor did I have any ambition to do anything. I switched my major three times in college.” He finally graduated with a business background and worked for Boston Consulting Group for a year before deciding that he wanted to go out and become an actor.

The Work Life

A one-way ticket to Bombay, Ajay entered the world of Bollywood to only be disappointed. “I quickly realized that acting was not for me, even though I had a background in music it was very difficult to make it big.” Next stop? The Wharton School for his MBA.

Ajay surprised us when he mentioned his first company was launched back in 2013 called Systmapp, a cloud-based planning, tracking, and reporting solutions for enterprises. His business model was mainly B2B and lacked drama, customer feedback, and witty jokes. Don’t be fooled, it’s still fully functional and operating today under his leadership.

The Aha Moment

After dating a girl for nine months, Ajay decided that he would listen to Beyoncé’s if you like it then you should put a ring on it and seal the deal. This is also known as the avocado theory in which men, like avocados, only become ripe once (and that is when) it is show time. Not before and not after. It has to be just right.

At the age of 29, Ajay began his hunt on 47th street in New York and boy was it intimidating, so he moved online. “It was through the process of trying to find the perfect diamond at the right price with the lack of online resources available that I decided to create a platform myself. I built a regression model to try and tease out what was a good deal and used math to figure out the rest. I couldn’t believe that there weren't any good sites out there for this experience.” From conception to execution, it took Ajay one year to build out the platform while managing Systmapp and boom, in October 2016, Rare Carat sparkles.

“We are just a marketplace for diamonds, connecting users and brands.”

So how does it work? “We assume that you know what you want when you come to our website. If you don't, we have a chat bot built in by partnering with IBM to help pin down your needs and use analytics to provide recommendations. We scan the online world for retailers that match your criteria and perform analytics on what we think is a well-priced diamond on the frontier. There are no lower prices, all we do is provide visibility to the entire market in one shot by allowing you to compare and contrast.”

Self-funded, Ajay recently pitched at a Shark Tank casting, so stay tuned to see if he makes it on to the show. If you are in the market for a ring, let Rare Carat guide you and may the force be with you. 

Photo courtesy of Rare Carat. 

TACKLEBOX, BRIAN SCORDATO: The Idea Bouncer

Ideas can come from anywhere—the problems you currently face, the gossip you recently heard or the trips you took half way across the world. But validation, yes, is essential if you wish to enter the startup galaxy. Hear from Brian Scordato, a man who has had his fair share of entrepreneurial moments and is now helping others reach their path to success. 

A basketball enthusiast, Brian Scordato was raised to become an entrepreneur. “My dad is a medical engineer and always pushed my sister and I to do our own thing since day one.” While he may have launched many ventures that failed, he recently decided to take the consulting route (given his expertise) and launch Tacklebox Accelerator for early stage founders to transition from idea to validation. Fun fact: he also writes for Fast Company and teaches Product Development at General Assembly.

“Tacklebox helps validate your idea within 6 weeks. It is a pre-accelerator for those starting out.”

“Our best startups have been due to the founder working in a particular industry for many years, noticing a problem and then wanting to change it. As for college students, they mostly notice broader issues which lead to a higher rate of competition.” So be ready to have your warrior paint on!

Brian wasn't always so wise. He experienced many mistakes when launching an app called Find Your Lobster back in 2011. “We originally launched under a different name, called 3 Degrees, which connected friends to friends of friends via hobbies and interests using Facebook's data. This quickly transitioned into single people wanting to meet other single folks in their neighborhood. Or as we know of it today as online dating.” Brian quickly pivoted his business model and came up with Find Your Lobster, an online dating app that finds matches based on friends of friends using Facebook's demographic. This was before the Tinder days when no one was swiping and users wanted to know more information rather than just looks.

The Challenges

“We didn't have enough users on the platform and made the app open to everyone and anyone.” Rookie mistake. It is best to intensely focus on one customer segment and one city so that users are satisfied with the services and supply can fuel demand. The saturation will also lead to word of mouth marketing. “We quickly learned that if you market to everyone, you speak to no one. You need to have a niche customer base, identify a customer persona and speak their language to be heard.”

“Customers would only have up to 10 matches per day due to there not being enough users. Or in some cases, no matches at all.” Brian had secured funding for this idea through his mentor whom he met while interning at Johnson & Johnson during his MBA and at that moment had no direct competitors in this space.

However, when Tinder launched and gained dramatic popularity due to its game-like feature, Brian’s investors told him to replicate that model. “We had a choice: to re-segment the market or follow Tinder’s lead. We chose to become like Tinder due to pressure from our investors, but that was the wrong choice.” Find Your Lobster died in 2014. RIP.

To Infinity and Beyond

“Best piece of advice I have ever received is to charge more. If a customer is not willing to pay a premium, then you don't have a differentiator. Don’t discount early on to try and get more customers and raise the price later. This becomes troublesome. Your early customers should pay more and as you move away from your niche segment, you can bring the price down.” 

Having dabbled in the VC world (for those interested in becoming one), Brian tells us that you need to have founded a previous company, know what it takes to raise money, and be super personable, quick on your feet, comfortable talking with people and not shy to always say no. Yes, 99% of startups get shot down by VC’s. It’s the wild west out there and this ranger ain’t nice.

Got a brilliant idea and want to get validation and feedback? Sign up for Tacklebox here or email us and we will put you in touch with Brian. Or in the word of Notorious B.I.G, If you don't know, now you know.

Photo courtesy of Tacklebox. 

BARTERSUGAR, LAYLA TABATABAIE: The Barter Queen

Albert Einstein once said, “If I had my life to live over again, I would elect to be a trader of goods rather than a student of science. I think barter is a noble thing!” and this is exactly what Layla Tabatabaie of BarterSugar tapped into. 

Layla is a woman of many talents with an urge to constantly be creating, whether it is writing poetry or recording podcasts. Hailing from Pennsylvania where she attended high school, Layla was heavily involved in sports including tennis and track and field. This she remembers as “quite amazing because it created a sort of community and it was the first team building activity that I was part of as an adolescent.” 

Always full of confidence, she thought she knew exactly who she would become—an attorney or a filmmaker (her amateur days would be asking her high school comrades to act so she could film them). To attain either one of these #careergoals, she studied Philosophy and Communication and minored in Political Science at University of Scranton. Right after, she went to law school in NYC (clearly, she is a go-getter). During this time, Layla interned at real estate firms where she dealt with millions of dollars worth of contracts. We know, you’re all wondering how did she go from wanting to become a filmmaker to studying law to being an entrepreneur…don’t rush! After all, what’s life without a little suspense?

“Career wise, moving to New York City was the best decision ever.” 

Indeed, it was in NYC where she started and achieved her dream. Since the beginning, Layla liked the idea of trading and her trading days began in college where she tutored a student in exchange for coffee. Once she grew older and moved to the city, she did some research and discovered that “65% of Fortune 500 companies barter and in the U.S. alone, there is one billion dollars’ worth of goods and services that are traded; worldwide that number goes up to about 12 billion dollars’ worth of goods and services” and that figure is probably higher today.

How It All Started

Layla had her aha-moment in 2011 when she saw her friends bartering and realized that she wasn’t the only one loving this idea. Fast forward to the end of 2011, Layla picked the name BarterSugar and started recruiting a team. She was still practicing law full time. In 2012, they designed the first version, which never launched. Learning from her mistakes, Layla created beta 2.0 and was able to engage a group of computer engineers in Boston that she found randomly to become her co-founders. Talk about luck!

The team worked together for over a year before they were able to raise funds from investors. This is when Layla decided to go full throttle with BarterSugar. She adds that “in the beginning, we didn’t have a designer and a UX/UI consultant, which now I find very important.” In fact, she advises people not to write a single line of code until they have it checked by a specialist.

How It Works

So how does one go about bartering? You go to the website and sign up. Once you’re signed up, you can post what you’re offering and what you’re seeking. You can search whatever you like using the bar filters to find it. After which, you can either message the responsible person or barter with them. It’s as simple as that! 

Cash is never exchanged between the two parties bartering on the website. So how does it bring in the dough? Once you’ve posted what you want to offer on BarterSugar, you place an evaluation (aka negotiation) saying how much your service is worth. But it is just a virtual number that helps describe the significance of whatever you’re giving. For BarterSugar, it is based on the value that the customer initially wrote down. The company then takes 7.5% commission of that value.

“In the beginning I thought things had to happen quickly, but then I realized that’s not the reality.”

Early on, Layla had to do a lot to get BarterSugar running! One of her biggest challenges was to learn how to read code, it was as if she was back to school learning a new language. In addition, she had to get users onto the platform, and for that Layla used a lot of social media (Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook). It’s with time that Layla started making money out of BarterSugar (patience is a virtue, folks!).

The Advice

Layla’s number one advice is to create a customer discovery; prepare something that’s similar to a survey and send it out asking consumers about their preferences on whatever you are working on. It should be around 15 open ended questions, so that you could have an idea on how to create something that’s in favor of your customers.

Finally, Layla gets most excited about trades that take place outside the borders or activities that are happening from companies, especially those from pockets of America that don’t get a lot of attention. 

Want to get in on the bartering system? Sign up here. If you’d like to get in touch with Layla, contact us. 

Photo courtesy of BarterSugar.

NEURO-INSIGHT, PRANAV YADAV: The Exceptional Mind

Ever since the age of 15, Pranav Yadav was no ordinary child. His parents may have called him opinionated, but we know Pranav as the charming and funny CEO of Neuro-Insight in the United States, the winner of ARF Great Mind Award and part of Forbes Top 30 Under 30 class for Marketing.

So what is neuromarketing you might wonder? Neuro-Insight is a neuromarketing firm that launched in 2005 in Australia. The company developed a patented brain mapping technology to investigate the quality of TV commercials, platforms and programming. Their clients include Google, Facebook, Samsung, Twitter amongst the many. They received the David Ogilvy award last year and have helped multiple brands win an Effie. In simple words, they test ads’ impact in terms of reach and frequency by measuring the speed of electric activity within the brain. Yes, focus group participants tend to look like Doc Brown from Back to the Future by the end, and no it is not harmful.

Back to the Childhood

Pranav’s path towards becoming a CEO was not a usual one. Born outside Delhi, India, Pranav grew up in a family of doctors, yet he wanted to become an actor. “I was the black sheep of my family. My parents had done very well academically and were very organized with their work. I was weird in the way that anything that was monotonous didn't interest me. The constant feedback from school was that your kid is so good at solving hard problems, but doesn't do his homework.” Fun fact: at the age of 15 he was one of the 30 kids in India to receive a scholarship to attend a high school in Singapore.

“Knowing where you stand is one of the most important things to know in life.”

