A Buzzworthy Business

(From left) Calvin Waddy, Shelby Baldwin and Brandon Johns. Photo Courtesy of Rocketing Systems, Inc.

By Carolanne Roberts

In its first month, an online clothing store started by a trio of Mississippi State student entrepreneurs made $3,000. In the second month and for several thereafter, the revenue rose to $50,000 per cycle. What made the difference? The addition of “brand ambassadors” or “micro-influencers” who ramped up the store’s profile on social media, leading to the next, even more successful step on its journey.

“When we first started our business on Shopify – which is a platform where merchants create and manage an online storefront – we tried to do the marketing ourselves,” says 2019 marketing graduate Shelby Baldwin, of her efforts with Calvin Waddy, a 2018 business administration alumnus.

Brandon Johns, a December 2020 management graduate, met his older peers in the MSU Entrepreneurship Club while all were still students. They found that the Center for Entrepreneurship and Outreach (E-Center) inspired their dialogue and plans, with concepts and possibilities sketched out on its glass walls. It was Johns, having started his first business in third grade, who brought the idea of brand ambassadors to the wall – and to his new partners.

In a short interval, putting out a call on social media, the three entrepreneurs amassed a pool of 9,000 ambassadors from around the world, each touting the clothing store and its wares to their own unique social media networks. In return, these influencers received perks such as discounted products and a percentage of the sales they helped generate. With the sudden success this brought, the team very, very briefly flirted with dropping out of MSU, but they stayed the course, valuing each class as a building block to improve their business acumen.

Their success also came with baggage – in this case, managing and tracking the many brand ambassadors.

“We would wake at 8 a.m. and get to bed at 2:30 a.m.,” recalls Baldwin of a time when they had to learn and deal with the demands of order fulfillment and tracking the ambassadors and the unique codes linking each to a sale. “At that point we were also juggling classes, papers and exams, too.”

The first pivot toward sanity and success came with the notion of building a software application to manage the ambassadors.

“Our clothing store wasn’t supposed to be a long-term business,” says Baldwin. “We were trying our skills at e-commerce and marketing, so when we came up with the idea for this new app that could solve our own problems, we pivoted. The second pivot came with the realization that our problemsolving app could be something for other Shopify merchants, too.”

The team entered the E-Center’s 2019 Startup Summit, where they pitched their app idea and swept both their own category and ultimately the entire competition, winning $9,000 total. They went on to triumph in the Fourth Annual SEC Student Pitch Competition in October 2019 for another $5,000 award.

“[The SEC competition] connected us with people we never would have had the opportunity to meet and gave MSU bragging rights, too,” says Waddy.

Waddy, Baldwin and Johns are termed non-technical founders – businesspeople, not software developers – of their app Buzzbassador. In fact, actual construction of Buzzbassador was outsourced through connections the three found on the Shopify site. Their app is now in the Top 10 of its Shopify category. It is available in the Shopify App Store, one of many opportunities available for merchants worldwide to find assistance with their e-commerce.

The team formed a C Corp for their product in 2020, operating as Rocketing Systems, Inc.

Up and running, Buzzbassador happily does it all for its merchant users. It helps onboard ambassadors, provides them a landing page of essential information, assigns them unique codes, tracks sales, manages rewards and rallies to other tasks, from major to miniscule.

During the journey, E-Center mentors – Director Eric Hill, Outreach Director Jeffrey Rupp and others – have listened and advised the team. The Center also enabled introduction to the Bulldog Angel Network, a Mississippi-based fund founded by venture capitalist and MSU alumnus Wade Patterson to provide investments for early-stage companies with MSU ties. After hearing skillful pitches perfected in the E-Center’s VentureCatalyst™ program, the Network’s members awarded a $90,000 convertible note to the team.

Patterson, impressed, keeps in touch with Waddy, Baldwin and Johns.

“The number of feature possibilities [in their app] is infinite, and I can see them going even deeper into the Shopify market,” he says.

In conceiving a solution for a challenge faced with their online clothing store, the Rocketing team realized they had an idea that could be the basis for a more far-reaching tech company.

Photo Courtesy of Rocketing Systems, Inc.

In late October, Rocketing Systems became the first Mississippi company to showcase at Venture Atlanta, a leading venture capital conference in the Southeast. The team’s selection marks them as a prominent rising technology company in the region – as well as one of this year’s youngest group of participants.

“Venture Atlanta went really well for us!” shares Baldwin. “We made solid connections with angel investors, venture capitalists and other investment funds and firms around the country. There was a lot of interest in our product and the “buzz” – pun intended – we’re creating in the Shopify and marketing automation space. We even caught the attention of the chief technology officer at Shopify, Jean-Michel Lemieux, who was a keynote speaker. He tweeted me to congratulate us on our success, so that was pretty exciting!”

At this writing, Rocketing Systems has raised more than $435,000 from various sources. The team continues to actively raise capital for their seed round, with several deals in the pipeline.

Earlier in the year, just as Rocketing Systems was indeed rocketing, along came the pandemic. Which, as it turns out, has not been a deterrent.

“COVID-19 is a horrible thing,” says Waddy, who has been taking the cue to hunker over his computer and grind away. “But because everything is more online than ever right now, this time has been good to us. Merchants are trying to find new ways to attract customers. We’ve seen a 29 percent month-over-month increase in our organic installations – meaning no paid advertising went in to attract those customers – since the start of the pandemic.”

During spring and summer, Starkville-based Waddy and Baldwin communicated virtually with Johns at his home in Tennessee, and they kept an unflagging pace.

Their success begs the question: Is it time to consider selling Buzzbassador while it is strong on the upswing?

Baldwin is quick to say, “In the next several years, we will concentrate on giving the best possible experience to our merchants and solving the problems for which it was created.”

Waddy allows that selling is, of course, an ultimate goal but agrees, “We need to be totally committed to what we’re doing now.”

Eric Hill steps in with praise.

“They’ve raised a significant amount of funding on a respectable valuation in the middle of a pandemic and civil unrest,” comments Hill. “And the fact that Mississippi State gets the attention it does means so much more to me because this is an example of what can happen when we work together in our state.”

He also notes that such successes resonate with talented young people who might otherwise leave Mississippi to seek their futures.

“Our program is offering the highly educated ‘under 30s’ a chance to get jobs and stay here,” he says.

Baldwin, herself a Mississippian, has no plans to leave.

“The E-Center still provides us mentoring,” says the company’s chief marketing officer. “We give Eric Hill updates regularly, and he points us to opportunities. We went there often when we could go places in person more easily.”

“We could not have done this all on our own. The E-Center has been fundamental in getting us started,” adds Waddy, the CEO. “The E-Center and its structured environment was important to me – not having that would’ve been detrimental. It has been the difference between Buzzbassador or working for somebody else right now.”

The team will remain intact too.

“You have three of us brainstorming together,” says COO Johns. “You have people by your side who are there for you no matter what. When we started with clothing in 2018, the thought of owning a Shopify application to help other businesses never crossed my mind. It’s amazing what has happened in just two years by being immersed in a market and learning and pivoting.”

At end of day – but not end of story – it is all about technology, how to use it cleverly and efficiently and mentorship from sources like the E-Center.

“I’m thankful to be in this generation where everything is so accessible,” says Baldwin. “It makes doing business so much more fun and makes us passionate about it.”