that we had within 24 hours of each other.
And it was a really scary
time for our family.
- I'm Flori Pate,
one of the co-founders of Dig Local.
- And I'm Ted Pate,
one of the co-founders of Dig Local.
- Dig Local is a discovery tool
that helps you find where
to go and what to do
in Asheville every day
and connects you to the
local business scene.
Our product solves problems
for two groups of people.
We have two target audiences,
one is people looking
for authentic Asheville
and the other are people who provide
an authentic Asheville experience.
And before Dig Local and since,
there is still no other platform
that has a really great resource
for connecting those two groups of people.
We often have people who
use our app and our platform
tell us that "Before Dig Local,
I used to have to go to
six or seven websites,
10 Facebook pages,
just to try to figure out
where to go or what to do,
or what's new in town.
And now I just have to go to
an app where it's a resource,
it's like a one-stop shop for
everything that's going on,
all local businesses,
no clutter from franchises or chains."
A-B Tech literally changed the trajectory
of Ted's and my life here in Asheville
when they hosted the
Startup Weekend competition
seven and a half years ago.
We ended up winning the Startup
Weekend out of eight teams,
our team won first place
in the competition.
We started a whole business just from that
56 hours of the A-B Tech Startup Weekend,
which it's pretty crazy
when we tell our story.
It's a pretty remarkable
one, but I'm so grateful.
And even just driving onto the campus
and thinking that was very interesting
how that experience literally
changed the trajectory
of our family's lives.
If somebody out there is looking for help
with getting their business started,
I think that there are
some great resources
and Jill Sparks at A-B Tech
is a wonderful resource.
- I think one of the
things that's most valuable
that we've learned from the
entrepreneurial experiences
at the beginning,
you really do have to do
a lot of things yourself.
If you have partners,
you need to make sure
that everybody's got their own roles
that they're responsible for
and everybody understands that.
Don't get married to
partners until you are sure
that you want to be
married to those partners.
Because once you join a partnership,
it's really hard to get out of.
- He's not talking about
our marriage though,
we were married before.
- We had other partners.
At first we had other partners.
We did, we had other partners
and one of the mistakes we made was
we were equal partners
with two other people
so we had four partners that
were all equal partners.
And when some partners
decided they wanted to leave,
it was very hard to settle
things because we were all equal.