Strictly From Nowhere: A Podcast Experiment by Cause of a Kind Cathy Hickman, Co-Founder @ SafeAgent | Innovate From Experience
Cathy Hickman taught anatomy and physiology for 20 years in Dallas public schools. She watched 18 year olds walk into her classroom unsure of themselves and walk out ready for the world. Then she got her real estate license, went all in, and started building a career helping first time home buyers and veterans find their way.
Then one night she went to show a vacant property and someone opened the door from the inside. She called her husband Brian, a former SWAT associate commander turned corporate security professional, and he asked her a question that changed everything.
That conversation led to Safe Agent, a wireless panic alert system that works with your smartphone and smartwatch. You check in when you arrive at a property. Your live location goes to your emergency contacts. And if something goes wrong, one button press dispatches through a live monitoring center straight to local police at your exact location.
In this episode we unpack the full journey from 20 years in education to real estate to bootstrapping a tech company with zero outside funding. We talk about the challenges of customer adoption, why the easy part is building and the hard part is selling, and how a teacher's instinct to serve became the foundation for a product that could save lives.
Key Takeaways
The barrier to entrepreneurship is not money or talent. It is you. Your own doubt is your biggest obstacle.
It took a full career in education before the tech opportunity revealed itself. Patience and goodwill eventually show you the path.
Building the product is the easy part. Marketing and selling it is where most founders struggle.
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LISTEN ON ALL PLATFORMS
Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/show/1V4SjmlnG2sntDnck8UrGW
Apple Podcasts
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/strictly-from-nowhere-a-podcast-experiment-by-cause/id1804380172
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https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-strictly-from-nowhere-a-po-315649122/
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Brought to you by Cause of a Kind
A boutique software development and startup studio from Long Island, New York
Stand up. Show up. Build.