This Week in Startups - Guess the fake startup + Founders of Jenni.AI, Wearloom, Track, Llama Life + How to hire Gen Z | E1343

Episode Date: December 10, 2021

First, Jason plays "Guess the Fake Startup" (1:30). Then, Jason interviews four founders he invested in (12:50): David Park from Jenni.ai about computer copywriting assistants (18:08), Samuel Spitz from Wearloom on aggregating the resale marketplace shopping experience (28:11), Sudhama Bhatia from Track about his premium calendar client (40:35) and Marie Ng from Llama Life on building a time-based productivity tool (51:05). To wrap up the show, we have an "OK Boomer" segment where Producer Rachel talks with Gen Z marketer Erifili Gounari (01:13:25)

Hey, everybody, we have a great show for you today. You're going to get to meet four great startups. One of them is working in SEO using AI. Another one is aggregating and making alerts and searches for a resell marketplace, as you know those, where people are buying used clothing, and it's a big trend. We also have somebody who's built superhuman for calendars. And finally, a really amazing productivity tool that helps you stay more focused. Producer Rachel has another OKBoomer segment for us today about digital nomads. But first, we're bringing back an old segment that everybody loved. Yes, that's right. It's going to be time for guests, the fake startup.

Let's get to work. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Post your first job for free at LinkedIn.com slash Twist. Lemon I.O. Need to speed up your product development without draining your budget. Hire vetted engineers from Europe at lemon.io. Go to lemon.io slash twist to get 15% off for the first four weeks. Data IQ. AI-driven growth is not just about technology. It's about organizational transformation.

Join more than 45,000 people worldwide who are driving results with data IQ. Visit d-a-a-a-I-K-U.com. Okay, everybody, it's time to guess the fake startup. I'm your host and contestant, Jason Callaghan, is with me the three producers of this week in startups. Big Nick, producer Rachel reporting, and Tom Selleck's nephew, producer Justin. Strong stash game. I actually sent producer Justin a picture of me with, my COVID mustache, which lasted for

under five minutes. I shaved, I showed it to my wife, and she walked me back to the bathroom to take it off. So tell us a little bit about yourself. Where you're from, Justin? I'm from Connecticut. I currently live in Brooklyn. Okay. Any hobbies, Justin, any hobbies you like to do there? In Brooklyn? Yeah. I like to make music and play DJ. Recreationally. All right. DJing in Brooklyn. And

How about you, producer, Rachel? Where are you from? And any hobbies that you like to do? Something on the weekend, yoga, baby knitting. I got knit a crocheting recently. So I think for hobbies, my number one would definitely have to be traveling. All right. Number one.

Any places, any destinations that you really covet somewhere you want to go? Number one place I've been recently with Lisbon. I went two years ago. And it was one of those trips where you don't plan anything. And it was just the cheapest one. It ended up being one of the best trips I've ever been on. So Lisbon would definitely be number one. And where do you want to go in the future?

Any destinations on the bucket list? Never been to Asia and I've never been to Australia or New Zealand. Two great destinations. Long flights. Really long flights. Yeah. And how about you, Nick? What do you want?

Hobbies? Yeah, what do you like to do when you got that long weekend? When you got the Monday off, long weekend plans for you? I like hanging out of my friends and snowboard. crack it up a couple of co-briskeys and hanging out with your friends maybe taking a little bit of the NFL okay we've got our game show today guess the fake startup everybody knows the rules my three producers are going to each present me with one startup each they will describe the startup and using my powers of deduction i will figure out which of the three startups is the fake startup two will be real, one will be fake, and I will figure it out. We'll go around the horn here. We're going to give you three data points. The name of the startup, a one sentence description of what they do in plain English, and a quote from their website. Perfect. Okay. I'm ready. Let's

go in clockwise. So that means Justin, Nick, and then ending with you, Rachel. Justin, tell us the first startup. This startup is Mamma Mia, a member shape-based dating app for Italian men looking for women or men who treat them as good as their mothers do. It's also for people looking for men that need to be taken care of, a quote from their website. Match is so good, they'll make your mother jealous. Mamma Mia is a site for Italians? Yes. who want to fit into specific stereotypes,

men who want to be taken care of, by women who will take care of them like their moms did, is what you're telling me. Got it. Exactly. Somebody who appreciates Italian culture. There's about 5.5 million Italians in America. Fantastic.

Didn't ask for that statistic, but interesting that you would provide it. Nick, go ahead. The second company is also a date, all three companies are dating apps. The second one is called The Locks Club. It's a private membership-based dating app for Jewish people. They're aiming to be the Disney of dating. And a quote from their website is, this is for Jews with ridiculously high standards.

Okay. The Locks Club wants to be like the Disney Corporation. And it's for Jewish people who have incredibly high standards. there is no way in earth that you would compare that to Disney that makes no sense. This is ridiculous comparison. You're saying that's what they say on their website. They are aiming to be the Disney of dating.

That's what they say on their website. Okay. That is completely nonsensical, which means it's a real startup because only a startup founder could say something so completely nonsensical. All right. So I'm doing good so far. Okay, producer Rachel, tell us the third startup.

Third startup. So the third startup is short, King dating. It's a dating app for men 5-8 or shorter and to join and get access to the first startup. Okay. Keep going. So do you know it? No.

I can just tell that there's a short guy out there who has this problem and he's solving his own problem. Keep going. Tell me what the website says. His own ideal customer. To join him and get access to short kings, you actually have to be a short king lover.

And a quote from their website is, Tall, dark, and handsome is outdated, and kings are in short supply. Don't let height get in the way of true love. Okay. So we have three. Short kings, Mamma Mia, and the locks club. Now, I'm going to ask you each to repeat the line from the website. Justin, repeat the line from the website.

Matches so good, it will make your mother jealous. Okay. Matches so good, it'll make your mother jealous. Nick? For Jews with ridiculously high standards. That's the line from the website? Not that they want to be the Disney. Okay.

No. Okay. And Rachel, go ahead. Tall, tall, dark, and handsome is outdated and kings are in short supply. Don't let Haight get in the way of true love. Okay. Very easy today. For me, I'll take you through my thinking.

There is a issue with short men because many women if we're talking about heterosexual relationships. This is a heteronormative description. Yeah, a lot of women say they need to date somebody who's taller than them, which then if you start dipping into the five, three, four, five category, you start getting left out of, you know, the average height of women, especially if they're wearing heels. So this is an acute issue.

It has, it is the most likely real one. you would never come up with the Jewish dating one for fear of offending somebody. It means the fake one is Mamma Mia. You are correct. Well done. Of course I'm correct. I am an expert on startups. You cannot be J-Cal at this game.

It's good game theory, though. So your theory was we wouldn't come up with the Jewish one because we wouldn't want to offend anyone. So you're saying we wouldn't create that one. with the Italian one. Correct. That's how I did it. We've got to level up. Did you guys think you were going to beat me?

Did you guys really think you had a chance? I did. I thought Short King, I mean, I thought Lox Club sounded fake. Locks Club is such a terrible name. It has to be real. It's so good. It's so funny. It is such an update.

Listen, if you made it up and you weren't Jewish, it could be offensive. But if you're Jewish and you call it locks club, I mean, listen, if you called the Italian one the pizza club, the pasta club, like that could actually be offensive if you didn't call it that. But Mamma Mia, it's quite charming and sweet. Everybody loves their mom. People clamoring for a Mamma Mia in the comments, by the way. They want us to build that startup.

They want it to exist. Yeah, I think the market is there. Just lazy Italian men. I will say, Mamma Mia. Well, see, Nick is from an Italian family. So I know he wrote that one. Was that next creation? I did write that one.

So that's another little bit of a mini tell I had. But I can walk it through how I came through it. So you can do better next time in tricking me. And this is where leveling comes in, because I'm giving you the tips on how to trick me next time. Locks Club is a ridiculous name. It's a ridiculous name. So it's got to be real.

And this concept of being the Disney of dating is something only a deranged founder would say. I want to be the Disney of dating. Like, only a founder could say something so ridiculous. Like, there is no Disney of dating. Disney is a totally different company. Amusement parks, merchandise, Star Wars. It makes no sense. Movies.

You definitely don't have to return to dating over and over and over again, too. Exactly. Short Kings. Clever name. Clever name, because it's owning that you're short. And to Nick's point, Nick nailed it that there is an ideal customer profile here. And I think it is an acute problem for folks. And so

you know, great job this week. I don't know my track record on all of these, but when we find our twist archivist, whatever maniac wants to dip into these 1,200 episodes of insanity as a career, some maniac will do it. They can find all the guests to fake startups. We've done them

20, 30 times in the early days. Because it's so funny and incredible. Everybody, guess the fake startup of this week in startups. It's our Freaky Fridays. I know you're looking for talent. It's really hard out there. The great resignation. There's a lot of people who have quit their jobs. Well, there's the good news. You're going to get your first job posting on LinkedIn for free at LinkedIn.com slash twist. And you're going to pick up some of that amazing talent that is recently on the market to solve the problems that you have at your company.

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That's why small businesses rate LinkedIn jobs number one, delivering quality hires versus leading competitors. We love LinkedIn jobs. here. And in 2022, we're going to do more hiring on the platform as our team grows. I found so many great team members on LinkedIn already. So here's the call to action. Easy peasy, lemon, squeezy, LinkedIn jobs helps you find candidates you want to talk to faster. Every week, you only 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn. So post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash twist. That's LinkedIn.com slash TWIST. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Is they're giving you something for free. Okay, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups on episode 1338.

