Ember, a startup from Utah Valley University’s Sandbox Program, is advancing its all-in-one PIM software for streamlining product data integration. The team recently added Porter Fairbourne to handle sales and marketing, enabling a stronger market approach.
Utah Valley University’s Sandbox team, Ember, continues to press forward with their PIM software. Ember is an all-in-one platform that focuses on streamlining product data information for businesses. The team started last spring and have been continuously developing their business ever since. Through the UVU Sandbox Program, they have received personal mentoring for their company. The program has just completed its first semester at UVU with student participants. It will continue into the Spring Semester to help students with their businesses.
Ember has made new progress within their business team internally and with their product. Since the last update, they have taken on a new member of their team, Porter Fairbourne. Fairbourne is studying Finance at UVU, and he will be taking on the sales side of the business. Originally, Porter reached out to Eli Holdaway (CEO of Ember), to discuss venture capital, but during the conversation, He expressed interest in joining the startup.
Porter explained in an interview with Techbuzz, “My parents are serial entrepreneurs, so it’s something that just comes really naturally to me…what I’ll be doing at Ember is overviewing, like overall sales and marketing strategy, and helping us get to market and gain customers.”
In addition to new team members, Ember has pivoted their product launch. Eli Holdaway reported, “We tried launching our product, taking it to a few customers, and we realized our MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is not something that the market needed yet. We needed to build out something a little bigger and solve a little more problems than we thought was the real issue.Our problem that we’re solving hasn’t changed, but the way we’re trying to solve it has changed.”
They have been isolating one specific issue of building connections with businesses and their sales channels in terms of integration. By doing this, they hope to emphasize the most value of their product.
Holdaway elaborated, “We realized that data housing wasn’t the main issue that we’re trying to solve. It’s more of the movement of data across platforms to storefronts, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), and then the organization.” They want to get better at circulating data between storefronts and customers.
They pull data from sales channels and give necessary information back to the customer as well as the customers giving necessary information back to them. Michael Holmes (Co-Founder) added, “the hardest part about pushing your product is getting it into the sales channels, and it just takes up a lot of time and manpower to fit everything into the different integrations.”
Ember has also started developing more potential partnerships. They have made contact with an enterprise resource planning tool that focuses on E-commerce and consumer goods companies. Through their collaboration, Ember received some positive feedback on their product in addition to some guidance for improvements.
“The ideal situation that they would like to be in is to partner with other tech companies, so we can integrate with them, and then they can just plug us into whatever company wants to use the product.” reported Holmes. They hope that as they continue pushing into the market, they will be able to better explain their product to businesses, and gain more clients. “We’ve found that tech people understand tech terms better than consumer people.” noted Holdaway.
Boston Egan, Co-founder, explained that the main tech issue that they have seen while building out their platform is that each company accepts data differently which makes things difficult for consumers. “Being a data housing center already, it helps us to move data around to different integrations.” As part of his contribution, Egan has been using different outlets to find more software developers. They want to outsource some of the work that is more efficient and inexpensive. To help, they also want to meet with VC firms to provide extra funding for this project.
Fairbourne, Ember’s newest addition added his thoughts, “The key here is that we’re not just building a company for our customers, but actually with our customers.” They have been developing partnerships with companies such as Luminous and Teton Sports. Through continuously building these relationships, they hope to be able to go to market.
Through Ember’s diligent efforts these past few months, they have gained greater insight into industry. With the addition of their newest team member, new partnerships, and other recent changes, they hope to be prepared to meet their company goals. They have identified specific needs to be addressed and have already made changes to meet these needs. As they continue working into the next semester, it will be interesting to see what improvements the company will undergo.
See introductory article about Ember, by Hannah Neilson and Chris Cabrera, here.