all right hi everyone um my name is Eric mikowski I'm the course facilitator here at startup school um excited to do a another round of online office hours with companies in startup school so office hours um for those that might be tuning in for the first time are an opportunity um that we take it at YC for the partners to actually spend a concentrated a focused 20 to 30 minutes
um with each startup really to dive in and talk about a particular problem or a particular situation the founder is experiencing um and help them brainstorm ways to solve that problem or figure out ways that they can work through and um and get past that problem so we're going to be doing that in an accelerated fashion here we've got a bunch of startup School companies that have signed up through the startup School
Forums to um to do office hours and we will do them in front of everyone who happens to be watching this um as I as I talk to the founders um I'm really going to try to keep keep my advice kind of um focused in such a way that even if even if you're tuning in and you don't have the exact same problem hopefully you can still get value from um from these sessions really in general like one of
one of the reasons why I like I like doing office hours is often times we as Founders are really like stuck in our own world we're working working from home we're working on a in a small team working on a project and sometimes we just like spin our Wheels trying to solve problems um with office hours it's a great opportunity to kind of like talk talk through your problems with someone
else and potentially even figure out ways internally that you can you can solve them just through the act of like saying saying them out loud and and and and sharing them with someone else um so as you're as you're watch watching this if you're um if you have friends that are also working on startups consider that maybe at some point you should just take the time to talk founder to founder
through the problems that you're having um might be a way to solve so without any further Ado let me pull in the first person um first up is box score JC this is JC JC can you hear me hi good to meet you let me just me okay here we go um how are you good how are you uh good to meet you this is uh Jose uh from boxor great to meet you why don't um why don't we Jump Right In start by uh
what's the name of your company and and what are you working on uh the name of the company's boxcore uh what I'm working on or what we have is we have a beta that's live that had uh uh what it is is a Futures gaming platform so what it really is is we asked trivia about future uh events that are televised uh so mostly sporting events but we also do entertainment like the Oscars and stuff
like that and people just answer what's gonna happen at the event you know who's going to win the match who's gonna win best picture all those type of things I don't completely understand from what you're doing let me ask a few question is it a is it a bedding or a gambling site that's where we're going to end up but we're not monetizing it yet but yes um and you're gonna play it instead of
playing it against the house you play it against your friends you play it in groups against against your buddies you know okay um and what stage are you at right now with the company we have the game live uh we had 240 plus users last month for the NFL playoffs um we it's a it's a beta what we have right now and we need to basically build the next version now um we believe we got proof
of concept at least to ourselves we prove prove it to ourselves like uh that it can be a second screen during a live event uh so for example for the Oscars we just had a lot of people reaching out and being like hey like you're late to scoring this or that like it just we felt the energy you know and like and so we need to and how many how many users do you have right now um we have about
20 in the latest competition active users right now but the truth is is I've been doing it the whole thing by myself and so I've brought down the amount of content we have so basically no trivas really um and I'm building a team uh trying to scale to what's your website I'll take a look at the site uh box boxcore dolive um so yeah uh we um we have the competition but there's two other legs that are very important that
we need to add to this product that aren't there yet and one is uh utility to the user and that would be in the form of of live scores of previews Recaps all that type of stuff um why do you why do you think your users need that like those are available on other sporting platforms that is correct but uh we think we can do it better than the other sporting platforms because the key
is that users are giving us in real time their preferences uh when you like they if we give you a catalog of like 10 different sporting events that are happening this week you're only going to pick the ones that you're interested in and so because of that we know in real time what you're following if you go to espn.com and you put in your preferences you you're gonna put in who's my
favorite team but your favorite team may not be the most relevant story uh for the following weekend that does that does that make sense I I get it but I think like what I would be pushing to do especially at the early days for a company like this is really to test what is the smallest thing that users actually want that they can't get out of the existing apps like right now um if
you're a sports fan there's a multitude of different apps that you can use um but presumably if you want trivia about a specific team or a specific sport or specific type of sport maybe that's missing so have you have you tested like carving off just a very tiny portion of what users want and just delivering that rather than trying to do every sport every um every feature 100% And that's
that's what we did you know that's what we have live we have live is just a trivia competition of future events that you play against your friends you know and we've had people that have done betting on the by themselves for example the Super Bowl we had a group of 10 people one guy brought nine people to play against him um but like even on your website you've got uh the Grand Prix you've got the World Cup you're
talking about Super Bowl I see some like uh other World Cup like why not just pick one specific sport to um uh to to focus on because that's not how sports fans behave sports fans um and I say from experience don't tend to follow just one sport they follow multiple Sports year round you know um I I don't think what what I'm trying to say is like even if they follow follow
multiple Sports if this is truly a problem that they can't solve anywhere else wouldn't wouldn't they want to solve it just for one sport for one team at one time to start with um like couldn't you make it go viral within just the community of like one particular football team or one particular cricket team and just get everyone who's like interested in that team using it to start yeah no it it's
possible and and and and let me think about it a little bit more because basically what we're acquiring uses or where we're working on the use acquisition is in Mexico so it could be uh soccer and MX now the the way I've been thinking about it and and and sounds like you may not be on on the same track but the way I've been thinking about it is that um for example the Mexican soccer fan follows Liga MX
but he also follows Champions League he also follows uh some of the European leagues you know and so um what we the way we're we're approaching it is more like hey let us give you um all the different things that you follow that like most like the way it works is domestic players will give you these type of competitions but they only focus on domestic or on one particular thing
and so we're trying to kind of break down the barriers and give you the if if there's many apps that are already solving this for uh local Teams International Teams Etc why do you think there needs to be one app that has all of them why can't people just have three apps because well one is because you just said three Ops is very uncomfortable or not not not not optimal that uncomfortable but I agree but but I
think it's mostly about hey I want a product that gives me gives me that becomes my second screen for the spores that I follow not just a subset of the spores that I follow but the all the things I follow you see what I'm saying so second screen your second screen is it would be that like you are watching the event and at the same time you're following live how this how you're
fairing against your friends or how the stats or how things are are are kind of evolving during the match right and so I'm thinking the way I'm approaching is I'm thinking about the users themselves and so like I know a lot of people or like the people that I've pulled in that like hey we want more content of for example the Real Madrid Barcelona but we don't want all the all the games
happening in La Liga this week that type of thing and so tell me tell me what what are the problems that you're struggling with right now uh the problem that I'm struggling with the most is uh I'm not a technical founder uh but learned how to code and I basically launched the beta that got over 200 users uh congratulations that's awesome thanks yeah so I I learned how to do this I started in June um and so but I
basically hit a well at the end of January and that's what I told you right now like there's not a lot many users I hit a wall and I realized like okay this is as as far as I'll go by myself you know or like I'm not gonna be able to do a lot better like maybe I can but I don't have the time you know um so I need to scale I need to get people and so uh so someone had been offering to
give me money for a while so uh not that much but 50k but like anyway I'm going to take that money uh maybe I'll go raise some more and I started hiring people and so I went back to my alma moer in Mexico and I'm getting engineering students for $ five an hour um and one guy is already working out there's a couple more that may work out as well um and so my problem is how do I
structure the whole thing to be ready uh to your point of one event one one thing Focus on that um Euro 2020 and the Olympics happening this summer and so I kind of want to like reposition rear the whole thing my recommendation is that sounds like it's a long way off um the Olympics aren't until August I don't know when euro is but my recommendation would be don't wait that long you
already have 20 users who already started using it and are interested in it I would start talking to them and seeing how could you build features that cause them to for this to become like an addictive app something that they use on a on a regular basis and then iterate on a weekly cycle saying okay well I talk to users they're they have these problems that are holding them back from becoming active users we have the
engineering team try to make uh try to make batches of work that are less than one week so this is this is like a really important strategy oftentimes people think in these really long-term future dates they're like okay I want to have the app ready by yep in the problem with that is the feedback cycle for your engineers and for the whole team is really long because it's February it'll take you a
couple months to get the app ready then you'll spend some time getting the launch ready and then you'll launch in like July you know before the Olympics that's way too long a a much faster a much better cycle would be to do this on a fast basis where every week you you sit down with your engineers and you say here are the things that I'm hearing from users here are the things that I
think we should fix and then here's how we're going to test to see if the fixes that we just built are actually useful yep you do that every week oftentimes I talk to Founders that set up like one meeting on on Sundays for maybe a couple hours between them and their co-founders and they actually use that time on Sunday to plan out what they're going to do for the the following week and to
measure kind of the results from the last week's work yep no that makes sense and that's actually how how how I have doing it since the launch of the beta in September until I burned out last month um I've had users that have given me over 500 predictions multiples uh I've had uh and and I speak to a lot of them regularly and I've had about 300 plus signups you know and I think half of it
