This Week in Startups - Melengo's Justin Kwong on the future of end-to-end clothing manufacturing | E1913

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal-breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. TWiST listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at http://www.vanta.com/twist Uizard. Struggling to transform innovative ideas into concrete product designs? Uizard can help you turn your visions into polished UI designs in a fraction of the time, while enhancing collaboration across your entire team. Get 25% off Uizard Pro for an entire year at uizard.io/twist Experimentation is how generation-defining companies win. Accelerate your experimentation velocity with Eppo. Visit geteppo.com/twist * Todays show: Jason welcomes Melengo's Justin Kwong to the show to discuss how his company simplifies the process of developing, financing, and scaling apparel lines for brands and creators. The two dive into Melengo’s business model, initial customers, fundraising, and much more (1:49). Then, Jason breaks down his A.D.D. framework, designed to enhance efficiency and focus within companies (36:50)! * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason kicks off the show (1:48) Justin Kwong from Melengo joins Jason (4:38) Justin demos Melengo and its use cases (9:45) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at http://www.vanta.com/twist (10:37) Melengo’s business model, initial customers, and fundraising (22:19) Uizard - Get 25% off Uizard Pro for an entire year at http://uizard.io/twist (23:26) Building Melengo's team and the next steps for finding product-market-fit (36:50) Eppo. Accelerate your experimentation velocity with Eppo. Visit geteppo.com/twist (37:50) Jason’s A.D.D. framework (Automate, Deprecate, Delegate) * Check out: Melengo - https://www.melengo.com A.D.D. Framework - https://calacanis.substack.com/p/startup-productivity-in-the-age-of LAUNCH Accelerator - https://launchaccelerator.co Founder University - https://www.founder.university The Syndicate - https://thesyndicate.com * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Follow Justin: X: https://twitter.com/jkwong LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinckwong * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (9:45) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at http://www.vanta.com/twist (22:19) Uizard - Get 25% off Uizard Pro for an entire year at http://uizard.io/twist (36:50) Eppo. Accelerate your experimentation velocity with Eppo. Visit geteppo.com/twist * Great 2023 interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

All right, everybody, welcome back to Twist this week and startups today. We've got an action-packed lineup for you. First up, I'll be talking to Justin Kwong. He's building Melengo, the easiest way to develop and scale fashion products. Very cool company that went through our accelerator. And then after Malengo, I am going to talk about my new framework for automating, deprecating, and delegating inside your company. This is a way to just have massive efficiency.

So if you're a member of my substack, you may have read this blog post I did. But I'm going to really get into details about it and how to implement it in your company. it's my new ADD framework. Automate, deprecate, delegate. It's going to make you if you're a resource constrained as a startup much more efficient. And if you're a big company, it's going to allow you get focused on what matters. It's going to be a great episode. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a sock to report fast. Twist listeners can get a $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist.

Wizard. Struggling to transform innovative ideas into concrete product designs? Wizard can help you turn your visions into polished UI designs in a fraction of time while enhancing collaboration across your entire team. Get started now and take advantage of an exclusive offer. Visit wizard.io slash twist for 25% off Wizard Pro for an entire. year. That's U-I-Z-A-R-D dot I-O-slash- Twist. And Epo. Experimentation is how generation-defining companies win.

Accelerate your experimentation velocity with Epo. Visit getepo.com slash twist. All right. As we discussed, Melango is here with us on the show. They came to our founder University, which is kind of like a pre-accelerator. They came to our fifth cohort. Then they came to our accelerator where we invested in the company. They were part of the launch accelerator number 30. You can find out more about these programs, founder. Dot University or launch.com.

Welcome to the program, Justin, excited to share Melengo with the world. Yeah, thanks for having me, Jason, excited to jam. All right. So you've had some great success since you came through Founder University and the Accelerator. We'll get to that in a bit. What is Melango? What's the mission? So, Malingo is the easiest way for any kind of brand or creator to develop finance and scale on apparel line. We make it really easy so that you just focus on your dream, your idea.

We handle all the complex parts of that manufacturing process and help you scale up when you're ready to scale up. So we have a tech-enabled dashboard. There's some technology that we're using to automate parts of that manufacturing process, so that we're able to develop you a product in, let's say, weeks instead of the typical months that it takes. Got it. So I'm an influencer on Mr. Beast, let's say, or the All In podcast crew. We let the fans go crazy with the merch. At some point, we may reverse that and have to make our own merch.

So if All In wanted to make merch, we could use Melango as an example. Or if Mr. Beast, he probably has merch, but if he wanted to make additional hoodies or whatever, Malengo is a service provided through a website that allows you to do the entirety from designing your hoodies with AI, to manufacturing them in China, Vietnam. I'm not sure where the best places to manufacture are today for clothes, India and Pakistan, I assume we're in there as well. And then also all the way to fulfillment in your store? Or you drop it off?

We don't have the fulfillment. We have some great partners on that side, and we're just laser focused on the product development side. But even for like the Mr. Beasts or the all ends, like if you want a hoodie, we can help you make a hoodie. If you want a really nice cashmere sweatshirt, that's like a Montclair level, we can also help you do that. And I think that's really what sets us apart, you know, from the print on demand or some of these existing companies out there is the capabilities.

So if Saxie Poo wanted to do like a Montclair competitor with the Saxi Poo logo on it, we could design that. Okay. So it would be great for you to show us, you know, this process and then explain to us as you do it what some of the secret sauce is. Because when I saw this, you know, coming out of Founding University, I was like, oh, wow, that seems incredibly disruptive and efficient combining all these different. aspects of making a merch line. So show us. Show us what you about. Yeah.

And for those of you listening, you can always go to This Weekend Startups on YouTube and watch us as we do this. So go just type in This Weekend Startups and look at the recent videos and you'll see this Melango one right there. Okay. Get sorry, Justin. Maybe share your screen and let's do a little demo. Sounds good.

So this is the Moingo app that you get access to and it's free for anyone to sign up. You get to see all of your projects that are in progress, the samples that you're making. We have this showroom where you're able to browse. some existing styles that you can get information from or customize them 100% from the materials to the trims to the colors. If you think about how apparel was made, there's just a lot of manual labor that happens along the way. So there's like a product developer that comes up with an idea, fashion designer that does a sketch, a technical designer that creates like the blueprint. You know, at the factory, you have a merchandiser that's like translating this blueprint, an account

manager, pattern maker, sample maker. So there's all these like manual parts of the process that we as Molingo handle for you. So you come in, you can start chatting with the member of the Mengo team. This is one of our customers who uploaded, you know, some sketches of his idea out in designs. We're able to turn that, you know, from idea to a 2D design. We're able to get samples made for you. And this is all done in a chat interface.

