#113: Bill Wichert & Matt Crowley (TonDone)

Bill Wichert [00:00:00]:
We might know what it is today and how to fix it today, but what's the next step? What's the next step after that? Let's make sure that we're prepared for all of those and that we're aligning ourselves properly now. So those were the pieces, I think, too often, you just don't wanna ask for help. And I'm just telling everybody, if you're listening to this, ask for the help. Ask anyone you have available to you to give you that little bit of assistance, that little piece of that nugget of information that you might need that might make the biggest difference.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:26]:
Let's discover the Cleveland entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are telling the stories of its entrepreneurs and those supporting them. Welcome to the Lay of the Land podcast, where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland. I am your host, Jeffrey Stern. And today, I had the real pleasure of speaking with Matt Crowley and Bill Witcher, the founders collectively of Tundum. Matt and Bill's paths had crossed while attending Case Western Reserve University, where they had decided to work together going forward. With an eclectic joint career experience, Matt and Bill had found themselves in the chief information officer capacity across both the Philadelphia International Airport and Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, where they oversaw the technology and development resources to serve the security and operational needs of tens of millions of airline customers annually. Their collective nuanced knowledge and experience in the aviation industry sparked the idea to develop software specifically for airport operations, which they set out to do in May of 2020.

Jeffrey Stern [00:01:33]:
Through a series of learnings and of pivots, Matt and Bill ultimately arrived at the crux of the problem they are now addressing, which is a business operating system for the building and facility service market at large. They had developed a platform to help frontline employees get a ton done, hence, ton done. After having graduated from both Akron's Bounce Innovation Hub Accelerator and Techstars Accelerator programs, respectively, Matt and Bill recently closed on 1,500,000 in funding, route over 30,000,000 in work orders through their platform, and are continuing to build in service of their mission to address the problems faced by building and facility services. We cover a lot in our conversation today from the nuance of airport innovation the trials and tribulations of pivots in entrepreneurship team building falling in love with an idea versus falling in love with the problem itself knowing your own strengths and weaknesses, accelerators, and much more. So please enjoy my conversation with Mac Crawley and Bill Witter. So first off, thank you both very much for coming on the show today. I know it's been a little, logistical work in the making here, but I'm I'm very glad we found the time and, I'm very excited to learn a lot more about the the work that that you 2 are doing together. Before we we kinda dive into it and get into the heart of the work that you're doing, I'd love because there are 2 of you, just if you could each briefly give a little introduction so folks tuning in can associate names with, voices here, and then we'll we'll go from there.

Matt Crowley [00:03:17]:
Awesome. Well, appreciate being here. My name is Matt Crowley. I'm the CEO and cofounder, you know, along with many other hats over at, Ton Dun. And I'm here with

Bill Wichert [00:03:28]:
Bill Wingert. I am the chief operating officer and cofounder of Ton Dunn. So I'm really excited to take part in this, and let's see where we go.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:37]:
Right on. Right on. So perhaps the the best place to start is if both of you could just share a little bit, you know, about your respective backgrounds and and how your paths came to cross. Matt, I I know from from your perspective, you definitely have this kind of really fascinating breadth and diversity of experience across, you know, consultant, government, Fortune 5 100. It's now as a founder. You know, I'd love to hear about the arc of of your professional journey and and, Bill, from from your perspective as well, you know, from the academic standpoint, you know, how how how you two cross paths and and, you know, kind of ended up working together in this way.

Matt Crowley [00:04:13]:
Yeah. I guess my story is, you know, all about I don't know what I wanna do when I grow up. So it's been, yeah, I I went to school for computer engineering, here at Case, Decided to get out of Ohio for a little bit and worked out at Microsoft, on the Internet Explorer team. Left my job, wrote a book, and worked for a startup out in DC doing browser virtualization, and then went to IT management. I was done writing software for a while. I loved airplanes, so I got a dream job in my twenties as the chief information officer for Hopkins Airport. You know, luck luck of the draw, I don't know what it was, but, had the opportunity to move back. You know, I I love Ohio.

Matt Crowley [00:04:58]:
My family's here, and it was it was just a sweet gig. So came back here, did that for few years, moved to a bigger airport for a while. I was a CIO for Philadelphia International Airport, and then decided that, now it was time to go into entrepreneurship. And it was did a cybersecurity consulting company for a little while and also around the same time is when we started what originally was Signal Cortex, and we can talk about that later of how horrible we are naming companies. But, yeah, that that's been kind of the arc. I would say it's more of a roller coaster of events and different parts of the theme park, if I can describe my career, but, you know, it's it's been a long and winding road.

Bill Wichert [00:05:42]:
And for me, I think the, similar idea, didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I got the opportunity to work for some amazing Cleveland area companies, whether it was, Highland Software, Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve. All of those provided some really interesting, kind of different backgrounds and different understanding of different markets. And, actually, at Case Western is where I met Matt. You know, we were together in a class there and worked on a project and then reconnected later when I was ready to leave academia and wanted to try something different and actually came to work for Matt at, at Hopkins and later took over as CIO when he left. So that's been kind of this process. I did follow him on to Philly when I was done at Hopkins, and it's funny that these have all kind of we both have such very different backgrounds, but at the same time, a lot of similarities. So we always have something, you know, similar to talk about whenever we you know, some kind of background or references that we need to discuss.

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:48]:
So before we we get to Signal Cortex and and then Tundan, I I would be remiss if we didn't take a a brief layover and, and chat a little bit about, you know, that that whole experience at the airport in that, you know, chief information officer capacity. I don't know, Matt. Like you said, it it it does sound like somewhat of a a dream job. I'd love to, you know, discuss your your interest in airplanes and airports and, you know, what what that role actually entails and some of the, you know, unique business or otherwise things that you encountered with airport IT that, you know, I think most of us probably don't get to think about on a regular basis.

