Innovator of the Week
Jim Kelly
Founder of IndustryMD
Please provide your 30-second pitch about your company.
The #1 goal of any company or organization is to optimize their assets & operations. With the enormous amount of information available online from thousands of vendors, how can you easily and efficiently find the best solutions to your operating challenges? IndustryMD solves this problem.
Companies and organizations can find proven answers to their challenges via demonstrated B2B vendor solutions. IndustryMD does this by curating the proven solutions of all B2B vendors, including all equipment, software, services and materials companies, serving all industries. It is a unique tool to easily find proven answers to your operating challenges, problems or aspirations.
Users can easily save, organize and retrieve all the industry solutions they discover on IndustryMD. They can create a personal library that is a free and permanent reference bank of solutions they curate and use throughout their career. Users can also easily exchange industry solution ideas with others while collaborating and learning from industry experts.
For the first time, IndustryMD provides B2B marketers with a dedicated platform to communicate their #1 message ie how their solutions help their customers succeed.
Who or what was your best resource for starting your company?
I had always worked on both sides of the B2B marketplace and those experiences shaped the idea for IndustryMD. I was in fact trying to solve the problems I had faced as both a user and vendor of B2B offerings. When I left corporate life to start IndustryMD, I found AlphaLoft and Mark Kaplan to be a fantastic resource for support, education and networking as I entered the startup world.
What was the biggest obstacle in starting your company and how did you overcome it?
From my previous career, I had a lot of experience in product marketing and business management as well as domain knowledge in the markets I was planning to address with IndustryMD. On the other hand, I am not able to code a single line of software and so technically building the product was my biggest challenge. After some challenges in trying to build an internal technical team for this task, I decided to outsource the project and find an experienced software development company that could quickly understand the idea and get the product up and running. I was lucky to meet Dave Todaro of Ascendle at an AlphaLoft event and partnered with the company to build the product. This approach has worked very well for me and I plan to build out the rest of the offering in the same manner.
What is the best advice you have received?
If you are going to do something, don’t do it in half measures. Be all in and do the very best you can or don’t do it at all.
What about the NH lifestyle that appeals to you?
I’ve been lucky in my life to have had the opportunity to live and work on three continents and a number of US states. I can honestly say that New Hampshire is my favorite place in the whole world. It is home and I never plan to leave. As all of us Granite Staters say, the quality of life in tandem with the geography, seasons, people and more make this a special place.
What does the future look like for you and your company?
IndustryMD launched in September and we were really excited to be subsequently chosen as the 1st place winner at TechOut 2015, the largest startup competition in the state. This was terrific external validation for our belief that IndustryMD is a novel product that is needed to solve a severe problem in a large and growing market. As to the future, we are hoping to attract Angel investment to allow us to market the value IndustryMD brings to both sides of the B2B marketplace, build out the rest of the product, and resource our team. Fingers crossed !
Connect with IndustryMD on LinkedIn!