The Build #14: Clean

Daniel Tobon‘s early experiences growing up in an entrepreneurial family shaped Starchup, a business that helps big brands and mom-and-pop laundry operations compete on a level playing field.

Transcript

Announcer:
From 2820 Radio in Philadelphia it's The Build, conversations with entrepreneurs and innovators about their dreams, their triumphs, and their challenges.

Joe Taylor Jr:
Clean. Even as washers and dryers get sleeker, more compact, and more energy efficient a growing number of Americans rely on commercial laundry mats and dry cleaners to get their clothes looking great. This weeks guest entrepreneur believes that it's not just a matter of convenience, commercial cleaners are already set up to wash our clothes in more sustainable environmentally friendly ways that we can do on our own.

Joe Taylor Jr:
Daniel Tobon's been to the battlefield and to the board room, yet his early experiences growing up in an entrepreneurial family led this veteran to launch a new career launching companies. His latest idea helps both small businesses and big brands streamline how Americans do their laundry. In an era of startup fuel disruption, Daniel's got some big plans for helping mom and pop businesses compete on a level playing field.

Joe Taylor Jr:
It's the story of Starchup, coming up next on The Build.

Announcer:
The Build is made possible with support from 2820 Press, providing business consulting and content strategy services to customer obsessed companies nationwide. More information at 2820press.com.

Joe Taylor Jr:
It's The Build, I'm Joe Taylor Jr. Joined today by founder of Starchup Daniel Tobon. Welcome.

Daniel Tobon:
Thanks for having me.

Joe Taylor Jr:
We love to collect origin stories here on the show. It sounds like your story includes a really diverse set of experiences. The Army.

Daniel Tobon:
Yes.

Joe Taylor Jr:
Law, and laundry.

Daniel Tobon:
Yes.

Joe Taylor Jr:
How does one go through all three of those experiences in the course of one career?

Daniel Tobon:
Funny story, but I actually kind of went through all of them at the same time at one point in my life. My dad is an operations manager for Blue Kangaroo and Family Pride Laundries, which are one of the largest coin operated laundry chains in the Midwest, because of 9/11 and everything I actually in the military right out of high school. I did a couple years of active duty first, and then I got out. Ended up getting out in July of 2001. I went to college, I was there for a semester, and then I left to go overseas after my first semester of college.

Daniel Tobon:
Then when I would come back from whatever deployment, before I went back to school, I would work at my dad's company. I would pick up the actual tokens, and change from the machines. That's the first time where I felt, there's a lot of money in laundry. We were collecting $250,000 a day in coins, from just a couple of locations. This was almost an everyday thing that they had, picking up all these locations.

Daniel Tobon:
I got interested in the laundry business from a financial perspective, in my time between going back and forth, between the Army and school. I left for one deployment, came back. I did a couple more years of college, and then I graduated with a political science degree. I always knew that I wanted to go to law school. I was one of those kids that knew he wanted to go to law school and become a litigator around middle school, so I always planned for that.

Daniel Tobon:
I graduated college and ended up getting deployed again. This time to Iraq. I went to Iraq for a year, and then there was like six months of pre and post deployment stuff we had to do. I came back and then started law school right away at the University of Chicago. While I was going through law school I realized that I could make a lot more money to be a corporate attorney. Which was not what I went to law school for, but it did give me a lot of other opportunities.

Daniel Tobon:
It allowed me to learn a great deal about how corporate finance worked, how different companies managed their cash flows. I did leverage finance, so I helped bank create debt back securities for large corporations that couldn't access the capital markets in another way either. They couldn't sale stock because they were private companies, or they couldn't fund raise in any other way other then to sale their own debt, so we made corporate bonds.

Daniel Tobon:
In that process you get to become very familiar with the way that a companies finances operate. Which was a very hallucinating experience. However, it wasn't my dream job, it wasn't what I was passionate about. In hind sight, I think I would've liked being a litigator a lot more, but being a corporate attorney also gave me the opportunity to live in the UK. That's where I practice. I practice for Latham and Watkins in London.