So what we see on the screen right now is you're firing up a chat interface. You're talking to a Malingo representative. The person uploaded an image, just the back of the envelope, literal scratch pad. those designers on your team start designing and making designs that they get feedback from the creator and this is just all handled in a chat room. So you just start working.

You don't have to go on Fiverr or some marketplace to look for somebody who's done this before. You've abstracted that whole process of getting started, the cold start problem. 100%. And then once we have all that done and you're ready to create a sample,

we're doing that process for you in two weeks max. which is a lot faster than, you know, even if you're an Under Armour, who's one of our customers, it's going to take you maybe three to four weeks to do that up to. If you're a new person starting out on Alibaba, that might take you months, two years. So all that's handled for you, we're able to finance your purchase order when you have it ready, and just take care of that whole process. We have like tasks that make it super easy for you to track every part and, you know, a calendar.

So this is like what we're seeing on the screen is a Kanban style board. We have all the tasks associated with this. One of them, to go back to that, is confirming the details, you have to sign a contract, you have to approve, you have to confirm the materials, you have to approve a sample, and then you finally place your order. So instead of me having to hire a consultant to say, hey, what are the steps to creating my merch line? You basically have a template right here where, you know, I guess I could ask ChatGPT or

maybe Notion or Code to have a template for this, but you have the services and the template all built into your software, yeah? Yes, so you can just live in this and have everything, you know, done for you. And if there's stuff that you need to do, you can take action. And transparency is really important, too, because a lot of times when you're making something, you don't have visibility on where is it in the process, when is it going to take? And so we've broken that down by the steps and make it clear to our customers. Here's this step.

And, you know, it's going to take this long for that sample to be created. So you're basically the project management, the design, the fulfillment, and managing the factory. all of that abstracted in one service? Yes, and that's the hard part. I mean, we've iterated several times in this model to get to, this is the hardest part that no one really wants to do, whether you're a brand or factory, but if we're able to help them solve it,

can save a lot of time. How much do you charge for this? How do you make money? Is it a software as a service? Is it a percentage of what you're buying? How do you charge? So we have development packages, and these are to get a sample off the grid.

So sample could be a hoodie or, you know, really complex cashmere sweater. And those are going to range from, you know, $300 to $500 per product, which is still a lot cheaper than if you were to do this on your own. We had a customer that came to us having worked with the factory here domestically that was charging her $6,000 for a sample. And she only got one and she wasn't happy with it at all. And the factory was like, hey, we want to, you know, charge you an extra $20,000 to do a production run. So they're price gouging. They're trying to make a home run off somebody who's a sucker who does. understand how much work the stakes.

I assume when you charge somebody $300 to $500 to design their hoodie and get them a sample, you're just breaking even on that. That's not like a moneymaker, is it? Not right now. I mean, over time, we'll be able to automate more of that to make some money on that side. But really, we're helping, you know, creators and brands to production runs. So our minimum start at 50 units. You know, we have all the way to, we have brands doing thousands of units at a time.

And we'll make a small margin on that, you know, on the factory side. And that comes out of the factory side or the person placing the order. It's abstracted through it. How does all that work? It's a combination of both margins, but it equals out to, you know, if you're a customer and you wanted to source this on your own, roughly the same pricing that they would get, if not a little lower, just because we can negotiate bulk buying from a lot of the factories we work with.

And yeah, so that's your speciality. If you can lower the price for them, you can get some of that margin that they wouldn't be able to get themselves so everybody wins. Listen, a strong sales team can make all the difference for a B2B startup. But if you're going to hire sharks, you need to let them hunt. And you can't slow them down with compliance hurdles like SOC2. What is SOC2? Well, any company that stores customer data in the cloud needs to be SOC2 compliant.

If you don't have your sock too tight, your sales team can't close major deals. It's that simple. But thankfully, Vanta makes it really easy to get and renew your SOC2 compliance. On average, Vanta customers are compliant in just two to four weeks. without Vanta, it takes three to five months. Vanta can save you hundreds of hours of work and up to 85% on compliance costs. And Vanta does more than just SOC 2. They also automate up to 90% compliance for GDPR, HIPAA, and more. So here's your call to action. Stop slowing your sales team down and use Vanta. Get $1,000 off at Vanta.com slash twist. That's Vanta.com slash twist for $1,000 for $1,000. So everybody wants to know for a startup. How do you get the first couple of customers for this? Were you in this industry before? had you had experience. So that sort of cold start problem for your startup,

not the people making, you know, Mr. Beast are all in making their merch or this week's service merch, but for you as a startup, you have a cold start problem. So did you come from the merchandise background? Did you have your own line? How did you come up with the idea?

And then how do you get those first couple of customers to buy into this? Yeah, my last company was a direct consumer brand making bags and accessories for working professional. I grew that to a few million in revenue. but it was really challenging to grow the brand just because we couldn't launch product fast enough. It would just take us, you know, eight months to a year. And we couldn't be competitive to where companies would come and knock off the bag and do

a lower price point. And I think to be competitive in e-commerce or D2C in general, you need speed. You have companies like Sheehan and Timo that have taken over retail because they're launching 10,000 new products a day. So everyone's really playing catch-up. And so how we got our first customers is really a combination of just referrals and some of our network on the supplier and brand side. And so explain to me how fast fashion works.

If I liked a certain bomber jacket, let's say, I like there's like a brand Rhone, there's a brand cuts, McWeldon. I got a couple of these men's brands that, you know, I'll buy their T-shirts and really enjoy them. But let's say I wanted to take my Rhone hoodie. And I wanted to adapt it and make it my own. And you know, put the This Week in Startups logo on it or the

launch, Loger, Founding University. Can I just point to that and say to you, hey, I want something similar to this jacket or this hoodie combination, you know, from this brand, and then you can start the process of finding out what factory can make it, the materials, et cetera. When you work with us, that's exactly what you can do. And we have a lot of people kind of bring mood boards or inspirations of all these different styles that they like and say, I want a bit of this and a little bit of that, but definitely this zipper from this, you know, other jacket and we kind of help them mash that up into a really unique design and then develop that product. And my understanding of fashion is you can't really trademark or copyright like a blazer or a hoodie, right?

You can do your logo. But, you know, like if I've got some double collar or uniqueness to my thing, it's not really protectable IP. Is that correct? And that's why fashion exists? Yes. There's certain things you can, I think, trademark or copyright on like patterns or prints are like definitely the logos. But from like a garment perspective, there really isn't a lot of protection there. And that's why you get a lot of these small designers and brands that get ripped off by the fast fashions of the world. And that really is part of our mission where we want to empower these designers and creators and small brands and say, hey, Sheehan and Timu have taken over with their fast and agile supply chains. Let's build something similar and give you access to it.

