Ever since Phil Terrill bought his first pair of sneakers at Friedman’s in North Minneapolis, he knew he wanted to do something related to shoes.
That dream became a reality last summer when Terrill founded SoleSafe, an insurance platform designed for the “sneakerheads” who are fueling an industry valued at approximately $70 billion in 2020, according to Statista. Earlier this week, SoleSafe was selected as one of the 10 startups that will participate in the inaugural Minnesota Twins Accelerator by Techstars.
Terrill’s sneaker collection has ebbed and flowed in size as life events passed by, including graduating from St. Paul Central High School, then Tuskegee University and upon landing his first job at Microsoft’s campus in Fargo, N.D.
But Terrill didn’t see an entrepreneurial link to his passion for collectible sneakers until he was getting ready to insure his wife’s wedding ring. That was a light-bulb moment when he realized he wanted to insure his sneaker collection — which takes up an entire room — in a similar fashion.
“I wanted to track every sneaker of my collection in an automated fashion,” he said. “And if I did want to insure it, I wanted it to be very simple to do and not just a blanket policy and be confused about the language and the insurance documents.”
But insurance carriers didn’t quite follow along.
“It immediately became, ‘Is it memorabilia? Who wore these shoes?’" Terrill said of the calls he made.
After growing tired of convincing insurance carriers that the coverage should exist, Terrill decided to create it on his own.
Even though Terrill’s background was in cloud computing, not insurance, he wasn’t deterred from jumping into an industry that rivals the complexity of sneakerhead culture. He instead focused on the things he knew well, such as connecting with the culture and the collectors themselves.
But frustrations arose as the company evolved around the solo founder.
“The idea became less of a cool concept and then it was like, ‘Oh, we’re actually building an app,'” he said.
In order to build out that app, Terrill turned to an outsourced development team he connected with during his tenure at Microsoft. He also needed to create his own formula to generate premiums.
Now that the Minnesota Twins Accelerator is underway, Terrill is planning to shift from bootstrapping the company to opening a pre-seed round of fundraising. He's also gearing up to hire a head of insurance by the end of the year, which will propel the company out of its current form, which limits the number of users, to a broad release.
