Meet WRANGLD, Startups of the Year Winner in Richmond, VA

This interview series celebrates all the phenomenal Startups of the Year Winners. Congratulations! Well-Deserved, Champion.The HackerNoon community is excited to learn more about you!

What does it mean for you to win this title?

Being recognized as the SOTY in Richmond VA is awesome. It’s tangible evidence of our hardworking team and meaningful work that we could get people behind us. The real win is the users we connect with, having a cool HackerNoon award to go with it is the icing on the cake!

What sets you apart from the competition?

At our core we are built around User Experience - it’s not just a buzzword or department - it’s a “way of life” at WRANGLD. Innovation - building a platform that not only solves problems for our industry; but delivering tools that enable and connect our users at the same time.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

Our team unites under a common vision/mission and this is reflected in the output of everyone every single day. Most of our current team has worked together at other successful startups/companies/and wanted to be a part of building something special at WRANGLD. You can’t buy or fake that kind of culture and that’s a team if you put any challenge in front of them - they’ll conquer it.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

If money didn’t matter - I’d probably be hitting up National Parks with my wife and dog and bike-packing on the Colorado Trail.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

We’ve built an amazing platform quickly. Seeing it gain traction and scale is the exciting part. Right now, every new user that comes on board and realizes how it can help them change their businesses is a huge metric for us. Establishing partnerships that help our mission to modernize the trades industry is another one - partners who see the big picture and want to be a part of driving that change now is another mark for us that reaffirms we’re on the right path.

Tell us how your startup is changing the world.

Blue Collar Jobs get overlooked and/or looked down upon by a lot of industries, especially tech. The crazy thing here is how much these companies drive our world! Consumer expectations change and industries have to rise to meet those expectations. We help the companies of the trades industry meet and exceed those modern expectations as well as streamline their operations to help them scale and grow their companies at the same time. If you’re enjoying your heat/ac, water, etc - don’t forget to thank the men and women who make our “comforts” possible!

How do you or your company intend to embrace the responsibility of this title in 2024?

We’re a little biased obviously to think what we’re doing here is a big deal - but holding the title as a SOTY - we want to show our users who trust us to be the backbone of their company’s operations, our partners who empower us to provide more for our users, and anyone who joins our team’s mission - there is a reason why we’re SOTY for Richmond, VA and we’re just getting started!

What goals are you looking forward to accomplishing in 2024?

Making WRANGLD a household name in our industry! Adding more members to the WRANGLDPack! Changing more business owners’ lives after they embrace our platform’s capabilities!

Which trend(s) are you most excited about in 2024? Share your reasons.

In our industry - seeing more companies modernize their operations by embracing technology. We’re pretty stoked to show off more of how we’re utilizing AI/ML to make our tools even better for our users. Being embedded partners with our Fin-Tech portion of WRANGLD Finance - we’re excited to see more contractors be able to enable their consumers with buying options that make sense for them.

2023 had been another crazy year, especially in tech, with layoffs and the Generative AI takeover! Which trend are you most concerned about? Be as brief or as detailed as you like.

There’s always a new “buzzword” topic in tech that causes waves and ripples in the industry. I think AI in general is an amazing topic and is going to change the tech industry as a whole. The “concern” I have isn’t about AI taking over and ruling over us all - I think our bigger problem comes in the form of companies touting how their “AI-Powered <Insert Tool Name Here>” product is changing the industry, etc, etc, etc - and charging crazy prices because it’s the hot topic when in reality they have a simple if/else flowchart that developers could build as a fun side project. This makes the tech industry look bad and makes it harder for companies that are building cool stuff to advance when consumers become jaded from the other products that didn’t deliver. I’ll get off my soapbox on that one now…

Share your biggest success so far.

Hmm… That’s a tough one… Sure it’s easy to measure success by KPIs/metrics/Sales - but I’d have to say when I look at our current team and the advancements we’ve made as a company together this fast that no one else in our industry has done yet… That’s one I tip my hat to.

We would love your feedback on HackerNoon as a tech publication! How has your experience been with us?

So far it’s been awesome - I spend most of my time reading articles and I enjoy learning a lot from the contributors.

Any words of wisdom you’d like to share with us?

There are a lot of amazing quotes/books/etc on wisdom - I’ve always enjoyed the simple ones that still ring true. One that I feel applies to the startup world is from Confucius: "When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don't adjust the goals; adjust the action steps."