From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like the Issa Selling. It was like we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Feiffer, the Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. I'm just going to come up with a theory here, but I think I'm right about this. I don't know you tell me. I think there are three kinds of companies.
Number one, companies that create a solution that people know they need. Company number two, a company that creates a solution that nobody needs. And then number three, a company that creates a solution that people need, but don't understand or don't know they need. We haven't thought about it. We don't see the need. Anyway, you can imagine how to bucket basically every company in the world into these groups. I don't know. Let's just say something simple. Let's say that you are a plumber.
Well, if you're a plumber, then you have a solution that people need and are very well aware, especially when their toilet is overflowing that they know they need. Number two, you could be that company that made a mug that controls the temperature of liquid from your phone. And that's a cool technology, but does anybody really need that? I don't think so.
And then there's number three, which I think is the most interesting because here a founder creates a solution that would really, really help people. And it's a very compelling, compelling pitch. But the problem is that it doesn't fit any of the active questions that clients are asking. So you have a solution and people just don't recognize that they need this solution, even though it would be useful to them. Now what's an example of that? Well, let me introduce you to Gary. So I'm Gary Cooper.
I'm the CEO and co-founder of Rebly. And what is Rebly? Rebly is a Chicago based climate technology company. And we mostly build solutions to help companies with reuse. So think, reduce, reuse, recycle. And we built software to help companies with reuse. Now what does that mean? How does Rebly help with reuse?
All right, well, let's say that you're an employee at a large company and you need to go procure something that you need for your work, which could be literally anything from chemicals to furniture. And so you go into your normal procurement workflow, which is to say the way in which you get new stuff. And then maybe you wonder, wait a second, does my company own the thing, like already own the thing that I'm about to buy for new? And if so, how do I find it? And is it available to me?
And now imagine the flip side of that. Imagine that you're at a large company and you're going to get rid of something that you don't need anymore. It's just been sitting around for a while. Maybe you're just going to throw it away. But also you spend a moment thinking, does anyone else at my company need this? Because if so, it would be great for them to have it instead of for me to just shut it. And I would say the founding to use cases that we please after.
There are some other ones too, but those are the main ones. So in other words, Reaply helps big companies reuse its stuff. It helps people who are going to buy a new thing realize that the company already has that thing and help people who are about to throw out a thing, find new use for it inside the company. And this isn't just a good thing to do. This is a massive money saver for organizations, massive. But of course the thing is that organizations haven't been thinking this way.
They haven't thought about this as a problem. They just buy stuff and they just chuck stuff, which means that when Gary went out to try to introduce this solution to clients, at first it did not make sense to them because they thought, ah, too complicated or we're doing fine the way that we've been normally doing things. So how did Gary and the Reaply team solve for that problem? How did they get more than one million items posted on Reaply? How have they gotten major clients?
How in the last year alone did they recapture more than $2.4 million worth of value and recaptured 491,000 pounds of stuff? That's really impressive. Well, that's what we're talking about today on problem solvers. Gary is going to give me his playbook for how he went out and his team went out and they introduced a new solution to clients that didn't even understand the solution, but eventually came to love it. Coming up after this break.
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So when brands choose paper-based packaging, they're helping to support the growth of our forests. Paper-based packaging is an easy way to do good for the planet. Learn more at howlifeunfolds.com slash innovations. All right, we're back. I am talking with Gary Cooper, the CEO and co-founder of Replay about how to introduce a new solution to people who don't necessarily know they need that solution, but they do.
And to start, Gary is going to orient us to where he comes from with this problem because this was also him solving a very personal problem, something that he saw up close all the time in a previous career of his, which wasn't as a startup founder, but as a scientist. So the business was started. I'm a PhD scientist, so I did 12 years of my life, 13 years of my life, have been in a lab, mostly working on Parkinson's disease.
So where the business got started, some of those materials were things you would find a laboratory. Whether they be a chemical, whether they be an antibody, whether they be in a buzzword that we've heard of the last three years, PPE, whether they be things that are connected to microscope systems or laser systems and things like that.
I would say just after 2018, we did Techstar Chicago, and we started working more with, I would say, more broad scale of corporate organization, so not just in laboratories and university. And there are a lot of the times to use cases are things that you work on or work with. So table, chair, keyboard, mice, not the mice that run around with the mice that you click, and then come maybe specialize equipment.
