The Data Stack Show - 15: Early Stage Analytics and Learning from the Y Combinator Experience with Axel Delafosse from Pool

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

This week on The Data Stack Show, Kostas and Eric are joined by Axel Delafosse, founder and CEO of Pool, a messaging app designed to help couples spend less time deciding what to do and spend more time together. Axel shares his story of how he went from having his idea being shot down in person by Paul Graham to being accepted for Y Combinator. While Pool is still a young startup, Axel offers wise insight from lessons he’s learned along the way.Highlights from this week’s episode include:Pool Messenger, “the ultimate antidote to decision paralysis” (2:50)Pitching to Paul Graham and applying to YC (6:17)The importance of the co-founder relationship (14:01)The YC experience and losing Facebook’s API (17:37)Products die, relationships last (22:05)Breaking down the data stack (28:50)Using data and conversations with users to evaluate the experience (36:12)The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Welcome back to the Data Sack Show. This is Eric Dodds and Costas Pardalis with a great episode for you today. We're going to talk with Axel De La Fosse, who is the founder of Pool, and we'll hear all about what that app does. Very interesting. He's built the entire thing himself. And we'll get to hear from him about an experience of going through Y Combinator with a previous company. Kostas, Axel's company is really early stage.

What do you want to ask him? I think it's going to be fascinating to, first of all, hear his story around Y Combinator. And not just like Y Combinator and not just like Y Combinator, but about chasing the dream and building a company. He's a young founder also. I think that's going to be super interesting for him to share his experience. By the way, this is the second product that he's building right now, the second company. So I think it's going to be super, super interesting to hear his experience on that.

On the other hand, I mean, from a technical perspective and from a, let's say, technology perspective in general, I think it's very interesting because it's the first of such an early stage product and company that we are hosting on our show. So it will be interesting to listen about what are the differences when you start so early on the lifecycle of the company and the product and what you do differently, how you keep yourself lean and your data stack lean and do you need at the end a data stack at this stage. So all these, I think, are questions that we should ask and chat about him. And I think that it's going to be super interesting and insightful. I agree. And we'll just give a full disclaimer. Axel, we met on our open source community forum

for Rudder Stack. He was just so insightful and so helpful in the community. We reached out to him and began a conversation. And then he had such an interesting story. We wanted him on the show. So very selfishly, I want to know why he chose RudderStack and what the experience is like running an open source. So let's go ahead and jump in and talk with Axel. Axel, welcome to the Data Stack Show. It's great to have you.

Hey, thanks for having me. Wonderful. Well, just a little bit of background for our listeners. We met Axel on our open source community channel for Rudder Stack. He had a ton of questions about the product and was really helpful and an active member. And we just messaged him and said that we'd like to get to know him and hear about the project that he's working on. So Axel, could you give us a brief background on who you are and the company that you're building? Sure.

So hi, everyone. I'm Axel, the founder and CEO of Pool Messenger. So Pool is a messaging app for couples combined with a shared list where you can pool your ideas of things to do together. So instead of forgetting or losing your ideas in the flow of conversations, they are saved in a shared list. So you can easily find them when you need. We help you decide what to do. It's the ultimate antidote to decision paralysis.

So when you and your partner don't know what to do, or where to go, or what to cook or what to watch, Pool will help you pick your next move. And you can also share your recommendations with your friends in one click and get inspired by his recommendations as well. It's so interesting. When I first started looking it up, it's that really funny situation of you have a free night with your partner and even though there are a million things to do, it's so hard sometimes to just decide what to do, which seems crazy, but it's true. It's true. And

it's that, I know that you have said before, it was kind of out of your personal experience. The reason you started the company, can you tell us a little bit more about when you had the idea and what kind of the point at which you said, I need to build something to fix this? Yeah, sure. That's just because I needed it with my girlfriend. As you said, there is so many times where we don't know what to do. We don't know where to go. And yeah, I just needed to find an easy solution to share our IDs. And what people use today is just messaging apps or

notes app and it tends that the IDs are lost and you forget about what you wanted to do. And it's just a mess. So I figured that I would just stop this because I'm a software engineer and I built the first version and we started to use it every day with my girlfriend. And then I realized, OK, I'm serving a real pain here. So that's how it started. That is really cool. Well, you applied to Y Combinator. Tell us about that experience. When did you apply and when do you find out? Have you already found out about acceptance?

