Catie King is the Co-founder of Stradia Partners, a consultancy that empowers companies to optimize operations through low-code, no-code, and AI-powered technology solutions. Stradia Partners specializes in building scalable internal tools using platforms like Airtable and Retool to streamline workflows, consolidate data, and boost team efficiency across industries. With over a decade of experience in product management, Catie previously served as Head of Product at flyExclusive, one of the largest private jet operators in the US. Outside of her work in tech, she is also a musician and a strong advocate for data-informed decision-making.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [2:33] Catie King shares how selling CDs in high school prepared her for entrepreneurship
- [5:19] Why Catie chose to study entrepreneurship and her pivot from business school
- [9:25] Founding a music magazine network during college and scaling it to 16 campuses
- [13:14] What did the transition from public transit tech to private aviation teach Catie?
- [16:26] Catie explains the concept of low-code and no-code development
- [17:56] The impact of generative AI and ChatGPT on B2B SaaS and software development
- [22:51] The challenges of building a sales team and finding clients
- [25:07] Benefits of using Airtable and Retool to replace outdated spreadsheet systems
In this episode…
Many growing companies struggle with inefficiencies, fragmented data, and time-consuming manual processes, especially when teams rely on outdated spreadsheets or lack the budget for full-scale development. How can these businesses leverage today’s tools to simplify operations and scale smarter?
Catie King, an experienced product manager turned tech founder, believes the solution lies in low-code, no-code, and AI-powered platforms. Drawing from her experience leading product at a major private jet company and now co-founding Stradia Partners, Catie shares how tools like Airtable and Retool empower non-developers to create sophisticated solutions that streamline workflows and reduce costs. She also unpacks how generative AI is accelerating this shift, making once complex tech accessible to lean teams.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Catie King, Co-founder of Stradia Partners, about building custom solutions using low-code and AI. Catie shares how her background in music and journalism led her to tech, why she believes in empowering operations teams, and how tools like Airtable, Retool, and generative AI are redefining modern software development.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Special Mention(s):
Related episode(s):
Quotable Moments:
- “Being a musician is a great trial run for entrepreneurship — you learn to face rejection early.”
- “Low-code tools are a power trip; you can build powerful apps without waiting on developers.”
- “The boom of generative AI was an awakening for industry and made advanced tech accessible.”
- “We don’t sell; we just help people stop wasting time on spreadsheets they hate.”
- “No one throws a parade for a clean database, but it’s what enables automation and growth.”
Action Steps:
- Explore low-code platforms like Airtable: They allow non-technical users to build efficient internal tools. This reduces development cost and empowers operations teams to solve problems directly.
- Evaluate current workflows for inefficiencies: Many teams rely on outdated spreadsheets that hinder collaboration and accuracy. Streamlining these processes enhances productivity and reduces errors.
- Introduce AI tools into your operations: Platforms like ChatGPT and other generative AI models can help automate repetitive tasks and offer insights. Embracing these tools can boost your team’s agility.
- Partner with digital solution experts: Hiring teams like Stradia Partners helps companies implement no-code or low-code solutions faster. This ensures scalability without needing a massive dev team.
- Empower internal champions: Operations staff often know where inefficiencies lie. Giving them tools and support to fix problems can drive significant digital transformation from within.
Sponsor: Rise25
At Rise25 we help B2B businesses give to and connect to your ‘Dream 200’ relationships and partnerships.
We help you cultivate amazing relationships in 2 ways.
#1 Our Predictable Podcast ROI Program
At Rise25, we’re committed to helping you connect with your Dream 200 referral partners, clients, and strategic partners through our done-for-you podcast solution.
We’re a professional podcast production agency that makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses build strong relationships with referral partners, clients, and audiences without doing the hard work.
What do you need to start a podcast?
When you use our proven system, all you need is an idea and a voice. We handle the strategy, production, and distribution – you just need to show up and talk.
The Rise25 podcasting solution is designed to help you build a profitable podcast. This requires a specific strategy, and we’ve got that down pat. We focus on making sure you have a direct path to ROI, which is the most important component. Plus, our podcast production company takes any heavy lifting of production and distribution off your plate.
We make distribution easy.
We’ll distribute each episode across more than 11 unique channels, including iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon Podcasts. We’ll also create copy for each episode and promote your show across social media.
Cofounders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars, YPO, EO, Lending Tree, Freshdesk, and many more.
The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.
Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and to cultivating amazing relationships.
