Beer, RFID, and Rubber Shoes: My Unlikely Path to Building an Event Tech Company
In the summer of 2011, I went for a hike with Ryan Hitchler in the foothills of Boulder, Colorado. He was in the midst of finishing his Master’s degree and I asked what his plans were after graduating. Expecting him to push for a management role either at his current job or a new company, I was surprised to hear him say, “I’m thinking of starting a business.”
I pressed him for more details, and he explained, “I have an idea for using RFID to track things that happen at a library or a store.” At this point, RFID inventory systems were gaining ground, but were still far from commonplace. Ryan’s idea was deeper than that. In addition to basic inventory and asset tracking, he wanted to characterize how people interacted with items in a retail location. Behavioral analysis of shoppers is a crowded market (pun intended), but I hadn’t seen a concept that married technology to customers in such a subtle and non-intrusive way. Unlike comparable systems, shoppers wouldn’t know they were being observed, their behavior would be unaffected by the technology, and best of all, their anonymity remained intact. I was fascinated with the idea and my engineer brain immediately started thinking through all the technical challenges in play. I told Ryan to let me know if he ever needed an extra set of eyes.
To the Croc Cave!
A few weeks later I got a call from Ryan. “I could use some help getting this RFID concept up and running. Are you interested?” I jumped at the chance and we started spending evenings at his place (not technically his garage, although we did go out there occasionally) experimenting with a variety of far field RFID systems. After a couple months, we had a prototype built — an Arduino-driven SkyeTek M10 RFID module that wirelessly uploaded observations to a centralized PC. Ryan pitched the concept to a contact at Crocs (yes, the rubber shoe company), and they agreed to let us experiment with it at their store in Boulder. We had our first gig!
The Crocs gig taught us a lot about how to build a prototype and even more importantly, how NOT to test a prototype.
We struggled at Crocs with a number of technical issues, most of which could have been identified outside of a customer environment. Additionally our prototype was physically fragile, so when a store employee adjusted a rack of shoes, or an IT guy showed up to make changes to their internet connection, our prototype suffered. It was also very limited in range and coverage within the store, so the data we collected was extremely limited as well.
Eventually we presented the collected data to a couple folks on the marketing team at Crocs. The reception was understandably lukewarm — we had collected a limited data set and did only very rudimentary analysis on it. In its present form, we weren’t going to revolutionize the rubber shoe marketing business.
Hold my beer and watch this
After our presentation, I ran through the concept over and over in my head. Did we know what it would take to build a great marketing platform? Did we invest in the right technologies? How would we scale across an entire store when we struggled to make a small display work well? Something wasn’t sitting right, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
Ryan and I met about a month after the presentation to figure out where to go next. He had been struggling with many of the same questions. He suggested we brainstorm a little to see if there was a better way to position the work we had already done. I had spent the early part of the weekend pouring at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, and beer was still at the tip of my brain. “What about tracking the beers you try at a beer festival?” I said. Admittedly, I was trying to remember that one beer that I really liked. Ryan thought out loud, “Could it work at other events too? What about resumes at a job fair?”
The technology stack we were considering was completely different — active user participation with near field RFID vs passive observation with far field. The idea was compelling though! Here’s a concrete, opt-in sort of tracking that people would want to use with many of the same marketing benefits to companies. We decided to build a proof-of-concept and see where it went.
Several months later, we had a PC that could read RFID cards and show some basic information that was attached to each card. It was built from all off-the-shelf components and was easy to set up. We settled on job fairs as our first use case. The concept seemed simple and straightforward — attendees hand out paper resumes, and employers would prefer to have those resumes electronically. Ryan started prospecting job fairs that were happening in Denver/Boulder, and eventually made a contact at Metzger Albee who was hosting an upcoming job fair for their client companies.
The job fair turned out to be a great piece of validation for us. Employers loved the concept and were patient with some of the hiccups we encountered. We had a list of improvements a mile long, but lots of good encouragement to keep going with the idea! Spigot Labs was born.
I want to mention how much we appreciate Doyle Albee for taking a chance on us out of the gate and continuing to be a great advocate for us since that very first event. Thanks Doyle!
Onward and upward
Fast forward to 2016 and it’s clear we’ve come a long way since that first job fair. We’ve offered RFID solutions at 18 different events including job fairs and trade shows. We’ve worked with some great companies including Techstars, Oracle, and Boulder/Denver Beta. We continue to expand the platform to provide integrations into the applications that our customers are already using — applications like Salesforce, Mailchimp, and Google Contacts.
We haven’t yet provided taste tracking at a beer festival, but we’re working hard to change that very soon — after all, beer was part of our inspiration.
The past week in particular has showcased some important milestones for Spigot Labs as a company. We launched our brand new Spigot Labs wireless node on Monday at Boulder Beta. This wireless, battery-powered NFC reader is the key to tackling larger events. Setup is as simple as dropping it on the vendor’s booth and walking away, enabling us to add our technology to an event in a matter of minutes. I’m so ridiculously excited about this giant step forward!
The other big milestone is that Spigot Labs has recently become my full time job. I’m proud of how far I’ve gotten working part-time, nights, and weekends. It’s simply time to step things up and take our product to the next level. I’m excited and terrified all at once, but I hear that’s part of the experience. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the journey so far and I welcome the next round of challenges and successes.