was organic half of it was like little promo we ran but anyway um well Jose really glad to get the chance to chat um I hope to hear some up updates and hopefully not all the way to till uh till August um I agree I think that makes sense cool thank you I've got to move on to the next one but it was really great meeting you Jose thanks sounds good bye bye bye okay next up is core care
um do do you see them John nope maybe not okay next up is Mary from parley oh that's IQ IQ cool uh I think unmute your audio hi um Mary I think you need to unmute your audio how that I can hear you yay how you doing Eric I'm great it's good to meet you nice to meet you too um very excited about uh talking with you yeah we're actually building a hard tech company I guess I saw somebody say hey
there needs to be more hard tech companies um what were we're doing uh is essentially turning your smartphone into smart binoculars okay allowing users to zoom in view capture and live stream events imagine if you're up in the nose bleed section and being able to zoom in on on the game and certain plays uh be able to record Snap photos share on on uh YouTube or Facebook live um we're at
a point where we've um develop this product it uses your smartphone okay okay and we have a lot like the um the magicals binoculars in Harry Potter yes yeah exactly you got it yeah we actually were inspired by Star Wars electr binoculars that's what they they call it we um so so it's kind of like you use your camera on the phone and then it magnifies it okay exactly yeah and it it's a new
category in consumer Tech which is why I wanted to talk with you because you brought the first smartwatch to the market and so um would love to hear some of your advice what what stage are you at right now I see that you have the Prototype maybe show it off a little bit sure sure um so uh black white pardon do you have any customers yet yeah we did a Kickstarter campaign um we had very
little funding but we did raise our goal of um uh 27,000 now we're up to 30 but thank you $30,000 um and we've raised a part half of a seed round um we should be closing that by the end of okay so so when will you start shipping them to customers before for um the or by the 2020 Olympics we have our tooling already done okay uh hang on just got something um yeah we we've already done our
tooling our first article and um we one of the the obstacles I I see right now we're already to bring these the first batch the first um pilot is what we're calling it The Pilot production to ship to our uh 200 plus backers and also have enough to seed the Market um we have major leagues interested as well as um okay so so um as of as of right now so you have some early customers that
ordered on Kickstarter you're getting ready to ship them um do you know where your customers live or have you talked to any of these customers yes they're all over the world um we we opened it up and so based on our crowdfunding campaign um why why are you waiting till the Olympics to start shipping if your users are all around the world oh it's just a a timeline in July rather than say July we're saying you
know we'll be there in time for the 2020 Olympics but um one of the um if I understand it correctly it's a plastic holder for your phone with a lens like so we have a proprietary touchpad on top yeah maps to an app and you're able to control your smartphone camera functions um with our touchpad okay we have an app in the app store um in the IOS app store uh called IQ space live um
and it's I like your eyeball not the letter I and so what's what's the biggest problem that your startup has right now well what I wanted to ask of you is given that you brought in a new product a new category as well if you were bringing that to market right now um just what would be some of your advice you would give us considering the Corona virus is causing issues in Supply
chains and so forth your question is like around the supply chain how do you um we're in we're on in the crossroads right now we we're ready to manufacture we're talking with factories we're trying to mitigate risk um for manufacturing in China um but our tools there and we certainly could get the first Plastics out is there a reason why you need to build plastic injection molded Parts is
it possible to do this with 3D printed Parts instead well we've already we've already done that for the the first uh yeah but like oftentimes one thing that I as I talk to Founders people sometimes skip ahead to the plastic injection molding step way too fast oftentimes end customers are are totally fine with 3D printed um products even if they're buying it off Kickstarter in fact we've had several YC
companies go through to the point where they were making thousands of units um 3D printed completely just just by themselves off 3D printers and actually selling them to to customers that that would be one way of uh eliminating the need to actually um get parts from factories in China because you just have them coming off of your 3D printer yeah um we we sold the the products um at a at a
reasonable price we're retailing these for 199 and of course with Kickstarter you always have to do little discount there um to get you know the interest going so um I'm not sure that we could do the 3D printed ones um at scale for the price there's a you like I mean you not it's not just the Plastics that that we're concerned about we just the overall um so one thing that I would do
if you you have about 300 orders right uh yeah yeah so if you have like something like 300 or less than a thousand one thing that you can do is just place the orders now for all of the components since you've got the money from Kickstarter you kind of have an idea um so that you can just like put it out of your mind yes it will take a couple months for the things to ship but if you just place the orders and you you
you work with the factory to make sure that they're like you know they on thing that I like to do with factories is just you know let them know every week that I exist like remind them over we chat that units um but but in your case with 300 units I don't think you're going to have much problem I think that'll be I think that'll be all fine well we have we have more I mean that's just what the
pre-orders were we have a lot of interest for yeah but I would focus on building those pre-orders first right one that I've noticed a lot of other Hardware companies they kind of get ahead of themselves they think oh I've got 300 orders that means I should really build thousand units um because it's cheaper to build several thousand units than just 300 um but this is actually like a very potentially
dangerous mistake um because first of all you want to get your 300 units out to the kickstarter backers so that they're happy and that they tell their friends so if you if you start trying to plan for like thousands of units it may actually delay the first 300 to to those customers and so um if it's if at all possible try to build just 300 or 400 or 500 some small number of units to start
so that you can actually ship those to the end customers as soon as possible yeah great um and then uh if I can just ask another couple questions um what what would you say would be the most important higher once you got your funding and so forth um in the early days uh especially before companies have hit product Market fit some of the best some of the best companies are run extremely
small um usually it's just just the founders at that point do you have any co-founders on your team yes yeah there's um our CTO uh who's a mechanical and Optical engineer that sounds very cool yeah so he's it was his invention and um we also have um some folks in the in the sports Community we have um a a software engineer who's building out our AR app so that you'd be able to see like
the yellow line when you're at a football game and that sounds great I mean sounds like you got the whole team right there um like oftentimes like I really try to encourage Founders not to hire too many people because you know the the the smaller your burn rate the easier it is for you to become break even and and even profitable um every additional person that you hire is g to
be is going to make it harder and harder for you to kind of break even above that above that point so you're saying um what we have is is good for now if you can make it happen with the people that you have then I would highly encourage you to do that yeah sometimes it may be necessary to hire particular contractors or people with specific expertise to help get over a particular problem this is especially
true for Hardware companies where you may need an electrical engineer for two weeks and then you may need right but it's not necessary to hire them as a full-time person you just won't have enough work for them right right no that's good advice very good advice um and uh what else can I help with what's it speak up our CTO here too yeah hello yeah no I just wondering uh if if you might have any advice about uh bringing
in uh interest from uh developers to uh you know to to to develop on a platform as category yeah certainly do so the qu yeah so my recommendation here would be to focus on shipping your units to early customers as as like when in doubt that it's always the right move to do because this is really interesting within that group of 300 people that have bought it off kickstar there may be actual
developers who are interested in hacking and building on top of the product that they already bought so the the first Developers that will be part of your community may actually already be there okay in your user base but you won't know until one thing you could do now is you can email the 300 people I'm sure you get the email list from from Kickstarter you can ask them like hey is there
anyone here who's interested in hacking or building on this product um that would be the first step and then the second thing is once you ship it to them that's when people's mind start thinking about what are the cool things that you can do with it and they may end up just hacking on it themselves especially since it's just like their phone fitting into this right right in fact in fact um
just your the the previous the previous uh the previous uh uh developer that you were just talking with would be like an example of uh a app that our product and we've I mean so that's actually one of the uhh use cases we've looked at is is is real time uh you know so forth well it's great to meet you both um I wish you good luck with the kickstarter I pulling for you and hope
to see it in a couple months what's the name of the product IQ IQ e q got it thanks very much thank you by okay next up is track trackport Jake track actually did we get the other one come in core care no track Point Joan do you see track shap from track oh Jake I'm missing at the top okay Jake hey how are you doing this is John Jake and John um great to meet you great to meet you too um so we're here
with cargo laabs Incorporated uh it's a Fint tech company for truckers and we our first product launched in December it was it's called trackport it's a mobile app that tracks how long trucks spend at a ship or receiver while the truck's getting loaded and unloaded so it it tracks it tracks the truck while it's like an app that runs on the phone yes okay and and what's the problem like
I'm not I'm not a trucker I don't have that much experience in this in this tell me what like what's the problem that people are trying to solve with your app yeah the problem is that trucks spend a long time at shippers and receivers uh waiting to get loaded and unloaded and many times not only is it not clear to the Brokers that are paying them this money this the times are not
clear but also they have a difficult time invoicing for those for those rates because okay so you just said you just said a mouthful and I'll I'll I'll I'll let you know that like as someone who's not really familiar with this with this space I'm like I'm still working to try to understand who this is for like who the who the primary user of this app is yeah what is the problem that they have
and then how does your app solve that problem so maybe you could start like is this for the trucker is this for the owner of the trucks primarily it's going to start for the uh the trucker and the trucking company to get paid for the time that they wait at that ship room receiver inefficiently because there's times when the loading process and unloading process moves very inefficiently and they wait there for