Yeah, disclaimer, it's not, it will be next time. I guess the project is too early. Yeah, so I applied, I think it was three months ago. I can't remember, but yeah, it's always a great exercise to apply to Y Combinator because you're forced to ask you the right questions and articulate your business in a way that makes you see it more clear so yeah maybe you have some more specific question about the application well it was just you know it's always interesting to hear about the experience.

I think, I know Costas has a bunch of questions, but just one question about the process of applying to YC. As a software engineer who's now founding a company, what was that experience like? You know, I know as a software engineer by trade, you're immersed in the technical side of things day to day, but interested to know what it was because yeah I'm the CEO so I have to think about the business model and what the company should look like in 10 years. So actually it's a lot of vision like what the product should look like, where should we go but it's really like just

thinking about what your users want and trying to make it super simple to understand. So it's a very natural process. Try to understand what you do and explain it super clearly. It should be crystal clear and then write it down and just remove all the useless parts. And then you apply. Actually, I guess the first time I applied to YC was a little bit easier because I met Paul Graham in Paris.

So that's a funny story. Yeah, tell us that story. Yeah, I met PG in Paris three years years ago he was invited at the family it's a startup accelerator here in paris and he told me to apply to ic after i delivered my one-liner he responded with hmm that's a shitty idea and you can't imagine my face at that moment i'm like okay we just had a talk and i was like man, I read your book and it's amazing. And we just talked about like technical stuff. And at the time he was working on a new programming language

and didn't release it at the time. And then, so we were talking like technical. And then I'm like, okay, I will deliver my one-liner and try to pitch and stuff, but I'm a, okay, I will deliver my one-liner and try to pitch and stuff. But I'm a tech guy, right? So he just said, that's a shitty idea. And I'm like, you can't imagine my face at that moment. But I stayed calm and continued the discussion, explaining how different we were than other event guides.

Because, yeah, the startup was, we helped you find the best electronic music events in Paris. And so, yeah, I explained why we were the best to do this. And 30 minutes later, he asked me to send him an email and to apply to YC. And I told him it was probably too early and I was too young. I was 21 at the time. And he told me it's never too early to do YC and that I should apply.

And I did it and it was the best decision of my life. Yeah, basically. So that's why I would always follow this advice. And even if it's probably too early for my startup to be accepted into YC, I would just apply. Axel, how many times you have applied to YC so far? Two, I guess. Two? I mean, the first time you were accepted?

No, two with this new startup. All right. And the first time you were accepted, so you participated to the YC program or not? Yeah, we participated in summer 17 batch. Ah, alright. So, how was the experience during the program? I have applied like

three times, I think, Y Combinator for my previous company. I never made it to the interview to be honest. So, I know a little bit about the process of applying and like the questions and all that stuff and the video that you have to create and pitch. But I never had like the opportunity to move to the next step.

So it will be amazing like to hear about the overall experience, like from the day that you apply. Okay, your case was a bit more special because you had the opportunity like to meet with Paul Graham and you had like this conversation with him. But I guess the rest of the process was the same, right? So how was this? How was the whole process from the day that you submitted the application

to the day that you started the program? And then we can also discuss about the program itself. To be honest, I wasn't sure if we would apply because I was like, that's... Yeah, he told me to apply, but I'm not sure if we would ever get in. But anyway, we did it and it was a late apply. And they just started to send the invites for the interview but anyway we got a little bit of help from from some partners at the family to craft a good application form and we applied we got the interview so we told paul graham because i was sending him emails at this time he actually invited us in in the UK to have a chat and help us figure

out what we should tell the partners to get them excited. So again, we got super lucky on this part. And then we get to the interview. And that was the most stressful moment of our lives. I had like two co-founders and after the first interview, they started to like just go crazy. And I was like, okay guys, stop argumenting, stop, just stay calm, stay calm. And that's what we did. So we stayed calm. They told us, okay, so we are going to do another interview.

