Robbie Hillis, founder and CEO of Ark Labs

Being in the South and hearing a name like Ark Labs, your mind might immediately gravitate to the great state of Arkansas. But you need to think about that other Ark to understand the crux of this Northwest Alabama startup, which is flooding, in particular, in one’s home.

“It was really just a thought one day and it stuck,” says Robbie Hillis, founder and CEO of Ark Labs, which incorporated in July 2015 in the GIGTank accelerator. “The Ark is synonymous with floods so it made sense to flip it around and let The Ark be the one to save you from that flooded basement or house due to a major pipe burst.”

Hillis and his startup have been on our radar for some time now, and the fact that it took us a few months to connect probably says a lot about the plight (and available time) of most startup founders. But, alas, we connected, and were able to find out a lot more about his startup, the challenges of being in a consumer-facing industry and the benefits of being in a tight-knit startup ecosystem like the one of North Alabama.

In a nutshell, how does the anti-flooding system work? There’s a device and then there’s an app?

Ark Labs water monitoring system

Actually we are touching all three worlds, mobile, analytic software and hardware. There is a device that is installed in a home, apartment, condo or business that monitors the flow of water. Inside this device is also a shutoff valve. Then, the usage data is transmitted to our analytics server where the software begins to understand the consumption behavior of the installed location. Every time water is flowing, the software begins to make a determination as to whether it is normal or not. If it is deemed abnormal, then the server sends out an alert to the owner through the mobile app. The owner has the ability to tell the system everything is okay or shutoff the water flow from anywhere in this world.

Do you have competitors? Or, is this pretty cutting edge at this point?

Yes, of course we do. There are companies that are startups like us, some in their infancy stages and major corporations that are all trying to address this portion of the global water crisis.

What has been the reception of your product? Is it available now, and who’s interested in it?

The reception has been tremendous. Every single person we have met with has asked “When can I get my hands on this?” or “I wish I would have had this when this event happened at my house.” We are launching a private beta in August. We have so many potential customers waiting for us to get them some hardware so we have had to close the beta to our initial partners. Lots of people are interested in our solution. The hardest part becomes how to convert the interest in sales and at the cheapest conversion cost since we are a startup. So we have some great strategies in place to guide us over the 12 – 18 months.

What’s your industry? If we had to take a guess, we would call it something like environmental tech. Are we close? Although it’s probably not strictly environmental, either, because it also provides benefit from a “My house won’t flood if I’m not there” standpoint. 

This is an interesting question. As much as we want to gravitate to the Internet of Things market and be a cool technology startup, some view this simply as a plumbing product. Obviously the residential homeowners are going to be huge, and that segment is also going to be the most expensive group to reach. But there are certainly early adopters out there and we get inquiries almost every hour.

What would you say are the top two or three challenges facing your startup? And how do you go about on a daily basis, solving them?

I think access to talent is a challenge that we face on a daily basis. The only way to overcome this is to continue to network and keep making connections with people who have been around great talent. The other big challenge is getting people to understand the pace at with which I want to move. Our suppliers and vendors don’t understand how quickly we have been progressing and how fast I want to continue to move. They learn that quickly though.

Did you have startup experience before The Ark Labs? As you carry on, has anything about running your startup been harder than you thought it would be?

I started another business prior to Ark Labs. It was a company focused on digital marketing in North Alabama. Of course there have been many things that have in essence turned into much more major projects than we were anticipated. But we continue to navigate through them and pivot when needed. So far everything has led to a much better and smarter solution!

What would be your No. 1 piece of advice to a fledgling entrepreneur?

I have two sayings these days for our team and for others thinking about being an entrepreneur: 1. If it was so easy, everyone would be doing it… 2. Done is better than perfect.

You’re located in Florence, Alabama, not exactly what one thinks of as a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity, and yet there you are and we also know the Shoals Entrepreneurial Center is pretty active. Do you sort of roll your eyes at this point when people find out where you’re located? Or, is the struggle real? Is it harder to be a startup in Florence than it is in, say, Birmingham? If so, what’s the solution?