From one scholarship to the next, Pranav made his way to Carleton College (on a full scholarship) where he majored in Physics, Economics, and Math. “It is important to assess your market value so that you can ask others for help on things you don’t know and double down on what you do well.” It was during his junior year that he actually heard about Goldman Sachs for the first time. After realizing the capability to live a lavish lifestyle, Pranav applied for an internship at Goldman and ended up being offered a full-time job. After two years, he quit and decided he wanted to get involved in branding and marketing. “No one would hire me due to my lack of experience. I had never studied it so I didn't know what went into it, but I had an inherent belief that I understood it as well as anyone else did. This goes back to my acting days and how if I was given a character to play I had to convince everyone that I was that character. Understanding the nuances of how this character thinks, behaves and acts is essentially how marketing works. Somehow, I felt that this would become my thing.”

“You know what I like about you PY? If I dropped you butt naked in the middle of an African Jungle, you would come back wearing an Armani suit.” - VP at Goldman Sachs.

As an international employee bound by the rules of the H1-B visa, Pranav would have to leave the country after he left Goldman, unless he found another job. He got himself a 90 day notice period and took the leap – every day that passed without a new offer was a day closer to him having to move back to India. “I reached out to everyone I knew, looking for a job. On the 89th day of the 90 period, I got an offer from a Danish strategy consulting firm who were opening up an office in New York and stayed with them for a year before applying to Wharton for my MBA.”

“The only reason I wanted to get my MBA was so that people would give me a stamp of approval to run a company because I didn’t have the capital back then.”

After being waitlisted at Wharton, Pranav marched to the Dean’s office to try and understand why. This was a major turning point because it was here that Pranav would be exposed to his future position and the opportunity to run a company at the age of 25 back in 2010. “I remember when I went for an interview at the age of 15, they asked me where do I see myself in 10 years. I said, I see myself doing something interesting, probably running a company at the age of 25. Probably doing something with mind and technology. And I didn’t think about that statement until I was offered to be the CEO of Neuro-Insight, serendipitously 10 years later.” Looks like dreams really do come true. 

When he isn’t working, you can find Pranav writing poetry, recording vocal records, making a kick-ass coffee, designing his own tailored suits or doing yoga (what doesn't the man do?). Interested in attending a focus group session for Neuro-Insight? Contact us and we will put you in touch.

Photo courtesy of Pranav Yadav. 

CARHOPPER, BORA HAMAMCIOGLU: The Travel Buddy

You just landed in a new city and need a car to get around. Yes, there are Ubers, cabs and car rental companies. But, gone are the days when you need to rely on others to get you places. To make sure you never go ride-less, Bora Hamamcıoğlu founded CarHopper.

Launched in April 2016, CarHopper can be seen as a mix of Expedia and Toro (a peer to peer car rental platform). Via a mobile app, it lets you browse through a detailed profile of high end cars in their database to rent during your stay in Florida and Los Angeles. There is no surprise (stressful) element here. You pay for what you get upfront.

The Idea

Bora Hamamcıoğlu is originally from Turkey and attended Bentley University, where he graduated from in 2011 with a degree in Management. Post-graduation, he decided to move back home to Turkey and work in consulting in the family business. A couple years later, he revisited studies in the US while pursuing a Master’s in Real Estate and Finance at Georgetown University.

As the subject of his Master’s thesis, Bora explored the realm of Miami and quickly grew a passion for its real estate and international investments. “I thought of what else I could do with international visitors flying into Miami and needing things to do. So I thought, Oh! car rentals, why not?”

When you think about it, the idea makes total sense. With a booming nightlife, conventions and art shows, Miami is one of the most visited cities that brings a constant need for transportation. Around this time, coincidentally, his friend moved to Miami and wanted to start a peer to peer boat sharing platform, basically an Airbnb for boats. He was looking for investors and Bora came on board. However, with a love for the shared economy phenomenon and a curiosity towards starting something with higher volume and less seasonality, Bora decided to create an Airbnb for cars instead. “I noticed that there are two companies doing this but no one was dominating the market. I saw an opportunity in that.”

The Business of Rentals

CarHopper officially launched via Miami Herald in October 2015 and the iPhone app was introduced in February 2016. Today, their database has over 200 cars available for rent in Florida. The business model is based on people’s need to rent a car for a duration of two days or more. The demographic, as Bora mentions, is someone who is an auto fanatic. While Uber provides you with a transportation solution, CarHopper gives you a driving experience by renting cars like Lamborghinis and McLarens. Two different aspects but with the customer in mind always. 

Since we knew nothing about the car rental space, we asked Bora to shed some light. “Through analysis, I realized that 90% of the people listing their cars had more than 5 cars listed on their accounts. I started calling these customers, setting up interviews and meetings with them and noticed that these were mom and pop car rental companies that are based near the airport and are trying to compete with Avis, Budget, Hertz, Enterprise, etc. But, their own website is very old school, so this is where they wanted marketing exposure. And I noticed that these people had the highest ratings and the fastest response rate versus other users because their cars were always available.”

“The greatest accomplishment was first round of raising capital and the greatest downfall was getting out there.” 

Bora also saw that individual car owners either decline rental requests or cancel last minute, thus, have poor ratings. This is due to the lister’s backing out of their offers last minute. Thinking this would represent CarHopper in a bad light and portray the platform as unreliable, he decided to shift the focus to become a booking platform for the mom and pop car companies. By giving them exposure, CarHopper allows them to compete with the larger brands and let them use the platform in a way the big players use Expedia. By March 2016, Bora pivoted the business model and raised $500,000 in funding through angel investors.  

The Challenges

The biggest challenge for Bora was getting insurance. After days of Googling peer to peer insurance companies, making 300-400 phone calls and stalking 5 to 6 brokers on a daily basis, Bora finally settled on an insurance policy after six months in September 2015. Other challenges, as he recalls were, “understanding where the product fits in the market and modeling the business to the user’s needs.”

From a personal view, Bora says that knowing how to work with technology took some time. Long hours of Youtube videos, several Reddit articles, Growth Hackers newsletters and meetups later, Bora taught himself the language of technology. “When you start a business, you need to learn a new skill every 6 months so you can stay ahead of yourself.” 

Going Far

Reflecting back on how quickly the company has grown, Bora says “the total value of the inventory is worth $10 million.” This is calculated by the value of each car and no car is accounted for more than once. You can see this through the high end inventory they show on their app, which will soon be available in Boston as well. 

Visiting Miami, Orlando, Fort Lauderdale or Los Angeles in the coming weeks? Get your ride on while looking fly with CarHopper. Download the app here and use promo code: RADICHE50 for $50 off your next rental. Offer valid till January 1, 2017. 

Photo courtesy of CarHopper.

DAILY PNUT, ALEX & TEWFIK: Word In Your Box

As the world becomes highly globalized, Millennials want to be abreast on political talk but tend to not have time to scrimmage through multiple news channels to get the lowdown. Co-Founders Alexandra Schuster and Tewfik Cassis realized this problem and launched the Daily Pnut to make you sound smarter and seem cooler after a quick four-minute read.

Founded in July 2015 in Boston, Massachusetts, the Daily Pnut is an email newsletter that summarizes world politics in a nutshell. Focusing on major events around the globe, this newsletter will make you marginally more intelligent and cultured about your surroundings. No longer will you be an ostrich when it comes to world affairs.  

“I had a feeling that people do really care about what is going on around the world, but they are just not spoken to in a way that they can relate.”

Tewfik tells us that the reason they started the Daily Pnut “is to help our generation understand what is going on in the world. Things that are happening in Syria, Russia, and god knows where really do impact our lives today in a way that it didn’t before. With that mindset, we are providing meaningful content that people rely on in an intimate setting.” The newsletter tends to go out at 6 am EST or as we like to say during morning coffee time.

The Partnership

Alexandra and Tewfik have very complementary skills when it comes to running a business. Tewfik is more analytical in terms of numbers and his past experience includes working as a consultant at McKinsey in Dubai as well as interning at Facebook during his MBA program at HBS. Fun fact: He majored in Finance at MIT during undergrad (yes, MIT has a Finance program, who knew!). 

Alexandra, on the other hand, is extremely OCD to the extent where she thinks it is not normal. A true politician at heart, Alexandra always had an interest in media and politics and was the editor of her high school newspaper back in the day. “I always knew I wanted to do something in this space, but felt awkward about it being at UPenn. For those who don’t know, UPenn is a funny place because even if you're not in Wharton undergrad, everyone wants to be in that program and ends up becoming bankers or consultants.” Alexandra also worked for HuffPost to launch HuffPost Live (you go girl!).

“Try everything! If it doesn't work, kill it quickly.”

Daily Pnut was formed in one day. The idea was generated at noon and by 5 pm, all the pieces were put in place and went live the next day, including the logo made from Fiverr. Tewfik tells us how being an entrepreneur has its ups and downs by the hour, yes, by. the. hour. “There’s always a moment of reluctance and then it grows and we stay. We started out with 40 emails of our friends and today we are at 100,000 subscribers. Our industry’s open rate is usually around 10 to 15 percent. We are getting 60 percent.”

So how did this growth occur? After two weeks of launching, the co-founders were invited to Sweden for a conference and the subscribers started to take off from there. They also went into sweepstakes and partnerships with media companies, brand ambassadors and launched a referral program.

Interested in engaging in native advertising with the Daily Pnut? Don't worry, it’s very effective and sounds like it’s part of the email. Hint: people enjoy reading it. Contact us and we can put you in touch or subscribe to their newsletter today and marginally increase your IQ.

Photo courtesy of Daily Pnut. 

DREAMERS//DOERS, GESCHE HAAS: The Sisterhood Of Business

At a time when America is anticipating the first female President to take office, there is no better time to celebrate women in leadership roles. She has been dubbed as the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg and she's changing the way trailblazing women help each other succeed. Meet Gesche Haas of Dreamers // Doers.

Dreamers // Doers, a business that was initially built around co-working sessions for 100 women has now become a social network of 1000s of female entrepreneurs. Launched in 2013, Gesche’s vision was to increase the number of successful ventures launched by women. Today, it’s doing exactly that by encouraging confident and successful women to take their businesses to the next level, all while helping each other out along the way.

Part German and part Chinese, Gesche was born in Africa and brought up in Germany, Malaysia, and Singapore. After completing her studies at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), she worked as an investor at a hedge fund before transitioning into strategy, growth and business development roles at venture-backed startups.

“Women help more and benefit less...we’re changing this.”

To echo her international exposure yet humble nature, the active female members of the community, or “dreamy humans” as Gesche calls them, are entrepreneurs, investors, senior executives, students, mothers...the list goes on. Gesche was motivated by crafting a product that allowed people to get comfortable with themselves. “There is a lot of self-inflicted pain. Too often, we think we're not good enough." 

To fix this, Gesche has made Dreamers // Doers a highly curated referral and membership based forum, where personality matters over pedigree. With eight cities worldwide and a home base in New York, trailblazing women from all ages and professional backgrounds come together via private online groups. Some groups are open to "non-members" and others are "secret groups," only accessible to Dreamers // Doers [Insiders] members.

“Our biggest success factor has been knowing our "why" and optimizing for that.”

From sharing life-changing funding or visibility opportunities, to bonding over life crises or everyday successes and failures, Dreamers // Doers members have created a high-impact sisterhood in the business world. "I knew that in order for the community to do this at scale, and in a way that fits into the hectic life of a trailblazing woman, the majority of interactions needed to take place online." 

