Q&A with Innovate WithIN winners Ethan Hilton and Tolen Schreid
See here for the original Inside Indiana Business article
EVANSVILLE, Ind. - Three Evansville high school graduates won this year’s Innovate WithIN pitch competition finals in June. Ethan Hilton and Tolen Schreid of Signature School and Emily Rudolph of New Tech Institute took the top spot with their legal tech startup, Caseflood.ai.
The trio beat nine Indiana high school teams and received thousands of dollars in scholarships and funding. Hilton and Schreid spoke with Inside INdiana Business about winning the state competition and what’s next for their business.
What is Caseflood.ai?
Hilton: We are the first multilingual AI receptionist for law firms. It’s highly effective at qualifying clients, and it’s super easy to customize with drag-and-drop customization.
What are your roles in the startup?
Hilton: I’m CEO and co-founder, Tolen is CTO and co-founder and Emily does a lot of the more operational tasks.
The two of you are Signature School graduates, and Emily is a New Tech Institute graduate. What brought you together for this venture?
Hilton: We’re long-time friends. I did a legal tech company before this, and we did well. But there was internal turmoil within the team. I remember thinking, “I wish I could just do this with two of my best friends. We could do some awesome stuff together.” And it was Tolen and Emily. So we ended up giving it a shot, and it’s been going great ever since.
Where did the idea for Caseflood.ai come from?
Hilton: With the last legal tech startup I did, I talked to a lot of lawyers, and I learned a lot about their problems. And there was one problem that just kept coming up over and over again. It was that most small law firms just don’t have the capacity or infrastructure to do client qualification or the process of gathering relevant insights from prospective clients to see if they have a case the lawyer wants.
I wondered if this was a regional problem or something like that. So I took to the web, and I found a study done by Clio, a case management software company. They sent out 1,000 phone calls to law firms across the nation pretending to be a client. They found that only 56% of law firms ended up picking up the phone and the rest went to voicemail. And on average, about 20% of the people who reach voicemail bothered to leave a message.
We thought that was absurd and kind of insane. So we decided to engineer the first AI receptionist for law firms.
What role did Signature School play in your entrepreneurial ambitions?
Schreid: We were both part of the Business Club. And every year, we competed in Innovate WithIN and UE Changemaker. It gave us some experience, but Ethan did a lot on his own. And with my role as CTO, I’ve done a lot of my own. Signature School brought us together more than anything. It gave us the opportunity to do all these things.
Tell me about the Innovate WithIN experience.
Hilton: It’s the largest high school pitch competition in the nation. I think over 3,000 teams submitted applications this year. There are a couple of different rounds. You send the first application, and then if you make it past the initial cut, it’s the regional round. Then if you win the regional round, you get to the top 10 state finals.
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That’s when you enter a six-week boot camp where they connect you with a ton of incredible people. It culminates at the very end with all of us meeting in Indianapolis. We stay at IU Indy, and we get to go to Indianapolis Motor Speedway and network with, talk to and get advice from some of the most influential people in all of Indiana.
Once we have the state finals, we go to Washington, D.C. for a week where it’s more of the same thing. It’s an entire week of us getting to talk to, network with and get advice from some extraordinary people. We get to go to Congress and House of Representatives and stuff like that.
We got the opportunity to visit ZEBOX, which is a startup incubator. We got to visit a marketing firm and have one-on-one conversations about what our marketing strategies should look like. So they give a lot more advice and hands-on help than most other pitch competitions.
How did it feel to win the state finals?
Hilton: It was really cool and exciting. It’s like a $55,000 grand prize plus a whole bunch of other stuff. But we were immune to it in the sense that I was prepared to lose because we knew we were going to start this as a company anyway. It was already a company, and we were going to pursue it no matter what.
The amount of help we got from Innovate WithIN alone would have been enough to make this thing a reality. The fact that we won was just icing on top. And it means that we’re no longer cash-constrained.
The cool thing about Innovate WithIN is that they give the same experience to the people in the top 10 as they do to the person who wins. We’re all going to go to Indianapolis. We’re all going to go to D.C. We’re all going to get the same sort of connections and experiences.
What are the benefits of winning Innovate WithIN’s pitch competition?
Hilton: We got $25,000 cash and $30,000 in 529 funding, as well as 50 marketing hours with this marketing firm, 5 and Rise. We get access to a technical team from a place called E-gineering. They’re a software solutions company. So it gives us a lot of monetary as well as physical benefits, having an actual marketing team and technical team behind us. It’s a fantastic place to springboard.
A Signature School teacher, José Mota, won Innovate WithIN’s Teacher of the Year award. Tell me about him.
Schreid: We like him. He’s a cool guy. He runs the Business Club pretty well, I’d say, and all the adjacent stuff like stock trading and getting everybody to go into competitions. He definitely motivates people who wouldn’t do this normally to get into it.
What’s next for Caseflood.ai?
Hilton: We’re about to start our pilot program. We’re going to get 15 law firms, and we’re going to roll this thing out into the real world, get to see what this looks like and hopefully have some incoming callers get pleasantly surprised with our technology.
What’s next for the three of you?
Hilton: I’m going to Carnegie Mellon University. Tolen’s going to Purdue University, and Emily’s going to the University of Notre Dame.
What are your majors?
Hilton: I’m majoring in computer science and business.
Schried: I’m doing aerospace engineering, and Emily’s doing mechanical engineering.
