Iron Yard Demo Day Preview: Greenville Startup Spent

Iron Yard Labs is a 13 week accelerator program in Greenville South Carolina. It’s part of the Global Accelerator Network which was founded by Boulder Colorado based TechStars. The Global Accelerator Network affiliation gives the startup teams participating in the Iron Yard Labs session access to top shelf business benefits like free hosting, legal services, accounting services and more.

The inaugural class at Iron Yard will graduate next week on August 29th with a demo day in Greenville. In the week leading up to demo day we will have interviews with some of the exciting startups accelerating in the program.

We got to kick off this special section with Greenville ride sharing startup Ridepost you can read that interview here.

Next up is Spent.

Spent is an ad platform that targets traditional brick and mortar grocery stores. Co-Founder Andria Trivisonno equates Spent to taking the recommendation engine found in Amazon.com shopping and applying it to traditional grocery stores. Spent is able to achieve this by leveraging a customers buying habits and purchase history.

We got a chance to interview Trivisonno who clearly shows the Global Accelerator Network’s influence in Iron Yards, by referencing “mentor whiplash” a phrase coined by Brad Feld at Foundry.

They don’t get too much into the nuts and bolts of the app itself but from what we’ve heard Spent may actually make some headway in a space that’s being tackled on many fronts. We’ll have more details about Spent after they debut on the Demo Day stage. They are working on their seed round to continue forward with their progress. Check out our interview with Trivisonno below.



What is your startup, what does it do?

Spent is an ad platform for grocery that targets shoppers using their purchase history and integrates directly with retailer’s point of sale systems. If you’ve ever used Amazon, you’ve probably seen their personalized recommendations for you. We do exactly this, but for grocery retailers.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Terry Horner, Co-Founder & CEO

Terry has bootstrapped and exited three profitable startups in the last nine years, making Spent his fourth venture. He has over 13 years tackling big data as the CTO of an email communication platform and President of a database development company. Terry is leading the development of the Spent consumer app and retailer tools.

Andria Trivisonno, Co-Founder

Andria began her career in Los Angeles working for a production company and soon after founded her first technology startup building a resume portfolio tool while raising $250,000. Andria brings 10 years of experience in marketing, social media and product development to the Spent team and oversees the design team and marketing efforts.

John Krebsbach, Co-Founder

John started and sold his first business while in high school, and has six years experience working in entrepreneurship, finance and legal. Most recently, John served as controller of a $12 million a year consulting firm. John is leading Spent’s business development and strategy and using his widespread network within the CPG space to connect to industry experts and retailers.

Where are you based?

Greenville, SC

What is the startup culture like where you are based?

Innovative, flexible and fast-paced. We’re part of The Iron Yard accelerator’s inaugural class this summer.

What problem does your startup solve?

Grocers: Hard to engage shoppers using outdated channels like paper coupons and circulars

Brands: Difficult to precisely target shoppers and allocate budgets in a ROI driven channel (expensive and time-consuming channel/ROI tracking with current channels)

Shoppers: Advertising isn’t personalized or relevant (shoppers expect a personalized experience like Amazon or iTunes, why not in grocery?)

What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in the startup process?

Because of the accelerator program, we’ve been introduced to a variety of mentors who have helped define our vision immensely. But that feedback has caused what we call in the startup world as ‘mentor whiplash’. With so many different opinions on our business, it’s sometimes hard to maintain our clear focus on the path we want to pursue. I believe that our team has overcome the initial mentor whiplash as we worked through it to apply aspects of opinions, and adapt our original core idea to something that could be more viable. We also used customer research and interviews to validate the core vision and feature sets as we started to spec and build.

Who are your mentors and role models?

Clay Mathile (founder of Iams), Dave Grohl (lead singer of Foo Fighters), Brad Feld (Foundry Group)

Whats one thing the world doesn’t know about you or your startup?

We love squirrels

What’s next for your startup?

We have our prototype working and ready to be piloted with a retailer. We’re focused on securing pilot retailer customers to connect Spent to POS systems and prove value of our retailer and consumer tools. We are currently working on our seed round.

Linkage:

Find out more about Iron Yard Here

Find out more about Spent here at their angel.co page

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