Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast’s most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes.

My name is Jon Birdsong and I’m with Atlanta Ventures.

Y’all we did shorten the intro as time is just too precious.

Product of the Week:

There are two products of the week worth highlighting. First is a company call Nauvus which is one simple platform to book load, manage expenses and get paid when it comes to freight and trucking. Still early, but the grand vision is to be a universal freight network & payment solution for trucking companies and the independent dispatchers that support them all in an effort to maximize revenue and reduce cost. Check out Nauvus and if you’re into logistics and payments.

The second product of the week is called Givsly. This company has created software that makes it really simple to infuse social good into your marketing. Let’s say Arby’s wants to promote a new sandwich and wants to put a social good twist on the campaign. Enter Givsly that provides the tools, services, and reporting capabilities companies can connect with causes and produces seamless campaigns to increase revenue and giving. Check out Givsly if you want to add a charitable spin to your go to market efforts.

Quiet Giant:

This week’s QuietGiant raised a growth equity round in June and the company is called Inductive Health. According to LinkedIn there are approximately 60 employees and Inductive Health brings disruptive technologies to the public health informatics arena to lower the costs of integration and large-scale analysis of health data – probably a pretty timely tool over the last two and half years. From the looks of it, they have been bootstrapped and the PE firm that infused growth capital is called Diversis and they are out of Los Angeles. Another fantastic example of a Quiet Giant, right off Clairmont road, that is nearly another 10 year over night success story. All you folks out there building Quiet Giants, keep at it!

Question of the Week:

Can billion dollar businesses be built on nice to have products? This is the question that was posed last week in a conversation with an entrepreneur we talked to in Miami. The call that was supposed to last 30 minutes and wove towards an hour as we shared our thoughts on the differences between nice to have products versus need to have products — which is such a fascinating discussion. The short answer is: at some point the product must become a need to have in the person or company’s business, if not significant churn will result and it will not become an extraordinarily valuable business. I’ll never forget the moment years ago, when I was speaking to a CEO who had about 30 sales reps at the time, share how Salesloft had transformed his sales team and that it was a must have for them to operate. Yet, for the 18 months beforehand, they piece-mealed the workflow on spreadsheets and free email accounts. So I asked: “when did you finally realize Salesloft was a must have for your business?” Two things had occurred in the business: one the pain point of having so many sales reps on his team that the manual process was costing the business too much not to have it. 2) It took a sales rep to uncover that realization and educate the company that there is a better way. Fortunately, Salesloft is tied directly to ROI which makes the case that much more compelling. There is a continuum of nice to have vs. need to have products but at some point in the customer’s life span, the product must turn into a need to have.      

Raise a Glass:

Nashville based SoundStripe just raised their Series B led by TopMark Partners out of Tampa and includes existing investors most notably David Sacks of Craft Ventures. SoundStripe “keeps creators creating” with a plethora of royalty-free music, videos, and sound effects. Now, creators to corporations can pay a simple subscription fee and not have to worry about licensing rights, copyright infringements, and more. To date, the startup has issued more than 10 million licenses for tens of thousands of customers in more than 140 countries – cha ching! Started in 2016, SoundStripe out of Nashville, fills the seemingly ideal narrative for fast growing software company out Music City.

Annnnd, that’s 5 minutes.

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Resources discussed in this episode:

Product of the Week: Nauvus and Givsly

Quiet Giant:  Inductive Health Raises Money from Diversis

Raise a Glass:  SoundStripe

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