So we were like, okay, that's not a good sign. But actually, it's never a good or bad sign. That's just normal. If you don't have, it's 10 minutes, right? So it's just too fast to understand everything about your business, about your funding team, about your product. So again, we stayed calm. We just did the second interview. And at this point, it was like the best interview ever.

They were like super excited about the product. I did a demo and they were like, okay, that's amazing. And so we went back to our apartment and actually we wanted to make the most of it. So we met with a software engineer from Instacart and we just tried to network with everyone we could during these three or four days in San Francisco. And we got the call from Michael, my co-founder Raphael got the call from Michael and we got the call from Michael my co-founder got the call from Michael and we got in so yeah I guess that was one of the happiest moments of our

of our lives and and then we prepared for what will happen during the batch so we stayed focused keep working on the project keep growing the community and and yeah yeah

it's amazing i mean congrats first of all for making it into that batch yeah that's incredible yeah it's not easy to get into y combinator regardless of what happens after that so congrats on that and for also like leaving your comfort zone behind and taking paul graham's advice and regardless of like feeling too young or too early or whatever at the end you did it and i think that's something that they really uh appreciated in the whole process so basically you said that like the the interview is like 10 minutes based on your experience now, after it's been a while and you've been through that and you're much more mature and experienced on that, what do you think they are looking for during the interview?

And what advice you would give to people that they will manage and will go in front of this interview in the next batches? The most important is don't speak over your co-founders. You really should have your own domain of expertise and you should trust your co-founders. And I'm saying this because they are looking for great co-founders relationship

because it's like the first reason that startups die, like early stage startup die. So they are really looking at how you interact. And that's the most important part, I guess. That's what you can really feel during an interview. It's how the co-founder talk about each other, talk about the business and trust each other. So I guess that was the most important part

during our interview. But I guess that was the most important part during our interview. But I guess there is always like what you know about your market, how well you know your customers. You should always try to teach them something. I guess that's something that I did with Paul Graham when I first met him. And I teach him what I knew about the people who like young people who were going out in Paris

and I guess it showed that I knew my market perfectly and I knew my customers and what they wanted so I guess that's the most important part go from their relationships and how well you know your customers it's a great advice. I think that many people will find it interesting. And what happened after that? I mean, you got accepted, you moved in the Bay Area for a while. How was the experience at Y Combinator? But before that, how was the experience for a person, for a young person livingis and france and coming to the bay area

i mean that that was my dream for a long time so at the beginning it was just unreal but then we got a flat in mountain view and the fantasy started to just fade away and it was just work, like work, work, work. And it wasn't much different than what we did in Paris, to be honest. It was just working a lot. And what was different was we weren't alone. We were with the best founders we met so far and with the best partners we met so far and with the best partners we met so far.

We learned, we just learned like 10 times faster. So I guess it's just the best super inspiring, obviously, as young people. I mean, in my batch, there was Eric Rice starting his new startup, LTSC. So we were like, okay, that's just so inspiring. So it definitely helped us to keep our focus and just work super hard. You know, it's such a fun story because to go from Paul Graham telling you to your face that you have a bad idea, then actually, you know, making it into YC is such a cool story. And that I'm dying to know, like Kosta said, what happened? I mean, you went through the program and it was awesome, but what we did the demo day but actually as a

french and european startup and american investors didn't really get what was happening in paris meaning like why do young people are interested in parties and why do they need to find the best parties because here in the us it's more like you have like a big concert and a big arena and and there is no small little parties or small raves so it's not pretty hard to find events so they didn't really get what we did so to be honest the demo day was pretty bad for us but we like my co-founder and ceo was doing a very very good job at keeping in touch with a lot of a lot of people we met in paris so we managed to raise like 500K from top tier investors in Paris, from business angels, from actually the biggest business angel in France. It's called, it's called Found Kim Aventures. So with this and YC and the family and other business angels, we raised a small seed round.