Matt Crowley [00:07:27]:
Yeah. And so it's funny. There are, you know, 500 and about 30 odd commercial we call them part 139 airports in the US. So when you think of, like, the Hopkins and the Philly and the JFK, you know, there's 19,000 airports. You see them all over the place. But, you know, 530 of these kind of bigger ones, They're all, except for 1 or 2 pilots, government owned. No pun intended with pilots. There's some privately managed airports in the US, but they are very few and far between.

Matt Crowley [00:07:58]:
So you get kind of the government work feel, the purchasing differentiation between private and public life, how things are run or a little bit different versus private industry. So you get kind of the fun interaction of dealing with private aviation companies, publicly traded aviation companies, hundreds of businesses that interact in in an airport environment, and then the large government agency that runs it all. It's it's really like a city within a city. You have everything from a water department to an electric company to maintenance management, operations management. And like at Hopkins, I I think they might be back at 10,000,000 a year, But at the time, it was 8 or 9,000,000 passengers a year. At Philly, Bill, correct me if I'm wrong, it was 5th was it 55,000,000 passengers a year?

Bill Wichert [00:08:51]:
30, 33, I think.

Matt Crowley [00:08:53]:
It's just you have a large amount of of people, and you have to somehow guide them from parking or busing or taking a train in, getting out of the airplane through all these, I guess, strange technology workflows that you wouldn't think of. So I I the the draw of the aviation industry is you just get to play with everything, you know, from bag belts to screens on the wall that tell you where to go and advertising, music. It is a a truly all encompassing technology experience that you that you get to, manage.

Bill Wichert [00:09:28]:
And there's a reason to work there. I mean, again, it's the the concept that you're working for a city at the end of the day, and you're helping the region because the airports in each region are such huge economic drivers. You know? They're not only connecting grandchildren with their grandparents and, you know, seeing family members from across the world, but you're also able to connect businesses and connect business opportunities and allow people to see things that they never thought they'd see. And those things all take place there. So there's a larger space than just it's a business or it's just government. There's actually an output at the end of the day where you're really helping people connect, and you're helping it's the first place people see when they land in the city. It's like it gives them that impression, and you wanna try to give them the best impression you can.

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:20]:
Yeah. Both the first impression and and probably the last impression. Yeah. What what were just to to to go a little deeper on it because I'm just curious. What what were some of the most interesting, you know, scale challenges that that you have to think about in that role? Maybe security challenges. Where where do you feel that, you know, airports are are really innovating in kind of a an interesting way?

Matt Crowley [00:10:42]:
A lot of it has to do with I think when especially when we were there, you don't see you just you hand your bag off to someone, and you really don't see the, the guts of what's going on. When I was there and Bill were there, we was there. We were actually helping out with the new baggage handling system, and, you know, you had gone from these rusty old bag belts and tons of people manually lugging these things around to robots

Bill Wichert [00:11:09]:
on

Matt Crowley [00:11:09]:
the other side of the wall that move bags around, throw them through x-ray machines, that was an extremely complicated build out that, airports are just light years ahead in terms of security screening and scanning. When you're comparing all their types of public venues, malls, stadiums, which an airport is very similar to, You have the luckily, the backing of of the federal government and state government where we get these grants and opportunities to do it. Surprisingly too, like, the passenger concessions, notifications, signage, you're seeing a lot of airports, Customized signage even where the aviation industry is using some of these new technologies, polarized light being able to direct specific messages at specific people. So if you're standing at a different angle than me looking at, we call them FID screens, flight information display screens. But if you're looking at some of these screens on the wall, it can send you a different message than me regarding your flight just by knowing from your devices or who you are, what's tied to your travel itinerary. So I think with the whole passenger journey, the whole passenger experience, airports are just doing great jobs recently. I think the hardest thing, and I I think you're seeing this with mayor Bibb and all the changes he's trying to make, at the city of Cleveland, it is still a government organization. So the wheels and gears of government sometimes slow things down considerably.

Matt Crowley [00:12:41]:
You know, I I loved everyone at city council, but having to go in front of, you know, the the various committees all the time and and, not only build the budget at the airport, but also follow the traditional government protocol for, managing, budgets and expense expenditures was I I I think, can if not handled properly, can slow things down a bit. So, you know, there are lots of lots of good things and lots of more challenging aspects of working at the airport, but all in all, it's an experience that I wouldn't trade for anything else.

Bill Wichert [00:13:12]:
And I would add the you know, for example, what what we were looking at and researching at Philly was around, like, how do you do passenger tracking? How do you provide better wait times? They're able to look at the passenger journey and try to find how best to optimize or reduce, you know, kind of the the TSA wait times. Can we make them more accurate? Can we make them more representative so people know at what time it's gonna get busier? When you show up to the airport, can we make sure that certain bathrooms are cleaner at a specific time because there's gonna be more passengers out there at that moment? Do we know where people are going and where they're not going? What concessions are using and not using? Those are the pieces that become massive build outs and massive you know, these are just massive facilities. How do you manage? How do you dispatch people? How do you get them around? How do you send them to different places? How do you ensure that there is if there's a spill that that's cleaned up? How do you ensure that if there's an error or somebody falls, that somebody is is addressing that immediately even in these massive spaces? So those are all the kind of concerns and things that we were having to deal with, and those all as a teeing it up, that's how it facilitated how we move forward with the entrepreneurial journey.

Jeffrey Stern [00:14:24]:
So in this roller coaster of of a career that that you've both had, you know, why at this point with such a fascinating, you know, evidently problem space that you get to work with and through the the lens of an airport, Why entrepreneurship? What what are the the questions that you are that you 2 are beginning to ask? What are what what vision do you begin to have for the future that inspires you to, to take that entrepreneurial step?

Matt Crowley [00:14:49]:
It started when we were at at Hopkins Airport. If you still I think they still have it up there. They have the TSA wait times up on the screens. We had actually built that software internally when we were at the airport years ago, And, you know, that was pretty unique for the space at the time, and then you see started seeing, like, Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. So at over at Dulles and Reagan, they started building some of their own software for passenger facial recognition scanning. You start to see innovation programs open up at at, San Diego and Minneapolis, Saint Paul. But at the same time, it's a great place to work and great industry to be in, but, it can be a bit constraining, because you're you're not a you're not a software company. You're not trying to build a business.

