Startup Interview with Dawn Dickson-Akpoghene, PopCom, Founder & CEO

Please tell us briefly about your background.

I am a serial founder and inventor with over 20 years of experience in entrepreneurship and technology. I have founded six successful cashflow positive companies since 2001, five are still in business. I am passionate about solving problems, big and small.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

PopCom is technology company with a software solution to revolutionize automated retail. We make vending machines and kiosks smarter.

What is the origin story?

PopCom is a company that was born out of necessity. I created the company my own struggles to find vending machines that could sell my rollable flat products Flat Out of Heels (flatoutofheels.com) at high-traffic areas like airports. Also absent was the data I relied on to track and monitor traffic and conversion rates through my website and shopping cart; analytics, email collection, retargeting, remarketing–arguably the tenants of successful sales growth–were not possible with traditional “low-IQ” vending machines. I then assembled a team that came together to change automated retail forever: PopCom was born.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

Everyone on my team is an entrepreneur (five of which have exits), 80% of my team members are engineers and 100% of my team is driven, passionate and committed to PopCom and our mission. Combined we have decades of experience in technology commercialization, entrepreneurship, and scaling companies. We are the ones to solve this problem because we care the most. I love working with them because it’s a fun, family environment but we are competitive and obsessed to achieve our goals.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

If I was not building a start up I would be traveling the world studying ancient history and being a vegan food blogger.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

At PopCom, we celebrate each win but we measure success by our quarterly OKRs and our ability to meet, or exceed, our goals. Currently our core metric is converting customer leads to paying customers since we are focused on getting market traction.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

The most exciting thing about our traction to date is we have big enterprise customers and we have finally secured a big cannabis and alcohol customer, which was a major goal for us on our path to lead the way in empowering retailers to sell regulated products in vending machines.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

I am the most excited about blockchain technology and the capabilities to use the blockchain for identity management in order to purchase products like alcohol, cannabis and pick up a prescription. I am the most worried about some forms of AI because I do believe that we are getting very close to the singularity.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

HackerNoon has a great audience and is a respected platform in tech. It is a credible source in the world of fake news. PopCom appreciates the inclusion in the Startup of the Year conversation.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

If I could give my 21 year old self advice I would say to keep going, “the hard work will pay off and you will meet all of your ‘40 goals’”

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

This year I have learned that we really don’t need to raise money from VC to be successful and scale, we can raise millions from the crowd through equity crowdfunding…it’s amazing!