Indeed, Gesche compares the platform to Facebook’s path. “They weren't the first social media platform but they're the ones who now own the world (most definitely the social media world). They achieved this by being hyper-focused on their product and initial target audience, even limiting growth initially, but not out of ignorance but rather by having a much bigger end goal in mind.” Dreamers // Doers has been approached by investors several times, yet, Gesche has refused the big money and continued to focus on growing the membership base organically. Hello #Girlboss!

“Everything that it requires to be a founder is in exact inverse of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.”

Her journey from the hedge fund to the startup world was everything but easy. This has put Gesche in an ideal position to emphathize with the many entrepreneurs she works with. She understands that things can get really hard, really quickly; ranging from burning through savings, struggling with self doubt, or potential lack of support from friends and family. At the same time, she feels strongly about female founders having at least the same potential as men to build massive empires, even if they may take different approaches. “With everything in life, our weaknesses will only be weaknesses if we let them be. And our strengths will only be strengths if we let them be. It's so important to learn what our strengths are and to own them. Given Dreamers // Doers nature and focus, it would have been close to impossible to start this company if I were a man.” 

She also advises entrepreneurs to fundraise only if it makes sense for their particular company and life trajectory. Not because it's what everyone else seems to be doing or because TechCrunch is writing about it. On this topic, she further recommends reading Eileen Carey's medium post or Paul Graham's essay on fundraising, Pitching Hacks and the classic Venture Deals. 

Omni-channel Community Building

The Internet has changed the way we communicate today (RADICHE wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for it). Gesche agrees, “The Internet is an enabler of communities and sharing of resources; both things we at Dreamers // Doers are massively leveraging to the benefit of entrepreneurs.” Dreamers // Doers has become a facilitator where women can find their mentors, co-founders, advisors, roommates, coffee buddies and long-term friends. 

More importantly, through frequent listings of press opportunities, roundups through a Weekly Digest newsletter, and even seasonal offline events, Gesche has gone beyond online conversations. It’s this omni-channel way of community building that has led to members empowering and supporting each other in real time, making this community an irreplaceable ‘secret weapon' for countless areas of their life. With Dreamers // Doers, members can instantly get answers to the most difficult problems, find a sympathetic ear, and cheer for each other. This mixture of empathy and efficiency is what has enabled Dreamers // Doers to turn so many of its members' dreams into reality.

Featured Dreamers // Doers member profiles:

HANH NGUYEN | Glamoutfit | Arizona State U

ASHWINI ANBURAJAN | OpenUp Inc | U of Cambridge

LIZ LONG | Bag the Habit | Temple U

MISTI CAIN | whyzze | CSU Stanislaus

AIMEE HAYNES | Initiate Advancement | UCLA

Want to get in on the action? Like the Dreamers // Doers Facebook page here or email us if you’d like to be referred for membership.

Photo courtesy of Dreamers // Doers. 

UPRISE ART, TZE CHUN: The Art Gatekeeper

Tze Chun at the Uprise Art offices. Photo by Phil Chang (@heyphilchang) for Bond Street.

The skill of collecting art has always been in the hands of the older generations. Those who can selectively choose what they like and pay the high prices. Well, times have changed and so has this trend. Thanks to Tze Chun and her company, Uprise Art, anyone can now be an art collector.

Tze graduated from Columbia University in 2006 with a double major in Dance and American studies focused on contemporary art. While Columbia was still known as a feeder for finance firms and most of her friends from an Art History major went on to work at art galleries or as visual artists, Tze decided to start her own dance company, Tze Chun Dance Company. (Because, why not?)

The Aha Moment

Tze Chun by Megan Weaver.

After spending a couple of years touring internationally and holding residency at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, Tze had an epiphany in 2010. From witnessing it first hand with her artistic friends to simply doing basic research, she realized that there was a lot of interest in selling art online but there was a lack of strong curation. Very quickly, she understood that curation could be king and she could start an online art gallery without actually holding the artwork. So, in June of 2011, she started Uprise Art with $800 in her pocket and said a sweet goodbye to Columbia Business School, where she had been accepted for an MBA.

“Uprise Art makes art accessible in the financial sense.”

Around 2011, there were a couple of platforms out there already (think Etsy) but they weren’t specifically curated. The idea for Uprise Art came from breaking three main pillars or barriers to entry that made it easy for anyone to become an art collector. The first was access. “Being able to make something you find in a Chelsea art gallery available online gave users the ability to browse through multiple pieces of art.” The second pillar was education. “The problem I saw was that people didn’t know enough about an artwork to purchase it. An online platform would make it enjoyable for users to spend time educating themselves on emerging artists and their techniques.”

Lastly, the third pillar was pricing. “Most people don’t feel comfortable spending so much money if they’ve never bought art before. So, I thought to myself, if people can buy homes on mortgages, why can’t we give them the same option for buying art?” To answer this, Tze build a payment structure for her users where art under $1,000 can be bought outright with flat $50 payments till it’s fully paid off. For art worth $1,000 or more, Uprise Art will ask for installments over 10 or 20 months. In both ways, the user can purchase art right away and have it shipped to their house. There is also an Art-Under-$800 section that allows users to browse works under $800. All artwork on the website is under $15,000 price point. Let’s just say, this was revolutionary in the art world!

Artwork by Anna Beeke in an Uprise Art collector's home in Brooklyn. Courtesy of Uprise Art.

One Artist at a Time

What bothered Tze as she dug through the art industry and tried to fix it was the fact that artists had so much to offer, yet they couldn’t pay their bills. “The most important time is when an artist is deciding if art can become a financially viable career option. Their contemporaries would want to know who these artists are and in 20 years, they’ll want to know each other.” Empathizing with this fact and breaking down the traditional art gallery model, Tze built Uprise Art the harder way. While a lot of platforms were focusing on click and buy ecommerce, Tze’s core focus was the conversation between the artist and the end buyer. “We wanted to do justice to the artist we represent.”

To that end, Uprise Art goes beyond a shopping website. Once they scout an artist to showcase, a well-structured contract is written that gives Uprise Art the right to promote their work. In the past, Uprise Art has also been a sounding board for the artist by fighting for what they deserve, for example, the payment from a gallery that never came through. “We are offering the same thing traditional art galleries do with the artist’s best interests at heart.” How does it make money you may ask? It’s the standard 50/50 split on the purchase.

“It’s a silly thing to not create relationships with people who would want to buy artwork from you in 10 years. Basic customer service is lacking in the art world.”

"Red 2" by Charlie Engman. Courtesy of Uprise Art.

We’ve all been to a brick and mortar art gallery before; there are hundreds in New York and Paris, where RADICHE resides. But, there is a black hole in the experience when as a potential buyer, you go to the “gallerina,” as Tze refers to the women at the front desk, and ask about an art piece you like. There is a good chance they’re not interested in giving you more details because they know that you will not buy the piece based on its price. Uprise Art is challenging this by keeping the users in the loop through Salon nights, email newsletters and art fairs.

“It’s interesting to have an online art gallery because art never looks as good online as in person. Hence, we invest in art fairs. We use Square for payments and one day, we got a review from this woman who we had met at an art fair. She said, 'I was wearing running clothes and went to the fair. No one spoke to me except for Uprise Art.' She ended up spending upwards of $3,000 with us that day!” Tze’s efforts in altering these perspectives have been important to Uprise Art's early success. “Everyone is important in our book of business. When we release new artwork, every customer who has purchased that artist’s work is invited for special access. That connection and reinforcement is important to us.”

Thought you were broke and couldn’t buy art? Fear not, we got your back. Start discovering artwork here. Want to connect with Tze? Email us.

PARIBUS, KARIM ATIYEH: The Price Inspector

Eat. Sleep. Shop. Repeat. This is the motto for most shoppers, especially when you can buy almost everything at the tip of your fingers. Yet, many of us lose money due to price drops that happen every second. To save the day and our bank account, Karim Atiyeh co-founded Paribus.

The story begins when two friends, Karim Atiyeh and Eric Glyman, moved to New York for work. “Because we didn’t have time to go to physical stores but we had disposable income, everything from toothpaste to television was bought on Amazon.” Soon enough, they noticed that the prices of all the products they purchased kept changing. For example, Eric booked a flight to go on a ski trip. A week later, his friend bought the same trip on the same flight for a very low price.

The Aha Moment

Karim Atiyeh with the Paribus team.

Through an experiment in 2014, Karim was surprised to see that more than 80% of the items he had purchased during a certain month had lowered in prices. Via further research, he found that price adjustment was actually a very common phenomenon. “Then, prices were changing by 100’s and 1,000’s. Today, they’re changing by millions!” To put it in perspective, there are more price changes on Amazon than there are items listed.

“It seemed unfair that customers had to pay more. There are clear policies on these retail websites but it’s hard to find and work against. We wanted to stand for the customer using technology and data because at the time, no one was doing that.” Hence, Paribus officially launched in June 2015 at TechCrunch Disrupt.

“We wanted to be the customer’s voice.”

A former Harvard University graduate with a degree in Engineering and Computer Science, Karim initially decided to go down the consulting path. “It kept the door open for me to try different projects,” he says. Although he focused on more technical and quantitative side of things, he wasn’t content. “I wanted to do something more useful.”

And his plan worked! Today, Paribus with 1 million active users has become synonymous in the ecommerce world with retailers like Sephora, Macy’s, JCrew, etc. (Fun fact: The inventor of #hashtag, Chris Messina is a social ambassador for Paribus). Karim points out, “Users make decisions and buy things. They don’t’ want to think about how to optimize their pricing. But we can do that on their behalf via data collection. We’re giving them peace of mind although these aren’t huge savings! It’s small amounts that add up to big ones.” Interestingly, they also found that users who received more savings from a retailer converted into a loyal customer for that retailer.

The Name Game

Paribus comes from a Latin term, ceteris paribus, that is commonly used in economics. It translates to “holding all things equal or constant.” This is in line with the company’s vision to help users find the product they want to buy and not to worry about all the noise and variables.

How It Works

The Paribus brand is fairly simple. All a user has to do is sign up for Paribus and give the company access to their inbox. The Paribus Receipt Fetcher then identifies your purchases via receipts delivered to your mailbox. While you can keep doing what you’re best at (shop), Paribus will work in the background as your personal detective and track any price changes. If you’re lucky and the price of your product has indeed dropped, Paribus will file price adjustment claims on your behalf.

At the end of every month, you will automatically receive a summary of your purchases and refunds. Paribus gets 25% of the cut though there are ways to decrease this by inviting friends to sign up. In short, you’re literally getting paid for shopping!

Data Is King

When we asked Karim what were the basic details that the Paribus foundation was built upon, he explains, “There are many variables at play. Retailers like Amazon and others can be culprits because they have gathered so much data on their customers. They use this information to maximize their profits. Historical purchase behavior is also monitored. Basically, if you always purchase the first item that pops up in your search results, retailers can track it and show more expensive items during your next search. Then, there is the notion of high demand increases the price of that product. Timing is key as well – items are priced higher on the weekends vs. weekdays.”