Matt Crowley [00:15:38]:
You're trying to sustain an airport, ensure that you're bringing economic value to the city and the region you're in. And, you know, Bill and I started seeing problems in airport operations that we really wanted to start solving, but definitely was not in the scope of our jobs and definitely not in scope of budget. So I think that's where it stems from is we just wanna do a lot more things than we really could. And it's not that we didn't get support from, you know, the the cities and and our managers at the airport. It was mainly we just wanted to go beyond, what we were doing. And Bill loves to tell the story about, the problems we were seeing at some of the airports and operations, but it it wasn't as if anybody was doing anything wrong in their jobs. You have a a massive machine with lots of moving parts, lots of of passengers, and when you have so many operational chess pieces, it's very hard sometimes to optimize things in such a way that you're building a super positive passenger experience. You know, there there was one specific event at Philadelphia that we ran into, which, Bill, you wanna you wanna give the

Bill Wichert [00:16:55]:
the story of this one? Sure. So Matt was giving a, doing a tour for a new executive, and they're walking through the through the concourse and a dog, in front of them. There were actually urination stations around the airport, and they were just they were actually set aside with, like, grass, and it looked like, you know, a, fire hydrant. But, unfortunately, with the number of animals that are in airports now, this particular animal chose to go where they weren't supposed to. And so there's a little spill in the middle of the, the middle of the concourse. So Matt tried to make a phone call and said, hey. We need somebody to come out and and take care of this. Well, by the time it went through the process to get to a person to get out and do it, it was 2 hours.

Bill Wichert [00:17:40]:
Now, again, that's not the person who's there's nobody in that chain of command is at fault. It's just you've got a massive facility with people assigned to do work all over the place, and you're trying to make sure that everything is done. And that can just be a challenge. So that's one of those pieces where when we saw that, we said there's there's gotta be a better way to do this. There's gotta be a better way. And not only is it does that work here at airports, but that's gotta be the same problem with other places. And how many markets does that apply to? Yeah.

Matt Crowley [00:18:09]:
And and I think this is also where we had our first entrepreneurial failure, which was leading with the idea instead of the problem. And this also goes back to our original name of signal cortex. You know, we we had that incident. We hit we had we would see flights, for instance, empty out, and someone had just cleaned the restroom or cleaned the gate area, and it's just trashed after after plane lands because you just have so many people. Right? No one's fault. And then, you know, halfway through that group of passengers using, an airport facility, they get upset. It's suddenly dirty. It's suddenly unmanageable.

Matt Crowley [00:18:52]:
And it's a coordination problem. It's a communication problem. And we said, let's write a piece of software to fix this without ever talking to a soul. And so we we, in our infinite wisdom, decided let's write an app to do audio based dispatching of, airport, facilities folks. No one ever wanted it. No one ever needed it, and it was the absolute wrong way to solve that problem that we saw. And and that that was our first, what, Bill, month and a half of life as a company. We said know, first, we got an idea.

Matt Crowley [00:19:30]:
Let's say, well, let's go, let's go form a, Delaware C Corp and and just build it. And we built it, and no one cared. So if you're wondering signal cortex, it was because it had to do with dispatching work via AirPods and using Siri to respond back how you either did the work or did not do the work or whatnot. But, yeah, totally not scalable and uninteresting to any potential customer.

Bill Wichert [00:20:01]:
And we also we did a lot of interviews after that, after we'd formulated it. And then we made some mistakes, which we learned later when we improved our our our kind of customer interview process, that we would lead people into their into the answer we wanted. And so when we talk to them, we talk to them about, is this the problem you're having? And they'd say, yes. Would this solve your problem? Yes. Great. We have the right solution for you. Well, we just told them what the problem was and told them how we were gonna solve it, and they're not gonna tell us no. So when we went back later, we went through, program at at the University of Akron.

Bill Wichert [00:20:40]:
When we went through the program, it was more about, okay. Step back, improve your interviewing skills, don't lead them into those kind of answers that you want because you so desperately want to be right. You so desperately want to know that everything you're building is the right solution when in actuality, the concept we had was right. The execution was wrong. And so that's where when we got a chance to go through that and start taking those kind of tactics with our interviews, suddenly, it was leaning towards a different outcome. It was it was more about the problem was the systems in place to manage it. It was problems with prod business process and solutions that way. Not about the last mile, but it was upstream more that we then had to address.

Bill Wichert [00:21:24]:
And when we realized that, it was like, we got we got a pivot. We've got a this is we've got a feature, not a solution, and we've gotta go fix that. So that was that was very enlightening. Again, those are the things you learn when you are first time entrepreneurs, when you, you know, you so desperately want to know that what you're doing is the right thing and that you're that you're the risk that you're taking is the right thing only to have it be the wrong way that you're going about it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:21:51]:
It's a it's a a challenge in in in the startup process that I I think it comes up time and time again is that, you know, somewhat falling in love with the idea rather than the problem, as you said, Matt. And but but at the at the same time, I'll, you know, I'll I'll call out that, you know, you 2 obviously do have unique insight into the space and the set of problems. You know, they're being only, you know, 500 or so airports and, you know, this is not like there are a lot of people thinking about this stuff all the time. And so you do have this, you know, unique insight into what are the sets of things that are are problematic and causing actual pain in the in all the stakeholders that are involved with the airport passengers, field and service workers. I'm curious as you decided to as you kind of went through that process of discovery that led to the decision to pivot from, you know, on the ground to more of the systems level, you know, side of it. What what did you, at that point, begin to have a vision for, you know, what, you know, signal cortex transitioning to Tundun would become or, you know, where where are you in the in the process of the company at that point?

