So this is how you become the hot new entrepreneur.
You bum around the world for a couple of years, which sparks an idea that you think can make gazillions, which you then reveal to a room full of ambitious people, who then rush to help you turn your idea into a business, which naturally is about creating a smart phone app for people who want ... to bum around the world.
Jesse Maddox isn’t a big name in business yet and neither is his freshly minted company, TripLingo. They may never be. But the 25-year-old Atlantan has taken important strides in that direction in little more than a month’s time, and as of now, nothing seems out of reach to him or his team of seven.
His idea: offer travelers a sort of Rosetta Stone learning course on speed, a customized and contextualized foreign language phrase list that they can download for $10 to help them talk like a native most anywhere in the world, no matter the situation. There also will be a free version and cheaper mini-versions for topics such as “Spanish Flirting.” Business travelers and institutions can get their own customized phrase lists. TripLingo also will be accessible via computer on the Internet.
Maddox revealed his idea to the public in January at StartAtlanta. That’s the Friday night-through-Sunday night marathon pitchfest where entrepreneurs seek to attract the technical, legal and financial support of others to turn their ideas into a functional company by weekend’s end.
TripLingo emerged from a crowd of contenders as the winner, and Maddox left the event with a team of seven supporters who have since become his business partners, a critical development, he emphasizes, in building the business. The company added $50,000 in seed capital from acquaintances and has moved into an appropriately communal working space in Midtown called The Hub Atlanta where the partners, most of whom still have day jobs, come in for hours at a time, sit at long tables and work their laptops.
The team won a second important competition when it took top honors at Startup Riot, another showcase for emerging local companies, beating out 50 other businesses, some of which already have paying customers. That netted TripLingo prizes including meetings with seven prominent venture capital firms, sessions that could lead to more and larger funding in the future.
The crucial rollout of the smart phone app to the consumer public is planned for early April, fast-track development by any measure.
If TripLingo emerges and prospers, it will be a rarity, according to business people familiar with the entrepreneurial sector.
“The success rate is probably in the single digits,” said Wayt King, an angel investor and mentor to local startup companies. He has met with Maddox and thinks the company “has a chance.”
Startups can be plagued by any of many potentially fatal flaws, said Genna Keller, founder of the Start-Up Council in Atlanta and a principal at the Trevelino-Keller Communications Group. They can include, she said, a lack of funding, an inability to scale the business as it grows and failure to articulate the real value of the product.
“These are commonalities that any emerging company needs to be aware of,” she said.
Even Maddox calls the swift advancement of the TripLingo idea “amazing.” He recalled that when his time abroad was over, “I came home with a business plan, but no funding and no one to help me build it.” StartAtlanta, where he assembled his team, provided a jump start.
Though a philosophy major at Brown University, Maddox had the technical chops to devise the algorithm that allows for customized language instruction, a point of differentiation from competitors. His team of “weapons grade” software experts are taking it from there.
The idea itself grew from Maddox’s time in Vietnam and India, where he realized how much richer the travel experience can be when the wanderer is able to converse more personally with locals by using slang, humor or other expressions not typically found in other translation guides.
King said he likes that TripLingo offers a solution to a real problem facing travelers. It’s not, he said, merely a solution looking for a problem, a common flaw of entrepreneurial ideas.
Stephen Rosenberg, co-founder of Brainpik, another local startup, said the company’s “team is right and that’s a huge part of it.” He added that, “One of the things TripLingo has going for it is Jesse. His commitment is infectious.”
Maddox, the largest shareholder in the firm, owns less than half of the business, but he clearly is the leader of the group, even if his manner is generally low-key.
One of the team partners, Ross Rankin, agrees. A former entrepreneur who sold a successful business, Rankin came on as chief operating officer after hearing Maddox’s pitch and plan.
“Jesse has got the drive, the spirit, the focus,” Rankin said. “He’s a guy who’s going to build a company.”
His early success hasn’t moved Maddox off point in that quest.
“All the trophies are great,” he said, referring to the competition victories. “It’s sort of validated our idea and business model. And it opened a lot of doors that we might not have been able to approach, let alone open. But we’re focused on building something that will change the way millions of people travel. We’ve got big plans for our own journey.”
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