accessment period of time uh our app calculates how long they were there uh give also with a given detention rate this this problem's called the detention pay problem because they're stuck in detention when they're at the shipper and receiver so our app calculates how long they're there um with the given detention rate and then sends off an invoice for the amount of money that the
truckers owed okay so it's it's an app for the trucker they run it on their own phone and then they set a do you have to like if like if I understand it's like the trucker arrives at a Walmart Distribution Center they wait there for like half an hour or an hour or multiple hours to get loaded and right now they're not getting paid for that time time paid for that it's they have a
hard time getting paid for it it's not always clear because there's not a good syst is it part is it part of their existing contract uh it's usually outside of the contract typically because it can't be predicted so it's it's a secondary contract uh typically but this is all done right now verbally this is all gentleman's agreement through the phone and um cool so what what's the next what's uh what
stage are you at have you already launched the app and do you have people using it yeah so we have seven or eight truckers using it so far we launched in December um and we just got uh I think Summerfield Trucking they put us on their website last night he also run some accounting firm for 25 other Trucking comp so tell me about the seven truckers that you're working with um do
they use it for every job that they do today they use it typically for areas that they know they're going to have problems at so not all places that they pick up product have problems but many places do how many times a week do those truckers have problems so it's t typically a really a trucker that Encounters this a lot will have it two or three times a week actually I'm not asking hypothetically
like for those seven truckers you probably know them by name right yes like how many times did they it last week yeah so like two to three times a week typically in a five day so you had 14 14 stops tested how many how many um I guess like track five to seven orders not all of them have been using it consistently we've been working out the bugs for the last couple weeks work do you have like the phone
numbers for all of those seven truckers yeah or phone phone or email we have contact info you you like have you tried phoning them all up yeah we give him calls so one guy's name is RL he's an owner operator so he runs his own trucking company and drives for it he's been our most helpful so cool that's many times yeah yeah great so what's the what's the big problem like what are you
what are you guys working on right now um so we're working on actually having a cryptocurrency processing system where we have a dollar backed cryptocurrency that Pro that uh makes the system work under the hood so we can move the money from the broker to the trucker instantly with a smart contct that releases it as soon as the trucker finishes his order if that makes sense to pretty much
automate the payment system for between the people buying the trucks and the trucks themselves and the reason why that's important is because sometimes it can take about a month for that payment to process so if we can get that processing time down to a second by working with both the broker and the trucker uh we think there's a lot of value there is that a critical component to
this like from you managed to explain your whole startup I understood what you were doing and it sounds like there's a problem here that truckers and you introduce this whole other concept of like let me try and bridge that a little bit better so right now my major question is like why don't people just use US Dollars that's what we want to do but we're gonna have a digital way to
interact with those dollars we we're not super but like correct me if I'm wrong these truckers are already getting paid for the truck loads that they that they move right in 30 days yes yeah like they're already getting paid that's like a very known you know method for how they get paid or whatever um I thought the problem that you're trying to solve is they're currently getting paid this
much but they're missing out on like a couple hours worth of extra pay because of the time of just fent with the dock right yes and that's the primary thing that you're trying to fix like they're getting you know $100 you're trying to get them an extra $10 um yeah okay so why don't they just pay the $10 in the same like why don't you just add that to the invoice they already have the $100 invoice why don't
you just add the $10 to the invoice that's that's the the difficult part is the the the calculation of this extra rate that comes on sure but you're calculating that with the GPS and on the app right you you don't need a cryptocurrency to add $10 onto the we I I say cryptocurrency we could do it like a a processing system similar to PayPal or VMO where they process internally it
doesn't have to be cryptocurrency we just know that I would I would highly if you have the chance to to adjust any part of your plans I would highly recommend keeping it as simple as possible and potentially just reconciling it in cash or venmo or PayPal or even the same contract that they're paying the the truckers on the the reason being is I like I really encourage Founders to focus on the the
the pain point that their users are having and the minimalist simplest solution to that because then it then it tests your hypothesis your hypothesis is that truckers want to get paid for the two or three hours that they're spending at the dock um right now and it's a good hypothesis it makes sense um and you so you want to test that but adding all this extra complexity with like smart contracts and
stuff that makes it harder for you to test your core hypothesis and makes it like it's going to take longer for you to test that hypothesis so at what point do you think we could comfortably say that the hypothesis has been validated or invalidated like this is this is like generally called this the the search for product Market fit and you're right in the thick of it so your mission right now is to try to
figure out what is the core problem that your users have build the smallest app and then start giving it to the to the customers and when you find that the customers are telling their friends about it because I'm sure they know other people who have truck trucks when they're using it for every load um when they're phoning you up with features and bugs and requests and it's just
spreading like people are pulling it like they're downloading it even with you you like getting in touch with them that's when you know that you're on to something and so the mission in the early days is to get to that point before you run out of money yeah um well we don't have too much we're bootstrapping so far so exactly yeah so like that's perfect and I would just like encourage you so you have seven
users now what is your goal for the next week um well we uh we want to sign up this payment processing system is a crucial component to our our overall business plan we do have we we talked to our first broker yesterday we're trying to get Partnerships with broker just as well so we can why do you need a partnership with a broker why don't they just use cash or PayPal to to pay
because we we're gonna take a processing fee on the movement of the funds from PayPal has a functionality where you can act as a Marketplace and take a small percentage fee sure we could we could use PayPal too but either way we want to work with the broker and have a system in place where they can instantly release detention money to the trucker without having to again like they're already doing this
right because the trucker has to get paid for the the the $100 the main part of what they're do reliably right now a lot of the times they'll get denied reest ah but now now it sounds like you're introducing a new problem it sounds like the first problem that you were trying to tell me about was truckers aren't getting paid for the hour or two that they're at the dock and now you're telling me about this new
problem which is truckers aren't getting paid reliably at all well the reason for the the not reliable payment seems to be that they can't accurately track how long they were there typically they pick up the phone and call and say don't people don't people just make a deal they say like I have this much this load I want it delivered here by this date I'm willing to pay this much they don't
they don't get reliably paid attention yes the the regular contract they get paid within 30 days because it is written and they're told from due point A to point B no the reliability comes in is originally what we were talking about was that last portion is not relied because they can't verify and all the reasons cool so like if you're doing that I would definitely say ignore all
the crypto currency stuff and just like try to focus like just like get them to send a check or get them to send a PayPal or get them to send a venmo like there's got to be a simple way to do this without having to make a deal with the distribution set like you want to again you want to test the hypothesis make it as simple as possible cool so what's what's the goal for next week so I feel like our goal
for next week would be to it'd be nice to like double our user size um or at least double our people that we we're talking to and have them download you know let's say majority of the loads over 50% of the loads they move for the seven people who used it in the last week did they use your app to get paid or did they use their your app to tell the trucker I was wait to tell the um
the distribution distributor that you were waiting uh that they were waiting for this many hours or something so so far all all it's been able to do is accurately log those two times we have an auto invoicing feature set up but no one's turned that on yet because they're not comfortable sending that invoice off of the broker yet we're still working out the well you can also you can also
manually just send an invoice like you can we have the app too so you can tap a button and send the invoice like sure but I mean you too you you personally can do it as well you don't have to let the app do it on the back yeah cool so the goal over the next week is to get 14 users total sure yep sounds great well it's good to meet you both and uh good luck on the gold send me a tweet if you
uh in a week with how it's going sounds great thanks thanks okay next up uh Nate from meme party Nate can you hear me Nate are you there I can see you oh hey can you hear me yeah awesome thanks for holding these office hours by the way no I'm happy to do it and it's uh to meet you um why don't you uh oops why don't you tell me what what um what your companies doing yeah so my name is Nate and I'm with me party so
mean party is a mobile party game where people um can create memes competitively okay um what does that mean that sounds uh um that sounds that big I'm not sure exactly so we currently have an app release on IOS and Android where um every round there so people can join into a game with friends like up to eight people can play at a time and there's like a series of rounds every round up um each person's
presented the same meme they all edit it to create like the best meme they possibly can okay and everyone votes to see who made the best meme cool so it's like Instagram for memes sort of yeah it's kind of like the Apples to Apples uh like those kind of games you say meme you mean like the uh kind of like image image macro with text what's your what's your website I'm gonna check it out uh
so it's me party game.com it's primarily just a landing page for our mobile apps right now okay cool and how many users do you have right now yeah so last week we had 56 active users cool that's awesome some of your friends are using it um a little bit so we actually had an event last week that we hosted where we got about 20 active users from okay and then we also an iners event yeah yep so we host an
advent at a brewery where we advertised and brought in some friends and some strangers and we played it with them great so um tell me like what why are people like why are people using the app there there's there's many apps where people can use um can kind of create memes uh why are they using meme party well I think me part is the only app that I know of we can actually like
