What were you doing previously and what inspired you to launch your company?
Prior to Porchboxx and really the entire startup game, I was flipping homes. My background was heavy in residential finance, securitization, and mortgage-backed securities and I come from a family of contractors, so it was easy to transition from my previous life in residential finance.
The inspiration for Porchboxx came from a Zoom call I had with a VC during quarantine that, while holding his two-week-old baby, he had some porch pirates walk up to his porch and walk off with his groceries. He was explaining this happened a lot and that his wife would either let their food sit outside for a while (*for virus reasons) or she would bring them inside and hand wash everything.
He goes: “Find a way to fix this problem and we’ll invest.” That was May 6th. On May 28th we incorporated and beginning of August we had a fully functioning MVP.
What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?
Porchboxx protects your packages from porch pirates, disinfects your items from any potential infectious threat, keeps your items cool/warm to prevent spoilage, and acts as a security system that will integrate with almost any IoT device.
What gets me amped up is seeing something that was just a figment of the imagination a few months ago, scale to something that could be the gold standard for how people receive and handle their packages. COVID-19 is going to continue to shape the eCommerce landscape, and home delivery is going to continue to be the new “thing” for most Americans. This addresses a lot of the issues that come with that.
Name the biggest challenge you faced in the process of launching the company. How did you overcome it?
Honestly, we haven’t hit any real heavy roadblocks yet. This isn’t my first product to develop, so I had all the resources necessary at my fingertips which made it easy to get to prototyping. However, I know we will have some hard bridges to cross when it comes to production and logistics, so come see in six months when we’re live and ask me to answer this question again.
Where do you see your company headed next?
Ideally, we hope to license our IP to an IoT company that sees a fit with our tech in their space. I think the problem(s) we are solving are big enough that someone is going to take notice pretty quickly, realize what our patent covers, and want to capitalize on that.
Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with another founder just starting out.
Stop comparing yourself to your peers. Worrying about what someone else is doing, or thinking that because they’re working 18 hours, you should be too is not the way to go through life. What’s normal for one person, isn’t normal for another, and you’re going to have lulls in your work cycle that can be hard to get through because you see everyone else plugging away. Set realistic goals, focus on them and as long as you’re on schedule, it shouldn’t matter what anyone else is doing.