So you can have that kind of agility too. Got it. And when you brought this idea to the venture capital community, investors after you went through our program, did they look at it and say, oh, this is like a service business or this is like a manufacturing business, it's not venture scale,

or do they look at it and say, you know, like some of the investors in Uber or Airbnb, hey, there are real world things that need to get done. And then there's a technology stack on top of it. So, you know, the person who's bold enough to take on a little bit of friction gets the benefit of this wider network effect. how did the venture community and the CEC community look at Malingo?

Yeah, I think there's a lot of people that didn't get it and they were just like, how is this better than a custom ink or a print on demand where you're literally just slapping a logo on an existing, you know, medium to low quality blank. But I'd say, I mean, I've learned that investing in your finding. They didn't. They didn't. They didn't. I don't think a lot of, I'm sure there, I know, because you did very well with your fundraising,

that enough people got it. But it's just amazing to me how stupid some partners are adventure firms or seed funds that they don't listen deeply to the founder's vision here and the problem

or talk to the customers because if you were to talk to any of your customers, they would be able to explain like, no, we don't want a issue shirt like a bad, disgusting shirt with our logo on it peeling off. We're trying to build a unique garment that, you know, might sell for 10 times that amount, that's signature to us.

Like what you're trying to do, correct me if I'm wrong here, is enable the next Yeezy, right? Like the next... Yes. Yay. I guess his name is Yeh. And I want to be respectful to his new name, not his Kanye West name, but Kanye West created Yeezy, I believe, and the design clothes. You're for that person, correct?

Not a person looking to make a logo for, you know, their corporate offsite. Absolutely. We want to help the next, you know, Kanye's of the world create the next Yezies. And, you know, even if you look at what Gaye is doing right now with Easy, doing $20 drops and everything is $20. It's very mass market. You know, even being able to help companies like him because they're going to have to develop so much product to be able to scale that, too. But going back to the investor project, Jason, I think the investors that got it were people that experienced the problem themselves or had family members or friends that were like, I want to try to start a clothing brand or I have a brand. I'm trying to scale it.

and understood the problems that they're running into. I think we got lucky in finding our perfect match. I know the term used a lot as like, you know, finding investors is a lot like dating. You know, it's about compatibility and seeing, you know, who's a good fit and all that. And we got lucky that we found a great match with Sion Bannister, who I think had a thesis in the space and just saw the vision, you know,

a long time ahead too. And so, yeah, in science, so people know, one of my oldest friends in the industry, we both became angel investors at the same time. And I introduced her two really good. investments, a cap company and a marketplace for home services, thumbtack, and Uber. And so we invested in those together. And we also invested in density as well together.

And she's just tremendous. What was her thesis? And when it clicked with her, what did you learn there about what I'll call investor product fit? Like if the investor really does love the product or service, man, that does carry the day in my experience. Like, this is why Uber did so well raising money. Airbnb did not.

Airbnb does not appeal in the first version to a venture capitalist. They want to stay at a five-star hotel, a luxury hotel. They don't want to stay on somebody's couch, but Uber started with luxury cars. So Lincoln Town cars were exactly what, you know, having your own private, your own private driver was the original tagline. So investor product fit is really good. Clubhouse also had investor product fit because VC's like to talk and hear their own voice. So yeah, tell us about those meetings. and how she got it.

She was actively thinking about the space. I think she had tried to make some of her own products on Alibaba and had a thesis that, like, there's going to be a company that just makes this whole process a lot easier. And maybe the manufacturers in China, maybe it's not, maybe it's in these other parts of Asia or near to home in Latin America, but something that helps all these makers,

all these individual artisans, turn their dreams into reality. And I think she had blogged about that or tweeted about that a couple years ago, and I took note of it as we were building more, go being like I have to meet her someday and talk to her about what we're building. And, you know, luckily got introduced to her through Jackie and Ryan through the accelerator, which was really nice. And 10 minutes into the first conversation, she says, yes, just because she'd been thinking about this and, you know, whether it's through long journey that she's a GP and or as an angel.

Amazing. Yeah. We just got very lucky with that. So you had noted, because you track other investors on social media and on her Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, whatever, X, she had been talking about. building merch. So that was, or building fashion design, I guess merch is like a

too dismissive way to say it. It's more like building a clothing line. Yeah. Building a brand. Building a brand, yeah. So you raised the money. You did very well at the accelerator. How did you do in terms of voting?

I'm curious. For people who don't know, at our accelerator, we ask every week the VCs to rank their top three companies out of the seven. We do this for two reasons. one, because it's entertaining, it keeps people awake and, well, maybe three reasons.

It keeps people awake during the process of pitching. Two, it makes a little bit of a competitive environment between the founders, which is always good. And three, if you pick somebody as number one, two, or three, and you're an investor, you kind of got to meet with them after, right? It gives you a little bit of, hey, you picked us as number one. You picked us number two. Can we do a follow-up meeting? So that's a little my own Machiavellian way of organizing it.

But how did you do in the voting? I'm curious because that's why it's sent. Yeah. I mean, we ended up at second behind tax GPT, Cash is a great founder there. But it's a great camaraderie. I think it's really exciting every week.

We're kind of like friendly, but also we just want to beat all the other companies in the cohort. And we got lucky with just an amazing group of founders in that cohort in general. And yeah, just every week there'd be a new demo. I think one of the interesting, unique things about the launch accelerator too is that,

you get the option to defer the program. And this was really helpful for us in the very beginning. We came out of Founder University. I think it was June. We got accepted into the accelerator. But we hadn't really figured out how to grow yet. And we had some customers. We were still figuring things out.

And so we took the 100K and said, hey, could we defer this till later on? And we joined in October, built some momentum and that really kind of helped propel us later on. Yeah, I've come to realize, like, I like to meet founders where they are. So at Founder University, we would give this 25K check if people just wanted their first check. You know, not everybody can afford the 25K it takes the kind of startup operations, get incorporated, whatever.

And we did that as a test. It turned out like two out of three founders asked for that. We were like, okay, wow, that's interesting. Now we didn't give it to everybody who asked, but we started giving out maybe we did 50, 60, 70 of those checks, which is kind of interesting to do a million dollars in those checks. So I noted that. Yeah. And I just decided after your experience to offer people the standard YC Techstars deal,

because I don't know how I got to 100. I think it was because my original fund was 10 million. So I was like, oh, 100, 100K bets. But then I changed it to 125 just recently this year so that people don't have to think, oh, it's different than YC or TechStars. It's just apples to apples kind of situation for 7%. And then we told people, check this box if you want it. And we'll just give it to you.

