Expanding Accessibility with Assistive Solutions with Kelly Twichel

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper countins counting beans Contador quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy beer and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco stand in pesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean watch the sunset la Hoya shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders who you believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon SDTechOS with your host Neil Bloom. Startups get the party, startups get the.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host Neil Bloom, San Diego's Tech Ambassador and together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle. This segment is brought to you by Cox Edge. Our longtime partnership with Cox Business has helped their engineering teams develop new tech products for small businesses and startups. Cox is investing in Edge capabilities and working with developers and engineers across the ecosystem to deliver ultra low latency compute solutions, helping customers to improve application performance and to reduce cloud transport and on premise infrastructure costs. Interested in hearing more about Cox Edge? Please visit coxedge.com and mention Neil Bloom or freshbroodtech.com for our partner discount. And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host Neil Bloom and I am thrilled to have Kelly Twitchell on CEO of AccessTrax. Hey Kelly, thanks for being on the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. It's been fun seeing you. I feel like tangentially throughout the ecosystem through Connect all and other places in the community. But I really want to get to know you. I feel like you've been working on something super special near and dear to a lot of people's hearts. So can you give us a quick overview of what AccesStracks is?

Absolutely. AccesStracks is a social impact startup based Here in San Diego. And it was founded in 2018. We empower people of all physical abilities to easily access outdoor terrain such as sand, grass, gravel and snow. And we do that with our modular, patented, portable pathway system called Access Tracks, which essentially makes it easy for someone to lay out like a portable sidewalk, essentially, so that someone who maybe uses a mobility device such as a wheelchair, can get out and access recreation in the outdoors. You know, kind of on demand wherever you are.

I love it. The inclusivity, the accessibility is huge. A lot of people are passionate about building that into our ecosystem, but you're doing it as a product for the world. And I'm thrilled to kind of get to know the story of how it founded. But I want to get to know you a little bit and kind of the spark for this. Where are you from and where'd you grow up?

Sure. I am actually from here in San Diego. I grew up in Lakeside and Santee. And I actually went to SDSU for my undergrad in biology and kind of my path to entrepreneurship was kind of a not direct path, I would say. So I was going to SDSU and was figuring out, okay, what do I want for my career? And I wanted to be a doctor. So I was pre med technically at sdsu and when I was in my senior year, kind of something didn't feel right for me to apply to med school. I thought, well, I want to have a lot more impact on my patients lives. And I don't think I could do that with just for me, being a doctor, just kind of seeing them for 10 minutes at a time in an appointment. So I thought, okay, I need to regroup here. So I didn't go straight to grad school after sdsu. I worked in cancer research here in San Diego in La Jolla area. And I also worked at a golf course at the same time. And I just asked everybody I knew, what do you do for a career and do you enjoy it? And I kind of found through some of those interviews that something about occupational therapy and it reminded me how therapy is something that's a lot more hands on, you know, within a person's life. It kind of follows their journey a lot more in depth for their healing or whatever they're going through. And it reminded me about how when I was just turning 13 years old, I was impacted in my life when my mom had a massive stroke just two weeks before I started high school. So she ended up having a lot of occupational and physical therapy to kind of help her regain her independence. Fast forward to when after I graduated SDSU and I'm trying to figure out what my direction is, I thought, oh, Yeah, I remember OTs working with my mom. And so that's kind of the career that I went to. I love San Diego so much that I actually didn't even leave for grad school. So I went to the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences in San Marcos, and that is where my journey to entrepreneurship started because of a school project.

Oh, interesting. Really cool. Had you met a bunch of other occupational therapists before even you applied for the school or.

What happened was when I was working at the golf course, one of the regular golfers, his wife was an occupational therapist. And so I kind of, you know, talked to her, and I got some volunteer hours at Sharp Grossmont Hospital. And that's actually the hospital where my mom had her rehab. So it kind of felt like home to me. And then my brother married a woman who was an occupational therapy assistant. So just kind of from talking to them, I realized, ooh, this is interesting. There's a lot of flexibility in that career, because with one license, you can work in a ton of different settings. I could work in the school settings with kids. I could work at an outpatient clinic or the hospital, or even in ergonomics in corporate. So there's. It's really an exciting field, and I encourage a lot of people that I know to kind of look into that as they're deciding to.

Yeah, huge impact on so many lives as well. And you can see it right at the end of every day. You see, hopefully, progress. Often. Many times. I'm sure not. Right. Frustration, too. A lot like an entrepreneur. Right. You know, you can have 10 ups and 10 downs in one day. So how did school lead you to kind of starting your own business?

