month. He declined to name the organization he’ll be working for, saying only that it’s “established” and “not large.” He will continue to be based in Madison.
DiMarco, meanwhile, is still weighing his options.
“It’s been such an intense five years [that] I don’t even know where I want to go next and what I want to do,” he says. “For all I know, you might find me waiting tables in Bali or selling t-shirts on the street in India. I could literally be doing anything.”
MobileIgniter had four employees, including Nott and DiMarco. Nott says that both of the others accepted severance packages.
DiMarco said it’s possible he’ll work with Nott again in the future. The two met in 1994 when they were students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and kept in touch over the years before creating MobileIgniter. “We still have a really solid personal and business relationship,” DiMarco says.
Their startup came a long way from its beginnings. It was originally conceived as a platform for developing iOS and Android apps using a Web browser. That concept got MobileIgniter accepted into the first class of Gener8tor, an accelerator for early-stage companies that runs programs in Wisconsin and Minnesota, in 2012.
DiMarco says that soon thereafter, a bevy of entrepreneurs and startups flooded the market, “and it became a race to the bottom on price.”
So MobileIgniter pivoted, and would later pivot again.
First it developed Lyft.io, a product that focused on equipping drones with software to assist with building inspections and other tasks. DiMarco sounds wistful as he describes what he feels was poor timing. “We were so far ahead of it,” he says. “The FAA just made some [recent] changes that actually could’ve made some of the stuff we were doing back then legal.”
MobileIgniter then shifted its focus to IoT. The ultimate goal was to create and commercialize a novel device. Since that would require a significant amount of capital, the team decided to do IoT-related consulting work to keep revenues flowing.
“We played with several product ideas, but none of them passed the customer validation steps,” DiMarco says.
MobileIgniter is the fourth of Gener8tor’s 42 graduates to go out of business, says Troy Vosseller, who co-founded the accelerator. The other three are DineInTime, SpanDeX, and Zero Locus, he says.
(While Gener8tor considers Zero Locus a failed company, Vosseller notes that it has been reincarnated as Functor Reality. Art Mellor, who co-founded Zero Locus and served as its CEO for three years, left the company last year, according to his LinkedIn profile.)
Meanwhile, four startups in Gener8tor’s portfolio have been acquired: Driblet Labs, Docalytics, Optyn, and Modern Movement (which Nautilus acquired in September, Vosseller says).
Gener8tor was one of several investors in MobileIgniter, along with American Family Insurance, according to the website CrunchBase. MobileIgniter raised a total of $311,000, according to the site, and Nott says that figure is roughly accurate.
One of the steps involved in winding down the business is filing dissolution papers with the State of Wisconsin, DiMarco says.
“It’s actually remarkably simple,” he says. “You have to pay off all of your bills, but it’s not as if we have creditors. There is no bankruptcy going on.”
Nott says one thing he learned from MobileIgniter that he’ll carry with him into the future is the importance of keeping your ears open, and acknowledging that your grasp of the market is never perfect.
“Spend time understanding your customer,” he says. “It costs very little to just call people, have conversations, and try to find pain points.”
