Startups supporting startups: Josh Salvo on ReddyYeti, his new site that’s bringing attention to action sport startups
Release Date: 07/15/2016
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info_outlineAs many of you know only too well, starting a business can take a long time! But what we often don’t count in the time it takes to start a business is all the history and experience from past ventures and adventures that make our skill set. All the things you have learned, ever, work together to make you the person you are.
My guest on this week’s Intrepid Entrepreneur Podcast, Josh Salvo, says his newest project has been seven years in the making. The most recent version of the ReddyYeti platform just launched a few months ago in March, but Josh says it couldn’t have happened without his past experiences and websites.
At age eighteen, Josh launched a website to help skiers find the right gear for their needs. He himself will admit he was young, and he didn’t quite realize what he was getting into! Several projects and years later he and his partners are running ReddyYeti, a community for action sport enthusiasts to discover and help startups.
ReddyYeti partners with startups creating amazing products and giving back to their communities. They host a podcast to interview founders, to share the passion and goals of the startups with the community. And they increase visibility of these startups through giveaways. Members of the ReddyYeti community can enter themselves in the giveaways, and gain extra entries by sharing with friends.
Josh is telling me about how he and his two partners started ReddyYeti using The Lean StartUp Methodology: they found a cheap way to prove the value of their product, and took that to companies for partnerships! ReddyYeti is only a few months old and already has 2,400 members.
We’re also taking about how Josh and his partners learned to pivot as they planned for ReddyYeti to launch, and their plans for the future of the site. And, he’s sharing some of the amazing startups ReddyYeti has already partnered with!
Bravery in Business Quote
“Pushing yourself to a limit like that really helps you really get to know you kind of much deeper level” - Josh Salvo
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Cliff Notes
- ReddyYeti is a community of action sport enthusiasts that want to help action sport start-ups get discovered and be found. They are solely geared towards helping start-ups related to outdoor action sports.
- Want to help get people outside and grow the community of outdoor sport enthusiasts by helping start-ups that they feel align with their values ethically, morally, and in terms of high quality products. Also, they want to work with businesses that are giving back to the environment or the community.
- When they partner with a business, they bring the founder(s) on their podcast so they can tell their story so people can find out more about them and why their started their business, to make it more personal so consumers can know who they’re buying form.
- Startups partnering with ReddyYeti are also featured on their blog, and their products are in the ReddyYeti giveaway.
- ReddyYeti community is currently 2,500 members and growing daily
- Members enter giveaways via email, and then are also given unique URLs to post/share, and they get more entries into the giveaways by sharing. At the end of a giveaway period the member with the most shares gets a gift card ($100 to evo)
- They were also doing e-reviews and articles on the products, but based on member feedback going to focus more on podcasts in the future.
- Josh started out at 18 with a website for skigear called MySkiProfile. Users would put in data about themselves and got products matched to their needs.
- Then ran the American Yeti, a website with contributors from across the country chiming in about outdoor sports. Just trying to build traction not make money. Operated it for a year, then dormant for a year.
- Then, Josh and his friends sat down in a basement and came up with the vision for Reddy the Yeti as a new logo/idea. He is Reddy the Yeti, always Ready to help you out and go on an adventure.
- This version of ReddyYeti just got launched in March 2016, but Josh says it was seven years in the making, had to experiment with all of these other projects to be the person he needed to be to get ReddyYeti started.
- Seven years of growth / experience has been helpful in getting ReddyYeti launched, and in how fast they have grown (only 5 months old). Josh and his partners (2) had a lot of connections from outdoor sports that helped.
- Tried to follow Lean Startup methodology: wanted to test product idea. They made a simple webpage with their plan and asked for emails from people who were interested, to be contacted when it launched, and to be automatically entered into 1st giveaway. Grew to 400 subscribers in a few weeks just by reaching out this way to people they knew. They used this as their proof of concept from Lean Startup.
- Took these numbers to 4 brands and launched their 1st giveaway and got 1,400 more subscribers.
- ReddyYeti 2.0 will be a platform with all the brands they’ve ever worked with on there, and any sales from that site Reddyyeti will get commission for. (This is how they plan to make money.)
- Josh grew up skiing on the east coast (Jersey) went to Utah for a winter in college, “best winter of my life”. Now he lives in West Harlem NYC.
- Three partners own ReddyYeti, Josh, Drew (childhood friend) and Mott (college friend of Josh’s)
“Instead that you buying from a company, you know who you're buying, you're buying from a person, sort of a community of people that come together to create this product.” - Josh Salvo
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Resources
Podcast: ReddyYeti-Blog-ReddyYeti-Discover
Blog: ReddyYeti.com