um comp compete to make memes where it's actually like that's what it's designed to do there's lots of apps where you can like post memes or look at memes but it's not really designed to be like a party game or like competitive no so there is like what do you mean which is a kind of a card game which is similar yeah kind of like what it called Cards Against Humanity or apples apples or
that kind of thing yeah yeah but there's some issues with that game more like Okay so what's the what's the main so are you the programmer you you wrote the app yourself yeah I'm the main software developer nice and what's the um what's the main kpi or what's the main metric that you're tracking right now we're just tracking uh weekly users and a weekly like is your goal to make people daily users of the app or
weekly users um weekly because because this is a game meant to be played with friends so it's the way I think of it it's it be primarily use like during weekends or when you get together with friends so it might not become like a oh sorry I misund so this is actually like an in-person game so everyone opens the game on their phone in person oh cool yeah party I used to play Space team
that was like a fun in person in video game yeah cool okay um awesome so what are the what what are the big things that you're working on what are the what are the problems that you're facing right now yeah so we released our IOS app about three months ago and then about about a week ago we released our Android app so I've been spending most of my time just doing development but
since we've got both the apps release now we're kind of transitioning more into like marketing so what me and Lucy who's another member of the team I've been doing is like several nights per week we've been going out to breweries and just kind of asking people if they want to play with us and that's how we started growing our initial user base so great idea so it's kind you're kind of
thinking how do we make this a trivia night game at the bar because because we we started doing like social media marketing and putting up flyers and stuff but we found that didn't really have any effect no one is actually using it and part of the reason why is because since it's a party game you can't really use it by yourself yeah need your friends to be there anyways yep so we found
so I think like that's a that's a really good learning that other companies in startup school could benefit from that sometimes you just can't Market to people over the internet at the beginning you need to be there in person like talking to them tell me what did you learn from from talking directly to people like what was your conversion rate when you were actually like talking oneon-one with someone at one of these
bures or bars I would say our conversion rate was like almost 100% really so Lucy um she's a very good people person and she just looks around the brewery for like a group of people that looks well welcoming goes over there and asks like hey would you be willing to help us uh test out our app and give us some feedback and almost everyone say yes and they you know spend like 10 or 15
minutes gu here's the important next question has anyone who downloaded it at one of these Brewery events used it again later on when they were back home with friends or otherwise uh so I actually don't know so we actually don't have a method right now for tracking users over time but we're we're adding um yeah that's a pretty that's a pretty important feature you know there's there's many
there's many ways that you can add that quite easily to your app one would be say to add mix panel have you considered doing we've actually already added it but um we don't have data from last week you added it after that okay yes we added it like this good well I'm glad you I'm glad you added it it's never too late um yeah the right time to add analytics is now for yesterday okay so are you going to try
that again this weekend to go to some breweries and bars and and and do that um yeah so we're planning on doing it a couple times this week okay cool I think like my hunch my my my first impression is that it's a great strategy for getting your initial users because people don't want to say no in person like they're always they're they're more than happy to have a conversation like
they're they're at the bar for a reason um the problem will be getting people back after uh that will be that will be diff difficult and in order to do that I hope that you have things like Ina messaging where you can push push notific notifications to people say for example like on Friday you meet them in the bar and on Saturday night you send another notification to say hey if
you're hanging out with friends why not try this app again okay it's a good idea yeah because they won't have uninstalled hopefully they won't have uninstalled the app and they're they're again again out with friends or at a point where they they want to try it what are some other you've had on how to find users because this is probably going to be your biggest problem in the early days yeah
so we also have a social media account so when we started out this wasn't effective but we just tried posting like just memes that were just kind of generic just to kind of create like a meme account but we found more useful is posting memes that people have actually created through meme party have you recorded a really cool kind of like short video of how to get started like a
couple groups a couple people getting started really quickly with mean party that's a good idea we haven't done that that could be something just brainstorming kind of off the top of my head um where I live there's a lot of card shops where people hang out on Friday and Saturday nights play card games um you know magic and and Warhammer and that kind of stuff is it possible that you could go to one of
those and see if people who are already playing games might be interested in doing that as well yeah that that'd be a good venue to try marketing yet um yeah another thing would be some some pubs host Tri nights on Tuesdays um that could be like you could even go to a bar and say I guess you already tried this but like go to a bar and say hey if everyone downloads M party um we can
like run we could run a a trivia night on the app um cool uh the other thing that I would do is like really think really as your as users are using it for the first time look over their shoulder and and really see how do they use the app what are the problems that they have setting it up um um connecting it with all the other people oftentimes like my favorite apps are the ones that just go out of
their way to make it so damn easy to use and I think like there's so many things that that are happening in our lives it's so easy to like have a little bug and then move on to the next app so I really think carefully about that first like 30 seconds of usage from downloading the app to getting it set up to getting their friends on the same game like I would really I would really
work hard to kind of make that yeah I think that's really critical because we're still kind of early phase there's been a few issues with our app and I think that's part of the reason why our retention hasn't been very good is because there's a few like annoying bugs but the good news is since you're in person you don't have to wait for people to report the bugs you can literally look their shoulder and see
like are they just poking the wrong butt often times like as developers like we have it in our head how a thing works perly it's possible that you know the user who's using it may actually see it in a completely different way yeah that's one of that's been one of the most helpful things about actually playing it with people in person is like look and seeing what issues they have
and what's not working um what's your goal for the next week uh so our goal would be to get up to 100 weekly active users what are you at right now uh we got 56 last week and but you don't know if people were coming back again right uh I couldn't measure last week okay cool so week one 56 week two 100 it's pretty good growth so I do have a question for you so right now we have no
Revenue generation features so we have no ads primarily just because we want to like make the user experience as good as possible um and we don't have any other it's a free app yep um we have a few ideas for Revenue generating honestly features like it's it's very odd for me to say this because I always encourage companies to really focus on Revenue I think that's okay if you're in the
gaming World there are some pretty common models that are just very well known you can sell inapp purchases you can sell upgrades you can ads it's pretty common like you can Google around and see what the CPM apps are paying for um or receiving for ads right now I wouldn't worry too much about that um I would focus mainly on like like you said getting to 100 users fig out your
retention figuring out your churn that's like the biggest things to worry about on these apps is like do people use it again because you need to get to the point where you understand um like eventually you may be buying ads you may you know may be spending money to acquire users you need to make sure you have a complete understanding of for every user that comes in the funnel on one side how many active users do you
get on the other side okay interesting because we had um back to the revenue for a second I agree with you that I think um folks saying user growth is important that's why we haven't added any Revenue um methods right now but one idea I wanted to get your feedback on was having like tournaments so I was looking at um other YC companies that have been founded uh funded in the past there's one company
called Players Lounge where people like compete and like they kind of bet on themselves and if they win and like they get money from the other players yeah um we're thinking like I wonder if something that would work like that for me party possibly I mean the good news about your app is you will like you don't have to come up you don't really have to innovate business model side you can if you want
but the main Innovation is around the the game right like party kind of like you know uh it that that itself is the Innovation um I would really focus on making sure that that is in tune with your audience and your users and that people are like super excited about picking up mean party to use it um later on you can experiment with monetization and if the normal ones don't work like
in app purchases or upgrades or ads then I'm sure you could you know work on figuring something El but like you won't even get to the fun part of figuring out Revenue if you don't crack the first part which is do people like want to use it so I would just like spend my time and energy focusing there okay makes sense thank you yeah cool well it's exciting I'm gonna have to try it with
some friends meme party I'm glad you have Android I'm an Android user and I always feel oh nice that makes me feel feel L um well it's great to meet meet you and uh good luck nice to meet you too Eric thank you cool thank you Nate [Music] um next up is WP clover cheffy cheffy okay cheffy are you there I'm here yes okay I just need to I don't think your video is coming through oh there we go I
am hi um one let me just cool hi hi um thank you for uh taking the time to talk with me today um my product is called WP Clover um I'm a software engineer and I run a lifestyle company and we're kind of transition that into a platform and service um and we're focusing on WordPress development hosting and maintenance for small businesses and startups looking to build their MVP okay um so if I could so you
you you shared a mouthful now I'm like trying to unpack each of those components so one thing that I find is helpful is for me to try to like repeat it back to you what I what I so what I heard was uh software engineer building WordPress sites for individual companies and now you're transitioning to build a hosting platform for small businesses where they can start a website really easily on WordPress
correct so the small tweak that I would recommend is instead of making WordPress the focus of this make the focus of this you are helping small businesses launch their first website or maybe their second website first good website um and it happens to be on the WordPress platform okay fair enough yeah cool okay so what what stage so am I correct in saying that you were kind of like
