During his sophomore year of college, Wes Schroll learned grocery shopping can be tedious and difficult, so he decided to do something about it.
As a result, Schroll, CEO of Fetch Rewards and former University of Wisconsin-Madison student, co-founded the smartphone application aimed at eliminating some of the redundancies of grocery shopping while saving students’ money.
Fetch Rewards, which launched in October with a test run in Fresh Madison Market, allows users to scan their items as they shop and automatically applies coupons to eligible items. The app has seen rapid growth since it opened, Schroll said.
Six stores currently use the Fetch Rewards program, with three to five more joining before the end of the year and more than 300 planned for 2015.
“It has grown into more than I ever imagined it could be,” Schroll said. “It’s overwhelming to say the least, but in a good way.”
Schroll said when he and his friends began doing all of their own grocery shopping they noticed the process could be made better by speeding up checkout lines and making coupons easier to use.
With a rough original idea, Schroll said he entered business plan competitions to gauge whether his vision was feasible and worth working on. Along the way, he set monetary goals that he met after just one summer and decided to take time off from school to fully dedicate himself to the startup.
Over the years, the original concept has grown and developed vastly as Schroll learned to network with other startup owners. He said the best thing for young entrepreneurs is to talk to as many people as possible about their product in order to gain insight into how to make it better.
“You’ll get a million pieces of advice,” Schroll said. “It’s just about finding the right ones.”
Fetch was not Schroll’s first attempt at a startup, but he said it has been the most successful.
“You’re going to fail, and you have to come to that realization early on and be okay with it,” Schroll said. “For a lot of people, that’s one of the hardest things to accept.”
