Atlanta Startup Podcast David Cummings on Helping Unemployed Georgians Start Companies
Jul 7, 2020
David Cummings, a serial entrepreneur and founder of Atlanta Tech Village, is on a mission to empower unemployed Georgians through his new initiative, Start It Up Georgia. He shares his journey from childhood entrepreneurship with baseball cards to building websites in college. Cummings reveals valuable lessons from his startup experiences and highlights the innovative 12-week mentorship program aimed at launching 100 companies and creating over 1,000 new jobs. He also recommends key community leaders to connect with in Georgia's vibrant startup scene.
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College Web Hustle
- In college David built websites for local businesses and hand-coded HTML, CSS and JavaScript while designing interfaces in Photoshop.
- That mix of technical and design work seeded his love for building products end-to-end.
Build With Customers, Not Assumptions
- The 'field of dreams' mentality is false: building a great product doesn't guarantee customers.
- You must build with customers and invest heavily in go-to-market to reach them.
Finding Customers With Cold Calls
- When content-management software didn’t sell, David bought Google ads, found colleges were buyers, then hired students to cold-call 4,160 colleges.
- That cold-calling hustle converted early interest into a repeatable sales channel.