You saw my interview with three of the founders from our accelerators last class. That was Launch Accelerator number 23. Today I'm going to interview the four other founders in that cohort. So you can look at and see the four other companies that are trying to find product market fit and build new companies out here in startup land, get that first round of funding, maybe the second round of funding and change the world. We love to invest in companies early. What kind of companies do we look for?

We look for founders who have great product jobs. Basically, they can build a product that delights a customer, and that product should have great design. It should have great U.X and UI, user interface, user experience. And hopefully these founders build a product that solves a problem for customers. That is acute. that's a hard problem. And today you're going to love these companies.

They are very forward-looking. They have real products, and they are, in fact, delighting customers already. These four founders, again, came to the 23rd edition of the Launch Accelerator. If you would like information about the Launch Accelerator, you can go to launch.co, our website, not.com.com.

And you'll see information about the accelerator. You can apply. It's just like any other accelerator, like Y Combinator or TechStars, except that instead of just investing $100,000, we typically will invest in the companies if they find product market fit two or three more times because we have this great syndicate at the syndicate.com, which allows us to invest over and over and over again if the company is growing. So we like to double down, triple down on the winners. We take a lot of chances. We take a lot of risks. Most startups

don't work out. But if a founder does do a great startup and they come back after failing and they do another startup, we'd love to invest in founders a second time. All of this is to say we're early to companies and we love being related companies. We've had a number of companies become worth hundreds of millions of dollars and in one case, a billion dollar company has already come out of the first 10 or so additions of the launch accelerator. So we're very proud of the track record and there's one very unique thing. It's a 16 week course. It occurs over those 16 weeks remotely now. Because of the pandemic, we went fully remote.

That allows us to accommodate founders from around the world. And we have hundreds of people apply, but we only accept seven per cohort. And those seven companies gives us the ability to not drown investors who come to see these companies with too many companies. If you've been to a demo day or watched one online, some accelerators like Wycombinator have 150 companies, 250 companies present. very hard for a company to stand out, isn't it, when you have that many companies? In fact, I can tell you as an investor, when you have to watch those after the 10th company, you become

bleary-eyed and everything just starts melding into one startup. And you can't even remember the names of the companies. Seven's the right number. Why seven the right number? Turns how a short-term memory is seven plus or minus two in most human beings. That's why if you were wondering how we decided on seven-digit phone numbers, three plus four. That's because they did a study on short-term memory. Short-term memory is seven, plus or minus two. So some people can do eight or nine. Other people, they can do five, six, seven. We went with seven. It's also reasonable if you're going to have an accelerator. We let each one of them pitch for three minutes to a group of investors every week. They meet hundreds of investors during the accelerator. That's a big part

of what we do is introduce people and the founders and their brilliant ideas to tons of investors, hundreds, if not thousands. We also specialize in helping the founders really pitch their ideas crisply, cleanly, and answer questions well and learn about the fundraising process. We also help them with their products and growth and other topics, but generally speaking, we only accept people who are good at products, so we don't need to teach them all that much about product, but we do need to really support them in raising that first round of funding, which is the hardest. And if you think about it, what we're doing is we're helping

anoint these companies and other downstream investors from us who like to write bigger checks, Series A, Series B, will look at my track record as an investor and say, you know, if Jason invested, maybe I'll take the meeting. If I invested, it doesn't mean they're going to blindly invest in the company. That does happen with Angels sometimes. They will blindly follow an investment I've done. But more often than not, the best I can do is give founders some great advice, introduce them to as many people as possible, and just get them a meeting. And then it's up to them to close. And sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. But we work hard and we really enjoy, I can tell you personally, I really enjoy working with founders when they're under five or 10 people

in their company and they're just figuring everything out. So first up on the program today is David Park. He has a company called Jenny J-E-N-N-I-A-I. Welcome to the program, David. Thank you so much for having me, Jason. Okay. So you launched Jenny AI in October 2020. Tell us in a sentence or two, what you built and why? Basically help smaller medium-sized businesses do SEO. SEO is really difficult. It's very time-consuming. There are agencies out there that charge monthly retainers $2,000 and $10,000 a month. And I think that the world's a better place when small and medium-sized businesses can actually do these things in-house.

And we want to make one platform where we could do that on one place. Why is SEO so important to small and medium-sized businesses? Explain what SEO is at its core. Sure. Yeah, SEO is basically free organic traffic to your site. If you're an expert in your field, you should be able to create articles that people want to read. and then you put those articles on Google, and then people will find them, and then hopefully

convert into users or learn more about your cause, and just generally a low-cost way to get more people visiting your product. Fantastic. Everybody who's in marketing, who's built a website generally knows that search engine optimization is a way to get free traffic. People type something into Google or Bing or dot-dot go, and where you rank is critically important in understanding what content to write and what keywords to use to get those searches is critically important.

How does your solution work? And maybe we could do a little demo here. Yeah, I'd love to go through a demo. So first you put in the title of your article here. Just describe your content. Jenny then does the research for you, gives you a few generated titles. Let's go with the ultimate guide to search engines.

Jenny, that is the direction that you want to go. She'll give you the outline. I like the introduction. Let's generate that. If I like what she spit out, I can just keep going down the article. It's not just about the money. I don't like that heading.

Let's change this to a list. one, content is king. So Jenny now is a collaborator on my document. She's going to change everything below that heading as well. She sees that I want a list instead of just headings like before. And as I go down to the document methodically in this way, I'm able to write an article in minutes, not weeks, and you keep the writer in the driver's seat and you end up with a high quality article. That'll hopefully do well on Google. Okay, so behind the scenes, as I'm writing, let's say this was how to how to pick an SUV. I start by saying, hey, I want her, I'm a car dealer and I want to help people pick an

SUV and I write how to pick an SUV. Somehow you're taking that first sentence I'm doing that I put step one, how many seats do you need is the first thing you have to answer or what is your budget? As I write that, what is happening on the back end? Because for people who are not watching this live, you type a. sentence and then all of a sudden words start filling in, keywords, sentences. Yeah. How is it getting those?

Is it doing Google searches? Is it using AI? Is it using GPT3? What is the process of pulling all this information in and basically starting you on second base with a bunch of ideas? Yeah. Great question. Basically, everything that we do is centered around things that are currently doing well

on Google, the articles that are currently doing well. So if you make your outline, say, step one, the seats in an SUV, Jenny then actually goes back to what's doing well in Google and the same way a human would do when they're researching and trying to write a great article, they'll say, oh, when people talk about seats in an SUV, usually they then talk about the interior, what type of interiors in the car. So then she'll try to give you that a step two to talk about next. We do use GPT3. We have our own in-house models.

We've built our own scraping system. We have five to six of our own in-house AI models that help with creating the topics that all these articles are talking about on Google and then actually great. creating questions, which you should be talking about, maybe some topics that aren't being discussed, that maybe should be discussed. These sorts of things help, as you said, get writers on second base rather than first base, and then put them in a position to create great high-quality content, which ultimately is what Google wants and what the user wants and what searches want, what's the website owners want

as well. When you're growing your startup fast, and I hope you are, trying to hire engineers can slow you down like nothing else. Well, there's some good news. Lemon.io will find you a perfect candidate in 48 hours. I was going to say 48 days because that's probably on average what it takes. No, 48 hours. So what is lemon.io, you ask me? Well, I'm going to tell you, there are a marketplace of engineers from Europe. Lemon.io is a great solution if you are a technical co-founder and you need to delegate tasks. Or you have a project that needs specific technology and you don't have that skill on your team.

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Get in there, everybody. Lemon.com. slash twist. So, to be clear, you're not writing the full article for people and then spamming the internet with random words. I'm starting to write something about this SUV concept. And then it knows,

since I said how many seats, because that was my idea, hey, maybe the interior matters. Maybe the layout of the seats matter. Okay, two captains chairs, two captain chairs, third row. Do you need the third row? How much storage space do you need?

Oh, and by the way, the next question people tend to ask is price. Oh, and by the way, used versus new. Oh, by the way, what weather conditions are you going to drive it in? What size engine do you need? All of this. And maybe alternatives to an SUV. Maybe there's crossovers or hybrids.

So you're able to, just for me starting out, give me ideas and things that are adjacent to it that I might not have thought about, correct? Yeah. And the funny part is the tech, this GPT3, it's all. almost too sexy. It's almost too, you're so tempted to just generate an entire article. You just want to click and have the AI read everything for you. That's kind of where we are perpendicular to our competitors, where we actually purposefully

slow our writers down. We want to give them context. We want to give them data. As you write, if you're writing about an SUV and you write about how many seats, Jenny will show you on the side of the research tab, hey, here's what your competitors are saying on how many seats, you know, this brand of SUV has. Hey, here's maybe what some users are saying on Reddit about. about how many seats are the best.

And it allows writers to literally be in the driver's seat in this example, as they're writing the article versus just minimizing inputs and maximizing outputs of clicking a button, see how many words you can get out, how many words you can get GPT3 to spit out. So, yeah, I'd say it's pretty accurate. And everybody who has ever built a website has got an email from an SEO consulting firm that asks you to sign a two-year contract that you can't get out of for $2,000 to $10,000, $25,000.

to $100,000 a year, they promise you're going to rank. How much do you charge for this solution? Because what they're doing essentially is looking at the top results, looking at your competitors, and maybe doing this in a manual fashion. So instead of spending $2,000 to $10K a month, what do you charge for this service? Yeah, so we just charge a flat $100 a month that comes with up to 30 documents and unlimited generations within each document. So you can explore.