personally building sites for people and now you're moving to this hosting platform or was I correct well it's actually a little of both we've always we've always hosted our own clients um sites but the way we did it previously was not scalable okay so um we're kinding to we're moving into a space where we automate most of the processes so that we don't have to touch the sites as
much but still get them the value they need so how a customer on boards with us with their site they send us a ticket I need this P fixed I need this repaired can you add this content and then we give them an hour a day um for to fulfill their tasks cool so they don't have to be technical whatsoever they don't even know that it's WordPress all they're saying is like hey I need to
change the menu on on this restaurant or I need to like add a holiday to this calendar right absolutely okay sounds awesome um how many customers do you have now currently we have uh three okay um and we'll have three onboarding within the next week nice you're gonna double in the next week that's pretty okay yeah so um it was kind of an easy transition because we had some customers
on a previous version of this and we converted a couple of those and then we brought on a couple more so um great the the biggest challenge has been finding our target market because in the in the lifestyle company my target market was women and most of our customers were women but now that I'm doing actual market research and we're putting out ads and connecting we see that our audience is largely
men interesting so you know we changed our website to kind of fit the the uh women feel and and look but now we're finding that we're actually converting more men instead what is what is your what is your website I'll put it WP clover.com good good domain um okay we get be great with WordPress hosting development maintenance on one service okay so so again so it sounds like I I might have misunderstood it
initially like this is for people who understand WordPress no not necessarily um initially we were targeting people who probably already have a WordPress website but have no clue how to really work with it yeah so that's where we were kind of pulling those folks in we do have people who are starting brand new never had a website and then we have people who are moving their WordPress
site to us because they don't want to have to manage it got it so one thing to consider is that you may need different landing pages for those different customers so this first landing page that I'm that I'm on right now it's very good for people who already have a WordPress site and they're like man this is annoying I just want someone to take care of it like you totally nail that
but if you're going to a new company or a new customer who doesn't even know about WordPress but they know that they want a site and someone to handle it it may be useful to have like a separate landing page we have something similar we have what's called office hours where they can uh come and talk to us about their their WordPress site or if they're considering it and then we have one that's just web
development um it's kind of leaned more towards our customer Discovery there's a there's like solutions for Freelancers for startups for businesses um but like if I were if I were a business clicking on this page there's just not much for me here it says visitors and customers get more leads through your local business like you need to like like try to inhabit the mind of this
small business like what is the problem that they're struggling with they want to get listed on Google they want to get you know be on Google Maps like put yourself in the mind like hopefully through the conversations that you have with these folks like they'll they'll they'll share their innermost pain or their innermost problems and then you can like put that on the site and say you know here we're g to solve your
problems okay that's fair yeah because I think again like as you transition away from being just a WordPress site to maybe being more of a Solutions provider for other businesses you need to maybe think a little bit broader Beyond just the WordPress okay what else what else are you what else what are the other problems that you're working on how how can I help um marketing uh one thing
when we first started because we started this back in October um uh I kind of got a the realm that our information was highly technical so we weren't closing as many people because because of course I'm transitioning from an Enterprise solution because that I do open source for Enterprise to a more B2B with a B Toc mindset yeah um so we started doing simpler um blog posts like one blog post
was simply how to get a yes and that's probably been one of our most popular um as well as uh some of our YouTube videos that are really simple little Snippets of how to do little things um I guess in that realm it's like how to be H how how can I be more non-technical while still being technical at the same time I've got an idea so one of the things that I like to do is talk to my friends who I who are in this like
specific who have this problem um and really just like because I trust my friends uh and they and they trust me so I would if I think that I'm overthinking a problem or if I'm like thinking on a like a much higher level because like I'm spending all day working on this sometimes I just like to go to them and say like maybe in your case if you're like are tell me about some of the types of
customers that you're working with are they restaurants and and small businesses like physical small businesses or are they more like internet small businesses more like internet Consulting Freelancers we do have a couple of startups in the pipeline because we do have a startup program so it's like I I I have a Consulting business and I want to have a web presence so people can find out more
about me okay cool so I would say I would go to like maybe your friends who are running these businesses and they already have websites and just talk to them like like my my conversation to them might be okay think back to when you were setting up your website the first time like how did you know what you wanted uh who did you go to did you did you did you search on the internet
to find out like where how you would set up your site like really try to just walk through all of these like all the steps that led them up to making the website and then after they made the website what are the problems that they've had since setting up you know WordPress or Wix or Squarespace or any of the the sites that they have and really just enumerate like very specifically the pain points and the
problems that they had um this I think is really helpful because you and I like as we as we run our businesses like this is all we do every day of the week so it's very to like get caught up in the week of like the specific problem that one customer is having sometimes I need a break out of that and really uh like talk to a bunch of other people with kind of the similar problem okay that
makes sense the reason why I like doing this with friends versus say completely new customers I think they're both valuable but with friends I can really like I could really work them I I'll ask them a ton of questions I'll like force them to sit in front of the computer with me maybe like in your case you could actually ask them to open up their WordPress or their Squarespace or their
Wix dashboard and you can see like how they run the pro like what buttons do they click you can like you can see like what are the changes that they've made in the past I don't know like sometimes I just really enjoy you know walking through it with like a friend or a colleague or or someone that I trust that's fair that's fair okay because I've been hyperfocused with like
LinkedIn connections and some people connect but then it's like uh they are busing building their to they don't have time that's your friends because your friends you know they want to help you and so they'll take like do that the other thing that I would recommend is do it in person it's so easy or or like over a video call like this right like it's so easy to be on a phone call and
be doing something else and to be like distracted or if you're doing it over email like you'll send an email and they won't even respond for like a week what you could try doing is just say like drive over to their place and say like hey I'm in the neighborhood could I just like come and hang out and let's talk websites for like half an hour um I'll bring I'll bring lunch or something and or or you could schedule a
video call where you know that they're Focus just on you for like 20 minutes and you could share the screen and you could really dive in and see kind of how they're set up okay that's fair I like it than you what else are you working on so you said that you're working on kind of the marketing problems right now right because the product is built I am a software engineer um the we we pretty
much just built a dashboard and tacked on a ticketing system to it it's real simple um we already have the staff to support it it's just now getting people to buy in because of course our cost is a little bit higher than Wix and things like that but at the same time it's significantly cheaper than paying a WordPress developer to build your site for $3,000 yeah totally so one of the
things that that I like to do at this stage is to really segment my potential user base I build like a spreadsheet and I put the different categories of users on it maybe people who don't have a site people who have a Wix site people who have a WordPress site people who hired a WordPress developer like identify the segments of customers and then as I have individual conversations with either
potential customers or maybe even just user interviews to get more research I actually plug all of that data into the spreadsheet so that my mind like I shift from thinking anecdotally like oh Jim he had this problem or Susan had this problem and I shift like looking at the data in a spreadsheet and I could say actually based on the last 50 conversations that I've had the best
Target group is people who run Consulting businesses in the US that already have Wix pages that they have a problem that they need to solve and so they're looking at the next upgrade and then once I've identif ify that customer segment maybe it'll take a couple weeks to actually talk to all the different segments and to find out is one that like so excited like this is a really
burning problem the benefit there is then you can actually say okay this is what this group looks like where do I find more of this group do I find them on Facebook groups do I find them on Reddit do I find them on Twitter hashtags do they find them in person at like small business meetups or conferences and if you if you know that your product is super useful for this group of people um instead of trying to
look at the whole universe of all the different types of customers you can actually just try to find this fruit in some in some place you know around the world okay okay that makes sense I need to hyperfocus on a specific let me let me clarify that you don't have to hyperfocus right now you can actually do the do the leg work to kind of figure out like what are the different categories and maybe try to
talk to say five people in each of these categories and then after you've talked to people in maybe five or six different categories and you talk to five people that's enough data to make a decision you you look back at your SP like actually I think category B is going to be the best and then maybe this takes a week or two then the next after after the two weeks and you've identified that
category B is going to [Music] bees maybe the next experiment that you run is how do I find 50 more potential customers that are this that are in category B okay yeah okay that makes sense cool well it was great to meet you I got a um I gotta do the next off hour but problem fantastic and uh word WP Clover um let me know how it goes so in the next week or two as you like hopefully double your user base to six
and then maybe start experimenting with these different segments send me a tweet um more than happy to follow up and see how it goes great thank you so much thanks Jey right byebye okay thank you next up is fi laabs with oh weu misu with youf hey I cannot hear you I guess you can hear me nope still can't hear you are you there maybe it's going through your airpods can't hear you
