10/21/2020
The birth of a new idea and the creation of LureScore
In late July I stumbled upon a local Facebook posting from a woman seeking help with a new health insurance plan. There were 58 comments from members of the page recommending this person or that person. I was humbled to read that my own name and business had been sprinkled in among the many recommendations. I also recognized many of the names as they were brokers within my own company. This was good news, too. I also saw several names of competitors that I hold in high esteem for their knowledge, professionalism and customer service. But then, I saw there were a few names of individuals I knew, firsthand, who did not have their clients best interests in mind. In fact, I knew these folks to be commission-hungry and lacking transparency with their clients.
I obviously could not post a warning on the thread as it would make me appear unprofessional, petty, and slanderous. But having these individuals being recommended alongside these other professionals cheapened every recommendation. And, with the sheer volume of names being listed within the thread, how could the poor soul who needed help possibly know who to call, or with whom to do business? There had to be a way to differentiate the good from the not so good recommendations among this flood of information.
Over the next few days, I became more aware of the number of people seeking referrals on Facebook, the NextDoor App, and other social media platforms and the results were always the same maddening tidal wave of anonymous, unverified, non-vetted recommendations. People wanted to find or be introduced to a reputable plumber, painter, electrician, hairdresser, dentist, chiropractor, realtor, and of course, the best Chinese, seafood, Italian or pizza place in town, among countless other ‘In Search Of’ postings.
After a handful of sleepless nights trying to create a solution, LureScore was born...though it did not yet have a name.
Fast forward several weeks and a half dozen extremely poor ‘pitch’ presentations to my wife and a few colleagues, I began to formulate some of the details, including the metrics and scoring algorithm.
But I had a couple problems that needed to be resolved if anything were to come from this idea.
First, this type of undertaking requires technical engineering and I’m a guy who quite literally defers to my young children to operate the television remote control.
Secondly, start-ups often require some significant capital for build-out expenditures, payroll, marketing, advertising, scalability, and so on.
So, the search was on for an IT guru. But knowledge of technology was only half the battle. I also needed to have ‘chemistry’ because I didn’t just want a designer, I wanted a business partner who could understand the vision, buy into the vision, and become just as passionate about the idea as I had become. I needed somebody that was willing to lose sleep over this thing—oh, and i needed him or her to be willing to provide sweat, blood, and tears, as needed—for FREE!
I decided to post ads on LinkedIn, Facebook, Craigslist, and more. Surprisingly, I had more than 200 responses within 12 hours. I felt like the lady looking for a health insurance broker. I had too much information to choose from and I needed to narrow it down.
As the idea was quite nascent, I was concerned about telling too many people about the idea as the Intellectual Property had not yet been protected. I did not yet have patents pending or trademarks, so ‘treading lightly’ was an understatement.
In the end, I decided I needed a U.S. based team to mitigate IP theft, as an American court would at least give me a fighting chance to stake claim to being the founder and originator if push came fo shove. This narrowed the responses to about 50 developers. Still too many.
So I decided I needed a designer that shared my time zone, give or take an hour so that we could communicate more effectively. Now I was down to about 25 names.
I started sending messages, coordinating calls and zoom meetings. I spoke to several very talented and capable people, but not everybody was willing or able to work for equity. Not everybody was the company owner capable of calling the shots for themselves. Not everybody could fully comprehend the vision, which at the time was probably my fault for not yet being able to properly articulate what LureScore was going to become. And finally, I didn’t have that critical element of chemistry and connection with any of them.
Then, on Saturday, August 29th, after about 7 or 8 conversations that day, I had a call with Rodman Henley, and he just ‘GOT IT.’ Our initial call went for more than three hours. He owned his own company. He had a team of developers. He had a company that allowed him to feed his family so he would not be desperate to make a profit immediately. And most importantly, he proved to be a simple, solid, low-key, steadfast, intelligent, curious, dependable, trustworthy, and downright likeable human being. I had found my guy!
A few days later, after about 1,000 scribbled notes and domain availability searches, I had found our name: LureScore!
And while capital and scaling has yet to rear its ugly head, we believe the app needs to be ‘proven’ by first obtaining some traction, understanding the trends, and perhaps gaining some early-stage ‘viral’ effect if all goes well. We will determine if we have a financial need after we reach a specific number of ‘users,’ which we will track very carefully. However, based on some rather in-depth valuation methods in the app and dot-com space, as well as some legal IP precedence, we’ve estimated a pre-money, pre-revenue valuation at $2.25M. Our goal is to eventually expand into a global platform, but for the coming year, 2021, we are seeking 100,000 users before the platform becomes functionally ‘monetized.’
Our ‘Pre-launch’ landing page will go ‘live’ within 24-48 hours (NLT October 22, 2020), allow us to build anticipation and excitement while collecting interest in the application before it is ready to be published.
The actual, functional application, which will be available on Google Play and the Apple Store, is due for completion the first week of December.
There is an awful lot more to this story, but if you are receiving this post and you ‘accept’ our invite to connect early on, then you are obviously somebody that is very important to Rodman and me and we would be forever grateful if you would kindly help us spread the word about LureScore by sharing this invite as well as asking them to join our ‘Wait List’, which will be available this week when we publish the pre-launch Landing Page.
Thanks so very much—we are excited you are here with us as we begin this journey. Let’s get it!
God bless,
Brian Dow