On the flip side, Karim & co. learned that metrics really do matter during their time at Y Combinator. “Our metric was user acquisition every week. We had to meet that metric no matter what. If it didn’t happen organically, we had to ask friends to join or do a few Reddit posts. We had to become creative with the process to meet our numbers.” Other metrics that were important to them: conversion rate, sharing rate and clicks/visits to website from sharing.

What’s Next?

“We want to do more with retailers and make the user’s shopping experience as seamless as possible. We want to build a platform that integrates a user’s input (receipt data), the discounts/coupons that are on the Internet, and given this input and what’s going on in the world, understand how Paribus can act on behalf of the customer.” Examples: emailing the retailer, automated purchasing, replacing credit cards, canceling subscriptions, negotiating cable bills and the list goes on.

The Paribus team working away.

RADICHE GUIDE to building a tech business:

• Don’t start with a business plan. Start with creating your prototype.

• Hire people that are like you, especially in their curiosity and intellectual caliber.

• Co-founders are important! One is ideal, more than 1 is too much. Responsibilities should be split 50/50 and make sure to keep each other honest.

• Test and break things fast.

• Build version 1 and release in 2 weeks to gather user reaction. Evolve based on their feedback.

Want to pick Karim’s brain for your tech business or have ideas for Paribus? Email us! P.S. Don’t forget to sign up for Paribus here.

Photo courtesy of Paribus.

Written by Alysha Malik.

BOLLYX, SHAHIL PATEL: The Boogie Man

We’ve all seen at least one Bollywood movie by now and yet there aren’t many outlets to express the Indian within us. This MoveMaker was self taught, but has created BollyX to bring the power of shared choreography to the masses, one step at a time.

A competitive sports player, once-upon-a-time singer and a badass dancer, Shahil Patel, is the visionary behind BollyX. Through this Bollywood-inspired high intensity cardio workout, he has found a creative way to mesh people, culture and fitness together.

A 2009 graduate from UC Berkeley, Shahil knew that he was meant to be more than a strategy consultant at Accenture (his first real job) or a doctor (like all good Indian boys). In fact, at Berkeley, as a way to surprise his parents with a cultural performance, he joined the South Asian dance team. “I was embarrassed to go to rehearsals because I was surrounded by highly trained dancers. I considered myself in the bottom tier. So, I set up a tripod in my dorm room and started watching YouTube videos of Michael Jackson and other pioneers in the space. I would learn the choreography, record myself, and then analyze what I did to understand what really differentiated a dancer from others.”

“Bollywood as a genre is not about movement; it’s about confidence, expression and owning it!”

Many of us have a hard time when we go to group dance and fitness classes. It almost seems overwhelming. Shahil, from his personal experience, says, “With dance and coordination, people don’t break through the inhibition period. They feel that they look foolish doing it and that’s why they don’t try. This is very typical of men especially.”

That’s where BollyX and its trainers come in. By giving people the opportunity to learn how to be confident and feel good about themselves ultimately leads to opening their minds to embrace dance. Shahil jokes, “If you ask 20 people to run their hand through their hair in the same room to a badass Bollywood soundtrack, everyone will do it differently but will own it. That’s the basis of Bollywood and the moves we create for BollyX.”

“I wanted to find a way to connect East and West.”

Remember how Shahil wasn’t the best on his dance team? Well, thanks to his determination, he ended up becoming the captain during his junior year and raking in seven intercollegiate competition wins. Fun fact: Under his captainship, the team was qualified for America’s Got Talent top 40 in 2009!

Besides suiting up for his day job at Accenture, Shahil took a stab at starting a dance company. “Building a business with no blueprint was tough. Although we were capital positive, we made a lot of mistakes (if only RADICHE existed back then!). But over the two years that I worked on Ishaara, I realized one thing: everywhere we performed, people would get excited. Then, there were movies like Slumdog Millionaire that people loved but there was no avenue to continue that experience. Nowhere to actually immerse in the culture beyond just witnessing a performance.”

Getting Down to Business (School)

In 2012, Shahil started an MBA program at MIT Sloan with the thought process of buying (or paying a lot of money for) time to build a substantial business. He credits the university culture of “get shit done” and his mentors for his decision to stray away from the original idea: a mobile app for dance. Specifically, the Managing Director of Entrepreneurship, who forced him to “think bigger and solve a real issue.” A few days later, Shahil took a leave of absence from b-school and set out to recruit a team of product and tech experts that would eventually become the #bxfamily.

The Team

BollyX was born in late 2013 when Shahil teamed up with co-founder Minal Mehta, an HBS graduate and Marketing buff. Together with the help of Fen Tung, their Product Director, an impressive Instructor Certification program was designed. Since its inception, BollyX has certified 1,000 instructors, with a goal of reaching 10,000 by 2017.

“We live and die by our community.”

The foundation of BollyX was built upon a customer centric model. With 400 BollyX meetups that happen per week, the company has been successful in building an extremely loyal following. “One thing I found with how the Indian culture was being portrayed in the U.S. was that it felt authentic until it wasn’t accessible. We wanted to be authentic yet approachable. For us, it was important to have a safe, effective, credible and results driven workout class. Then, the integration of various dance styles to appeal to a wider audience without losing our roots in Bollywood.”

RADICHE GUIDE: Building a Community Around Your Brand

• Find your customers, get them by providing an incredible experience, and keep them by providing long term value.

• Give them a good product that they will believe in and stand by.

• Listen to your customers and evolve with their feedback.

• Don’t worry about generating revenue first. Focus on creating a product that people will be proud to use and in turn, refer you to others. Then, you can worry about $$$ and scaling the business.

Interested in becoming a BollyX trainer? Register here for a limited time offer of $99 (it’s usually $325). Want to get your dance on with Shahil? Email us and we’ll put you in touch.

Photo courtesy of BollyX.

BOND STREET, DAVID HABER: The Robin Hood of Finance

Stop wasting valuable time. Never dress up to impress the bank for a loan ever again! David Haber co-founded Bond Street to disrupt the American banking system by enabling online loans with low interest rates. Buckle up small businesses, we are taking you to the big league. 

In the words of ABBA, money, money, money in a rich man’s world, doesn't need to be exclusive to only those approved by traditional banks. Given the increase in small businesses over the past seven years, we hear of more cases in which profitable companies are rejected for bank loans. Similarly, they are unable to obtain the ever-so-famous “investment funding” due to not meeting the traditional, old school status quo. To save the day and encourage small business growth in the U.S., David Haber created Bond Street. 

“There are over 7,000 banks in the U.S. and yet you still can’t apply for a loan online!”

The way we buy groceries, shop for clothing and heck even pick a date has changed dramatically over the course of ten years, thanks to the digital wave and technology. But, the banking system seems to be following the same rules and regulations when it comes to applying for a business loan. You can’t apply for a loan online. For those who have never applied, the process goes like this: you dress up all snazzy, walk into a bank with all of your proper documentation that needs to be printed out. You give the heap stack of papers to the clerk, who doesn't know anything about you. He faxes it to Texas and tells you that a decision will be made in four weeks. News flash: the decision is usually “No!” Then, you cry. “This is a really shitty experience that hasn’t changed since decades.”

“A lot of the customers I was seeing were making millions of dollars in revenues. Maybe they didn't check every box at the bank, but to me, naively, it didn't make sense. Why shouldn't there be a product or business that can solve that middle gap? That is where we have always positioned ourselves.” 

Co-Founders David Haber & Peyton Sherwood

We already have a whole ecosystem of companies that collect data online regarding accounting, payments and invoicing. It was a matter of filling in the dots. “The genesis for creating Bond Street was to use the data from these technologies to create a better customer experience.” Bond Street makes capital available to a broader community of small businesses. Their USP? Time and convenience. It only takes 48 hours to get approved for a loan up to $500,000 with interest rates starting at 6%. Since nothing is for free, the payback duration ranges from one to three years. Fun fact: their clients include Cafe Grumpy and Tuft & Needle among many. 

“The biggest mistake we made as a company: we ran out of money for about three months, right when we were seeing all of these amazing companies knock on our door and we couldn’t fund them.” 

Bond Street’s business model lives and dies according to risk assessment. As a result, they convinced Jerry Weiss, a senior Citi Bank Risk Manager, to join their team in the early days. “We realized we needed to raise much larger institutional capital and spend a lot of time talking to investment banks, hedge funds, and private equity firms. We had a limited track record at that time, but we ended up raising $100MM in lending capital for the business." 

The Good Ol Days

A Harvard University graduate with a degree in Biochemistry, David was not your typical financier. In high school, “I was involved in a bunch of different stuff. Class President, Student Council as well as running my side hustle business, Haber LLC, to make gas money. I went to a very big public school and being on the student government, convinced the school to let me bring a Taco guy to campus for football games. He crushed it. I made both him and the student government a bunch of money!” Looking back, we can see how David has had a passion for finding local business owners and helping them grow their ventures. 

The Genesis

David has consistently surrounded himself with an entrepreneurial group of friends dating back to college. These include the founders of AirBnb, Thrive, and Oscar to name a few. “For me, it's always been easy coming up with business ideas, but it's been hard to figure out what to pursue.” David worked with Spark Capital in Boston for two years. “It was a great opportunity. I got to sit in on every partner meeting, at every investor meeting and every pitch as well as see behind the scenes work–the logistics of actually running a venture fund.” This got him thinking about a technology enabled financial company that he pondered on for four years. Alas, Bond Street was formed in October 2013, shortly after David got married to his wife, best friend, and the woman who helped expand his connections, Julia. “We didn't make our first loan until June 2014 and raised our first seed capital from friends and VC’s in January, 2014.” 

The Mentor

Ever heard or Rory Riggs? You know, the guy who took Genzyme public, started the largest billboard company in Japan and much much more. Well, he was David’s mentor. “I was helping him out with a science experiment during one summer at college, and he ended up being a big influence on the way I thought about business.” David ended up working with Rory for two years after graduation. “When other people ask me what they should be doing after school, I always say you should definitely not be optimizing for cash compensation. You should be optimizing to work for people you admire and can learn from.”

RADICHE GUIDE on building a strong business foundation:

• Recognize that everything takes longer than you would think.

• Push through failure and learn to deal with it quickly.

• Be patient around hiring. This will have a huge impact on your corporate culture.

• If you’re in a highly regulated industry, hire someone with a lot of experience to help navigate you.

• The magic happens when you stick people in different fields together.

Seeking financial advice or capital to grow your business? Email us at founders@radiche.com and we'll put you in touch with Bond Street.

Photo courtesy of Bond Street.

FUELED, RAMEET CHAWLA: Who's That Guy?

There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who settle for what is handed to them and those who actively yearn to become better, faster, and smarter. We were lucky enough to meet the latter, Rameet Chawla, the famous fashionable guy on Instagram and successful Founder of Fueled.

