FilterEasy planned to pick up some resources and meet people in the Iron Yard Accelerator who would take the Raleigh company to the next level back home. Yet with its launch last week, owners say they intend to stay and grow their company here.
FilterEasy delivers custom air filters to homes, having customers sign up for a recurring service that sends filters at scheduled times. Its cofounders, Kevin Barry and Thad Tarkington, say their three months in the accelerator have paid off.
A day after launching, the company had 26 paying customers and more than 1,000 unique hits to the website, Filtereasy.com. Users are located throughout the country, the owners said.
“If we had not been here, it would not be what it is today,” Tarkington said. The experience has been “pretty much exactly what we thought,” and several people have contributed to help them fill in their skill and knowledge gaps, especially Web designers and developers.
Designers from Zaarly, a local company, and also people from the nationally known Web-based companies MailChimp and Treehouse, helped them discern the best way to lay out the website.
“We’ve worked many, many hours on the user experience of the website. How the workflow’s going to go from the time you go onto the website until you become a paying customer,” Barry said.
While the accelerator yielded few surprises, Tarkington and Barry said Greenville was an unexpectedly good fit. They had intended to return to Raleigh, splitting their time between the two cities and eventually returning to North Carolina. Tarkington said he knew nothing about Greenville and “was not very excited” after doing some Web research.
After a few weeks, however, it seemed that Greenville was the place to be. The accelerator recently moved to a building at Main and Washington streets, and as with many people, the charm and energy of downtown helped to win them over. The number of young entrepreneurs willing to help them with their own endeavors was also a crucial selling point.
As a result, they have sublet their Raleigh apartments and will remain in Greenville full-time. They will continue to make frequent trips to Raleigh, where important parts of the supply chain are located.
The service is available nationwide, but the Upstate is the current focus. Last week they papered Greenville, Greer, Simpsonville and other surrounding areas with 5,000 door hangers as part of their marketing efforts.
“We’re excited to have people interacting with what we’ve been working on for seven months. It’s all about testing and finding out the easiest way to convert people and get them to sign up,” Tarkington said.
The young entrepreneurs say they are continuing to make improvements. They’ve smoothed the issue of oversized shipping boxes that left products damaged upon delivery. Now they need to figure out how to overcome the problem of potential customers who usually do not know their filter sizes and are often not in a position to check while they’re on FilterEasy’s website. People checking the site at work tend to forget by the time they return home, or they just might not want to get up from the computer immediately.
FilterEasy is not their first experience in business. Barry, 20, previously ran a marketing office in Massachusetts. Tarkington, 21, ran a landscaping company in that same state for four years.
Other companies in the accelerator will present their work May 30 to June 1 at Greenville Grok, a three-day tech industry conference hosted by the Iron Yard. The point of the event is essentially to replicate FilterEasy’s experience.
“Once you see Greenville for yourself, we think you’ll have second thoughts about leaving,” the Grok information page says at theironyard.com/events/grok.
