#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Mandy Poston, Founder & CEO, Availyst
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Making Food and Beverage Delivery a Personalized Experience
Availyst is a customizable delivery management platform that allows consumers to find and sort through local grocery, takeout, convenience, and spirit options. Mandy Poston, CEO of Availyst, spoke with us about her company, what policymakers can do to help bolster the success of new businesses, and the difficulties startups face trying to navigate American privacy law.
Tell us about your background. What led you to build Availyst?
I have about 15 years of experience in technology and operations. I was the first employee at another successful startup. It was a language technology company, which sounds really different but actually has some parallels to my current work. But before all of that, I grew up in the food space. I worked as a waitress all through high school and college. My uncle is a chef and my grandmother was a butcher, so I have always loved food. Every morning, food is the first thing I think about and when the pandemic hit, my daily thought of “What are we going to do for dinner?” turned into “How are we going to get dinner?” I started thinking about how we were going to get the ingredients needed for making dinner, which was a problem many people were struggling with at that time. Then one night, we were having socially distanced drinks with two of our friends and, as all great ideas happen over whiskey by a fire, they were talking about their worries about exposing their new baby to COVID because they couldn't figure out how they were going to get their groceries. And we just sort of said, there's got to be a better way, so we started working on Availyst. Availyst is an app that helps consumers find more local food and beverage delivery options by surfacing providers of all sizes with consumer preference driving the experience.
What is the user experience of Availyst?
You, the consumer, can log in to the application and decide whether you’re looking for groceries, restaurants, convenience, or spirits. Based on that, Availyst will surface all of the delivery players in your area, allowing you to compare options by what's most important to you at that moment. For instance, who can get it to you the fastest? Who has the lowest fee? Maybe you want to search by criteria such as “women-owned” or “minority-owned,” which can be built out in custom lists. Availyst will then give you results based on your search parameters. We don’t allow any providers to pay to be at the top of your list, creating a search experience that gives you exactly what you asked for.
Could you speak about your experience with StartOut? Are there any takeaways that you think policymakers should be aware of regarding support structures and getting entrepreneurs off the ground?
StartOut has been a great resource. Early on, I found that StartOut aligned with the values and goals I had as a founder, so I decided to go through its Growth Lab incubator last summer. I learned a lot there, and I’m also on the StartOut programming board now. On a more holistic level, I would say one of my takeaways from being in this program that policymakers should be aware of is that new founders often don’t know what they don’t know. It's really hard to search for information if you don't know the exact keywords, making it hard to find resources even if they already exist. When I was first starting off, I was looking into grants and loans but discovered they were really difficult to find or had really burdensome application processes, and it was unclear if they were relevant to my company. In the end, I wasn't able to find any that applied to what we do at Availyst. I'm sure there are some, but it's just so cumbersome.
Recently, I was having a conversation with someone whose entire business model is built around helping others take advantage of R&D tax credits. If they’re able to build a business off of this consulting, it shows there are a lot of other businesses and founders that don’t realize these incentives exist as an option for them. If they did, these incentives could probably save founders a lot of money. What it all boils down to is better knowledge management of what public resources are available. Because that doesn’t currently exist, a lot of founders feel like our only avenue is fundraising and there aren’t any other means of support. It's hard to get off the ground, and that creates a pattern of the same types of people being able to succeed again and again, especially in the tech space.
Your company was born in the pandemic era. What lessons did you take away from growing your business during that unique time? Were there specific challenges you faced that you feel policymakers could improve upon?
A particular challenge for me and many others trying to start a business during the pandemic was the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) fund. My understanding was that those funds were earmarked for companies that had lost revenue. Because Availyst was a new business and I didn't have the previous year’s revenue to compare against, I didn’t qualify for the program. But I could have used that extra bit of help. In times like the pandemic, necessity is the mother of all invention. That's when people have ideas. But there weren’t apparent resources for companies trying to get off the ground at that time (compared to the resources existing companies received to keep afloat.) So, it would be great for policymakers to consider those challenges as well. I mean, those early days are where so many people fail. If you're trying to build a scalable company that's not a traditional small business, even though there are lots of small business loans available, they won’t apply to your business and this ends up driving startups to the VC world, which is very exclusive. I think the government should work on providing more systematic support for companies in the early stages. Like with hiring, I wasn’t incentivized to grow my full-time team quickly and opted for a contractor model to remain flexible. Even though we probably could have used the extra staff, high fixed overhead was too much of a risk. If there was more support, businesses might be willing to take on more overhead for things like hiring.
Given the location-based nature of Availyst and the necessity of utilizing user data for the functioning of the app, have you run into any challenges complying with multiple different jurisdictions of privacy law? Have you experienced any other privacy law-related challenges?
I'm a proponent of privacy rules and standards, but they pose challenges for us as a mobile app business that is bought and sold through app stores. We have to comply with the app stores’ standards which are designed to comply with all the different privacy laws, no matter where our operational footprint is located. On the one hand, it makes it easier for us to comply because we just need to meet the single set of standards the app store lays out. Conversely, that means any time there is a new privacy law that the app store has to comply with, we have to make sure our product complies as well even if we’re not currently operating in that jurisdiction.
Another thing that is important for us to grow our company is the availability of user analytics, which helps us know how our product is performing and how to better serve our users. Measures designed to promote user privacy can pose challenges for basic business insights, like usage and retention. We would like to see a more nuanced approach to data collection, and perhaps more focus on the end-use of data. That would be helpful and would allow us to better serve our customers while respecting their privacy preferences.
What are your goals for Availyst moving forward?
We want to reach our mission, which is to help people find the food that they love and make it easy to get. While the app works nationally, we want to work with local small businesses in various geographies, creating a real community footprint, and getting to know those consumers. From there we would take that feedback, based on the geographies, and apply it across the U.S. Ultimately, we want to create a place where we remove the friction that exists between searching, organizing, and ordering food and beverages.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
Engine works to ensure that policymakers look for insight from the startup ecosystem when they are considering programs and legislation that affect entrepreneurs. Together, our voice is louder and more effective. Many of our lawmakers do not have first-hand experience with the country's thriving startup ecosystem, so it’s our job to amplify that perspective. To nominate a person, company, or organization to be featured in our #StartupsEverywhere series, email advocacy@engine.is.
