How UrbanLogiq is STIRing up GovTech
The Beginning
We’ve written previously about how the Startup in Residence Program (“STIR”) laid the groundwork for the formation of UrbanLogiq.
Prior to our participation in STIR, the co-founders of UrbanLogiq were looking for a way to channel their passion to assist government. Despite political opinions ravaging the airwaves, we strongly believe governments have a fundamental impact on everyone.
We can see this daily when we try to get to our jobs from our homes and wonder why it takes so long ,why suburbs exist far away from work places or why a large company has decided to locate a new headquarters in our town.
STIR allowed for the exploration of our passions, and since that fateful experience in 2016, UrbanLogiq has found its mission to help local governments make sense of their data as it relates to city planning decisions. We provide complete Urban Intelligence.
Public Servants are just like us
The biggest opportunity presented by STIR was actually getting to work in government for the first time. The program facilitated direct interaction with public servants. In our case, we had the privilege of meeting folks from a variety of different departments in what can be a very complex organism- the County and City of San Francisco. These kind of early interactions would likely have not been possible without the program.
By embedding ourselves in the day-to-day life of our department partner, we learned the typical challenges faced by public servants. However, more importantly, we were surprised to learn how passionate public servants are about their roles.
Government is often construed as this big monolithic organization whose only purpose is to impose bureaucracy. While there are some legitimate issues with government, nothing can be further from the truth.
STIR showed us that public servants are just like us. They are open to innovation, they have the same struggles as we do and they often have a passionate view of the work they do.
From the traffic engineer tinkering with the latest hardware to make traffic lights work better, to the economic development professionals who care about protecting workers, we learned that most public servants care.
That understanding and bond has helped guide us to where we are today.
The journey to 500 Startups
After the amazing experience that was STIR, our team was hit with another game changing experience three months later. We participated in the 500 Startups accelerator and were listed as one of the top startups to come out of the program by Techcrunch.
There were a few ways that STIR helped us prepare to succeed in the difficult interview process and the accelerator program itself:
- Establishing Domain Expertise — By having access to real, specific pain points in government as a result of being in STIR, our team was able to gain an understanding of the day in the life of our targeted users and establish real personas.
- Gaining an understanding of market potential — STIR allowed us to talk to other cities and validate or invalidate product/market hypotheses. After all, cites love to know what their peers are up to. As we have heard from mayors, cities love being second. We gained a clear understanding of the market potential as a result and were able to quantify that.
- Access to networks — Most importantly, STIR gave us access to networks. This helped us gain the potential for additional traction with other cities and get connected to other innovative individuals in government throughout the US. These connections continue to provide tremendous value today. It’s no coincidence that one of our mentors in 500 Startups was also previously in government.
STIR helped us understand our product, our market and our users and gave us confidence as a team. All these factors were critical in our success with 500 Startups.
Where UrbanLogiq is today
Today we continue to work on our mission to bring modern urban intelligence to city planners. We are now eight employees, have several interesting data partnerships underway and continue to bring value to public servants. We are thankful to the hard working public servants who work tirelessly to provide better services to everyone. This includes the folks who came up with and run STIR.
The experience changed our lives. We recommend that any individual or team or company looking to get into the GovTech or CivicTech space to participate in STIR.
