Episode 322: Ryan Shank - Founder & CEO, ShareWillow

Episode 322 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Ryan Shank, CEO & Founder of ShareWillow. Finding the right idea for building a company that will scale is hard. It’s even harder when you get influenced by all the news about the trends in tech like AI, Web 3, crypto, or whatever is the latest trend. Yet, there are still some very large industries that are still operating with very old tech and are still ripe for disruption. Case in point is Ryan’s latest company, ShareWillow, which is a modern platform that enables businesses to design, launch, and manage profit-sharing plans. It makes me think of Gusto, which modernized payroll or Stripe, that modernized payments with tech that just worked. As Ryan was looking under the hood of this industry, it became very obvious that there was a massive opportunity. Instead of stock options, lots of companies issue profit-sharing plans and come to find out businesses that have a profit-sharing plan tend to be more profitable over the long term and get more output from employees. Yet, there really isn’t an easy way for creating a profit-sharing plan on a modern tech stack that does everything from getting started to ongoing management of the plan. Bingo! Here is a massive market opportunity to build a category defining company which is in desperate need of a modern tech stack and user experience. Investors have noticed too as the company has raised $6.5m from top-tier software investors in what ended up being an over-subscribed round. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * The importance of learning sales as an entrepreneur. * Ryan’s background story growing up in Ocean City, Maryland and his early entrepreneurial roots. * A rant / business idea about how the experience of college tours is broken. * The story of mHelpDesk and its acquisition by HomeAdvisor. * The details and lessons learned about his next startup, PhoneWagon, which was a TechStars company that went on to get acquired by CallRail. * The state of the state with ShareWillow * Things to think about during the acquisition process, including how an escrow factors in. * And so much more.