So $3 a document, basically. It's pretty cheap. And, you know, I mean, we're, like you said, we're early stage, maybe one document, you'll find that you have a little bit of trouble with the AI or maybe you have a little bit of trouble writing it. And you can always just use 29 other documents because you only really need to put out four to 10 blog posts a month. I mean, that's pushing it.

That's a lot of SEO. One a week is a good cadence. One of a week's agreeing. And so, yeah, we definitely think that we put our customers in a position where they're never worrying about, oh, am I going to run out of documents this month? oh, I'm scared to click the generate button in this document. You know, go wild and hopefully create content that adds value in the world versus just AI generated garbage.

So it's a really cutting edge idea. That's why I liked it. And I thought this is a very affordable tool. Can't imagine people with websites who actually have a business not wanting to spend $1,200 a year on this because if you do hire an SEO consultant, not only are they going to charge you that $2,000 to $10,000 a month. On top of that, they're going to charge you $500 to $1,000 per article to write it. Or you're going to have to write it yourself and they'll edit it for you or something

to that effect. How are you doing in terms of traction? Do you have any customers on the product paying yet? And what's the growth strategy here? Yeah. So traction's been pretty great. We've grown continuously month over month for the last five months, around at least 8% growth each month. I mean, it's not like crazy scaling unicorn type growth, but we've also been fundraising at the same time, which is not very fun and it does take a bit of my time. Yes. And so I do most of the, I'm pretty much the only person on the business side as right now. So that's the reason why. I mean, it feels weird to say for my own mouth, but I'm so sure that we could have ballooned that growth much more had I, could I have allocated all that fund reason time? But, you know,

fun reason is doing well. So it's a delicate process when you're at this stage of a company, you're under-resourced and you need to show growth in order to get investment. But getting investment is a full-time job. So you're balancing those two things, always a struggle. There's only so many hours in a week. Right. And if you're doing this, you've got to be working six or seven days a week. You're really doing two jobs concurrently.

Getting those new customers, delighting them and building the product while, of course, raising money. Really excited about your future. Congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much. All right. Next up on our program is Samuel Spitz. He is with Wareloom. And Warealum also went to the launch accelerator number 23.

We just picked our seven companies for the fall cohort. And we'll do six, seven cohorts next year, I'm sure. And so welcome to the program, Samuel. Thanks, Jason. Super excited to be here. So tell everybody what you're building and why it's important. Absolutely. So at Warealum, we're building the demand layer for secondhand shopping.

Secondhand shoppers come to us to find the best listings from different secondhand sites like Poshmark, Deepop, and eBay. What we're doing is really important because secondhand is a massively growing industry, growing about 40% a year within the fashion vertical. But right now it's incredibly fragmented and the buyer experience is super broken, much harder than shopping retail. And so our goal is to make shopping secondhand just as frictionless as shopping new while still being less expensive and more sustainable. Fantastic. And from what I understand, people buying secondhand clothes are not just doing that because it's a great way to save money and to get premium products at a discounted price.

They're also doing it because they really do care about the environment and they don't want to see clothes going into landfills. Am I correct in that way? Absolutely. The fashion industry is the second largest polluter on the planet. And one of the best ways to be more responsible with your consumption of fashion is to shop secondhand. It's even for the most sustainable fashion companies, producing a new good is always going to produce more waste than getting something that already exists in the world. And there's so much stuff that just fills up people's closets, never getting used. So there's a lot of opportunity here.

And there are plenty of sites that do this. There's eBay. There's the one Poshmark you mentioned. What's the other big one? There's Deepop. There's the real real vestiaire collective rebagged. The list goes on and on. There's 10 plus billion dollar companies just within fashion.

Wow, I didn't realize that. So there's 10 plus billion dollar companies doing this resale of, and there's so many different skews and items that if you're looking for a certain brand of dress or shoe, it might not be on one. It might be on one of the 10. So you're now aggregating these databases together, which is really helpful for those sites. They must love the fact that you're creating this meta search engine, correct? Absolutely. That's why we're already partnered with several of them. Fantastic. Can you give us a little demo and take us behind the scenes of how this actually works for consumers? Yeah, that'd be great. So we're on wearloom.com right now, our website.

So what you need to do is go to this website and then just click on the sign up button. That takes you to a form where you can enter all the items that you're looking for. So you give us a search term. In this case, we're looking for a St. Laurent T-shirt, your category. So this is a shirt. Your size, for me, this is a larger and extra large. The brand is St. Laurent. And then I'm going to be looking under $200 in the Mince section.

So then you could add additional items, but here we're just going to stick with this one. We're going to go to the next page, enter our name and email, and then click submit. And so now we're in one of my actual alerts that I received from Wharlem Daily that has the best listings for my searches. Here we're clicking on a St. Laurent T-shirt with a skull print graphic. This is actually a shirt that I actually own. And here we're on D-Pop. And so if I was interested in purchasing this item, I could just click Buy Now, use my existing D-Pop account and seamlessly check out. And now I've saved hours per week and what it would take to search across D-P, eBay, Poshmark, and several other sites on my own.

And probably gotten a better deal because I've gotten the best listings from these different sites. And what's critically important for people to know here is it's not a one-time search. Because you're putting your email address in, you're setting this as an alert. Because, hey, let's face it, you know, those pair of Yeezys or that Eve San Laurent shirt or, you know, that East I say a blazer that I really like and I covet, you know, there may not be one right now in my size. But this is going to week after week give you updates on your favorite brand and what's available, which in a way, let you. you get to it before other people. Is that correct? This lets me snipe it before other people get to it? Absolutely. So the thing about secondhand is that the best listings tend to sell pretty quickly. And so what I actually did, this whole product came out of my consumer experience as an avid secondhand shopper.

Before Ware Loom, I was spending hours per week doing rote searching on all these sites because you have to do that every day. Do you want to get the good deal? So we basically automate that search process for you and save you a ton of time in the process and you'll probably end up getting a better price too. Now, how do you make money doing this? Does it a customer pay? Do you get affiliate fees? Do you get both? So absolutely no fee for the customer. You pay exactly what you'd pay by going to any of these sites directly.

We partner with different resale sites. Currently, our partners include eBay is one of the ones that is our biggest partner to date. And we take a percentage of every sale. And so the way we like to think about it is we're sort of disintermediating the supply from the demand in the market and taking a percentage of the take rate for feeding back buyers the best possible buying platform. The potential for positive change with AI is huge, but seeing that value is hard.

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And your retention is well above 90%. Am I correct? Those are some of the old statistics I remember from your pitches. You have obviously millions of listings being sent every month. Am I direction and correct on these engagement statistics? Yeah, absolutely. And what's really exciting is all this traction has come pretty much through organic canals. We've spent, you know, about $1,000 on paid marketing to date.

99% of those users are organic. And a lot of them are actually from user-led organic referrals. And so actually from our very first month, this is one of the things I remember talking to Presh about in our first meeting getting interviewed with the accelerator is from our very first month. We saw that users were coming to the most bare bones version of our product, having success finding their items with it and then actually sharing it with others personally or on social media. And so I think having a really strong finger on the pulse of our consumers, which came out

of me building for myself as a user, has helped us get to the traction that we've seen today. Do the sites that pay you affiliate fees pay you for somebody visiting the site, a click to the site, for opening an account or for closing a sale or some combination of that? It's all based on sales for now. Got it. So, you know, you're, You get a lot of people creating the alerts, but you only get paid when they actually make a sale. Are people actually winding up making a sell? I could understand people making the searches and doing the window shopping, as it were.

But are you actually converting? Yeah, we are. Our conversion rates are quite high, several times higher than e-commerce benchmarks. We're not publicly talking about GMV or revenue, but both are at a pretty exciting place for where we are with the product and headed in the right direction. We introduced you to hundreds of investors during this process, but knowing what I know, a lot of investors are not aware of this category, how vibrant it is. And let's face it, wouldn't appeal to rich venture capitalists who have unlimited budgets to buy brand new fashion. They're not part of the generation that cares about this necessarily. What was the reception like for a product that maybe didn't have appeal to a venture capitalist? personally, and how do you get them over the hum in terms of understanding this? That's a great question. So I'd say it varies a lot. And so we had one meeting where we had a team of venture capitalists come in. I won't say from what firm, but, and one of them actually

said in the meeting, I'm a current user of this product. And this was back when we have like half as many users. And so we've had examples like that where the VC just coincidentally happens to be a big resale shopper. Obviously, that makes driving the value home a lot easier. But, Certainly, like you talked about, there's a lot of other cases where not only might the investor not be a consumer of this market, but they might not even be aware of the size of this market. And I'd say with those sorts of investors, I think what we really come back to is a couple key things. One is the growth of the market. The fact that it's growing 40% a year while already being a $15 billion market, just online resale fashion alone. I mean, that's pretty incredible.

The growth potential for the market. So we look at secondhand more broadly, which after fashion, we plan to go to other vertebrae. Mercari is estimated that in the United States alone, secondhand commerce will be a 350 billion plus market by the end of the decade. With the way we're building this company, our idea is that we can be the central buyer layer for all of that. And so I'd say I drive home those two points combined with just the friction points from the buyer experience, that fragmentation, the friction that comes with the search process because

of all the data problems in secondhand, and then going back to the traction that we've seen and executing on those problems today. So that's what I start with. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. But we actually did end up getting a lot of good investor interest over the course of the cohort and afterwards. Fantastic. And of course, if you build this technology, if people were trading watches or they were trading electronics and there was a secondary market for those other types of items, just like there is a secondhand market for cars.