You may recognize Rameet from Instagram, come across him at Burning Man, or know him as the man behind Lovematically. New York Post even dubbed him as “the most stylish man in high tech.” But there is a lot more to this gregarious fella than what his fully grown beard may seem like at first.

Rameet’s creative eye, financial know-how and an urgency for smarter technology has helped him turn Fueled into a mobile app dev shop worth an estimated $30 million. At the same time, his humility and dedication to support young startups has provided an incredible platform for Fueled Collective, a coworking space, and Fueled Ventures, an investment fund that is co-owned by the Fueled employees. (Read on for how this awesome business model works!)

“As an underlying theme, my past gigs were some form of a marriage between technology and innovation with a business layer on top of it.”

“In middle school, I would randomly sell stuff to kids. I started with candy and I developed a clientele so I was almost always sold out before the bell rang. I continued to sell, this time chewing gum, but slowly realized that no one knew that I had it (hello, marketing issues!) so I started giving gum sticks out for free. After days of handing out 120 sticks and buying out local Publix and grocery stores, one day, I decided to start charging 25 cents for a pack. I would sell a minimum of 100 packs every single day.”

Besides being a natural salesman, Rameet started a business for burning and customizing CDs, got his real estate license, designed brochures for his mother’s real estate company, did a short stint at a Jewish bakery and more importantly, invested into public equities – his first portfolio dates back to 6th grade! In short, he was interested in secondary markets and was a computer geek.

Good Ol’ Days

Rameet was born in New York and ended up moving to Boca Raton, Florida at the age of seven. The most defining period in his life was the two years he spent at a British boarding school in The Himalayas before joining high school in Boca Raton. While the latter included frequent trips to the country club, the former meant staying alive and covering basic necessities (#throwback to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs). Yet, Rameet’s present work ethic and business acumen are very much the product of his past attempts at building businesses in his youth.

Upon graduating from New York University in 2005, Rameet entered the glamorous world of finance. Bankers were hot back then! During his two years at Merrill Lynch, he managed primary markets. “It was weird working at a big company. My performance wasn’t equating to the hours I was putting in. I would over perform and still get yelled at for being late to work. It was unsatisfying and so I quit and became a freelance designer. That year, I made $30,000 and cleared nothing. It was humbling because I went from having a comfortable lifestyle to having to miss birthday dinners. It was crazy to see that shift.”

His advice? Don’t quit your day job right away. Quit only when you think the amount of time you’re spending on your own business is unethically cutting into the company’s time. New businesses usually take longer so ride out your full time job for as long as you can – it’s paying for your lifestyle!

Business of Fueled

What started as an eight-person team in 2011, Fueled has now grown to 80 full time and 20 freelance employees with offices in London, New York, Bordeaux, and New Castle. At the intersection of business, design, and technology, Rameet and his team build award-winning mobile apps and tech products for an array of clients including Barneys New York, QuizUp, Afterlight, Verizon, Warby Parker, Gilt, and many more. But the Fueled business model is unlike a typical agency or dev shop.

While product development differentiates Fueled from other industry players, the company’s diverse investments have shaped its brand reputation amongst clients. Here’s how: Fueled is the umbrella agency where 80% of the company builds digital products, mainly apps. The agency operates under Fueled Collective, a physical co-working space that currently houses 35 startups. Due to its success, Rameet and his team are turning it into a franchise and will soon be rolling it out across the U.S. with a goal of selling out 40 locations by 2017.

“I am trying to create a brand around lifestyle and a place to put our money that is safer than just in startups.”

With a finance background, there is no surprise that Rameet has a full proof plan for the cash that the agency spins off. This is where Fueled Ventures comes in. 50% of the cash is invested in startups that Fueled and Rameet believe in – Blue Bottle, Makespace, Hyper Loop to name a few. The best part? Half of Fueled’s portfolio’s equity is given to employees so that not all of their eggs are in one basket. The remaining 50% is invested in hard assets like real estate. To cater to a lifestyle brand, this portion of investments will work towards managing hotels as co-owners in upstate New York, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Employees will be able to work remotely at these locations and get access to the properties as yet another perk (have we convinced you to apply for a job yet?). Lastly, Fueled’s relationship with clients is temporary but an important one. Fueled will be creating a staffing firm that helps its clients make smarter decisions while recruiting product managers and developers.

The Like Phenomenon

We couldn’t leave Rameet without knowing the secret behind his popular Instagram account and 25K followers. Little did we know, there is an entire backstory for it! A few years ago, Rameet launched Lovematically, a technology that automatically liked your friend’s photos from your feed. “The idea behind this was that we should love everyone’s photos! It was a positive spin on human psychology. I wrote an article about the effect it had on my account over three months until Instagram shut it down. Then, I experimented with selfies and would post photos of myself. My likes and followers count kept rising and I thought to myself, people are crazy but now, I have brands sending me products to promote and people will yell across the street saying, I love your Instagram feed. So, really, it was just a bunch of experiments that have summed up to what you see now!”

“I want to be able to walk into a room with floating arrows hovering on people’s heads that show every person’s name and a little context of who they are. When that happens, we’ll be like, how did we not have that before?!”

When we asked Rameet what motivated him, he says, “artificial intelligence scares most people but it excites me. I love that voice recognition is close to 95% and that we’re going to get to 99%. Our voice as an interface will change! I also don’t think wearable technology on our face will be socially acceptable for a long time. Look at what happened to Bluetooth tools and Google Glass – people simply don’t like wearing tech on their face. More importantly, I’m looking forward to have greater control over, and smarter conversations with my computer in the future. It’s an active frustration and I hope we get there soon!”

If you’d like to connect with Rameet and talk business, tech and design or shamelessly get some fashion advice, email us at founders@radiche.com.

Photo courtesy of Rameet Chawla + Fueled.

PASSION PASSPORT, ZACH HOUGHTON: The Lost Explorer

Photo courtesy of Mat Rick, @matrickphoto

Travel means currency, education, and most importantly, personal growth. Yet, it’s not part of the life equation for many who work full time jobs and have mundane responsibilities. What if we told you that you could quit all of it, grab a journal, and book a one-way trip around the world? Sounds too good to be true, right?

Zach Houghton, Founder of Passion Passport, did exactly that. A man of many talents, including photography, fluency in foreign languages, and creative writing, Zach found himself stuck in a corporate job. The only exciting thing about his everyday role as a trader back in 2009 was that he was based in Hong Kong!

Born in Montreal to a father who was a travel writer and a mother who worked as a professor, Zach had an innate need to explore the world. (Fun fact: his parents met on a bus in Guatemala while his father was writing his first travel book.) However, for Zach, the idea of packing his bags and traveling to faraway lands helped him become a better person and a satisfied professional.

“There was only one type of travel story that was emerging–travel is perfect, go here and all your problems will disappear. There was something very interesting of showing the ups and downs of exploration. We wanted to showcase that through Passion Passport.”

We’ve all heard of companies and cruise lines offering coupons and giveaways. Most of us even enter in these contests (you know who you are!) but what we fail to realize is that the companies never showcase the winner’s experience beyond a simple winner announcement. Why is that? Zach tells us, “Travel is a gift that keeps on giving. At Passion Passport, we do something called The Bucket List Initiative (TBLI) several times each year, where people submit an application of where they would like to travel and why. We then have a jury that whittles down to the finalists. Lastly, our community votes for the winner. The “why” behind this application is very important because it gives us the opportunity to provide meaningful travel.”

“We wanted to personalize people and travel.”

Passion Passport may have begun as a personal project where Zach documented his Wanderlust Year but today, the company has helped thousands of people share their travel stories. With a team of photographers, planners, and creative minds, their mission is to help others travel with a purpose. “For me, purpose is dictated by our thoughts. If we want food, we go to a place with great cuisine; if you want architecture, you pick a place with long lasting history. As with anything, you really are the master of your destiny.” 

“Travel is a driving force for positive change. I wanted to find a place to build a community around meaningful travel and storytelling.”

The heart pin that is the emblem of Passion Passport supports the notion of doing things that you love. Take your passion to unknown places! A common thread with all of Passion Passport’s initiatives is providing unforgettable experiences that change people’s lives. Recently, Zach and his team curated a mobile conference for 40 people through Passport Express (inspired by Polar Express and Hogwarts Express). “This train trip from Washington DC to San Francisco captured people’s imaginations and got them to think creatively through onboard seminars and workshops. It was also free of charge.” Continuing with the idea of giving back to the Passion Passport community, Passion Passport also launched Passport to Creativity. A recent engagement with Adobe gave six students unprecedented access to three of the world’s most remarkable protected landscapes. Passion Passport also runs a boutique creative agency that provides services along with photo/video/content production for brands and tourism boards. 

Today, with over 681,700 followers on Instagram and a personal following of close to 300,000 on Instagram, Zach has built a serious community around the love for travel on social media. Most of the images shown on Passion Passport’s account are sourced by the community. A few images are also shot by Zach himself through his SLR camera or iPhone (have we convinced you to switch over to Apple yet?). 

The Turning Point

Zach is a Columbia University graduate in Economics and a fluent speaker in five languages: English, French, Italian, Mandarin, and Spanish, with conversational knowledge of Cantonese and Japanese. While his career started in finance working for a trading company in Hong Kong, he quickly understood that he wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life there. “I remember being at dinner with my colleagues and each one of them was on their Blackberry phones. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to become that person. At a crossroad, I spoke to my parents who suggested I fight it out and learn the basic macro skills. Then, India happened.”

Zach photographed by Adam Kingman in Montana

While overseeing his company's trading operations in India, Zach traveled to India quite often. He was stimulated by the people, culture, and food. Yet, as a business professional, he was never allowed to leave the hotel compound and explore the locality. Till one day, in 2011, his friend decided to stay with him in Mumbai. “I felt very trapped not being able to leave my hotel so my friend planned for us to leave at 6 am on a Sunday morning. We took the train to Churchgate and walked around for a couple of hours. I shot some beautiful photos that day and had an epiphany that I couldn’t be doing what I was doing at the trading company– that was not life! This was one of several aha moments of that year until I finally quit my job.”

The Everybody Project

When Zach left finance, he had no idea what he wanted to do (join the club!). With a sense of having lost himself in the cutthroat corporate world, he decided to take a few months off and travel. “I didn’t really have an itinerary but what I knew back then was that you are the average of the five people you spend your time with. At my job, I was surrounded by people who weren’t creative so I actively wanted to replace these people with those who inspired me. Hence, I planned my travels that way–one of them was a friend who had quit her job as a lawyer to pursue a career as a pastry chef, another was a college friend who worked in the Peace Corps, others were people who had started incredible businesses. The underlying theme was that they were people who had all chased their dreams.

I created a card with their portraits on it and scheduled meetings with them in their cities. This personal project became The Everybody Project–the idea that the people who you seek advice from are the most important people in your life. It helped change my thought process completely–one of confidence and creativity from what was previously anxious and misaligned with my own passions.” After traveling on and off for nine months, Zach returned to the U.S. and Passion Passport officially launched in 2013. FYI, out of the 50-ish countries he has visited so far, his favorite travel spots are Cape Town, Morocco and Porto in Portugal! 

