Grand Island Company Helps Digital Ventures Get Started
Grand Island’s tech industry is growing. Among the local companies at its forefront is CoFound.
Located at 214 N. Locust St., CoFound helps digital entrepreneurs develop their ideas and provide them with needed software.
“Our ultimate goal here is to build a launchpad for other businesses,” Founder Jon Rhoades said. “We want to invite people who are at the growth stage, the early stage, the point at which their struggling, to get growth or capital, whatever it is that they need, and help them through that path.”
Since launching in November 2020, CoFound has helped to bring about several new digital enterprises, The Grand Island Independent reported.
These include ValiData Outcome Services, which helps agencies that work with people who are going through substance abuse.
“As they go through that process, typically what happens is they get sent out into the world with no follow up or limited follow up,” Rhoades said. “ValiData helps solve that problem through a digital platform.”
CoFound also helped launch Yo.City, a mobile app platform that maps cities to be used by a Chamber of Commerce.
“It acts as a digital brochure for the city so they can share what their city has, what their destination has to offer,” Rhoades said.
The Locust Street space is open for people to explore their ideas.
“We generally get three or four crazy ideas a month that come in here,” Rhoades said, “and we work through them and figure out what it would take to get to the next step.”
Joined in these efforts is Logic Nebraska (formerly Nemetric), headed by Jeremy Heeg, which helps to develop the custom software for digital entrepreneurs.
The company has been serving central Nebraska for a decade, Heeg said.
“With CoFound coming up as a software development shop, it goes hand-in-hand with some of these efforts that CoFound is helping to launch,” he said. “It’s creating awareness that Logic exists but also helping some of these startups with technology consulting and trying to help them to spread their wings and fly.”
Digital entrepreneurship is still a new paradigm for many people, Rhoades said.
“We’re software as a service, and that’s the industry we’re probably most familiar with,” he said. “We’re also both business owners, and that helps with the development of the business side of it. Our goal is to ultimately create a business that could exist in Grand Island.”
Launching a startup can be difficult, Heeg said.
“As we’ve ventured into that arena, we’ve realized that it’s hard to find those resources,” he said. “CoFound serves as a way for anyone who wants to start something on their own. We want to help them out, help them make the connections we’ve struggled to make, so they can be more successful.”
He added, “Really, it’s just about helping people.” Such efforts benefit Grand Island and its economy.
“We can pull money from anywhere in the world,” Rhoades said. “As a digital platform, I can put together a service that somebody in California might want to take advantage of. So now we’ve transferred money from California to Grand Island, Neb., which is tremendous.”
Grand Island has advantages over some other regions, Rhoades said.
“Because we’re small and agile, we can move the city to surround and support that startup, whereas other places are too small and don’t have resources or are too large and it takes too much time to get the players in the room to create a more conducive environment for that startup to take off,” he said.
CoFound also hosts IdeaStorm, a monthly gathering.
“There’s three pitches where somebody comes in and talks about an idea or a problem that they’re passionate about,” Heeg said. “The other half is just discussion around those concepts and what anyone else participating sees as something they want to talk about.”
Rhoades, a Central City native, has a long career in the tech profession.
“I’ve done everything from climbing cell phone towers to put up wireless internet to working with small businesses to get their servers right,” he said.
Approaching the end of CoFound’s first year, Rhoades said the effort has been “encouraging.”
“We’ve seen people show up who want to participate. And from that we’ve seen businesses and ideas launched,” he said. “It’s been easy to connect with local government. From those connections, we’ve seen a little bit of funding and some help. The community itself has been really accepting. This downtown area definitely feels like a little village. They want each business down here to grow. Being a part of that energy is pretty exciting.”
This story first appeared in The Grand Island Independent. It was distributed as a member exchange story by The Associated Press.
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