Are you considering launching a podcast to acquire partnerships, clients, and referrals? Would you like to work with a podcast agency that wants you to win?
Rise25 Cofounders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.
#2 Our Comprehensive Corporate Gifting Program
Elevate business relationships with customers, partners, staff, and prospects through gifting.
At Rise25, thoughtful and consistent gifting is a key component of staying top of mind and helps build lasting business relationships. Our corporate gift program is designed to simplify your process by delivering a full-service corporate gifting program — from sourcing and hand selecting the best gifts to expert packaging, custom branding, reliable shipping, and personalized messaging on your branded stationary.
Our done-for-you corporate gifting service ensures that your referral partners, prospects, and clients receive personalized touchpoints that enhance your business gifting efforts and provide a refined executive gifting experience. Whether you’re looking to impress key stakeholders or boost client loyalty, our comprehensive approach makes it easy and affordable.
Discover how Rise25’s personalized corporate gifting program can help you create lasting impressions. Get started today and experience the difference a strategic gifting approach can make.
Email us through our contact form.
You can learn more and watch a video on how it works here: https://rise25.com/giftprogram/
Contact us now at [email protected] or message us here https://rise25.com/contact/
Episode Transcript
Intro: 00:00
Okay. Today, we’re talking about leveraging low-code and AI solutions to transform business processes. My guest today is Catie King. I’ll tell you more about her in a second, so stay tuned.
John Corcoran: 00:13
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:29
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this show. And you know, every week we get to talk to smart CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies.
And if you look at our archives, we’ve got some great episodes. We’ve got Netflix and Grubhub and Redfin and Gusto and Kinko’s. You’ve seen it before. Go check them out. Lots of great episodes for you to check out.
And before we get into this interview, this episode is brought to you by Rise25, our company where we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you to run your podcast. We are the easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do three things.
It’s a three-legged stool strategy, accountability, and full execution. Infact, we actually went and invented a platform called Podcast Copilot, which my guest here today will probably tear apart if I show it to her. I’m a little bit afraid to, because she’s a bit of an expert in how to build these sorts of things. And so that’s the story behind Rise25. Go check us out at Rise25.com.
All right. My guest here today. First, I want to give a shout-out to past guests on the show, David Rose of US Expansion Partners. Some of our best guests come from previous guests on the show. And we asked him, who else should I interview?
He recommended Catie, and she is the Co-founder of Stradia Partners. She has a decade of experience as a product manager, most recently as head of product for a private jet company. So we’ll talk about that. And then they focus now on delivering software solutions that consolidate data, automate workflows, and empower teams. And we’ve got so many, you know, cool tools that have come out in recent years between low-code and no-code and stuff like that.
We’ll explain what those are for those of you who aren’t familiar with that. And she’s based out of Durham, North Carolina. Catie, pleasure to have you here today. And I love to start by getting to know what people are like when they are younger. And you are a musician and we’re out there recording your music and then go out there and schlepping in high school, getting your friends to buy your CDs first. I guess we should probably explain it to the younger generation. A CD was a round thing that had music on it back in the day, but what kind of music did you play? Catie?
Catie King: 02:32
Yeah man. Classic. Like too many emotions too young to process singer songwriter trend trending rock so I did. I loved I got the opportunity to sort of grab all of the local studio rats and force them on stage with me, and that was a really awesome thing. So if you see me in a full band, it’s more towards singer-songwriter on the rock side of things. But cool. Love me a minor chord.
John Corcoran: 02:58
So cool.
Catie King: 02:59
And you are a happy person who takes all my sadness and puts it into the song.
John Corcoran: 03:05
And so did you learn a lot about sales from selling your own CD, or trying to get your friends in high school to buy your CDs?
Catie King: 03:13
For sure. And I think I joke all the time that being a musician is a really great trial run for entrepreneurship.
John Corcoran: 03:22
There’s a lot because you’re putting yourself out there and facing rejection, right? I mean, yeah.
Catie King: 03:27
You know, when you are pouring out your diary pages on stage and like two people in a random passerby or the people in the audience, like, know what it’s like to have no customers for a.
John Corcoran: 03:39
While.
Catie King: 03:40
It was good. It was good practice. And you have to be a jack of all trades which I think is even more true now. To be successful in any entertainment role, you have to be an influencer, which is a completely different skill set, so it was certainly good, good preparation.
