Nashville's startup scene is roaring like a Saturday night on Lower Broadway.
Eye-popping funding rounds, multimillion dollar exits and a wave of businesses launching outside of the city's traditional health care ecosystem have elevated Nashville's profile in the startup world, while inspiring a new generation of entrepreneurs to innovate.
To cover this unprecedented era of entrepreneurship in Music City, the Nashville Business Journal is launching a new outlet called Nashville Inno, your go-to source for reporting on early-stage startups and innovative companies and entrepreneurs in Middle Tennessee.
To celebrate Inno's launch, we found six creative Nashville entrepreneurs under the age of 25 that are hustling to build their startups into the city's next success stories.
Some of these young entrepreneurs are juggling running their business while still attending college, while others are searching for funding to take their startups to the next level. All have faced never-before-seen challenges to construct a new business amid a global pandemic.
But as one founder told us, these entrepreneurs "don’t really take ‘no’ for an answer."
What is GoodPepper? It’s basically on-demand meal kit delivery. We are planning on officially launching in early 2022, but we are doing a soft launch in October. What we are doing is kind of a mixture between HelloFresh and Uber Eats. Instead of going fully software, we’re really digging into the actual food and produce side of it. The way we think about it is “inconvenient meals with convenient delivery.” … You go to the website, order the meal and it’s at your door within 30 to 45 minutes. We’d like to scale that, of course, across the U.S., but Nashville is the proving ground and where the headquarters will be.
What made you want to start a food company? In early 2020, I had a really good friend ask me, “Jordon, what do you do because you love to do it, not because it’s for your career?” I didn’t have an answer for him. But very quickly that thing became home cooking, especially when we went into quarantine and all I could do was either play video games or cook. … I started digging into really unique recipes. I was making 8-hour-long braised pork shoulder and French omelettes and things that I never thought I could. If you had asked me two years ago [if I could cook,] I would have told you I would burn cereal. I literally could not cook anything.
How did you learn to cook? I just taught myself. I got this French cookbook that I just started going through recipe after recipe. Then I ordered a Mexican cookbook, then a Creole, sort of New Orleans cookbook to try to get back to my roots as a Black person and experience that cuisine. Every time there were these beautiful stories about where these dishes came from, and they were things I never thought about when I went out to a restaurant to eat a burger. … My goal was never to start a company with the food, it was just to find something that I loved. But it just so happens that I’m entrepreneurial at heart, and I see a really big opportunity.
What got you interested in entrepreneurship? I went to Belmont to study music business, and I realized I didn’t love the music world as much as I thought I would. I came across this podcast called “Startup,” which was started by former “This American Life” producer Alex Blumberg. I just listened to his journey of starting something, and at the same time I was trying to start an organization on Belmont’s campus. I just fell in love with the process of building things. So, I switched my degree to entrepreneurship. … I ended up starting a company called College in Color while I was in college, selling coloring books to university mental health counseling services. I sold 10,000 books over the course of those two years, and I fell in love with … the process of bringing something from an idea to reality. It’s almost like music, but with a little more revenue.
How are you raising funds for GoodPepper? Primarily friends and family. … It is still very terrifying asking people that you know for money, because the reality is it could just all go out the window. But on the flip side, I feel like I’m bringing people that I care about into what could potentially be something very lucrative or at least very fulfilling to be part of. We plan to raise a pre-seed round mid next year.
What’s the hardest part of starting a company? Rejection. Rejection sucks. I started talking to angels very early on, and as you can imagine there were constant ‘Nos’. … There are a lot of reasons angels don’t invest in pre-revenue companies. So, getting that rejection sucks, but you learn a lot from it.
Age: 24
Company name: GoodPepper
Year founded: 2021
Employees: 1 full time
Total money invested: $7,000
Total money raised: $80,000
Revenue: N/A (pre-launch)
Any programs or business incubators you have participated in to help launch or grow your business: “None specifically for GoodPepper, but I’ve gone through plenty in the past that have helped me grow, including Belmont’s entrepreneurial incubator and the [Nashville Entrepreneur Center’s] PreFlight.
