Alli Truttmann just celebrated a HUGE milestone for any business: the 10-year anniversary of her company, Wicked Sheets. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 20% of businesses fail in their 1st year, about 50% of small businesses fail by their 5th year, and only 30% survive over 10. And things are really starting to heat up now with her upcoming appearance in front of an audience of 96 million on QVC!

Alli has been interviewed for a lot of Louisville area publications, but as she mentioned during our talk, she's never been interviewed about how she got her funding to get started, what it takes to be an entrepreneur, and what she would have done differently.

Since our mission at Metro Startup Launcher is increasing the number of local "micro-angel" investors and helping more startup companies get their early funding, we really enjoy learning how our amazing local entrepreneurs made it happen and getting to know them a little better.

So, enjoy our podcast interview with Alli Truttmann.

Transcript (machine transcribed, so please forgive the typos!)

Alan: 00:03 Hi everybody, welcome to the Metro Startup Launcher podcast. I'm Alan Grosheider, and today I'm talking to my friend Allie Truttman. She's the founder and ceo of Wicked Sheets. Hey Alli. How's it going?

Alli: 00:19 Great. Thanks so much for having me on today.

Alan: 00:22 Yeah, we finally got on after a month of you blow me off so I know you, but

Alli: 00:29 when we delve into what the, the things I've been through the past couple of months, I think you'll understand why it's been hard to get me on the phone.

Alan: 00:36 I know you've had a lot of stuff going on. I'm totally kidding and I will. We'll definitely get into talking about all the stuff with in China and it's. I know you've been super busy so I'm totally kidding. So what I would try to accomplish on the podcast, just you, you know, a little bit about metro startup launcher and our primary focus has sort of morphed into really being focused on trying to figure out how to get more angel investors in our area, investing in startups and then helping startups utilize that and hopefully crowd funding to, to get a lot more startups started. So in talking to you and other successful entrepreneurs, I just really want to get a lot more information about how you became an entrepreneur, how you got started, what triggered you to want to be an entrepreneur and uh, you know, advice that you would have for other entrepreneurs and maybe mistakes you made that you could help somebody else avoid.

Alli: 01:34 They're absolutely. If you, if you don't mind, I'll go ahead and take that one question and say, how did you become an entrepreneur and getting into the business world? I actually, if you ask my parents, I actually was designing what I didn't realize were small businesses when I was really young. So, um, I, I fashioned myself and inventor of sorts, not in the very technical science realm, but, you know, there were always things that when I was younger I would notice and I would say it would be so much better if, you know, for instance, OK, before the radio would tell you what the song was or who sang it, I, I, my mom said I was like six or seven years old. And I was like, if only your radio would tell me who sings a song or what the words are that I'd be a better singer.

Alli: 02:20 And then everybody laughed and then we sold painted rocks in our neighborhood. And um, my favorite was like a double toasted tostito that we took chips and we, um, we basically flame broil them over scented candles and sold them to people as flavored to Tostito. And I mean,