John Corcoran: 03:58
It is fascinating to see some musicians that are embracing these new tools, building up a social following, because it really is at the point where now you can kind of if you build that following, you can have a much more direct tool for communicating directly with your fans. And, you know, frankly, Phil shows, you know, or sell music or get streams or whatever your goal is. My 14-year-old son is actually learning to play the drums. And he had a performance this weekend that they just put on the drum instructor does like he rents out this local music hall, fills it with parents, you know, charges the parents to come get a ticket to come to it. And then each kid comes up and does one song with his band. And it’s super cool if there’s such a cool experience.
Catie King: 04:43
That’s brilliant. Yeah. I was always told it, you know, you just need 1000 true fans. And I think that’s true in music. It’s true in business, but it’s very, very difficult to find those thousand people.
John Corcoran: 04:56
Yeah. You went to college and decided to study entrepreneurship. First of all, why? You know what? What happened between, you know, selling CDs in high school and deciding you wanted to study entrepreneurship in high school, that sorry, in college that convinced you that it was for you. Did you grow up around entrepreneurs or anything like that?
Catie King: 05:19
Not really. Both of my parents were sort of career public servants. So my dad was in public transit and my mom was in public education. So just entrepreneurial in their own right for sure, but career public servants. So when I got to Carolina, I thought, business sounds fun.
Business might help me with my music. I’m still very into that. And so I started as a business major and it turns out that to get into the business program, you have to be good at things like financial accounting and microeconomics and business calculus, and I am not good at any of those things.
John Corcoran: 05:57
So the hard way.
Catie King: 05:58
Yeah. And did I learn a lot? Sure it was. It’s just that my math is not my forte, which I know sounds counter to someone who’s now landed in data science, but yeah, so I got rejected from the business school. You apply at Carolina and you go through all of these interviews and they are basically like, Catie, your grades in these pre-reqs are not good.
I was like, good point. So I went home. I actually played rugby in Carolina at Carolina as well, and went home to one of my roommates, who was a senior in the advertising major in the journalism school and, you know, sobbed and was just so upset, like, I’m two years into my four year time here and I have to rethink everything. And she was like, you’ll be fine. You’ll like the journalism school. Just just go there. So applied to that, I got in. And then I saw a flyer on a bathroom stall door for entrepreneurship.
John Corcoran: 06:51
Where all good things originate. Exactly. Yeah.
Catie King: 06:55
And I said, well, that’s kind of what I was looking for out of the business school. Let me go check that out. And you actually have to apply to that minor as well. And applied. And I remember I’ll never forget walking into the room.
There were about a hundred people at the time. It’s now 450. And I spoke at one of their classes last year, which was a wild, full circle experience. But I remember walking in and looking around the room, and it was a lot of people I had met on campus that I sort of aspired to be more like. So the room was full of people that really were already doing amazing things with their time on campus and were really inspiring to be around.
And I knew right away I wanted to be in that circle. So it was a great fit. There was an arts entrepreneurship track, and I got to actually go to class with the former manager of Crosby, Stills and Nash as my professor, so that was pretty cool.
John Corcoran: 07:50
Okay, cool.
Catie King: 07:51
And really I was just itching with excitement every day. It really struck a chord with me. So yeah, humbled in face first but left forever. Changed for sure.
John Corcoran: 08:01
So you don’t go into journalism but that wasn’t your original passion anyways. You end up going into product management. So what? What drew you to that field?
Catie King: 08:11
Yeah. So what’s cool about the journalism school at Carolina is it’s actually journalism and mass communications. And they had, and it’s even more evolved now. They’ve gotten really impressive. But there’s a traditional journalism track.
But they also had marketing, public relations, and advertising. And with that, at the time they were really embracing the digital revolution of all of those fields. And so I did get a lot of exposure to graphic design, web design, videography. And then with the exposure to entrepreneurship, I think the culmination of all of that was a real interest in technology. And during my time at Carolina, I was.
I founded a music technology platform called resound and had no idea what product management was, had no idea how software was built, but knew I wanted to try to get into it. And through that again, just through pure necessity, I learned. Learned the technology industry and learned how software is built and kind of stumbled into that.
John Corcoran: 09:11
And resound was a magazine and a national network of locally focused digital magazines. So tell me how that came about. Did you, like, go around to other digital magazines and say, let’s work together on this.
Catie King: 09:25
So, we actually ended up founding those magazines. So there were a couple business models at the time, both very successful, that we were like this. This should exist for music. Her campus was a very popular one that was filling that void between sort of 16 and like in Teen Vogue and, and Cosmopolitan for college students. But they were kind of crowdsourcing that journalism by having individual campus magazines that all were published on the same site.
