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.
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