Daniel Tobon:
That's an opportunity that unless I would've done international arbitration, or a very niche field it's very hard to get into, I wouldn't have been able to practice abroad. Weighing the balances once I was coming out of law school, I realized that I had more of the entrepreneurial spirit. I took a lot of business school classes while I was in law school. I took entrepreneurship in the law. I took these courses that primed me to leave the legal practice and go into entrepreneurship. Which I found a lot more interesting.

Daniel Tobon:
I wish that we would've had the exposure, or I would've had the exposure, that younger generations get today about the concepts behind entrepreneurship, and just the ability ... It's a legitimate track. You have major universities teaching entrepreneurship courses. Back when I was in college Facebook was just coming out, so these young darlings that left college to found their own company, that concept was just being socialized, and it wasn't something that was ... Obviously different people have different levels of talent, like entrepreneurial drive.

Daniel Tobon:
I feel like now it's much more spread out through society, and it's not something that's very foreign. Back in my generation if you were to tell your parents that you were going to leave school to be an entrepreneur, they'd look at you like you wanted to go to art school. Like, what are you really going to do for money? Now it's more accepted.

Daniel Tobon:
People that have a good idea, and a passion to pursue to make that into a real thing have a lot more support. Even things as simple as co-working spaces, or like the meetups that you have for technology that helps engage people at a much earlier age, and make them think of that as a possibility. Whereas my path I think was much more convoluted because, I didn't know what I wanted to do.

Daniel Tobon:
I had a rough general idea of the things that interested me, and that's what I studied, but I didn't imagine that there'd be a direct line between my chosen academic path, and my ultimate career path.

Joe Taylor Jr:
I think one of the things to come back to, when I talk with founders especially who've grown up in entrepreneurial families. I grew up, my dad and his dad were both entrepreneurs. It didn't seem like that conversation with the parents was as rough as some others might have had when. When you started talking to your family about the idea of running your own company as opposed to practicing law, what was the feedback?

Daniel Tobon:
My dad had also been an entrepreneur, but he's also very risk sensitive person. A much more risk seeking person. For example, my wanting to be an infantry in the Military, and be a serial entrepreneur, but my dad had a restaurant [inaudible 00:06:48] for a very long time and he had gotten out of that business, and gotten into laundry. He knew how hard it was to setup a business, and he knew the failure rates. Your parents always want what's best for you.

Daniel Tobon:
Whenever I've come to my parents and tell them that I'm leaving this traditional ... Especially being at a top law firm in a top city, and they're always, my parents at least, were always a bit are you sure you're thinking this through, do you know the consequences. Of course we have a conversation about it, but I feel like my volunteer to go into the Military several times has made them question my judgement overall.

Joe Taylor Jr:
Let's talk a little bit about how the Military experience influences your entrepreneurship. I know you're part of Bunker Labs, which is an accelerator for startups founded by veterans and members of Military families. Give me a little bit about the perspective of how that is influencing how you're growing your startup called Starchup, and why is that important to give that support to folks who are coming out, transitioning out of Military service.

Daniel Tobon:
Okay. Lots of parts to that question. It's funny, because I spoke at the opening of the Bunker here when they opened [inaudible 00:07:57]. I said that, being an entrepreneur is a lot like being in the Military. Everybody thinks it's cool, but nobody wants to do it themselves. That is true, and the reason that is a very small portion of our population serves in the Military, a very small portion of our population ever becomes an entrepreneur.

Daniel Tobon:
The similarities I draw are not perfect, but I think there's a lot to say for being able to work with a small group of people in a very hyperbolic environment where there's a lot of stress, there's a lot of pressure, there's a lot on the line. Obviously in the Military it's your life or safety, but an entrepreneurship it's your career, it's your well being, it's your life savings, it's your time, it's very high stress. It takes a certain adaptive and resilient person to work very well in both of those environments.