This also goes back to another saying that we have and that we are preaching in Northwest Alabama, “Start Where You Are, Use What You Have, and Do What You Can.” My thoughts are to just start and get going no matter where you are located.

What’s the startup scene like in Northwest Alabama? In what ways is being in a tight-knit community like Florence a benefit to your company?

Of course being from a small area, the startup scene is small. But with that being said we are starting to devote more and more resources to encouraging entrepreneurship. It is also fun starting in such a tight-knit community because everyone is rooting for you! Everyone has heard the story because obviously we have been in the local newspaper several times so it isn’t uncommon to be at the grocery store and have people walk up and ask me how things are going. The potential to make a significant impact on our local economy is also a huge motivating factor for our team. For so long this area has been focused on recruiting and retaining manufacturing jobs. We must change that mindset and having a successful startup, whether it is Ark Labs or one of the others in town, will go a long way in helping us do just that.

You pitched at 36/86—where we finally connected—and you also participated in Alabama Launchpad, as well as some other programs. Congratulations on all of the recognition! What do you get out of these experiences, besides the opportunity to secure funding as the big winner? 

The question to participate in events is constantly asked around here. What are we going to benefit if we do participate and what might we miss out on if we don’t attend. All of these events have been amazing for our company and we continue to get invited to startup and idea events all over the world. We continue to walk away from these events with more partners, more connections and more friends! That is the important thing. The latest thing we have learned is that we don’t know who we don’t know yet. Meaning there are companies around the globe that might help drive our business in ways that we haven’t even begun to think about yet. So when we do attend these types of events, we have to treat every conversation equally until we can confidently decide if the company will be able to benefit us or not.

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Sloss Fest, Birmingham’s two-day music & arts festival now in its second year, is coming up this weekend and expected to bring in over 25,000 people to the location that lends its name to the festival. Sloss Furnaces will be an event venue for those cacophonous two days, but it actually is a national historic landmark and museum to the company that existed for nearly 90 years, producing iron nearly since the beginning of Birmingham itself in 1871.

For a century, Birmingham thrived from its steel and iron production, earning the nickname ‘The Magic City.’ While manufacturing still exists in the city once called “Pittsburgh of the South,” they are also well aware of what it means to innovate and be another sort of hub for the Southeast.  

Maybe it’s only appropriate that the new tech event held in conjunction with Sloss Fest this year is called Sloss Tech. “We created Sloss Tech to give Birmingham a SXSW-type event over one weekend,” says Greg Wingo, member services manager at TechBirmingham, a 501(c)(6) nonprofit organization that conceived of this festival. “Out of the gate, this inaugural event has one of the strongest line-ups possible compared to any similar event around the country.”

The tech event, occurring a day before the Sloss Fest activities, is indeed packed with a mix of sessions that bring in focus to the local while looking out to the larger ecosystem.  In a single day, they’ve managed to bring in three noted speakers: Gary Vaynerchuk, Robert Scoble and Andy Grignon. There are still a few tickets left for purchase, and all for a good cause.  All profits will go to further TechBirmingham’s mission of strengthening the local tech ecosystem. Perhaps their past as a major Southeast railroad hub gives them a better understanding that a hub becomes one only when there are others connected to it. 

What does Wingo want the attendees to take away from Sloss Tech? “We hope they will take away a better understanding of what’s happening in Birmingham from a tech standpoint, as well as a desire to help us continue to get the word out regionally and nationally about our desire to attract tech talent to this great city. We also want them to see that Birmingham is serious about growing the tech industry here and TechBirmingham is willing to step out and create a first class event like Sloss Tech to show where we are going as a community.”

Wingo also said that the event is a physical representation of the campaign that allows them to inform local and regional tech enthusiasts about the emergence and growth of Birmingham’s tech ecosystem. Though Sloss Tech will not be at Birmingham’s historic landmark, how thoughtful that the event’s name itself captures both the heritage and the future of The Magic City.

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Two years ago, Cole Kinchler was still a student at Alabama’s Auburn University. Today, he’s the COO of Simply Prose, a collaborative writing platform for writers and editors that is getting some serious startup love. In addition to taking the startup scene in Alabama by storm, Simply Prose was invited last year to demo at Tech Crunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley in San Francisco.

