Interviewee
NoiseAware Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer Andrew Schulz began his career at IBM at the tender age of 17. Graduating with honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Schulz used his electrical engineering degree to gain further experience building radar systems for the government. He now applies his engineering, technology and assembly-line expertise full-time to NoiseAware.
Transcript
Andrew Schulz: So again, my name's Andrew. I'm one of the co-founders here at Noise Aware. Always found myself in the fun position of where hardware and software are solving interesting problems. And we actually started the company in 2015 when my co-founder and I met at a networking event, startup networking event here in Dallas. And he had recently started renting out Airbnbs that he owned in town and very quickly ran into the problem where college kids were renting them and throwing parties in them. And I'm sure everyone's seen the kind of headlines associated with that unfortunate behavior. And I just happened to have the right background to build a sensor that worked for him. And then we found more people like him. And then here we are.
Elisa Muñoz: And that was back in 2015?
Andrew Schulz: Started the company in 2015. We launched our product in 2019. So we went through a couple revisions. There's a hardware component to our product, which anyone who's in hardware can tell you that it's hard, it's not as fast as software iterations, but it does provide some benefits.
Elisa Muñoz: Do you have an estimated time? I mean for how long it took you guys in order to build this software?
Andrew Schulz: Yeah, so the hardware, we went through three revisions. So we launched our first, let's call it Alpha in 2016. So actually within a couple months of starting the company that really got us our first paying customers got us a lot of feedback on how to build the service. Built a second version that was more scalable but still not what we wanted to go to the market with. And then ultimately we launched our third version, which had an indoor noise sensor and an outdoor noise sensor. And doing both of those is what ultimately took a little bit more time, is launching two hardware products at once. And then throughout that entire process we were iterating on the, on a software product.
Elisa Muñoz: And what would you say it was your first experience with investors?
Andrew Schulz: I think my, my funniest story is our literal first investment to build our first thousand sensors. You know, we were talking to this group of angel investors here in Dallas and they're like, love this. You know, we get the need, we want this to be really simple, we don't wanna do a lot of legal back and forth. And so we had our lawyer put the documents together and their response was that the entire sheet had changed. It was just they, they went from saying this is gonna be super simple to, I think they changed every sentence and that, that took me a little while to calm down from, we joke about it now, but it was, it was a, it was a rude awakening for me, you know, someone coming from the engineering world to have that many changes to what was supposed to be a simple document, but just, just how it is.
Elisa Muñoz: And I'm actually super curious to ask you, like I know that you went to school for electrical engineering, so what, what was that jump for you in order to be like, “Okay, I'm gonna found my own company, you know, like I'm gonna go into the finance world.”?
Andrew Schulz: Yeah, a lot of mistakes. So this is actually my third company to start. The first one didn't really go anywhere, but taught me a lot of lessons. Second one, I was able to raise some money, which taught me more lessons, most notably how painful it is to close down a company, which has been very informative as whenever things felt off, I knew that, you know, there's things that I have to fix pretty quickly. But just making the jump, I don't know, I've always had this fascination of, again, having hardware, software, technology solve problems. And I guess I'm this interesting mix of my parents for my mother's the technical one, and my dad's the entrepreneur and I'm kind of just right in the middle, so Okay. I've just kind of leaned into it and it's been a pretty wild ride.
Try to have your first customer before you spend too much time and effort on a product, make sure that you're building it with your customers and you have their feedback through every stage of the process.
Elisa Muñoz: Oh, so I'm pretty sure that your dad probably already gave you a lot of advice about starting your own company, right? I mean, since the very first one.
Andrew Schulz: Yeah. My parents have actually been very helpful with anything from sales tactics for my dad or you know, how to manage people for my mom. And it's definitely been a family affair for sure. And they've just been wonderfully supportive through all the ups and downs.
Elisa Muñoz: Well I'm glad to hear that. And you were mentioning that NoiseAware actually solves problems, you know, just like any other products. And what you will say is the main problem that the company is solving right now?
Andrew Schulz: Now? Well, I think the, the very large niche that we kind of honestly stumbled into is there's a large portion of the real estate market where someone is renting a piece of property and there's no one on site to make sure they follow the rules. And as luckily, most people, you know, 95 plus percent of people are following the rules, but that other 5% aren't necessarily doing that. And it can cause a lot of problems for the rest of the community. This just happened to be a problem. Airbnb, the Airbnb community was facing kind of in their growth spurt from like 2014 to 2017. There's just a ton of headlines about party houses. Cities like Austin, Texas were actually banning short-term rentals. So saying nobody can put their properties on Airbnb. And so there was just a lot of turmoil. You know, I grew up with my family staying in homes, like that's how I went to the beach and that's how I, you know, hung out with my family. So it was an industry I cared about. And then I was able to take my hardware, software, single processing background to try to find this happy medium in between the communities, you know, right. To a quiet enjoyment of their property and the homeowners, right. To kind of do whatever they want with it.
