“Ambition,” said Joseph Knecht, CEO and founder of VentureTech, “is not a standalone feeling.”
He’s talking about the fact that small startup companies often have one big limiting problem: they operate in a vacuum. According to Knecht, the answer is to surround oneself with passionate experts and reach out to potential customers before a product is developed to ensure it is something they’ll buy, even pre-selling it to guarantee its success.
That’s what VentureTech is all about. The company helps business owners vet an idea, write a plan, create a product and market it. The company goes one step further, investing in its own customers as a passionate, ambitious and involved partner.
Knecht said the group-ambition and pre-selling approach to business constitutes a fundamental evolution in the approach to entrepreneurship that hinges on technology, one of VentureTech’s specialties. “Ten years ago, if you went directly to a potential customer with an undeveloped product idea, they’d have laughed you out of the building,” he said. “Now, we are used to looking at ways we can use technology to make successful products a reality.”
One of VentureTech’s ventures, Fanstreamm, is a good example. The online group-ticketing platform for sports events allows users to invite friends to games and then manages the ticket-buying process. The owners already have sold it to 37 baseball teams, grossing $180,000 — and it hasn’t been built yet.
How did Knecht know this approach would work? Because he used it on his own company. He surrounds himself daily with experts at VentureTech, who know how to use their exponential ambition to turn ideas into highly successful products for four to six companies each year. Personally, he loves it. His own ambition is — and always has been — to make money by helping other people make money.
Kindra Foster is a professional writer and our ground reporter covering Nebraska.