You don't even have to come to the accelerator because of your experience. And now we've got, I think, two out of three founders say, I'll take the 25 or the 125. And so then we get to make a decision, do we want to own 2.5%, 7%, what makes sense? And again, meeting the founder where they are. If they want us to give them the 125, they want to come to the accelerator, or they don't want to come to the accelerator, they don't want us to just help with introductions. I'll just customize it to the founder, is my experience, because I just want to help the founders, because at the stage we're at 80% go to zero. So if you come into it with that expectation, kind of frees you.

Like, all you want to do is just be as helpful as possible knowing very few of the turtles make it to the ocean. A lot of them get eaten before they get to maturity. It's kind of dark. Right now, startups have to do more with less. We all know that. And that means increasing your product velocity

while maintaining or even lowering your costs. Now, don't forget, product velocity is how startups beat incumbents. So here's the great, news. AI is going to help you do that. So let me tell you about Wizard. It's spelled U-I-Z-A-R-D. It's an AI-powered suite of UI and U-X design tools. With Wizard, you can generate your app or web designs from simple text prompts. You can then iterate on these designs with an AI assistant, and then you hand off your completed designs as React or CSS code. Wizard's text to UI mock-up tool is called Auto Designer, and it's really cool. If you're watching, you can see it

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dot I-O-slash-T-W for 25% off. Stop wasting time and start shipping faster. So tell me more about, you know, being a seed stage company, what do you feel you need to accomplish in order to get that coveted series A, the $10 million from Sequoia, or I don't know what your top firm is, you know, Antonio and Valor, Sax and Craft, you know, getting on Chimot's radar at Social Capital. What are the goals you have to hit in the next, I assume, 18 months of runway, 24 months of runway. What do you have? Yeah, I think, I mean, there's some quantitative metrics that we want to be able to hit. We want to be at a certain runway, whether that's like two to three million net revenue. But I think on top of that, we really just need to have the confidence that what we're doing can actually scale with really good unit economics too on the sampling side. You mentioned that and, you know, barely breaking even there.

We'd love to be in a spot where we're actually making money there. So we could just help as many people make samples as possible. And then we've brought on, you know, a little bit about my founding team, Greg, who I met, who's one of our, of co-founders. He came from like the textile world at Nike. So that brings a lot of manufacturing experience. Bonn, who were bringing on as a co-founder's CTO, actually met through one of the syndicate type of demo days early on. And she started as an AI advisor. But we're bringing her on- one of our syndicates. One of your syndicates. Yeah, back in like October, I think. Explain that to folks. It was like a like a digital demo day where you had the ability to present in front of,

you know, some of the members of Jason Syndicate and get some feedback there. We got some amazing connections out of that too. And Bonn was one of them who has been like an advisor to us and we're bringing her on as a co-founder because she went teams at meta doing AI. So how many co-founders will you have? We'll have three total. Perfect. And you know, this is something I've learned over time. It's something I learned from Paul Graham. He always accepted multiples into Y Combinator. And I was like, ah, you know, I'm a solo guy, maybe whatever. And it turns out he's right. You know, at seed stage, there's very few, there's very few solo founders who can make it work. And even the history books may tell you, you know, certain people were solo founders and they get like some disproportionate credit.

But then you go back in the history book and you realize, oh, yeah, there were three co-founders of, you know, YouTube. People forget Javid. Oh, there were three for Snapchat. Oh, there were three for Airbnb. It's like, it's kind of a pattern, folks. And so we have become very biased towards two or three co-founders because one inevitably moves on to something else in life. And then you have two where you have one. It's just, it's like a redundant thing.

So get to a couple million. Getting to a couple million, I think the hard part about that, Jason, is that because we make a lot of our money on bulk production and this is like a delayed timeline, we don't see that immediate, you know, revenue gratification month over months. So something that we try to think about too is like, how do we really focus on our inputs? So we're saying like, you know, revenue is a lagging indicator. Let's just really focus on certain inputs that we can control, whether that's like 100 samples or, you know, one hour better on customer success time.

and then hopefully revenue will trail after that. One thing that we're focusing on now as we try to find product market fit, and I think Raul, which you invested in on the superhuman side, created this really good framework for finding product market fit. I think there's like a first round capital blog post about it. Yeah, product market fit engine, I think he called. And I was the investor in his first company, which was called Reportive. And then I was the first investor along with Darmesh from HubSpot in his.

second company, superhuman. And yeah, he really is an expert on understanding product market fit. And you are you essential to that group of people? Or if you went away, would they be like, okay, I have another solution for this. And with yours, it does feel like if you got addicted to this process, man, you do good. How do you acquire new customers? How do you, how do you get a new customer who's going to do hundreds and then eventually thousands of, you know, items? We get some great referrals in word of mouth, especially on the enterprise side with brands that are looking to launch new lines so they could be doing footwear and want to get into apparel. We're also doing a bunch of content. So that's for some of our newer entrepreneurs,

educating them on different parts of the apparel manufacturing process. What is that blog posts or TikToks? Blog posts. So we're getting more into like video contents like TikToks and Instagram Reels. We have some great partnerships too. On the creator side, there's a platform called Fourth Wall that has, I think, like, two million monthly active users. We're one of their first custom apparel manufacturing partners. So if you're making something on fourth wall, you know, you can make it, your products through us and then sell them on fourth wall.

Fantastic. And what about, what role does Shopify play in all this for you? And would a Shopify partnership make a difference or is it just up to the resellers, you know, what they do? Can you put something in the Shopify app store that would, I would goose this as a marketing channel? Yeah, that's a great idea. And that's definitely something I think we're going to move towards as we want to get more

of those Shopify brands and work closely with Shopify, just because we have a lot that product data on what they're, what they want to make and, you know, what they're making. It'd be interesting, since AI is getting popular these days, I wonder if you could pick 20 different targets and then use AI

to make 10 skews for each and then send them their designs and say, hey, listen, these are very rough designs, but we know your brand, Mr. Beast, and we know you did feastables. So we made a line of feastables, you know, sweaters,

hoodies, whatever. And, you know, hey, you just send it to, Mr. Beast and his team, and they look at it and you say, hey, you know, we could get these going. I could send samples, you know, let me know. You, you kind of would have done that $300 to $500 work ahead of time and kind of giving it to them for free. So it's a little bit of trust

there. Like you may have spent, you know, a couple of hours of doing it. So. But that's how they get inspired and they're just like, yeah, like this or this is a good direction. Yeah. Have you tried that before? Like sending the work? We've tried it. We tried it in different varieties in terms just like creating mood boards or, you know, I think we were even doing that for like a this weekend startups. Like we had some different polo shirts that you guys thought might be interesting. So that's definitely great idea. This is something I want to make for my team.