Matt Crowley [00:22:55]:
So, yeah, we we had finished up Icore, and this was mid 2020. You know, middle of pandemic, everything's just remote. And, at that point too, we had we had joined Techstars. So it was towards the end of 2020 where we're finally starting to correlate all this information, connect the dots, and we said, you know, yes. We have a lot of aviation experience. There were tons of problems with the market. We love the aviation market, not to knock it, but there's 530 airports. You're talking an 18 month contract time, typically, when you're trying to sell the airports, which makes it hard for any start up to enter the aviation space.

Matt Crowley [00:23:35]:
Even though contracts can be large over time, it is it is difficult as as a small player to be in aviation. And we said there's there there's gotta be other areas with very similar problems, and we we took a step back and said, well, wait a second. You know, an airport really just it is a city in a city. Right? You have maintenance. You have a lot. Even though, yeah, there's planes, it had all these other pieces, and we said, well, what if we just target the markets under the pieces? And this this came to kind of a a culmination in the middle of tech service where we said, well, the the true target that we were looking at anyways was operations and building maintenance. Well, that's that's everywhere. That's not just airports.

Matt Crowley [00:24:18]:
What I mean, do you look at strip malls, the skyscrapers at the at when the stores close at the end of the day, someone's coming in to clean, someone's coming in to do light maintenance, work on the the property itself. Almost immediately, I would say, it was a matter of, like, 2 weeks pivoting into that market that we had our first big customer, who has stuck with us since and been absolutely amazing. This is, Mid America Building Services out in Chicago. And they, you know, they work on commercial properties. They clean them, provide maintenance services. I love to joke cold patch asphalt has become my favorite example of things I never knew that maintenance companies did. You know, they did them at the airport, but, again, we were we were a couple couple levels away from being deep in those operational sectors. So, you know, it was kinda taking a a step into, what we were doing at the airport to to find some other markets, and, you know, we were we were lucky enough, I I would say, that we found a super related market that ended up being large enough that we wanted to pursue it.

Matt Crowley [00:25:28]:
Right? Like, it was you you look at the building maintenance market in the United States. There's a 1,000,000 registered businesses in the US. Half of those are are sole proprietorship small businesses, but it's 5,000,000 workers, 1,000,000 businesses. It's a large market segment that's relatively unknown. Right? Like, when you go to Starbucks, there's no chatter during the day about the folks that had to come in at night, especially during COVID and scrub the place down. So it that's kind of the timeline and and how we got to our current market, but I would say that everything we learned in aviation is 100% relevant to everything we're doing today. It's just slap some planes on it, and then you got an airport, compared to every other building.

Bill Wichert [00:26:13]:
And the when and in Techstars, that was during that same time, I think what was important was that we iterated very quickly. That when we realized that we, you know, we we'd go through these interviews where we would talk to other entrepreneurs and we would try to pitch what we were trying to do. And you'd get a lot of those, you know, I don't get it. I don't understand what you're trying to do, what problem you're trying to solve. And there those are those are great questions or great kind of responses because if you're not doing a good enough job of communicating what problem you're solving to somebody who doesn't know the market, you're not doing your job. You have to be able to easily, quickly help somebody understand what you're trying to build, how you're building it, where you intend to go. And we would iterate through this constantly and keep getting these, what are you going to do? How are you solving it? What is it gonna do? And I think that made us really look inside again and say, is this the right fit? Is this the right thing? Let's go back through the data and see. Is there something else? And I think that was that was a month of some of the deepest, like, you know, soul searching we had to do.

Bill Wichert [00:27:23]:
And when we finally came kinda twisted it around and got back to the right answer, it was like, this is this is the right way to go. This is the right answer. We need to go in this direction, and then just went light speed, you know, full speed ahead and and, like Matt said, got our first customer a couple weeks later.

Jeffrey Stern [00:27:40]:
So with with the first big break having really honed in on the the right problem, what is Tundun? What you know, what is the nature of the work you're doing? How would you describe the, you know, the company and the services that that you're offering and and the problem that that you are are solving?

Matt Crowley [00:27:56]:
So we're the operating system for building maintenance companies. We we try to be their their heart and soul of the business operations, but in a way that supports a group of folks that their expertise is in really hard work and not technology workflows and all this other technical jargon. The the folks that have run and built really successful companies in the space are really great maintenance workers. Right? They're they're not out there with their MBAs. They're out there with their their hands and their trucks and doing great jobs and working really hard to build their businesses. So we try to come in, and as they grow, bring bring some order to the chaos without being super complicated. We're we're an app the the frontline employees can use to tell folks, hey. I'm out doing some work.

Matt Crowley [00:28:47]:
They can get a list of the work they're supposed to do. They press one button to start their shift, one button to stop, and they get all the relevant information. And on the back end, you know, it doesn't require a college degree or or a doctorate to to run the application. It's a pretty simple way of organizing the most complex parts of an operations, focused business to be able to dispatch people, take in requests from customers, and just provide some really unique insights in the business without getting in the way. So we try to, again, bring everyone together in a way that is you don't need a dedicated individual, to manage the technology for your business. It's drop in and suddenly provide, a really great way of of mapping out folks and and work.

Jeffrey Stern [00:29:37]:
That that all resonates quite a lot. I I always when I think about, you know, a product approach, you know, the the goal is is to help people actually do their jobs better. It's not to teach them how to use a new system and software tool. There's only, like, so many walls people are willing to run through if it's actually going to to help them do their their job better. So that I like I like the philosophy.

Matt Crowley [00:30:00]:
And and by the way, it it's not you know, that is that is our vision. Right? Like, we we hit bumps all the time where we're we're constantly trying to interview our customers. If, you know, we we build something even after talking to folks and it's still not easy enough or we're still trying to improve things. So it this is, I I think, a learning experience for us and everyone we work with of we're we're digging into every single business, finding ways to improve them and improve us. So it's a really great relationship that we have with our customers, but that's also the benefit of being a startup. Right? Like, we do this 247, 365. We eat, live, and breathe this thing. So it's it's kind of a a great opportunity versus when when you're working for a Fortune 500 or another company where the gears just turn a lot slower.

