Dave: Hey everyone, Dave here with another episode of the Philly Tech Connect podcast. Every week, we interview another member of the Philly Tech entrepreneurs community. We learn a little bit about them, their journey, and what brought them here today. Today, we’re speaking with Nolan Maach, and he’s going to be sharing about his entrepreneurial journey. He’s a graduate from Penn State with a degree in engineering. He’s started and stopped different projects, been in incubators and accelerators, and multiple communities including PTE. Right now, his approach is to build as many small bets as he can because he just needs the right one to be a winner. He’s been working on a browser extension called Safe Select, which helps online shoppers avoid toxic ingredients in the products they buy, specifically for people with allergens or dietary restrictions. He is currently part of a program called Build Space Season 5. So, what’s up Nolan, how’s it going?
Nolan: Hey Dave, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it, pleasure to talk with you.
Dave: Yeah, for sure. I mean you come out to the events and everything. I know we talked at SRA Green, we talked recently in Old City, you told me about Safe Select and everything, so it’s always cool to have that evolution with a community member bringing on the podcast. Tell us a little bit about your time at Penn State pursuing engineering and then how that led into entrepreneurship.
Nolan: Well, my entrepreneurship journey actually started well before that when I was a young kid, like seven years old. My first experience was me and my cousin starting a drink stand on the beach in Sea Isle City, New Jersey, on a hot summer day, just selling drinks. It was an easy sale to sell cold drinks on a hot day, plus it was great money for a seven-year-old. So that was my first experience with entrepreneurship. From there, I had a couple of side hustles as a kid and also worked normal jobs. The compare and contrast between having a normal job and a side hustle was just night and day for me. With a typical job, I would work at a restaurant, a retirement home, or do some construction. I hated the repetitiveness and didn’t like how my inputs weren’t tied to my outputs. If I worked twice as hard as the person next to me, I got paid the same hourly rate. I didn’t enjoy that aspect, and it opened my eyes to realize that entrepreneurship is my purpose in life and that I should probably avoid working for other people if I can. From there, there was really no turning back. I went on to Penn State, got a degree in multi-disciplinary engineering, and once I graduated, I decided to bet on myself rather than pursue a normal job. I got started in e-commerce but got bored with it quickly, so I looked for other options and let purpose be my compass. Eventually, I pivoted into web development. I had to teach myself, though, because I didn’t know much web development from engineering school. I knew some coding but not much web development at all—they didn’t teach us any JavaScript or anything in engineering school. The inspiration for this came after listening to a podcast—Peter Levels talking on the podcast “My First Million.” He was talking about indie hacking and the building public community, and it opened me up to a whole new world that I didn’t even know existed. That was when I really pivoted. With indie hacking, I fell in love with the aspects of freedom and the challenge of wearing many hats. I also find software and technology fascinating in general, so it was just a much better fit for me.
Dave: Yeah, I love the classic story of the lemonade stand approach and how that evolves into other businesses. What’s cool is that you had that contrast at an early age. I worked at the movies in the summer, and yeah, it wasn’t that fun. Inputs weren’t really tied to outputs, but I didn’t know there was another option. It took me years to understand that people start their own side hustles and things like that. Once you’ve done it, you realize how addictive it is to have a little bit more control over your fate and destiny. I’m shocked that in an engineering degree there isn’t a more web development part of the program. It seems so necessary. It’s smart of you to teach yourself that because if you’ve already got the business mind, now to complement it with the skill set, that’s pretty neat. So, you have been taking this approach of doing a lot of small bets. Tell me what the logic is behind that.
Nolan: With entrepreneurship, you only need to be right one time to win. My approach is to minimize my time invested in each product before getting feedback. If I get traction, I keep building on top of that idea, but if not, I move on quickly. That’s my approach. Rather than having all my eggs in one basket, I like to spread them out and see if my luck is better. That’s my way of increasing the odds in my favor because when you’re doing a SaaS, the odds are already stacked against you, so you need to do whatever you can to make them more favorable.
Dave: I like the concept. I think that by the nature of the approach you’re taking, it limits how much you would invest in any one product, which aligns with the MVP lean approach—making sure that we don’t overinvest before we get feedback from the market. It’s tricky, though, because you have to come up with lots of ideas. Where do some of your ideas come from for the different projects you pursue? How do you prioritize them?
