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Learn how former CIA analyst Heather Nickerson became the Co-founder & CEO of a legacy company, Artifcts. Artifcts deals with the ‘stuff’ that is difficult to value when you don’t know the story behind it. Heather describes her motivation to start this company after her mother passed away. She tells host Kyle Rand, Co-Founder and CEO of Rendever, that the company is not only helpful at the end-of-life stage, but also throughout someone’s lifetime. The podcast begins with advice on how to find a compatible co-founder, finding your “why”, and the versatile uses of the Artifcts platform. Heather and Kyle also discuss advice for founders such as scaling your product roadmap to include milestones and goals, and they stress the importance of being flexible as time goes on. Hear more founder tips from Heather by listening to this episode.
Tanya Perkins, Host:
Welcome to AgeTech Talks, conversations about AgeTech powered by AgeTech Collaborative from AARP leading a global mission to drive innovation at the nexus of longevity and technology. You are tuning in to a series of discussions recorded live at CES 2024 that highlight the dynamic startup founders who are making aging easier for everyone by pioneering innovative AgeTech solutions. In conversation with fellow startup founders, Kyle Rand and Tanya Perkins, each episode invites an AgeTech Collaborative startup founder to discuss their journey and share the invaluable lessons they’ve learned along the way. Today we’re thrilled to have Heather Nickerson, Co-Founder and CEO of Artifcts, to share their story.
Kyle Rand, Host:
We are joined here today live at CES day one of the expo with Heather Nickerson from Artifcts. Heather, how’s it feel to be here on the show floor?
Heather Nickerson:
It feels amazing. This is a dream come true for us.
Kyle Rand:
Is this your first CES?
Heather Nickerson:
It is our first CES. We are completely blown away. It is nothing and almost everything like we ever thought it would be all at once.
Kyle Rand:
That is, I think, the definition of CES. How did you prepare yourself for being on the show floor here today?
Heather Nickerson:
So being former analysts and total data junkies and geeks.
Kyle Rand:
Oh, amazing.
Heather Nickerson:
We reached out to probably every member in the AgeTech Collaborative that we knew was going to be here, and we also reached out to those that went last year and we wanted to ask them those that went last year, what did you do? Lessons learned, what should we do? What should we do differently? What should we prepare for? And we got some awesome advice.
Kyle Rand:
Love that.
Heather Nickerson:
And then those that were going this year, we reached out to you and said, “Hey, what are you doing? What are you thinking about?” But then I think really nothing truly prepares you for being here.
Kyle Rand:
Yeah, very clearly hearing that you are quite prepared, what is it about you, Heather, that makes you you?
Heather Nickerson:
Me being me, it’s that there’s curiosity, there’s adventure, there’s the why say no. If you can say yes, say yes, let’s try it, let’s do it. I think that’s really, I think any entrepreneur, you have that mindset of there’s a problem, we’re going to solve it. We’re going to figure this out, and that’s a big part of me.
Kyle Rand:
What is your modus operandi when something just comes in from left field?
Heather Nickerson:
You’ve got to roll with it. So part of my background, part of me being me is I am former CIA analyst. That thing you typically hear probably-
Kyle Rand:
CIA analyst?
Heather Nickerson:
CIA and not-
Kyle Rand:
Oh, okay.
Heather Nickerson:
Not only was I analyst there, but I also served as a presidential daily briefer. So when you’re a briefer, you get asked questions sometimes out of left field and you have to be able to act on your toes and give an accurate and responsive answer. You never know what’s going to happen. You never know what’s going to come out of left field or what is not going to work today or what’s going to go exceedingly well today and how do you plan for it all. So I think it’s having that understanding your surroundings, understanding who you’re talking with or who you’re working with, understanding if there’s a problem, what is the root cause of it and how do we quickly solve it.
Kyle Rand:
You have a co-founder?
Heather Nickerson:
I’ve got a co-founder, Ellen Goodwin, who also is former CIA. That’s where we actually met and grew up together.