It was in 2016, so it was my second year in school, and we took a class called Assistive Technology. What that means is assistive tech is basically anything. Whether you purchase it right off the shelf or you're modifying something, it helps a person kind of be more independent or successful in completing a task. So it could be an app on your phone that makes the print larger for you to see if you have some vision difficulties, or it could be your hearing aids or a mobility aid. So all of those types of things are assistive technology, whether they're high tech or no tech. And in that course, we were challenged to create a device that would help people with disabilities. And a classmate and I who had worked on a couple of other projects together, we knew that Hey, I know you're going to do the work, and I know I'm going to do the work. You know, you find that person. And so we wanted to take on the challenge of how can we help adaptive surfers in our community cross the sand at the beach in their own wheelchairs with dignity and independence? Our teacher at the time, she was a surfer, and she kind of had a special request for that particular project and problem. So we said, we'll do it. We're going to try to figure this out. And we went to Home Depot like, four times in one day. Just looking down the aisles of what are materials that we could use that are lightweight and will just basically provide the traction that the wheels need to prevent a wheelchair from sinking into the sand or other terrain. That's kind of how it all got started. A school project, and we tested it out with actual adaptive surfers within a couple of weeks of having our first handmade prototype. What really spurred the difference between this is just a school project or this is something that we need to take to market was that day when we had those five adaptive surfers trying it out for the first time. I'm, like, getting goosebumps right now because just thinking about that moment of the expression on their faces and the fact that they literally looked us dead in the eyes and said, we need more of this. It really provided a sense of freedom to them. Whereas using a beach wheelchair, somebody else has to push you. You have to transfer in and out of that chair. Sometimes they're not comfort or not even available, or somebody has to carry them like a child across the sand. And that's not what somebody wants. You know, they want to be independent. They're a grown adult going to compete in a sport. Oftentimes, you know, this is their passion. So, yeah, that day In October of 2016, we realized that this isn't just a school project, and we need to, you know, help millions of people around the world.

Wow. Incredible. I got goosebumps, too. The hair on the back of my neck raised. So what'd you do? Like, did you just incorporate the next day and said, I have a company? Or how'd you really take the leap? Because that's what many people are scared from, right? They look over the edge and never really do it. So how'd you kind of de risk it enough for you to say, I'm actually going to do this as a company?

Right. And that's a huge question. So, you know, it definitely didn't happen overnight that year. You know, we were about to go out to field work soon. It was getting really busy in school and stressful. But this was always something that after that day, okay, no matter how long it takes, no matter how hard it is, this is gonna happen. You know, you kind of get that determination and then, okay, so then how? The first thing was, obviously we're not going to make this by hand for the rest of our lives. So we need to find manufacturing. And then what comes before that? Money. You have to have the funding to be able to create a prototype, a manufactured prototype. And we're students, you know, we're effectively broke, right? You certainly can't work full time while you're going to full time school like that. So essentially I asked around at my school, I said, are there any scholarship or grant opportunities that are available to us as students? And it just so happened that there was a competition. It was a global business plan competition. And the company that owned our school also owned, you know, I think over 100 other schools across the world and they had this competition. We had six weeks left in the application period, whereas other teams knew about this from the beginning and they had six months prior to, you know, get all their stuff together. So it was a pinch, it was a time crunch, but we made it happen. And it was the first time anyone from our School of St. Augustine had ever even competed. So we applied, we were selected as a finalist. And I think I was on field work at the time. This was summer of 2017, because it takes a while for them to go through all the applications and stuff. I remember waking up for field work. I was working at the hospital in Palm Springs and I was living with my parents at the time. It was on my birthday at 5 in the morning, I woke up to my alarm and I saw my email and I jumped out of bed and I screamed, I'm a finalist. I'm a finalist. And I think my parents thought that I was yelling, there's a fire. So it was pretty funny. But it was a cool moment for my birthday to know that we were a finalist. So long story short, there we ended up winning some funding to start the prototyping. And then our school board of directors flew us out to St. Augustine, Florida to present at one of their meetings. Shortly after, and they surprised us with another check. So that is how we miraculously got the funding for prototyping for this. So 2017 got the funding. Fall of 2017, we both graduated because we were in the same cohort, went into full time occupational therapy mode, but always had the business Initiation, kind of like on our checklist. It was February 2018 when we actually incorporated. We formed the LLC partnership and got it all going.