Matt Crowley [00:30:46]:
So there's a lot of benefit to being agile at this point. And I'd be remiss to say, it took a while, by the way, to rename our company. But, so ton done is get a ton done. So then we and I you know what? We people was, well, how'd you come up with that? We spent days looking for domain names that were expiring. So

Jeffrey Stern [00:31:09]:
That's hilarious.

Bill Wichert [00:31:10]:
Well and the and people would ask us. It was the number one question in when we would talk to them in sales calls was, what's a signal cortex? And if you have to explain it, they're just like they they would just give you this glazed overlook, and then we would come in and say, well, we're a ton done. We help you get a ton done. They're like, oh, that makes sense. Like, even if they don't fully understand what we do, the concept resonated, and the wording resonated much more deeply than some vague, you know, over overly engineered title.

Jeffrey Stern [00:31:43]:
So you had you had mentioned Techstars, a few programs that you had been involved with. I know recently you've closed on, I believe, a million and a half in in funding. All very exciting and and great developments. With that, you know, what what does the company actually look like today? And I love to hear, you know, in reflection how, you know, your involvement in some of those programs, Bounce, Techstars, how those relationships with those organizations have helped to, you know, develop the the company and then support your your growth throughout it.

Matt Crowley [00:32:17]:
Yeah. I I really need to make sure I I highlight we've had a lot of local support. You had mentioned Bounce, we had mentioned Techstars already. Valley Growth Ventures led our round and jump start as well, and they continue all of them to provide mentorship. I mean, I pick up the phone even with any of our lead investors, and it's just folks that want to contribute every day to the business and are there to be mentors and guides and advocates for everything we're doing. So, you know, the round obviously was great, but I think most importantly, it was really great people that we got to work with and that we can still get to work with every day. It you know, the the programs provided us, you know, a really great way locally to get to know a lot of companies, build our customer base. I think that it filled a large gap that we had.

Matt Crowley [00:33:13]:
You know, everybody says the start up founder wears many hats, but you find out there are hats that just don't look good on you. You know, the Bill and I, our our weakness, like, you know, talk about 2021 where, okay, we found our market. We found customers to sell to. We found out we're we're okay at doing pitches, investment pitches, but, man, we are not good at outbound sales. But we could do we've gotten to learn how to do inbound stuff, and this formulated why we wanted to do our round in the first place, which was we started noticing all of these gaps. And and you had asked the question, what does it look like now? I think it all had to do with 2021 was definitely a year of reflection for us in terms of admitting to ourselves that you do not want Bill or myself leading a sales call. We're really great having a conversation like this, but we we are not that we're not closers, so we get no coffee. And then so that was one thing.

Matt Crowley [00:34:15]:
We said we're really good technically. Right? Like, Bill is awesome with customer success and getting people set up on the system. I'm I'm a really good developer. You know, I built the initial iterations with our product. I still help out with the team, but the thing that we really needed help on was business development reps, sales. And I think that's what formulated, okay, end of 21 when we started to we got our lead. We got some term sheets. It was because we recognized, kinda what our team looks like today of we have these gaps to fill.

Matt Crowley [00:34:48]:
And even though a lot of times, it's a harder sell when you're pitching that you're you just tell people honestly like, hey. We're having trouble selling. We knew why we were having trouble selling, and it's because we needed these experts. So that's that's kinda what our team looks like today. We have 9 folks on board. We have a a good sales and business development team, excellent engineering team, and, myself and Bill and our CTO, Somer, who we just try to do everything and help everybody out, and then a a cadre of interns, from local schools. So, you know, when we, we both Bill and I teach classes at at various colleges in the region, computer science, business, cyber security, and affords us an opportunity to meet really good students that we bring on board, every once in a while to do internships. So, that's kinda what it looks like now, but it it took a a lot of self realization and evolution to to get to that point, focus on it for the round that we did, and then once that closed, just execute on it right away.

Bill Wichert [00:35:54]:
I I think one of the challenges, at least that I've learned and that I've heard in in my conversations with other entrepreneurs, is that there's a certain amount of I'm doing it on my own, that this is me succeeding, that there's some level kind of inside that drives an individual to say I'm doing this. But that also means that they don't ask for help and that there's a certain level where people need to realize that you can't do it on your own. And if you can, great. I'm I I wish you all the best of luck, but there's so much that you that if you're new to this kind of concept of entrepreneurship that you just don't understand and that you don't know. And we got so much help, whether it was Techstars, Bounce, Ichor, our investors, like, just random people in the street who would just be like, hey. Let me help you with this. It didn't matter. It was just the ability to ask for help and having them provide us stuff that we had no concept or understanding of what those challenges were going to become.

Bill Wichert [00:36:54]:
We might know what it is today and how to fix it today, but what's the next step? What's the next step after that? Let's make sure that we're prepared for all of those and that we're aligning ourselves properly now. So those were the pieces, I think, too often, you just don't wanna ask for help. And I'm just telling everybody, if you're listening to this, ask for the help. Ask anyone you have available to you to give you that little bit of assistance, that little piece of that nugget of information that you might need that might make the biggest difference.

Jeffrey Stern [00:37:20]:
As you, you know, dialed in on what would have been required to take this to the next level, you know, rounding out the team, kind of filling in all the gaps that that you had mentioned. What was the the vision, you know, in a hypothetical, right, if if you're given the the the pitch to, you know, prospective investors to to raise the round, What was the vision for the future you were painting? And, you know, today, what does success look like? You know, what what is the kind of impact that that you hope to have looking back in in retrospect?

Matt Crowley [00:37:51]:
I think there's there's 2 things here. 1 is 1 is a business vision, and one's more of a a social impact vision. You know, from a business perspective, there is there's no dominant player in our markets that we target, and that is what we want to be. If there's service tightened on the field maintenance side, that's what we wanna be for building and facilities maintenance. We want to be that go to application, you know, used by some large percentage chunk of, companies around the world. Right? But I think there is there's a larger impact here on employees. Being in the airports, we got to see that, you know, a lot of frontline employees would get a lot of flack, for the work they did when they actually did a great job and it was circumstantial, the problems they would run into. Right? Like I mentioned, a person just cleans a restroom and then 200 people dump out of a plane and start using those restrooms, and people question, well, why didn't the employee clean the restroom? This this is more of an organizational problem than it is an employee problem.

