Rippleworks

Angela and her co-founder husband developed Rippleworks based on the "ripple effect"—an observation that many organizations conducted annual performance reviews without truly addressing whether they were developing individuals correctly or training them for organizational needs. Drawing on her husband's dissertation research into the KMO model (knowledge, motivation, organizational needs), they identified a market gap: while companies had tools to manage machines and processes, they lacked visibility into the "heartbeat of their workforce."

Launched in 2018, Rippleworks started as a tool for athletic teams and tactical athletes, helping optimize performance and align teams toward specific goals. The founding team of four expanded strategically, eventually reaching six equity-holding co-founders. The company raised upwards of $1 million in friends and family capital to fund significant upfront development costs. Angela emphasized that they invested heavily in development early because they wanted to build a product that could serve enterprise-scale customers from day one, incorporating business intelligence and predictive modeling rather than bootstrapping a simpler MVP. This strategy of "going big" early shaped both their capital needs and their customer selection.

After validating the concept with athletic teams, Rippleworks expanded horizontally into high-performing teams broadly—production studios saw themselves as "athletes," and law enforcement recognized the need to motivate, retain, and drive cultural change within their forces. Starting in the Southeast (Atlanta, Huntsville headquarters region), they eventually grew to serve customers throughout the U.S. and internationally. The company has now reached 50 customer organizations, with geographic and vertical diversification across government, entertainment, and other sectors.

The turning point came when Rippleworks hired quota-carrying sales representatives. Angela acknowledged that early sales hires weren't successful, but once they refined the playbook, the last three hires proved effective, each carrying roughly $1 million annual quotas. With 35 total employees (15 in engineering, the rest split between sales engineering, customer support, and business development), they've built a repeatable sales model targeting mid-market customers with 500+ seats at $4-6 per user per month, yielding roughly $2,000 per customer monthly. The strategy of targeting larger, name-brand customers early paid off: instead of chasing friendly SMB customers willing to work out product kinks, they sold to organizations that demanded stability, forcing product maturity.

Rippleworks is generating north of $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue (~$1.2M ARR) and has raised capital without pursuing a formal Series round, choosing to remain disciplined about capital allocation. They're excited about upcoming releases in natural language processing to better correlate qualitative feedback (like survey responses and sentiment) with operational factors (like police workload or 911 call patterns). Angela's stretch goal is to hit $10 million in revenue, potentially without raising additional capital if customer revenue and existing funds can sustain growth.