Elisa Muñoz: Did you get any sort of feedback, you know, from the customers? Like were they concerned about, I don't know, maybe privacy or something like that?
Andrew Schulz: Yeah. So privacy was, and still is the number one concern every customer has. Luckily it was one of the kind of earliest design constraints we put on ourselves, which is how can we build this sensor that can quantify a sound environment, you know, and classify it either good or bad, but don't make any recordings, don't stream anything, just, just treat sound like a thermometer would. Temperature right. Just a, just a number in time that you can't get really any other context from. And so that kind of started the company and I think it served us incredibly well where other products, like, you know, any of the home assistance or anything that is Alexa enabled, I think it's been pretty widely shown in the news that they can't be trusted, right? They are recording, they have people offshore listening to all the clips and it's, you know, you just really don't have any control over what's, what's happening in your home with all of that data.
Elisa Muñoz: What would you say has been the biggest technical challenge that you guys have managed to solve since starting the company?
Andrew Schulz: I would say manufacturing, just as in general, the software we have is, you know, outside of the, the algorithms that we've developed in house to kind of provide our service, which we're always improving, you know, the infrastructure. Luckily we live in a world where you don't have to have your own servers on site. And a lot of these tools are just kind of freely available, but there's not, not that same infrastructure on the manufacturing side. I think that's where Dallas has actually been quite a benefit for us as being the place where we founded, you know, the first five or 7,000 sensors we built, we built here locally. You know, we used our connections here to find our next manufacturer we can scale with and so on and so forth. Building a product that you can scale efficiently with is, you know, far more difficult than, you know, your consumer products on the shelf makes you think it is.
Elisa Muñoz: And was it hard in order for you to, to find the customers, you know, the product market fit?
Andrew Schulz: Yes and no. We've stayed more b2b so there's actually a very large property management network both in the kind of vacation rental world, the multi-family world and the hotel world. And so we've focused on the businesses where sales cycles are longer, right, because there's a lot more involved in their process, but it's much more sticky. You know, we signed multi-year contracts and so I think that's served us really well, especially, you know, through, you know, the pandemic times where, you know, there was a lot of turmoil in the hospitality space. Luckily I think our space recovered quite quickly as everyone learned that now they can work anywhere. And so having those kinds of contracts in place mainly shielded us from that, from a lot of the downsides.
Elisa Muñoz: What would you say it's next for NoiseAware in the next couple of years?
Andrew Schulz: Well, I think the hospitality world in general is adopting technology at the fastest rate in history. And so for us, I think we just wanna stay ahead of that. We want to help our customers run their businesses more efficiently. And ultimately if we can do that, we allow them to spend more time on providing amazing guest experiences, which for anyone in hospitality, like that's what they would prefer to spend all their time on. So I think we just wanna stay ahead of the curve and then help our customers run efficient businesses and make their guests happy.
Elisa Muñoz: I know that you guys were around when the pandemic hit, so did you have any challenges when it comes to the procurement process?
Andrew Schulz: Actually we haven't, because of the privacy constraint we kind of really took to heart early in the company's history, that's also allowed us to rethink how we develop our, our circuitry where at least my perception is a lot of consumer electronics startups kind of throw everything they can into a product and, you know, they want to add all these features later. And where we've actually gone the other direction is how simple can we make it so that we can confidently stand on our privacy claims and, and, you know, guarantees. And that's also allowed us to use more off the shelf parts, commonly available parts. And honestly, we haven't had any issues with the supply chain. I think we've been remarkably fortunate. So I hope, you know, I'll knock on wood and hope that continues. But so far we've been, we've insulated from it.
Elisa Muñoz: Do you have any advice for future entrepreneurs starting in this tech world?
Andrew Schulz: I think one of the biggest lessons I've learned is try to have your first customer before you spend too much time and effort on a product, make sure that you're building it with your customers and you have their feedback through every stage of the process, even at that first stage.
Elisa Muñoz: Thank you so much for being here Andrew, it was a pleasure to have you around.
Andrew Schulz: Well thanks so much for having me.