So I would say whether you are a large organization and you have no labs, you probably have a lot of furniture and especially in a COVID environment, you're probably thinking about reduction of your footprint, where does all this stuff go? And also are you also helping employees set up at home offices? Are you buying net new for all of those setups?
So all the way to helping laboratories, not just universities, but in national labs and also in commercial laboratory settings and helping them with all the inventory that flows out of those. So those are coming from the use cases. And then I would say the last year we've gotten into the world of what's called C&D or construction and deconstruction material. So these are the things that buildings are made up of, steel, concrete wood, glass. So we also have a whole offering for that as well.
So in a way, this is a classic entrepreneurial case of identifying a need and solving it. But I imagine that you ran into some challenges trying to get people to understand this because you think it's you are solving a problem, but you're not solving perhaps the problem in the way that people think there's a problem. That's right. And so what did you have to solve for as you try to introduce this to your potential customers? There's two problems that come to mind.
So the first problem, I'd say both it's top. So one is low friction to usability. And the second I would say is like, what's my why statement? Why would I do this? What drives engagement? So just to kind of give a few sentences to both. So the first is, hey, if I have a cash of furniture that I, my business no longer needs and I'm unsure what to do with them.
The thing I used to do was I'd either put them out back if a person just haven't picked up our local waste management folks on a city or maybe if I'm more sophisticated, I might try to liquidate them and try to get a dollar for every hundred dollars of value. And that kind of worked for people. And the way of the world that kind of worked. So that's kind of what I would say if it's the Amazonian, it's the kind of Amazon to everything.
Like if it's not super convenient, then like why would I ever try to inventory this stuff that I was just going to give away or inventory this stuff I was going to throw away? Right. So like, can I just say as an employee of many companies, I have been shocked at how useless things become to companies. They just, oh, I can just take this chair home because you were just going to throw this chair away.
Like it was, it's crazy, but that's what happens because I guess, I guess there just wasn't a better solution to do something with this. So they were perfectly happy to just chuck things or have. That's right. Take them. That's right. And the second is around engagement, which is if I'm an employee doing cancer research or I'm an employee at a organization, I'm managing furniture.
Why should I post something on a platform to give it more visibility, to give it more usability with our organization? What's my personal why to doing that? So these are questions that we try to answer at their very top when we started the company. And as a scientist, I never think anything is done. I think you're always re-answering the same kinds of questions. But we've gotten some answers. And we've gotten better at trying to help. One way is, is we try to...
Well, actually, we'll go up Gary. But before you go to how you thought about it, can you take me into some of those early conversations and how people just did not understand the things that we're trying to help them with? Oh, yes. So, a conversation that comes to mind with, I'll just say, a Chicago University that we continue to do work with is someone saying, well, you know, this isn't, how is this going to count against my granting?
So the way that grants are normally expensed is that if I give you a grant, I'm the federal government. I give you a grant for $1,000 to do cancer research. It's your job to spend $1,000, meaning if at the end of the year, you only spend $900 of those dollars. What's going to happen in next year, we're only going to allocate $900 to you. It's smaller grant for you. Yeah. Smaller grant for you.
So there's this like background psychology of, wait, you're saying don't spend the money I've been allocated. I got to spend it. And so two things that we can't, we employ and doing some more research that we were able to do. The first is, yeah, but spinning it on what? Right? Like, why should you be buying stuff that is commonplace that's in surplus, that's overrunning, next door, a lab next door?
Shouldn't you be buying the stuff that's not commonplace that's really important for your research, saving those dollars and employing them more strategically? So having scientists think like business people. And then the second was actually turns out there's a whole bit of government regulations that require you to do what Riekewee is doing. I didn't know that at the start of the business to be quite frank. This is a whole thing called uniform guidance.
It's a whole multi hundred page booklet of like, when you take federal tax money, what she, the procurement guidelines, when you buy stuff with us money, what are the kind of overarching procurement guidelines? And turns out there is a meaty section around, oh, when you buy something with tax charge and taxpayer money, before disposing it, you have to make it available to other folks who have taxpayer money. Right?
So if I bought something with grant money, I didn't make it available to other grantees before I get rid of it. How do I do that at scale? So that was kind of two of the ways that we started tackling the, like, I got to spend my money. Yeah, but on what? And by the way, you need to curateize your spend for the future by complying with government guidelines.