yet nope unfortunately not oh there I hear you got it hey how's it going good okay I'm glad that I'm glad we saw that we have the technology maybe it's going through your airpods yeah I had to go through my airpods but it's not working so now we're on my MacBook I think okay cool I think you've also got the YouTube stream open can do you mind closing that yeah I Clos that for a
second okay cool now we're all set up tell me uh let's Dive Right In what what's your company and what are you working on so my company is called wusu wusu is a platform that helps people save money in rotational groups so now what that is is let's say for example that um you need assuming that you are a lowincome person it may take you up to 10 months to save $1,000 by yourself but
in the small micro groups you could get that $ thousand within three months oh interesting so it's kind of like crowd like a crowdfunding platform but for a small group of people yeah exactly okay exactly so kind of like a we funder or um one of those other websites but like are you thinking about this for like maybe an extended family group like you and your your your close family can save
towards it is it a common goal or is it like a personal goal that other people are donating towards well it's a common it's a common goal so so what um attracts people to this is because they do are also in the same position or in need of X dollar amounts so so let's take for example you have four people in a group and we all need $100 but we need it during a different time of the year um we all put in
$25 into a pot this month and then next and then one person takes $100 and then we repeat the cycle every month until everybody has collected $100 at least once cool okay um what stage are you at right now have you built it is it live do you have any users no so no it's not it's not live however we do have a interactive demo that people could play with um we send the link out to people
on an individual basis and we do have a landing page that people could um sip through what's the what's the landing page Wu IO okay cool um I see it here yeah so these are like those groups the savings groups okay are you imagining that these groups will be for like people that I know in person like PRI private groups this is for almost this is going to open up to anybody and everybody who
um needs to share money so it'll be an open platform to people who don't know people so much changes so the the tough part about this is that it kind of feels a little bit like a pyramid scheme in that if you put more money in the first month and then you like or like you have to put money in a couple times before you get the thousand dollar like doesn't that doesn't that seem a little bit pyramid well no it's
not that's why that's why we focus on we focus on it being a circle versus a pyramid okay um and and this mythology has been going up for over hundreds of 800 over 800 years and multiple coaches around the world I get it and I think like the thing that when when I was imagining it first like I was imagining this with like my sister and like cousins like a very small type group so
the only difference is that on your website it doesn't really focus on that it focuses more on like this public group and so that's the intention yeah well it's it's risky because like when you focus on the wider public groups you get into kind of the pyramid schemes but if you focus just on like personal small family groups then it becomes more like this crowdfunding campaign where but
it's just for like a small group of people um and so I would like personally I actually think that those are two very different problems like one is more like this kind of global movement thing and the other one is like a very of these micro groups happening today yeah where people are sharing money to improve one person's Financial Health one person at a time yeah so how many groups have you run personally if I ran
personally I probably did about three myself okay so I my recommendation here is while the app looks pretty good it looks pretty slick I would say that like I would try doing this quicker I like making an app sounds like it's going to take too long for this like you could this today you could start helping groups form on venmo today or square cash okay the one and you could be the one
who arranges it like you could be the one who like keeps the spreadsheet makes sure that people pay up and like bans them if they don't get or like you know basically is the person who makes sure that all the money goes to the right people flows yes exactly and you don't need an app you could just do that using like venmo and a spreadsheet a Google spreadsheet that's that's the real
that's the real basic version of it yes well then go and do it it sounds useful it sounds like people could could definitely use this you should just do it we'll do definitely we'll definitely probably launch one tomorrow night okay cool because like and this is this is the exciting part like you can provide value you can make this actually useful for people without having to like do all
this do all this app stuff like I I bet that if you even told this told this like pull this idea shared this idea with some of your family and friends people would be like oh yeah I want to do one of these I want I want to set one up and they'll give you the phone numbers of like the four people that they want to put in this group and then you could like jump on say like an IM
like an ey chat or an iMessage call to like explain it to people um and you could like share this Google spreadsheet like a new Google spreadsheet for each group so everyone can kind of track like have they committed or not see where the status is see who's been paid out Etc I don't know I'm just like I think you could totally hack this together yeah definitely good advice I'm definitely going to um play
with that and then after after you run a few of these you know you could see well you could test the hypothesis do people actually want this yes or no and then after they after you like find out that people truly want this you could see like what are the minimum features that they need in an app to make this work and then you can try building it like there's a lot of um C are you you're a
developer are you going to code this yourself developer not a developer okay um well there's a lot of ways that you can actually build apps without being a developer these days like no code apps um you could use uh the name is not on the top of my head I think there's some good threads on Startup school about like no code apps um but I could totally see you like hacking this together with Google
spreadsheets VMO and really providing value understood cool um what's the goal for the next week what do you want to accomplish in the next week um well giving your new advice I'm going to try to set one up and do it manually first to see how that works out over the next month or so sounds good yeah I do have a question for you though let's hear it all right so ultimately
this space that it's a fintech space that we're in and it's heavily regulated um because we could we tther we tther around being a money service business and we may need a money transmitter license so you probably already answered it but what's the best way to launch an MVP if we chose to go through the appway uh the best way that I would do it is because you're gonna take like a small cut or would you take no cut we
take we Tak the cut a platform cut so there are some services that you could use that do this I know that PayPal has a Marketplace feature where you won't actually be the money transmitter PayPal will the money transmitter and you could just say like take 3% and put it in the um wiu account from every transaction that happens on the platform um stripe also has a similar Marketplace
feature what you the the key word that you want to look for here is you want to be like kind of a a marketplace now the tough part is I'm not an expert in this the tough part is you're actually G to be this might be harder but yeah actually now that I think about it because you're not actually selling a service you're just redistributing money yeah almost like a Marketplace for lack
of a better word because people are coming on the platform to with the same intention of rotating money around yeah I I don't have an answer here actually now that now that I'm uh now that I'm thinking about it more um there's a website called wee that I think does this um so you can check that out it's a YC company they they originally were started for like pulling money kind of in a similar way like
pulling money for to host a party or something like that everyone chips in five bucks to host the party so it's similar idea maybe maybe that would be maybe they have a service that you could use that's wepay.com yeah cool well it's good to meet you youf and send me send me a tweet um when you when you host your first uh Circle well do cool thanks good to meet you
bye okay next up now we're on F laabs okay Armen I hope you're still here and you're here hey Armen can you hear me I can hear you I think hello hello hi hi so what is phabs um uh we're building software sort of a moonshot project to predict um genetic Evolution um so for example to help design a better flu vacine that sounds particularly relevant to uh what's happening in the world today thank you yes
yes give me a little bit so you're building better flu vaccines give me a little bit better give me some more information like tell me a little like the next sentence if I were to say like okay tell me more so the problem is that like we don't actually have the statistics get for this year's flu vaccine but historically the flu vaccine has got less than 50% efficacy and the problem
is that scientists have actually deciding next year's flu vaccine right now so they basically are making an educated guess as to what its DNA will look like so the idea is can we use computer software machine learning to make a much better prediction based and how are you like presumably you need to collect a lot of data in order to make this happen right that sounds like the hard part how how are you going to
get your data yeah actually the data is not the hard part there's tens of thousands of influenza sequences collected every year going back you know the that last decade at least the problem the bottleneck is that we can't analyze all of this data um you mean it's been sequenced and they're sitting on dis somewhere or they haven't been sequenced and they need public Al
available on government databases anyone can go and download this data okay bottleneck is computational analysis what do you mean by that what I mean is if we just set aside the problem of prediction suppose we take these DNA data can we even just answer the question what happened what did the last epidemic look like and no we are very bad at that what that means is that scientists put in that they can take
like maybe at most 500 samples wait one month plus for a computer program to run and then get out the results they want okay I think I understand um what what stage are you at with the company um so the stage I'm at is I'm I'm sort of I'm prototyping I have a prototype that I'm testing on small example data sets um real real data yes so you're you're a programmer I I'm a mix I'm I'm a programmer I'm a
computational biologist just I'm a statistician yeah you combo for this startup that's we call that like founder founder startup fit it's good good okay so uh you're working on this um and are are you like back testing it right now based on like uh flu vaccines that like you have the sequences I guess of the of the vaccines as well and whether it worked or didn't so so this is what I
wanted to ask you about was Milestones because predicting flu vaccines is like this big milestone and and so of this the smaller mstone I've said first is can we analyze more than 500 sequences in less than one month in like one day or one hour what do you mean by analyze 500 sequences I mean I mean so I'm saying even though the O the big goal is we want to predict what flu will look like next year the problem is we
don't even know how flu evolved last year we're not even able to really understand what last year's epidemic looked like because we can't analyze all the data and we can't do it in a reasonable time frame so that's getting you're you're kind of losing me a little bit because I I lost between uh what you mean by kind of analyzing it in time um this like because I I just I guess I just
