We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lee Mills. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lee below.

Lee, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I’ve been in tech for quite some time, since the 90s. I’ve done all kinds of B2B, consumer, and SaaS. Construction software was never on my radar until my friend co-founded Raken. We had worked together for almost 5 years at a previous startup called MojoPages and MOGL. When he asked me for marketing help, I jumped right in and had the ah-ha moment. This is the industry and the people I want to help. After Raken, I spent a year at PlanGrid, which led to me being a fractional CMO For a company called Cupix that was just entering the North American market. Between those three roles, I visited hundreds of construction projects of all shapes and sizes, from new hospitals, data centers, office parks, airport improvements, water treatment plants, remodels, and everything in between. After successfully launching Cupix, we could not agree on what a full-time role would look like, and I realized the industry needs a super simple, fast, affordable way to improve project documentation and collaboration, and the idea for Pixly was born.

Construction projects are complex, with lots of moving parts, people, and hurdles to overcome. The bigger the project, the more complex and risky it will be. The industry has a very high rate of disputes (30%), and the party with the best documentation wins disputes. As cheesy as it sounds – a photo can be worth a thousand words or millions of dollars. Documenting projects with photos is necessary but time-consuming and painful with either antiquated manual workflows:

Workflow 1:
1. Take daily project progress photos
2. Upload them to a cloud/folder
3. Download them to a PC
4. Mark them up with PowerPoint (drawing circles, arrows etc)
5. Add annotations, – comments and questions
6. Email them to various stakeholders (sometimes dozens of people every day)

Workflow 2:
1. open up large construction software mobile app
2. Navigate to the camera (this can take 2 to 4 minutes)
3. Capture photos

Workflow 3:
1`. Take photos or videos
2. share via text or SMS

The problem with all 3 is they take a lot of time. The other problem is the dispute may not arise until next week or years from now. When it’s more than a few months or years, it can be tough to locate the photo or video you need to protect yourself from a dispute.

One customer said, “Pixly is like Google Photos, Instagram, and Slack had a baby.”

I knew it was a worthwhile endeavor because before we agreed to start a company, raise capital or write a line of code, I first met with dozens of construction pros to understand without any doubt that we were solving a big problem.

There was a lot of pain because COVID-19 slowed us down in development, fundraising, launching, and scaling. We raised enough money before COVID-19 to build our MVP and go to market early but ultimately ran out of money. I self-funded the company until we won a $100k pitch contest, which was also put back into the product. We’ve burned through that money and I’m back to funding the company bootrap style.

Lee, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m originally from New Jersey. My Dad commuted to work in NYC every day and missed out on a lot of my early childhood. We moved to South Bend, Indiana, when I was 10. I had a great childhood there. I am the son of an entrepreneur. My Mom had 3 stores call The Elegant Peddler. I spent many a weekend and holiday helping her stock shelves and inventory, assembling furniture out putting displays together. When I was not helping her I was playing soccer, tennis, golf, and lots of cross-country skiing during long winters. After high school, I went to Holy Cross and joined the US Navy. I served four years onboard the aircraft carrier USS Constellation Cv-64 as a Damage Control Petty Officer (a Navy firefighter), earning the Navy Achievement Medal for my service.

The Navy brought me to San Diego. Once I stepped foot in San Diego, I knew this would be my home for a long time.

After the Navy, I put myself through college (design school at The Art Institutes), working full-time as a telemarketer. School by day, dial for dollars by night because the GI bill did not go far. I started as a rep selling long-distance phone services, which was brutal, to say the least. I got very comfortable being told no and learned to filter out opportunities and close phone sales relatively quickly. My performance was noticed, and I was promoted to sales trainer, assistant manager, and manager, responsible for 200 sales reps. That role took a lot of recruiting, training, and, unfortunately, employee churn because it was a hard job and 100% performance sales-based.