Nolan: I’m constantly coming up with ideas. I keep a note filled with them. Most of them are horrible and won’t ever see the light of day, but it’s just to get my mind in the maker mindset—always looking for problems to solve. To decide on an idea, I have constraints. I make sure I’m solving a problem that I have myself so that I understand it thoroughly and am not solving problems from the outside looking in. I also want the MVP to be built in less than a month, so the scope needs to be narrow—sometimes just a single feature. That way I can minimize my time invested before getting feedback. I also try to solve major pain points—products that solve true needs in the user’s life, not just nice-to-haves. Those are some of my constraints that help me narrow down the list. Eventually, I want to focus on just business-to-business, but for now, I haven’t found the right opportunities for that yet. My philosophy is to keep building more startups and find pain points for businesses in the process. That’s when I’ll pivot to business-to-business.
Dave: Nice. That kind of brings us to Safe Select. It’s the product of the month right now, the one you’re working on the most. Where do you feel this fits into the painkiller versus vitamin or candy spectrum? Where did the idea for this come from, and why do you feel it’s something people need?
Nolan: The inspiration for Safe Select came from a lesson I learned from my mom’s battle with stage four stomach cancer. Her diagnosis was related to the products she used and her lifestyle. I learned from that that health needs to come first because without health, nothing can come next. Now, I’m very health-conscious because of that experience, but it’s a challenge to know what food or personal care products are safe. Regulations lag behind science, and our product safety regulations in America also lag behind other parts of the world like the EU. There are many known harmful ingredients in the products we use every day, and it’s our responsibility to avoid them, but it’s a pain to do that. I buy most of my groceries online to save time. There are other apps out there like Yuka, which I love, but it’s mostly designed for in-person shopping and depends on barcodes. Safe Select aims to fill this gap by building a solution that can read images and text of ingredients or nutrition facts and let you know what products are safe and meet your custom dietary guidelines. I talked to people about this, and many have the same pain points. It seems like a good problem to solve.
Dave: I like the concept. I think of myself as relatively health-conscious, and my wife is as well. She does a lot of the food shopping and cooking, and we do a lot of online grocery shopping. We do both, honestly. You don’t really know—certain brands and labels present themselves as healthier, but they’re just trying to appeal to current trends. If you actually look at the ingredients, there’s a bunch of junk in there. Naturally, making this a browser extension makes a lot of sense. We talked at the last event about niching down further to focus on people with allergies or pregnant mothers with strict diet restrictions. That’s where it goes from a nice-to-have to a must-have. Where are you in development?
Nolan: The MVP will be ready in around three weeks, that’s my estimate. I do have the landing page live, though, and people can buy Safe Select product scan credits at a discount right now. We have an early bird sale at 50% off. You can go to safeselect.app and join our waitlist to be the first to know when we go live. I just announced the landing page was live and reached out to some warm leads this morning. I was pleasantly surprised to get our first sale. I’m hoping that’s some validation, but I don’t want to get too excited too early. I’m waiting for a few more sales before I really get excited about it.
Dave: That’s cool, man. Congrats! When I’ve had products that didn’t get a single sale, it is something to get that first one, then get to 10, then to 100, hitting those milestones. That’s when you start to feel you’re onto something. I think it’s a cool concept. When it’s live, definitely launch it in the Slack chat. We have a humble brag channel where you can get feedback. I think people would be willing to give it a shot. We’re excited to see how your journey follows. For people that want to get in touch with you or learn more about what you’re working on, where should they go?
Nolan: They can reach out to me on LinkedIn, Nolan Maach, or on Twitter, also Nolan Maach. I also have a podcast—you can find me on YouTube or Apple Podcasts. I’d be happy to talk if anyone wants to reach out.
Dave: What’s the podcast about?
Nolan: It’s basically documenting my journey bootstrapping SaaS, sharing my lessons along the way. In the future, I want to have other founders on to talk about the intersections of tech, science, and business. It’s all interconnected, and I want to have interesting conversations with interesting people.
Dave: Awesome. I’d love to be on it when you make that transition. Thanks a lot, Nolan, for being on the show with us today and for being a member of the community.
Nolan: Thanks for having me on, Dave. It was great talking to you.