It only makes sense that you would be able to quickly aggregate that data and build these alerts for those other categories. So even if they don't believe in this vertical, they might very much believe in the watch one or some other collectibles or things that are sold secondhand is what I'm reading into that, correct? Yeah, absolutely. And just also understanding that the size of the opportunity is a lot bigger when you look at all secondhand versus just the fashion vertical.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, listen, continued success. And of course, let us know how we can support you and we're rooting for you. And we're absolutely delighted to be in business with you. Thanks so much, Jason. All right, fantastic. We're moving at a nice pace here.

And this is very similar to what we do in the accelerator. Each company gets about 10 minutes, three minutes to pitch or so. We're not doing the full pitches here. And then six, seven minutes to answer questions from investors. We videotape everything. We track all the questions the founders get asked. And we actually workshop with them. Why are the investors asking these questions over and over again?

In this case, they might be asking the question over over again about the TAM, the total addressable market. So then we learn, hey, investors. investors don't understand this market, we need to spend a little bit more time in the presentation, educating them on the market. In some other cases, they understand the market implicitly, but they don't buy that consumers need that product. So maybe you need more consumer stories to engage those investors and prove to them through which detailed examples of consumers, real consumers, being delighted, spending money, and being just absolutely enamored with

product. So that's part of the science that we do at our accelerator, something I pioneered with Jackie, who runs the accelerator with me, is taking a scientific approach to analyzing what are the investors thinking about when they assess a company? And what can we learn from that, right? Because investors do have great signaling. In some cases, they also may be unaware of an opportunity. And we try to take our feelings about that, a little bit artistic, with the science of it, and do a little bit of alchemy. Okay, next up on the program is track. And you can go see track at the track app.com.

And the founder's name is Sudama Atia. Sudama, did I pronounce it perfectly or did I get it wrong? Yeah, perfect. It's so weird. For some reason, I'm assuming your name is Indian. Yes, it is. I get Indian names right and I can get other names completely wrong. And from what I understand, Indian names are some of the hard.

artist to pronounce. So I'm super, super proud of myself that I got that right with my dyslexia. So when I saw your app, I said, wow, this reminds me a bit of superhuman. And in fact, you described it to me as superhuman for calendars. Why don't you go ahead and tell us what you're building and why? Awesome. By the way, great to see you again, Jason. So thanks so much for having us. And so we're building track. We're trying to build the fastest and most. elegant calendar experience out there. So you can think of Google Calendar, currently and Doodle kind of built into superhuman kind of an experience.

And the background on this is that even before track, like we were building this mobile app for scheduling phone calls, it was called Check-in Call, because I was frustrated by the kiosk of unscheduled phone calls in India. And we realized that that was one of the problems, you know, around calendars and scheduling, but it just, you know, after talking to a lot of people and of, you know, our own sort of internal frustrations around Google Calendar started bubbling up.

So we started connecting the dots and seeing things like, you know, in Google Calendar, for example, it's pretty cluttered, unintuitive, and kind of slows you down. The UI and UX also is not designed for people who live by the calendar, essentially. So we felt like calendars are not designed for the people who live by them. And people are using that in conjunction with Calendly, which was a bit impersonal. and for people who wanted to optimize their time and had several events a week, it was not the best solutions.

I had also worked at Goldman Sachs in New York where I saw traders use the Bloomberg keyboard, pawns use Excel shortcuts, and then Superhuman came along, and all of these dots started to connect for us. So that's how early last year we started working on a more efficient solution. And I personally, one of the things that I really,

really dislike about calendars was, you know, all the dragging and then clicking, and then selecting and then typing, and you just do this endlessly. You know, that's one of the things and can't manage multiple accounts, like working across time zones. All of these things are very painful,

and they just add up, right? So that's where we decided that we had the thinking and the building blocks for it, and we should go tackle this problem. So making the quickest, most elegant power user version of calendars, let's do a quick demo here. Remember, most people are listening, so describe what they're seeing.

Awesome. So this is Sej, who's one of our earliest users, trying to schedule a call with Anjana in India, so he opens up a widget where he can enter the time zone. And then on this calendar view, he has an input where he can type in natural language, the duration of a call, the type of the call,

and the days of the week he's available and the times. And then he shifts without having to switch out of the keyboard, he types Anjana's information so that she doesn't need to take the effort. And then track creates a message which is customized and personalized for her so that when Anjana opens the link, she can match with the calendar or browse a few slots and pick one and then book the call in two clicks. So it's really efficient, very fast for all of these workflows basically. And when you did that for people who are not watching, you just said, hey, 30-minute meeting with this email address on these days in this window,

it presents the landing page for that person to pick from one of those options and then automatically inserts it. You never had to touch the mouse. as I tell anybody when you touch that trackpad or a mouse, you've just failed the assignment. The assignment is to be able to do that really quick. Just like in superhuman, you never touch your mouse and you become bionic. When you're scheduling like this, you're probably doing it in one third to one tenth of the time is if you were sending an email cut in pasting times and you're just putting together, I guess, calendarly and noodle in some of those other programs allow you to do that.

here's my open schedule, here's your open schedule, pick a date, correct? And that's just built in here. Exactly. And with the whole keyboard first experience, as you talked about, right? Like, we just think of it as, I shouldn't have to, you know, think too much. I just say, okay, this is what I'm trying to do. This is my command. You just share some options, create the message for me.

All I need to do is just, you know, paste it somewhere. And those are multiple steps, which otherwise take a lot of time and then a lot of clicking around. So we paid a lot of attention to that experience, basically. And so, of course, the objection you're going to get from investors is, well, what if Google does this or what if Microsoft does this? Or is it really that much better? When you get those kind of obvious objections, how do you overcome them? That's a great question. So in terms of the bigger players, I feel like I think there's already a lot of inefficiency that they've built in.

And designing a keyboard first experience like this, it's incredibly hard because you have to pay a lot of attention to details to like literally every single drop down and interaction and then they're building for the masters right so they can't really change the experience for everyone this is designed for people who want to really optimize and use the calendar a lot and so that's one of the aspects and in terms of like you know is this really much better it's like anyone who's really used the calendar extensively understands how deep the product is and how many pain points are there.

For example, as I mentioned, like, you know, working with time zones, multiple accounts. And we, you know, even now get like tons of requests from my users around things like, oh, can I use, you know, Gmail and out my out to account together? Now, that's not something that either Gmail alone can do or Outlook alone can do in that sense. So those are gaps already, you know, that exist that we can capitalize on as well. So, you know, those are very much stuff. And how do you make money with this product? So currently we're just offering a two-week trial, and then it's a $10 a month, you know, for a monthly subscription and an annual subscription are $100 a month.

And by Q2 next year, we plan to open up the end year. I think you'd be a hundred dollars a year. Yeah, $10 a month, $100 a year, you get that little $20 discount. And if, do you have a multiplayer version here where if I have an organization of 10 or 20 people in my department, or is that something you're going to build next? Yeah. So the good thing here is that currently. in single-player mode, you can already do things like scheduling time with your teammates, which is a big problem.

And we've optimized for that. But yeah, in the near future, we'll also be building a multiplayer version in that sense, which makes things much easier. And of course, when we invest for people who are listening, we always look at a product. And one of the lenses I look through is, hey, if the founder can build something this elegant, this beautiful, this high functioning, the founder doesn't, and it's just advice for angel investors and early stage investors,

It's not like suddenly a great founder who's incredible at building an elegant product is going to run out of ideas or not have other challenges they find. Of course, multiplayer mode is going to become even more dynamic and you can just keep building into adjacencies or make the product deeper and richer. So there's always more innovation left to do. That's why I always like to bet on founders who build great products relentlessly and have great product cadence. you're releasing features on what product cadence every week, every two weeks, how often does your team add a new function to the product? What's your goal in that regard? Our typical cadence is once a week at least, but oftentimes we're getting so many requests

from users that we will ship out a version like if something is important and we feel like it could really create value. You know, we just ship it within the week as well. So it could be like sometimes two, three times a week if we feel that that can create value for everyone. As an example, recently, you know, Chris was also a launch founder, you know, requested this feature to auto-join calls. So he doesn't have to even click, you know, just join the next call automatically. That way you don't miss calls as well.

Oh, that's a great feature. So I have a Zoom call coming up and it just automatically load Zoom at 1 o'clock. Exactly. It clicks me in the waiting room. Oh, my God, that's such a genius feature. you've demonstrated perfectly for me, my point about great product teams that have great product cadence can come up with an infinite number of features if they just obsess over their customers. How do you obsess over your customers?

How do you get that feedback from customers? How do you extract from customers great ideas like auto launching the Zoom? If they're that crazy and they want to do something like that. Exactly. So actually, this came out. I was just chatting with Chris on Slack. thanks to the launch community, but he put it out there

and then he put a post on LinkedIn as well and that just made us more aware of it and then we just built it really quickly but we also built a community of close users that we take constant feedback from and it's like literally every day we have multiple requests. So that's a great way for us to

sort of iterate and then choose between our own vision and the things that people are requesting for. Fantastic. Just people are very apt to send you an email or to chat with you in a chat room if you give them the green light and you encourage them to do that. Hey, is there anything we can

do better? Any features you want? Just email us, just fill in this chat room. So continue to success. And it's great to be in business with you. I'm so proud of the progress. You're me. Thanks so much, Jason. Great to be here. All right. So there you have it. Folks are getting tons of feature requests. Revenue

is still very early. But you got those small teams really interested in that multiplayer mode. So what I like to do is just suspend my disbelief and always have that faith that the founder will keep iterating and have that great product velocity. When you see that as an investor, you're going to, you're going to have a good chance of success. That's what I always feel. At the very least, the product's not going to be stagnant.

