Scream lasted two years, and while it failed to become a profitable business, it made the foundation for what became Jeni’s just a few years later. I learned a lot in those two years, especially the importance of having a balance between being new and being consistent — I loved making new, unique flavors like goat cheese with fresh cherries each day, while customers sometimes just wanted their go-to salted caramel day after day. So I created a dipping cabinet for our signature blends, and kept another for the experimental concoctions. It worked. And here we are today, with nearly 400 employees and our ice creams being sold in over 1,200 grocery stores.
How has using Google Apps helped you in building and growing your business? Google Apps makes it possible for businesses like ours to exist at all. When I started Jeni’s, I didn’t have to hire an IT guy to tell me how many servers I would need, which meant we could put that money towards our ice cream flavors instead.
Equally important is how Google Apps helps our business feel like a family. Yes, being profitable is essential (I learned that with Scream), but it’s the people that make us successful, and Hangouts keep us connected as we grow and hire throughout the country. We hold company all-hands meetings, new flavor brainstorm sessions and weekly status check-ins over Hangouts, so our employees in California feel like they know their colleagues in New York, despite the distance and lack of in-person contact.
Also, here’s a fun fact: I wrote two books on Google Docs. We organize recipes and track our changes and tweaks along the way in Docs, so everyone can access a single document and add their updates and comments, and it just made sense for me to do the same for my books.
Any advice for other aspiring or budding entrepreneurs? Starting with nothing is a hidden blessing, so don’t let a need for scrappiness get in the way of launching your business. Having your boots on the ground from the get-go means learning about every aspect of the business — not just the fun stuff (the ice cream mixing) but the hands-on stuff (serving the goods) and the stuff you thought you’d never imagined yourself doing (financial statements). You learn the ins and outs and the nitty gritty details of running a company, which is an essential skill for any small business owner. And never distance yourself too much from the customer; they’re the ones your livelihood relies on, so make sure you keep an ear on the ground.
Make sure you do something you love. I’ve gone through plenty of tough times, but I didn’t question what I was doing because I knew it was my passion. I took the plunge for something I knew I was meant to do.
Our decision to go full forward happened quickly. We had built a fully functioning prototype that people were genuinely excited about and we were propelled into working on Orbotix officially full-time when we were accepted to Techstars, a seed incubator in Boulder, Colorado.
Was there a pivotal moment when you realized you’d made it? That you’d really turned that business a reality?
Ian and I were both humbled by our first prototype Sphero being shown on Gizmodo — the video got nearly 60,000 views in a single weekend. For us, it seemed we had discovered a form factor that struck a chord with the world. Securing our series A funding was another obvious milestone, but was really just the beginning of a long journey towards success.
How has using Google Apps helped you in building and growing your business?
Let's face it — setting up email, calendars, a shared "drive" space, simple forms, a QA site and hosting, among other things, would just slow us down from our real goals. Using Google Apps lets our company focus on what we do best, and have someone else focus on keeping our email secure and syncing our calendars across all our devices.
If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently?
We would’ve launched our education program earlier on in the game. We started pretty late with SPRK — “Schools, Parents, Robots, Kids” — to inspire and teach kids to be tomorrow’s inventors and innovators by teaching them concepts in programming, robotics and math in a fun way, and wish we had thought of it earlier. The Sphero product is a really natural educator of technology, but it took a few years to realize we could build an educational curriculum for students around it.
Any advice for other aspiring or budding entrepreneurs?
After Ian and I secured our Series A funding, we asked our lead investors if there was anything we could do that they would get upset about. We got two pieces of advice that I’d pass along to other aspiring entrepreneurs:
1. Be extremely critical of your own products, dream big, and go HUGE. 2. Don't get in over your head, be intellectually honest with yourself, co-workers and the board.