don't really understand what what what you mean by that so I mean I guess so in if we want to be able to predict the mutations that are going to happen the flip side is which mut happened in the last year of flu Evolution and we can't even answer that question very well we also can't answer very well how the flu spread and is that because but I thought you said we we do have or there are
public data sets of the DNA of past years's Clues right there are the data sets but we can't put that data together into a picture of what how the epidemic actually happen like the way the example is like this suppose I gave you a bunch of pictures from my family and I said said I want you to put together my family tree but I just gave you the pictures would you be able to do
that okay so do you have um frequency as well as like you have say several hundred samples of flu DNA do you know how many people were infected with each of those um strands uh yeah so each we we have we have DNA sequences and each represents one person who's theoretically been randomly sampled and that's so you do get frequency and that you have several hundred samples and they may have the
same yeah we we we have I mean we have like tens of thousands of samples and I mean some of them are going to be duplicates but a lot of them are different because blue evolves quickly okay and so what do you need to like you're talking about what the first um Milestone is right uh do you have some ideas on what like maybe you could bounce them off me what you think the first Milestones could be so so the
first big milestone I've been aiming for is to have a scientist bring their 10,000 DNA sequences or 1,000 DNA sequences let's say even and for me to build them a picture of that epidemic in one hour so DNA comes comes in and I build them a diagram that shows how influenza mutated and how it's spread and I do this in a time frame of one hour of computer analysis why do you think that
the hour is so important like is is someone else able to provide this answer but they're doing it a much longer period of time yeah so the software that currently provides this answer it takes at least one month to run and why don't you just start by making it less than a month sure I mean I two weeks that works too right can you do that a good Milestone yes so so the no I can't do
that it's it's it's strange but it's easier to sort of aim for one hour than why is that because like presumably if I understand correctly scientists are currently using the the method that takes one month so it kind of follows logically that if you were to have that or even drop it to three weeks that would be good right and people your system from the other system absolutely so the difference between current
software and my software is current software doesn't scale with big computers it's like a Serial algorithm I get it yeah yeah but like why don't you make the first Milestone something and presumably it's easier to make it have from four four weeks two weeks sure sure okay so my first Milestone is to is to be faster than current software back two times right and and actually I guess my
hypothesis is that once I hit that then actually I can easily Coast to being 10 times or 20 times that's great because you then you saying you could scale that makes sense okay yeah sorry yes you're right my my goal is just to be fased by the reasonable fact and have you talked to some flu vaccine scientists that could uh kind of umh switch to using your software if if you do okay yeah so I I
work with lots of epidemiologists and this is like the branding you when do you think you can have that done by the first like the first usable software that that makes it so it's less than four weeks um still it might be a few months away so the because I've I've been working on this for a couple years and there were it there were a few times where I thought okay I solved it but
then when I tested it on user data it didn't it didn't work as plan so then going back you know it's weird I'm interacting with my users passively which is that they've dumped their data on me yeah and once I can get that going then I have something generally useful um and the second half of the problem is that even once I've sort of solved the R&D part they're still figuring out okay
how do I actually coordinate you know a couple super computers to work on this yeah I would focus on the primary problem which is like just talk to the scientists and researchers who are already using the slower software and then say how much would you pay to switch to using my faster software instead of using the slower software yeah like you don't have to solve all the problems for them just
start by solving that first problem and and and and the first problem is I want to faster so I want to Crunch the numbers from one sample in in three weeks instead of four weeks right but I I don't I don't think I I mean I think that's still a pretty hard problem to solve I agree I'm just saying like that sounds like an easier problem than in an hour or something sure sure sure so what uh are you
working on this fulltime or is this a part-time project right I've been working on this fulltime that's fine what's your what's your goal for the next month to accomplish my I my goal for the next month I guess is to Benchmark what I've built so far and hopefully do sort of a soft launch where on my landing page I say this is my metric I'm twice as fast as the existing software or something
well that sounds exciting uh when you do launch it send me uh send me a tweet with the site um I've got a friend who may be interested oh really okay thank you very much no problem well it's good to meet you Arman sounds like the world needs what you're working on thank you thank you appreciate it hope to see the see the results soon I'll thank you thank you thanks byebye okay next up is Amy from curved
wear Amy Dr Amy hi Amy hi good to meet you you are from curved Weare right yes cool I'm trying to get back to my uh yeah you can hear me I hear myself myself there I'm trying yeah I'm trying to turn off the YouTube okay is that better much better okay what is curved Weare so hi curved Weare um finally provides an option for curvy women for travel or outdoor adventure pants um with technical
features like moisture wicking material quick dry material um deep functional Pockets so we provide um pants that for curvy women for that provides um comfort style and function which currently isn't really available for us do you have a website I do it's just curved wear.com good website nope curved wear.com curved wear showing up for me R ve D oh no e yeah that was my mistake no still H see
r u v d c oh I spelled where wrong I'm stuck in the software world that's funny okay pants for women there we go so it's underwear or it's p no it's pants I'm one of my biggest problems is that I like getting the sample prototype I've been working on that for months and months and months and so I didn't have that was just a picture photo that I put up there which I have been to make your first version
or else people won't know or at least do you have a render of it like in cat software I do yeah I have like a tech pack that has yeah in fact I've been yoursite yeah or else people won't know like I'm like I think I can visual it it's like they're not they're not it's not like yeah again like I'm it's like the kind of pants that youd buy at REI yeah like uh technical hiking pants okay cool which I
personally use for travel because I like packing yeah having pockets is amazing I love Pockets yeah um Okay cool so what stage are you at right now so I was planning on launching my crowdfunding campaign last year and I just keep getting pushed back I'm I'm at the stage where I'm trying to develop the sample prototype and the manufacturer sample maker just isn't getting it um so I'm
just like really frustrated about what I feel like it's not really in my control which OB sample maker based sorry oh he's in LA and I'm in San Francisco okay have you considered just driving down to LA and going oh I've been there yeah in fact when I got the first sample it was like I can see my vision in it and it was pretty good it just needed some work so I went down there and I spent like at
least an hour with him and we talked about and I brought down like sample pants I'm like this is how I want it and you know this and not this and he took all these measurements and he's like like oh yeah the next one is going to be totally good I I totally get what you're talking about so I got the next one right before Christmas and it was the exact opposite of what I was looking for
it's like basically everything that's on the market right now for girls who were women who are like size two and and built exactly like the mannequin so one one thing that I found to work well with like creative Consultants that I'm working with sometimes to schedule like a whole working like week weekend or Workshop where like if they if they truly like want to be a partner or if you think
that there's a chance that they can be a partner in this with you to really spend like a long amount of time going through like the motivation of why you're doing this why you're working on it and really like outline extremely clearly what are the deliverables that you're looking for um that's one option the other option may be to switch to a different Spire well and that was my question that put
in the thing like at what point do I kind of chalk up all my losses financially you know I'm bootstrapping this and um just kind of switch and find a different pattern maker or a different manufacturer and I don't know it's a tough call I mean but but sometimes we get too committed to the money that we spent in the past and not for the future um so one I mean one thing to consider
would be like are there cheaper places where you can prototype this um um could you try prototyping it yourself like you seem to have a very clear vision of of what what you're working on like can I'm laughing because my background is I'm a policy researcher and this is a whole new industry for me I've just been learning as I go for the last year but like I would Hazard a guess that you
have a very clear idea of what you want to build yeah um could you teach I feel like I've communicated that mainly like this is mainly a sewing sewing problem or is it a materials problem no it's a pattern problem problem okay I mean could you take a course on how to create patterns and and no these are people who not I'm not talking about for the final production I'm talking about to make
that first version so that it fulfills your like dream and your goal I don't I don't think I can I mean I don't know anything about sewing I don't know anything about the pattern because the pattern is really the first step in apparel and then it has to be graded up and down I I get that like in order to take this into production and to build like many of them you may need but like
I'm just trying to brainstorm ways that you could solve this potentially without spending a lot of money like a lot cheaper to learn how to sew than to spend thousands of dollars on someone else true right could you go to like a local um a local college that teaches this and and take a course on this uh or maybe like even you could go to the college and talk to the professor or the teacher who teaches the course and say
do you want to earn some extra money on this side like yeah my initial when I first started this my goal was to get interns from the local fashion schools and that just didn't really pan out again totally totally but like maybe if you went for the teacher rather than that work yeah that's a good idea yeah or um maybe there's a club maybe there's like sewing clubs or maybe like actually
I I don't know too much about this industry but I have some friends who spend a lot of time on Instagram sharing patterns for children's clothing because there's like these large communities of of people who sew their own clothes just for choice or for other reasons maybe you could talk to like you could join these Facebook groups and really like meet some of the people that are
participating in them and see if anyone wants to maybe even be a co-founder on this and like work on this with you alongside yeah that's a great idea um again like you don't have to go after someone especially for this first like you just want to you want to get one for yourself right like you want to actually make it so you know I want to be able to have something at the very least that I
