Brandon Waselnuk, CEO, Tattoo Hero
You can check out the full episode with Brandon here.
(Brandon Waselnuk — far left — is the CEO and co-founder of Tattoo Hero. Minh Dao — center — is the CPO and co-founder. Steve Tannahill — far right — is the CTO, co-founder, and catalyst of the team)
What You’ll Learn In This Episode
- How Tattoo Hero Started at a Startup Weekend Ottawa event.
- How and why the team got into FounderFuel, a top Canadian accelerator.
- What they learnt over 3 months and where they are today.
- How they’ve managed to build such an amazing community around tattoos.
- And More!
The Setup
Brandon Waselnuk is from Ottawa, Canada. He attended Algonquin College where he studied marketing. By age 24, he was working at IBM within the business analytics division as a business investment lead. As he put it:
“I got to see tons of business cases for why people needed lots of money, like hundreds of millions of dollars, to build things so it was really, really cool and I was too young to be doing that.”
Over the next two years, Brandon developed extensive experience building strategy and looking at the new opportunities. This led him to begin his own startup journey through a Startup Weekend Ottawa in 2012.
Brandon asked his IBM colleague Minh to come with him. There they met Steve Tannahill (the introvert as Brandon likes to joke), who was pitching the idea for a community that would connect tattoo artists with enthusiats. However, Brandon and Minh actually ended up working on a separate idea from Tattoo Hero over those 54 hours.
As the hours flew by and teams hurried to build products and to test ideas, Brandon, Minh and Steve began to build a lasting friendship.
Tattoo Hero took first place at the competition, and after the weekend concluded, Steve approached both Brandon and Minh about continuing to work on Tattoo Hero.
Several weeks later, while in Montreal at the International Startup Festival, Tattoo Hero was covered by TechCrunch, TechVibes, and more. This solidified in the founders’ minds that there was a real business opportunity.
Knowing that they would all leave their jobs to work full-time on Tattoo Hero, the team began looking into funding options. Joining the FounderFuel accelerator in Montreal was their best option.
“[On FounderFuel] You will come out either in a position where you understand what success looks like or in a position where you understand that you will not be successful.”
Over the next 3 months, the FounderFuel “bootcamp” took them through a series of sessions with mentors, speakers, investors, and workshops. They worked on hypotheses, their product, their business model, and their pitch, among many things.
Most importantly, the team had to go out into the real world and speak with their target customers — trying to understand their different needs and doing whatever it took to get them to sign-up.
“It’s all band-aids, and duck tape, and shit…”
The original version of Tattoo Hero was built using Wordpress. Throughout the three months of FounderFuel, Steve, devoted his time to rebuilding the app using Ruby on Rails.
The Tattoo Hero team is now comprised of 6 people: Paulo Arrdua and Henri Kuschkowitz join on as developers, and Amber Allen is the head of Business Development.
Angel funding, the BDC, and an initial seed investment from FounderFuel have enabled them to continue to grow the product. Tattoo Hero has just launched V1 of their software into private beta.
Checkout the full Hack To Start episode with Brandon here:
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Important Links:
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