As soon as I graduated, I wanted to get into tech. My first tech job was with Backup.com. We did online backups, as you can imagine. But we did it before there was broadband, and we did it without a marketing budget. I was tasked with getting partners to promote our offers on commission-only terms, which was the dawn of Internet marketing and affiliate marketing.

It took a few months to get some traction, but once I had a few live partner sites as examples, we gained more traction, traffic, downloads, user accounts, and revenue. We used the performance-based marketing model to raise capital and then launched a bigger idea of SkyDesk, which is what Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides are today. We were just way too early for that offering. Timing has a lot to do with a startup’s success or failure.

During this time I became good friends with my partner rep for PCWorld.com. She asked me if I could do her a favor. That favor was to meet her customer Olympus, who was launching an all-new product and an all-new exciting technology called the digital camera. Yes, the digital camera. They knew how to do everything traditional media, direct marketing, broadcast media, print, etc. but they did not know how to do online marketing. I was invited to a fancy d Agency in LA to tell my story and strategy for online marketing. I only had a PowerPoint presentation with example sites, creatives, tracking, and reports. I talked about finding the right websites based on audience and content. I talked about how I reached out to them and pitched the idea. I showed how I created three unique banners and matching landing pages and presented them with an opportunity to market backup.com. I would guarantee publishers that we would outperform their effective CPM on the remnant ad space, and if they were marketers, they owed it to themselves ti give it a test.

Olympus loved the model, and they wanted to hire me. I had to say no. At this point, I had a full-time job as a marking director for backup.com, and business was booming, so I said no several times. They pressed me and kept asking for a number. This is not something I was prepared for but excited about. I gave them a number, which was way too small because they said yes immediately.

That was the beginning of my first true entrepreneur journey with my agency called Beyond Clicks. This was the late 90s. I partnered with other agencies to offer online media and web design services. We made a huge splash and had a very successful launch for Olypus. If there was a conversation about digital cameras, they were there. We had way beyond banners with advertorials, a contest on the Real Player (way before YouTube), newsletters, links, you name it.

I had a few people working with me then, and it was a lot of fun but stressful. I was simultaneously helping to grow an internet marketing association called iMarketers. We are for marketers, by marketers, about internet marketing. That was also taking off. I decided to partner and join SiteLab, which at the time was a leading web agency focused on design and SEO. I came in to beef up the online media and paid search offerings. We had a sweet office in La Jolla Shores where I could take the occasional break and surf at lunch.

After a few years at SiteLab, I went in-house with a client called Anonymizer. They were doing VPNs before VPNs were cool. Originally a tiny startup with awesome tech, they needed to grow faster. They hired me and a VP of Engineering and a VP of Sales who became a lifelong friends to catapult growth, and we did. We launched new B2B and government offerings, which resulted in the company being acquired.

The VP of Engineering and I were recruited to a turnaround startup up in Switzerland. The CEO had bought a tech company out of bankruptcy. He was looking for a new team of US startup experts to rebuild, restructure, rebrand, relaunch, scale, and sell it. I took a leap of faith, took the job, and moved to Switzerland without ever stepping foot in the country. I moved there with a few suits, clothes, and surfboards. Because it took so long to get furniture there, I slept in my surfboard bag for three months before I got a bed. It was the most exciting time of my life. Everything was an adventure. Figuring out how to get to work, buy food, and do laundry without knowing German was awesome. I was doing something I was passionate about, and every day was an adventure. We rebuilt the brand, launched new language-specific websites in eight countries, rebuilt the marketing funnel, rebuilt sales, and rebuilt all the tech. I was living the high life and crushing it. After one fantastic year the CEO wanted me to move to Vietnam, where we had some of our marketing team to save money and we could not agree on terms so I came back to San Diego.

