Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Jumpstart Episode 18: Jacques Woodcock
- Jacques is Founder and President of theKit
- theKit is a fully hosted CMS platform built around affordability, usability and customer service
- WordPress and Drupal
- theKit was in development for 2 years
- Nov 2010 went launched publicly by sponsoring Nashcocktail
- Jacques is fascinated with controlling his own destiny
- he is motivated by finding solutions for people
- Jacques spent two years at his prior job where he was not recognized for his accomplishments, so he spent one year preparing to work for himself
- he is inspired by Nashville’s technology community which is young and vibrant
- inspired by Steve Jobs
- get into a group of like-minded individuals locally to keep you excited every day
- Kate O’Neill interview
- Nashville’s Entrepreneur Center is the place to be
- Jacques subscribes to 99%, 37 Signals, Slashdot and Apple
- contact Jacques at @jacques_thekit or @thekitportal on Twitter. Or visit www.kitportal.com.
Jacques’s 3 tips every entrepreneur needs to know
- Wait until you have enough experience and contacts in your industry before going solo.
- Understand the venture capital industry
- Remember if it doesn’t ship it won’t make any money
Please SUBSCRIBE to the podcast is in iTunes, so you’ll get new episodes as they are available.
Jumpstart theme song “DLDN Instrumental (ft. Onlymeith, Mellotroniac)” by: St. Paul from ccMixter.
TRANSCRIPT
Dave: Welcome to Jumpstart. I am your host Dave Delaney. My guest today is Jack Woodcock, Founder and President of theKit. Hi Jack, welcome to Jumpstart. How are you?
Jack: Hi Dave. I’m doing well thanks.
Dave: Thanks for joining me.
Jack: Yeah my pleasure. Thanks for having me on here.
Dave: So tell us about theKit. What is it that you guys do?
Jack: Well theKit is a fully hosted CMS Platform built around affordability, usability, and customer service. And what we do is we really target companies who have a need greater than WordPress, something like Drupal and anything like that but don’t have the budget to pay fulltime staff to support it. So our system we have 15 different specific tools to manage website contents and then we throw in customer support with any of our packages.
Dave: That’s great.
Jack: Yeah we really look at ourselves as a partner for these organizations, really trying to be there back in technical team as they have issues with their website or they’re looking to grow their website. We can easily direct them into using what tools to do what and creatively find solutions for them.
Dave: Yeah I know that WordPress is the popular blogging stuff but Drupal has quickly become quite popular as well. Also because as an alternative because of all the CMS functionality.
Jack: Yeah Drupal is a really robust and great solution especially if you have a technical background, if you’re a programmer.
Dave: Right.
Jack: But a lot of the organizations we work with they don’t have anybody technical on stuff. They don’t have anybody who’s ever look in the line of code but they need something that robust. And so that’s where we come in.
Dave: How long have you been around now?
Jack: Well theKit has been secretly in development for about two years now. It’s a pretty robust system that we’ve been working on.
Dave: Yeah.
Jack: I think we became public knowledge about November of 2010. That’s when we went public and I think we did that sponsoring the Nash Cocktail.
Dave: Right.
Jack: Was our first stay here.
Dave: Yeah that’s great.
Jack: And so I guess we’ve almost been a year now out in the public. So our main focus is really been on getting awareness out there that we’re even here and what we do and what makes us different.
Dave: Right. And at what point in your career did you realized the entrepreneurial bug had bitten you?
Jack: The entrepreneurial bug really never has bit me per se I would say. I mean I’m really fascinated in and of course like all Americans are fascinated with like controlling my own destiny.
Dave: Yeah.
Jack: But what motivates me more than anything is solving solutions for people. The moment that I realized that I needed to be an entrepreneur was with my last job I worked for, the last company I worked for. I spent two years there. I was there Director of web technologies or whatever, pretty much the Web Division. And when I came on they’ve been doing small web stuff and they were doing about 10% business in the web technologies.
And I spent that first year working about 70-80 hours, 3 different jobs really, I was doing the web development, I was doing the PHP programming, the multi-media programming, the product management. I was really doing a number of jobs at one time which working from small agency I’m quite used to. But by the time I was done that first I was also doing business development. I brought them in over $100,000 business. I had run a couple of jobs. I increased the capacity of the Web Department, educated everybody. I think in that first year we got up somewhere around 45-50% of their income was coming from the web and I got my bonus check. And I looked at it and it wasn’t even enough to cover 5% like business development fee for bringing a business.
Dave: Right.
Jack: [Inaudible – 00:04:20].
Dave: Yeah.
Jack: I looked to that and I was like, “Well maybe I should work for myself.” I spent the second year preparing to work for myself.
Dave: Good for you.
Jack: Yeah so that’s kind of how – I guess I kind of got thrown into it out of just common sense.
Dave: Yeah.
Jack: You’re working that hard, you really want a bigger piece of the pie.
Dave: And who inspires you?
Jack: Man, everybody really inspires me, this community that we’re in a fantastic community. It just feels young and vibrant even though Nashville has been around for a long time but like the players in it are really starting to change. I’ve been in Nashville for about 12 years.
Dave: Yeah.
Jack: And I’ve worked in a number of different industries. I’ve seen the healthcare. I’ve seen the music and what not. But this new technology industry that’s popping up here is super exciting.
Dave: It is yeah.
Jack: The players they’re coming out, the things they are doing, the EC, the Entrepreneur Center, all these things are just really encouraging for anybody who has ideas.
