Creating Your Story

Founder: Nathan

Start-up: find technologies

Located: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

So what is find?

The first time I heard about find, I was excited because in the work I do on a regular basis, I could see the value in using it. Essentially, they harness 2 things: 1) value in crowd-sourcing, and 2) collecting info through a more holistic browsing experience. Think of it as a place to share info with others and to leverage the research others have done on a topic you care about. Check-out their pre-release version at findtech.co to try it out!

How did find come to be?

find officially incorporated last summer, but the idea has been swirling around for some time. The co-founder, Nathan, noted he’s probably been thinking about it for 4 years and it came out of the inefficiencies he noticed when making searches online. At first, he couldn’t put words to what was wrong, but his “aha moment” came from searching for a pair of brown shoes.

It shouldn’t be that difficult to find a pair of brown shoes online, right? Wrong.

Nathan searched for a brown pair of shoes and 10 pairs of black shoes popped up. And find was born.

Evolution of find

Ever wonder how many iterations a start-up goes through to get to their “final” product? Well…

Iteration#1. Nathan delved into the idea of crowdsourcing searches, so he tried this out through an excel model using 200 different product variations of shoes, and many tags to describe them, like: brown, leather, laces, etc. He assigned a value as to whether he liked or disliked the shoe by literally printing out webpages and fake “swiping” the page. (This is how rough your first iterations can be!) This led him to what he was looking for. The model worked! But then, he met someone who told him this would be impossible to scale-up, which led to…Iteration#2.

At this time, Nathan met a team at Carnegie Mellon University working on a similar idea, so they partnered and came up with “Bento Browser”, which is an App. This helped to structure the browsing experience, so you could remove results and never see them again, and you could group searches within certain categories. Unfortunately, this was only created for phones and was a little too techy for anyone other than scientists…This led to Iteration#3, which is based on the power of collection, fact-based searches, crowd-sourcing, and a more holistic browsing experience that is built for computers.

A tip for a great pitch

Nathan worked in venture capital for about 1.5 years before moving into a Founder position and he learned a lot about what you should be pitching. Unlike some people, who try to remember words or paragraphs, one thing he likes to focus on for pitching is the emotions he’s trying to evoke in the audience. He will have notes on his slides like “evoke a feeling of overwhelmed here” and will continue to evaluate the audience to see if he’s achieved this objective of emotion. He also noted that when people memorize their pitches, it seems way less authentic and is easy to see through; remember to drive home a few points and update your story to your specific audience.

In a start-up, there will always be challenges

The biggest challenge Nathan has found while working on a start-up is creating and communicating a story that everyone understands. Nathan noted he has a vision of something 10 years down the road, but breaking it down into something simple, in present day terms, can be tricky. He continually re-evaluates how his story is portrayed by others.

The second challenge he has found in starting a company is finding the right people, who are interested and willing to take the risk. There have been about 25 people, who have been involved in different capacities at find, such as students working on the idea through their entrepreneurship courses.

We can all learn from “embarrassing” stories (thanks for sharing Nathan!)

Story#1: It was Nathan’s first year in his MBA where he was involved in the Centre for Entrepreneurship. Nathan tried to tell the professor leading the centre about his product, but every time he received a blank stare. He went back to the professor, and again, a blank stare. Then 2 months ago, this professor came to him and said, I get it. Takeaway: Most things take longer than you expect, no matter what it is.

Story#2: Nathan was hoping to get an adviser on board and was very hopeful this person would read his cold email. He spent an hour on this email and noted that if this person read any cold email, it would’ve been this one. He hadn’t heard a response after a day or so, and so he went back to re-read the email and he found some grammatical errors…(proceeds to pay for the premium Grammarly). 😊

Finding inspiration

Nathan likes books that mix physics, psychology, and entrepreneurship. One recent book he has read is called “Outer limits of Reason” written by Noson Yanofsky, who writes about unsolvable problems. Nathan noted he enjoys books like this because they help you think out problems in the world and problems you want to go after.

If Nathan were to write a book, he would call it “Get beat down” because he said as an entrepreneur you will get knocked down again and again trying to figure something out, but eventually something will come through. Nathan quoted one of his profs “its never as good as it seems, and it is never as bad as it seems.”

Some great advice for budding entrepreneurs

Nathan noted that the hardest thing for entrepreneurs or anyone starting a new project is that you are thinking of the whole problem and you are in this “analysis paralysis.” You need to do X, Y, Z, and you don’t do anything because you are overwhelmed. You need to remember everything is going to be wrong the first time you do it, but eventually, it will become right and it’ll work. People just tend to be afraid of creating a website without a logo or selling to a customer without a perfect product. It’s like static vs kinetic friction, static is higher once you start moving a ball, which makes it easier to move as time goes along. So get moving!!

find has a great team, but they are looking for more entrepreneurial-minded, risk-taking, dreamers, who want to challenge the tech giants, to help them out. Feel free to contact Nathan at nathan@findtechnologies.com about joining their team or learning more about what they are up to. Please reach-out if you have any questions for me—I am always looking to speak to awesome entrepreneurs!