Kyle Rand:
One of the most important things every founder knows, this is your leadership team and especially your co-founding team, how do you guys play off of each other in this context of being prepared and also being quite nimble?
Heather Nickerson:
So we are complete data junkies. We will go through rabbit holes and click through 10,000 things down the road to figure out what is this accurate number or this accurate data point. I will readily admit I am not the technology person in this company that is Ellen is, she’s all product and vision and she understands the tech pieces. I’m much more about how do we operate, how do we execute, how do we do a lot of the bigger things that we’ve got to tackle together, but also laying the groundwork.
Kyle Rand:
How do you guys make sure that your personal relationship is able to stay glued like this because you’ve known each other clearly for a long time to make it through the lows as well?
Heather Nickerson:
Yeah, we were talking about this last night. We’ve known each other for almost 18 years.
Kyle Rand:
That’s amazing.
Heather Nickerson:
So we got in our early years, we got to know each other, the good, the bad, the ugly. And very quickly I think we both saw and appreciated we were super-duper hard workers. I could never imagine finding someone that would work as hard as me and that person was Ellen. That’s the key where someone who’s as passionate and as driven as you. We take time to check in, we take time to do fun things. We take time to celebrate really small moments sometimes. For us it’s, it may be, hey, we pressed a new membership threshold or we launched to us it may be a small product feature, but we’re still going to celebrate it.
Kyle Rand:
So one of the things that you mentioned there was that she is just as passionate and just as dedicated and I think this comes down to, right, in order to be successful as an entrepreneur, you have to love the problem you’re solving, which is all about what is your why. What was the moment that you were like, that’s the problem I want to solve?
Heather Nickerson:
Yeah, so my why actually came seven years ago and for me it was my mother passed away and she was really young. She’s in her sixties. It was completely and totally out of the blue and being the eldest and only girl, my brothers turned around and said, yeah, good luck with that. So we found ourselves rather unexpectedly having to sort through 6,000 square feet of stuff. My mother had an estate plan, but that estate plan divided all assets equally among the next of kin, which were us.
So seven months into that process, I still didn’t know what was what. I knew what things had financial value by looking at it like a jewelry or an art piece of artwork or china or crystal. But what we all wanted to keep and preserve were the things that mattered most to our mother. And she wasn’t there to tell us. We had absolutely no clue what we were doing and we were hoping we were making the best decisions. There’s all these decisions, all these things I don’t know. And it was my frustration and grief and all came out at once. I then realized I can’t be the only person going through this, we all have stuff. We all have it.
But unless or until you combine the history and the story and the meaning and even value with it, you have no idea what you’re actually looking at and started asking a lot of questions and it was, well, I put a sticky note on an object and that’s it. Or I use color code dots. Or one person was like, well, I make an Excel spreadsheet and it’s password protected on my computer. And I’m like, that’s awesome, you password protected. Does anyone else know it’s there?
And I got this blank stare of like, oh no, I’ve never told anyone it’s there. There’s a ton of apps and companies that deal with memories and stories and photos, but no one was dealing with the stuff. And that’s when I reached out to Ellen and said, “Hey, I’ve got this idea for a company. Do you want to join me?” Yeah. So that was our founding story and that was our why.
Kyle Rand:
That’s amazing. And I love that you did so much user research before you even really put the business plan together. I think that that’s so critical. I’m so curious. How did you find those people? Was it online forums?
Heather Nickerson:
Once I got through that initial stage asking those around me what they were doing and how they were tackling it then was starting to reach out and doing a lot of Google research and seeing what being the analyst, cyber research is awesome. So seeing what others were talking about in forums, and again, I kept seeing how it’s like so glad dad did his memoirs or did his memory book or did his this or his that. But then again, no one was talking about this stuff and it was just that really it was that again, the elephant in the room. You want to talk about metrics? We have the boomer generation and they’re set to pass down $3 trillion of durable goods to Gen X. and Gen X has no idea what that stuff is. That was that turning point during COVID where you were just like, I can’t ignore this anymore. We have to do something about it.
