Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Brandon Winfield. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Brandon, thanks for joining us today. Before we talk about all of your success, let’s start with a story of failure. Can you open up about a time when you’ve failed?

I could write a book on the failures or as I like to call them. “hurdles”, that I have encountered along this journey of growing a start-up. The one that hit me the most was working with a consulting group that told me they would develop iAccess Life at no cost to me, just a percentage of the company. A percentage in hindsight, that was incredibly too high. This is one of those “failures” that I believe taught me a lot and got us to where we are now.

This group that shall remain nameless, introduced to a Dev team out of Romania that we would be working with. The head of the Dev team even came to town and we got to meet and see all the previous work they had done. I was so excited because I had finally found a group of people who believed in what I was building and would bring my vision to reality, something to seem so far fetched at the time.

We started working together and the first couple of months went smoothly with check in calls and updates on the design process, where we were with development and everything else. It got to the point where we would be expecting the first version of the application to test in the coming weeks, but it never came. The beta app. release kept getting pushed back and pushed back for months. It was starting to become embarrassing to the people I had been hyping up about this application.

Then one evening around 8pm, we finally got the first version! We were supposed to have a native iOS and Android app but only received a version for android. As soon as I opened the application on my friends phone it started to crash left/right. It wasn’t even close to being done. I called the consultants to ask what was going on and they explained to me that this was just the first version and that they were working on patches. I asked them who was working on patches? Considering that it was 2am in the morning in Romania. They eventually told me they were working with someone hear in Atlanta that had been finishing up the application.. not the original development team they had introduced us to.

There was never talks of them running low on funds or trying to cut back on budget, they never asked for my sign off and everything was pretty much smoke and mirrors and now here we were, with an app that didn’t work and close to half of my company in these peoples hands. Needless to say in the days that followed, their were some choice words exchanged on my end and we severed ties. It broke my heart to feel so close just to find out I would have to start all over again. Fast forward to today, this was all a blessing in disguise and was something that needed to happen to help me get focused, find myself, grow and get back on track with my plans. I believe this “hurdle” is what made me who I am today.

Brandon, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Ever since I can remember, my goal and dream was to become a professional motocross racer. At the age of 14, I ended up crashing at a race that left me paralyzed from the chest down. It was hard to accept but I knew the risk of what I was doing. I knew I wanted to continue living my life the same way I always did hanging out with my friends and experiencing new places. As I started to travel, I quickly realized that there was a lack of consistency when it came to accessibility from place to place. I’ve never been someone to complain and felt like if I was experiencing these issues that there had to be so many others that were dealing with the same thing. I decided that I would find a solution for this problem and that was by developing a mobile application.

After many years, many attempts and shortcomings, we were able to launch iAccess Life into the iOS and Google play store in April of 2019. Since then we’ve had over 13,000 users visit the application and contribute over 7,000 unique locations rated in all 50 states and over 35 countries. As we continue to grow the brand of empowering users to live their best life, using our application, we have also partnered with Passport Parking to start making an impactful change.

Our partnership with passport will not only allow for users to pay for parking sessions using our application but our parking feedback signs will allow for the community to leave feedback on parking accessibility. We are currently running a pilot in Atlanta where we have over 20 signs up around the city and will be expanding to around 5-10 other cities before the year is up.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

One thing I had to change was my mindset. Before I got injured and even after, I’ve always been somewhat naturally talented when its come to athletics. Things would come easy to me. Jumping into the tech space and running a business has been something that has taken a lot of work. I used to believe it would just workout for me but ever since I little mishap with the consulting company, I’ve had to drastically change the way I work and focus. There’s been a lot of lifestyle change outside of just working on the company, that has helped provide the self-belief and luck that comes with the start-up journey.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

I got so lucky when it came to finding a co-founder. When I first began this venture, I wanted to do everything by myself so badly. This is an impossible task especially when it comes to not being a technical founder. Luckily for me, a video a friend and I initially made, to explain the purpose of iAccess, was reshared by my sister on Facebook. Sayeed saw it, loved the idea of what I was trying to do and offered to help in anyway he could. The rest has been history, we have worked together for the last 6 years on bringing this thing to life and I wouldn’t be here without him. The best part is despite our age difference, we have always gotten along and almost never disagree with each other when its come to business decisions/operations. If there’s ever been a differencing of opinions, we’ve always communicated well and found a middle ground.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.iaccesslife.com
• Instagram: @bmw937/@iaccesslife
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iAccessLife/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandon-winfield/
• Twitter: @bmw937/@iaccesslife

Image Credits
Patrick Howe