The Hectic Home Office
Janine Williams knew she was sitting on a goldmine. Technically, she was sitting at her dining room table, the center of operations for the two most important ventures in her life: motherhood and soon-to-be CEO. Her four children under the age of ten pinballed in and out of the room, brimming with drama and full of questions: “Mom! Mom! Mom! Where’s the paper towels? Niko spilled a bowl of cereal in your bed.” Williams paused the online team meeting she was trying to conduct for her fledgling startup company, Impulsify. She turned her attention to one of her daughters and the dog came bounding up to the table, barking like it was the end of the world. “Janine, is everything okay? Should we reschedule?” one of her Skype’d-in colleagues called out from her laptop screen. She reminded herself to breathe. And then the doorbell rang. The UPS guy was at the front door, adding to the already overflowing chaos of her home. Janine reached for the table, not quite white-knuckling it, but hanging on with what little strength she had left, quietly saying to herself, “Don’t fail…don’t fail…please don’t fail.”
The Beginning
Williams’ tumultuous journey from high school English teacher to startup founder from her suburban Denver dining room began nearly ten years ago, when her husband launched a distribution business supplying hotel lobby pantries with stock items like candy bars and bottled water. At her husband’s request, she read through the business plan he drafted and wound up rewriting it, then had to create a logo and a website, and so on. Williams’ helper role scaled steadilys they got the company off the ground, all while raising their three young children. Then she realied their next opportunity for growth. Williams wasn’t the only one that realized this. The hotel employees she would inevitably work with felt exactly the same way. Williams created a retail service component to her husband’s business, providing pricing and assortment recommendations along with visual merchandising know-how. She devoured whatever data she could get her hands on, from their internal supply and demand stats to convenience store analytics and consumer trends. She used it to give clients like Marriott incisive direction in shelving the perfect balance of salty snacks and sweet treats, along with healthy and trendy options.
The Split
Business was booming and she and her husband welcomed a fourth child to their family. But then, divorce reared its ugly head. Because Williams’ ex-husband was her CEO, and she had no stake in the company on paper, she walked away with nothing from the business they’d built together. Williams was down. But fortunately, she had an idea. While there’s no shortage of point of purchase software on the market, no one had designed a platform to meet the unique needs of unmanned hotel pantry operations. Hoteliers typically made do by trying to modify software designed for room reservations, golf course pro shops, or in Youngblood’s case at Embassy Suites, an interface built for the restaurant industry. Williams, stubbornly inspired by the fact that her former husband/CEO “laughed at the notion that a blond English major from Florida State was going to build software,” set out to do just that.
With $30,000 from her savings, Williams hired a CIO and a small contract development team to take her vision for ImpulsePoint from slide decks to a functioning interface. Powered by machine learning, the ImpulsePoint system gets smarter with each transaction, making Williams’ clients smarter in the process. In less than a year after she and her team turned Youngblood’s relic of a gift shop into the thriving Cascadia Market, the value of his hotel increased by a million dollars. Williams’ combination of game-changing software, retail services and never-before-captured data is doubling profits for hoteliers like Youngblood and edging her former company out when the two go head-to-head competing for business. Back at the dining room table, Impulsify was taking off, but Williams felt isolated and, despite her success and resourcefulness, she was cracking under the challenges of keeping her startup afloat while single parenting four kids in what felt like a universe away from Denver’s thriving tech scene.
The Saving Grace
Then Williams found Galvanize. Last June, Williams took the plunge and became a member of Galvanize’s Platte campus in Denver, where she and the Impulsify team now work their magic in a glass-walled suite in the thick of the bustling tech-and-entrepreneurial community. Williams proudly refers to her new headquarters as “the Fishbowl.” This brings us back to the goldmine Williams is sitting on: millions of potential dollars’ worth of data being collected by the ImpusePoint algorithms that can be packaged and sold to manufacturers and brands. Williams has her eye on more than mere data domination, and making sure she gets her brood out the door and off to school by 6:40am every day. She’s raising a seed round of funding to expand Impulsify’s reach, and she’s determined to strike a better work-life balance than she did in her first tour through the startup minefield, where it was 22 hour days and not seeing enough of her kids. And she’s done it all on “a boot-strapped budget” while supporting four kids. She smiles as she glances out at Galvanize’s deck overlooking downtown Denver, where her 7-year old son is playing Corn Hole with a data science student while she crunches the numbers for her startup.