Daniel Tobon:
It's definitely not for everybody, and it's definitely something that's appealing to a certain I think our key type of personality. I like the unknown, I like having a concrete say in your own destiny. The success of my company is directly proportional to the amount of effort and energy that all of it's members put in. The same thing goes with a Military unit.

Daniel Tobon:
Now, why I think that we should support people that are trying to transition into the Military, and open this entrepreneurial career path, that's where I think the environments differ. In the Military you're given a lot of structure, you have these circumstances where you do have to work very closely in very stressful environments, and that's all very similar, but the Military is based on structure. Everybody has a role, everybody has responsibilities. It fits into a bigger machine, and their function is to do that one specific thing that they're part of that bigger machine.

Daniel Tobon:
Once you get out and if you want to become an entrepreneur, the things are completely polarized. You don't have any structure, you're building the structure itself. You don't have a defined role, you have a lot of roles that you need to until you can find somebody who specifically fits that role. This is especially true for founders. I think the biggest thing is taking those qualities that made people successful in the Military and showing them how they can be applied in a low information, high decision rate environment where you are responsible for institutionalizing the processes that would eventually become your business.

Joe Taylor Jr:
We'll come back to the structure and how you're building the business, but the concept of a startup focused on laundry. Where did that come from? Is that just from that experience when you were younger? Was that sitting in the back of your head?

Daniel Tobon:
It was kind of sitting in the back of my head. Before Starchup I was working at a big coin business. Very relevant to what I'm doing now, but it gave me a lot of great experience when it came to development, and product building. I was in the midst of leaving that company, and I knew I wanted to do something else. I was looking at taking an executive role at another startup, I was interviewing at a couple smaller companies.

Daniel Tobon:
Then my good friend from law school Nick Chapleau, who is now my co-founder, he and his wife had just moved from Austin Texas to Chicago, so we started hanging around and shooting the shit. Talking about different business ideas that we've had, and we developed. At this point, Washio hadn't come out yet, but it was starting to get some press as a launch. I did some rough math, and looked at their business model, and I'm like this is going to be really hard to do. They're going to have to raise a lot of money.

Joe Taylor Jr:
Washio is a straight to consumer play?

Daniel Tobon:
Correct. They essentially insert themselves as a technology layer, and a delivery layer over somebody else's processing facility. They're a single brand that's everywhere. They're in six cities right now, but it's a direct consumer brand that provides the technology in the delivery layer, where somebody else actually does the laundry. From the consumers viewpoint, you just see one seamless operation, and you just interact with Washio.

Daniel Tobon:
I understood that the complexity of doing delivery is very high. Which is good for new market entrance, because it's going to take a while before people get it right. The customer acquisition costs for something like this were going to be pretty high, which they are, and launching a national brand is also something that's incredibly expensive and difficult to do.

Daniel Tobon:
In my mind, these [inaudible 00:12:27] companies that were coming out, and there's another company before Washio called Prim that failed spectacularly after raising about 5 million dollars. They were a why company or company. The cost to Washio is not new, and it's not something that was very creative, or imaginative. There was actually a failed why company to company that did the exact same thing. They screwed up as they were doing one off deliveries, instead of routes or geographically limited deliveries, so they burned through their cash really quick, and found out that it wasn't ... It's like do the math later approach of entrepreneurship. As long as you can raise a bunch of money, you have a lot of money to mess up with.

Daniel Tobon:
That's what I saw these companies doing. The other thing is, I really dislike when the term disruption is used to basically say, I'm going to come over here and destroy a bunch of small businesses, because I have either an information on a web advantage, a technology advantage, or a capital advantage. I can so much money that I can put these small businesses out of company. I have technology that's so good that these services become obsolete, or my whole business model is just taking market share away from smaller businesses. I also saw with Washio, and Drive, and these other guys were doing as part of that.

