This story appears in the September 2025 issue of Utah Business. Subscribe.
If you ask Chipper Whatcott about his entrepreneurial journey, he’ll tell you it’s been full of trial and error — a “graveyard of dead businesses,” as he puts it. But out of the rubble arose Mallow, a platform designed to serve its users by slashing payment processing fees and simplifying invoicing and contracting. After selling off his first business venture, Whelm, Whatcott learned to focus on strong core offerings rather than spreading too thin.
“‘Build it and they will come’ is a lie,” he says. “It was better to just sell [Whelm], then go build something people actually wanted.” With Mallow, Whatcott and his co-founder Ben Ruckman are aiming to master the essentials, capturing their market by doing fewer things exceptionally well. With positive customer feedback and a laser focus on growth, Whatcott embodies the startup spirit of “free falling” and “building the plane on the way down,” using ingenuity and resilience as the fuel to get Mallow off the ground.
Weighted vest
“I recently started wearing a 20-pound weighted vest to turn my walks into rucks [walks or hikes with a weighted backpack].”
IQBAR
“This is an easy snack with clean ingredients and a quick boost of calories when I need a pick-me-up.”
Mallow
“We use our own product! We save a ton of payment processing fees on our customers’ subscription payments thanks to our low rates (which we offer to everyone, by the way).”
Owala FreeSip
“This is the best water bottle in the game, and I love buying from Utah-based businesses.”
Audible & Libby
“In the last six months, I have started turning a lot of my podcast listening into audiobook streaming. … Lately, I’ve been loving ‘Escaping the Housing Trap.’ I think every citizen of the U.S. should read it. We have to get smarter about how we’re building, and the only way that we can do that is by advocating for change at a political level. … ‘Escaping the Housing Trap’ basically details how to do that.”
Library card
“Speaking of libraries, they are an underrated public resource. Need a quiet desk to work for the day? Library. Want free audiobooks? Library. Need to host a meeting? Library. Need a makerspace? Library. Libraries are awesome.”
“My LinkedIn advice is to just post stuff that you care about and enjoy. Who cares if it’s business-y or not? You’ll attract the people who care about the same things you do.”