In 2014, Kinchler and two partners, also students at the time of Auburn’s Harbert College of Business, knew they wanted to start a business, but they took their time coming up with a concept they thought would work.

“We saw the inefficiencies clearly: writers were bogged down with a seemingly infinite number of options on how to move forward with their work, publishing was decentralized, and professionals felt distant,” Kinchler explains. “Timelines seemed to remain the same or lengthen each year, even as technology improved. The costs of editing still surged, even as sharing information becomes simpler every day.”

Kinchler’s team saw the benefits of merging real-time collaboration and the community that writers have built in existing infrastructure of writing forums and self-help pages. Additionally, they wanted authors to be able to share and promote their work in order to gain experience and build an audience.

“We thought through software that would help the publisher too; collaboration and project management tools could cut down on costs and reinvigorate their followings,” says the Opelika, Alabama-based entrepreneur.

As the partners put their heads together to figure out how to solve issues that writers and editors were facing, Auburn was planning Tiger Cage, its inaugural entrepreneurship competition. Fast forward to last April and SimplyProse took the stage as one of the winners at the event.

“That gave us the initial validation that we were looking for,” Kinchler says.

In the past year, Kinchler and his partners have continued to receive validation. Following its Tiger Cage success, the company entered Alabama Launchpad, a statewide entrepreneurship competition sponsored by the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama (EDPA).

“After several more pitches and nervously waiting to hear our names called at the finale, our team became the youngest to win money through the competition,” Kinchler says.

SimplyProse took home $40,000, which he says put them in a good position to begin development on the product.

Quickly following the Launchpad win, the company was invited to demo at Startup Alley, becoming the first company from Alabama to ever attend the event.

“After returning from San Francisco with new perspectives on startup culture, we began ramping up production on our beta,” he says.

The product is now in open beta, and the team has capped sign-ups at 250 so that they can gather feedback, fix bugs and make important improvements.

“The initial response has been exciting, to say the least,” Kinchler says. “We are hoping to continue expanding our connectivity to writing communities through focusing on increasing collaboration opportunities based on location and interests, developing tools for literary professionals and creating avenues to get in touch with publishing houses. We are excited to continue growing and providing the best solutions for authors and writers online. Financial and networking limitations should not prevent a writer from pursuing a dream.”

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Regions all around the South are trying to foster their startup ecosystems, and nowhere is that more evident than in North Alabama. Anchored by Huntsville, population 680,000, the area is already home to lots of established industries, including aerospace, defense, manufacturing and biotechnology. In fact, one of the biggest names in genome discovery, the HudsonAlpha Institute of Biotechnology, is located in the massive Cummings Research Park, which looking at land mass alone, is second only to North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park. If nothing else, that shows huge potential for growth.

Support organizations, including the Chamber of Commerce of Huntsville/Madison County and RocketHatch, a startup community for the region that was founded in 2014, among others, see this potential and are helping infuse the area with a variety of programs designed to support entrepreneurs.

Pammie Jimmar, small business and events director for the chamber, says one of its most popular programs is the quarterly Ignite Forum, which features local entrepreneurs who candidly share their experiences and insight into starting and growing a business. This past weekend, RocketHatch held the inaugural 24Hour Generator in Huntsville, which placed 40+ students from the region and beyond on teams with mentors and facilitators to propose entrepreneurial solutions to pressing problems from businesses and organizations in the community. During the event, participants and audience members also got the chance to hear from Brandon Kruse, a Huntsville entrepreneur who in 2014 bought and old public school building and turned it into Huntsville West, a hip coworking space and business incubator.

Other RocketHatch resources for startups include Co.Starters, a nationwide program that walks creative small-business owners through lean, effective business modeling methods in a simple and intuitive way, and with the help of a supportive community, Investor Day, which gives local entrepreneurs a chance to test their pitch with real investors. Last year, RocketHatch announced a clean-energy accelerator program, but it has yet to get off the ground.

Meanwhile, the University of Alabama Huntsville continues to receive federal backing for its Invention to Innovation Center, which will provide physical facilities, activities and services to support inventors, entrepreneurs, high-tech companies and partners in the innovation process. After winning a $3 million grant last year, it picked up another $500,000 last month. The $9 million center is scheduled to break ground next year.