And you love those teams that have those founder chops, which is actually a great segue into our next founder. Her company is called Lama Life. You can visit them at L-L-L-A-M-A-L-I-F-E dot co. Lomalemolife.co, launched in August of 2020, and they're in the category that I love, which is productivity, because I want everybody on my team to be productive. I want to be productive. So, Marie Nang, welcome to the program.

Hey, Jason. Thanks for having me. And you joined us at the accelerator from outside of the United States, correct? Yeah, I'm based in Melbourne, Australia. one of one of my favorite countries. I can't wait for this pandemic to end so I can get back down under and visit my friends in Sydney and Melbourne

and just enjoy your amazing country. Does that mean you were up at three in the morning to pitch to investors? I don't know what time you wound up having to get up. And I apologize, but... No, that's all good. Yeah, it was pretty early, but, you know, that's one of the advantages of having it remote, right?

So just the fact that I could participate was amazing. But yes, it was very early for me, but I just got myself into a routine. So I got up early, but I also went to bed early. So in the end, I was still getting, you know, seven, eight hours sleep, which is really important. As a founder, you need to be sustainable the way you're working. And it actually turned out to be quite a good routine for me. And it worked out fine. Fantastic.

Yeah. And you've done well. in your fundraising, we're going to be participating in helping you close out the round, I understand, from my team. So that's fantastic. Let's talk a little bit about the product. You are building a time-based productivity tool. I think the best way for us to explain this is to just show it. So why don't you go ahead and give us a quick demo? Yeah, cool. So Lama Life is a web-based productivity app. And for those that are listening online, what we're looking at is kind of like a task manager view, which has a timer on the top. And what you do,

is you type in the task that you want to do and you decide how much time you want to spend on it. And when you start the task, it starts a countdown timer, which effectively puts a cap on it, like a time box on it, which encourages focus. So Alamal Life is all about helping you increase your focus and flow to help you get through the day. There's also soundscapes that you can play in the background. So beach sounds or storm or forest sounds. And there's also a mini report and preset lists that you can create for routine tasks that you have every day. So if I had a routine task of, hey, I like to talk to my product manager.

I like to check in with the sales team. I like to check these metrics in Google Analytics. Then I like to write a blog post. And of course, I then always have my staff meeting or huddle. I could have my daily morning routine. And every morning I pop it in there and I get my countdown clock. It keeps me on task.

and if I need to add five minutes or take out five minutes, I can do that by just hitting a quick button. This reminded me of something I had seen, like a physical product I was pitched on or some system. There's the GSD system getting stuff done. There was this like tomato timer system where you used a little egg timer. This is in that same zone, correct? Yeah, it's in the same realm.

So the tomato timer that you're talking about is the Pomodoro technique, where people typically set, you know, a 25 minute, focus session followed by a five-minute break. And Lama Life plays on a similar concept, except it gives people a lot more flexibility. So instead of being restricted to 25 minutes, you might want to start with a five-minute task or a 10-minute task. And often starting is the hardest part. So we can get ourselves going and get into flow with a very short task. Usually that helps to, you know, continue on to a larger task. And like you said, you can add five minutes or take away time as well, depending on how you're feeling. And I think the biggest difference with Lama Life is the whole

product is designed to make you feel good about completing a task. So there's a lot of animations, there's confetti. It's meant to be a fun way to complete things. And also is kind of playing on this timer mechanism, which increases your focus at any given time. And it's really great because it gives you some level of structure and some kind of accomplishment because sometimes we've all had this experience. We come to work. We know there's a ton to do. We go into our email box and we get lost for hours. We're surfing the web. We check our Facebook. We check Twitter. And all of a sudden, the day's gone and we're like, what do we actually get done? But if you structure it with Lama Life, you actually have a track record of what you've done.

I'm assuming it saves this audit log of what you've done. So if you were working on a team, if you had a manager or something, you could actually export and say, hey, by the way, here's what I got done today. Anything else I could be helpful with? Are people using it in that way to kind of take credit if they're in an organization for what they're getting done and do reporting? Yes. There is a reporting page.

So you can see how much time you have assigned to a task and then how much time you actually spent on it in real life. and some of the feedback that I've got so far is that, you know, after completing just a couple of tasks, people are actually quite surprised at the amount of time things take, right? So, Lama Life is all about helping you be more effective with your time. It's not necessarily the amount of time that you're working in a day. You don't necessarily have to do crazy kind of, you know, 10, 14-hour days. It is all about helping you make the most of the time that you have.

So be more effective with it. So people are using it in that way to kind of check themselves to see what they've accomplished in any given day. It is a consumer SaaS product at the moment. So right now we're just selling to individuals. That said last week, we had a really good week. So it was the first time I actually sold 10 licenses of the products in one go. Oh, wow. Yeah.

One company that somebody got addicted to it and said, I want my whole team. it? To one person, yeah, to one person. So I'm still deciding how they're going to use that, but they, you know, they really bought into what the product's trying to achieve, what the brand is, the community around the product and said they'd like to buy 10, 10 licenses in one hit. So that was, that gave me a lot of confidence that, you know, we can start selling to small teams and eventually go into enterprise. But yeah, it was just a really great moment, you know, kind of those little steps along the way that give you confidence to get. We could definitely throw some confetti in the air for that 10 sale at once.

Yes. Well, okay, so then this leads to the manager who wants to have a productive team, which is a reasonable thing. But then there are some people who don't like to be micromanaged. They don't want people looking at a task. They want to be judged on their holistic view of work. But we have remote work now. And it's very hard for people with remote work to know who's doing what. And then we all have this experience where somebody is just absolutely kicking butt, knocking out task after task,

after task. And then there's somebody getting paid more money who's not going through task after task. How do you plan on when you do have multiplayer mode, when you do have an enterprise version, and you clearly have demand for it because people are buying it even though you haven't built it yet? So have you started thinking about how to architect that so that it's not considered oppressive or micromanical, managing, but maybe creates a pool of tasks that need to get done. And I as the manager could say, hey, I need somebody to write this press release. I think it's a 90-minute job. I need somebody to talk to this customer and do a user interview. I think that's a 45-minute job.

I need somebody to talk to this vendor and negotiate a lower price. And I could put a pool of tasks into one place, which developers do, right? Developers have con on boards or, you know, stories. And they just say, hey, next person, take the next item. So developers are pretty used to this. but I think the rest of us maybe are in. So tell me how you're thinking about that functionality and if maybe I'm projecting here and this doesn't actually exist or if this actually is a real concern. Yeah, I think it's, you raise a really good point. It's a very, very fine balance when you take a consumer product and start putting it

into enterprise. So you mention the fact that, you know, there's in an organization, the people using the product don't necessarily want to be micromanaged, but at the same time, The managers want to know that their team is making the most effective use of their time. So this is something I am spending a lot of time thinking about because the nature of Lama Life as a product and as a brand is that it's very fun and easygoing to use. And I want to make sure that when we start transitioning into small teams and to enterprise, that we don't lose that attractiveness of it, right? people are using it because they like the fact that it's not overwhelming.

It makes them feel calm and focused while they're using the product. So it's almost completely like contradictory to having a manager have this kind of godlike view on what everybody is doing. So I am spending a lot of time thinking about that. At the moment, the plan is to go bottom up into enterprise. So ensure that it is going through employees that really wants to use the product and they're bringing it to their manager. in order to sell it into an organization. The plan at the moment is to be able to do multiplayer mode, but have that in such a way that people are still working on their own tasks,

right, but they're able to share a focus session with another team, another individual. Right? So it's less about going, you're doing that task and you're doing that task, right? The team can still have their own overall goals, but it's more about saying, okay, let's create a focus session together. Maybe it's one hour. And we're each going to work on our different tasks,

but we're going to work like we're almost like we're in the same room, right? Maybe I can see you on the screen, you can see me in a thumbnail view. So it's not too intrusive, but we're working on our own tasks. And the way I think about that is, you know, if you're in a co-working space and you're in like a communal area, there's lots of people working on their own businesses and their own tasks, but you're feeding off the energy in the room, right? You're feeding off the fact that everybody's focused,

everybody's in the same mindset of trying to get work done, and we've dedicated one hour, and we're going to bash it out, and we're going to figure out whatever else is doing. Yeah, so it's more about social accountability than micromanaging specific tasks. And for people who are angel investors invest in listening, one of the angel experience,

when you're talking to founders is they have perspective. And Maria, you have a perspective on this and you have a point of view, which is this isn't about being oppressive. This is about being productive and having joy and having that great sense of accomplishment. And so I love that you have this perspective of, hey, this isn't about being oppressive and having a punch list. This is about us banging it out and winning together. And I just love this idea of us focusing together.

and you've got the right metaphor for the right time, which is, hey, maybe we can't all be in the same room and now distributed teams are becoming a thing. So, yeah, maybe this is a postage size stamp or we use something like a slack huddle or the equivalent of a clubhouse room. We have audio going on. And we say, you know what? We're doing a barn raising today. We're going to fix our website and get our marketing materials done for this event we're hosting. And here's all the tasks. And you could see people on this combined Lama Lifeboard.

and, you know, okay, I'm going to go proof the website. I'm going to write the press release. You're going to compose the tweets. I'm going to make the Canva invitation. You're going to make the Eventbrite invitation. Whatever it is, I'm going to create a list of 20 targets for speakers. You're going to create the list of 20 targets for sponsors. I'm going to do the work on evaluating locations for us to host this event.