We took a flat in Paris. So we were close to our users and we kept growing the product. Actually, it was a great growth rate and it was amazing. It was very, very, very cool. We were super happy about our startup and the people we were working with. But one day, Facebook started to have troubles with the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. And they killed the strategic endpoints of the graph API that we were using to scrape events. So basically we were using a lot of Facebook data. So you were logging in with Facebook so we could get your friends, your likes, so we knew the artists you loved, the events you were attending, and a lot of data

from Facebook. And one day they just shut down the API. So we had to stop. And that's it. That's a great lesson though, because we learned that you shouldn't rely on one platform to grow. Yeah, that's a great lesson actually. And I think that many people will relate to that. I think similar situation, like in similar situation our companies like that we're using twitter a lot same with facebook and i think that the lesson at the end is exactly as you said that's relying too much on one platform it's a very risky business yeah so hopefully our investors knew about it and that that was actually a good thing for Hot Bros because we could like launch a new city in 10 minutes.

We just launch our scrapers on one city and bam, we launch. So it was great. But yeah, we couldn't know that Facebook could one day just kill the endpoint without any notice actually without any email just killed it wow so actually sorry eric last question and then you can great you said that it was your dream to to come to the bay area and be part of the ecosystem and all that stuff and i think you are one of the rare few people that managed to materialize this dream in one of the most, let's say, ideal ways.

Your whole journey started with meeting with Paul Graham, then applying to the YC, being accepted to the YC. Of course, there was a roller coaster of situations that happened, as always, when you build a company, going back to paris starting to build the company raising money did anything change on your dream through that experience like if you could go back do you think that you would do something differently and what has like let's say axel today has to say to Axel back then, who was just following his dream? To be honest, I won't change anything about what I just told you. I would probably change something about what happened just next, because obviously when things go well, everything goes well, especially with your co-founders, because everything is great and everyone is happy.

But then we had to find another project to work on. But it was our love to work on this mission. So it was pretty hard for us to find new things to do. And it started to show the relationship with one of our co-founders. And actually that's something I heard from someone recently and it resonated with me so much. Product dies, but relationship lasts. And I wish I knew that because I was pretty angry about one of my co-founders because he left us and it didn't feel right to me at the time. But

now I will treat the relationship between co-founders differently. And it's okay if a product dies and it's okay if a startup fails, but you shouldn't lose a relationship for this. You should treat your co-founders well. You should keep your relationship intact after all this. Yeah, I can absolutely relate to that. I think that's great insight that you're sharing.

And I think it's a sign of maturity. That's also my experience through building my previous company, Blendo, with the relationships between the founders. It's extremely, extremely important. And I think that makes a lot of sense also and it explains why the yc interview is just 10 minutes at the end and all they care about as you said is about the dynamics between the co-founders that was a great insight actually like thank you so much for sharing that i i think that probably also eric has some experience on that based on

like the companies that he built in the past so what do you think about that eric like do you agree with axel's insight yeah i i absolutely agree i think you know one sort of a mentor i had one time told me he gave me a really interesting really interesting insight about investing. And he said, you know, there are lots of different things that an investor considers, right? They consider the market, obviously, the product, technology trends, they're looking at so many different components. But he said, really, at the end of the day, they're betting on, you know, the potential size of the market, and they're betting on, you know, the potential size of the

market, and they're betting on you, you and your and your co founders. And that really stuck with me. And I think that is similar to your experience in the YC interview, and such an interesting point on not talking over your co-founders and showing people that there really is a powerful dynamic there. And I would say, you know, one of, in, in my last business, or I guess in the last startup I did, the, I had, there were three co-founders and one of them, we worked together great. We got along great, but we also disagreed on a lot of things just because we approach things

from such different perspectives. And he had a birthday recently and we did a Zoom call with all of these different people for his birthday. And we went around and everyone said something that they appreciated about him. And then he came back and said something he appreciated about all of his friends. And he said something really interesting to me that I'd never thought about before. He said, I don't know if I've ever had a friend who I've argued more intensely with over such a long period of time, who I still consider a really good friend

