Feb 11, 2018
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While Ellie never really saw herself as growing up to be an entrepreneur, she did start a couple of businesses as a kid. Her favorite was a dog walking business when she was just six years old. Not very many people wanted to let a six year old take their dogs but it was Ellie’s solution to not being allowed to have a dog herself.
BeeCorp builds analytic software for beekeepers. Their first product can tell when a queen bee dies. The queen is the most important member of a hive because she has all of the babies and builds the community. When the queen dies the other bees go into major housekeeping mode instead of creating honey. Eventually the bees will just leave. BeeCorp helps beekeepers realize this sooner and solve the issue before the hive dies.
They love the technology piece, the alerts are super helpful and the beekeeper are actually providing BeeCorp a ton of information so they know what new products to build.
Ellie has been a beekeeper for 6 years and she’s always loved it. She even started a Beekeeping club in college. Colony collapse was just starting to get
The world has one-third of the population of bees we had in the 1960s. Climate change, pesticides, globalization, and beekeepers themselves are all continbuting to the problem. Ellie knows that she can’t necessarily solve the problem but her goal is to help beekeepers catch some of the results on their hives so they can diagnose the problem and fix it.
Both are actually a major problem in the beekeeping world.
Beekeepers actually steal hive from each other a lot. Beecorp clients have GPS senbsors in the hive so it can be found and the theaf could be prosecuted.
As for vandalism, the Beecorp sensors can tell the beekeeper quickly so that they can go out, fix the hive and save it for total demise.
They were raising money and they’d received a fair amount but they weren’t quite there yet. Ultimately one of the founders asked their landlord who pulled through along with another few final investors.
The pressure of having other peoples money is a huge difference. Ellie
An important moment of business ownership?
Having control over what you do and how you do it and create the culture of a community
Ellie can’t stand receiving all of the sales calls. Her number is on the website
Ellie and the BeeCorp team They want to be an employer that employees love to be at, keep hive and do research in an innovative way. Have more technical solutions for the problems beekeepers face. Build a database of information
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Music by Mark Vinten
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