Chris Turney’s interest in entrepreneurship was as sudden as it was intense.
Six years ago in Bangalore, India, Turney was interning at IBM. One day, his boss tasked him with running the day-to-day affairs of the multinational corporation’s foreign operations.
“The director was running around, and I was managing problems across 200 accounts working with a lot of corporations,” recalls Turney. “It was a crazy thing for someone my age to take on a huge amount of responsibility like this at a major company.”
Despite initially making Turney feel inadequate because of his young age, this testing of survival skills quickly turned him into a leader, sparking a desire to take on bigger projects and set greater goals for himself.
“You need to put yourself in tough situations so you can learn what you’re capable of,” Turney says. “Living and working in India challenged me in so many ways that in retrospect, reaching out and having a conversation with Mark Cuban was not a big deal.”
How did he continue back home what he learned in India?
“I got involved with a venture accelerator at Northeastern called IDEA and got a coach,” says the 26-year-old WeWork Dumbo Heights member. “I started mocking up stuff for a productivity suite to find a better way to organize the internal communication I dealt with at IBM.”
His interest in streamlining communication between groups of people didn’t stop there.
Turney drummed up an idea for a restaurant app called Check.it. The vision was to make it easier for large groups to split the bill at restaurants. He then went abroad for a semester to the University of Cambridge, where he took his first entrepreneurial class. When he returned from England, he pushed out this app with his classmate and then co-founder Eric Tarczynski. They incorporated and got a lawyer, but 10 months into the business, they had a cash crunch.
The pair got pushback from their developers, and they decided to shut down the product months after they raised $60,000 in 2013. Turney rebranded the startup and bought back almost all of the shares from his co-founder. In 2014, he took another stab at an app in the restaurant space: Pass, a subscription-based membership platform.
Once Turney and his team started beta testing Pass, they moved from Boston to New York and rebranded the business to Disco, an app that offers an assortment of exclusive perks from a curated list of small businesses in Manhattan. These perks are available to all app users and select local businesses. It allows consumers to take advantage of discounts and benefits and gives merchants guaranteed money up front from subscribers.
“We want to work with top quality businesses, and we want people to make more for their money,” Turney says. “We decided to move to New York because it’s a hub of local businesses. There are so many more businesses per square mile, and it’s a much more competitive area. We think giving them strategic ways to get business is a value add.”
Turney, who had a team of nine including a co-founder, downsized to three development freelancers last fall and is a solo entrepreneur. With plans to hire this summer, the app is taking off with more than 600 users and 36 merchants.
What’s next? Connecting shoppers and small business owners in additional cities. Taking over New York was just the start of it all.
Photos: Katelyn Perry