This Week in Startups - E1125: LAUNCH Accelerator Cohort 18 founders reflect on their journeys thru the program: Fluent Forever (language learning app), SupportPay (child support management solution) & v.one (no-code app building platform)

Episode Date: October 16, 2020

Check out Fluent Forever: https://fluent-forever.com Check out SupportPay: https://supportpay.com Check out v.one: https://www.yourvone.com FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

This week in startups is brought to you by Clavio is the e-commerce marketing platform that helps brands build relationships with memorable email and SMS messages. Today, more than 50,000 brands like Living Proof, Hint, and Chubbies choose Clavio to help them grow. Learn more and get started with a free trial at clavio.com slash twist. That's K-L-A-V-I-O dot com slash twist. LinkedIn jobs. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters.

Get $50 off your first job post at LinkedIn.com slash twist. And Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code. twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of This Weekend Startups.

I'm super excited to share with you. The top three vote getters at the launch accelerators, 18th cohort. We run an accelerator, and we used to do that in San Francisco and have everybody come out for 12 weeks, but during the pandemic, well, that ended. And we went completely virtual. The accelerator is just like, any other top accelerator you've heard of, like TechStars or Y Combinator, we put in 100K, we work with the company over four months. It's now a 16-week program, essentially,

and we try to help them raise money. We introduce them to every investor we can imagine. And then when they invest each week, they present to investors. So it's like a demo day each week with 10 to 20 investors present. By the end, they've done this 16 times. So they've presented to likely 500 investors. If you can't raise money, after you've pitched 500 investors, that should tell you something about the business. Either the business doesn't have product market fit or doesn't have that uptick that would lead investors to want to make a bet. Maybe the investors don't like the space. It could be a space that's been where the well has been poisoned, maybe like a we work kind of situation. But in general, the companies that go through the accelerator, they raise

money and they tend to do it pretty efficiently. That is kind of the point of our accelerator. Other programs are more like incubators. We're not that. We're not incubating ideas and getting a product launch. We're looking for companies that have a product in market that have some base level of traction. That could be 2K a month. It could be 50K a month. Typically, it's somewhere in between those two numbers. And we work with them. We put a stamp in their book, hey, launch, Jason are involved. That helps a little bit on the margins in terms of getting a meeting. And that selection process, where we pick seven companies out of 500 or 1,000 applicants, that really helps other investors know that we ran a process and that we worked deeply with

these companies and we diligence them. So without further ado, I'll have the company that came in first place, second place, and third place present out of the 7. So this is kind of like a little reward for them if they came in for second or third. They get to talk about their companies on the podcast. And these are companies that we have an investment in. Typically, we put 100K or we put 100K when they come to the accelerator. Then we typically will invest another $250 to $2 million after they graduate because we have the syndicate.com. So first up is Gabe Winer. He is from Fluent Forever. You can go see Fluent-Forever.com is their website or you can search for Fluent Forever in the App Store.

He came in first this class with 154 points, so welcome to the program game. Thank you for having me. So explain to people what fluent forever is? Basically, it's an app that can get someone to fluency in another language in about six months. So totally mobile app, asynchronous learning, you're playing around with some stuff on your phone, and by the end of it, you can speak and think in a language. Great. And so, of course, what's going to come to people's mind is du lingo, because they've all heard of or seen doolingo.

How is it? And you got this question every week for 16 weeks. So when people say, how is it different than du lingo? What is your response? Basically, we use a completely different methodology. Duolingo teaches people translations and tries to gamify that thing. So you're looking at perro and you're saying, that's a dog. and dog and perro and let's connect these two things.

And it's kind of, it's a learning how to translate is a completely different task than learning how to think in a new language. And so your conception of like a word, it needs to be connected to pictures. And it needs to be connected to pictures that you actually care about. So there needs to be a ton of customization there too. And it needs to be reminding you about everything in that language

at the right time, which is before you forget it. So we need to figure out when you're about to forget a piece of information and quiz you then. And we also need to be able to deal with this whole fact that foreign languages sound foreign. And what are you going to do about that? And so let's train your ears so you can actually hear that stuff. So we look at language learning from a really, really different lens. And we're tackling the specific problems you need to be able to think in that language

rather than like how quickly can we get you to translate stuff. And when you join the accelerator, were we going to be in person for the 18th cohort? Or was it 100% virtual from the beginning? I'm trying to remember. We weren't sure. It was basically like, I think about three weeks before the accelerator started, there was the decision of, no, let's pull the trigger. Let's do it 100% remote.

Got it. And so let's talk a little bit about what it's like to fundraise in a pandemic. You had success raising money during a pandemic. What was that like? I mean, March was terrifying. Like, everyone was basically saying it's over. We don't know what we're doing. So just call us in a few months was kind of the response in March.

You're saying from investors. From investors. But by the time launch really started and we were talking to folks, people were interested in testing the waters again. And being in a field where remote ed tech just happens to be where it's one place where it's at. Like that happens to be. We got really lucky. Like we were in the right vertical. You were not neighborly or cafe X, two of our great accelerator companies that were operating in the real world.

and they were both crushing it, and they both then had to stop operations almost essentially during the pandemic and slowly coming back now. So you guys started April 30th was week one, and July 20th was the final week. Let's talk a little bit about what it was like each week in the accelerator as you refined your pitch. What did you learn about communicating with investors that you didn't know before you came? to the launch accelerator. So my background was in performance. I have, you know, public speaking chops. The thing I was expecting to get out of the accelerator was like,

oh, I'm going to get some tweaks. That'll be great. You know, my pitch will be 10, 20% better or something like that. I came in the first week. I got sixth place out of seven. You tore me to shreds. I did. Oh, sorry.

Yeah, no, it was good. And I fixed it. You loved it when I tore you to shreds. I mean, I got a lot of value out of it. It didn't feel comfortable, sure. but that's not the point. I'm not there to be comfortable. I'm there to get funding, really.