I was realizing my team does like 80 calls a week with founders. And we, you know, we do the nice backgrounds where it has the launch logo and their name and their ad. So it just helps with like branding what I want to do, I hate to say a uniform, but I wanted to give my team a hoodie. you know, it says Founder University or launch accelerator or launch, whatever it is,

and give them polo shirts or whatever and just say, hey, listen, when you're on calls with founders or other VC firms, you know, swag up, you know, logo up. So we can be proud of our logo, reinforce it. And then maybe if you meet somebody

you like them, you could send them, you know, one of these things. So I do, but I want to go more like a hoodie jacket kind of, you know, quarter zip kind of style.

So I'm definitely going to get in there. Because I want it to be more expensive. I find when you give people cheap shirts, they just cut them up into rags or they give them to like homeless people. Like literally, I would, founders don't buy cheap swag. It gets thrown in the garbage. But if you buy a high quality one and you make the logo small and subtle, and people actually wear it. And that's what you're looking for. That's my best in I don't know what you do. You want the stuff that people are going to want to resell on eBay, but not for the bad reasons, you know, just because it's a great quality product. Yeah, exactly.

I know people do that with the all-in swag, and some this week in startup, right, listen, continue success. It's been great to get to know you, Justin, and your team. We're really proud of the effort you've put in and love the product velocity and you don't really keep at it.

I think you're going to have great success. I think we're going to sit here and look back on this video. I think you're going to be like a unicorn. I honestly think you're going to build a billion-dollar company, and I can't wait for you to hit these milestones. I can't wait for you to get that Series A. You've got to get to $2 or $3 million is your goal. You know, that means you probably need to be shipping, what, 20 million in product, something like that, 15, 20 million in products. So it seems doable. You know, if each item is, you know, $200, you know, whatever that is, you know, 100,000 items have to be shipped or something like that. So it doesn't seem impossible, right? A hundred thousand items. If everybody ships 1,000, you need 100 clients to do 1,000 items or you need 200 clients to do 500 items each. I think you can do it. I think you can do it. I really believe in you and the team.

Thank you, Jason. Yeah, I'm excited to have you part of this journey. Oh, yeah, it's going to be great. I can't wait to start tweeting this stuff out. I'm always good. I always tell my founders, like, if you release good product, like, you know, write some great tweets and then, you know, we'll interact with it. I think it's one of the things, you know, that our team has been doing particularly well

in the last year. I've been asking my team to work with the founders to teach them a little bit about social media and telling their story in blog, post tweets, TikToks, et cetera, and then send it to us and share it with the rest of the, you know, four, where we got 700 founders in the founder slack. And we tell them, hey, share it there. And we try to do like this weekly thread. And then, you know, you get three or four of your classmates to like something.

You like their stuff. You reply to it. You know, one of those tweet threads could get a cyan banister. You know, you get a sequo. Somebody might see it and say, oh, that's interesting. So tell your story, you know, and be out there with your logo. You know, that's the other thing. I don't know if the team did that this time, but I was like,

everybody should have a shirt with their logo on it, on the front and the back. You know, so when you're at a demo day, you're at a party, they see the back or the front and it's like, make it an orange shirt, make it a bright yellow shirt, make it like you can't miss its shirt with the logos on it. Be proud. Be the brand. Absolutely. This is why for us it's all about dreaming it.

You know, all you have to do is dream it. We'll take care of the rest. Love it. All right. Everybody check out melango.com. It's M-E-L-E-N-G-O-com. correct? Absolutely.

And it's Justin Huang and he is on Twitter, J.K. Wong. Right? Yes, sir. There it is. Jay Kwong, yep, on Twitter. J-K-W-O-N-G, J-K-W-N-G, Jay-K-W-N-G, interact with him. And hey, listen, if you're listening to this

and you get value from listening to this week and startups, and you say, oh, I wish I could do J-Kal a favor. You know what you can do? Just go check out my startups and see if they're, like, appropriate for what you're doing or spread the word. always that helps me the most. It does mean something, doesn't it? It's hard to get the word out because there's so much good stuff going on in the world. You got to kind of rise above the noise. So keep doing that. I really think TikTok videos where you get a TikToker to talk about, hey,

I'm making my own brand with Melango and, you know, whatever. And here's what I'm doing. So like my guy, Chef's Reactions, do you know, Chef's Reactions? He went through Founder University. Chef's Reactions is my favorite. No, I'm going to check him out. Yeah, he basically will just like either roast or praise somebody with who's cooking on TikTok. And he does like the side by side. And his brand is, I watch the video and you get my first reaction to it. And you know, some people are making absolutely disgusting junk food with no consideration. And then other people are doing like really well thought out or simple food. That's great. And he kind of does his chef's reaction to it. And he's becoming a bit of a brand. And I saw he did hats at some point. But he really should be

doing aprons and even more, you know, intricate stuff. So it'd be amazing for you to, do a co-lab with him. And then even if you did like, you know, a hundred shirts for free or whatever and it costs your grand, that's like kind of cool to kind of get the flywheel going with these folks. And I know that the cheap, you know, merch brands are out there kind of doing this stuff. So anyway.

Yeah. There's so many ways. The way you know you have a great startup is when investors can't shut up about it and have a million ideas. Like Sian's got a million ideas for you. Probably better off listening to her ideas at this point. She's a brilliant, brilliant. You're the marketing guru.

I have my moment. I have my moments. I have my moments. I like your brand name. I don't know what Melengo means, but I love the way it sounds. My co-founder Greg came up with that, and it's inspired by the Swahili word for Goals. Goals in Malingo is actually with an MA, but I was like, we have to have the dot-com. And we need a rank number one on Google. So M-E-L-E-N-G-O is a riff on Malingo as goals, but we own the IP. I love it. Malengo is just, it rolls off the tongue. I think it's going to be like a great asset for you. All right, everybody. If you want to be like Justin, go to founder.

dot university and apply to come to our 12-week course. It's basically free. We charge you $500 to reserve your spot. If you come to all 12 weeks, which is Monday nights for two hours, you learn some stuff. We just charge you back to 500. And 96% of people complete the program for that.

And so we don't charge. We just hold your money for 12 weeks and make sure you learn something. And then the accelerator, launch.com slash apply, launch. dot CO slash apply. That's where we give you 125K for 7%, just like Y Combinator, just like TechStars and 500 Global, all those great programs. Pretty similar.

