Two Door County entrepreneurs say regional business pitch contest was worth the effort

DOOR COUNTY - The contest is over, but the pitch work continues for Dustin Overbeck and Emily Hubbard.

Overbeck and Hubbard are the two Door County-based entrepreneurs who placed first and second in the Lighthouse Launch pitch contest for aspiring and growing business owners Nov. 15 in Algoma.

By taking the top two places in the local contest co-sponsored by the Door and Kewaunee County economic development corporations, they advanced to the regional NEW Launch Alliance Pitch Event sponsored by New North, Inc., where they pitted their pitches against the top two from five other local contests across Eastern Wisconsin.

And while neither Door County representative won the regional competition, held Nov. 30 at TitletownTech in Green Bay, or the cash prizes for placing in the top three − $2,000 for first, $1,000 for second, $500 for third − each said it was well worth taking part.

For Overbeck, founder/CEO of municipal software development company HeyGov, the contest was a chance to get out the word on its new product, ClerkMinutes, a program that puts together meeting agendas, agenda packets and minutes from previous meetings in much less time than a municipal clerk would need.

"I wanted to use the opportunity to pitch our company not as a suite of tools for municipalities but to pitch our new product, which I think can be our rocket ship," Overbeck said. "The whole purpose was to see if we could generate interest from communities. The prize money would be nice (he did earn $1,000 for winning the local contest, while Hubbard earned $500 for placing second), but the PR we get from it was a higher priority."

For Hubbard, founder of Vente Tours, which is meant to provide visitors with personalized driving tours given by local guides, it was a chance to gain experience delivering the pitch for her business idea as well as develop contacts with potential investors. She said she'd never taken part in a pitch competition before the local one.

"I think the most important thing was just making the pitch, sharing it with enough people," Hubbard said. "I think it went so well. I'm really grateful for the opportunity to be around so many business-oriented people."

ClerkMinutes, making minutes and agendas easier

Overbeck got into municipal website design in 2001 when his uncle, then-Sevastopol Town Chairman Leo Zipperer, expressed interest in a website for the town that would be easy for staff and the public to navigate. He got the job (without Zipperer involved in the decision, he added), and a couple years later the town of Jacksonport asked him for a similar website.

More interest and work from other local governments led to Overbeck forming a company called Town Web as a full-time effort in 2007; it now has more than 750 municipal clients across the country.

But that company ran into problems when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020. Not because of its work, but rather, because a number of the municipal governments that were its clients canceled meetings or didn't have enough in-person attendance to achieve a quorum. This meant these governments weren't able to approve payments or mail out checks, which is how most of them paid service providers like Town Web.

"When COVID hit, the company faced a lot of challenges," Overbeck said. "For about two months, municipalities weren't meeting, so checks weren't being sent."

The situation led Overbeck to consider creating software that would help municipal governments become more efficient in their digital workflows.

The result was a new company founded in 2021, HeyGov, that allows people and municipal staff to make payments and perform online tasks they used to perform with paper and pen. People can fill out a form for the municipality, such as a license or permit application, submit it and pay the fees, all online, instead of printing out a copy of the form, bringing or mailing it in and paying by check or cash or having to go to the municipal hall to use a credit card. Municipal clerks also can respond or follow up online.

Currently, just over 100 governments have signed on for HeyGov, and it won the Information Technology category of the 2022 Wisconsin Governor’s Business Plan Contest.

"We found there was this big need," Overbeck said. "People want to pay online. … It's taking all (the municipalities') PDF forms and converting them to an online form."

Now, Overbeck wants to use the rapidly advancing and increasing prevalent artificial intelligence technologies such as ChatGPT to help streamline the work municipal clerks regularly face. He said he asked himself, "What can we build that uses this technology?"

The result is ClerkMinutes, which uses the technology to transcribe meeting recordings from speech to text and put together agendas. Overbeck said other programs are capable of similar work, but ClerkMinutes is different because it uses the ability of AI to include the names of speakers when assembling the minutes of prior meetings, which is legally necessary.

"ClerkMinutes is to reduce the amount of time to organize an agenda, the agenda packet and summarize meeting minutes," he said. "Right now, it takes at least five hours for a clerk to do that. ClerkMinutes takes about 30 minutes. .. It's taking away the drudgery, lessening the repetitive tasks."

ClerkMinutes is currently in use by 30 municipalities for free; Overbeck said they're basically beta testing the program. He's trying to raise funds to move the product forward; in fact, Overbeck was meeting with potential investors in New York in the past week.

And, regardless of the official placings in the pitch contests, Overbeck said contests such as these are worthwhile for entrepreneurs.

"I think a big advantage of taking part in any pitch competition is it's always a learning experience," he said. "It forces you to get your thoughts together and present them in a way that's concise and clear."

For more information, visit clerkminutes.com. For more on Town Web or HeyGov, visit townweb.com or heygov.com.

Vente Tours, personalizing your tour

Hubbard's idea, Vente Tours, has people create and book personalized, guided driving tours of a particular community or area, such as Door County. They visit the Vente Tours website (Hubbard hopes to develop an app, too) and create a profile that gets matched with a local driver/guide who knows the area and has the same interests, thus offering a customized experience with local flavor and knowledge instead of a generic tour.

"I feel like there's a special opportunity in profile matching," Hubbard said.

If the idea of going online or using an app to book a driver sounds a bit like what Uber offers, it was an Uber driver in Mexico City, where Hubbard lived for four years, that inspired her idea.

"I asked my Uber driver for so many recommendations," Hubbard said, "and I realized that was valuable. People who've been in a city for so long are proud of their city, know where there are things to see. I thought it'd be a good idea to create a structure for that."

Hubbard, who lives in Sister Bay in the summer and Milwaukee in winter, debuted her new business by giving free Sister Bay Storytelling test tours around the village over Labor Day weekend, after working with Sister Bay Scenic Boat Tours over the summer to learn about tourism. She said she received positive feedback from those initial tours is looking for investors to get the idea off the ground.

With a background in mechanical engineering, Hubbard said in her pitch she is looking to build a team that includes a software developer and someone with entrepreneurial experience. With the website up and running, she is looking to create the app and hopefully sell it to tourism services and related organizations. Along with investors, she also is seeking people interested in leading the driving tours, not just in Door County but elsewhere.

Hubbard said her pitch in the Green Bay contest drew interest from at least one potential investor, and the competition taught her much about presenting her idea to them.

"The feedback I got in Algoma was to detail my pricing structure and identify how I would roll out operations in Door County," she said. "In Green Bay, I was asked a lot of good questions that helped me realize it is important to explain that Vente is developing an app as a tech company, but that we are testing out the model in Door County to start."

Down the road, Hubbard said the business is looking to grow, of course, and adjust as Vente Tours grows.

"I've studied companies like DoorDash," she said. "They started out small and got things right."

For more information, visit ventetours.com.

This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Door County entrepreneurs say business pitch contest worth the effort