Kyle Rand:
When you’re talking about that stuff, you have to be talking about end of life, you have to be talking about death. And so I’m wondering in those conversations, do you really end up talking a lot about legacy and would you really call yourself like a legacy company?
Heather Nickerson:
So we have joked legacy tech, we would love that to be a thing. But it’s also what’s been fascinating to us is we initially thought Artifcts, estate planning, insurance, end of life, right? First public artifact ever created, not joking, was a living breathing cat. And we got a very nice email from our member kindly asking us, could you please create a pet category? Because he artifacted his cat, Princessa, you can still see her on Artifcts today, but she was very offended there was no pet category. We quickly realized that stuff is not just an end of life issue. For us, Artifcts touches so many different pieces of tech and of the ecosystem. So you’ve got, again, the new parents who you’re overwhelmed with baby stuff. You’ve got, in my case, sandwich generation, I’ve got kids at home who bring home artwork all the time. They’re doing sporting events. They’re living their lives and I’m trying to keep track of it all. And I do I Artifct, I don’t keep everything my daughter brings home through the front door.
I probably keep 10% of it. Do I Artifct all of it? Yes. Do I get her on audio and telling me the story in her sweet… Well, still kind of sweet tween voice, definitely yes. But then I also have parents who are dealing with the downsizing and dealing with the whole like this is what we’re living. We talk about the different uses of Artifcts. We also have a brain health side as well. So earlier the summer we won a grant through the Massachusetts eHealth Institute and we’re doing a pilot study with UMass Medical School looking at can artifacting help be an early screening tool for dementia, mild cognitive impairments because again, we have the audio, we have the video, and UMass has an amazing machine learning algorithm that can detect biomarkers in voice to denote dementia and early onset and mild cognitive impairment. So when you look at the world of stuff, that’s where Artifcts is. That’s the beauty of it. We’re not just end of life, we say we’re living life.
Kyle Rand:
How do you navigate this understanding that ultimately everybody has a legacy and you have to scale a business? How do you put those two things together?
Heather Nickerson:
So when we did kind of that market research, pre-launch, everything during beta, we had 11 unique personas and we had done research into each persona and they span the ages from 18 to 97. After a year of launch. We wanted to see where this goes, because again, everyone has stuff and everyone has a story. After our first year, we narrowed it down to three that we’re very keenly focusing in because we know we have to prove that we’ve got traction in these areas in order to scale it to enable it to be this overarching consumer platform. Two of the categories were always in our original list. One of them we call our planning, and this is really your estate planning, your insurance, your end of life. This is you’re taking proactive measures to make sure your affairs are in order. There’s that category. The second we call community, and this one kind of came at us a little bit out of the blue.
We always thought community was a big piece of it, but in community we have a huge part that’s all about genealogy. They are so used to using companies like Ancestry or FamilySearch or others that build beautiful family trees that array your family history and data. But at the end of the day, they’re still dealing with Great-Grandma Anderson’s rocking chair and what do I do with it? And even like, does anyone know it? One generation removed. So our second category is very quickly become very much about genealogy and family history, which we love and think it’s fascinating to see how that’s been adopted. And then of course our third category is that it’s that brain health, it is that whole, we believe there’s being much bigger here with Artifcts on the brain health side and we’re very excited to be working with UMass to just figure out how can we help this hopefully become that proactive screening tool. We’ve built the technology platform to enable it to be very self-sufficient, very user-friendly. So even those that aren’t in those core buckets can still easily use and enjoy Artifcts.
Kyle Rand:
Have you built any sort of framework to be able to say this has to go on the back burner? We have to say no to this because when things work, when people get excited about things, it’s so hard to say no.
