Today we’d like to introduce you to Jake Price

Hi Jake, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.

My story mostly begins in Champaign, where I studied entrepreneurship & information systems as a student at the University of Illinois. I became fascinated by the possibility of making an imprint on the world. Towards the end of my freshman year, I started a mobile app company that allowed bargoers to pay for a cover charge on their phone, rather than with cash. There was an accompanying app for the bar owners to get data insights about their customers & market to them in real time.

I worked and worked and made tweaks where needed, but the app never got anywhere. I came out of this experience having learned a lot, and having a refined existential purpose: to make the world more efficient & more informed. I wanted to give people information that would help them make better, less wasteful decisions.

I thought to myself – what skills am I missing? Sure, the app fizzled out for a lot of reasons that had nothing to do with me. But which reasons *did* have to do with me? I figured I was missing a technical skillset which would allow me to communicate most effectively with the engineers and UX designers bringing my vision to life.

So, I became a product manager at Walmart. I got to grow the skills I had lacked, and further my goals by introducing product capabilities that have saved Walmart’s customers more than 100 years in total time. Finally armed with the skills & experience, it’s time to turn the page and get back to my own venture: Agent.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?

Agent has been anything but a smooth road. Technology companies are expensive to build and I had to use personal savings + my income from Walmart to make it happen. About 4 months after we started, my cofounder who was building the backend for Agent had decided he did not want to see the project through. At this point the absolute best thing I could have done was to start over from scratch with someone new. Instead, I went with a contractor replacement that would attempt to fully bake what my previous cofounder had partially baked. Big mistake. This set us back a long ways in our development, spinning the wheels and overcomplicating the efforts to the point that I was spending a lot of my personal income and the app was not going anywhere. Biggest lesson I took away from this is: the people that work on the project with you are the single most important factor in how fast you’re able to bring your vision to life. You will not find success without first finding the right people to help you get there.

Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Agent?

Agent is a mobile app utility for your contacts. It is a somewhat altruistic model of contact management which provides its users with more information, faster, with guaranteed accuracy. Agent is really just getting started, but in its most useful future state, it will help its users remember their friend’s birthday’s, make sure they are paying the right person on venmo, quickly find an address, and more.

A core tenet of Agent’s offering is that users are granted agency over their information. On Agent, users request to connect with others with each choosing which specific information they want to share with the other.

One of our greatest challenges is what we call a cold start problem. For Agent to be useful to you, we need to have people that you already know on the app – but somebody has to be first! Accordingly, we are trying to get started on college campuses, which have pre-formed networks and subnetworks where this can spread faster.

The app is free to download, does not sell any of your personal information, and takes less than 2 minutes to sign up!

Contact Info:

• Website: http://agentcontacts.io
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agent.contacts/