Do you have a travel bug? Would you like to help others find their true purpose? Zach has some exciting things in the works and we’d be happy to connect you. Reach out to us at founders@radiche.com and in the meantime, keep calm and wander away!

Photo courtesy of Zach Houghton + Passion Passport where credit isn't given. 

LEBLUM, SARAH CORRIGAN: The Fresh Floristas

When was the last time you bought flowers directly from the grower? No, we are not talking about grandma's backyard. There are a number of florists out in the market today, but the essence of buying fresh stems has been lost. Mainly, because customers have lowered their standards and companies have raised their prices. Worry not, we have a solution!

As big time lovers of fresh flowers and all-things-floral, we were excited to have been introduced to leblum, the go-to floral guru in town. Or in business terms, an innovative e-commerce platform that is revolutionizing the industry one stem at a time.

Founders, Gayatri on left, Sarah on right

Sarah Corrigan and Gayatri Patel Bahl, the talented duo behind the brand may descent from different backgrounds but their passion for transforming an ordinary experience into an extra special one is what plants them together (pun intended). Gayatri, a graduate in Economics and Theatre from Emory University is a self-taught coder and an expert at building websites. On the flip side, Sarah studied architecture at Lehigh University, landed in a flower shop after quitting the corporate world and eventually, started her own garden design firm. But it doesn’t stop there! Shortly after, Sarah bought into a Tribeca based flower shop at the brink of bankruptcy and began turning it around. This is also when Gayatri met Sarah and assisted in refreshing the shop's website. Sales at the shop went on to nearly quadruple, which marked the beginning of their friendship. Eventually, this turned into a business partnership, when Sarah asked Gayatri to help build leblum in October of 2015. 

Simple is Beautiful

Leblum was born to fill a market gap that exists between consumer options: cheap bodega finds to high end boutique shops. The founders very quickly realized that New York was a unique market in which consumers genuinely appreciated high quality flowers but not everyone could afford $200 arrangements. (Tip: on average, leblum flowers can last up to a week longer than the ones customers usually buy from stores). To fulfill this gap, leblum has curated various options including a LIVE market that opens for a few hours daily and lets you order fresh flowers along with a subscription model, blumBUNDLE, that schedules flower deliveries once every two weeks. Leblum is literally automating the way consumers shop. Soon, they will be launching a build-a-bear like inspired business model for event planners and DIYers that will enable them to curate and create arrangements per their taste.

When it comes to packaging, it doesn’t get any simpler than this: no packaging, no vases, no unnecessary garbage. Understanding that each farmer is different from the grower, leblum delivers flowers the way vendors receive them. Each arrangement is wrapped in a brown paper wrap with the leblum sticker on it. “There are many startups focusing on the flower business today but they are mostly digitizing 1800-Flowers. A lot of them have high overhead expenses that unfortunately bullies vendors in marking down their prices. We didn’t want to be a product that bullied people to make margins for our investors; we want to take the industry and make it uber-efficient. At the same time, we’re trying to raise people’s expectations of what they’re getting and educating them.”

Flower Power

So what makes leblum different from other ecommerce sites in the floral industry? “We use my expertise of who the best growers are, take their flowers and remove all the layers between the grower and the buyer. For example, with the blumBUNDLE, buyers get to experience flowers that they normally wouldn’t see at a bodega or Whole Foods.” No wonder leblum has several repeat buyers. Gayatri proudly reminisces, “just recently, one of our customers ordered peonies at the last second in our LIVE market and we were out of peonies. Sarah picked up anemones instead and emailed the customer saying he would be receiving different flowers (he wasn’t too excited about it) but within a few hours, he signed up for the blumBUNDLE. It was amazing to witness because he would have never have picked that flower, yet he loved it. As a flower buyer, we normally get attached to the flowers we love and tend not to take risks.”

The Name Game

“Knowing flower names simply doesn't matter; the important part is experiencing a perfectly grown, high quality bloom. When I worked at the shop, I literally made flower names up as I went: Hemoglobin, Chlorophyll, etc. If you say it with conviction, people actually start to believe you. But, this doesn't work with leblum because vendors will most likely cut our terms and now, I actually know all the flower names out there!” On an extra creative note, Sarah tells us how “coming up with a company name was a few weeks of making noises. I loved the sounds of “le” “bl” and “um” and eventually, when you’re taking three syllables and repeating them for weeks, you come up with “leblum.” (Woah!) It sounded like a blossom and premium pretty. It was cool to take a name that meant nothing and create a brand out of it.”

“We are trying to craft a personal experience of a small town flower shop digitally.”

“When we launched, we wrote handwritten letters to 500 people who we thought would enjoy the product. We value handwritten notes but it’s not sustainable with a two-person team.” Sarah’s original concept was to build a mobile business that didn’t require any overhead and was user friendly for vendors. Gayatri agreed to the fact that many companies today are growing very quickly and can’t sustain massive staff influx. To avoid that mistake, leblum is creating efficient systems and using technology to their advantage, with each future employee added for the value they bring to the company. This includes Wellington, leblum’s very own Butler who manages customer relationships.  

The Partnership

Similar to many startups, having two founders was crucial to not only building leblum but also convincing investors and tech accelerators that there was structure to the company. Gayatri, who is a part time actress and dancer (she spent seven years in India to make a Bollywood debut), is in charge of coding, tech development, marketing and outreach. Meanwhile, Sarah focuses on brand, product, consumer, and design. Their advice to aspiring co-founders? Yoga and meditate every damn day! But on a serious note, it’s about never wanting to compromise the original vision of your company.

Quick Tips:

• Do as much in house as you possibly can

• Whenever you hear yourself say or think you can't do something, say “heck, yeah I can" and drink beetroot juice (known to increase your serotonin levels and make you feel happy)

• Have the discipline to confront the brutal facts of your current reality (crappy margins, wonky user experience, no investors)

• Never accept the word “can't” or “no” unless it's from your mother

• Most importantly, have faith, nothing comes easily

Currently, leblum delivers in New York and is set to launch in the tristate area in the coming weeks. (Woohoo!) By mid-summer, they will be looking into their second urban market but this time, you get to pick where! Vote for your city here. With a 150% growth month over month since its launch in November of 2015, leblum has officially been invited to join one of the top tech accelerators in the world with an acceptance rate of 0.8% which is less than Harvard, Stanford and Yale combined! Basically, watch this space.

As a little push to experience the beautiful collections at leblum, here is a promo code: Radiche for 20% discount at checkout. If you are looking to get in touch with Sarah or Gayatri, email us at founders@radiche.com.

Photo courtesy of leblum.

T BRAND STUDIO, RACHEL GOGEL: #WhatWouldRachelDo

In an age of instant photo filters and multiple personal blogs, creativity isn’t hard to find. But to meet someone who oozes creativity, integrity and ambition with every piece of work they produce? That’s rare and rightfully defines our next ArtMaker.

Creative Director of The New York Times' T Brand Studio, instructor at the School of Visual Arts, founder of the Creative Jobs List and part-time globetrotter, Rachel Gogel is an atypical Parisian living the dream in the Big Apple. Known for establishing and optimizing efficient teams, producing phenomenal creative work and building a kickass personal brand, Rachel is a go-getter with a #lifeistooshort attitude.

But she didn’t get it from her mama (or her papa) working in creative realms. Her exposure to art and design—besides living in Paris, the most cultural city on the planet—came from taking tons of design and art courses during high school and while attending the University of Pennsylvania. Senior year of high school, being on the yearbook committee inspired her to pursue a career in media and publishing, but hard work and non-stop innovation is what has earned her accolades from the 2015 Forbes 30 Under 30 for Media to the 2016 Inc. 30 Under 30: Movers and Shakers in the Content Industry.

“All my side projects have helped me in my day job, expanded my mind and built my brand.”

Rachel worked as a freelancer after graduating with a degree in communication design. Her gigs included working with Diane Von Furstenberg, USA Network, Travel + Leisure and many others. With a portfolio that ranges from book covers and flash banners to documentary film posters, Rachel is the embodiment of a content creator and innovator. Peek at her website if you want a nudge toward taking up a design course.

But she remembers well the times where she felt lost and had no control. “I took up communication design because I wanted to be entrepreneurial about the work that I would end up doing. When I graduated in 2009, the job market wasn’t great and I was stressed because I didn’t have a job. I knew I wanted to move to New York and that I would figure it all out once I got there.”

Carve Your Own Path + Carpe That Diem

A few weeks prior to college graduation, Rachel came across a two-week masters program in typography in Italy led by Steven Heller, a well-known design critic and historian, and Lita Talarico. She applied hoping that she would get immersed in the art community and get inspired. She got in. “There was a moment at a book shop when I was looking at magazines, writing down on a piece of paper the names of all the art directors and designers at magazines where I saw myself working. I still have that paper hidden somewhere in my apartment.”

Once in Italy for the program, Rachel researched and sent out approximately 70 emails to art directors and designers whose contact she found. Only a handful responded. But she was determined to make it in the creative space. In 2009, she moved to New York without a job in hand. It was a time of hustling hard, crashing on her sister’s couch and fielding a couple of job offers that all fell through. She finally earned an internship with DVF and accepted after some hesitation—after all, she had always wanted to work at a magazine instead. “The best thing I did was to be open-minded and take a chance to see where it would take me.” Four months into her internship, opportunity knocked in the form of a design director from GQ, who finally responded to Rachel’s contact attempts. To work at GQ had been Rachel’s dream from the beginning! But, with no GQ opportunities available, she was connected to someone at Travel + Leisure. In 2010, Rachel started as junior designer at Travel + Leisure along with many freelance gigs. “My roommate would make fun of me because I stayed up working on the couch till 3 AM every night. I had a weird energy level. I was very determined to get my name out there and it was genuinely fun.” Shortly after, she was given the chance to work as an Associate Art Director at GQ at the age of 22. Point being: build it (your portfolio) and they (dream jobs) will come.

One of her strengths is knowing the value she can add to any company. At GQ, managing older and more experienced employees was a challenge, but Rachel credits the culture at GQ for how well her peers respected her. Within a few weeks of starting, her boss quit. Rachel instantly was in charge of rebuilding the team, learning how to manage people, and ultimately, understanding the do’s and don’ts of starting something from scratch. Over three years at GQ, she managed the art department, launched new initiatives for the company, including a mobile app powered by Augmented Reality, and got involved in public speaking engagements. Hence why Rachel was offered a position as a Creative Director within the ad sales unit at The New York Times.

When she resigned, her GQ publisher told her, “Rachel, all the things you sound like you want to be doing, I don’t think it’s possible. It will be very hard for you to find a place where you can do that.” Fast forward to eight months after she took the position at The New York Times, he said, “I’ve been watching you and everything you have been doing. I was wrong.” Well, he’s right about being wrong! What started as a 4-5 people studio has now grown into the 80s. Last year T Brand Studio made close to $35 million in revenue, making it the fastest growing team at The Times.

