This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with 30-year-old Jacob Stonecipher, founder of Sustainable Skylines, a startup drone manufacturer based in Miami. His identity has been verified. This story has been edited for length and clarity.
In the summer of 2016, I was 21, living in New York City, and working as an intern for a private-capital research firm. One weekend, I went to the Jersey shore with a group of friends. I’m from Seattle, so I’m not used to seeing airplanes flying banners every couple of minutes. They looked like they were from the 1940s. They were noisy and emitting a lot of smoke.
I couldn’t help but think that there’s got to be a better way of doing this, so when I got back to the city, I went online to learn as much as I could about aerial advertising. I became obsessed. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
A year later, after I graduated from college and got a job at the same private-equity research company in Manhattan. I quickly rose through the ranks in business development and was making a handsome living. But at night, I would try to find out if a drone could pull the same-size banners.
It was just a lot of cold-calling drone manufacturers and shipping sample, 800-foot banners to those willing to give it a try. Every single one shipped the banners back, saying this would require an entirely different software and hardware solution to work.
Getting the FAA’s blessing
At this point, I knew I would have to have the kind of drone I envisioned built from scratch. I then emailed the FAA to understand the process for getting approval for this novel operation. Though a few months went by without a response, I went ahead and hired three engineers in Maryland to develop a prototype anyway. I found them by searching LinkedIn and doing more cold-calling. With money from my savings, my mom, and my best friend from college, I was able to invest about $150,000 in the project.
One day, someone from the FAA finally got back to me and said we should have a call. They said aerial advertising has caused tons of accidents and that it sounded like my drone idea could make the industry safer. By then, I had a prototype that could lift a heavy banner — not for a long flight, but long enough to prove my concept was feasible. I provided a demonstration over Zoom to about a dozen people from the UAS Integration Office of the FAA.
The FAA then basically gave me their blessing to proceed, which was a big vote of confidence. It meant there would be a light at the end of the tunnel if we continued to pursue this. It was 2021. I named the business Sustainable Skylines and incorporated it. I then raised $1 million from angel investors, family, and friends.
A leap of faith
I was a senior director but I quit my job because all I could think about was building drones to replace those old airplanes. It was almost unfair to my employer to continue working. It was certainly nerve-racking, a leap of faith, but I had so much conviction that I was doing the right thing.
In 2022, I moved to Miami, which is the hub of banner towing. You can test all year round. It’s just a big, open space. We donated a lot of our ad inventory right out of the gate, just because we were learning how to do this. By the following year, the business was me, the three engineers, and my mom as CFO. She’s been a career CFO. It’s pretty special to work with your mom.
A year ago, on Thanksgiving, we got our first FAA approval in the US for a drone-based commercial operation. We launched our drone with a banner across 10 miles of Miami Beach, and this past spring break, we did our first paid ad campaign with a sunglasses company.
Scaling up
We’ve since opened a production facility to begin scaling the aircraft. Aerial advertising is a business we want to reinvent, but we also want to apply our drone technology to other use cases.
As of today, we’ve raised $2.8 million in seed funding and plan to start raising institutional funding soon. My best friend from college, who served seven years in US Army Special Operations, joined the team as head of government solutions, and we hired a chief marketing officer.
Overall, building this business has been way harder than I anticipated, but it’s been the greatest ride of my life.
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