Daniel Tobon:
Once Nick and I started looking at these business models outside of their capital structure being off to us, we also realized that the service quality wasn't that great, because they were outsourcing the actual processing of laundry. They were exposing their brand to quality control that they weren't in charge of. When their sub merchants that were actually processing the laundry were losing stuff, or doing stuff wrong their brand was the one that was being exposed and taking the hit. There was no direct feedback loop between the consumer and the actual service provider. Which has cost them a lot of churn, and has made their marketing cost increase, because they need to keep getting new customers in the door.

Daniel Tobon:
Once we had our heads wrapped around the industry, and what these players were doing, we were like all right we want to build something for small businesses. Hard to do, but the good thing is that it's B to B, so it's much easier to market. We don't want to build a brand that is exposed to the quality efforts of some other player. We wanted to be able to white label this technology, so we did that. We wanted to use the existing network of 60,000 laundry businesses that exist across the US. Not all of these would be candidates for our product, but we figured we'd get the best ones here and there, and then we can build a network that's nationwide.

Daniel Tobon:
That allowed us to build our initial product, which is now what we are selling globally now. Got customers in South Africa, Canada, and looking to go to Costa Rica next. The way that we decided to launch this was a Uber style platform, that can be used by any small business. What we're doing is we're leveling the field for technology between these west coast companies that are raising $20 million but know nothing about the industry, and we're taking industry experts and handing them the technology that those companies claim to have as their advantage.

Joe Taylor Jr:
In some ways it sounds like what you're providing is disruption insurance for a lot of relatively small mom and pop type businesses, who've been in this business in some cases for decades, and maybe haven't had a lot of incentive to get involved in the technology upgrade. You're basically providing this with a bow on top. What are the specific services that you offer? If I'm running the laundry mat down here, where I drop my clothes off, what does Starchup do for me?

Daniel Tobon:
Disruption insurance, I'm going to steal it. That was really good. I'm going to take that. Basically what we do is we give them a semi point of sales platform. It's a management dashboard that allows them to manage all their drivers, all their orders, keep a record of all their customers, and does the billing for them. It does things like, track customers down by individual address, you can see all your customers on a map, you can see all your customers and their entire order history, you can track your drivers real time.

Daniel Tobon:
There's another part of the dashboard that actually shows you where your drivers are at any given point. What orders they have. You can manage your routes, see who's getting picked up or dropped off today. The actual owner gets a very high end digital management dashboard that allows him to see his entire delivery operation in one snapshot. We also provide a driver app, much like your Uber driver would have, except this also carries a manifest of all his orders, and it shows him where he needs to be at exactly what time in order to make his deliveries and pickups.

Daniel Tobon:
On top of that we offer them a white label application, so if it's Jen's cleaners down the street, they'll have a Jen cleaner app, which is powered by Starchup in very small letters. They get to say to their customers, if you want to order pickup and delivery from me, I have an app. For a small business to be able to say that, especially at the price that we are charging them, it's huge. The marketing value that you have by being in somebody's phone, and being in somebody's pocket is huge. You can run promotions through email, and then they can run right on the app.

Daniel Tobon:
You save a lot of time in customer service because, the customer is interacting with a piece of technology instead of calling you to ask you about something specific. They have the convenience of being able to see when you're available at any time, they don't have to call in. It reduces the amount of customer service inbound calls, and it gives them a peace of mind, and lowers the overall management cost of providing the delivery service. Which is the greatest value that we provide, but cleaners need to be doing other things to managed.

Daniel Tobon:
Instead some people out running routes based on spreadsheets. Literally manual entry spreadsheets. People are calling in. We also provide a web boarding app that we'll be launching pretty soon. You may think, my customer's demographic doesn't fit the profile of somebody who's going to download an app. Just direct them to your website, they can login and do the exact same thing.

