Koby Hastings, the founder and CEO of SalesRiver, does not consider being named one of Kentucky’s Emerging Entrepreneurs this year an individual achievement. Hastings was one of four individuals at three companies named Emerging Entrepreneurs at the Kentucky Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame ceremony in late November. The award recognizes leading entrepreneurs across the commonwealth who have made an impact on the entrepreneurial ecosystem, said Brian Raney, a founder of the business incubator Awesome Inc. and one of the Hall of Fame’s leaders.
Koby Hastings, founder and CEO of SalesRiver, is a Louisville native who started in web development as a teen.
But that recognition wouldn’t be possible without the help of his team, Hastings said. “I was honored to be a recipient, but I didn’t really feel like the award was mine,” Hastings said. “Our company wouldn’t be where it is today if it weren’t for the people who were a part of the journey over the past five years.”
Hastings, a 30-year-old Kentucky native, started SalesRiver as the online platform Leadrilla Inc. in 2018. The website connected independent local insurance agents with consumers shopping for insurance products. Over the first four years, he said, the platform quickly grew from just a handful of insurance agents to more than 3,000 agents. He said that’s when large insurance carriers and larger insurance agencies started to take notice.
“They wanted to use the software that we had built to power Leadrilla because nothing like it existed in the market,” he said. “We decided to basically take the software that powers Leadrilla, extract it, and sell it to large insurance carriers and agencies.”
That software became SalesRiver, a business channel within Leadrilla. Launched last February, SalesRiver is now used by approximately 20,000 insurance agents nationally, he said.
Leadrilla places ads about general insurance products, and then delivers the leads generated from those ads to the insurance agents. The software does multiple checks on the lead to ensure that the information contained in it is accurate and that the lead has not previously been generated by the system. Additionally, the platform reaches out to the customer via text message and email to let them know the agent will be contacting them, while reaching out to the agent to let them know they have a live lead.
The company is the latest in a number of business ventures Hastings has developed since he was a teenager.
Growing up in Louisville, Hastings said he was a kid into all sorts of sports. But when he turned 15, he took a web-development class, and everything changed.
“Every single day, I got home from school and would go to my room, get on my computer, and build websites,” he said. “When I turned 16, I wanted a truck, so I figured, why don’t I go make money building websites? I started my first business when I was 16 in Louisville, door-knocking businesses on Bardstown Road and building websites for a few hundred dollars.”
When he went to college at Eastern Kentucky University, he passed off his clients to other developers he knew so he could focus on studying computer science. After graduation, he joined a start-up company focusing on the Bitcoin/Blockchain space as its lead engineer. After two-and-a-half years there, he started his own blockchain development firm, building software for large banks and corporations in Asia, Europe, and the United States.
The profits he made from that venture funded starting up Leadrilla, he said.
“We had some clients we were doing some work for at the time whose contracts were about to phase out,” he said. “Instead of going out and finding new customers to build software for, we decided to take the capital we had and go all-in on the vision of Leadrilla.”
Since then, the company, located in the Square in downtown Lexington, has grown to more than 20 employees. Hastings credits his team with the platform’s success and a reason it stood out to the Kentucky Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame selection committee.
The company’s employee headcount, its growth, and the impact it has had on the insurance industry are some of the reasons Hastings was named one of the state’s emerging entrepreneurs, Raney said.
“It’s an award that is meant to recognize up-and-coming entrepreneurs throughout our state and ideally identify entrepreneurs who will someday, hopefully, be in consideration for the Hall of Fame inductee award,” Raney said. “[Hastings] did check a lot of the boxes for the criteria that we were assessing. This company has been growing very quickly and has done a great job of managing the growth and raising the capital to get to where they are today.”
For Hastings, the next steps are to continue building out the SalesRiver platform and enhancing its customers’ experience.
“We have a handful of Fortune 100 companies that either use us actively or are in the process of going live,” Hastings said. “Our core mission is to provide a platform that allows these large enterprise agencies and carriers to manage their entire sales and marketing teams there. We want to automate a lot of that process, but also give them insights and visibility into things that historically they’ve never been able to see that allows them to make data-driven decisions that will foster growth.”
And doing that will mean relying on the team that has developed the product so far, he said.
“Right after the event, we brought the trophy straight to the office and sat it in our little café area,” he said. “I would love to win the ultimate Hall of Fame Award, but in order for us to win, we need people guiding our company to help us get to where we want it to be. If we focus on that, awards like the Hall of Fame will come naturally.”