Heather Nickerson:
We have a product roadmap that goes out three years and we recognize we have to tweak and as things change, it’s not going to be set in stone. But when we look at when new things come in, we look at does it fit one of our core strategic budgets and how does that align with our product roadmap? And then we make those sometimes tough decisions. This is, and I’ll give an example. So for us, we thought in year one that assisted living and senior caregiving organizations would’ve been a really awesome fit for Artifcts. We’ve had individual instances where yes, perfect home run.
However, to scale that it’s a really slow sales process. And being a self-funded startup, we need to scale a little bit faster. So for us, although it’s a great fit and it fit one of our personas like that, we had to set that aside. So when we get those that come in the front door right now, we go back to, all right, this is, yes, we know that’s something we want to do, and we want to do down the road, but we can’t focus our time and attention on it right here, right now, today. We’ve got to stay focused on these things.
Kyle Rand:
So if I could abstract that out a little bit, what you’re ultimately saying is that you have to get super serious about the milestones that you need to hit. And then when an idea comes, you have to be able to look at it from all sides and say, it might fit the picture but it doesn’t fit the track.
Heather Nickerson:
Or it doesn’t fit now, it may fit the track a year from now or two years from now. And that’s I think part too, having the founder mindset of it’s not just the here and now, but it’s being able to think out what is it short term, medium term, and long term and being able to stay flexible enough that you can amend to kind of where the medium and long term is, but never losing sight of where do you want to be? Where do you want to take this and what is it going to take right now today to get it there? What is it going to be a month from now, six months from now? That’s the whole… It’s breaking it into digestible chunks but still executing on that overarching vision that you have for what you’ve built or what you’re building.
Kyle Rand:
In your journey over the past few years, have you had any moments where you were like, that’s why that mentor told me to think this way?
Heather Nickerson:
I think for us and also me personally is that doing the research, we knew we wanted to raise funding and we knew with being female, two female co-founders, less than 2% of venture funding goes to females. And we had mentors very early on saying, you’re probably not going to get it or it’s going to be three, four or five years out. Being very realistic, we’re like, no, we’ve got these amazing backgrounds, experiences, career path, we have a business model, we even have people using our product, we have all this. We laid the groundwork.
So for us, we thought maybe 18 months to 24 months we’d be able to get funding, which is a longer timeline than some. But we thought, all right, sure enough, we’re three years in and we are still bootstrapped. And it’s one of those things where one of our first advisors kind of like, you’re not going to be able to get this funded. This is going to be a really tough road. And I look back on that and I’m just like, yeah, they’ve been right so far. You’re doing something really, really different. And I think being a founder and overly optimistic sometimes and just having that view of we are totally going to do this, I definitely discounted that. And that was a really, I think a very tough lesson for me this past year personally was just being like, they were spot on. This is so much harder than I ever thought it was going to be.
Kyle Rand:
Yeah, it can be a tough pill to swallow, but going back to the very beginning, that’s where having an amazing co-founder and having a relationship you can lean on and really focusing in on those small wins, that was one of the first things you said is so important because the big, big rushes, like those big fundraising announcements or those big partners getting secured, they are few and far between, especially in the building phase.
Heather Nickerson:
I think it was really fascinating too is that you look on LinkedIn or you look on even newsletters and blogs and you hear about the wins, you don’t hear about the 59 other attempts before you got to that 60th win.
Kyle Rand:
And we need to be so much better as founder networks to just share the tough stuff.
Heather Nickerson:
Yes.
Kyle Rand:
It’s not rainbows and butterflies no matter what we might say on LinkedIn.
Heather Nickerson:
Exactly. But I think going back to that co-founder bit too, it’s one thing that I think with Ellen and me, it’s nice having someone to be reminding you of that big vision all the time and not letting you lose sight of, hey, this is why we’re doing it, this is what we’re doing. And yes, if we just keep at it, it’s going to work.