I do a great job of getting you intros, helping you refine your pitch, helping you learn how to grow. And for the accelerator, we're kind of looking for people who have a product that's in market, maybe one or two customers, 10K a month in revenue, whatever it is. For founding a diversity, you don't even need to be incorporated. You've got to have two or three people working on a project and maybe show us some screenshots or your business plan and we'll accept you if you got two or three really good founders. See you all next time. Bye-bye. Are you tired of slow A-B testing? Do you have trouble

trusting your experiment results? Well, get ready to 10x your experiment velocity with Epo. Epo's experimentation and feature management platform transforms uncertain launches into clear-cut experiments. Epo is going to centralize your experimentation workflows across your entire organization, including product, growth, and machine learning teams. This means better coordination and faster innovation. Their cloud-based system is all about empowerment. Easily run experiments, with powerful analysis tools, and it all integrates seamlessly with existing feature flags or EPO's SDK. If you didn't know, stands for software development kit.

Epo keeps you informed with automated updates and shared reports, and the best part about Epo is that it lets you go deeper into experiment results you can trust and understand root causes. So here's your call to action. Experimentation is how generation-defining companies win. Accelerate your experimentation velocity with Epo. Visit getepo.com slash twist. That's G-E-T-E-P-P-O-com slash twist. All right, everybody, I wrote a substack.

I'm getting back into writing. But one of the things I want to do is take the essays I write. I started a substack, and you can get to it at calicanus. com. It's free right now. I may do a subscription later, but for now, I just want to write something once a weekish and really try to help founders with advice that I'm seeing, and I'm deploying in my companies and the companies I've invested in.

and I wrote a blog post. They'll pull it up here during the show as I talk about it. And I've been thinking about productivity. So the title of this piece I wrote is Startup Productivity in the Age of AI, Colon, Automate, Deprecate, Delegate, ADD. Get it? Attention deficit disorder. People tell me I have it. But I'm in the generation where it was undiagnosed.

So we just drank coffee. We didn't take Adderall or anything. I've invested now in, I think, about 400 startups, definitely over 350. and I've watched really up close and personal all of the productivity hacks that startups do. Now, why is this important? Well, startups are resource constrained. When you do a startup, unless you're rich, and listen, some rich people start companies, billionaire start companies, they put $100 million into it.

But most people have a small amount of resources and they have to make that money go far. They've raised $100K from an accelerator or they passed a hat and did $150K from friends and family or they did a small pre-seed round of 250 or a seed round of 500K, it's not actually that much money. And hopefully you have two or three founders. But then as you start to grow, you need to add people. And what you constantly want to do is you want to look at the work that's being done in your company and ask yourselves three simple questions.

The first is, can I automate this? Okay, can this be automated with software? And software will fall into three categories, writing code, like, you know, developer running software, making no-code software, and then using new tools like Coda and Notion to build apps. That last one is what I've been doing mostly. We do some no-code stuff, too. But we don't have developers on our team, but we do automate stuff using Coda and Notion, Zapier, which makes you happier, and all these great products bubble on the no-code side. So, number one, can you automate it? Number two, can you deprecate it? Deprecate it in our

industry means stop doing it. So can you deprecate it or can you delegate it? And that means having somebody else do it. Deprecate, pretty simple. We're going to stop doing this. Why are we going to stop doing this? It's not having an impact. And it turns out your employees will very often, have loyalty to you, you'll tell them to do something and they just keep doing it every week. Why? Well, they want to be loyal to you and it gives them something to do because they want you to get value for the money you're paying them. But you may have failed as a manager and they're doing something that actually has zero impact. And so you're paying them for 10 hours. They do some report for 10 hours every week. And you forgot that you asked them to do it. This is why it's very

important to have a transparent management system. How do you do a transparent, honest assessment of the work everybody's doing? Well, you could do something which most people would consider a bit oppressive, which is time management, clock in, clock out. This is what attorneys, accountants, designers and consultants have to do because they have to bill those hours to somebody. So they, when they're doing their day, they got time management software on their computer and they say, 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. I'm working for this client. 1130 to 1.30, I'm going to bill to this client. No, that's at a necessity and people do it. But most companies do not micromanage people to that level. However, time management, if presented as to an employee, to a team member,

as, hey, you should do time blocking on your calendar. You can look that up. And hey, you should report back to the rest of the team, your teammates, what you're doing, why you're doing it, and what you intend on doing. So I created a very lightweight framework for this. I call it the SOD, EOD framework, start of day, end of day. I ask everybody who works for me to go into our Slack channel

and just say, start of day. These are the three things I'm working on today. It should take only five minutes. And then at the end of the day, reply to that same message, here's what I got accomplished, and to link to a Notion page, a Coda page, a Google Doc, a Slack conversation, whatever it is, a database of, hey, here's that, right? So here's that work. As one example, if we're doing this weekend startups, we might link, the producers, if they say,

I edited this episode, they'll link to the episode. So people can see the episode. If they're on the investment team, they say, I met with four companies, they list the four companies they met with, and they link to that company's profile. in our database of companies. So, once you have the SOD and the EOD, you can then ask people to consolidate those into an SOW and an EOW.

Yep, you guessed it, start of week, end of week. And you just say at the start of the week, these are the big things I'm working on for the week. At the end of the week, you recap it. Now, if everybody does their end of week correctly, you will start to see patterns. If somebody were to leave your company, all you have to do to replace them

is take the last 10 end of week, weeks and you consolidate them and you just categorize them and say, okay, this person was doing this in accounting. They were doing this with the sales department. They were doing this with this reporting. They were doing these one-on-one meetings. Okay, let's take that list of the 10 things they do. We'll estimate what percentage of their time is. We don't have to have time management. Most people don't find time management a bit oppressive. Some people use like productivity stuff. Like I use this because people tell me I have ADD. And this is called the time timer. or a Pomadero method where you can set a timer.

So what I do is I say, hey, I'm going to do 20 minutes to write this blog post. So when I wrote this blog post, I set it at 20, and my mind works in a nice 20-minute increment, and then I click it, and it counts. Down. Very simple, right? And so that's how I do time management,

because I can, with, if I do have ADD, I don't know, with these diagnoses, I'm not a psychiatrist. But, you know, I can say, I'm going to do this for 20 minutes, go get a cup of coffee, walk to the kitchen, take a walk around the block, have a bite to eat, whatever it is, check my email for 10 minutes.

And then I jump back in. I do 20 minutes of email. I do 20 minutes clearing my Slack. And I just beep, press the button, start the clock, and then it tells me when I'm done. And then I'll go overtime. Hey, I do 20 minutes. I feel really good about this block post. Boom, I'm going to click it again.

Okay. So now you've got the person's leaving your company. Okay, let's look at what they did. Oh, they were emailing all of these customers asking that and sending them this message every month, a report on how their advertising did, whatever. Hey, you know, all they're doing is cutting and pasting from here into an email and sending it. Okay, we can automate that with Zapier and Coda. Oh, we could do that in Notion.

