‍

Throughout the stages of launch, you find yourself catching drift of numerous rumors on how Soul id was created and who it was created by. This story is to set the record straight, and to give everyone a look into the company’s background, and where we all came from. It also serves as a journal entry, so the team can recall how it all began years from now.

August 6, 2011 — The first mention of the idea for Soul id. I had just finished high school and my best friend Eric and I had founded a company called Aspect which sold organic athletic apparel. We had just finished an event and I was driving home with crates of shirts. I was thinking about a comment someone made as they were passing me 22 dollars for a shirt they just tried on. He was a local mountain biker and we were discussing how we should connect on Pinkbike.com (an online mountain biking community) and go for a ride sometime. He was up to connect and let out a side comment “it would be great if we had a Pinkbike.com for everything.” The idea popped into my head for a social network for action sports that would function as a host of communities for every individual sport. Bigger picture, we could build a community for everyone with a passion. I called Eric as soon as I got home and brain vomited everything I was thinking of. Eric, the more realistic one of the two of us, suggested we not look into this at all, given we had enough on our plates, lack of capital, and no tech experience or knowledge at all.

‍

‍

March 20, 2012 — I had just started putting the wraps on Aspect. We had just completed a year of traveling around California, working with athletes in numerous sporting disciplines. Through working with these athletes, we noticed that each sport culture had an independent style, and selected specific brands that displayed the sports they were a part of. I was incredibly close to pulling the trigger on the development of a new apparel company; I am. The idea was to blatantly state on the shirt what sport you were a participant of, thus relieving the need to purchase over priced designer clothing. I wanted people to have the ability to easily identify their passion and what community/culture they were related to. More importantly, I wanted it to be easy for people to identify others with similar passions. I wanted to give this to everyone. After a brief feasibility analysis, I passed on pushing money into the brand until I could logistically figure out what I was going to do with my life. To the back burner “I am” goes.

May 18, 2012 — Facebook IPOs with a $104 billion market capitalization. The business of social media was booming with no apparent slow down in sight. It was exciting, moving fast, and I wanted to be a part of it. The biggest issue I had with Facebook at the time was that I couldn’t filter content down to see just the items I wanted. I was sick of seeing cat pictures or the regular post about how sh*tty someone’s boyfriend was. I wanted a tool that gave me the ability to access exactly what I was interested in from numerous user groups. That was problem one. Problem two was I wanted the ability to be part of groups that had similar passions. I wanted to connect with the people that loved what I loved. This was difficult because Facebook was a relatively closed and private system. The more I drilled into these problems, the more I realized that people around the world had a similar desire. Ideation continued and I would later develop my first wire frame that I showed to my freshman roommate who was a computer science major.

May 20, 2012 — “So basically, it’s numerous social networks, within one umbrella social network that aggregates all the data into one central location” I explained to my roommate Phil. My biggest concern was just seeing if the logic was even possible to accomplish a platform of that scale without the need for a developer with a PhD in computer science. “It’s doable… I think… it’s going to be a F**king massive code base” Phil informed me. “Doable” is all I wanted to hear at the time. I just had an urge to receive some form of confirmation that the project would be technologically feasible. Still just an idea. Still just a concept.

‍

May 23, 2012 — I started working as a financial analyst at the One Maritime Plaza in San Francisco. It was my first time working in the heart of the most innovative city in the world. I was surrounded by inspiration, from technology giants to entrepreneurs sleeping in cars trying to raise a seed round of funding. It took me a month in the cube to realize that the corporate lifestyle is not the direction I wanted to head. Feeding off of the high paced Silicon Valley environment, I started working on the social network concept after work to see how far I could progress the idea. I started teaching myself how to design with an absolutely POS software application called Mirage. My routine would be to wake up at 5:30 am, head to the city and work, get back at 7:00 pm, and work on the social network concept until 1:00 am, then repeat. Most my time was spent on education. I only had one year of college under my belt and needed the business and design skills as fast as possible. I also needed to learn how the start up game worked and how to launch a company in an agile fashion. My room at the time was the size of a Harry Potter closet, so my white board took up the majority of my space. This closet was where I started designing and building out the idea for the first time. The first person that ever looked at a wire frame for Soul id was Rich Bona, my aunt’s father and an amazing man. An entrepreneur himself he helped with the business education part of this journey. I’m sad to say he passed this year from terminal cancer. I’ll always remember his gifts of an amazing business foundation.