And so I came back the next week with a wildly different pitch. And by that point, that's when things started going really well for us. And you made this point early on where you basically said that being able to pitch a company in three minutes in a way that is perfectly clear has value in the sense that it means you're perfectly clear on your business. And that was one of the chunks. that came in the first week where I was talking about all this stuff. Like, hey, we have this partnership with TikTok. We have this other thing. You're like, partnership with TikTok, is that driving revenue?

And I was like, no. You're like, why do you have it in there? Right. And it was a really big moment for me of just being like, wait, let's, why don't we get to the roots of what we're trying to do? We're trying to build a great app that people buy and pay for. And that's what drives revenue the end. Right.

There's nothing else to talk about. And then we started, doing really well with the investors. And it was like, oh, well, that, that meant something. And then it started having ramifications of the business also, where we stopped putting as much focus on, let's, let's drive up partnerships and let's look at B2B and let's look at all this stuff. And we were just like, if this is what's working for investors and it's what we actually want to do anyway, let's just do what we do well and stick with that. And the idea that a pitch would influence the business itself, rather than just being kind of window dressing, that was very new to me and

really important. Yeah. I mean, and this is part of why we have people do a three minute pitch and keep it essential, right? Like, it's the trailer of your company. You're not going to talk about every experiment you're doing in three minutes. You're going to talk about this is our customer, this is our product, this is our traction, this is who we are done. You really don't have that much time to, you have to be kind of essential in your approach to it. And the truth is, when investors see a level of focus from a founder where they know their customer, they know their marketing channels, and they know where they're going and what their plan is, it's pretty straightforward. Then you have a very easy decision to make because the founders made it very clear to you.

So what is the performance? So that's interesting that the forcing function of having to do a three minute presentation gave you clarity on your business, which is great. The feedback you got from investors also gave you some clarity. Definitely. What was the reoccurring theme that came up? Because that is a part of how I constructed the accelerator was to force you to do 16 presentations to 16 sets of investors. Because if you repeat 16 times to the people you're trying to get money from what you're doing as a business, you better have some goddamn clarity, right?

Yeah. I mean, the thing is that we got lucky that the first theme that we got happened to be the recurring theme that I was already used to from months and months and months of pitching this thing. beforehand, which was just, well, how are you going to compete against Duolingo? And that was the part that wasn't answered in the pitch, and it was the part that you tore me up on. And so the following week was like, well, why don't I just answer that part ahead of time? Let's make the pitch about that. And then all the recurring themes went away. I mean, there were no more recurring themes, really. At that point, the narrative was like pretty much controlled. It's like, this is the story. If by the end of it, you're like, well, what's the

difference between this and Duolingo? Then my answer was like, oh, you weren't listening. Right. Exactly. There's nothing more to say. We're using a different methodology than do lingo. Our methodology results in better outcomes. We're a better way to learn. It's like we have a better product. It's really that simple.

And here's the data showing not just that the outcomes are better, but that the financial outcomes are better as well. So if you don't like that, then you shouldn't be investing the end. And then what, let's, when we come back from this quick break, I want to know how your raise turned out as we wrap up with Gabe from Fluent Forever. Is your team behind on planning for Black Friday? Or how about Cyber Monday? No worries because Clavio is here to help.

Clavio is the ultimate e-commerce marketing platform for online brands of all kinds and sizes with email automation, SMS marketing, growth tools, and more. You'll get everything you need to build a strong relationship that keeps your customers coming back. And with the holiday season right around the corner, there is no time like the present. You want to get up and running right now quickly, and you want to use Clavio's flexible automations, you want to get those powerful insights and have super precise targeting. So you're sending the right message at the right time to the right customer with the right product or service. So whether you're a billion dollar business or just starting out,

Clavio is the e-commerce marketing platform for growth during the holidays and into 2021, which is going to be an amazing year. So get a free trial at clavio.com slash twist. That's KLAV.A. i.ryo.com slash twist. Get a free trial right now at clavio.com slash twist. K-L-A-V-I-O-O-com slash twist.

Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Welcome back to this week in startups. I'm your host, Jason Calcanus. With me as Gabe from Fluent Forever. If you want to learn how to speak another language, you could try DuLingo and then churn and fail, or you can use Fluin Forever, which is infinitely better in terms of efficacy.

and it's only $10 a month. You, while you were pitching hundreds of investors in the syndicate, you also had to run the business. But the business was growing. And you had a really great experience fundraising. Talk a little bit about what your fundraising target was and how you did. So we started raising, I don't know, like nine months before launch started with the goal of raising. two million bucks. By the time we arrived in launch, we had raised 900K of that thing. And then really within a month of us starting the accelerator, I think we raised the next 1.1 million

and finished it out. Wow. So it was quick for you. I mean, it was really rapid and it was rapid to the point where we kept getting people saying, hey, we want to give you money and you don't have any more room. So are you going to make some room for us? And so at that point, it started becoming this questionable. Let's optimize. I have piles and piles of money out on safe notes and they're going to murder me later on. I can't keep raising on safes, but I can do a price round. So let's try and optimize for that. And so a few months later, we started up a raise on a on a priced round to convert all the safe notes and tried to raise a million bucks. This got the term sheet like a week and a half ago. Within two days, we had a whole million committed. Within like

seven days, we had 1.5 million committed on a one million raise. And at this point, it looks like we're going to have to turn away around a million and some change. We're going to raise one and a half million and yeah, there's just, there's a lot of interest. So to be clear, you were able to raise in the opening weeks of the accelerator, then you graduated, had so much demand you raised again. Right. Just recently. So this is a great success. And so I'm very proud of you. If people are thinking about coming to the accelerator. The number one critique I ever get is like, oh my God, six percent, 100K, is that too rich of a deal? I mean, it is the standard deal in in accelerators, but if somebody were to come to you and say, is it worth it? Because there is that economics,

you're basically agreeing to a $2 million or so valuation when you take that money. How did you reconcile that internally? And was it worth it? It's a matter of figuring out how much are you gaining and How much are you derisking the business for me? I mean, that was my calculation. So I didn't have access to Silicon Valley. Launch gave me access to Silicon Valley in a way that I never would have had. I have some advisors out there. They could do intros, but intros versus this whole format and being in front of people in a really like, no, this is me.