Wow, that's pretty cool to have your school, you know, bet on you like that and double down.

Yes.

And now you have them for life as obviously people who. Not just, not just the company or not just the school, but the people associated with the school, they see it aligned so well. Obviously now it could be even taught in curriculum. I would imagine using your product to train every occupational therapist down the road using your product too. Pretty cool.

Yeah, it's really cool. I mean, The University of St. Augustine is a, you know, one of the biggest sponsors of the US Open Adaptive Surfing Championships, which actually just happened this past weekend in September. So they're definitely still involved and supportive and it's really neat to have that connection.

That's great. So take us through, you know, going forward. You've got, you've got some. Sounds like non dilutive capital, you know, kind of grant money, it sounded like. And you've built some prototypes. Like, how do you scale that up to an actual business?

Yeah. So the prototyping was interesting. It was figuring out as much as possible how we can stay local. So we found a company in Southern California, it was in Escondido, that was willing to work with us. So we had our first manufactured prototype. And very quickly, after testing it out at the World Adaptive Surfing Championships, which just so happened to occur here in La Jolla every December, we kind of tested it out with real people once again, like, that's the main goal. Right. You got to get the feedback of the actual users to say, is this enough to be called a minimum viable product? Right. Like, is this something that we need to continue to iterate right now before we bring this to market, or is this good now? We ended up making some design changes over the year of 2017 and into the beginning of 2018, and we ended up switching who was our manufacturer at that time. Because you gotta learn to, yes, take the feedback of the professionals who are embedded in the career of manufacturing and plastics and whatever materials you're using. But you also have to listen to your customer and your gut. So we switched who was manufacturing because they didn't agree with some of the design changes that we had, and that's okay. But we ended up taking to market in 2018 something that looks almost exactly like what we have today. Essentially, it's a three by three foot square that has hinge slits on all four sides. You can connect these mats together in any configuration. And surprisingly, we went with, for the hinges, just hook and loop Velcro, industrial grade Velcro. And some of the feedback from the adaptive surfing community is when we are trying to figure out how do we pick that material, you know, something that is rust resistant, flexible, lightweight, inexpensive, functionality wise, easy to use. They were like, hey, what about the surfer leash? You know, the surf leash, it's made of Velcro, you know, that's what connects you to the board. So we thought, well, let's give Velcro a try. And it worked. So minimum viable product, you know, it's, that's, that's what we had and it's worked really, really well so far. So, you know, from going from prototyping to finding that minimum viable product to take to market, that happened like pretty quickly, honestly. Yes, we were still working, you know, full time to part time at our daytime OT jobs, but this was very much something that I was working on almost every single day. You know, it was a lot of work over the years.

Yeah. And I've got to imagine listening to your customer, you heard who the buyer Persona changed a little bit too at times. Right. Kind of a B2C approach, maybe the adaptive server and maybe the B2B approach, the parks or, you know, lifeguards, or maybe people who manage beaches. Like what? Take us through coming to that. Like the discover the customer development of who the customer is.

Right. Well, I think that it was the beginning of 2019 when I got into the first cohort of Connect all, the Jacobs center, that, you know, San Diego's business accelerator. That was really crucial for me to learn, as you know, a founder, as a CEO, as a wearing all the hats in the business, how to do customer discovery and how to create customer Personas. Because I had all this data coming into my brain, but how could I organize it and how could I make it functional and work for me so that I understood better what direction to take? So essentially we have a couple of different Personas. And you've got the adaptive athlete, you've got the family who just happens to have somebody who has a physical disability, who sits still, is, you know, wanting to have that independence. So maybe the pathway is just for their yard, their driveway, their garden. Maybe they're not necessarily traveling as much. You've got the adaptive sports organization, typically a nonprofit, so they're focused on cost, especially because they fundraise for everything they have, you know, but they also serve people with disabilities in their programming directly. So they see the value proposition, you know, what we have to offer as far as cost and functionality and something that's very easy for their volunteers to understand how to use. And then you've got the government entities and so that could be anywhere from the Department of Veterans affairs in their therapeutic recreation department, which kind of mimics a little bit more of like the adaptive sports Persona as far as talking to the program coordinator and things like that. And then you've got government entities such as the National Park Service or Parks and Rec, who really, their focus is on something that they can semi permanently install. So that's very different from a typical family or nonprofit who just wants this out for the day, a couple hours, and then picked right back up and stored for for a while. So, yeah, still learning, you know, how we can create a product that is versatile to kind of meet almost all of those needs. But then, okay, so when is the feedback coming in from a particular Persona crucial enough to where I need to develop a new product line? And so that's what I've started to do this year is kind of really get serious about developing additional product lines so that we can best meet the needs of those other customers that our current product is not quite the best match potentially.