So if I can scale out that kind of interaction, you're going to organizations, whether they're companies or universities or science labs or whatever, and you're saying, look, I have a solution here. There's a lot of waste happening at your organization right now. Either you're buying stuff that you already have and you don't realize or you're throwing the waste stuff that somebody else can use. Exactly. And so why don't we help you reduce that waste?
Because you know, not just because hearts and rainbows, we should reduce waste, but because it literally saves you money. And their answer to that is often, but the thing that we're doing right now works perfectly fine. Yes. Yes. So, so how do you, right? This is really hard because because this is so common, right? This is so many businesses. Like, yeah, there's a better way to do this.
But not everyone is waking up thinking, I need a better way to do this because they're like busy doing lots of other things. And so figuring out how to navigate this one thing may not be helpful. So how do you tell that story in a meaningful way that makes them willing to go through the process of working with Replay, which is, you know, it's asking them, it's asking things of them. It's asking them to learn a new thing. It's asking them to think of their systems in a different way.
And even if there's a positive outcome at the end of that, there's some amount of onboarding and rethinking that needs to be done. Yes. So one of the, I mean, our first bits of our first clients and a huge bit of our client base was research leaders. And so as a person who's been in research, again, in most of my professional life, I don't think you, you win their hearts and minds. I think you win their thinking.
And so the, what I thought was like, okay, what we got to do is we actually just got to go create the data. We got to go and create some case studies, publish them, literally publish them so that they know that they're real, they're reputable. And then just say, do you disagree with the data? So what we decided to do was make our pricing extraordinarily cheap. I mean, so cheap that like if you said no to it, you just don't like us.
Like it's not like this is going to be owner is from a pricing perspective. And so we did that with our first five clients, basically. And we just said, hey, we just want to work with you. We know there's a huge upside. But all we were trying to do was get the actual empirical data to one published and to show the other 99.9% of the market that this is something that they should be looking at.
So just to give you an example, the University of Chicago was our second customer and they, so in that five cohort. And after three days of launching, just three days of launching in one department. I think it was like the biology department or something. We had saved them over $700,000. Wow. So that was so big to help people wash the news in Chicago. Those are the news. You know, these are things that are going on the news anymore. And that didn't happen by itself. What happened?
Who ran to the news and told them that story? That would be me. And I can, and of course, you should call us like, oh my God, we get to tell this story. And now we do a lot of work with the University of Chicago much broader than that department. And they become a leader in this space in some ways. And so it's really about, and then we publish that work in those stories in nature, which is the most prestigious career you journal in scientific research.
We continue to support and go to sustainability and kind of academic merging conferences. So where academics are going to learn that, how can they make their universities and labs more sustainable? So we continue to march on that even though our slope of interest is much broader than the lab these days. But yeah, I mean, I don't think there's any, especially when your audience is trained to be critical, trained to not trust things.
I think there's no way in getting around just creating the data, going out and doing the hard work. But you still need a willing partner to say, yes, even when you're trying to do a pilot or when you're trying to get access to a few dollars to be to do something. And actually also as a company, you have to have the resourcing to be able to do that. So to not putting all of your financing of this project on the customers back at the beginning.
And so that's kind of tough because it was really tough for us to fundraise because even though I knew we had a hundred plus billion dollar marketing United States, you got this scientist guy who's never run a company before who's talking about some type of eBay and science kind of thing. And investors are like, what is this? Yeah. It's hard for me. And we all know the realities of African Americans and how much they've been funded in the venture world and technology.
So there were some headwinds, but there's some headwinds and trying to figure out Parkinson's disease. And I crash right into that. And I'm crashing right into trying to figure out how we can rid the working world of obvious waste. That's right. If we didn't go into headwinds, we'd be going nowhere. That's right. So you're based in Chicago. Yes. I was just in Chicago recently talking to the YPO group there. And somebody, oh, we could have been there together.
So somebody in the crowd asked me this interesting question, which started an interesting conversation among the YPO folks. And I'm reminded of it as I'm thinking about you trying to figure out how to help potential clients understand your value. So this guy raises his hand and he says, we have some, and I don't remember the details, but we have some kind of sustainability solution and we hear all these companies talk about how they think sustainability is so important.
But then when we go to them and we say we've got the solution for you, they don't seem to care or it's not as a top priority for them or just something is not working. And so this started an interesting conversation in this YPO group. And the thing that I, the response in the room that I love the most was somebody who said, here's what we figured out. We figured out is that somebody in an organization is incentivized to find sustainability solutions.