Antonio Montoya, RocketHatch’s CEO, says the region is primed for entrepreneurial growth, in large part due to its high percentage of people in “prime entrepreneurial age.” He says millennials make up about 20 percent of the population, while Generation Xers make up another 16 percent.

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Tomorrow, the greater Nashville area will welcome a new service to its community. Residents of Gallatin, Hendersonville, La Vergne, Mt. Juliet, Murfreesboro, Smyrna, Spring Hill and Thompson’s Station will have the ability to order groceries online for same-day delivery. And the company that’s making it all possible? Shipt.

Shipt is the brainchild of Bill Smith, a seasoned entrepreneur and local of Birmingham, Alabama. Smith founded Shipt in the Steel City in 2014. The service originally offered same-day delivery for retailers like Target, Best Buy, and The Home Depot.

But shortly after Shipt’s launch, Smith received some interesting feedback. “During that period,” he explains, “customers were saying, ‘We really want you to deliver groceries.’” So Smith listened to the idea and tested it, and the business was completely transformed. Shipt dropped their retail delivery service altogether and began delivering groceries exclusively.

Like any good entrepreneur, Smith has made sure that in all his ventures, customer demand is being met—even if it means he has to pivot. “Our customers inform nearly everything that we develop and implement…” he says. “It’s an approach that requires our team to closely monitor all communications channels, and provide rapid responses to feedback and suggestions.”

Shipt continues to encourage customer feedback, even offering a live chat support on their site. They also encourage residents outside Shipt’s current service areas to sign up for a launch alert, which measures demand in specific cities and alerts potential customers when their services become available in their area.

In 2015, Shipt set a goal to reach 100 cities in three years. At 23 cities and counting, Smith says they’re on track to reach that goal. But it does come with its share of challenges. “The number one challenge?” he says, “Finding talented people who move extremely fast and care deeply about our customers.”

Images provided by Shipt

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Quinton Crawford is a U.S. Navy veteran and seasoned entrepreneur. He’s run his own business more than once, but a lack of business experience often led him to make costly mistakes. He got in trouble with the IRS because of bad bookkeeping practices and he had a habit of not screening potential hires, which led to hiring the wrong employees. With a new education under his belt—Crawford completed the Veterans Entrepreneurship Program at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business and received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Alabama last year—he’s working on growing his latest venture, QCrawford Financial Services in Fultondale, Alabama, a financial planning firm that focuses on helping startups. “I learned some lessons the hard way so I want to help others not make the mistakes I made,” he says.

We talked with Crawford about his new business and other tips he has for startup success.

Quinton Crawford

When did you start QCrawford Financial Services and how are things going? It officially began in January of this year and I specialize in business and personal bookkeeping. My target market is startup small businesses in my surrounding counties and I am working on a partnership with LiftFund, a nonprofit small business lender that helps small business owners with limited access to capital. The personal side of the business is starting to pick up as well; people are tired of living paycheck to paycheck.

From your perspective, what are the biggest challenges and obstacles facing new business owners? One of the biggest obstacles new businesses face is not having enough startup capital to sustain them until they become profitable. Another obstacle is finding good employees; that was a major problem for me when I started my first business 20 years ago.

What’s your best piece of advice for new business owners? Hire a bookkeeper as soon as possible and make sure you learn how to read your monthly financial statements. Your financial statements will tell you what your business is doing and, when you truly understand them, they will help you make better financial decisions. 

What’s the biggest mistake you see new business owners make? One of the biggest mistakes new business owners make (myself included) is we try to do everything ourselves, just to save a dollar and it ends up costing us much more.

How important has your education been vs. real-world experience to your entrepreneurial journey? The real world taught me that I needed to be educated on the financial aspect of my business so my education is playing a significant role and my degree gives me credibility in this arena. Now I actually understand financial statements, how important they are to my business, and now I am able to tell if my business is heading in the right direction or heading towards insolvency. Knowing how my business is doing on a day-to-day or month-to-month basis gives me security, and I love when I know exactly what’s going to happen when I make certain decisions.

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