Dave: Yeah.
Jack: It’s really supportive. And then really it’s just this community in general. Of course you can layout – I’m always inspired by people like Steve Jobs of course and stuff. But where it really comes to being an entrepreneur I think it’s really easier to get into a group of likeminded individuals locally to keep you excited every day.
Dave: It’s funny. I interviewed Kate O’Neill previously and she had mentioned the same thing. She actually said that Nashville’s tech community is who inspires her as well. So that’s great to hear.
Jack: Yeah we’re such in an exciting point. You wonder when this thing grows when it actually gets recognized we have our homeruns like 10 homeruns on our belt.
Dave: Yeah.
Jack: Are we going to be the same startup community?
Dave: Yeah.
Jack: I’m just dying to get there to find out. I would hope so.
Dave: Yeah me too. Well the stuff coming out of Jumpstart Foundry is pretty exciting. She almost plug their of course but it is really an exciting place to be. Actually anything at the Entrepreneur’s Center that’s happening there as you know is exciting.
Jack: Definitely and I actually was down there was it Wednesday or Thursday and I took a walk around to see the new crop of businesses out there was some really exciting things going on for sure.
Dave: Definitely. Hey are there any blogs or websites that you read regularly?
Jack: Blogs and websites regularly. I don’t do a lot of motivational websites and stuff like that. 99 Percent is pretty awesome.
Dave: Yeah.
Jack: It gives you practical knowledge on how to take a deep philosophical question and answer it.
Dave: Interesting.
Jack: Then of course 37signals, I only come up with 32 signals.
Dave: 5 short.
Jack: Yeah. It’s my math ability I guess. 37signals is always fun because they’re the really one company out there saying, “Screw it.” to all like traditional business concepts.
Dave: Yeah.
Jack: Which is at times a little too much, they do it a little too much. But it’s fun because it challenges your perspective on what’s a typical business is. And then other than that I do a lot of industry news websites. What going on in the industry, deep level technical stuff/dot.
Dave: Yeah.
Jack: Because I technically have to geek I guess. I do a lot of programming and a lot of technical solutions and stuff like that. So I guess I got to satisfy that end.
Dave: For sure.
Jack: And of course being an Apple fan boy I got to follow all the Apple thread which is exciting because more and more they get into patent cases because you’re getting expose to so many other industries right now because everybody is suing them or they’re suing somebody else.
Dave: Right. Yeah there’s a lot of that going on.
Jack: So fortunately being an Apple fan boy you get all the great news on what’s actually trending in the tech industry with Google and the patent issues and all that stuff which is quite funny. Microsoft coming out and being like, “Google said they didn’t want it.”
Dave: Right. Yeah.
Jack: Ops.
Dave: Ops. I usually end each show to ask for three tips that you would recommend on any entrepreneur?
Jack: Great well for me the three tips would be first if you’re trying to go solo and you’re already working in the industry, it heeds you to wait until you get enough practical experience in that industry to justify you going solo and along with that contacts for you to go solo. When I went solo I had already 10-19 years in the industry. I had a pocket or rolodex full of contacts that I could call.
Dave: Right.
Jack: My first year I made well over what my salary was at my agency justifying the move. Especially if you’re a sole income person, it really deviates so much of that money pressure. That applies more for like a consultant thing. If you’re really going to do a startup it’s very important for you to understand the different avenue of your startup. So you really need to do some research on that. Having an idea is great and going out there and trying to raise money for that idea is great but you know there’s three different ways primary ways that you can raise money for that idea and which ones should you do win and all that stuff and how much should you expect to lose percentage ownage of your company. I mean it gets pretty deep and pretty personal. And if you go into it blindly, you’re going to get hurt. So that’s the second piece of advice is to understand the VC, the Venture Capital industry. And then the third is to remember that if it doesn’t shift it’s not going to make any money. So going back to Steve Job’s quote, “Shipping is success. You got to ship.”
Dave: Right.
Jack: So we spent two years in secret development of theKit and that is a tremendous amount of time for any startup. But we did it on purpose per se. We had clients lined up, we multiple clients on the systems since the beginning since we started development. So it made sense for us to do it that way. But if we were just in our garage trying to launch a business and we had no client lined up, we got to shift. You can’t spend two years waiting to launch a product and then hope that it’s still relevant.
Dave: Yeah that’s great advice. So where can people find you?
Jack: I’m on Twitter jack_thekits on Twitter.
Dave: Yeah.
Jack: I’m on Google Plus, Jack Woodcock on Google Plus. You can find me on LinkedIn. I don’t really do much there though. And then you can find theKit on Twitter @kitportal and you can find us online @kitportal.com.
Dave: Okay and I’ll show all the links that you’ve mentioned in the show notes. So if anybody wants to connect with you they can certainly hop on over the blog jumpstartpodcast.com and find those links there. Jack, thank you so much for today. It was a lot of fun.
Jack: My pleasure Dave, anytime.
Dave: Talk to you soon.
Jack: Bye.
[Music playing]
Moderator: For show notes, links discussed in today’s podcast, and much more visit jumpstartpodcast.com. Thanks for listening.
Posted on August 21, 2011
Categories: Blog, Podcast
Tags: 37 Signals, 99%, Drupal, Entrepreneur Center, Jacques Woodcock, Kate O'Neill, Nashcocktail, Nashville, Slashdot, Steve Jobs, The Kit, theKit, Wordpress