“Being on-camera was a life moment—hair, makeup, a 28-page script, and the whole crew. I enjoyed every bit of it.”

A rock star networker, Rachel has always had a knack for leveraging connections to her and other’s advantage. She’s spoken at multiple conferences. Teaches a course at the School of Visual Arts. Strutted the runway for Carrie Hammer’s #RoleModelsNotRunwayModels show during New York Fashion Week. Not to mention she’s been reviewing final edits of her upcoming online course, “Designer’s Guide to Building a Brand Story” for The New York Times' new education initiative. Now we call that an all-rounder!  

“I like paying it forward, it gives me a sense of purpose.”

Plenty of women can relate to Rachel’s story: “My manager at Travel + Leisure was a mentor. She taught me a lot of what helped me get to where I am today. But at some point, I wanted more.” Since then, witnessing a lack of women in the creative space and the gender disparity in pay, it has become her personal mission to help women succeed and find their strength in this cutthroat industry. “Because I am still young and can identify with this generation of people, I want to be able to share my experience and expertise. They are constantly seeking inspiration from entrepreneurs and intrepreneurs.”

Her personal project, Creative Jobs List, a subscription based newsletter with 2,400 active subscribers, does exactly this by referring young and passionate creatives to vacant positions in the industry. “I don’t care to be known as the most talented designer. I would rather have my name associated with mentorship and helping aspiring designers, especially for women in this business. There is a lot of work to do because even if there are many women designers, they are not getting paid well enough. I have always pushed my rate higher than the previous job—not in the context of being a woman, but in knowing my personal worth.”

If you would like to grab coffee or collaborate with Rachel on her next creative project, email us at founders@radiche.com and we’ll put you in touch!

PRANKDIAL, FAHIM SALEH: The Man Before His Time

Why you messin’ with my girlfriend? Your car has been hit! Your order of 20 pizzas is here! We’ve all heard some variation of these pranks in our lifetime and have unwittingly been duped into our most gullible selves.

Yup, we can blame our guy, Fahim Saleh, Founder of PrankDial and its parent company, KickBack Apps (formerly known as TapFury) and Founding Partner at HackHouse Dhaka, who never grew out of his childhood tendencies to pull others’ leg and successfully created the original Internet prank dial website.

Born in Saudi Arabia, Fahim moved quite a bit before settling in Rochester, New York. From a middle-class Bengali family with two sisters, he was extremely determined and was constantly seeking novel ways to earn money. While attending eighth grade in Poughkeepsie, NY, his interest in computers developed from researching websites and reading about the Google founders and other players in the relatively new tech industry. Did he inherit this computer interest from his father, a computer scientist? Nah, Fahim instead credits his knack for technology to the hours he spent playing video games.

Baby Steps

Fahim’s first website was Salehfamily.com, hosted on AOL Hometown. When his parents threw family parties, his father would ask relatives to visit the website, bringing the total monthly visits to approximately five people! Not BuzzFeed numbers, but for someone who was trying the ropes, it was exciting and encouraging.

At the age of 15, Fahim began experimenting with programming and built teen-hangout.com, a too-early-for-its-time social network. After he asked all his friends to publish articles, it became a community-oriented blogging forum. Through a lot of site trial and error, he started making $2-$3 a month. “I just sat at my house in my pajamas, created something, placed some ads and generated revenue. That showed promise that it could actually be successful and I could make money off this.”

“Although I was an early adopter of the app industry, I missed out on a bunch of gold mines like the Facebook app market.”

By high school, Fahim was generating $100k-$150k in profit from websites that catered to a young demographic, such as AIMdude.com, iconfun.com, msndollz.com, icondude.com, and more. He recalls, “I would stay up super late, work on it and would be worried my Dad would catch me. He thought it would hinder my schoolwork, which it didn’t. Then, I got my first paycheck from Google for $500 as a teenager and showed it to my Dad. He was like, ‘Okay, let’s open an account.’ The same website was sold on eBay for $2,000.” During this time, Fahim serendipitously met Ohio native, Kyle Kapper, a young man as tech savvy and ambitious as Fahim, also building his own websites and selling them. Although very different culturally, they found a common ground in their passion for creating websites and decided to work together, remotely.

Fahim with the HackHouse Dhaka team in Bangladesh

Who Says You Need To Be Social To Get Social?

“I was a very naughty kid and would go out with friends, even get rocks and scratch cars when I was young. The wake up call was when I got caught by the car owner and had to plea with my parents to help me. They ended up paying $500 for the damages, leaving only $1,000 in their savings account. I remember that night vividly; my Mom was crying because our only option would be to move back to Bangladesh. Luckily, the next day my Dad got an offer from a university to teach computer science. But, we could easily have been back in Bangladesh and it has been a slow progress ever since.”

This may be the reason for Fahim’s strong work ethic and humility, but his pursuit for success began at Bentley University, where he was studying computer information systems. “I was a loner in college, very shy, so I had a lot of time to work on side businesses and dig deep on how to make cool things that other people would enjoy.” His college gigs (while most of us were partying it up in Boston) included starting a customized t-shirt company (think Ed Hardy!) with his roommate and initiating menuvo, a Facebook application that students could use for food delivery. He remembers literally going to every restaurant in every nook and cranny of Boston to pick up their menu, then uploading them all to a server. To his dismay, the server crashed one day and rather than manually update it all over again, Fahim moved on.

“I am very lucky to get in before the app market was saturated…it would be much harder to get the word out for PrankDial now”

April Fool’s Day may only be once a year, but Fahim’s love for pulling pranks lives year round. Graduated in 2009, not able to land a job he cared for, Fahim was motivated to create something of his own. What better way to mesh his mischievous nature with his tech knowledge, than by automating the prank calling service?

PrankDial was the result of Fahim’s innate ability to manipulate in-person social experiences into fun and interactive activities online. Working with a contractor, he taught himself the nitty-gritty of the app business, including recording his own voice for some of the pranks (his most famous ones are still on the app, by the way). A mode to send personalized pranks to your friends, PrankDial has grown enormously and now reaches half a million active users on a monthly basis.

“When you’re doing really well and become very successful, the most valuable thing in your life becomes time”

With company headquarters in Chelsea, a beautiful apartment and constant travel plans, Fahim may seem like he is living the dream life. But the journey wasn’t easy. Along the way, he learned a thing or two about building app companies. He even admits, “I’m not a great leader. I am not the guy who walks into the room and motivates my employees to kick ass. As a CEO, the best thing to do is to have thinkers on the team, not employees, but partners who are co-sharing your vision and success.”

For those starting off in this space, he advises, “two things: (1) invent something really ingenious; don’t just improve an existing product, and (2) your user base depends on your focus. For example, PrankDial has no audience constraints. But for a social app like Tinder, you can’t expect to launch everywhere. Test the service in specific markets first. Understand how to get your customers to become evangelists for your product, all the way from customer support to quick turnover on bug fixes in real time.” His most expensive lesson? “It is very important to hire people that will take the time to concentrate on one product and treat it as their baby, 24/7. When I tried to do too many things at once is when I failed the most. Hire people if you want to grow!”

“I would like to create something that adds legitimate value to humanity”

Besides changing the way the world interacts via app design, Fahim is looking toward the next thing: “PrankDial is great because it makes people smile, but it still doesn’t have a huge impact. The real question is, how can I use my abilities to make humanity better than what it was before I created this product/service?” 

Looking for a mentor, advisor or simply a friend to plan your next prank with? Fahim is your man and we promise he won’t disappoint. Email founders@radiche.com to get connected.

Photo courtesy of Fahim Saleh.

Written by Radhika Mehta.

ALLEY, JASON SALTZMAN: Behind The Alley Way

Hustle hard. Work harder. Ditch that boring office cube and roll in your Herman Miller Aeron chair to a co-working space—a revolutionary way to meet entrepreneurs, grow your business, and become part of a badass community.

We sat down with Jason Saltzman, the Founder of Alley and an early adopter in many industry verticals, to see what differentiates the Alley space from the rest of the co-working spaces in New York City—and we were blown away by his insights and work ethic.

From a middle class Long Island family, Jason remembers childhood as a basic lifestyle without immense wealth. (Fun fact: Jason grew up with Seinfeld! What do they put in the water over there…) Divorced at the time, his mother was taking care of two children and, to survive, went back to school to become a kindergarten teacher. This was young Jason’s first glimpse at witnessing someone who had accomplished something in her own right.

The Hustle Is Real

Jason was an entrepreneur at birth. Well, almost. From selling little things that he collected from his pediatric dentist uncle to rationing candy in elementary school, Jason was generating revenue from a very early age. In his own words: “I liked having money. When the ice cream truck would come around, I was the only kid that could buy my own ice cream.”

Then, as a youngster on a mall outing, Jason met a man hustling people using the three-card Monte. “This guy hustled me for $20 but he felt bad seeing my reaction and decided to take me aside and teach me the trick.” The enterprising young man took this trick to his high school cafeteria, earning an audience and his lost $20 back several times over.  In summation, Jason fell in love with hustling before he ever took a girl to the movies. And he wasn’t ever one to follow rules.

Alley office space in Chelsea

“Doing is much more educational to me than actually going to school…when you live it, it’s a lot different.”

Post high school, Jason didn’t know what to pursue as a career (show of hands, who’s been there?) He enrolled at Fashion Institute of Technology but soon quit to attend art school for graphic design. This was during the dot com bubble, when graphic design was in high demand.

Then his girlfriend’s brother asked him to join his business running call centers across the U.S. At that time in 2002, before the market crashed there was an urgency in debt consolidation. Instead of dealing with mortgage brokers directly, though, Jason started aggregating leads and acting as a lead broker. This online marketing business exploded and, by the age of 22, he was running both the call center and his online marketing business, waiting tables at a restaurant, studying graphic design, serving as the art school student body President and lastly, living in an incredible apartment with an expensive car.

Groovy, right? But he goes on to say, “I hated it. Money is great freedom, but if you’re working the amount of hours you are working and dealing with tough people, it tears apart your soul. I wanted to quit but I was stuck because I had all these high expenses. People look at you a certain way; it becomes a psychological rabbit hole, which literally kills people to keep up with the façade. I had a lot of anxiety and didn’t like myself and who I was, so I promised myself that the second I found something I really loved, I would quit everything if it ended up being a good opportunity.”

“I learned one fundamental thing throughout all these years: Even though I was making a lot of money, I hated it because it didn’t fill the void of a sense of purpose.”

Alley lounge area in Chelsea

Founding a co-working space was largely the outcome of the right relationships at the right time for Jason. While creating a tech company named Bizotto, now Seamless Docs, and looking for a place to pitch the business to prospective investors, he realized that there weren’t many spaces to rent in Midtown. In 2011, there were three co-working spaces in New York, all located in the downtown NY metro area.