You have this chance to invest. Get out if you don't. That's really powerful. And so the idea of saying, well, we're in a super risky time where we don't know if people are actually investing. this is going to get me in front of people in a way that I don't have access to otherwise, and it's going to maximize my chances of actually getting the money we need to make the business survive and thrive. Like, in that case, that was enough to tip me over to say, okay, yeah, this is worth it.

I mean, and they are, yeah, standard rates. This is what accelerators cost. And you met over 500 investors or so during the program. How much time would that have taken you to do? Did you ever make that calculation of, because you had previously met with, I don't know, maybe 50 or 100 and you're... No, like 300 before it launched. 300 before launch. Right.

So just going to launch, you added 500, so you doubled or tripled it. But you keep in touch with those investors, don't you? I do. Like the ones who are. And how do you as a founder keep in touch with the investors who have not yet invested as a category? I mean, the people who led our round this time, this price round are people who had not invested in the previous route. This whole thing happened because of those ongoing updates with those investors. So that stuff is valuable.

But yeah, we have a monthly mailing list. I mean, there's a list of all these people that on a monthly basis every single month in the middle of the month. Like it's usually on the 20th, we send out this update saying, here's where we're at, here's how we've grown, here's what we struggled with, here are asks. Why do you think some founders don't send monthly updates to their investors? and then how, and did you send these updates before you came to launch, or how did we get through to you that this was a worthwhile pursuit? I'd been sending them before I went to launch. It's, at this point, I feel very, very convinced about their value now that, you know, now that it's actually produced a lot of real checks. But, yeah, I mean, I think I understand why someone wouldn't want to do it.

It's a huge pain. It's a pain. Like, it's a ton of work, and you don't always have good news to report. and it's hard to go to a group of people who you really want something from potentially or you at least want them to think that you're doing good stuff and go to them saying, hey, we didn't grow this month. Yes. I mean,

it is tough to write that update if it's not going well. We'll continue success, Gabe, and we'll circle back around with you at the end of this program and discuss more of some topics. But next up is Sherry. Sherry Atwood is from Support Pay. She was also in the launch, Accelerator's 18th cohort.

we do these monthly or so. We're trying to get to monthly. And Sherry, you had a company called Support Pay. Explain to the audience what Support Pay is. Yeah, Support Pay helps parents manage child support and share expenses directly with each other. So it is an app that people pay for. What do they pay for it? Correct.

They're starting at $7.99 a month or $79 a year. And that way they can manage their child support, their finances with their ex, ultimately never having to talk to their ex about money again. So why would somebody use this app? And I think this was your number one question, as opposed to just having an I message stream or a Google sheet or whatever, it happens to be an air table sheet? Yeah, absolutely.

I think the first thing is managing money with any family member is difficult. Now try thinking about managing with somebody you don't particularly like. On top of it, a Google sheet or an I message. is not a certified record. So the biggest value for our customers is not actually the day to day of entering expenses or making payments, but it's having a long term up to eight, 12, 15 years of records that show how much money they've either spent or received. I'm curious when you came to the accelerating you started presenting this idea. Did people think this was too small or niche of an idea? What was the reaction to investors as you went through, you know, 16 presentations,

essentially, to investors? Well, I think from an investor standpoint, unless you've been through it, you don't really understand it, nor do you realize how huge the market is. So in the U.S. alone, there's 55 million parents that live apart. So when you first just look at the opportunity, you're thinking, oh, this is really small until you start doing the calculations. So I think a lot of the investors were actually shocked by how huge the opportunity actually is. And it's, while focused, it's not actually really niche per se. What was the main, so I get that. People who have been divorced understand this because they've seen the pain point up close and personal. What was the other feedback you got

consistently from investors? And then what was your success, you know, coming out of the accelerator? Well, I think if you compare us to Gabe, and we happen to always go after Gabe, you know, Gabe had a clear competitor or two that they could compare to, and we actually have no one. So we're the first in the market to do it. So it's the kind of opposite of why isn't there another option out there? Why isn't somebody, why hasn't somebody done this before? So overcoming that objection and then understanding that this isn't tied directly to court orders. So a lot of people thought that there was regulatory or government requirements that were necessary, but being able to prove that

that wasn't the case. And so for our solution, it's a lot of education, especially to investors, even to our customers. We're like Uber before Uber, where it's a huge pain, but nobody realized that there's a different solution out there. And that's really where we're coming at it, compared to other offerings where you could see a direct competitor. We heard Gabe talk a little bit about the clarity of the three-minute pitch. What is your experience learning how to pitch? And if you were to rate yourself on ability to pitch prior to the accelerator upon graduation on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate yourself?

Well, it was interesting because similar to Gabe, I had pitched so many times in almost every pitch competition we entered. I came in first or second, had got it down to the five minute or the five-minute or the the three minutes. So I was like, yeah, I'm pretty good. I can do this. And then again, my first week, yeah, you ripped me to shreds or even my pre, the pre pitch. And I was like, you know, same thing with Gabe, which was like, ah, but I loved it. As much as I hated it, I loved it, because it forced me, just like Gabe said, to really focus on what was important. And I was sharing way too much information, which was causing way more questions rather than really focusing on

