This Entrepreneur Used Kickstarter, A VC And Two Accelerators To Fund Her Assault Prevention Startup

Jacqueline Ros, 26, is the cofounder of Revolar, a Denver-based startup that produces an alert device designed to help people who feel they are in physical danger. The user presses the rectangular plastic Revolar, the size of a key chain, and it sends a signal to five designated loved ones who know to phone immediately. The signal is delivered via an app or a text message. Two presses signal a yellow alert, which means danger; three or more signal an emergency. If the user doesn’t respond to a call, Revolar uses GPS data and Google maps to communicate her whereabouts to her contacts. Launched in 2014, Revolar, which has 21 employees, has raised more than $3.5 million in venture capital. Since the company started retailing the $99 device in April, it has sold 4,000 Revolars through its website and through Brookstone. In this edited and condensed interview, Ros describes the lessons she has learned on her journey from an idea, through a series of pitch contests, incubators and accelerators.

Susan Adams: Tell me about your background.

Jacqueline Ros: I was born in Miami. I’m Cuban-Colombian. My father passed when I was 16 but before that he was a salesman for various telecom companies and we moved all over the world, including Mexico City; Geneva, Switzerland; Boulder, CO; Alpharetta, GA. I went to college at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Adams: Did you always want to be an entrepreneur?

Ros: No, actually.  My majors were international studies and Spanish with a focus on nonprofit management. I wanted to work for UNICEF. After college, I worked with Teach for America .

Adams: What made you want to start your own company?

Ros: My little sister was assaulted twice before the age of 17. The first attackers were people she knew. The second was a total stranger who tried to abduct her in a parking lot in Weston, FL, which is supposed to be one of the safest neighborhoods in America.

Adams: How is she doing now?

Ros: She is doing amazing. She’s a nurse and recently moved to Colorado. She’s our biggest cheerleader and wears her Revolar daily.

Adams: How did you react to the assaults?

Ros: I didn’t know how to react. I just remember feeling heartbroken and angry. Both times were so different. I wanted to find something that could have helped in either circumstance. That’s where the inspiration for Revolar came from. I asked myself how I could have been there for her.

Adams: How did you turn your inspiration into a product?

Ros: My senior year of college, I took a class on entrepreneurship. It was about idea innovation and the basics of getting your business off the ground. It taught us to focus on a real problem. I focused on my sister and all of a sudden I could see Revolar in my head and what capabilities it would have.

Adams: How did you know people would want to use the product?

Ros: We talked to hundreds of survivors about their experiences and to people who had had health emergencies. We kept hearing, “I knew something was wrong but I couldn’t access my phone.” Also my sister didn’t tell us she was attacked for some time. Revolar gives victims a way to start the conversation.

Adams: Why didn’t you set up the device to call the police?

Ros: The reality is that not everyone wants to call the police. We’re big believers in giving people the freedom to report when they want to.

Adams: How did you turn your idea into an actual device?

Ros: I used my $1,000 in graduation money to pay for a patent search and to start the patent process. Finding someone to build the device was the hardest part. I went through a few different contract engineers until I found the people who had originally built Life Alert, the medical alert device designed for seniors. I was introduced to them by another engineer. But it was actually a lot of different people who came together to build the device. I needed two different people to get the app going.

Adams: How much did you pay for the prototype?

Ros: All the money I had. We had raised about $30,000 from friends and family. I was scraping.

Adams: What did you learn from that experience?

Ros: I learned I didn’t have to build a perfect prototype. The first one plugged into the wall. I’d go to startup competitions and insert the judges’ names and phone numbers into the app. By the time I was finished with my pitch, they’d have a message saying I needed help. The mapping didn’t even come until later.

Adams: What was your first pitch competition?

Ros: It was Denver Startup Week in September 2014. I had finished teaching the previous summer. We won free legal services and free SEO services. It helped us get to the next step. Also I met great mentors who helped me become part of the Innosphere incubator in October 2014.

Adams: What did you learn at the incubator?

Ros: Incubators help you with your raw concept. My incubator mentors trained me how to talk about the opportunity. They helped me understand human resources, and what convertible debt was. I hadn’t thought about any of that before.

Adams: Did you meet any investors?

Ros: At Denver Startup Week, one of the mentors introduced me to Seth Levine, one of the partners at the Foundry Group, a venture capital group in Boulder. The first time he talked to me, he’s like, “you’re really early.” I was still trying to figure out what a VC was.  He’s like, “what are your terms?” I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. I spent two days looking at a convertible debt document. I read his blog while looking at this and sent him a term sheet for $200,000. He’s like, “we’ll do it for $216,000.” We went from zero funding.