can take some photos and some videos and then I can launch crowdfunding also like you want it for yourself because you want to know is this actually gonna solve the problem right yeah so I would just do the like I would work I would work to figure out a way to spend the least amount of money that gets you to the point where you have one that works for you and solves the problem and you
could be like okay this is this is it I I believe it like it's also going to help you motivationally because you've been working on this for a couple months and there's been some setbacks and so you you need like you want to win you want to you want to feel that win and I think in order to do that you need to get one pair for yourself yeah so in terms of like users that I should be talking to it's hard to determine like
being I feel like I'm one of the few non-te companies on here so I'm not I've been kind of confused about like because I've already done you know not that market research has ever finished but you know I've done a lot of market research on this that's great yeah sounds like sounds like people want this as well get the mission the critical thing here is like how do you build one
for yourself and then maybe how do you like if you've built one you could actually probably make 10 like find other women that have you know similar similar needs and say like here I made I made one like do you want to buy one and in the same way that you made that first one you make five more okay I had never even thought about that but yeah yeah sounds good I think too often especially like I'm a hardware
Hardware guy like through and through too often we get set in these like what we see on Shark Tank and all these things where it's like you have to pitch your one idea and then you you get funded then you get to make a thousand of them that's actually incorrect the best way to start a hardware company is to build one then build two then build five and build 10 like you do it
iteratively you don't you don't go all the way to the finish line and build a thousand of you just build like and maybe the first few that you make will have to be sold at a slightly higher cost they're handmade and they're one-offs and in that case like like maybe maybe you'll have to charge a little bit more money but that's okay because you hopefully you're finding people who really have this problem and
are willing to pay a little bit more to solve it okay how much attention should I be paying to like social media marketing at this point digital marketing that doesn't sound like your main problem your main problem is you need to make one the pants yeah yeah you need to make one and then you need to sell one and for that you don't have to go to social media you could just go to your friends
like other other High other people that have this problem like go to them and say like hey I made these awesome pants they're so cool do you want to buy a pair yeah and I I mean I have like at least 40 people or so who have already signed up on the great amazing so like make one and make five and set like I'm sure that within the group of 40 you'll be able to find five people who will pay
maybe double the price in order to get one of the first ones cool thank you and thanks for doing all this no problem I'm excited to see it pa pants with pockets thank you you cool good to meet you and great to meet you too thanks for going over time too problem see you soon bye okay cool next up is Lindy with work work life Lindy's here hi Lindy can you hear me yes I can hear you hi
it's great to meet you why don't you tell um oh wait so your name is Lindy the company's name is work lifee just yes what is work life yeah so work life provides mental health care as a workplace benefit the idea is to provide every employee regardless of whether they have a mental health issue with regular company funded confidential therapy okay so a therapist so it's it's a it's a
workplace benefit yeah so it's that like you get to go to a therapist every single month and talk through everything is like as Founders we're always interested and excited to like share everything that we've been working on when in reality when you're sharing it with someone who's just like coming from zero you may actually need to pause and let like just soak it in and so like you kind of you said that first sentence
and then you started saying so many other words that it over it overfilled my buffer and I was like left kind of thinking okay let me get this straight so in your case you you make a uh what was it called a the a mental health a mental health Wellness benefit for yes to offer to their employees yes okay cool so then you pause and you like wait for the person to say like okay I got it
and then maybe they ask a question and my question might be like I think I've seen some other companies that offer this so what's special about yours okay so the difference between my company and other companies is that the other companies still have all these barriers to entry on seeing a therapist you have to get to the point where you actually are having some sort of issue
you have to go through Tech first or you have to talk to an unlicense therapist before you actually get to see someone so what's happening is you're only treating people when they already have an issue instead of preventing the issue altogether so what I do instead is that I actually proactively sign all of your employees up for therapy so everyone's going and normalizing therapy making it easy to
access sounds a bit creepy well it's completely confidential a lot of people will not want to do that and does this work if everyone does it yeah so you would do opt out style so if you think about um organ donation for example so in the US organ donation is an opt-in system so you have to say I want to be an organ donor and when you want say you want to be an organ donor only about 15 % of people yeah yeah and
there's tons of studies that show yeah I guess my question is like Insurance generally Works in breakage model where they like they oh that's that's insurance right you want to charge more and then you hope that people don't use it work how does it how does this benefit work if everyone has to use it or or by default uses it yeah yeah so the r on therapy is actually huge so
just there's a ton of research on this that shows that someone just going to therapy can increase productivity by about 73% reduce turnover by 67% and reduce sick days by 62% so it helps people deal with their mental health issues they come to work and they're more productive so it's actually to the workplaces benefit to be paying no matter what and getting people to do it no matter what instead of only
having them do it when they seek it out so like an average tech company can be making like 50 to $200,000 per employee just by virtue of them going to therapy do you have do you have any customers right now so I actually am only seven to eight weeks into even past idea stage so my question is actually how to make my first sale so I started cold emailing I'm a cold call I'm going to network EV
asking friends but what's the best way to make the first sale in B2B I mean I would go to the place where you worked previously oh I I don't think that they would be a potential customer but they might have connections to other like the reason why I that is presumably you you noticed this problem because you experienced it yourself right yes and so it kind of makes sense that the last
place where you experienced this was the last place where you work they know you they trust you presumably they like you like try to make the sale there if you can't make the sale there you know that's that's not a great sign because like again they know you they trust you they had the problem like figure out why you could make the sale there and then hopefully if you can make the sale there
they would become a reference point where you can spread out to other companies and you can could probably get introductions through HR like HR teams say oh it's working really well at this first place you should definitely try this because we're seeing this huge Roi Improvement when more and more people go to therapy okay that makes sense so what I was planning to do is to email all of
my personal contacts and kind of say hey can you warm intro me to I wouldn't do it I wouldn't do it by email I would actually phone people up like look through your LinkedIn and say like hey so and so works over here at this company um I'm going to go take her out for coffee and we're going to catch up and we're going to talk about what we're up to and I'm also going to say ask a very specific ask uh here's the idea
that I'm working on could you introduce me to the HR Director at your company um so that I can give them a call okay that makes sense okay why I do this in person is it's so easy to say no over email like it's so easy I'm just going to push it off I'll snooze it whatever but if I'm if I'm in person like it's very hard to say no in person okay that makes a lot of sense so it's about me doing the
inperson meetings with people to then make the connection because I understand that this is like a niche product yeah at the start where I'm getting the early adopters and so I need that warm introduction to really get in the door the reason the other reason to do it in person is you gather so much more feedback by visually seeing how they react to your idea um versus an email
where they're thinking about the email they'll type it and you won't get all of that data from like their interim thinking like which questions did they ask um did they get it right away did they like for me I had to have like a couple follow-up questions in order to like fully understand it and you can really do that only in person so not only do you want to like do the meeting
to get the warm intro in person you also want to like do the warm intro in person so instead of saying like I'll just like send send that person an email be like can I just like show up at your office for like 20 minutes and we'll just talk it'll be super quick I just want to like have you read the book um the mom test I recommend I haven't but I've actually done this a lot in person where I've
been pitching people in person like probably 50 60 people at this point I been pitch people in my shared lift rides yeah the what what the book The Mom test talks about is not actually pitching it's actually the process of doing the user interviews to un to better understand the problems that these HR departments are having so like one that you'll want to do is before you actually
start talking about your solution you'll want to talk to the HR Director and say like tell me about the top three problems that your employees are having these days and if it's it's a much it's much stronger if they actually Bubble Up the problem themselves because that primes that means they're primed to actually solve it if they say oh man like we had this huge problem towards the end of last year a lot of people not
showing up for work it was like combination of the normal like you know sad Seasonal effective disorder stuff plus like some bad sicknesses and so we've actually like you want them to bring up the problem instead of you telling them what you think their problem is okay that makes sense that's very logical and then I can step in and make the sale after I'm already having the
conversation like not to push the book too much but it's a really good book because it talks about this exact strategy of like using the conversations rather than sales pitches but more for like learning more and you're only eight weeks in like you you still have a lot learn about what are the problems HR departments like are running into so my last job was actually interviewing HR departments about amazing they
had which is where the idea came from so and so I also have those connections where then I can follow up with them and say like hey I talked to you my last job sounds like you're in the right business yeah yeah all right awesome thank you so much I really appreciate it Happy to happy to help and send me send me a tweet in a couple weeks as things I want to catch up and hear how things are
going okay thanks thanks Lindy cool well hope you lasted the whole way those two hours with us get a sample of how office hours go down um if you'd like to do these I hope we'll we'll probably run a couple of these over the next few weeks um we'll post it on the start school forums uh that will be where you'll hear about these for um for setting up than thanks very much