I said that probably means that we were you know building some really good and hard things together and that has really really stuck with me because I'd never I'd never thought about it that way but it was very endearing and I think to me encapsulates what you were saying, Axel, around even through difficulty, if you fight to maintain the relationship, I think that that can have a really big impact on your life. Yeah, it matters a lot. And it applies not just to co-founders, but investors also, I guess. I just remembered the person who said productize

relationship last it's Ashton Kutcher and he's investing through sound venture and yeah it resonates a lot like even with investors it's important I guess I still have a good

relationship with all my investors and that's for. I guess I still have a good relationship with all my investors and that's for the best because I won't stop doing startup things. So that's a good thing. Yes, indeed. Well, Axel, this has been an incredible conversation, but because we're called the Data Stack Show, I guess we need to talk about a couple of technical things before we hang up so that we can at least stay true to the title of our show.

So Pool is a mobile app. So it looks like you run on iOS and Android. Can you talk about, you know, what are any unique challenges that you face in building it from a technical standpoint? And then for being such a young company, it seems like you're building in a data layer to capture everything really early on, which is something we don't really see very often. data infrastructure world. And a lot of the companies that we get to interact with are exploring these types of solutions because they've hit a certain scale and they're trying to make sense out of all the data that's coming out and separate signal from noise. But you're starting really, really early. So we'd love to know about sort of your technical setup and challenges and then what drove you to make a decision to implement data infrastructure so early. So we'd love to know about sort of your technical setup and challenges and then what drove you to make a decision to implement data infrastructure so early. Sure. So yeah, POOL is a web app and a message and a mobile app. So I chose React plus Next.js for the web app and React Native plus Expo in bare workflow for the mobile app.

And everything is in TypeScript and I'm sharing code and types between React and React Native and between front and backend. That's why I've been able to do everything all by myself. So I choose this because I go fast, I iterate quickly, and I'm clearly betting on the React ecosystem. I'm really amazed by this ecosystem. It's amazing. And TypeScript is growing very quickly too,

so I'm pretty happy about those choices. And speaking about data, it's super important for an early stage startup to get analytics right. So yeah, day one, I already tracked everything I could. And yeah, I can talk about the data stack actually. Yeah, that'd be great. So I use Red Hat Stack, obviously, and it's connecting FullStory, Amplitude, and Google Analytics. And I'm also sending everything to my database in Postgre, and I'm using Metabase. To be honest, I don't really use Metabase at the moment, but at least I do have all the events stored in my own database

and ready to query if I need it. But today, I'm mostly using FullStory for URIX improvement and debugging and Amplitude for product analytics, like tracking everything and measuring the numbers of weekly active users and the retention. Very cool. And interested to know, we see all sorts of different data warehouse choices,

but interested to know why you chose Postgres as your sort of centralized place to store all of the data that you're collecting and sending through the app? Yeah, I'm already using Postgre for my own backend. I'm using Node.js plus Nest.js and Azure for my GraphQL API. And Azure is doing a good job with Postgre. So that's why I chose Postgre. So it's in the same database.

Sure. No, that makes a ton of sense. And so you decided to run Rudderstack open source. And we have a lot of open source users, but it's interesting. It's not, I wouldn't say that running an entire data infrastructure is something that, you know, a junior engineer wouldn't necessarily, you know, jump into as far as like running it for a company. What was your experience like sort of installing

or getting the open source infrastructure up and running with RouterStack? And do you use any other open source technologies like that as part of your stack? Yeah, you're right. It's not something that you should really focus on if you're an early stage startup, but actually it's pretty easy to us RouterStack. I'm using AWS ECS.

And so I'm hosting RudderStack thanks to the Docker image. So it's actually super easy to do. And I have some cloud computing credits and I can host it for free. So that's a good point to do this. So yeah, I guess pricing is one of the main main reason it it costs a lot of money for a consumer app

to to do this correctly. And actually, that's why I migrated from segment to Rado stack. Because pricing is is very important. Actually, at my previous startup we started using segment and it was very expensive so i didn't want to do the same mistake again so that's why i took like three or four days to get everything up and running correctly and yeah it's super important for an early stage startup, as I said, to get analytics right. But you should also be lean. And I guess now that we have Rudder Stack,

we have a solution that makes it easy to do both. I know Costas probably has several technical questions, but one question for you. So you're unique in that you are both the sort of founder and CEO, but also the founder and CTO since your early stage at this point. How do you envision your role changing as the company grows and you bring more people on and sort of managing the tech stack that you've built? I know in the early stages you'll continue to be involved, but interested in how you're thinking about that.