I'm just picking event hosting us, but one complex thing that needs to be orchestrated. Because it's all happening together, I just love this idea. We all get to see the confetti, and maybe we could even click on, you know, you pick the right venue. I did the target list of sponsors and I get to put some emojis under it and give you a high five. It really creates that esprit to corpse where people are feeling like, hey, we're all in this together. So another great aspect of the way we pick founders is looking for perspective and looking for building a great product. And my gosh, you have both of those. So it's just delightful to watch you do this.

Thank you. But one thing that has been challenging for you is you're a solo founder. Yes. So how has that process been for you, fundraising, building the product, and maybe sometimes there are investors who have a biased against solo founders. How's that has that become an issue for you and how you're working through that? Yes. It certainly has been challenging.

And as you talked about at the beginning of the pod, fundraising is a full-time job. It's very, very time. time consuming, you're taking a lot of meetings. And as a solo founder, you know, you only have so much time and also energy and mental effort that you can assign to any given day. So, you know, I'm doing the marketing, the product development, the coding, taking the investor meetings. It was definitely very challenging for me. The way that I approached it, though, was to take less meetings. So I was very, very sort of selective in terms of who I was reaching out to.

In fact, I actually didn't do that much outreach. I made sure that most of the meetings that I took with investors were through an introduction. So there were, you know, with the launch accelerator, we were pitching to investors every week. And I definitely got several meetings through that process. but I'd also ask for introductions. And the fundraising that I've done at the moment, we're raising a 650K round. We have a lead investor,

Black Sheep Capital from Australia. So I'm really excited to have an Australian investor and also work with yourself and the launch team to hopefully fill out the rest of the round. So we've got a US investor and an Australian investor. But in order to get that meeting and in order to get, you know, that first check-in, I was pretty selective in terms of who I met with. I wanted to make sure that the investor understood the power of the brand because Lama Life is really,

you know, it's a productivity tool. It's a SaaS business, but it is sitting under this brand, this marketing brand of Lama Life. And as the product starts to expand, you can start to have different verticals within that, different revenue streams, similar to what Calm has done. Calm.com. I'm a huge fan. I know that you're an early investor. Me too. I mean, people don't realize this. I get a lot of credit for the Uber investment, but I owned a fraction of one percent of Uber, like a very tiny fraction. With Calm, we own 5%. So even though it's much smaller, we own a much larger percent, the Com investment will generate more cash than, in fact, my Uber investment at this point. And just what a great company. And what they've done is fantastic, you know, because they've

really leveraged the power of the brand. Like when you think about meditation apps, and I see this huge parallel with productivity apps as well, everybody always says to me and the investors gave this feedback as well is that it's such a crowded space. You know, what are you doing to be differentiated? And I always use this parallel of meditation apps because you could say that a meditation app, you know, at its core is maybe just a list of MP3s, categorized, right, and different things. And I would say, well, okay, well, that's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is, you know, what has calm done to differentiate itself

amongst a sea of meditation apps in the app store. And they obviously have a great product. They have great content. But they've also got a great brand. And that's what I see with Lama Life. You know, it is a tool on one hand. but it is also a great brand that we're building. And I was really looking for investors that understood that and got behind that

and could see the potential of branding. And Black Sheep Capital understood that. And you guys understand that. So, yeah, I'm really excited to. The brand matters. And, you know, it's like very easy. People will dismiss a brand and say, how is defensible? And brand is defensible.

I mean, if you look at a brand like Porsche or Tesla, just taking the car category, Mercedes. These brands evoke something, BMW, the driving machine, Volvo, safety, Tesla, technology, self-driving, you know, Mercedes. It's a driving, you know, like the precision of it and the craftsmanship. And Com, you're right, has an aesthetic. Robin Hood has an aesthetic that means something to people and makes them loyal to it. And for people who don't know, we like to invest in the companies. We like for them to learn how to fish when they do catch some fish. And as an invest. and they get to 30, 40, 50 percent of their round closed, we will very often just take the other half of the round. And so in your case, my understanding from my team is that you got halfway there and we're going to syndicate and do the other half. So we could very easily just syndicate every company that graduates from the accelerator, but we also want to challenge our founders, hey, to go find some other investors besides us and

wow them and prove that you can set a valuation and you can wow that because that is such a key piece. And I'm so happy that you did that with an investor down under because you do have these great firms. Was it Blackbird as one? The one you mentioned, there's like three or four of that have really dominated down there. What are the three or four? Yep. So you've got Blackbird, you've got Airtree, you've got Title Ventures. And yeah, yep, Black Sheep Capital is the, yeah. So it's absolutely like, and we just love the Australian founders because they're dogged, they're resilient and they want to win. And you fall into that category. We've seen Melanie from Canva and Atlassian team. So many great companies down there. The entrepreneurs in Australia are just at the

top of our list in terms of who we want to be in business with. So many great founders down there. I don't know what you guys are putting in the water or in the meat pies. But man, I just am absolutely enamored with Australian founders. They just work so hard. Y'all work really hard and you're focused on winning and it's just such a great country. I love spending time there. I've been there four or five times in my life, and it's just one of my favorite destinations in the world, and it's just the people are wonderful down there,

and the entrepreneurs are second to none. I put the entrepreneurs in Sweden, Australia, the United States, just all in that same category as just unstoppable. And they all share that obsession with customers and making just beautiful products. I see that in Sweden all the time, and the Nordics. I see it in Australia,

whether it's Sydney or Melbourne, both cities have equally, the Melbourne people have a little more chip, I will say that. Sydney people are delightful. I'm not going to start too big of a debate here, but the ones from Melbourne got a little bit of edge to them. Yeah, I have to agree. I have to agree, but I love them both. It's like Boston and New York to me. I love them both, but we're very happy to be in business with them.

I'm very proud of the doggedness you've had, and it hasn't been easy because you're in a crowded field and you're a solo founder, but you got it done, and the best is yet to come. Multiplayer mode. Oh, it's going to be so incredible. And that's really, when you think about it as we wrap here, my best advice to investors out there is you look at that first year or two of the progress the founder made. And if they made great product and they got that initial traction, just in your mind, allow yourself to say, what if they 10x it?

And then what if they 10 exit again? And you have 700 customers, I believe, now paying for the product. Is that right? Yeah, 700 paying customers total. Last month, November, did 2,400 in revenue. So until early days, but it's definitely picking up growing 30% month on month in terms of MRR. You know, when I see companies growing over 10%, to me, it's not an accident. Once you get past 10% a month, it's not an accident. Of course, we'll look at the churn and we've got to look at the engagement. When you break that 10% growth a month, something's going fabulous. right. And so I am super excited for you and all the other cohorts here. If you want to spend 16 weeks with me and my team meeting all these great investors. You can email Jackie at launch.com directly. She is the managing director of the program. She does 90% of the work. I take 100%

of the credit, as it were. I'm given 100% of the credit. But shout out to Jackie for really finding and selecting these great companies. And I am absolutely delighted. I love being early in these companies and watching them grow and really trying to be as helpful as I can to them. Our goal is always to be your first and best investor. And so we work really hard at that at launch. And we sincerely want to be early on your cap table. And we want to be there with you and you ring the bell when you go public, which I'm certain. Everybody will.

And if not, it doesn't work out, we'll invest in your next company. because eventually these dog and founders are going to do it. Thank you so much to everybody. And again, sincerely, Jackie, you are amazing for just what you've done with this program. All right. It's time for another segment of OK Boomer. Rachel is reporting. How are you doing, Rachel?

Doing great. How are you? What do we have for the audience today in our segment, OK Boomer, which connects old Gen Xers and boomers to the next generation of Gen Z and millennials and how they look at the world. This week, I got to speak to Arafeli Goonery. And a few weeks ago, she actually was recommended to me on Twitter after I asked people for the best Gen Z founder to come talk on this weekend startup.

So that was really cool that I got to connect with her that way. And she was just a pleasure to talk to you. Okay. What does she do? And what do you talk about in this episode? What are we about to hear? She runs a Gen Z social media agency and has a newsletter called Digital Native. And she's also currently a student.

she's getting her master's in strategic marketing at Imperial College in London. So she's wearing a ton of hats, doing a ton of stuff right now. And even though she's going to school in London, she's actually Greek. So she has a really cool third culture background as well. Great. And you talk a little bit in the interview about being a digital nomad and young people working from anywhere they want in the world and not having a home base, but basically living out of a backpack and living the dream. Everybody dreams of having this epic life, then retiring and traveling the world. And what we're seeing, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, is some Gen Zs and millennials are saying, well, with remote work, I'll just not sign a lease, I'll have a small amount of possessions, and I'll work from anywhere, and I'll get to see 10 countries a year. We got to talk about that, and she, I think, was very well spoken on the subject, especially because she's not only getting her master's degree right now, but she's running a company.

And I think when you're studying in a different country and when you're working in a different country, those are two totally different. things. I think it's very easy for a person my age to do a study abroad, but to actually work abroad, I feel like it's a lot more difficult. So seeing that she was able to do both was really incredible. And this past weekend, I also went to Art Basel and I met up with an old friend of mine that is currently, I think, next week, going to Italy. Wait, you were at Art Basel as well and you didn't look me up. I was there. I would have invited you to a party. I texted you. Oh, you did? Oh, no. I can't if I missed it. Oh, sorry. My bed then. All good. All good. I had my parties to go to too.

So I got to meet with a friend at Arbazel that is also a digital nomad living out of a suitcase. I believe he's been doing that for about six months now. It sounded really cool. And I think that most Gen Zs at this point would prefer remote work because this is kind of just the work environment we've now grown up in over the past two years, which when I graduated, it was 2020. The pandemic just hit. And I think there's a really big split between people choosing to live in cheaper places or moving with their parents, which is what I did. And kind of like how you mentioned earlier, how in a previous podcast you mentioned, you see a lot of young people moving to really cheap areas.