I found a cool little pad near the boardwalk in Mission Beach and joined MojoPages.com as #3. MojoPages was a Yelp competitor with tons of potential and a huge consumer audience to serve. I built a massive 50,000,000 keyword campaign to drive traffic and revenue. It was basic marketing arbitrage. For example, get traffic to one of our pages for $0.05 to $0.50 and have the user click on an ad for more than $0.55 to visit a targeted advertiser. Some days, we printed money, and everything looked great; some days, we bled cash and had to rethink everything. That led us to pivot to private labeling MojoPages for local media websites. Few local news stations, newspapers, magazines, or radio stations had local business directories, and we saw an opportunity. We became the leading provider and had some early success. Our first significant partner was Houston Chron.com. If anyone searched for “Houston dentist”, “Houston lawyer” etc. Chron.com came up #1 on Google with our directory listings. We were able to raise $5M from Austin Ventures in 2008 (a tough time) and got after it. We realized some of our best advertisers were Groupon and Living Social and that is when the idea for MOGL was born. MOGL was a cash-back reward and loyalty program. I helped growth hack that locally to prove the market.

MOGL got all the development resources, but I was frustrated with being unable to capitalize on everything in front of MojoPages. After five years, I left for another ad tech company called Injekt, and we rebranded Mako Labs. We built an app called Friends Checker that was a huge success, and 40 similar titles were all ad-supported worldwide. This was a lot of fun and money, but there was only a little value for the users, so there was a lot of churn and super-aggressive competition.

That was when my friend recruited me to help him at Raken. That is when I realized construction tech, prop-tech and going back to creating software the had real value that people would pay for would be how I would spend the res of my career. Raken had just started next door, and the opportunity was one I will forever be grateful for. It was what led to me creating Pixly. I had always gone all in for every job and every founder I worked for. I was not always happy with the results and I knew I was more than capable of founding a tech start-up and set off on a mission to do it when the opportunity presented itself.

Fast forward to Pixly! We make it super fast and easy for customers to snap, tag, and share project photos and videos in an easy-to-use app built for the field. Pixly is more than an app. Our desktop version syncs the field and the office, so we are truly a platform. Pixly requires little to no training, saves 45 minutes to 1+ hours a day and our customers love it. Pixly solves the photo documentation and collaboration problem. We stop the chaos of sharing project photos via text or email where they are lost or taking up storage on personal devices. Everything is encrypted and stored in a private cloud. We protect our users from disputes and help them build and maintain faster so they can get home to their family or passions sooner.

I’m proud to have won The Veteran Fund $100k pitch competition in 2022. Last year I came in 2nd place at the Vets In Tech pitch competition. This led to Kyocera announcing a strategic partnership with us that we are building now. I’m proud that Pixly continues to grow without venture capital, and I can bootstrap it by serving as a fractional CMO for a very select few clients.

This is a recent testimonial that I read every day for the field to keep growing:

“Pixly is the photo app we rely on to document all our projects from start to finish. It is super easy to use and saves us time and money. The layout of the folders makes it easy for my crews to capture photos in the correct locations. This makes it easy for our management team to review and track the progress of our jobs via photos” – Todd Hand, President GT Concrete / Shotcrete

Pixly solves a huge problem for construction, one of the worlds oldest and largest industries. We also have customers in facility maintenance, franchise business owners, landscaping and car wash / detailing

-Save 1 to 5+ hours a day documenting projects with photos and videos
-Instant automatic photo, video and comment sharing
-Sync teams to improve collaboration and productivity
-Photo tags, annotations, conversations and markups
-Unlimited secure encrypted cloud storage
-Find photos and videos fast whenever you need them
-Never lose another photo again
-Reduce risk, disputes and litigation
-Stop the texting and emailing photo chaos

My core area of expertise are leadership, marketing strategy, planning, and tactical execution for growth marketing, organic search, paid search, social organic and paid, affiliates, and partnerships. I love building products that improve customers’ lives and building teams to support growing companies. I won gold medal for mutli variable testing, have had case studies published and am having fun starting The Startup Therapy Podcast.