June 24, 2012 — I needed help. I had everything mapped for the network and knew how it would look and feel. Majority of what I had was wire frames but I knew I could get the idea across. It was time to bring on a technical co-founder. Earlier on in the year, I was on Chico State’s campus and noticed a club tabling called the Chico Entrepreneurial Association (CEA). Excited about entrepreneurship at the time, I introduced myself to Greg Bellinger and Kyle Nelson, two of the executive members of the club. They invited me to 36 hour jumpstart, an event that had the goal of getting companies off the ground in literally 36 hours. I said I would be there and would meet up with them later. At the time I didn’t even have a car to get to the event, so my friend Jaycob Arbogast drove me so I could be there. Jaycob now manages finance at Soul id. I met up with Greg inside and he began telling me how he runs a web design firm and had already built a number of websites. This instantly grabbed my attention as I was thinking about the social network concept at the time. We exchanged information, and I attended a few CEA meetings at the end of the year. Greg was the first person that came to mind when I knew it was time for a co-founder. I texted him in the evening and asked if he was available that coming Saturday to meet up. After work, I packed and left San Francisco for a weekend back in Chico.

June 25, 2012 — Greg and I met at his house in the morning. I’ll never forget walking in for my first time, meeting his dogs and seeing a spread of Transworld Snowboarding magazines on his coffee table. I was already thinking to myself that this guy was the perfect fit. I began explaining the idea to him, about how it was a passion driven social network, and you would be able access just the content that you loved, and connect with the people that loved what you loved. When I mentioned the idea of focusing on action sports out the gate, he was interested. “Is it doable?” I asked. “Anything is possible. It will for sure take some time but it’s doable” Greg responded. We discussed the idea in more depth and developed a vision on what this thing could become. After an hour or two, Greg said “I love action sports, I want to be in this business for the rest of my life, lets do this together.” With a handshake, Greg and I became co-founders on a long journey that still continues today. We discussed next steps, and I headed back to San Francisco to mock up the first designs. My drive back consisted of four hours of trying to develop a name that would convey what we did and could scale into what we wanted the company to be. I had no luck and knew we needed something soon as we began to share what we were working on with more and more people.

‍

‍

July 11, 2012 — Greg and I still couldn’t come up with the right name. If we had something, we couldn’t get the domain. If we had a domain, it was a crappy name. I had pages upon pages of names and not one of them felt right. I was catching up with my dad late one night and mentioned how I was having a hard time coming up with a name for the company. My dad, the veterinarian in a town of 4,000 people, said he would try and think of some names. Two days later, I received a call. My dad excited on the other line “Hey have you thought of calling it Soul id?” As soon as it rolled off his tongue I knew that was it! Soul represented your passion. id, symbolized the identification of your passion. I called Greg immediately after and we both agreed that was the one. There’s an emotional attachment that comes with this name. It constantly symbolizes what we’re working for and drives us everyday. Everyone should have the ability to surround themselves with what they love. Everyone should have a Soul id.

‍

‍

July 18, 2012 — I began designing the first iterations of Soul id. If you are a current Soul id user, you can tell we have come a long ways since 2012. Many of the features in this first design still exist today. I could barely design but I didn’t want to bring on a designer to create what this platform would look like. I wanted something that was clean, open, seamless, high res, and put other platforms to shame. It would take months to communicate how we wanted this done to another designer. “Fail Fast” was the mindset I had as I began designing Soul id over and over again until we had a fine tuned product. Progressively the design got better and more realistic and we continue to improve today.