Oh, we could send them a live report and a dashboard. Great, we're to automate that. Now we've recaptured 10 hours a week of that person's time. Okay, so now we have 75% left. Okay. Oh, it turns out these reports were internal. Nobody looked at them. We looked at the click data.

Nobody opens them. These reports are not necessary. We don't need them. Okay, so we're going to deprecate that. Okay, now what's left? Okay, we have 50% left. Okay, we do a survey and we ask, you know, each of the employees, these things. Okay, we can't really automate it.

It's a phone thing. We have to get on the phone with these people and do an interview. Okay, can we delegate that? Well, who do we delegate it to? Well, if you go to Upwork, if you go to Fiverr, let's say you were doing an onboarding call or qualifying a customer. Well, can you do that somewhere else? can you do that somewhere cheaper?

Well, in San Francisco or New York, let's say most people are getting paid $40 an hour. Just use the 2,000 hours a year as your guide, right? Most people work 2,000 hours a week times 50 weeks a year. That's 2,000. Some people do 2,300, 2,400. Some people are screwing around. They do 1,600.

They're goofing off at work, abusing remote work. Let's just average it to 2,000. You've got overperformance, you've got underperformments. Don't sweat. Don't sweat that plus or minus 20 right now. You should long term, but you don't have to sweat it right now. So 2,000 hours times $40 an hour, $80,000. Well, is that an $80,000 position?

No, it's really like a $65,000 position because that person gets benefits and time off. Typically, they wind up working about 47 weeks a year because you got vacation and holidays and off-site meetings, whatever else you do at your company. So you have to fully bake that salary. So if it was 80, it might go to $100,000 hours into $100,000. So maybe that's an $80,000 employee with $20,000 in benefits, time off, etc. Now you're at $50 in error. Okay, let's take that $50 an hour, an $80,000 salary as our guide right now.

That's a mid-level executive, an entry-level executive in San Francisco or in New York where they have high rents. That's an incredible job in Middle America. That's a high-paying job in Salt Lake City. that's a high-paying job in Texas, right? So different places, because if you're doing remote work, have different salaries. So you could literally get two-for-one in some places, right?

A $40, $50, $60,000 a year work-from-home job. You know, there are people in Middle America, Canada, Portugal, who maybe they're waiting to find that job, and it's hard to find. This is how the world's changed. So as the founder of the company, what I want you to do with the rest of the tasks, is ask yourself,

well, I had a senior person doing this task for the last two years, and their salary went up to $100, $150K, whatever it is. They're getting paid $50, $75, $100 an hour, right? So $150,000 senior person is getting paid $100 an hour, right? Or so, $75 an hour, $100 an hour. Well, if you got somebody like that, and then you go on Fiverr, and you find somebody who's done this specific job, and they love doing it, and they're charging $15 an hour,

hour. Well, that's one-fifth of the $75 an hour. So then you say, okay, we'll add $5 to that $15 in management time for somebody's got to manage that person, right? It's got to fully bake this. Now we're outsourcing it for $20. That's a third of the $60 employee, a fourth of the $80 employee. You get the idea. So you want to look at moving those, I don't want to say simpler or basic tasks, but let's call it what it is. These are simpler or basic tasks. You might be able to find somebody in Manila or Argentina. And this is how the world's changed. There are education systems in the Philippines, Singapore, South America, Canada, places that, you know, you might not have, you might never have had an employee that can do the work for much less. And what that does

is it allows your quote unquote higher level, let's just call what it is, higher paid, more experience people to do the higher paid, more experience necessary tasks. If you do this, what you'll find, and you've got to do it every year, and you may even want to do it every quarter, if you start automating stuff, you recapture 25% of people's times. If you start deprecating stuff, you're probably going to get another 25% of people's time. And then if you delegate it, you may reclaim 10, 20, 30% of time, depending on, you know, how much chores have accumulated to that person. And we see this happen all the time in our startups. Some highly paid salesperson who's making, you know, $75,000 base and a $75,000 commission plan. or more is doing stuff that a $10 an hour person offshore would do.

Why? Why are you doing that? Why are you spending 60 doing a $10 an hour job? It makes no sense. Give that person the resource to manage. So if you had 10 salespeople, if you gave them all an offshore administrator to set their meetings up or you automated it with Cal and Lee, right?

Those are two options. Perfect example. Well, maybe you could automate that. We did this. With our investment team, we use Callenly, we send a link to founders, we tell them pick, pick a link, and sign up for a meeting.

Now there's no back and forth. We put our calendars in there, boom, they pick it, we're done. There's no back and forth scheduling stuff. So automate, deprecate, get rid of, and delegate. If you do these three things, you're going to be so efficient, it's wild. And the reason this is all getting catalyzed

is artificial intelligence, which I haven't brought up yet, but let me explain how AI is. helping this. The group of people I'm talking about who are you're going to delegate to, whether they're in Manila in the Philippines or Argentina or Brazil or Portugal or Canada, places where you might, like an administrator in some of those places, Argentina and Philippines, they could pay five, six bucks an hour. If you were to put a $7 an hour job in one of those places, you would get too many people would apply for that position. They're typically getting paid $1,200 a month.

thousand dollars a month. If you can find a really great one, you might go up to three thousand per month, 36,000 a year. To find an administrator and operations person for 36,000 a year seems impossible. There are people I've watched who have used outsourced assistance in other markets, and they figured out how to do it years ago, and they'll have two or three executives using one person and getting massive gains. So $12,000 per executive to have essentially an offshore assistant. It actually works now. Ten years ago, it kind of worked. Now it's working, and it's working in a major way. Those people are the first people, the people on Fiverr, the people on Upwork, the people who are remote workers, it turns out they are typically have been involved in something called business

process outsourcing. You look up BPM. Basically, how do you do something like accounts receivable, like menial accounting test? How do you automate that and make it faster? Okay, take a picture of the invoice, scan it, doing data entry. All that stuff's been going on for 30 years in India, Philippines, etc. And law firms and tons of people leverage those kind of places to do literally data entry. All of that has led to automation. So these folks have been grinding out and they get the major benefit of doing automation. Automation started with OCR optical character recognition, you know, scanning documents.