So you got those aggregate stats to be able to advertise across the entire thing. We used to joke it was like Victoria’s Secret’s dream, right? To advertise to all those college students through one platform. And SB nation is another good example for sports. So we wanted to do the same thing for music.
So I went to college campuses and signed up, you know. Enthusiastic students who really wanted to found their local chapter of it. And we got to 16 campuses and had a lot of success. None of it was financial, but it was a great learning curve. And actually, some of those, some of those campus magazines still exist. So cool for you, the Berkeley Bee side might still exist. And that was actually a resound.
John Corcoran: 10:43
So how did you do that? How did you go approach people? How did you find the right person at each of these different campuses? Like, did you put out a posting or what it was?
Catie King: 10:54
I gosh, it’s hard to even remember. You know, the music industry is full of passion, right? Like sports. Like video games. So people just really want to be a part of it. So it spread pretty naturally.
Folks know other friends from high school who went on to college who really are into music and wanted to be a part of it, and they want to write about it. They want to discover the next local band that’s going to be the national sensation. So convincing college kids to write about something they love was the easy part. The difficult part was building a technology platform that would allow us to do that at scale. And I unfortunately could not find a technical co-founder, which was the key part.
John Corcoran: 11:33
So especially this in this time frame. So we’re talking 2012 to 2016 timeframe, I believe here, 2013. So that’s like a time when a lot of the solutions that exist today weren’t out yet.
Catie King: 11:47
Oh man, I wish that what was available today was available to me then that would have been incredible. So yeah, we struggled with the technology side, but the people side was actually pretty easy. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 11:58
Yeah. So you, you go from there and you end up going into product management and you actually ended up working and talking about your parents being in transportation. You actually worked for some companies that were kind of in the transit industry.
Catie King: 12:13
I couldn’t believe it. Yeah, it was completely by chance. I actually ended up working for TransLink, which is a technology platform. At the time, it was owned by Ford which helped Public Transit operate, and that was the office for TransLink is actually right across the street from the office my dad worked at, because they obviously wanted to be close to the Triangle Transit Authority, which is where he worked. So it was completely by chance that I ended up in his industry.
But there’s a lot of really interesting problems to solve in any sort of transit or transit-adjacent space. And so it is really the lure of what we can do to optimize and, help more people have access to transit was attractive to me. And it was a fun ride.
John Corcoran: 13:03
And that led you into working for Fly Exclusive. A I guess a private jet chartering or private jet platform. Right. What was that experience like?
Catie King: 13:14
Yeah, the jokes write themselves. I went from transit to private planes.
John Corcoran: 13:20
Yeah, quite an upgrade for you.
Catie King: 13:21
Yeah, my team recruited me for that. If you know, I think so. Fly exclusive is a the fifth largest private aviation company in the country. They just went public last year as a part of that. And I guess two years ago now gosh it’s 2025.
And the challenge they challenged when I came on board was that they had been outsourcing all of their technology development and recognition in order to grow and in order to go public, technology really did need to be at the heart of their strategy. So they hired me and my friend David Ivey to build a team from the ground up to help. Initially, the mandate was to get a mobile application out to their customers actually, so their customers wanted to be able to book from their phones. Who doesn’t?
John Corcoran: 14:04
Yeah. So there probably must be solutions out there that can do that. Kind of like a white label solution. Why did they need to build something from scratch at that point?
Catie King: 14:13
You know, I’m sure there are. Private aviation is interesting because the business models are varied and pricing is incredibly important. Obviously, this is a very expensive commodity, and the folks that are using this application in particular are folks who either own a plane and lease it back to flight Exclusive, and they call those partners, or they are Jet Club jet card members who signed a contract to get preferred rates. It’s.
John Corcoran: 14:41
Yeah, like Netjets. Similar to a NetJets model.
Catie King: 14:44
Exactly, exactly. And now fractional ownership is a big Netjets model. And flight schools have adopted that as well. So you can imagine all three of those types of customers have very specific contractual relationships. And booking looks very different.
John Corcoran: 14:57
In other words, there wasn’t a one size, all one fits all, size fits all solution that’s deceivingly complex.
Catie King: 15:04
What the experience needs to be. And one insight early on also, is that we were one of the first apps to provide a really high level of financial transparency to customers. They’re used to not having a lot of visibility into the price of flights and how much money they have left in their account and why, you know, the breakdown of charges. And that transparency really made customers a big fan of the application.