Joe Taylor Jr:
There's a lot of conversation, I just read something in the Harvard Business Review about the difference between disruptive startup companies that tend to do a lot with a relatively small number of employees, versus traditional businesses. Small businesses especially, very averse to hiring additional folks. What you're providing is basically that platform upon which you would normally need to hire three, four, five more people just to manage all of that stuff if you're a traditional mom and pop type cleaner. Your service is based on, is it a flat fee, percent of revenue, some kind of mix of both?

Daniel Tobon:
We do a mix of both. We have different packages depending on the size of the cleaner. Obviously we have larger enterprise clients like Tide Spin, which is a Proctor and Gamble brand. They're obviously a much different package than a smaller mom and pop shop that may only have one driver. We charge a relatively small monthly fee, and then a small percentage of transaction. Both those vary depending on the size and complexity of the platform that we are providing.

Joe Taylor Jr:
You brought up something really interesting, because in terms of focus on mom and pop tend to be one off or small chain associated, a handful of locations. You get a call from Proctor and Gamble, they want to literally spin up something big, and you're able to get them on that platform, and launch that. What was that experience like?

Daniel Tobon:
Nerve wracking. We had a former contract with Proctor and Gamble as a four person company. We've now added a few more people, but it was pretty manic. They also decided mid course that they wanted something completely different than we had built. Which to their credit, it was by far the best business decision that could be made. Luckily we were able to engineer a pretty solid work around, which was eventually launched as a go to market product. Now we are in the process of updating that product.

Daniel Tobon:
Working with P and G has been great because, they are so good at making really hard decisions. They hire really good people, they have processes in place to make sure that everybody's doing what they need to be, and they are a profit centered business. They are very focused on doing things that work, and doing things that make money. Which takes away the shaft and confusion of everything else. Working with them has also brought our professionalism up a notch because, we're working with a big giant industry that has all these structures and institutions in place to make sure things run smoothly. We've been able to learn from them, and operate in a much more structured and professional manner, to mirror what they've been doing.

Joe Taylor Jr:
How did they make the connection with you in the first place?

Daniel Tobon:
We reached out to them.

Joe Taylor Jr:
Okay.

Daniel Tobon:
Basically we trolled LinkedIn until we found somebody that worked there, and then started talking to the global brand manager at Tide. They were already in the process of thinking of coming up with something like this. It was a combination of persistence, us reaching out, right place right time. They were already thinking of launching a product, and we had already built the product.

Joe Taylor Jr:
Yeah. That just saved them the time to get to market.

Daniel Tobon:
Yeah, and cost. With the way that we've structured our contract it would have been orders of magnitude more expensive for them to build what we had already built.

Joe Taylor Jr:
In terms of your vision for the future, you've got revenue. Do you have investment in capital at this point?

Daniel Tobon:
We're actually in the middle of a raise right now. We have had investments in the past by angel investors, and one small fund, but this will be our biggest raise to date. Now that we have a legitimate book of business, and we have revenue coming in the door, we're in a much better position to go out and raise capital.

Joe Taylor Jr:
Tell me about the difference between pitching a potential client versus pitching a potential investor.

Daniel Tobon:
It's very different. Very, very different. A potential client knows the business probably better than I do, and basically the value proposition that I'm trying to make is I can create value with a tool if he uses it properly in his business. The value proposition that I'm pitching an investor is that I will be able to grow the value within this company. A lot of that has to do with education. Most people that are decision makers, and either a fund or an angel group, the only thing they know about dry cleaning is where the dry cleaner that they use is.

Daniel Tobon:
A lot of them are very intelligent and have a lot of general business knowledge, which allows them to get up to speed pretty quickly, but you basically have to start from the beginning and explain to them why there's such a giant national industry that's so fractured. That's one of the biggest things that attracted me to the laundry industry. Getting there is no national brand. If I get on a plane right now and go to ALX, I will not find a single dry cleaner chain or independent that is in both locations. I have a very hard time thinking of any other industry that's a $30 billion plus a year industry that's that fractured.