the problem is a solution and the opportunity in our growth. And that was, I think, a lot of your feedback was just so helpful in that way to really narrow it down. So then I would say after the first week, I did come in first week, but then you said that was because I was last. So then I said, okay, well, I won't bank on that. So then I was like, yeah, maybe I'm a six by the first week. And then I think through the whole program, you know, got to definitely like an eight or a nine. Yeah, for sure, put you at nine, nine and a half. I never give 10. when we get back for this break, I want to know how you did in fundraising. And then maybe unpack, because we now have had two founders talk about being savaged by me the first place and the second place, paradoxically, both report that I destroyed them in the preparation for their presentation. So I think the audience would like to know maybe in detail how I destroyed you in the presentation when we get back on this week at startups. Let's get down to brass tax everybody. LinkedIn Jobs is giving you $50 off your first job posting. If you're not familiar with LinkedIn jobs, well, it's the best hiring platform

in the world. It's that simple. We've had so many great testimonials from within our portfolio of companies from you, the audience, and we love getting audience testimonials. Aaron, who's the founder of Emma A.I, was looking for a machine learning engineer back in July, and he received 110 relevant applications. Get ready for this in only four days with a modest budget. He got so much value from job posts to offer accepted in only a few days. Think about what a win that would be for you and your team. If you could fill that really sticky, hard to fill position in just four or five days, well, that's the truth. LinkedIn does it all the time. And they have over 690 million members worldwide. And you're probably allowing people to work from home and remote now. So you can

fill jobs like I am in half to a third to a quarter of the amount of time. And you're going to do that best by using LinkedIn. LinkedIn Jobs is the most effective hiring platform in the world. We all know that hands down. That is the truth. So get 50 bucks right now, 5-0, waiting for you at LinkedIn.com slash twist. Tell your friends, tweet it, share it with everybody on your team. Get 50 bucks off that first job posting, LinkedIn.com slash twist. Again, LinkedIn.com slash twist to get 50-5-0 from your boy J-Cal. Terms and conditions, of course, apply because They are giving you $50. Thanks again, LinkedIn jobs for solving problems for me and my portfolio companies and

supporting this week in startups, which is super important for founders everywhere. Thank you. Welcome back to this week in startups. I'm your host, Jason Callaghanes. I am super excited to have Sherry at Wood here from supportpay.com. If you are divorced or you know somebody who's divorced and you are fighting with your ex over payments, go ahead and go to support pay.com. Download the app, use it, and you will reduce.

the stress in dealing with this stuff. Because when it's in a nice app like that and it's all organized, it's kind of hard to be a jerk about it, right? I mean, that is part of it is, yeah, this framework of how to organize all these bills. Well, do you remember even? And, you know, I just, for the audience, I've been very careful to not savage people. And I taught this in the angel university classes. When you're meeting with founders, before you've invested, do not savage them. In fact, they try to give no feedback in terms of what to fix in the business. I just try to, before I invest, I just try to learn about the business and the founder. But I'm not prescriptive. I don't give them too many notes or tell them changes, change this,

you should do that. After we invest, then I feel like, well, they've opted in to getting the candidness for me and they kind of expected. So I'm going to be full bore candid, as brutal as I can be so that they succeed down the road, better to fix your shot. or whatever little mistakes you're making in practice then when you're on the court. So what was the experience like when I savaged you? Well, I think that was exactly the point, right? When we were interviewing with you, you didn't give any feedback. And it's very similar to me fundraising before.

People don't give feedback. I think the key areas where you really, really helped me was one, just the way that my pitch deck looked, making it much more simple. And being all virtual and presenting virtual is, very different. And that's what I don't think people understand is, yes, we've gone into this virtual investing world, but your slides and how it looks and even how it sort of what I'll call animates, but doesn't really, all of those things are much more important. We realized, for example, we did this test of how many slides should be moving and how the, in real world, right, you want

less slides, but in virtual, we realized we needed it to, you know, move every three to four seconds. else people lost interest. So things like that. So the way it looked, and then the big one was focusing on where we're growing, not trying to go into every go-to-market strategy, and then finally really nailing the question and answer. Because if people aren't familiar, right, after we pitch, then the investors get to ask questions,

and we have two minutes to answer all of their questions. And so being able to be really concise and clear on your answers was also something that your feedback was, you know, even throughout the weeks was amazing because it really helped narrow it down. Yeah, I mean, just to give people a background on this, you really want to give short, tight answers when you're talking to an investor because the investors tend to be really smart. They've heard everything. They don't need you to explain basic stuff to them.

So when they say, how many customers do they have, it's great to just give them a number. We have a thousand people subscribed. When they ask you, what's your best marketing channel or what's your go-to marketing strategy? you say, we're doing paid ads on Facebook and Instagram, and our CAQ is $72. You answered their question, and you gave them one little extra data point, the CAQ, right? But I'll also say what you also helped with was how to answer more difficult questions or maybe questions where things aren't as great or wonderful. So how to reframe the questions that they were asking in order to make sure it promoted

the business and put you in the best light from those quick answers. Yeah, how you frame it is super. important, I think. You know, if you're going to answer the question about competitors, in your case, why aren't there competitors? I think it's nobody really had the idea, just like nobody had the idea for Uber or Airbnb until it exists. And now it's part of the fabric of life. This is what great founders do. They build products that solve very big problems that have been ignored. That is the great thing about entrepreneurs. So how you frame that is super important. And in the accelerator, we tried to workshop these things so that people really start to learn them.

And that back and forth. We also transcribe your answers and let you see exactly how long they are. Did you actually ever look at the transcripts of yourself or watch your video? Absolutely every week. And then we tracked all. And in fact, I still have the list of all the questions that we have. And then have sense as we've been fundraising and updating, keeping that as an FAQ for investors. So I don't have to answer the same question a hundred times.

Yeah. So you took all that feedback and just so people know, when we get all these questions, we actually write them down. And then we encourage the founders to keep track of them because what you'll see is the same themes. Oh, how do you, how does Fluen Forever compete with Doolingo? In your case, well, how is this better than using Google sheet? Or how is it better than having an I message thread? And it's like, here are the ways that it's better.