Like a lot of people in the organization are told that sustainability is now some kind of priority. But there's one person probably, this is like one executive who is incentivized, who's like bonuses are tied to sustainability goals. You got to find that person because that's the person who will selfishly see you as an asset. And it's easier to sell yourself to someone who selfishly sees you as value to them.
Then it is to try to convince somebody who is not incentivized to work with you, to work with you. And I wonder if you found something similar as you go to organizations of all kinds that like you need to figure out the right person who not just understands what the hell you're talking about, but is literally able to benefit from what the hell you're talking about. Yes, so I have maybe three big things to say about this. So bear with me. The first is, yeah, brother, that's right.
So it's the common phrase, if you know, show me someone's incentive, I'll show you an outcome, right? It's that kind of thinking. If you do have an incentive, that's a line with an outcome for an employee. Yeah, they're going to drive that outcome because they're incentive. That hasn't historically been the case per your question, right? So the board might have, and shareholders might have an informant ESG perspective that they're pushing down to the C-Sweets-Lash CEO.
But how does that make it down to IC is in director level people to adopt sustainability solutions? It don't. And the thing I will say is I have written a brief, maybe having a promotion entrepreneur, where I've called on us to change that framework and thinking that in order for a business to drive to net zero, I think it's impossible to do unless you have your own company. Your entire employee-in-base engage. Okay, what business it is.
And so I think just like revenue, you should be inciting people that if we hit our net zero goal, our ESG scores will climb, our stock price on some basis will potentially also climb. We should share in that one for the people who actually made that work at an employee-base, which is potentially all of our employees. So I think we should take our waterfall approach like we do in profit sharing when it comes to revenue and profit goals with employees as we share with sustainability.
What we did early days at Reeply though is to go, okay, if a director who's been doing their job for 25 years gets a call with Reeply and they go, why should I do this? Well, can we personally incentivize that employee to post something on the platform that they no longer need? And is they post something on the platform? Can we show them their impact? Literally can we give them money? And so that's what we did. We gamified every activity or feature set on the platform that drove business volume.
You put that chair that you no longer using, you get points. You take that chair off that instead of buying a net new chair, you get points. And as you get points every month on the top point, and we had a leader broke on the homepage for every client to see and to provide a little bit of FOMO, but basically every month we would give the top point, get her a $500 visa gift card or we would donate it to a charity that they could pick out. And so it wasn't just the organization getting a benefit.
It was the actual employees who were driving the change within these organizations who actually got the benefits. So we connected their incentive to the businesses over arching goals, operationalized through our products and our solution. And that really drove a lot of our business. And so we're actually now putting a lot more investment into how do we think about not just incentivizing employees, but also how do we educate employees?
A lot of times these sustainability goals come out, especially in this world of circular economy. And people are like, what's that circular economy thing? I don't know what that means. And it's like sharing. You know, this is what I talked about in the TED talk. There's a bit of lingo that my space uses to articulate really common and really digestible concepts.
But by calling things something that someone's never heard, you immediately undue, you opt them out of potentially helping you and helping their business. And so we think there's a total package beyond engagement and beyond incentives. We think there's an educational piece. We think there's a language piece, but we are working on, on working on this on a broad scale. What I would also say though is the market's changing and everything you're setting you're opening, I think is true still for us.
But what I will say is, especially at the university level, there is a heartbeat and an energy with Gen Z that I can't find in a sense of program that be harder than that.
And so the other thing that we do is we try to engage, whether it's a university, student leader, student sustainability leaders, whether it be on the MBA in the business schools, whether it be in the undergraduate schools or ERGs who are interested in sustainability within a large company, in the government and the municipalities sectors, or tend to be kind of alliances.
So we try to find the people who care not just because we're going to give them incentive that helps their personal bottom line, but they see a future that they have to live in or their kids have to live in, that will be influenced by the actions that we do right now. And so I think what we've learned at Reefly is we have to do two things at once.
We have to incentivize what I would call the my parent's generation to look at a program both for what it can do for the company, but also how it can help their job and potentially how it can help their bottom line and do that in a way that's contextually rich and in language that they understand. And at the exact same time, we have to find the future leaders and we have to say, hey, you got to help your business operationalize this program.
