Founders: Madeleine Coleman
Madeleine Coleman was one of those few kids who constantly experimented with ideas and asked the question “what else is possible?” Even when she was in the later years of primary school she felt compelled to do something different. At a young age she sold clothes on Facebook and created her own Etsy stores. She treated business as a creative outlet. If there was a will to do something, Maddi would inevitably find a way to do it. The clearest example was when she wanted to travel abroad for a year. She had no real savings as a university student. Instead of hunkering down in a part-time job and saving up for a long period of time, her first thought was to build a business that simply allowed her to travel. She used her previous experience to build an executive assistant agency that ended up funding a full year of travel through Spain and Latin America. After that experience she simply knew there was no ceiling to what was possible through entrepreneurship. Now Maddi is building Glowback helping service businesses combat poor retention through customised two-way SMS conversations that bring clients back to book.
Before starting Glowback, Maddi spent time in a few different fields eventually accomplishing her dream of becoming a lawyer. Whilst business felt like a creative outlet, law was always something that fascinated her. She excelled in everything that mattered as a commercial lawyer like writing and analysis but ultimately felt like her potential wasn't being served. The real reflection was realising her vision of law was going to be ten years away locked behind tenure and bureaucracy. This was a career path that rewarded tenure above all other things. Maddi didn't have ten years to spare; her ambitions were bigger than that. Like the swing of a pendulum, her career shifted back to what excited her most: building interesting businesses and helping real people. From here Maddi's journey to Glowback was actually quite simple. As a customer she always felt that service businesses didn't have meaningful ongoing connections with customers and she herself wasn't rebooking appointments she actually needed. When her hair wasn't looking right she felt odd that she hadn't heard anything from her hairstylist. Not one prompt to rebook. Not one reminder that it had been four months since her last appointment. Surely it wouldn't be that difficult for a business to stay in contact with their clients. That was the beginning of the hypothesis.
She created a minimum viable product and talked to as many beauty businesses as she could. When outreach wasn't hitting the mark, Maddi went to where her clients actually were: social media. After real organic traction from her Instagram posts, her first clients came from following up on businesses that engaged with her content. Her trial users made it clear that businesses had large dormant client lists and gaps in their staff schedule that combined were costing thousands of dollars of recurring revenue. Owners knew how important outreach was but simply didn't have the time to fix it.
Maddi is one of three solo founders in the cohort. Running an entire business from the ground up takes dedication. There are few who are more passionate about the end client of this problem. Maddi is developing new understandings of the pain point from her customer conversations and accelerating years of development in a matter of weeks. Her favourite saying is "the customer owns the problem, the startup owns the solution". After conversing with many different owners, she knows the problem inside out and understands how the solution should be built for this space. Owners don't have the time to run outreach to maintain clients and soon they won't have to. Glowback will manage the client relationships end-to-end leveraging the world's largest behavioural dataset in the service economy.
