Rob Coons

Our second guest speaker was Rob Coons, he is the CEO of the Scout military app. Scout military is designed to allow US military members, veterans, and their families to learn about which local businesses offer discounts for their service. As a veteran and military spouse, his presentation touched on a topic that is very close to me. Rob spoke about the process by which he found himself as CEO of a startup company and also how he is positioning his company to take advantage of the product that he is bringing to market.

Rob had a cautionary tale to tell about the way that his company started in its infancy and how they grew too large too fast. Essentially what it boiled down to was that the scope of the company was set too large too soon and they pushed for a national release of their app before they had the proper support channels to handle that amount of server load while keeping true to the original product design. Rob brought up a very good point here. He realized that at this point the development of the company had peaked and by scaling so fast they had reached their target goals, however that level was completely unsustainable. In order to save the project, he had to kill it. Rob had to gain control of the project and make the decision to re-build the application from a ground up standpoint in order to re acquire the faith of the consumer and to get back to a satisfactory product that can be pushed out to the public.

 Long story short, Rob taught us that THERE WILL BE HURDLES, adaptation in entrepreneurship is key. The project had gotten out of hand for him and his company and in order to save the project he had to make a drastic decision quickly. We need to be aware of these possibilities for ourselves and be prepared to make the hard decisions too.