Don’t wait for your product to be perfect. Tr3dent, Irish IoT success story

By Jemima Burke Journalism @nuigalway, @LaunchPadNUIG. The recent Enterprise Ireland / New Frontiers IoT initiative in Galway proved to be a great success.

Irish Tech News managed to find out more in this interview with Kevin McCaffrey. Founder of Tr3dent, Runner-Up in New Frontiers Business Competition, and recently featured in Irish Tech News Business Showcase.

Describe the journey with Tr3dent so far:

I started the company initially in Cape Town, South Africa and I moved back to Ireland about 15 months ago and established it here at GMIT. We’ve had funding from Enterprise Ireland and we’ve participated in various programs such as New Frontiers and the HPSU SPRINT program. And we’ve been able to manage to gain some serious traction and generate revenue through customer sales.

The Summit is centred on the Internet of Things. Where does your business come in here?

Yeah, the conference today is IoT-themed in that you’ve got a lot of suppliers and partners in that space which fortunately suits what we do very well.

Tr3dent has a strategic I0T planning tool that is a data visualisation tool using gamification and gaming engines to provide large companies with the ability to move forward and exploit the IoT market.

What about investors?

Tr3dent is in discussions with investors at the moment so obviously to win a competition or even just to be participating in the IoT Summit here today is good validation for what we’re doing. I’m actually pitching to a bunch of Asian investors next week so it will be good to come to that!

If you were to give some advice to students who have, say, a new software idea, what would that advice be?

Don’t wait for it to be perfect. Get it out there. Get an MVP built. Get people using it. Even if they’re not necessarily paying for your product you can say that you’ve got x number of users. You must get that customer validation – especially if you’re going to try to get funding. Unless you’ve done that level of validation investors won’t be interested.

Final random one: where were you at 19?

I went to GMIT. I did Business Studies there and was going to then move up to NUI Galway and do a B. Comm. But I emigrated to Canada instead, to earn my fortune – which didn’t happen either.

But it might happen yet!

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at Simon@IrishTechNews.net or on Twitter: @SimonCocking