And now with AI, they're all on chat, GP. They know they can take a picture of an invoice and pay it and write a script and have AI do it. So they have, on the DL, been doing this kind of thing, automating their work. Why do they want to meet their work? Okay, you can say this is a little gray hat, but they'll automate their work in order to service more customers in a short amount of time. So they're doing their own little arbitrage on the back end. They might have 10 customers and they're doing what's called SDR sales development reps. basically looking for customers for you to sell your product to and chewing them up, putting them

into a database, creating an email sequence, you know, all this stuff. Well, those folks, they will quietly automate their own work, not tell their customers, but still charge them. So the customer thinks this is taking 10 hours, it's taking 10 minutes. And then they arbitrage the other $9.50 and you as the customer are like, well, I'm getting somebody for $7 an hour to do this or $12 an hour to do it. I'm happy with that price. So this, quiet automation. Some cases, it's a little on the DL. They're not telling their customers.

In other cases, they're upfront about it. No moral judgments here. People in different parts of the world look at these kind of things differently I've learned. So if they can do the arbitrage, they're happy for you to pay, you know, and they kind of take the gain and they feel like they deserve it. Okay, let's put the morality out of this. You're offering a service at a price. They're giving you the service at a price.

If you can get a cheaper price, then go for it. Now that is happening to American workers at higher level tests because of chat cheap. It's happening to video editors who edit this show. They're going to get more efficient. They can do clips. Well, the clips could be done by AI. So maybe, you know, a really good clip makes a professional video editor take three hours. And then an AI-based clip takes 20 minutes.

It's not as good. But maybe they start with the 20-minute clip and the three hours or 20-minute meets somewhere in the middle at 90 minutes. This is all happening. And this is great. what it means is your company, your startup is going to gain, in my estimation, you should be gaining at least 50% productivity per year. At least in my company, I want to double everybody's productivity per year. That's a higher goal, but it's an obtainable goal because that's just

becoming about 7%, 6 or 7% more efficient per month means in about 10, 11, 12 months, you will have doubled your efficiency. If you can't be 6 or 7% more efficient every month, what the heck's going on here. Something's wrong. You should be able to be 7% more efficient. And the rule of 72, you look that up online, states that if you can be 7.2% more efficient during a time period, it's that number of time periods, you divide it into 72, that you will double your, this is compounding interest, you'll double your efficiency.

So if you're 7.2% more efficient per month in 10 months, you're going to be twice as a efficient. If you're 7.2% more efficient per week, in 10 weeks you're going to be more efficient. If you're 7.2% more efficient per day, yes, you guessed it in 10 days, you'll double your productivity. This is why focusing on your game and studying how you do your work is critically important. Now, of course, what I'm saying will scare people. And I'm fully aware of them. I totally get it. People are scared about their jobs in the age of automation. What you need to convince everybody is if our company can grow revenues by 30% a year and everybody in the company gets 50% more efficient, we will then have more profitability every year, which means when you ask for your raise

or you want a bonus or you think about job security, you're going to be locked in and more secure. So the people who proactively do this on teams and say, you know what, boss, I looked at my the last three months. I deprecated this. I got back 18%. I automated this. I got back 15%. What can I do with that 32%. And then they say, did you delegate anything? You said, no, haven't done that yet. Okay, do the delegate part. Oh, I delegated 8%. Okay, I got, you got 40% more of your hours back. You're working 50 hours a week. Okay, you got 20 hours. Yeah, you know what? There's that project we put on the not right now board. Do you want to do that one or do you have a creative idea? And this is when your boss and the leadership or your company will fall in love

with you or your investors will look at you and go, wait. These people keep producing more product, getting more sales, and they're more efficient and their revenues going up with their costs are saying the same, and they're getting to product, they're getting to profitability quicker where they're increasing profitability. Uber has something like 1% less employees than they did two years ago. During ZERP, they did the hiring freeze, they did some layoffs. Same with Facebook, same with Google. At the same time, those companies were growing 10 to 30% year over year. That's why the stock market during this horrendous crash has been rewarding them. Spotify just laid off like 17% of their employees, 1,500 people.

Stock went right up. I bought Facebook at $94 to share when Zuckerberg laid off the first 10,000 people. Am I like a lunatic, you know, horrible human being for doing that? I don't think so. I was just looking at it saying they're bloated. If they cut 10% of whatever, you know, 60, 70,000, 80,000 employees, they're actually going to get more efficient and because

they're going to start with the bottom performance. Let's call it what it is. This is a competition for who's the most efficient. If you ask everybody, they've got to cut 10, 15% of their teams. They're not cutting the top 50% of performers. They're going to look at the bottom, hopefully, and cut the weakest folks, which is healthy anyway, right? If you've got a basketball team,

if you cut a couple people from the team during training camp because they didn't put the effort in and you rewarded the people who put the effort in, you'd be like, that's the right thing to do. It's happening. corporate America right now. So I want you to not be scared if you're hearing me say this, because your bosses and the boards are all having this discussion. They're having the ADD discussion. Automate, deprecate, delegate. They're having that discussion without you. Include yourself

in that discussion and be proactively doing it. Hey, I found some place I can automate. Hey, I found some stuff we should stop doing and we should redeploy for something that's high impact. Hey, I have an idea of how to delegate this so we can do more. So if we could delegate the clips of this week in startups to some other person and get it done and have it be just as good for a tenth of the price. Well, then we could redeploy that in writing show notes or getting better guests, inviting more people, all of that good stuff, right? Or editing the show better or doing graphics, whatever. There's going to be another function we can redeploy it to or adding another day of the week. I want you to really think about this ADD framework. It's in the show notes or you can go

calicanus.com and sign up for my email newsletter there. I hope this is helpful. You know, when I write these, when I share my efficiency concepts with people, whether it's the EOD, start of day, end of day, if you get anything out of this, if it works, let me know. If you add anything to it, let me know. And if you want to take this, edit it, remix it and say, hey, I read J-Cal's post. We've adapted it, and here's our new version of it. Go ahead. Post a blog post and pay it forward. Email me, Jason at calicanus.com for life, and tell me what you did. And I might retweet you if you at Jason me or you, a DM me on X.com slash formerly known of Twitter on X.com slash Jason. You can follow me on LinkedIn. I publish stuff there. Let me know what you learn from this.

And tell me what I can learn from you because that's really what we're trying to do here in startup land. And I just want to end, if you're thinking of starting a company, I really want you to consider founder. At university, this is a program I run that's 12 weeks. As free for founders, we try to teach you how to start a company. And we're looking for more people to start companies so we can invest in their companies. When people come to founder.com university, they learn how to do a prototype. grow their company, build their team. And we also invest $25,000 and about 30 or 40 of the companies, every cohort, we do the cohorts quarterly that we invest in. So I'm really excited to get your feedback on this blog post, this email newsletter. I'm also hopeful that you start a company someday.

And when you do, you consider having my firm launch, which is at launch.com. I hope you consider letting us invest in your company. And we'll see you next time on this weekend service. Bye-bye, everybody.