Kyle Rand:
I love that what you’re ultimately doing is you’re kind of building a new category, right? Legacy tech, as you said is not a word that is currently being used, but we all have legacies. And I think it’s so much easier to build in the footsteps of an existing model or an existing market than it is to build something totally new and to build a brand new category. And I think the only way to do that is to do so with not just an amazing co-founder, but also an amazing network of people that support you outside of maybe the traditional means of venture funding. So I’m just curious who has played that role for you over the past few years?
Heather Nickerson:
Yeah, we’ve been so fortunate to have so many essentially cheerleaders in our court. And I think that’s reflected of us as CES yesterday. So we have two of our advisory board members here. We have Tara Bauman, who’s head of NAIPC. She’s here with us because she wanted to be here to tell the Artifct story. I mean, we have people that have just shockingly gone out of their way to really help and support us. And that for us, when we started building artifacts, we knew we had to build a network of partnerships around us. We couldn’t just put all of our eggs in one basket. You can go to our allies and stuff on our website and see kind of all of our allies and all of our partners.
Kyle Rand:
Love it.
Heather Nickerson:
But we were really focused on finding those partners that we could also… We could add value to them. That was a big piece of it. In the very beginning, we weren’t ever asking for them to essentially do anything for us. It was always, how can we help you? How can we make your job easier? How can we do this? And we built that ecosystem around us. Our advisory board has been phenomenal and we took a very strategic look at that because we know what we can do as co-founders. We also know what we can’t do. Between Ellen and myself, we did not have a marketing bone in our bodies. We try our best, but we knew one of our first interagency board members had an amazing background in marketing, especially consumer tech, consumer product marketing.
And that for us, that was one of our weaknesses. But on our board, we brought in a couple of really powerhouse hitters on the product and technology side to give us that advice we would’ve gotten from a CPO or a CTO. So we tried to again, build out that network, be it partners, be it advisors that can really help us grow and scale Artifcts, especially in the areas where we know we aren’t the strongest on.
Kyle Rand:
I want to end on advice for founders who maybe are looking at industries or spaces that don’t have success stories yet, what advice would you give them?
Heather Nickerson:
Don’t give up. First and foremost. I would say, so putting on my analyst hat and data hat, if you’re trying to build a totally new space, go back and look at the data, make sure that data can support that. And that was a really big… Ellen and I joked, but when I first came with her to the idea, she was kind of like, “So Instagram meets inventory?” And I was like kind of but so much more. And then I rolled out the numbers, like this is the total addressable market. And you start looking at that data, make sure if you’re trying to build something really new and really big and really scalable, that the data behind it support it. You can go to and have real conversations talking about, in our case, people talk about self-storage. People spend $29 billion a year in the US alone on self-storage.
And we know from working with AARP, most Americans visit the self-storage unit less than once a year. So think about all that money. If you were to artifact your stuff, you have the memories, maybe you don’t need that dining room table that sits in a vault that you’re never going to use in your living home. And because we had the data points, we had done the research, we could talk total addressable market, we could talk costs and opportunities. We could talk user base and user growth. And here’s the initial customer set and it’s 62.8 million women, ages 40 to 70 alone in the US. But here’s where it goes when you start looking at globally. So I think it’s that whole, if you’re trying to define a new space, understand the metrics and the data points and what would be the economic, especially that business model and plan to get you theoretically to that billion dollar level.
Kyle Rand:
Do the research, do the homework, make sure it’s scalable, and then start building that supportive network, that supporting community. And most importantly, once you start, just don’t give up.
Heather Nickerson:
Don’t give up, don’t look back. Just keep going forward.
Kyle Rand:
And Artifct it.
Heather Nickerson:
Artifct your journey. We have from day one been artifacting our corporate journey.
Kyle Rand:
Right. This has been an amazing conversation. Heather, thank you so much.
Heather Nickerson:
Thank you, Kyle.
Tanya Perkins:
Thanks for listening to AgeTech Talks from AgeTech Collaborative from AARP. You can learn more about today’s guests and all of the innovative startups in the AgeTech Collaborative by visiting the startup directory on Agetechcollaborative.org.