And honestly, in the out years, you're going to be the business to the factory or not of what we do right now or not. And so we've, that's taken a few years for us to learn, but now we kind of do both those things. Gary, I love how you expanded upon that line of thinking because the anecdote that I shared with you was a solution about finding a person inside of an organization that is already incentivized to listen to you basically.
And you said, yes, that's true, but also you can create more champions by creating incentives and also that the people who are most aligned with you may not be people who are incentivized through their employment contracts. But they may be incentivized culturally, like for example, if they're younger workers and they're more aligned. So that's a really wonderful way of thinking about the multiple different touch points that you can have or create.
As, as people listen to this as a kind of concluding thought, I'd love for you to share. Let's say someone hears this and they're thinking, this is the problem that I have. I have a great solution and I just cannot seem to communicate it properly to the people who I know can benefit from it. That's right.
I talked about a whole bunch of things that you've done it deeply to do that, but maybe take yourself back to the beginning and offer that person who's listening right now something that they can be thinking about or evaluating or some red flag they can be looking for. Some way to start to say, aha, I see that this is the disconnect and now I know how to think through connecting.
I love this question and true inform as a scientist, my answer will be somewhat verbose, but the things that come to mind are threefold. The first thing is I don't think you can fake it. I am passionate about this, Brogye. I'm slamming the table. I am passionate about what we're doing. Just as passionate as I was in my 10 year career trying to find some type of answer for Parkinson's patients. Something that's still leaves my heart and there's no one in my family.
There's no one in my immediate friend circle that has Parkinson's. I just got close to the problem said and I got close to the community. The very first thing I think about is especially as a business leader or as a CEO or founder thinking about a solution that benefits us in the out years from here, not just today. You have to have passion.
It has to bleed from you and people have to be both inspired within your organization and customers and supporters and people who have to do something like, I want that come to succeed. I want that entrepreneur to succeed. I don't think there's a substitute for that. The second thing is you got to recruit some disciples. They aren't just working for you. You have to find people who are maybe in the company but maybe come to adjacent the spouse, a student in intern.
Someone who has a voice of someone and go, but it all is waste. What's happening over there? Why did they put that thing over there? Where's all this construction waste go? Someone who can be, yes, you're choir to your pastor. And so we have those people who amplify our values and amplify our mission and vision. We don't pay them anything. We don't have a business relationship with them. They just believe like we do.
But we've been intentional in trying to find those folks and champion their stories and elevate them. And then I think the third thing is I don't think any change happens whether you're trying to get a low manager to take something. I don't think any change happens without some type of proof, case study, empirical data that maybe there's a pot on the other side of this proposed rainbow.
And so the thing that we had to do at the very start, which was super hard, was to generate data and know whatever had. Like I remember going to procurement leaders saying, do you know how much? Okay, you have this budget is big or this big. How much of that budget is going to go into surplus? Meaning no matter what we do at the end of the year, we're going to have X percent of our span, not use. And not a one of the procurement leaders could tell me what that number was.
Not even like an estimate of it. And I said, okay, the thing we'll do together, if you lot us as we'll try to come up with an estimate. And then the second thing we'll try to do is try to whether it's 1%, whether it's 4% or the in a university case is ended up being about 4%. Okay, great. What would it look like to reuse 1% of your budget? And I can tell you in Northwestern University, the spending is about $900 million a year.
So turns out 1% of 9 million is a really good number, especially when most grants and labs on order of a mill, grants that fund a lab for five years or on the level of $1 million. So I think being passionate, I think finding your tribe and finding people who will amplify you like, upvote you, reshare, repost, comment. And then I just think having some bit of early data that starts to empirically show that you're chasing. There's some value there that's on top. Those are some of the three things.
There is no better answer than a comprehensive scientist answer. Gary, thank you so much for walking us through all this. Oh, thanks for having me. This is the awesome. And that's our episode. I would love to hear what you think and maybe even about a problem that you solved. You can find me at my website, Jason Fyfer.com, J-A-S-O-N-F-E-I-F-E-R.com. Also I have some more useful stuff for you. I write a newsletter about how to future proof yourself and become more adaptable and optimistic.
I would love for you to sign up. It is at jasonfyfer.bulletin.com. Also check out my other podcast. It's called Build for Tomorrow. In each episode I take on some belief that we have that holds us back from progress and show you why it is not as bad as you think. Problem solvers is a production of entrepreneur media and comes out every Monday morning. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode. Thanks to Deepa Shaw for production. My name is Jason Fyfer. See you next week.