Bootstrapping From Oklahoma: Robin Smith, CEO of WeGoLook (Part 7)

Robin Smith: The corporate clients are amazed. A lot of them have to be in meetings over weeks and sometimes months just to have a project completed. They can do it with us, basically, overnight. Everything is geo-tagged. All the metadata includes time and date stamps. It’s all very secure. We’ve gone through our second security audit. All the data is deleted once it’s uploaded form our looker’s device. It’s exciting to have this mobile technology platform that works. We can instantly have it out in the hands of thousands of people.

Sramana Mitra: You said the initial part of the journey was all bootstrapped. Is the company entirely bootstrapped? Did you raise any financing? How are you managing to get to where you are now?

Robin Smith: We bootstrapped it until October 2014. A little over a year ago, I raised a Series A round for a total of $3.5 million. That’s what’s helped me fund the mobile portion. >>>

Bootstrapping From Oklahoma: Robin Smith, CEO of WeGoLook (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. How big is your company? How many people do you have?

Robin Smith: I have over 20,000 agents in our database nationwide. We only use around 65 to 6,800 of those on an ongoing basis, but we do have quite a few people interested in working for us. In my corporate office headquarters, I have 71 employees now.

Sramana Mitra: What do the 71 employees do? Functionally, how does that organization operate?

Robin Smith: We have a front end where customers, whether individuals or enterprise clients, are able to talk with their account representative. I have people that work directly with customers. Then I have a fulfillment team. Those are the people who are responsible for making sure that we have the looker who is weighted best for the task. Let’s say we receive an order for an auto inspection. The >>>

Bootstrapping From Oklahoma: Robin Smith, CEO of WeGoLook (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is the business model?

Robin Smith: We’re basically a mobile technology platform that provides data point retrieval for individuals and enterprise clients. We deliver that data however they need us to.

Sramana Mitra: How do you get paid?

Robin Smith: Our customer places an order and pays via credit card. Our enterprise clients get a bill every month and sometimes, twice a month. Our lookers typically receive 30% t0 50% of the total service fees. Of course, we have our overhead.

Sramana Mitra: How do you determine how much a job is worth? Is it a fixed price or is it a variable price? >>>

Bootstrapping From Oklahoma: Robin Smith, CEO of WeGoLook (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did these people find out about your service – that they could join as lookers?

Robin Smith: There are national property inspection companies and it wasn’t too far out of the realm of getting that same group of people. I didn’t want to launch with WeGoLook until I had the platform ready and I had the website the way I wanted it. We created a website and called it HouseLookers.net. We created this landing page. It was several pages but it was mostly landing page saying, “We want to sign you up.” Then I would go to different forums where there were real estate professionals or field inspectors. Those were the people we imported over into WeGoLook. Then I made an announcement to these contacts in my database saying, “HouseLookers.net is now WeGoLook. We are going to be looking at vehicles and heavy equipment.”

Sramana Mitra: We are in 2010. You have 4,500 lookers. What about actual looker jobs? How did you do there? >>>

Bootstrapping From Oklahoma: Robin Smith, CEO of WeGoLook (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Let’s go a bit granular here. You started in 2009 you said?

Robin Smith: I formed the LLC late 2009. It took about a year to recruit my first group of lookers. I built the platform and my website. It took about a year for me to do all that. It was myself and a software developer that worked on all of that for a year.

Sramana Mitra: You were doing all this in Oklahoma?

Robin Smith: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: This year when you were doing all this groundwork, were you financing the project yourself? >>>

Bootstrapping From Oklahoma: Robin Smith, CEO of WeGoLook (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What would the platform do? What was the idea?

Robin Smith: The idea behind it was really crowdsourcing. This was even before Uber. Even Dave Berkus calls us as the Uber of inspections. I had this idea to create a platform that would connect agents out in the field. I tried to think of who would be out there in the field, ready to go. I created the website, built the platform, recruited my lookers in the first year, and came out of beta at the end of 2010. Initially, my goal with the platform was to have customers place their order online.

If you wanted to look at a pinball machine on eBay that is in Kentucky and you’re in California, you can simply place a WeGoLook order and my looker in Kentucky would go out to that pinball machine, take pictures, record working demonstrations, and we would push it back to you in the form of an electronic report so that you would have current photos and all of the information to make a confident decision. That was what the platform was originally built for. >>>

Bootstrapping From Oklahoma: Robin Smith, CEO of WeGoLook (Part 1)

How often do you hear of a successful entrepreneurship story out of Oklahoma? Well, meet Robin Smith.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Robin Smith: I was born in Oklahoma. I was raised, primarily, on a farm. There were about 12 kids in my class. I didn’t know much about the outside world other than what was there in town. I started my entrepreneurial journey in the second grade making yarn belts on the playground. I was able to talk a few of my friends into making them with me. We had quite the distributorship going with yarn belts until the Principal shut us down. When he asked us to stop making yarn belts, I started making Christmas tree ornaments to sell. He shut that down too.

Sramana Mitra: Why were they shutting these things down? What was wrong with that? >>>

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