Adams: Had you already tried to raise money elsewhere?

Ros: Yes. We launched a 45-day campaign on Kickstarter in March 2015. We needed to prove people would buy our product. The early birds got the product for $40 and the rest, for $75. We raised $85,000 in 45 days, which came through the same time we got the Foundry Group money. We didn’t touch the Kickstarter money. We put it in escrow. We wanted to pay those people back if we couldn’t sell the product.

Adams: Did you learn anything from the Kickstarter campaign?

Ros: We learned that people love to give our product as a gift. It’s almost as though the gift is a physical manifestation of a promise. My mom used to say, if you’re in trouble, no matter what you’re doing or what time of day or night it is, call me.

Adams: What other funding did you get?

Ros: We also received a grant from the state of Colorado for $156,000 and we won $30,000 in pitch competitions, including the New Venture Challenge in Denver, through the University of Colorado. We also received $118,000 for joining a business accelerator called Techstars in Boulder in June 2015.

Adams: What did you learn at Techstars?

Ros: It was a three-month intensive program. It gives you incredible access to mentors, resources and funding. It’s harder to get into than Harvard. They found us at the New Venture Challenge. One of the program directors asked me to come in for an interview. I couldn’t believe it. When I got there I felt like Hermione, who came from the muggle world, suddenly discovering that witches and wizards existed. It was the best experience of my life. Coming out of that program I was able to raise $3 million.

Adams: Before you raised that money, how big was your staff and how much did you pay people?

Ros: We had five people and we made what I called teachers’ salaries, less than $40,000. Everyone was getting paid the same amount.

Adams: What challenges did you face after you raised $3 million?

Ros: Titles. I couldn’t have cared less what people said they did, whether they wanted to be chief of this or that, because I had never worked in a company with a structure like that. But as our team grew, communication was getting blocked because there weren’t clear lines of who should be working with whom and who’s in charge of what. Titles needed to match the jobs being done. My team had grown to 13. They helped me figure it out.

Adams: Once you had the funding, how did you figure out salaries?

Ros: I felt like my brain was exploding every day for awhile. I’m a fairly flexible and patient person, and I’d been dying to raise salaries. But figuring it all out pushed me to a whole new level. It was a bit of a mess but the employees were very patient with me while I fixed things.

Adams: What other lessons did you learn as you grew?

Ros: When our team hit seven, I got feedback from Sara Pate, our director of operations, that she didn’t need to be in one of our really cool meetings. I felt grey hairs popping out of my head. She was right. It was a high-level investor strategy meeting. I should have just been talking to my executive team. But I hadn’t even formalized who that team was. I had to figure out how to preserve a transparent, open culture while needing to get things done.

Adams: How did you decide where to manufacture your device?

Ros: Our chief product officer, Tom Davison, was the former vice president of global engineering at OtterBox , which makes cell phone cases. Tom used to work with a manufacturer in Thailand so we used the same company

Adams: How did you figure out how to price your product?

Ros: I really leaned on my board for that one and we worked with Seth Levine. It mattered to me that we kept our price affordable.

Adams: How did you start selling through Brookstone?

Ros: I met Tom Via, the CEO of Brookstone, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas two years ago. He said he loved the product, how soon could he get it in his stores. Then a year later, we were at Techstars and Tom came to visit us there. Brookstone has been a fantastic launch partner.

Adams: What’s your next step?

Ros: I’m now in Techstars Retail, a startup accelerator that’s in partnership with Target.

Adams: Why did you do Techstars a second time?

Ros: As a brand, I greatly admire Target’s design-for-all values. On a personal level, the most important reason I’m here is that I don’t know what I don’t know. Retail will be critical to our success. This  program gives me an intensive crash course in how to do it best.

Adams: Does Techstars take a stake in your business?

Ros: Yes but it’s worth it. As a small startup, there are so many ways you could accidentally die. Retail is a big monster. Having the ability to scale rapidly is critical, especially when it comes to inventory.

Adams: How is the accelerator helping you with that?

Ros: It’s giving us access to mentors. We have access to almost everybody at Target.

Adams: Is the main goal to get your product into Target?

Ros: No, they have a well-established buyer program. The program helps us build relationships, learn about scale and it’s making us better at designing for all.

Adams: Why did you name the company Revolar?

Ros: Revolar is a Spanish word. It means to take flight again. It’s an ode to survivors who constantly pick themselves back up.