Here's what our customers tell us. And, you know, you can really be concise about that. How is fundraising gone for you? How is the investment community looked at the company? Yeah, Fundraising was great. We met a ton of people and it ultimately was a full-time job, just the sheer number of interest that we got. So I ended up closing earlier and then saying, here's the amount.

I'm going to take the amount I need to get me to that one million ARR and then keep everybody else updated. So through that, I closed and then I was part of your syndicate and even there, my target was to raise 200,000, and I got almost 800,000 in interest just on your syndicate alone. That's bonkers. Did you take the extra or no? No, I did not. Wow, you turned the money down.

I did. I did. And it's hard. That's a very hard thing for, you know, as Gabe mentioned too, right, struggling to raise prior to doing accelerator and then to be in a situation where now you're like, wait a second. I'm turning money down. It's very hard. It totally warms my heart. and then turning it down, the reason you would turn down that extra money is why?

Because the valuation that I had, it didn't make sense for me to be that diluted this early. I felt like that would raise a red flag as I go into the next round where there wasn't going to be enough equity in the future to show obviously my continued passion and commitment, but also give the price rounds or the series A round enough where they would want to lead it. So you don't want to be super diluted. Have you took what you needed? And then you can always go back to those investors who wanted more and you can raise another round.

So this is becoming a trend in our accelerator. We used to see the top companies would raise by the end of the accelerator. Now there's so many people coming to the accelerator. Some weeks we had, I don't know what the maximum number of investors in a week was. But we usually target seven to 15. And I know some weeks we blew past that. You know, now people are coming earlier and investing in the, top companies in the beginning and then the top companies raise again. So you're,

you're going to raise again when you hit a million in revenue. Is that right? Correct. Yes. All right. Awesome. Well, continued success. And I know you have to go because you've had things to do. But we really appreciate you. And it's great to be on your cap table and be partners with you in this business sharing. Awesome. Thank you, Jason again for the support. It's been amazing. It's been great to get to know you as well. And next up is Jeremy. You know, Jeremy is the founder of V1, and he came to the accelerator and came in third. We score these points at the end of the accelerator to explain the rating system. We just asked every investor who comes, who's your third place, second place, and first place.

Third place got half a point, second place. You get one point and first place. You get two points. And we add those up over the 16 weeks or so and the pitches. and then we just see who got the best response in the most votes. Now, that doesn't mean number five, six, and seven in the ranking are not important or will not be the most successful companies. In fact, sometimes they are. But it does give you an indication of who is really resonating, at least with that first meeting and that first pitch with investors.

And it tends to focus on two groups, performance or novelty. So if they have great performance, Gabe had really increasing performance. And so did Cherry. But maybe these were not. Sherry's might have been slightly novel. Fluent was not novel in terms of no disrespect. People knew there were other competitors out there, as we heard. And V1, maybe somewhere in between.

So, Jeremy, welcome to the program. Tell everybody what is V1. And everybody go to yourv1.com to see it. Jason, so happy to be here. This is a humbling experience for me. Yes. So thank you. Okay.

All right, take it easy, Jeremy. This isn't the Oscars. Okay, let's get to business here. What is V-1? I know this is as close to the entrepreneurial Oscars as you get, right, J-Kal? All right, all right, take it easy. I got to perform. I got to perform.

All right. That music is going to start playing you off the stage. And so you don't have to thank your agent. Just tell us what your company does. Come on, James. Okay, so we are on a mission to build the easiest no-code app builder for non-technical founders. Got it. So no-code, very hot category.

Very hot. And so you have a bunch of non-techno co-founders who want to build businesses. How does your V-E-1.com? You can go see it right now, Y-O-U-R-V-1.com. How do you do that? So essentially, we take people through an onboarding, and we built this kind of through launch. We were kind of at an interesting point as we were transitioning the product from like the V-1 that we had in the market that people were paying a lot of money for into a wholly new, designed product with an increased experience for the customers.

So, now you can go in YourV1.com. You select the app style that you want so you can go, I want an app like Uber. And we have pre-built templates that you click that. You can go in, it builds it for you, and then you see that in your builder. You can maneuver the things around, change the styles, and then within minutes, push it to Web or the App Store. And so like a no-code website building to like WebFlow or something like that, you get to build a website. In your case, you get to build an app.

Correct. Yeah, a native mobile app or a web app. Got it. And you had solid revenue coming in because a lot of people want to build apps. But a lot of people who build apps with, you know, a development shop, they wind up having a bad experience. experience. But I remember with yours, people had a good experience. So why do people have a bad experience hiring a dev shop to build an app? And why are they have, why is your solution better than that option? Like dev shops in my, in my estimation, it's almost like predatory pricing. Right.

So like they come in and it is 50 grand for something that should be five. And I, I, I, you go through when you can go through their costs, they've got so much overhead, so many developers that have this downtime. And for us, it would. It's just like, you don't need to spend hundreds or thousands of, tens of thousands of dollars to a dev shop. And then along the way, you're not learning how to build that product because they're taking it from you. So for us, having them build with a dev shop and spending $80,000 on a V1 or the first

version of your app in the marketplace is kind of backwards. So we teach people that you need to get something in the marketplace as fast as possible, learn how to monetize. And then when you're ready on our platform, you can even export your source code for a one-time $99 fee and build your tech team around it. So it really rank and files the journey

of the non-technical person with trying to recruit the technical people later. When we get back to this quick break, I want to know how interacting with investors and fundraising went for you at the Launch Accelerator. From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace,

is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. With Squarespace, you can do amazing things like blog and publish content, promote your business, announce an upcoming event, maybe do a special project like I am apt to do, sell products and services of all kinds. And no matter what the problem is, Squarespace is the answer. They have beautiful templates by world-class designers. They've got powerful e-commerce functionality built in.

You may not need that today. but it's great that it's there, even if you don't. And everything is optimized for mobile right out of the box. So if somebody's loading on their new iPhone 12, where you're on an old tablet, where you've got some giant widescreen monitor like I have, it's all going to just work and look beautiful. They have built in SEO, of course, free and secure hosting, as well as their award-winning 24-7 customer support.