Joe Taylor Jr:
What do you think caused that? Why did nothing emerge like a McDonald's for laundry?

Daniel Tobon:
A couple of reasons. A normal brick and mortar drop store that usually does dry cleaning, usually services between a two and three mile radius in the past. Now this is changing because, they use toxic chemicals like perc. You basically had to write off the cost of the land. In order to get a facility, if you had a processing plant on facility that used these chemicals, you were spending between $2 and $3 million to get this facility up and running. Then, like I said, you basically had to write off the cost of land because, your using toxic chemicals and nobody's going to buy that at market value beyond that.

Daniel Tobon:
The capital costs of growing a laundry business were always very significant, and because of the tight geographic restrictions in order to service a large area and expand your business, you had to build another one these giant expensive processing plants or just a brick and mortar drop off store that then was serviced by a bigger regional facility. Again, the geographical limitations from capital costs, costs these businesses to be very regional, and that's exactly what you see today. If you go out there and you see who are the big dominant chains, where are the big dominant players, they're all very regional and geographically pigeon hold into whatever service area they started.

Daniel Tobon:
Second, these operations are very complex. Taking a single item and then tracking it while being processed, putting those items back together, and then giving them back to the right person is complicated. It's something that doesn't scale. It's just as difficult if you're twenty pieces, as if you're doing a thousand pieces, if you have a processing place. It's not getting any easier, and you got to make sure that you do that process well at every single location. That's probably another reason why it didn't grow.

Daniel Tobon:
With the advent of technology, these barriers to consolidation drop. They don't go down to zero, but they drop very significantly, because now you can play around with data. If I have data on how different cities are operating, I can change my expansion model, or my operational model depending on what the data is telling me. Long haul, that's like the play for most of these companies, is to gather market data in order to consolidate the market. Washio doing it direct to consumer, us doing by helping brands launch their own technology.

Joe Taylor Jr:
You're specializing in working with an industry that by definition can not scale the way that we would see scale in modern technology companies, but your business can scale. What are you trying to solve for as you build out this company?

Daniel Tobon:
The biggest thing we have right now is personnel. We can always use more good people to help do what we need to do. Part of the reason we're raising cash is to round out our developing team, focus on marketing and sales. Our marketing and sales people right now are doing brilliantly, but one person can only make so many phone calls in one day. That's very easy to scale by adding quality people.

Joe Taylor Jr:
Again, you're selling into a very traditional market where there are folks who don't probably think they even have a problem that they're trying to solve yet.

Daniel Tobon:
Correct. That's been one of the brilliant things about working with brands like Tide, or CD One Price, or our bigger larger operators, is that they're already players in the industry that are looked up to by other participants. It's very validating to say, these guys spend a lot of money on research and development because, they're one of the bigger players in the industry. If they're taking a shot on us it's because, they know that they're value there. There's a learning curve to some of our clientele, as to why we're a valuable tool.

Joe Taylor Jr:
Coming back to the idea of hiring, recruiting. How do you lure somebody to a business that's focused on maybe not the most glamours concept, compared to other fancy shiny startups that are out there?

Daniel Tobon:
Yeah, absolutely. Basically the idea of what we're trying to do, which is much bigger than just building a piece of technology, and two the technology is really cool. Having central management dashboard that then takes and inputs from four different apps is something that's not very easy to do, especially when all of them have a very specific and drastically different function, and it all comes back together. Something that's infinitely scalable. Building that is a very challenging thing. On the development side, we'll draw people in by the challenge of what we're trying to build. For our marketing and sales team side, we bring them in with the idea that we are building something that's going to help a lot of small, medium sized, and even big businesses.

Daniel Tobon:
We're working with a public company right now in a RFP. Getting them excited about doing things like working with Tide, and building a product and a brand from the ground up. That's the kind of thing we draw people in with.

