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Atlanta, GA | Posted: March 9, 2023
Breanna Durham, CREATE-X marketing strategist
Apply to Georgia Tech Startup Launch. The deadline is March 20.
Summary Sentence:
Richard Lee, an entrepreneur and graduate of Georgia Tech's and participant of CREATE-X summer startup incubator, Startup Launch, finally founded his own start-up success after five attempts and a career in the corporate world.
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Richard LeeRichard Lee, an entrepreneur and graduate of Georgia Tech's and participant of CREATE-X summer startup incubator, Startup Launch, finally founded his own start-up success after five attempts and a career in the corporate world.
The first company came out of Startup Launch produced a pants fitting software. That lasted four months. Then, he co-founded a company that was Google Photos before Google Photos was a thing. Then it became a thing.
Taking it as an opportunity to go another route, Richard would then go on to cofound a local travel guides app right before the pandemic, a college community software for hackathons, and a solo-preneur software that proved to cost him way more than the benefits. With each company, he learned a little more, following the Launch spirit of producing quickly, failing fast and then iterating something different until he got to a startup that worked.
Together with fellow Tech grad, Timothy Min, and a former coworker from a design firm called Maven, William King, Lee cofounded Supercopy. Lee said the idea came up as he and his fellow cofounders struggled to market. Good marketing required knowing the audience and making copy specifically speaking to the various types of people in that audience. Lee gave examples of marketers handling multiple roles or a large workload, prohibiting them from diving deeply into their audiences and tailoring messages.
“If it doesn’t connect, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’re also guilty of this. We also make emails that nobody opens,” said Lee.
The group has run Supercopy for the past eight months. Last year, they started using the Open Ai language model GPT-3 to prove out concepts. Doing so helped the team learn quickly about what works and doesn’t, he said. One of the things they learned in the context of marketing was that AI would sort of give you the answer you’re looking for, not what your audience is looking for.
“AI solves a lot of problems, but it also creates a lot of its own problems,” he said. “A majority of the market thinks that marketing is just creating content…If [people] don’t like you and you keep on sending them stuff, and it’s more stuff that they don’t like, you’re just creating a negative feedback loop.”
Now Lee and his co-founders are using their company to help marketers sit down and think deeply about who their audience is, then make copy.
“We want to make content that makes sense for your audience,” he said. “We want 100% personalized content, so that when they read it, they feel listened to.”
At Tech, Lee studied electrical and electronics engineering but spent his free time in the entrepreneurship spaces on campus. He got involved in GT Startup Exchange and the Student Innovation Design Collaborative. He took Startup Lab to learn more about creating a business and Idea to Prototype to create a product. He also attended CREATE-X workshops. Then, in the summer of 2015, Lee became part of the second cohort of Startup Launch. The group grew close.
“I think everyone came with the same focus,” Lee said. “Like how do startups work? Do I see a future in it? If things didn’t work, then what can I improve?”
In the program, Lee said he built confidence. The fact that CREATE-X invested actual dollars was a big factor, since it helped them get things they needed. In the program, teams create viable startups during 12 weeks in the summer. They receive $5,000 in seed funding and $30,000 of in-kind services like legal support. In addition, he and his team members had coaches that guided them to think deeply in the process.
Lee found the experience so impactful that he applied for a second time, participated in it for the 2021 cohort, and then came back to coach in the 2022 program once he graduated. Talking to other founders also kept his passion ignited, as they pursued startups, even when their livelihoods were secure.
“I think that was a big incentive for me,” said Lee “Knowing the value of providing compared to what I was getting out of it was pretty much symmetrical. The more value I give, the more I feel like I’m getting out of it.”
Lee keeps in contact with his cohort. They give each other advice and swap stories, commiserating on the struggles and celebrating together on the successes of the startup journey. Some are even his fellow coaches in Startup Launch.
“It’s interesting to see how we evolved as Startup founders over the last few years…Later on, that’s essentially your contacts in the market, people you can talk to about difficult things,” Lee said.
When he graduated Tech, Lee tried a more traditional route. He worked in cybersecurity, “the classic tech job.” At night, he part-timed teaching at Tech. Although he loved working with students, with his cybersecurity job, he realized his joy was slipping.
“No one was willing to take a risk… and everything felt like we will eventually get somewhere, that somewhere might not matter, but we will eventually get there,” said Lee. “I wanted to make an impact, and one of the fastest ways to make an impact is to directly solve someone’s problem.”
So far, things are looking good for Supercopy. Lee said Auburn University became their first enterprise customer. CREATE-X will even be using their software. They’re continuing to expand.
Looking back on his CREATE-X experience, Lee wishes he’d have mocked up his product quicker and started selling earlier, but also thinks it was great to start in college. There were less obligations; he learned the landscape of creating startups; and he became a part of a community of founders. Richard said that CREATE-X gave him the support to try.
Rahul Saxena, director of CREATE-X, said that the team was happy to support him in his journey of trial and error.
“Richard and his team exemplify what we encourage students to do in Launch,” said Saxena. “They kept trying. They found a problem to solve, went out to ask people about it, and made a product that serves customers what they need. I’m happy Richard came back to coach new cohorts in doing the same.”
For those interested in getting support to bring startup ideas to life, apply to Georgia Tech Startup Launch. The deadline is March 20. Apply now for a better chance at acceptance and feedback from our coaches to sharpen your idea.
