After exiting his edtech startup Script in 2021, Tampa entrepreneur Aaron White only wanted to play hide and seek with his children. But White couldn't sit still.
"I'm a perpetual builder; I'm constantly doing something," White told an audience at Synapse Summit 2024. "... I'm looking to solve problems. And so, out of exhaustion of coming up with ideas and pitching — my wife was so annoyed, I was constantly pitching her ideas — what we landed on was [solving problems in our last business]."
The idea stuck and simmered in stealth mode for a year. White enlisted his previous co-founder Patrick Cahill and served as an entrepreneur-in-residence partnered with TampaBay.Ventures. At the Tampa tech conference Synapse Summit on Feb. 28, the team launched from stealth with Outbound.com, an artificial intelligence-powered marketing tool.
The website is currently only available through a private beta program. It plans to be a tool for creating customized marketing materials and facilitating outbound marketing for small and medium-sized businesses. The website will scan a user's website to pull colors, generate ads and launch advertising campaigns.
So far, building Outbound has been different than it was with Script, White said. It has a different customer base and rate of growth. Previously, the Script team learned as they built and pushed ahead of the industry.
"This time, I know how this works, and I know the right players to get on at the very beginning to make this as simple as possible for us," White said. "For us, we have a clear vision of where we're going and what that looks like. Now we just have to execute."
In May, Tampa Bay Inno exclusively reported that White had partnered with Cahill and venture capital firm TampaBay.Ventures. These individuals represent the "super team" to White and a deliberate foundation for the startup. In part, White also sought these partners to establish a Tampa company, White said.
"We could go out and go to the West Coast and build, but I think, for us and our family and the ecosystem, it means so much for us to be here," White said. "So we're being intentional about staying in the community and also being a resource to the community."
For Linda Olson, the CEO of the nonprofit business accelerator program Tampa Bay Wave and a mentor to White during his time incubating in Olson's program, that's a sign of Tampa's evolution.
"A sign of a healthy ecosystem is when you have lots of returning entrepreneurs; when you have only first-time green entrepreneurs, you're going to have only so much success, but returning entrepreneurs bring all the skills and expertise they learned from their first venture, and often there are more successful in second or third opportunities," Olson said. "... He epitomizes what we want in an ecosystem because even while he's growing his [new venture], he's still engaged."