I live in Baltimore. It's obviously a lot cheaper to live in Baltimore than it would be in San Francisco. And I think on the other hand, there are also Gen Z's taking it a complete opposite approach than moving to cheaper costs of area, cheaper costs of living areas and moving back in with other family members who are doing this living out of a backpack experience. So it was really cool. It's pretty great. Yeah. About that.

The only issue I see is time zone. Like, you know, that could work or not. I mean, if you move to Europe and you're working for an American company, you basically are giving up every evening if your boss requires you to be online during the regular work hours, or you might be able to find, I know withinside.com, I'm always looking for editors who are in different time zones to do early morning coverage or late night coverage. So it could also be an opportunity. If you're a developer and the people in California can hand stuff off to you,

and you move the ball forward for when they get to work the next day, that can also be a benefit. So I think being honest with employers of what time zone you're in could actually create opportunities. All right, let's play the interview. And if anybody has ideas for the OK Boomer segment, helping translate trends that we're seeing young people do to the older generations.

You can just email producers at this week in startups.com. Let's roll the tape. Well, thank you so much, your affiliate gunnery for being on this episode of OK Boomer. The reason I found you was actually through Twitter. I tweeted out and asked a bunch of people who are the smartest of the coolest Gen Zs to talk to, and you were recommended a lot. So you obviously have an incredible network that likes you. So for those of you who don't know, your affiliate is the founder and CEO of the ZLink. And that's the first Gen Z-led social media agency that helps brands market to this generation.

And she's also the head of social media at the California-based company at Safety Wing. and she's the founder of the Gen Z Club community. And on top of all that, she's also a full-time master's student at the Imperial College London. So like I said, you were the most recommended founder when I tweeted out that I wanted to talk to young people. And besides stalking your Twitter, to be honest, I only read a business insider article about your day. And it was pretty impressive. So you're an international founder. That's what I want to talk to you about because it sounds like you have a ton on your plate.

and you're able to balance that even with having kind of a crazy time difference between the states and where you go to school over in England. So I guess, yeah, to start off, let's talk about being an international founder. And do you think it's easier being a Gen Z international founder than it is with other ages? I feel like my peers are so chronically online all the time that we are kind of put at such a good advantage of being international founders and online founders at that. What's your experience? Yeah, I agree with that. I think that because we grew up in such like an online environment, you know, with the first generation of digital natives, it's very different than any previous generation. And besides just being like more immersed in the internet, that also means that we're able to work a lot more like without borders and to not see the importance of being somewhere physically as much as previous generations just because we're so used to like having a lot more possibilities. Yeah. So for me, it's, you know, I've never known another way of being a founder, basically,

or I've never considered being a founder in a way that's not like remote and international, because I feel like it would only impose limits on my work that basically have no reason to be there. So it's a great time to be a founder. Yeah, it's funny that you mention that because Jason is the author of a book. It's called Angel. Everybody at the speaking startups and at launch has read his book. And he famously said in one of the chapters that basically founders have to be based in San Francisco. They have to be based in the Valley. And since that book came out and since the pandemic hit and we've been spread like all over

the globe, including his own team, he's been like, you know what? Maybe that's something we can rethink. Do you think that like SF and Silicon Valley startups are a thing of the past? Or do you think this is just a lull in time and eventually we're all going to go back to Silicon Valley? That's a great question. I'm not of like of one opinion versus the other. I think it will be a kind of a balance of both

because while I am an international founder myself, the company I work at as a head of social media in California is based in Silicon Valley, although it's also fully remote. So it's a sort of thing where it was founded there, it was a YC company, but the founders are not there and most of the team is made of digital nomads. So where I can definitely see the benefits of being based in SF as a founder, I don't think it's going to be a necessity in the future,

but it definitely will still give you some more opportunities and a very strong network to be there as a founder just because of all of the people that you get to meet and all of the things that you get to be even more involved in in comparison to if you were just kind of like doing everything online and remotely. But as I mentioned, I really don't think that this would be that this would be the kind of thing that will develop to be a necessity for founders around the world.

I think we're moving towards an age where no matter where you are, it's easier to be a founder anywhere and you can still access the kind of SF-based resources and network online. I completely agree with you. In fact, I've been pretty passionate about the idea of becoming a digital nomad myself,

probably since college before the pandemic hit, just because I've noticed, like you've said, just the rise of international teams. I don't think necessarily, I think the pandemic probably did inspire a lot more people to become international digital nobads, but I definitely think that it was on a rise anyway before that even happened. In fact, I started reading your newsletter called Digital Native. And I think it's really interesting how you talk about just working in different places. And can you explain to

everyone what it really means to be a digital native? For me, it means being a person who just grew up with the possibilities of the internet around you and who's so used to this world and is able to take advantage of the internet in its best ways and also just, you know, recognize the limits that we should place in our use of like the online world. And at the same time, I think it's also being a type of person who is comfortable, like being anywhere, kind of being like more of a digital nomad,

if that makes sense. But for me, the meaning of being a digital native, I think lies more in being like a Gen Z who grew up learning about everything that the internet can offer you and how to take advantage of it to create your own opportunities and learn and kind of like nourish your interests and everything. Do you have any practical advice for people that are aspiring to become digital nomads? Any practical advice? Okay, that's a good question.

I'd say one thing is make sure that you have connections in as many places as possible because I think that's, you know, if you have kind of a global network, whether you you gained that through social media or like through your personal branding and connecting with other people in that way. It's something that is truly invaluable if you travel a lot and have no like solid base. Yeah. And it's also what will enable you to be working with amazing people if you are based in a remote location and still want to have access to the talent and the network that's spread all around the world. That's awesome that you mentioned being a part of a network because you're actually, I think every single person that I've talked to on OK Boomer thus far has,

had their own kind of community that they're building, whether it was, you know, Megan with her Gen ZVC group on Slack or the virus with Emily Herrera. That phrase of just community building, I feel like is incredibly important to our generation. It seems like every single person I talk to to that is really a game changer in our generation is trying to help others build those networks, because networking is something I think that used to hold a lot of people back, especially when we were so confined to certain cities like London, San Francisco, Berlin had I know had a really good tech scene, but there were, I feel like, really pockets where you could find great, awesome founders that had amazing networks. And now our generation, I feel like, is throwing that all

out the window and really capitalizing on being phenomenal community builders. Do you have any tips about making those connections and building community for others? Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's something I'm very passionate about because it is a huge part of the work we do at the Z link. I very strongly believe that the brands that are the best with Gen Z are the ones that are community driven at the core and rely more on organic, social and building a community of people that truly understand your brand. And that doesn't only go for brands. But it's also super useful for individuals and professionals. One of the most useful things I ever did for my career was have a kind of a strong personal brand on Twitter over any other place.

That's how so many opportunities came to me. And, you know, without, like, it played such a big role. Yeah. So that's also a type of community building. And some tips I would have are just to, I know this sounds very general, but literally just start and just take the first steps toward building community, which is, you know, start communicating with your audience, start asking questions, starting. conversations, putting out some type of content and offering whatever value you can offer,

because you can learn something from every person you meet, and that means including you. So, you know, you have something to teach that people might want to hear. You have different experiences, different beliefs. So putting out content and starting conversations that allows you to share that value and communicate with people in a way that is, might be like informative to them or just more interesting and insightful, that leads to building an organic community and is super useful for brands and individuals and everyone. It's funny that you mentioned Twitter. So when I was in college, I don't necessarily thought I had an emphasis on Twitter in my mind at all. I feel like the

social media, at least when I was in school, was Instagram, right? And I got a very lucky situation where I had a mentor that was in the VC space. And he was like, no, you need to start being more active on Twitter and like sharing your opinions online, which is really scary as like I feel like we were grown-ups to not do that. Like, our parents, at least for me, we're always like, don't share things on the internet and don't get in people's cars so you don't know. And now here I am on Twitter, tweeting out things and getting in Uber's, like, all the time.

And so I feel like Twitter is, if I could give any advice to people that, especially that are Gen Z's E's starting out, you're right, just doing it. I think starting a Twitter account that I made away from, like, my personal account, I started making a Twitter account where obviously there's some personal things on there, but like that really is how I network. like if somebody is like is cool on Twitter, I feel like that's somebody I would meet in real life and I wouldn't necessarily meet like people on Instagram

if I just like followed their, I don't know Instagram's for people who I know, Twitter's for people who I want to know. And then on that, I really, really wish I capitalized on just doing it. I wish I started putting more of myself on the internet earlier. And the thing, the way I would have done that is actually I think through a medium account

because when I graduated and became more interested in the startup and VC community, I noticed how many people were excellent writers and I studied something in tech in college so I was like, who needs to know how to write? Like, if I know like what pretty UXUI is, like somebody will hire me for that. Now look, I obviously wasn't hired for that,

but I totally agree with you, just doing it and then taking the work that you've done in school and putting it out so to show people that you're well articulated in your speech and in your writing. And Twitter's obviously a great place to do that. I think medium's a great place to do that. But yeah, I really hope more of

the Gen Z audience puts themselves on the internet earlier. And I think people are trying to do that. Maybe I was late in the game, but I'd see the generation above us, like the millennials, taking over Twitter. And I'm like, you know what? I think Gen Z people have a way, have a much more in tune sphere of things to understand like what people are buying. And I guess you're the second person actually spoke to you that has kind of had like

an agency built all the way around Gen Z. So we previously got to speak to Ziyadh on Med, as you guys probably know if you're listening and you've listened to previous OK Boomer segments. He's a CEO and founder of Juve Consulting. So what makes you think that Gen Z is like so much better at like social media at branding? Like what makes us so much better and why are there so many agencies focusing on Gen Z? To me, it's not necessarily that, you know, Gen Z marketers are better at branding than anyone else. I think it's more that of course branding is developing at the same time as we are. So people that are now becoming Gen Z designers and marketers are the ones that have like a very

innate understanding of current trends, which is of course like natural for every generation. But for us, our focus and the point of it is that we show brands how to market to this generation from our own perspective, considering everyone on our team is a Gen Z marketer, designer, you know, Gen Z copywriters and everything. So compared to, you know, people that might. try to market to Gen Z, but being millennial marketers or older, I think what drove most of our clients to us from the beginning was that, you know, they're trying to target an audience, and we are that audience, and we are also marketers.

