Chad Reynolds of Batterii
How did you start your business?
I’ve always been excited about building businesses from the ground up. You challenge yourself short term (integrating people’s different skills together) and long term (building something people remember). We started out in a small office on Court Street with a couple clients who believed we were doing something new and wanted to take a chance on us. We invested in bringing on the right leadership early, including a new CEO from Silicon Valley, to help build a product that could be used by millions of people.
Our platform, Batterii, is open-collaboration software platform that is a way for their employees and consumers to go in and build new ideas together.
We call it Pinterest with a purpose.
It’s a branded social network for your company where all of your employees can source and share things that inspire them, and different groups of people can create a new idea to solve challenges launched by the company.
How did you come up the idea for your business?
We set out to build a technology platform that helped people build ideas together. While there were existing platforms out there, they we lacking the basic fundamentals of how great idea are created. This was a common problem for all businesses (and even individuals).
We wanted to build a technology that worked the way our brains worked. We are inspired by the experiences in our life. We collect elements from them (either consciously or subconsciously) and then stitch these back together when we’re presented with a problem.
Our technology removes the friction out of this equation, allowing you and your team to build new and exciting ideas together.
What resources here did you take advantage of and how did they help?
Our funding was led by CincyTech. We have relied on their expertise to help build a roadmap that aligns with our growth plans. In addition, we are thankful to be working with such great strategy, design and engineering talent in the area. We wouldn’t be anywhere without the effort and time everyone has put in.
What inspires you?
Beautiful aesthetics – typography, color, patterns and composition.
What’s next for you and your company?
We are continuing to build new features into our collaboration platform. Our team is excited to be working with some great companies and looking for more. We are rallying around some new ways for people to use their inspiration to propel their ideas and social connections forward. It’s a large market, around $6 billion, and we hope to disrupt how companies build innovation together.
Interview by Robin Donovan