That's awesome. I have to ask about one organization specifically near dear to my heart, a nonprofit called Triumph Foundation. Have you heard of them or worked with them?

Absolutely. We were a sponsor of their 2019 Wheelchair Sports Festival and I think it was in Costa Mesa or somewhere a little bit north. But yeah, so we were there. They're amazing. They do so much for especially people who were newly injured from a spinal cord injury. They're amazing.

Yeah. Andrew and team, incredible. Awesome. Love to give them a shout out. Another thing that you mentioned around new product lines also I've got to imagine supply chains big for you of just learning how to build a physical product and Covid. Right. Like did that, did that disrupt things, the supply chains of kind of the world?

Oh yeah. I don't think hardly anybody's immune to that. I mean, even still now it's gotten worse this year. You know, we're certainly not out of the weeds. I know I briefly mentioned this before, but I tried to keep as much as I could local to Southern California or at least the United States. So we source our material from the US it gets drop shipped to one of our partners who manufactures here in San Diego, and they manufacture the product for the most part for us. I do some of the quality control and assembly and all of that myself. But last year it definitely started to get difficult. But really, the beginning of this year was the big initiation of, wow, our prices, you know, the. The cost of supplies just went up and up and up. And it was like I was getting a quote one day and then three days later, nope, we're increasing prices again on you, even though you've already locked in what you just did. So, you know, it's been a challenge. And I think that I'm lucky in one way in that I didn't have overseas suppliers because I think that the shipping would have been a huge additional pain. Point is Ocean freight and all of that, because I'm hearing that things are getting so backed up at port and trying to get through customs, and so we've bypassed that part of it a little bit. But the cost increases and the increased lead times for materials we absolutely have not been immune to. And we've sold out of our product twice this year, unfortunately.

So good problem to have, but also terrifying.

Exactly.

Okay, so knowing, you know, supply chains and also diversifying the product line, like, what's on the horizon? Like, where are you where you think you are in one one year from now, and what are you building towards?

Yeah, I think a year from now, I would love to see that we've gone full swing into a Kickstarter starter campaign for one of those new product lines, because it's a little bit more geared towards family use. It's a little bit smaller of a product than we currently have. And so people could literally just throw this in their trunk for long term, like, hey, this is just an emergency. Or this is something that potentially somebody with, say they use a mobility device like a wheelchair, and they are, you know, wanting to be as absolutely independent as possible. This is something that they could potentially lay down themselves and pick back up. So it's exciting. It's something that I've always worked towards as just an entrepreneur, but also just as an occupational therapist. You know, our North Star is to empower people to be as independent as possible. So excited to kind of have that product come to fruition, hopefully by the, you know, a year. A year from now. And then, as far as business development goes, I would love to have solidified a few more distributor relationships for other countries because obviously the outdoors and people with disabilities are not just in the United States. And we're actively working on partnerships with organizations in South Africa and Australia. Kind of just being able to better serve people in other countries is a huge goal of mine.

It sounds like you get a really symbiotic relationship with challenged athlete kind of organizations and even the Paralympics maybe and everything that kind of trickles down from there. And I would got to imagine there's other countries who hold it at an even higher esteem than the U.S. are there certain ones that people could even write you and know that places you're trying to get in that are early adopters to this kind of accessibility?

That's a good question. I feel like the United States is very good about their accessibility law with the ada. And so that's been around, you know, since, well, it's been over almost 30 years or over 30 years now. I think this is the 31st year actually that we're ahead on that aspect of the awareness and things. But there are certainly countries that are catching up quickly. So there's huge opportunity in, you know, Asia and like Australia and even Canada where they're trying to catch up quickly. So I, I can't pinpoint a country that's farther ahead than the United States yet. But I certainly hope there are, you know, you would like to think that too, but when you mentioned the Paralympics. So the Olympics are going to be in LA in 2028 and I think that that's a huge opportunity for us to hopefully be involved. And so I've been working on that in the background for a few years now and we're good friends with some of the athletes that I'm sure will be competing in that year. And just kind of the organizations that you mentioned, you know, like Challenge Athletes foundation for example, you know, we're all trying to work together to create, you know, the best possible scenario for accessibility in the community by the time the Olympics come here. So really looking forward to that.