One of his clients at the time was a real estate attorney with market connections. When Jason seriously considered opening a co-working space in Midtown, the attorney was instrumental in finding Alley’s first lease. Today, Alley proudly resides in the heart of Chelsea, a convenient neighborhood with robust entrepreneurial spirit. “Initially, creating a space for people to come together was the business, but then I figured out that the community was my business. I wanted to help people through all the business acumen I had acquired over the years.”

Purveyors of Culture + Creators of Community

First, the team attempted to introduce people to the space via a meetup, which didn’t go too well. So, Jason decided to go to the market instead—inviting 100 people on the website Loose Cubes, an Airbnb-type site for companies to share spaces. Amazingly, many early adopters and really cool entrepreneurs showed up. Since then, Alley has welcomed and witnessed several startup companies.

“We didn’t create the culture but catered to a culture that exists. Our first PR article focused on our “douchebag policy”: We leave the douchebag at the door. We have kicked people out, said: ‘no co-working for you,’ literally! Our whole playbook is built around that: how to deal with people and be real with people, and by acknowledging that they are going through the hardest times in their lives, how do we make it better?”

“The biggest thing in business is not creating a business plan, it’s dealing with people.”

Jason’s advice: “Don’t go to college. Just go wait tables and understand how to make customers feel wanted.” This philosophy has helped Alley become more than just an office space. Example: one Wednesday afternoon, Jason received a bottle of Jameson from a client. On the way to his office, a fellow client from a startup company said, “You’re going to drink? I’ll come.” Seconds later, ten more people joined the two in Jason’s office and spent the afternoon discussing their businesses and consoling each other over obstacles.

He tells us, “One day is the best day of your life followed by the worst day of your life, and it’s a roller coaster ride. It was an amazing thing to watch these people come together like that. My goal from that point on was to get as many awesome people as we could in our space; it empowered me. Then, Hurricane Sandy happened and no co-working space had power except us, so we sent out an email saying we could provide accommodation. In a short time, we had Vimeo, General Assembly, Fueled and other incredible companies on our doorstep. It’s devastating to talk about Sandy and a positive that came out of it, but that was the jump-off point for not only showcasing what we’re doing but also what it would feel like with that many people.”

Jason and his team recently re-configured their branding strategy and are constantly looking for ways to help their community members succeed professionally and personally through speaker events, parties, and networking opportunities with industry luminaries. Sign up for their newsletter to get updates on all-things-Alley and as their motto goes: Peace, Love and Hustle.

SOUND OFF, CASTEL VALERE-COUTURIER: The Silent Neighbor

Dance to your own beat, throw a party and never get a noise complaint. Ever. Again. (Your neighbours will love you!)

To transform urban living, founder of Sound Off & Sound Off Experience Castel Valere-Couturier presents the wireless headphone that lets you connect to and select between multiple live DJs. It’s like hopping between dance clubs, minus the covers or taxi fares.

“My job is to inspire those around me to do great things with our technology”

Born and raised in New York City, a graduate of the University of Denver in Finance and Marketing and a true music lover, Castel has always had his eye on business. His first entrepreneurial venture was promoting and organizing university events. After graduating, he worked with CRUNK!!! Energy for three years as Brand Manager followed by Paul Frank eyewear for a year and a half until he decided it was time to do his own thing.

In June 2010, Castel founded a private consulting company to help luxury brands gain distribution in the USA. Being the workaholic that he is, Castel had not taken a day off work since college. Then he saw something that changed his mind: a man passed away tragically from a heart attack before his eyes at a trade show event. That made him realize two things—life is short, and you can’t spend it all working. So he decided to take a trip.

Transformation in Tel Aviv

Like most of the entrepreneurs featured in RADICHE, Castel’s inspiration to generate this business idea was an outcome of traveling. (Lesson: take a trip TOMORROW!) Known for its vibrant nightlife, Tel Aviv was his chosen destination haven. Here, Castel witnessed the concept of the silent-disco for the first time. “I reluctantly tried it, but then got lost in the music for two hours. Those headphones completely transformed my experience. I came back to the States simply dreaming about this product, thinking how can I do this again, and I couldn't find anything like it.”

After sourcing a factory to produce the headphones for him, Castel’s first focus group was his friends. “My friends all left saying, ‘When can I do this again?’ That was a very powerful moment for me because it is seldom in life that you find that moment with people that is so transformative that they go from being a total non-believer to being on board 100%.”

As a one-man-show, the hardest challenge was launching Sound Off without much labor. “I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of interesting and intelligent friends. It’s also been great talking to different entrepreneurs, even if they are in different spheres, to get little tidbits. I am always asking questions and being proactive.” 

Brand = Experience + Product

In the beginning, like most businesses, Castel struggled with designing his business model, defining his target market and finding ways to scale his business. When renting out the equipment to clients, no one knew how to work the system so Castel learnt very quickly that Sound Off is more than just a product. It is a brand associated with an experience. In fact, the comeback and popularity of the silent disco is a perfect example of how Millennials value experiences over tangible goods. So the experience has to be good. To make sure it was, Castel created a sub brand called Sound Off Experience to manage the technology at events versus Sound Off to sell the technology itself.

“I’ve always been in different places at different times. When people started finding out what we were doing, I was getting requests from all over the world. We just kept putting headphones on more people and seeing the same reaction over and over again.”

Point being: at first the founder, is, the entire company. Despite having an awesome product, people want to partner or work with YOU for your interpersonal skills and, sometimes, your charming smile.

While still managing his private consulting business, Sound Off started to grow through word of mouth marketing. Their first sale, unconventionally enough, was to the Denver Zoo, whose event coordinators wanted to host a dance party without disturbing the animals. (Technology these days is wild, isn’t it?) Shortly after, Sound Off launched their first event in partnership with Kush Con Expo 2010. For you smokers out there, this was the first initiative to legalize marijuana in Colorado, back in the day. But the real game changer was in October 2014, when Sound Off challenged the status quo by partnering with a yoga event in Hong Kong.

From warehouse parties to yoga retreats, and everywhere in between

Imagine you’re on a helipad in the middle of Manhattan city, doing yoga and wearing headphones.  Despite that, you can still hear your yoga instructor’s voice down to a whisper and even control the volume of soothing music. This is a great example of how Sound Off has shifted its focus from solely party environments to providing out-of-the-club experiences.

“The interesting thing about silent-disco is that it has been around for a very long time. The concept started 19 years ago in the UK, but it was always a subculture that you found in warehouse parties and outdoor raves in the woods, but it was never a commercial product.” Of course, Castel is looking to commercialize silent-discos, but instead of limiting these headphones to commercial parties, he is venturing out to diverse spaces such as yoga, hospitality, nutrition, outdoor movie screenings, bike tours, translation services and wedding after-parties. As for fitness and wellness, Sound Off is the only company in the world threading these two verticals in with a long-lived subculture. Why shouldn’t yoga be more like a warehouse party? (The whole world might get healthier if it does.)

Want to own a pair? This spring, you will be able to bring the party home with Sound Off's new consumer-based headphone model for $199. However, if you're interested in getting social at a Sound Off event, get in touch with us at founders@radiche.com to join us in revolutionizing noise pollution. 

POP UP MOB, ANA PELUCARTE: Not Your Average Mobster

Those who challenge themselves to think outside the store, stand out from the norm and create hyper-creative spaces for people to experience brands are often referred to as mobsters.

Meet Ana Pelucarte and Mari Lopez, the Venezuelan founders of Pop Up Mob, a full service pop up agency and incubator that launched in September 2014 in New York City (Yeah, it’s only been over a year, and they’re killing it).

Millennials value the experience and story of a brand and will often pay more for it. Understanding that trend and noticing a need in the New York market, Ana and Mari founded Pop Up Mob. Today they provide creative consulting and short-term space rentals, and help brands provide an interactive experience to their customers in a unique way.

The concept behind Pop Up Mob first came to Ana when she was completing her master’s degree in Milan during 2012. Back then, she lived over an Italian bar that sold different products each day ranging from scarves to bags to shoes. Then suddenly a sign appeared saying, “Temporary space available.” That day was Ana’s “aha-moment” when she realized the multiple (and cute) possibilities one small space could have.

Pop Up Mob featuring Desa

“You have to treat business like a piece of play-doh and let it shape the way it should”

The original concept of the mob revolved around the idea of selling underground names and bringing unknown European brands to America by temporarily leasing a space.  Now, the mob also helps bring national brands like Howard Hughes and Univision to life by creating kick-ass cool experiences.

Blast from the past

Ana and Mari met in an advertising class at Boston University. As partners on a class project for Oreo, they first realized their potential to work well together. Years later, after Ana moved to New York from Milan, she bumped into Mari again at a party. Even though she was still working in furniture design, Ana called Mari up the next day asking to be her mobster-in-crime. Mari was working at a consulting company at the time, and she had been looking to start a venture of her own. Perfect timing! Even so, launching Pop Up Mob meant both mobsters needed to work two jobs for a while—from six months for Ana, to almost a year for Mari. Mobster morale: sometimes you can't work normal hours if you want to do something outside the norm. 

“You should choose someone who will add something to you rather than be another version of yourself”

Pop Up Mob featuring Rona

Ana has a background in engineering design, while Mari studied business. Ana could be described as loud, energetic and impulsive—while Mari is rational, composed and likes to think everything through thoroughly. Their business partner advice: Don't look for someone exactly like you, but find a person who has the skill set that you don't. This is when the creative juices start flowing...and new, interesting combinations happen. Our two cents: When you're looking for a business partner, find an open, honest person who understands you. Communication is key, as all partners have their ups and downs. A business partnership is a marriage of sorts, but on the other hand, it’s still a business. Be careful to take everything with a grain of salt, and a lot less personally than you would, say, a friend ghosting on you for brunch.

How they got to where they are? Friends and family. Main source of inspiration? Their parents.

In their line of business, inspiration comes from everywhere. Pinterest, Instagram, social events, traveling—heck, even dating. Having a gregarious partner like Ana helps Mari come up with new ideas and sometimes set business deals in motion—like the time Ana’s drinks meet-up turned into one of their first clients. Note to self: Say yes to drinks next time. And definitely stay for a second one, even if you’re bored.

Social ties aren’t just important in generating ideas, but also with seeing them through. The support of family and friends has been crucial to the success of Pop Up Mob. Most of their marketing successes and clients have come from word of mouth and referrals. Interestingly enough, many clients wanted to collaborate with other designers and create a community to promote other brands. (Hey! New York isn't as cutthroat as you would have thought.)

Pop Up Mob featuring Amen

Back to childhood and finding your passion

When we asked Mari and Ana to close their eyes and think back to childhood activities they loved, the answers were amazing.

Ana remembers loving to hang out on a trampoline in her backyard, always bringing in random things from her room into this space, trying to be creative with her findings. Mari would take huge pieces of crepe paper and design dresses with her little cousins, thriving off being able to style them herself. Translate these memories into their current passion for Pop Up Mob, and you will find a near-perfect correlation of their young love for fashion and the ability to manipulate spaces into fresh experiences.

Pop Up Mob featuring Howard Hughes + WWD

Photo credits: https://www.behance.net/gallery/29824489/Seaport-Studios