Matt Crowley [00:39:03]:
Unfortunately, a lot of times, these issues, get reflected upon the employee instead of being solved by the organization. Not only that, these employees are typically paid minimum wage. They are not treated well by their employers, by those who use the facilities. It's a really hard job and really good people do it, and they don't get treated well. And if there is something that we can do, make it easier on the employees in terms of doing their jobs, take some of the stress off of everybody in the organizational chain by making the the ability to dispatch employees simpler and ultimately make it a better customer experience, we, you know, we're kinda uplifting everybody. And maybe everybody will just start feeling better about this, respecting the work, respecting the people. So, you know, yes, we wanna succeed as a company. I think we have we're on the right idea.

Matt Crowley [00:39:59]:
We're on the right track. We're in some really good markets that are ripe for the innovation that we're doing. At the same time, we also kinda wanna help out the businesses, the people, and, you know, the the users of these facilities, and we think we can do it with our approach.

Bill Wichert [00:40:13]:
And then we can require and and then we can all retire Yeah. To make a house, living, you know, living on the beach. You know?

Jeffrey Stern [00:40:22]:
Well well, there are two themes there, Matt, in in your, you know, response about what what success means that that I think are interesting. I I wanna double down on, for a moment, which is for for one, that the market is is highly fragmented and that the the people in it, you know, from a technological, even kind of cultural perspective are are somewhat underserved or or overlooked. And so I'm curious how you envision the role of technology in in in the building and facility and and kinda maintenance service industry evolving in the future and how, you know, you and and Tundan are positioning yourselves to to kinda meet or or lead, you know, those changes going forward.

Matt Crowley [00:41:08]:
Well, as the chat GPT of building maintenance I'm just kidding. So it it it's it's interesting. Right? And I don't know. It depends on how how deep you wanna dive on the markets here, but the problem that we come in, especially with this market, is or, again, really great folks in the management and the frontline doing really great work. Margins are low. So you have these companies out there touting the latest in floor cleaning robotics and IoT for soap dispensers and and all these these great gadgets. But in the end, in this market, with the margins, your biggest expense revolve around your staff. You don't have a lot of money upfront.

Matt Crowley [00:41:52]:
And again, we're talking about, like, up to, SMEs. Large enterprises are a little different story. But you you don't have the money to go out and and buy a floor cleaning robot. Right? So you need to evolve into these things. And how we are posing ourselves as a platform, not to get into all of our features is, number 1, for the business you're in now where you're mostly people management, we provide a way to help manage those people in a better way, kinda ease your margins a bit. Right? So you're not, like, dispatching 2 people in the wrong place, or you're not sending someone all over town just to to manage one work order. Kinda helping optimize that. And on the second front, once you start to have that optimized, you know, we have a rules engine, we have features in our software that hook up to these new technological tools that the industry is moving towards.

Matt Crowley [00:42:49]:
Right? So now you can use a soap dispenser IoT to auto dispatch your workers, then now that you have the funds to start investing in those pieces of technology. So it's a lot of growth that happens over a number of years with these businesses, And this is why we're starting at, kind of the the upper midsize business to small and medium enterprise because we're positioning ourselves to grow with them as they go from, you know, a $1,000,000 a year revenue company to a 10,000,000 dollar a year revenue company. And that's where that transition occurs. So that that's kind of the mark part of the market we're focusing on is those, you know, 1,000,000 a year in revenue and above companies that are looking to do that optimization. We help with that, and now we positioned ourselves as a long term partner as they move into some of that more intelligent technology.

Bill Wichert [00:43:42]:
Yeah. And the a lot of times, we we really didn't hit on this with the last question, but I'll kinda tie these together. One of the major problems with the market is customer churn. So you've got a lot of businesses that are trying, that are working really hard to grow their business, and they lose a customer because of a mistake or because of a miscommunication. And then that starts this kind of cycle of either stagnation or or they start to to lose revenue, which then results in potentially people's jobs being lost even though they did nothing wrong. This goes back to that social impact. We wanna not only help those individuals maintain their job, maintain stability, but also maintain stability in those businesses. And that's what this helps those businesses to do and continues to, is that it's not just a piece of software you throw into your business and it solves all your ills.

Bill Wichert [00:44:34]:
It solves a portion of what's what you need to have solved so that you can grow your business so that you can maintain a stronger business. And those are like, when we talk about long term, that's what we have to be able to do with these companies is help them continue to grow. That it's not just about one piece or another. It's about the system working for their business and working for them as they continue down the path and making sure that they continue to keep their customers happy and continuing to keep their employees happy.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:01]:
What are the the things that that keep you guys up at night, when you when you reflect on, you know, infinitely many challenges that that you face trying to to build a company, but what what are the things that that have you, you know, concerned that that that you're you're trying to work on or are within your control or maybe maybe things outside of your control?

Matt Crowley [00:45:21]:
Well, right now, I will say we just had this conversation earlier. With our industry, there is no good time of day to deploy software. You know, middle of the night, you'd think it's perfect. Nope. That's when folks are working. Middle of the day, folks are working. So, you know, we're like, when can we release the the next version of our app? Maybe Monday at 7:30, 5 in the morning. So it's it's interesting as as we've grown.

Matt Crowley [00:45:48]:
You know, we're, again, fighting this problem today of, release cadences, you know, lulls in the day that is common amongst customers. You know, that that is tough. I'd say that the latest challenge that we're tackling is, you know, in the industry, like, you know, you have, folks that will manage the company, may speak a different language as a first language with frontline employees, We're working on features right now for managing kinda translations, which we're running into, you know, what do you do with idiomatic expressions and things like this between frontline staff and management, and customers. Those are those are our biggest ones. It really is you know, we we know a lot about our businesses in terms of how they operate, how our customers are, either gaining customers or churning customers, what their operations look like. But kind of digging into the nuances of communication and product life cycle, I think those are the biggest challenges we're facing right now.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:49]:
On the on the flip side of that coin, you know, when you when you're thinking about what comes next, what what has both of you most most excited thinking about, you know, maybe the next year, the next 5 years? What's coming down the pipe?

