Chamber’s startup leader starts up his own project with RaceNote

Dusty Reynolds’ passion for racing began as a 12-year-old in Hooper, Neb., a town of 850 an hour outside Omaha. He swept garage floors of a dirt car-racing friend. By the time he hit high school, he was a crew chief of a team and for a while after school traveled around the country working…

Dusty Reynolds‘ passion for racing began as a 12-year-old in Hooper, Neb., a town of 850 an hour outside Omaha.

He swept garage floors of a dirt car-racing friend. By the time he hit high school, he was a crew chief of a team and for a while after school traveled around the country working on race cars for three to four years. It was there he learned the intracies of what it took to make a stock car run, but also run well. 

“You have to have good tools in the toolbox,” he told a crowd of 30 at 1 Million Cups Omaha on Wednesday morning. 

He watched one of the drivers, Tim McCreadie, taking notes on everything: the weather, what shocks they were using, what tires and engine settings. It was 10 pages of handwritten notes on paper per race. More than 750 pages a year. It all mattered to track the conditions in order to improve. 

“But there wasn’t a good way to take succinct notes,” Reynolds said. 

So in 2013, he began RaceNote, a desktop and mobile app startup dedicated to logging all the changes drivers make to the car, improving their “setup” notes and giving them the ability to share it with teammates and their car builders. They officially launched the iPad app in November at a trade show and also helps manage parts and their conditions, keep track of race-day conditions and also is an e-commerce platform for parts dealers.

For instance, Reynolds said drivers have trouble keeping track of when parts are installed and how many miles they have on them because the process is so tedious. RaceNote helps automatically track the wear and tear so they know when to replace it instead of having the part blow out.

But most Omaha entrepreneurs likely know Reynolds in his other role, as entrepreneurial director for the Omaha Chamber of Commerce. Hired in 2011 by the Chamber, he’s always been an entrepreneur by trade, starting two clothing companies—D&T Shirtified before starting Sababu Conscious Clothing in Mali.

So when he began with the Chamber, he laid it out on the table: he’d likely be involved in something entrepreneurial himself.

“Passion is one of the core values of the Chamber and they’ve worked with me on my passion,” he said. “I spend some days doing more RaceNote than Chamber and vice versa. We just put it out on the table about how it works and we’ve respected each other. It’s worked well.”

But there’s been a lot of late nights working on RaceNote, soon to be followed by long summer weekends as Reynolds and his CMO, Zach Meissner, and CTO, Kevin Berry go to different races around the country to share the product.

This month, they put their intern on a flight to Florida to put up and drive back a mammoth RV they plan to trick out and have as a showroom of sorts. 

“We were using my wife’s Suburu Outback and a tent before,” he told 1MC. 

But marketing to racers is different, Reynolds said. The industry is behind, he said. Parts sellers don’t usually have online stores. He said they’ve had success with word of mouth and even banner ads and message boards.

There are a few competitors out there, but Reynolds said they’re using old technology—they mail out a CD of their software. They are also smaller apps built for one class of racing while RaceNote has several classes, except for NASCAR and F-1 style racing. 

RaceNote is priced for the year and runs from $139, $239 and $539 depending on the features and number of cars. 

“It’s the price of a tire,” he said. “The average racer spends about $28,000 a year on the sport so some people see it as a drop in the bucket while others say they can’t afford it.”

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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