That's a good question. I'm a solo technical founder, but I totally intend to bring another good hacker in the team to join me as a CTO. So then we could just program together. And I guess the technical choices are pretty obvious for the product and for the stage of the startup. So as it helps us go very fast, we'll keep working with these technologies. And again, it's all open source.

It's super exciting to be part of this community. So I'm sure that anyone who would want to work in an early stage startup will be happy to work with these technologies. This is great, Axel. I have a question. It's not that technical, but it's more about the data stack that you have set up and how you intend to use it. From what I understand, by the tools that you have connected and where you send the data and what you said also about the data warehouse that you have,

at this stage, you focus more on using the data that you have to drive the product vision and actually build the product. Is this correct? Yeah, correct. So based on your experience, and because you have gone through like many different stages of building a company, like on a very early stage startup, what is the usage of data? Where do you think that it's more important for data to be used? Because, of course, you can come up with KPIs.

I mean, when you have the data, you can be extremely creative, right? And you can use the data for understanding and driving the business, do the same for product. You can do this for marketing, for sales, for almost everything. But this doesn't mean that it's the right way to do it, right? Because at the early stage, you also need to focus and focus a lot. So what's your advice in terms of how an early stage entrepreneur should use data and approach data? Yeah, you tend to look at this quantitatively. You set up KPIs and you try to monitor everything,

but what you should really do is qualitative. See how your users are really using the product. Do they use it like you intend? If not, why? And actually, I do use all this data just to understand what's going on in the product but then I just talk with the users to understand why they did it that way

and that's what I do I just optimize for learnings and I use the data to measure it and monitor it and find the users I need to talk to and yeah that would be my advice just try to understand I need to talk to. And yeah, that would be my advice. Just try to understand who you should talk with,

depending on what they did in your product. Yeah, that's actually an amazing product advice, actually. I think you are touching a very important point. I mean, it's very easy, especially for technical founders, to use data as an excuse to not get in contact with the customers. So, but this is not the case. I mean,

you should use data to actually get closer to your customers and build a stronger relationship because relationships don't only matter between founders. It also matters between founders,, the company and the customers. That's like at the end what you are doing. You build a relationship, a business relationship with your customers.

And yeah, I think what you said is like one of the most important lessons that someone can get like from with a technical background, trying to build a product. Use the data, as you said, to help you strengthen and choose the right relationships to build with your customers, but not to avoid getting in contact and chat with them. It's really, really important to get on a phone call or meet in person or have a Zoom call or whatever

with your customers, especially on the early stage. Great. That's another great insight today. One last question, which is a bit more technical. You mentioned your love for React and how the React ecosystem helped a solo founder build the product, both on mobile and on the web, which a couple of years ago, that would require a whole team to do.

And among React and the rest of the technology that you have used to build the infrastructure and the product itself, what do you think is missing? I mean, which parts you feel, from a technology perspective, that is not mature enough and it's not mature as React, for example?

I won't say it's missing in the React ecosystem. Maybe that I just don't use it today, but what's missing for me today is a great design system. And I want to build a universal design system, meaning that I could reuse components over web and native things to react native web. And that's actually what what's missing for me at the moment, I do have like a lot of components that I can reuse, thanks to expose thanks to other libraries. But what's really missing for me is that

