Field General

Cockpit Mobile is a company focused on improving collaboration & documentation for dispersed, blue-collar workforces.

We (Chris, Brandon, & I) left Carepool after Justin Beck (CEO of PerBlue Entertainment) approached us to start the company with him.

His eyes had been on the space for a longtime. We were looking for our next move and were excited about learning from a successful & experienced startup CEO.

We created two softwares - Field General & Virtual Race.

The earliest adopters of Field General were large events - music festivals & endurance sports events. Once COVID hit, mass participations events ceased and turned virtual. We siphoned off a branch of the tech to allow for an efficient & professional virtual race transition.

In short, we set out to create Slack for physical teams.

The Problem: None of these teams had heard of Slack and typically operated via text message and email. Pictures, notes, and all other information was scattered at best, and typically lost. Answers to questions had to be answered on an individual basis and nobody knew where anyone was.

The Solution: A map-based collaboration platform that used pins as markers for points of interest. Layered under these pins were notes, newsfeeds, pictures, task lists, and more. Think Yelp meets Google docs to improve organization and productivity

Teams could see where their teammates were in real-time, improving radio efficiency by reducing questions. We parlayed this functionality into equipment tracking across all kinds of spaces - the most novel was the ability to overlay a festival layout and track equipment down to the tent. We contracted with some of the largest tech deployment service providers to reduce lost technology that cost tens of thousands each year.

As the CEO, I was really the business lead & product manager given the small team. My responsibilities included:

Discovery conversations with clients
Packaging those conversations into feature sets and roadmaps with our teach team
Directing our designer regarding sales collateral
Raising round with our Chairman
End-to-end sales from discovery to contract negotiation and implementation
Customer success - I had constant conversations with clients and users to hear their input and vouch for them in product meetings.

Virtual Race by Field General (now Run Across America)

I had just gotten back from the Running USA conference in Las Vegas where we received an overwhelming response for our software. Some of the biggest companies in the industry wanted to partner and/or white label. Teams at the Chicago Marathon were setting up their teams and we were being plugged to corporate IronMan from multiple angles.

Then COVID hit.

Every race & festival canceled on us (Chicago Marathon, Coachella, Stagecoach - some of the largest events there are).

We rushed to create a software that would help these companies save revenue and reduce chargebacks. I led the creation of a partnership with the largest timing company in the UK then left Cockpit soonafter.

Successes

First experience with a “venture-studio” type development
Successfully led end-to-end sales cycles in multiple verticals
Implemented at Austin City Limits
Dramatically grew knowledge & experience in the customer discovery & UX spaces.
First experience in which cold drip-email campaigns resulted in the conversion of paying customers.

Key Feature Implementations

Content Layering
- The problem: our users comprised teams that had dozens of people at the minimum, with numerous points of interests, hundreds of tasks, and endless topics across a large geography. This led to excessive radio chatter, repeat questions, and stunted efficiency.
- The Solution: Real-time checklists & message boards pinned to their respective places.
  - This presented problems of its own - what did a user want to be notified about? What’s the balance between drowning in notifications and being out of the loop? Should every user have access to the entire environment?
  - Eventually, we built a dynamic role creation section that allowed teams to customize their roles. In addition, each pin acted as it’s own receptacle for photos, comments, tasklists, etc. - and all updated from all pins floated up into a master newsfeed that kept everyone with access in the loop. From there, they could flow back down to the pin level. Pins could consist of a job site, a tent at a festival, or a picture of a wall with numerous punchlist items. What’s more, everything was time stamped with user interactions for a complete record of operations & was exportable.
PDF & XML overlays
- A less complex undertaking than layering, but important nonetheless.
- Problem: After many discussions with large endurance events & music festivals, I found that many of these teams were using “Google My Maps” to scrap together some custom maps to fit their needs. This took some teams as many as 10 hours per event despite them having detailed festivals diagrams and XML course files.
- Solution: Easy overlays onto Google Maps that allowed for GPS functionality hosted on a far more detailed map (…we could see which tent a POS technician was tending to at Austin City Limits).

Lessons Learned

Money Talks
- We had so many discovery conversations in which the prospective client made it seem like we were changing their lives. They even said they’d pay considerable money. But when it came down to implementing, they simply didn’t. But then again, some customers with the same exact profile did. Was it an early adopter curve? or was it a niche customer? Either way, I wouldn’t build without more large, guaranteed contracts but the space wasn’t my choice nor was I very knowledgable about it.
Focus
- The goal was to build a broadly applicable tool, but small differences in operations means large differences in tech.
- I felt we let our focus slip a bit since we were on a hunt for revenue. The internal signals between increasing users and creating revenue were competing and made approaching conversations with customers more difficult than they should have been. This is to say, not only does the product need focus, but your milestones, OKR’s, & KPI’s need to be very focused as well.
Passion
Success & excitement can be fleeting. Passion may wax & wane, but it stays. I think this is important in accepting a role. If the company is established, success is more likely. But in an early stage startup, the passion must be there. They are too hard to approach with only professional ambition and little passion for the problem being solved.
Customer quality
This is a culmination of all of the aforementioned lessons learned. As you discover, sell, fail, iterate, etc - it is critical to document, understand the customer types that are worth your time, and pursue their interests most aggressively.

We eventually created a matrix that included sales cycle, LTV, rated the costs of problems incurred, etc. This added more structure & focus to an early stage sales cycle that is often difficult to navigate. A common dilemma is collecting minnows vs whale hunting large clients. We eventually decided to spend about 5% of time working on the prolonged corporate sales cycle and the rest focused on more dynamic clients to create revenue and extend runway. This is an important lesson for any business no matter what stage.