As an example, I wanted to start this thing Remote Demo Day, and we created it. Same day, boom, purchased a domain name, had the site up and running, minutes. It's so easy to use. Everybody and the team loves it. And so go to Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch your vision, your site, your store, your special project, use that offer code Twist, TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Again, Squarespace.com slash twist. You know Squarespace. Everybody loves it. They've been an incredible partner with this program for many years, for which I thank them.

Great job, everybody at Squarespace. Love your product and just amazing to see how far the companies come. It's a really great success story in New York, my hometown. Squarespace.com slash twist to get your free trial and twist to save 10% off. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Welcome back to this week in startups. Jeremy Redman is with us. He is the CEO and founder of V1, as in your first version, your v1.com, as we heard.

You had solid revenue coming in. You didn't need to raise money, right? You were profitable already, if I remember correctly. So what was your thinking there? And how was meeting with investors? Did they understand what you were doing? What were their objections? How did you get over them?

Yeah. So, like, as you said, I've always focused on the business first and not really catering to what prospective investors think. Right? So like hearing their feedback, but always focusing in trying to build leverage that I could get some of these tier ones when my charts were just up into the right. That was always my goal. Like, be operationally efficient throughout the company, really focus on building a great business. And we were able to do that, which got the attention of launch. So for us, talking with investors,

like kind of at the beginning, it was like the biggest objections that we probably heard were that it's getting to be a crowded marketplace. There's a lot of app builders. What makes yours different? So it was kind of how we. tailored that answer and kind of our go-to mark. I really had to dig into this, like why we, it really made me think when you hear it over and over again. And it was kind of to the point where if you use these other tools and I started really talking to our customers because I love our customers more than anyone. So why a lot of our customers were coming over from products like bubble. And they were like, you might as well

learn how to fucking code, right? Like, you're learning how to code here, and it's like you're learning their entire framework. And it's like, cool, okay, so a lot of these other platforms are bringing in the learning curves of the design platforms that they also have. So we just try to make it as easy as possible. And if you use both and you try to compare both side by side, you really start to feel the difference between the platforms. Got it.

And so those other platforms are more technical. technical and yours comes with more hand holding. Correct. It's almost like they're using every square inch of screen. And with every square inch of screen used, it's something that a non-technical person has to learn. And it, it's, we've learned early on where, uh, you're bringing people in and you normally on these platforms, you see button radius. And it's like we all our, all our customers go, what the, what is that? Right. What is button radius? Where we just make it round the button, right? In a sliding scale. We kind of build that.

end of the product. You've doubled revenue since you went to the accelerator. Is that correct? Correct. That's really exciting. Well, when you kind of, you go through launch and it really pushed me, really pushed me as like a solo founder. Like, it really makes you think about your priorities.

And you're split. And I think at one point, you gave some of the best good luck advice early on. And it was like solo founders, like you got to work double time. And it's the truth. Like as a solo founder, you're sitting here going, I got to spend 40 hours a week fundraising and another 40 hours a week like actually building the company. So when I was able to get out of launch and we closed our money, it was like peer focused on the company again.

And it was just like on a high. Like that is what gets me going. And what were you targeting to raise and how did that fundraising process go for you? Yeah. So like we were targeting. it was always a moving target to be honest but like it was like 1.2 and then people were like well why and I go uh we I think I need 600 so I just doubled it right right and like always going in trying to give myself a buffer and at one point a few weeks in when like the the

stress of doing it all all combined started going I met Scott Shane from comeback capital and he really wanted to dive into the why I needed what I needed. So, and he was the first investor to take the time and go, cool, like, let's figure out what you really, really, really need. And that was, that was probably the best eye-opening experience for me when it really got me to dive in. And that's what we accepted 400K. Yeah, great.

And so you raised what you needed. Correct. And you are making a plan to deploy that capital. Let's bring Gabe back into the discussion here. if you have a moment, Gabe. I'm curious how you look at once you secure the bag and you get that capital in. Did you, Gabe, also make a plan to deploy the capital? Or did you just raise opportunistically and say, hey, we want to have 20% dilution. We're willing to take this amount of money for that. Or did you actually methodically say, hey, if we raise this much money, we can achieve this

much in MRR or ARR. So the initial target of the $2 million was what we needed. There was a sense of like, okay, if we didn't have that, we're screwed. The additional million or now million and a half, that was opportunistic. And there was a sense of like, okay, if we had that money, we would, we know what we would spend it on. Like, this is how much engineers cost and this is what we need and all that stuff. But that was more opportunistic of just seeing there was interest and screw it. Let's move faster. We did some very basic modeling and plans, Jeremy, during the accelerator.

Had you done a model and a plan before that for your business? in the way we did it? No. That was one of the greatest exercises like we had gone through. So like the qualitative was all there like in my head. Like I knew where we were going. But you really made us put it to an Excel spreadsheet. So that was really good.

And then questioned us on the quantitative. So that was a really helpful experiment. Yeah. So for people who don't know, like building a model for a business, you'll see them sometimes in a business plan. There tend to be faca nonsense like made up. It's fiction. What I said was,

hey, well, what do you want to, what percentage growth do you want to have year over year? Okay, let's back that into what percentage growth that would be quarterly and weekly, I'm sorry, quarterly and then monthly. Okay, so you want to triple. Trippling means you got to, you know, grow, whatever it is, 20% a month, 18% a month, you can figure out the math with the rule of 72, if you look up rule of 72. And you start to get good at this, right? If you're growing 20% a month, if you divide that into 72,

It's like, three and a half months or whatever, you'll double. So compounding interest is an incredible thing. And then we, well, how do you sustain that growth? Like how many customers does that growth equal? Okay. And what's your turn? Okay. And so we went through that and we banged on it.