So it just works extra well. But of course, Gen Z audiences have also grown to have more of a liking to branding and aesthetics and content that is very current and very trendy and has like, you know, a special kind of like modern and bold aesthetic. And for all those reasons, you know, it takes also a Gen Z team to properly help a brand craft that. So I know you have some very corporate clients, but have you worked for anyone in a corporate setting outside of being a founder? Like, what were you doing before this agency? So yeah, I worked at many different companies alongside my studies. So I'm 22, now. I started working when I was 17 and I worked at business incubators. I worked at like museums and I worked

with the European Parliament and the Greek government and just a bunch of different organizations all on digital marketing and social media. I also worked a bit in the film industry and the art industry and all of that was like I know it's a lot but I was always doing it alongside my studies and all of that was you know in digital strategy and digital marketing. And And none of these were like, you know, huge corporate companies. I guess they were more like organizations. Like I was in kind of like government organizations and institutions. But it's pretty similar.

And in all of those places, you know, the usually they would hire me because they were like, okay, you're young, you know social media and you have experience in marketing. So help us do something that actually like appeals to young people like you. So to me that was like the first sign that I was like, okay, I need to be doing this on on a bigger scale. I see how many hats you're wearing in so many different fields. It's interesting you went from government to a startup. I think that is very cool. But I also see so many Gen Zs have side hustles. I feel like you can't talk to a single person or generation without having a similar life to yours where we do so many things. Do you think that this is going to be something

that is increasingly normal? Like, will every Gen Z as we progress in life have this side hustle? Or do you think that this is just maybe the world of startups in this echo chamber of Twitter that I'm in where I see all these successful for 30 under 30 people, right, like yourself, like stretching the limits. Like, is this something you think everyone's doing having side hustles and creating companies? That's a great question. I think it's actually expanding beyond that echo chamber, although I really see what you mean that it could just be, you know, us being so immersed than startup Twitter. I mean like, yeah, everyone's doing this. Yeah. But I'm thinking of people I know. who have nothing to do with the startup and VC world that are also kind of subconsciously starting

projects that end up turning into their own side hustles. And I definitely think it's the kind of thing that is increasing right now. And it's also the type of thing where, you know, I have friends that are more interested in working in the corporate world. But they kind of look down on the huge companies that don't allow you to have a side hustle or like your own startup on the side of working there because that just seems like a non-gen-Z friendly approach, like a non-entrepreneurial way to work, you know. So companies that are encouraging side hustles and are encouraging a more entrepreneurial mindset, I think, are definitely going to do better with our generation as employers as well in the future. So is this shift to having these side hustles and being digital nomads, like,

away from corporate? Do you think this is? just young people being adventurous or is this like a long-term shift that you think is happening? Interesting. I don't know. I think I'm a bit biased because I'm very like since I started this more remote and entrepreneurial career after all of the things I used to do in the past, I have gotten to really find all the benefits that it has compared to corporate jobs like indispensable to my future. I don't think I could go back to a physical job and a job that doesn't allow me to have a site hustle or, you know, take time to do things like that. So if that equals corporate, then I think we are shifting away from that. But I think that's, you know, too big of a generalization because also starting out in corporate for our generation is usually a great way to gain some experience that you can later use to become a great founder if you're interested in that kind of thing.

So there are so many paths to achieving what you want. So I think it's very hard to say. I think it's so funny. Whenever I think of corporate, I interned one summer in corporate, and that was like enough for me, right? I interned and I was like, you know what? I'm 110%.

I'm good. Like, this was enough for me. I'll go away. And I used to think, like, when I graduated, going to a startup and having no people know what company I was joining, I used to kind of not self-conscious about it, but I was like, oh, no, like, people don't know, like what the company name is?

Like, what's that going to say about my resume? like if I go to when the next company, like, it doesn't, it's very difficult. Like, this doesn't hold merit. And now I think, so I graduated 2020 when the pandemic hit. And it's so funny because when I knew that I was going into the venture capital startup podcast and community, I think it was just 2021. 2020, 2020 just hit, right? So it was January by the time I realized I wanted to do a fellowship in VC.

But the pandemic didn't hit yet. And I think like between the time that I signed and like by the time I graduated, lot more of my friends shifted to more of like the smaller businesses, startup world, just because of how flexible your hours are, the ability to have a side hustle, the ability to wear so many different hats and learn more than just an Excel sheet, honestly. Exactly. You know, and it provides so much help. And it's, I don't know what the world's going to look like in 20 years from now because

of it. And do you, what do you think the world is going to look like in terms of working 20 years from now. I think, you know, companies of all sizes are going to have to adapt to Gen Z in the workplace, which sounds obvious, but we're a very aware generation in terms of the things that we can have in some jobs versus in others. So, you know, some people that are super talented in our generation and might be getting offers from the corporate world might be very aware of the fact that in startups, you know, they can have a lot more flexibility and a much better work life balance and like life standards in general.

So inevitably, I think corporate is going to have to adapt to that and learn to offer things to Gen Z employees that reflect that better standard of life that you can have in so many other ways of working because, you know, there are so many opportunities out there in the startup world that are amazing for our generation in terms of how much you can learn, what the culture is like at these companies and the people you're going to a meet and the responsibility that you'll be able to take on at a much, much earlier stage. For sure. Even if, you know, most people don't know the name of that company, what you'll be getting

out of it will be kind of invaluable. I think we also are valuing our time more than we are valuing sometimes the corporate paycheck. And I think sometimes when I see like, especially in big tech, I was determined for some reason. My senior year, I entered my junior year and corporate in the finance industry. And I was like, I didn't like this. So the way to go is I should say. stay in corporate, but I should move over to tech. Looking back on it now, I don't know if I, I don't

know why I thought, like, moving over like vertically, excuse me, horizontally like that if I necessarily would have liked it just because it was in a different industry. But I felt like, you know what, I know it will pay me well after college. And with how expensive colleges in America, that seems like a great output. And the more and more I think about it, it's like, what do I value more my time and the learning experience that I'll be getting? Or the golden handcuffs that I would inevitably be in if I did go to corporate. it. And I think more and more Gen Zs are really starting to see how valuable our time is. And I don't think the generations before that necessarily got that. I think it was like hustle culture and very like,

I don't know, like, grind. And I think our generation is like, wait a minute. Like we want to do stuff too. And Jason always jokes. He's like, yeah, you can't be, he made a joke. It was something to do with like, oh, yeah, I don't want you being part time and like going to Coachella or something like that. And I was like, it's so funny because that's totally something. As a Gen Z, I'd be like, oh, yeah. like how many hours do I have to work here and like will I be able to have like a life to my own? You know, which sounds crazy, but it's so obvious. I mean, I know, right? I just want to say on that as a side note to what you said, you know, to kind of valuing your time more than like the corporate paycheck and all of that kind of dilemma.

It's also a big myth among Gen Z and especially among older generations that you can't have both in the startup world. That's so true. Which now, you know, there are startups that will pay six figures for someone who has their own entrepreneurial experience and has built up experience in their field while allowing you to work remotely and allowing you to be flexible and have work-life balance that this is so possible. And there are tons of opportunities. It's just that we're not exposed to them. You know, I'm still in education. Yeah. Like I'm still in university now.

And all I see around me is just like consulting corporate. Like that's, you know, the only career path. Especially, I mean, like you said you're at Imperial, correct? Yeah. So that's got to be a really interesting place to also be a founder. Are you business? Are you doing an MBA? Yeah, I mean the business school.

So I'm doing a strategic marketing masters. That's so for people not who don't know what Imperial College is, I can let you take this, but it is a very good university with a really good business program. So that's awesome that you're not only being a founder, but also getting an MBA. I see a lot of people that. Not an MBA just to clarify, but like a business master's. It's like a, it's a master's in strategic marketing. They have a lot of business related masters and they also have like one MBA program. So you can do any of those like within the business school.

That's awesome. Well, that's so cool to hear. I guess this is my final question. I want to know what are your tips for other young founders? Of course. So, um, I know this sounds like very lean startup of me, but, uh, definitely like don't overthink and spend like three years building your product before launching. can be such a big mistake in most cases. Again, like not want to generalize because there are exceptions.

If you have an idea, just like go for it, start putting out content, see the demand, meet people that can help and just like start building. And also if you can build in public and create an early community, that can be so valuable. You know, use TikTok, just try to show the world your product organically and build a community before it launches. and there are startups that can succeed just because of that and because of that early traction, which is just a great way to go. Awesome. I think that is incredible advice.

Well, thank you so much for being on. Can you let people know where they can find you over on Twitter? Of course. So thank you so much as well. And on Twitter, my username is Marauders. And then, you know, you can also find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, all of that. Very happy to connect.

Well, thank you so much. I'm really excited to talk to Jason about ours conversation. Of course. Thank you so much.