Matt Crowley [00:47:01]:
I I think it's it's the growth of our our, our mobile app. You know, we have a lot of companies onboarded now, a lot a lot of management using it, but, we're starting to expand into franchises. So we're going from, you know, businesses with 500 people to, you know, businesses with 6000, 10000 spread over multiple subsidiaries. And meeting that demand is super exciting for me. You know, we had we had one customer that is in a lot of the Home Depots and Ace Hardware is around the around around the the US and Canada and Mexico, and that was our our kind of first customer that really was serving multiple countries at, you know, a 1000 or sorry. It was 10,000 locations, and that was kind of the first scale challenge we had. And I'm I'm looking forward to more scale challenges. So, that that's kind of exciting.

Matt Crowley [00:47:55]:
And also ancillary markets. There is, other markets that we're we're working on right now, which kind of follow the same pattern in terms of work, have very similar problems. This goes back to the interviews never stop. There are other, markets that are heavy on, frontline workers that need support, need some, organizational, support within their back office that we wanna be able to serve. So, that's coming up, this year, and we're really excited about it because it's gonna take us into the next 5 years of growth.

Bill Wichert [00:48:30]:
For me, these are it's attending the conferences that we're gonna be attending this year and talking and continuing that dialogue with our customers. As, you know, Matt and I have a pretty broad breadth of knowledge in different areas, but we're not experts in everything. Obviously, we've mentioned that before. Like, you need to ask for help, but we ask our customers for, for their help all the time. Giving us suggestions on feature set, giving us, you know, insight into the challenges that they experience all across their business, not just with the things that affect our software. So better understanding of the challenges that they deal with mean that we can better prepare and better position our software for them, potentially make small changes that could actually help alleviate some of those potential concerns. Those are the things that I love, to get out and talk to these customers or prospective customers about what they're dealing with and where they're going because those help lead us everywhere we're gonna be going in the future.

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:25]:
And as you brought it back up, Bill, I'd I'd love to kind of, circle around some of the the reflections and learnings. You mentioned asking for help, continuing the conversation with your customers. You know, it it doesn't end at the point of sale. What what are what are some of the the biggest learnings that that you've taken with you as as you've built and and grown Tundan?

Bill Wichert [00:49:46]:
Number 1 is be humble and don't, you need to take that constructive criticism appropriately. Internalize it, understand it, change it, and move on. Don't take anything personally. Because as Matt said, you know, I had to sell for a year, and I'm not good at it. And I know I'm not good at that. I'm good at other things, and I know I'm good at those things. And I need to focus on those areas, which is why when we raised the round, we were able to bring those staff in. But I think sometimes individuals will get too caught up in, I have to be the best in everything that to be a leader, to be, you know, to be able to to lead your company, that you have to be the best at everything, and that is absolutely false.

Bill Wichert [00:50:30]:
You need to be a good leader, not the expert in the pieces that you're that's why you hire your staff, and that's why you hire the best people you can to do those to do those things that you're not good at so you can focus and do the things that you're best at. And so I think that's the pieces. Always stay humble. Learn from every mistake you make because you're going to make a lot of them, and you need every time, all the time, improve, learn, iterate, improve, and just keep doing it over and over again. And, eventually, you get to this kind of place where you feel like, I I kind of understand how this works now, but I don't think the learning ever stops. It's always gonna continue.

Matt Crowley [00:51:08]:
I would like to throw in there the zeroes law of being a founder, which is you need buy in from the people around you, aka your family and friend. Like so when Bill and I right before this start up, we also were working on a a cybersecurity consultancy. And the most important part of us starting our businesses was asking my wife, hey. You know, I know we have, like, a 3 month old son. Can I quit and take no income for a while? And by the way, we're living in Philadelphia. So can we also just move back to Ohio and upend our lives? So getting the, actual permission, the moral support, the buy in from, you know, the people that are closest to you, because, you know, the last 3 years of our lives, we we've impacted everybody around us. It's sometimes very negatively, you know, just because it's long hours and, low personal funding and eating ramen, and, I can't I can't make that decision on my own. So that that was kind of the biggest learning was, okay.

Matt Crowley [00:52:25]:
Can can I get everybody's buy in for this? Because it's it's not just, you know, Bill and myself running a company. It's everyone else is on this ride with us. So, you know, it was important.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:36]:
Yeah. I like the 0 with law. That that's good. Well, we've covered a a lot of ground here so far. I I do wanna leave a little space before, I bring up our our traditional closing question, that we ask everyone on the podcast. But are there are there any parts of of the journey of of your two respective stories, really anything that that we haven't touched on yet that that you feel is is particularly important that that you like to share?

Matt Crowley [00:53:02]:
I always knew that I wanted to start a company.

Bill Wichert [00:53:06]:
Mhmm.

Matt Crowley [00:53:07]:
I had this vision and dream that it would somehow be a lot easier than it actually was.

Bill Wichert [00:53:14]:
You

Matt Crowley [00:53:14]:
know, you're just like, oh, look at these people on Shark Tank. They're making, you know, the collapsible bed that folds into a purse. That's such a great idea. And, you know, it it comes down to it's it's really, really, really hard. It is a such a huge investment that should never be taken lightly, except my Etsy shop. I'm very proud of my Etsy shop, and that was super easy. So

Bill Wichert [00:53:41]:
I actually have one that I that, kinda goes off what Matt said. It's all it's about the social networking. I think too often, I said you don't ask for help. Well, you don't build your network out. Too often, you're you're building it late or you don't attempt to build it or you don't try to build it forward. And that's where all the follow-up and things had happened later happened. How were we able to connect with investors on the West Coast? We didn't know them. We we were able to leverage a connection for another connection to get to the people we needed to to talk to.