Joe Taylor Jr:
Thinking about the traits, the competencies, the talents that folks have. What are the biggest things that you look for when staffing up your own crew?

Daniel Tobon:
Independence. The ability to work independently with little direction. At this stage in our companies life cycle, I think that's by far the most important thing to do. People that can be given a overall larger goal, and be pushed in a certain direction, and they're self motivated, and self starters, and more importantly self learners. They emancipate themselves from traditional administration, and just go and get the test done. I think that's the number one thing that we look for.

Joe Taylor Jr:
Sure. I want to come back before we wind things up, because we're almost out of time, and revisit the concept of Bunker Labs. We talked about Bunker Lab, a great accelerator that launched in Chicago. There are now satellite outposts like the one here in Philadelphia. What do you as a startup founder, get out of being associated with an accelerator? What does the Bunker give you that you wouldn't have been able to pull together for yourself?

Daniel Tobon:
Legitimacy. We were in first cohort of Bunker companies in Chicago. We actually launched our base in Chicago, and then we've obviously joined a program here in Philadelphia, because we think it's worth wild, but certain people that you talk to when you say you're building a startup, the next set of questions that you get are validation questions. Who are you? What have you done? What education you have, and what other success metric I can judge you by, to separate whether you're a guy with a napkin, or somebody who's actually building a business. Not to say that the napkin guys don't ever build businesses, they do.

Daniel Tobon:
In any incubator is a really good [inaudible 00:29:19] that somebody else has bet you as a serious player. The thing about the Bunker is that it effects you in a lot of different ways. It shows that you're a Military veteran who's an independent thinker, and self starter. On top of that somebody else has abetted you and said, this guy is actually trying to do something, we believe in what he's trying to do, and we're going to back him in that progress.

Daniel Tobon:
Outside of that, the networking. The ability that the Bunker has to bring in either influential speakers, people who can mentor you through a specific time in your company, life cycle that's a resource that for me as an individual, or Starchup as a company would be really hard to come by if we didn't have that sport.

Joe Taylor Jr:
Now as you move through the process of being part of this first Philadelphia cohort, and you're taking on the role of mentoring other folks. What do you look for in the kinds of founders, leaders that you want to see included in future groups?

Daniel Tobon:
That's a really good question. Some people call it passion, but I don't know that that's the correct term because, some people are not what I would consider passionate about what they do. They're very interested, but I would say drive. Every structure fails until it doesn't. That's it. Until you start making revenue that is consistent and repeatable, you are just a guy that says he has a company, or a group of people that says he has a company.

Daniel Tobon:
For however long it takes for you to find your product market fate. For however long it takes for you to raise enough capital to make your idea come to fruition. For however long it takes for you to be able to pay a team that can build what you want, you're just a dude with an idea, and you've got to come to work every day without being compensated, knowing that you're just a dude with an idea, and get it done. Until that money starts coming in the door and you validated yourself, you're just a guy with an idea.

Joe Taylor Jr:
Thinking about things that are repeatable. What are we going to talk about when it comes to Starchup in ten years?

Daniel Tobon:
In ten years, hopefully we are the largest provider of logistic technology for the global laundry industry. That is our hope.

Joe Taylor Jr:
That's a great vision.

Daniel Tobon:
Yeah. I think we can do it.

Joe Taylor Jr:
Anything else we need to cover off on?

Daniel Tobon:
No, it's been great.

Joe Taylor Jr:
All right. Daniel Tobon, thanks for joining us on The Build.

Daniel Tobon:
Thanks for having me.

Joe Taylor Jr:
The Build is a production of 2820 Radio in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. Our producers Lori Taylor. Our associate producer is Katie Cohen Zahniser. Our talent coordinators are Katrina Smith and Gazem Ali, and our post production team is lead by Evan Wilder at Flowy Audio in Detroit. My name is Joe Taylor Jr. Thanks for listening to The Build.

Announcer:
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