One of the things I am most proud of and always will be is being San Diego Big Brother of the year in 2015. In my spare time I mentor at risk youth and startups through Connect and Founders Institute.

When I’m not growing Pixly or helping other startups and veterans you can find me living the life with with my 2 year old, surfing, riding or offroading.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

During my journey, there’s one particular chapter that stands out, showcasing the resilience that has been the cornerstone of my entrepreneurial path.

Picture this: I was a full-time college student, juggling academics and the demands of a job as a telemarketer. Those late nights and early mornings taught me the art of persuasion and resilience in the face of rejection. Little did I know, those skills would prove invaluable down the road.

Fast forward to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. My venture, Pixly, was born just before the world turned upside down. Despite the challenging circumstances, we pushed forward, fueled by passion and determination. But as fate would have it, we soon found ourselves running on fumes, our capital exhausted.

Refusing to surrender to adversity, I made a bold decision. I poured every last penny of my life savings into Pixly, believing in its potential to weather the storm. It was a risk, but one I was willing to take for the sake of my dream.

In a stroke of luck amidst the chaos, we clinched victory in a prestigious pitch contest, earning a much-needed injection of $100k. Hope flickered back to life as we reinvested every cent into our product, striving to elevate it to new heights.

Yet, just when it seemed like smooth sailing lay ahead, disaster struck. Investors, poised to support us, withdrew their backing at the eleventh hour. It was a devastating blow, one that would have spelled the end for many ventures.

But not us. Fuelled by grit and determination, we refused to let setbacks define our journey. Instead, I rolled up my sleeves and delved back into the fray, taking on limited fractional CMO consulting gigs to bootstrap our business. It was a humble beginning, but it kept the dream alive while we explored innovative growth tactics.

Through the highs and lows, Pixly and I persevered. I am 99% of Pixly. And in retrospect, every obstacle we faced only fueled our determination to succeed. Our journey is a testament to the power of resilience, proving that with unwavering resolve, even the darkest storms can be weathered, and dreams can be realized against all odds. I owe a lot of my grit and determination to my Navy service and to the amazing never give up attitude my Mom always instilled in me.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

Our journey to securing the initial capital needed to kickstart our business was a rollercoaster ride of determination and resilience.

Initially, we relied on a small friends and family round, tapping into industry Angels and close acquaintances who believed in our vision. This initial funding was earmarked for developing our MVP and laying the groundwork for our marketing strategy. However, fate had other plans in store for us with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which unexpectedly slowed our progress.

Undeterred by the challenges, we pivoted back to self-funding and bootstrapping, pouring every available resource into keeping our dream alive. During this challenging period, we stumbled upon an opportunity that would reignite our hopes—the chance to participate in a pitch competition.

Winning the $100k pitch competition hosted by The Veteran Fund at the Military Influencer Conference injected much-needed fuel into our venture. With renewed vigor, we reinvested every penny back into our platform, pushing forward with unwavering determination.

However, our journey was not without its share of setbacks. Despite our best efforts, we encountered stumbling blocks along the way. We faced a term sheet with unfavorable terms and experienced the disappointment of having investors back out at the eleventh hour, citing the uncertain economic climate as a contributing factor.

Nevertheless, we persevered, fueled by our unwavering belief in our product and the value it brings to the market. I have poured my entire life savings into the business and keeping myself afloat because I KNOW we solve a huge problem and it will all be worth it. We are not a bandaid. We are a pain killer.

Today, we stand strong, armed with a robust suite of accomplishments—we’ve garnered users, secured customers, generated revenue (ARR), developed intellectual property, and more.

As we navigate the intricate process of due diligence with an industry fund, we remain steadfast in our commitment to realizing our vision. Our journey thus far is a testament to the resilience and determination that define our entrepreneurial spirit, and we are poised to embrace the opportunities that lie ahead.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.pixly.ai
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leeeemills
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pixlyai
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leemills/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/pixlyai

Image Credits
No credits, me, myself and I Lee Mills