Had you done that kind of modeling, Gabriel, before you came to the accelerator or some version of it? And then I guess, what did you get out of it, you know, overall in total after we did it? I mean, we've done some modeling before. We're redoing all of our models now because, our growth was just kind of, our models are based on conservative growth. And once you start growing really, really fast, then models kind of go out the window. So I think the idea of really looking at growth as like trying to figure out how important that actually is and saying, okay,

what do investors want to see? What do investors need to see? What do we actually need as a company? And looking at those three things independently, I think was probably some of the most value I got out of that. So let's talk about that. What do investors want to see? What do they need to see? Investors need to see some growth. The idea of you having zero growth and saying it's coming is not convincing to anyone. And that's what we had the first year. That's where I was, you know, talking to 300 investors and not getting anywhere, was that we were flat growth. And we had reasons for it and stuff like that. But no one really cares about your reasons.

If you aren't showing more revenue the next month, the next month after that, like, we don't care. That's fine. Cool. You've literally proven to them to not invest. You're like, I can build a business that doesn't grow. Right. To be harsh. That is, like, to be super harsh and like part of this program is to be harsh, right? Like, I always tell people like, be sure you want to have this experience because we're going to be, we're going to be brutally honest here.

What non-growth founders prove is that they don't deserve capital. And that's a harsh way of saying it, but you actually realize that you've taken it to heart, haven't you, Gabe? I mean, I've certainly seen the difference between trying to come to investors with zero growth month over month and coming to investors with 20% growth month over month. I mean, the responses are very, very different. Tell us. Well, I mean, you have to bat people away when you're growing 20% month over month. I mean, we are turning away more than a million dollars now. And we turned away more than a million dollars a few months ago. At that point, we were growing 15% month over month. At this point, we'd be growing 20% month per month. And it's like the difference in desire from investors and just like, oh, no, please, let me in. Let me in. in. It's just night and day. Just from hitting, just from between like low single digits and 20%. It's not that big of a difference in terms of a number, but it is very different in terms

of the reception. And it's very different in terms of running a company. How is running a company changed for you now that you have a North Star that you want to be a high growth company? I mean, I think the idea of having a bunch of capital and having access to capital and whatever capital you want, that changes things. I mean, then you have to start making decisions about, well, what do you actually want, what do you actually need, and what is the right path for this company? And so it frees you up to be really, really strategic with this stuff in a way that just trying to get whatever you possibly need because otherwise the company's going to fold, like that kind of panic space gives you a lot fewer options and a lot less time to make strategic decisions.

So at the point where you get to actually start turning down capital and saying, no, what capital do I want and who do I want it from and why and what are we going to do with it like those being able to have the luxury of time like that's that's what you get yeah you've earned the ability to take a bigger picture to think more strategically and you know this is what Elon always said about Tesla and their journey is well the way capital allocation works is the more success that you have and the more you prove that there's a business there the more capital allocators will give you tokens to put into the video game. So in the case of Tesla, like when they sold 2,000 roadsters, it was like, well, that's

an achievement. Here's some more money, but not all of it. When they got the Model S and it was car of the year, it was like, oh, well, let's take this company public. Here's more money. And then they get the X out. And then the model three, eventually they're like, okay, this company's unstoppable. Now they can start thinking in a decade long way instead of, you know, in the early

days of Tesla, they were looking at, you know, month to month life. They were literally hand to mouth. So how has that change for you, Jeremy? curious in terms of thinking about life as a growth company versus, you know, the reality of like, hey, maybe the product isn't finished or it's not, you know, like, you can't just all of a sudden, you know, put the car at 100 miles per hour if it's only got three wheels on it. So how do you think about that? Yeah, it's so true. Like, I always think like everything's falling apart internally, right? Like, we're, we're building companies within companies. Like, there's companies built around being a

form builder and we have a form builder inside our app builder. So like there's there's always things that are like like three wheels and you're trying to like put the best face on you possibly can while you're still trying to grow. The funny thing that has happened since launch is the the outbound that I learned in launch that I keep having. It has it is slowly pivoted to getting the most inbound interest from partners at tier ones, like VCs, that I've ever had in my entire life. So, like, as you start to grow and, like, people are interested in the no-code ecosystem, like building the business does back that thesis that I was talking about earlier, that if you focus on the business and make sure that that's growing and wearing that pressure,

people will find you somehow, some way. Yeah, there are smart people out there watching you and what those investors are sometimes watching is, oh, you raised a seed round. So as I was, you know, I was training in the Angel University course, somebody asked me a question of like, well, how could I find companies to invest in? I said, well, that's very easy. Go on crunch base, say in your state or just in the United States, let's say if you're in the United States, and that's where you want to invest. Do the United States, take two-month period, January and February of last year, and take any company that raised between 50,000 and 750,000, which your companies might have fell into.

to at some point. And then if they're in there and they've raised that amount of money, that's not enough money to last three years. So if it was last year, a year ago, or maybe 15 months ago, they're probably looking now if they're still alive and then go see how many employees they have. If they've got 12 employees and they only raised 250, well, 12 employees times, you know, five or 10K a month each, they're going to, they probably have revenue. Or maybe they raised money, you don't know. So I was just teaching my angel investors how to fine companies. But that's, but that's just so you guys know how that's happening. That's how they're finding you. Yeah. And that's why it's important to keep your crunch base and to write a

blog post about your fundraising and to keep that cadence of news going, Gabriel, with your monthly updates. Now, Jeremy, are you writing monthly updates or do I need to check my email? I am because I, solely because I don't want to disappoint you. Good. Because I, I'm, I'm a, I'm a fan of the pod. So I know how much you, you hate it. So like, I'm all, I always double check because I'll mail merge. And I'll go, is updates a, is the right, are they in there? I go, I double check.

So I'm like, okay, cool. So like, for me, you kind of like, take you to do the update, to be honest. Uh, an hour. An hour? Like, I'm always writing good shit down like that I'm doing. So like, keep it a log. Yeah, I'm keeping a log going.