I'm going to put Eric Gasser on the spot. If you don't know him yet, we're going to connect you local entrepreneur and investor who has an Olympic connection. So if we can help make another one, let's make sure Eric Gasser is helping you too.

Amazing. That name sounds familiar. I may have spoken with him prior, but yes, absolutely, please reconnect me.

Yep. He's involved in Ad Astra, which I think you also might have a connection with. So.

Yep.

Any other resources in town that's been helpful to you that would be helpful to other kind of up and coming entrepreneurs?

I mean I can't speak highly enough of connect all to Jacobs Center. I know you're very, very familiar. I think you're a mentor which, thank you for that. But yeah, for a business who is in a city of San Diego zip code, please, please, please apply to that program. They have a couple of cohorts a year. And I think applications just closed last night for. And this is today is September 14th. So, you know, applications closed on the 13th. But you know, there will be additional cohorts, I'm sure. And it's a great program. As far as other resources, I would say I've used the Coalition of Retired entrepreneurs, it's called score.org many, many times, to just talk to somebody who's kind of been in my shoes as far as different aspects of business, whether it's business liability insurance or supply chain or business development. You know, you can talk to a mentor that has expertise in any of those little areas. And I've probably worked with 10 different people from mentorship in that aspect. Trying to think of any others. I think if you're a female entrepreneur. Nabo is amazing. That's the national alliance of Women Owned Business. Felina Hansen is amazing. I just got accepted into their accelerator that's starting soon, partnered with bank of America. I think it's a pattern of I go through probably two or so business accelerators a year because I think that you can never learn too much. And each accelerator kind of has its own spin or its own kind of special, unique sauce. With Connect all at the Jacobs center, it was a really great, well paced, longer accelerator. I think now it's four months and when I went through it, it was six months. So it really just allows you time to absorb the information and develop relationships with your cohort. That was huge. The Tory project was another accelerator that's focused on social impact and stakeholder capitalism. I also went through another accelerator earlier this year called Get Shit Done. It's for female focused entrepreneurs. And that one allowed me to really just focus, focus, focus on traction. So, yeah, those are resources that I would highly recommend.

Awesome. That's huge. We will put all those links in the show notes. But congrats on you for just showing up. I mean, you know, the resources are there and often it's easy to just say, I'm just going to focus on my business. But you've proven that you can do both, right? You can use business resources to help your business. And it's not a distraction. It's hopefully a one plus one equals three, right?

I totally agree with that math.

Yeah, well, great job on that. We have to know, since you've been a lifelong San Diegan, you've got to know all the taco spots. So let us hear it. Do you have a favorite or is one too hard to pick?

Oh, My gosh. I think if I could divide it into regions, that would be amazing. So, like, going to high school in Santee Estrada's was like the taco shop. Everybody went there for their California burrito. It's been a while since I've been there, but it was amazing. They had two locations. Where I live now is La Mesa, and right down the street from me is Desoto's Taco Shop. And they're so good. Like, I love their tacos. And then as far as burritos there is. And they have, I think, two locations, one in north park and one kind of down by. Kind of by Old Town. And the name of it is. Is Escaping Me, but it's. It's like Mexican style. What are their. It's like when you're fighting in the ring and they wear the masks.

Oh, Lucha libre.

Lucha libre, yes.

Yeah, yeah. Fantastic spot. The gold foil burrito. Oh, yeah. California burrito. Oh, yeah. Game changer for sure. Worth the wait in line always.

Yes, there's always a line, but sometimes if you call ahead, you can time that, right.

Oh, good one. It's funny, a lot of people talk about how to squeeze in more answers on this podcast, right? No one can pick one. Some people have the, I have a different taco for the time of day. We've got our late night taco. You've got maybe a breakfast taco. You went geographic, which I appreciate. And then there's the how upper high end or low end you want to go, right? Like, dirtiest kind of taco stand versus high end. So I love how we can slice and dice all of our favorite tacos. Yes. Well, Kelly, thanks so much for not just being on the podcast, but sharing your story, inspiring others, taking advantage of the resources to build a business that really impacts others. I mean, seriously, like, so incredibly excited to continue following along and being a supporter. So thank you for what you're building.

Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to share and thanks for what you're doing to make that happen.

All right, well, thanks, Kelly.

Thank you.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Bloom. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And this podcast is edited and mixed by Patrick Norden at Citizen Record. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter at Neil Bloom and on LinkedIn as well, as well as Fresh brewed tech and tacos and Tech Pod on Twitter too.

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