I don't have a great design system that I can share between React and React Native. And it would be amazing if someone could come up with an easy way to build a design system like this. Let's see what happens with the people who are going to listen to our podcast episode. You never know. That's all from my side, Eric. I have a question, Axel, on the, on the tech stack and the data layer,

especially with you having built all of this yourself. And this may sound like a somewhat of a self-serve, a self-serving question because we you know we built some of the infrastructure that you're using in your app but let's why would you choose to sort of collect everything at the data layer as an early stage startup as opposed to just instrumenting everything directly because you only have three three sdks as far as the primary tools you're using right so full story amplitude and google analytics so i'm just so interested in your perspective because i i've done a lot of consulting around this and talk with a lot of our customers

at rudder stack but i'm interested to know how you would describe the benefits of having all of that unified at the data layer as opposed to just direct instrumentation yeah so for me it's just that i i love the simplicity to only have one sdk but for i actually i did some free free hands for other startups. And most recently, I helped a startup move from Segment to Roderstack. And to answer your question, it's just that you can easily try new products if you're a marketing team or you just have like a unified view of your data and it's super easy to manage everything correctly. And if you do have like a lot of SDKs

and a lot of different API codes or whatever, it's pretty easy to make a mistake and making a mistake for some companies can mean a lot of money and you really want to have your tracking plan set up correctly and very solid. So using a tool like RedRStack makes you think about your tracking plan and makes it very solid so you don't make mistakes and you can easily try new products and everyone is happy like tech or marketing yeah yeah that's actually something we hear a lot is that the data engineering team part of their job is keeping

other teams happy one last question for me do. How do you think about attribution in terms of acquisition? Is that something you track in the data pretty closely around what channels are driving adoption of the product? Is that something you do at the pool? I know you're fairly early stage. And is that something you did in your previous company as well? No, not today for pool. It's still too early, actually. I do know where the users are coming from. But for the other company I was mentioning,

it's a mess to get attribution right. And using tools like RedouterStack can help you make it less a mess. I don't know how to say it. Yeah, it's hard to get right in general, I think. I did a lot of that in consulting before I joined the team here. And, you know, we used to joke that everyone's attribution is a mess it's just how big of a mess how big of a mess yeah i agree yeah that's just kind of it's just kind of how it is and there's certainly certainly things that can make it easier well axel this has been an incredible

an incredible conversation what an incredible story you have. And we really appreciate you taking the time to share it with us. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Thank you so much, Axel. That was great. We'll talk to you in a couple months to see how pool's going. All right. Cool. Thank you. Thank you very much, guys. You know, you have some of those conversations where there's timeless advice sprinkled throughout the conversation. And Axel had so much of that for us. I think two major things that stuck out to me. he had the fortitude to continue pushing forward and apply to Y Combinator after Paul Graham told him that his idea was bad to his face. That's a pretty amazing experience. But I think the other thing that really stuck out to me was Axel has clearly learned from his previous experiences, both from a technical standpoint, but also just

from the standpoint of being a founder and building a startup. And it's really amazing to see how he's made decisions based on carefully considering the learnings that he's had from past experiences costas what stuck out to you yeah i totally agree with what you said derrick for me and okay we are both uh ex-founders and we have built companies in the past and i mean here at rather stack again we are building a company uh i think what i found so interesting, and it's something that I share as a feeling with ThackSale, is actually two things. The first one is how a transformative process is to build a company.

And I'm talking on a personal level. It's not just, okay, what you do in the society, let's say, or the markets or your customers or whatever, which, of course is like ideally what you're trying to do with when you build a company but at the end it's also like on a personal level like an extremely transformative process and I don't think that you can build a company without getting yourself through a transformation especially when you are first-time founder or even second-time founder so that's one thing thing. And that's, by the way, regardless of age. I mean, it's amazing to hear such a young person being so insightful and that had learned

so many things through this whole process. So that's amazing. And the other thing that I found extremely interesting is about relationships. At the end, building a business is all about relationships. It's relationships with your founders, relationships with your employees, most importantly, with your customers, your investors, of course. So all the points that he made about building relationships and how important they are on all the different levels, I think that's also a very important and interesting advice that we can take from Axel and we can learn from that.

I don't have that much to say about the technical side of things. I mean, the most amazing thing is like how you should approach data on an early stage. That was also great. And you can approach and use data even on an early stage. You just have to be careful and not use data as an excuse for whatever.

So yeah, it was a great and amazing conversation with Axel. And hopefully we will meet again in the near future and discuss more about pool and what he has managed to achieve in the next couple of months. I agree. Well, great conversation

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