I have a template built out like in the mail merge that I'm always kind of going through. Um, no. that you're probably getting that on your phone somewhere. And if I do, you know, I scan it, I read it. And if something goods in there, sometimes, you might say one out of three or four times you'll get me to respond, but you certainly have people on our team looking through it for the key numbers.

And just so you know what the professional investors, the ones you want are doing, they're reading those updates or some associate is. And they're pulling out the key pieces of data and putting it into their spreadsheets. So I get a spreadsheet. People don't know this, but I'll tell everybody now. I have somebody on my team who's looking at your revenue. We look at what your revenue is this quarter compared to last year's quarter or this month compared to the last three months.

And then I tell them, make me a list, companies under 250K in revenue a year and rank them. You just tell me the top five and what percentage of their growth is and then tell me the company's over $250,000 and show me theirs. Now, of course, you'll have a com.com or a Robin Hood or an Uber previously. on there before they go public. But for the younger companies, man, that's how we make a preemptive offer. So when we see somebody's growing really fast, we'll be like, hey, you know, Steezy, FitBod, fluent, whatever.

Hey, do you want an lead IQ? Do you want an extra half million or a million? Because we can probably pop off a syndicate for that since you doubled revenue in the last six months. Like that's to the point. And then we get greedy. We're like, okay, we own 10% of this company. It might be nice for us to own 14 if it's growing this well.

your credibility just goes up, up, up, up, right? And that's what we're looking for. So, well, congratulations. J-Cal, can I ask you a question? Yes, you can. Like, does that ever contrast? Don't you like game how Jeremy's like on a J-Cal relationship with you right now? He's like, hey, Jay-Cal, let me ask you.

By the way, J-Cal is what, not my portfolio companies call me. That's what my friends. That's what Tramoth and Bill Gurley call me. I'm all in that podcast now. You can call me, you can call me, you're a bestie. You're a best thing on the all-in. That's fine. That's fine.

I'm in there going like that. level. That's the next level. Look, you got on the portfolio and now you're on the pod. Next step is being a bestie. Yes. And I, you know, one of the proudest moments for me in launch was getting a number one vote from David's axe. That's a big deal. That was a big deal for me. I think I think I got audible in my like celebrate, which is annoying. I get it. Yeah. But like it was like a really cool thing. You did a whoop, a little bit. Just so people know, we will. we will bring our companies directly to besties if need be. So that's part of our little secret sauce is, you know, we will bring our companies to, you know,

maybe a Sequoia or a craft or, you know, the introductions to go well. But, Jeremy, you're invited on the All In podcast after you go public. So you go public. I'll put it out there right now. Anybody wants to be on the All In podcast. All you need to do. is SPAC with Chamath and you know get JCal 11% of a publicly traded company and I think it can

be arranged but I need a couple more public companies. So more work to deal. Gabe, how long does it take you to get your update done? I'm assuming part of the discipline of going through our program and working with investors, you have dashboards now that makes it very easy for you to get a snapshot of data. I mean, it still takes like an hour or two to write the story. Right. It's more story creation. I have a, my head of business actually runs most of the numbers and it shows me like this is what

we should have in the update. Yeah. But in terms of actually crafting the thing like an hour or two. Great. And you work, each of you, I'm sure, 50, 60,

70 hours a week. So if you're working 60 hours a week, you're working 250 hours. Taking just an hour or two to write that update, isn't that 1% of your time well worth it? Yeah. Yeah. That's the way I try to frame it with founders who are having a block with

this stuff is just, it's worth it for you to reflect on your business and it will create a sense of like urgency for you to hit numbers and to perform just like board meetings doing those kind of things. Well, listen, continued success. Great to be on your cap tables. Great to, excuse me, be in business with both of you and continued success. Congratulations on securing the bags, getting the money. And now the hard part, you know, just all you got to do is take that money and triple

quadruple revenue and you get more. It's very simple. It's a very simple game. If you grow, they give you more money. If you don't grow, you get a lot of people who will say, keep me updated. So keep me updated, but up into the ride, boys, okay? Deal. That's the goal.

Up into the right. Up into the right, please, gentlemen. Mr. Calcanus. Mr. Calcanus, Jake. You can call me Jake Al. You didn't get to have you guys over for the barbecue. I know. No.

What's that happening? My plan is to do a barbecue for the companies that were in quarantine. So I'm going to have to get a second smoker for that barbecue because I can only fit like two brisketes and three sets of ribs on my trager. I'm going to have to get a second traeger or something in here. You get that barbecue going. I hope nobody's a vegetarian. I'll put up. If you're pescatarian, I can put some salmon on there and see how it comes out.

That works. I'm a red meat guy. You're a red meat guy? Yeah. I'm doing pork this coming week. I did brisket and beef ribs last week. I do smoke every other week. And next week's smoke is going to be a nice pork belly.

Okay. We're going to do a pork shoulder and do pull pork kind of stitch. Pork butt, pork shoulder, or something like that to do a pulled pork. And then we're going to do some baby back wet ribs. I'm going to try some wet ribs. Oh, baby back. Do some baby back, wet ribs. See how that goes.

But we're going to do it a pork three ways. Pork three ways. Okay. All right. Great job, everybody. We'll see you next time on this. And if you want to come to the accelerator, launch.co slash apply.

We pick seven companies out of the 500 to 1,000 that apply every six weeks or so. And we're looking for companies like these. They don't have to be perfect. But if you can get to 5 to 50K a month in revenue, got a couple customers, we can help you, you know, meet 500 or so investors and hopefully accelerate. That's why it's called an accelerator, not an incubator. We want to accelerate your growth.

We want to accelerate your ability to raise capital, accelerate your ability to build a team. We're not here to incubate your company and help you get launched. You can launch a company on your own. You can use your V1.com to get your company done, get to five customers, then come to us. So we'll see you all next time.

Bye-bye.