Bill Wichert [00:54:17]:
So build that relationship. Build the connections you need across all this the region because if if you don't have those connections, you're not gonna eventually connect to the people that you want. You know, we have amazing connections through Techstars, amazing connections through Bounce. All the people we meet build out that network to be able to get us to where we needed to be. And without them, we wouldn't have closed the round. We would not have been where we're at today. Those again, just the network. These are just people that you can just hit on once in a while.

Bill Wichert [00:54:48]:
Just say, hey. By the way, any any issues or any anything that I can help you with? Building that out was absolutely critical. And, I I we continue to do it now. We try to to go to events just to be able to give back a little bit to people who have helped us all the way along the way.

Matt Crowley [00:55:05]:
That that's one you know what, Bill? It takes a village to raise a start up. There you go.

Jeffrey Stern [00:55:12]:
That's the sound bite right there. Yeah. That's awesome.

Matt Crowley [00:55:14]:
Now what are what

Jeffrey Stern [00:55:15]:
are you selling in your Etsy store?

Matt Crowley [00:55:18]:
You know what? I wrote this, Python script to autogenerate crossword puzzles and, Mad Libs and stuff for holidays. So it basically just, my script, like, autogenerates, like, you know, Christmas crosswords. And I did it as a joke and still until people started buying it. So, it's, it's kind of fun. It's one of those things every couple months. I'm like, I maybe I should do something for July 4th. That'll come up next, and, I'll run the script a few times. So, yeah, it's not nothing like, you know, no awesome beading or knitting or anything.

Matt Crowley [00:55:57]:
It just goes back to what can I do that's really easy?

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:02]:
Yeah. I I like that. Awesome. Thank thank you both for for your perspective there. I'll bookend it here with, with our our traditional closing question, which will tie it back to to Cleveland, is for not necessarily your favorite thing in Cleveland, but for something that that other folks may not know about that perhaps they should. Hidden gems in Cleveland and in the area.

Bill Wichert [00:56:25]:
I will jump on it while Matt thinks because, he's he's gonna have much better options than I will because he does a lot more things than I do. I'm gonna pick, something that, goes with where I went to high school. So I was living in Valley View and went to high school at Kyer Cuyahoga Heights. And the towpath, the entire path going down I mean, they've extended it all the way into downtown. The ability to just take that all the way out to Peninsula and just either ride a bike or walk or, you know, take the train, you know, the the railway out to, you know, Hill Farm and Village or any of those things. Those are such amazingly different things that if you don't even like, if you don't spend any time there, you have no idea that they're even there, but you're literally just walking along this historic route that really helped commerce thrive in this region. And then you're like, wait. I'm just out here on my bike.

Bill Wichert [00:57:18]:
So the ability to do that, I would say, is something that too often is now in the winter, not as much. You can still take the train, but, the ability to just walk the path or ride it on, you know, all the way down to wherever you wanna go is fantastic.

Matt Crowley [00:57:33]:
You took my my answer, Bill. So I was actually going to yeah. So besides the towpath, I was gonna talk about, like, some of the Summit Metroparks. You know, I am originally from the Cleveland area, but when I came back to Ohio, I should live down in Akron right now. Now Bill's up in North Ridgeville. But, you know, the the, the Summit Metroparks, you know, when you live up in Cleveland, you know, everybody loves the Metroparks. Right? Like, there's tons of stuff to do, but Lake County has them, Summit County has them, and, a lot of times, if some of your favorite parks are are that busy, there are tons of of really great hiking spaces and, obviously, Lake Farm Park. There's this horse, dude, which is my favorite horse at Lake Farm Park, but he's also not very pleasant and I don't think likes me.

Matt Crowley [00:58:23]:
But, you know, have having a 4 year old that you get to go to all these places that you you never, think to go to. And by the way, the aquarium, is also fantastic. You know, people, you know, it it can be busy on the weekends, but, you know, in until I took my kid there, I had no idea I had never been there, and it is a fantastic place to be. So, yeah, I would I would say the 2 things, the aquarium, but also all of the Metropark system in all the counties. This is something that, you know, when I lived in Seattle and DC and Philly, there is nothing like it anywhere else. We're we're really lucky to to have all those systems here.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:04]:
We we definitely are lucky.

Bill Wichert [00:59:06]:
If I can jump in one more because I would be remiss if I didn't do something for my wife. So it is surprising how many amazing vineyards are out in, you know, the Geneva, Madison, Ashtabula area. Again, a little bit of a drive out, but it's still Northeast Ohio, and it's still when you're out there and you're at some of those locations and you're sitting out on a patio in the middle of the summer and you're looking out over a vineyard when the sun is, you know, just nice sunset, you're like, am I in, like, Napa? Like, am I somewhere else? It's amazing to be able to just have a, you know, glass of wine looking out over this area and be feeling like you're transported to an to other places in the world, and yet you could literally go skiing and then go here and then go here. There's so many different areas around this city and around this region that are just amazing when you connect the pieces.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:59]:
Well, Matt, Bill, I I I wanna thank you both again for for coming on and for taking the time and and sharing your story. I think the the work you're doing at at Tundun is is fascinating, and congratulations on the the recent round.

Matt Crowley [01:00:12]:
Thanks. It was great to speak with you.

Bill Wichert [01:00:14]:
Thank you very much.

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:15]:
If, if folks had anything that they wanted to to follow-up with you about, what would be the best way for for them to do so?

Matt Crowley [01:00:23]:
Email is usually best. Matt@tundun.com, or bill, bill@tundun.com. Best way to reach us.

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:34]:
Awesome. Well, thank you again. Really really appreciate it.

Matt Crowley [01:00:37]:
Thank you.

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:39]:
That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show, so if you have any feedback, please send over an email to jeffrey@layoftheland.fm, or find us on Twitter at podlayoftheland or @sternjefe, j e f e. If you or someone you know would make a good guess for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land.