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

A mentor asked me why our team was wasting so much time on design. He may have been right, we did spend a huge amount of time on the design, but I believe it’s a core function of what having a Soul id is all about. A piece of this platform was sharing your lifestyle and talents with the world, and we believed that every user should have a beautiful interface to do this, a core value we still have today.

Sometime in the fall of 2012 — The Soul id landing page went online for the first time. Greg and I were excited to start using our new domain name: www.mysoulid.com. As we started holding discussions around Soul id, we wanted to have something online as people started looking the company up. It was at this time that Greg and I put together the first logo for the company and set up our first presence online.

‍

‍

November 16, 2012 — We bring on our first team member. Greg thought it would be good to add a marketing backbone to our small team. Earlier in the year I had met Kyle Nelson, a good friend of Greg’s that was on the board for the CEA. Greg thought Kyle would be a good fit as he had recently completed a substantial amount of research on the action sports market and how to gain the attention of the audience. Greg, Kyle and I met in the library late one evening to see what Kyle had to bring to the table. After a few short conversations, we knew he was the man for the job.

‍

‍

Sometime in the fall of 2012 — I had two business classes under my belt when I went to write my first business plan for the company. At the time I thought my 30 pages of fluff was a well crafted piece; I soon found out otherwise. I was getting ready with Greg to show the business plan to Peter Straus, the Director for the Center of Entrepreneurship at Chico State. We prepared this business plan for him for two reasons. The first was to get his feedback on what we were working on and if he thought from a business standpoint it would be feasible. The second was to see if we could present our company to a due diligence committee to receive funding from the CSU Chico Accelerator Fund. I knew in advanced that Peter was direct and that we did not want to waste his time. We presented the plan and Peter quietly accepted it and read the first page. Upon completing the first page he looked up and quietly stated “boys… this plan is crap. It needs a lot of work.” To this day I can’t thank Peter enough for his brutal honesty over the years. It thickens your skin, and prepared us for our numerous Angel and VC investor presentations. Greg and I had a fire lit under our asses, and for five days honed in that business plan to a fine piece of work and presented it again to Peter. He agreed to let us present to the Due Diligence Committee to raise funding. This was an amazing point in the lifespan of this company and for me and Greg. It was our shot to turn this idea into an actual product and we would work our asses off to seize that presentation.

December 10, 2012 — It was the day of the presentation to the Due Diligence Committee. Greg and I had been working diligently to hone in the most important presentation of our lives thus far. Three teams were selected to present to the committee and we were grateful to be one of them. Greg and I had prepared a very energetic and exciting approach to the presentation. At one point we even considered entering the room wearing snowboarding and mountain biking gear. We were the second to last group to present, and our nerves were high as we waited for our chance to deliver our 15 min explanation on why to invest in us. We were called in and warmly introduced ourselves to the panel. We kicked off the presentation in our energetic fashion. At one point I threw the clicker to Greg on impulse and it was dropped (what were we thinking haha). We wrapped the presentation and answered all questions. We walked out of that room knowing we completed the job and just had to wait for a response a week later. On December 18th while studying in the library with my great friend Sean Woulfe, we would receive the email that the committee agreed to invest in Soul id. Excitement and fear rushed through me. We received the chance that we were looking for. We received the chance to finally make Soul id a reality.

‍

‍

That is how it all began. From there we built, we built some more, and we continue building to this day. We failed fast, we failed often, and we continue to fail all the time. The later months would consist of getting our first office, hiring a development team, doing daily sessions until 2:00 am, meeting with the lead engineer of Instagram, and the list goes on and on for years to come. It wasn’t easy to get to where we are today. We’ve run out of money a number of times, but have always managed to keep the gears turning. At one point I actually dug irrigation lines everyday just to continue paying our developer at the time. There’s so much more to tell, so stay tuned for chapter 2 of the story behind Soul id. Obsessed with a vision, we continue driving the company forward. Everyone deserves to surround themselves with what they love. Everyone deserves a Soul id.

‍

‍

‍