The dream of building what is now one of Chattanooga’s fastest-growing software companies began more than a decade and a half ago when Travis Truett, Jared Houghton and Brian Trautschold were business students at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
“We always knew we wanted to have our own business and kicked around a lot of ideas,” Trautschold recalled.
After graduating in 2009, Truett and Houghton briefly headed to Colorado while Trautschold took a sales job with Hewlett Packard. But within a couple of years, the trio reunited in Chattanooga and started work on a social media news reader first known as Retickr and later revamped as Fireplug.
The initial business taught the entrepreneurs about engaging users with software apps and personalizing the news reading experience as individuals used the product. Despite some initial success and purchase offers, the trio realized they could use their growing expertise with analytical software technology to build an even more useful and fun information system to better measure and reward sales workers at different companies.
So they quickly pivoted to create the business Ambition, which was launched in 2014. With the initial backing of the Lamp Post Group in Chattanooga, the firm quickly grew to a dozen employees when the trio was selected to participate in the highly coveted Y Combinator, a small business accelerator program in San Francisco in 2014. Ambition was the first team from Tennessee to go to Y Combinator.