I just landed in beautiful San Francisco. Is that good? >> The number one that I care about is Dude, I love Claude. Have you heard of >> Whisper Flow? There's the logo. >> I'm going to be honest with you guys. I have been feeling a bit stuck recently. If you're new here, my name is Chris. I build productivity apps. I got a couple apps. They're doing decently well, but I'm a bit lost direction-wise. I've been trying to figure out, do I focus on one app? Do I just keep building out a portfolio? Should I raise money for some of the apps? I genuinely don't know what the right answers are. And I thought the best way to figure this out is to just talk to other builders. I'm based in Dallas. There really aren't that many builders out there. So, I thought that the best thing to do would be to fly to San Francisco. I've lined up a bunch of events and I'm going to talk to people who are way ahead of me so I can learn as much as possible. And I'm going to take you guys along for all of them. >> Does it work? Can you hear me? That looks crazy. >> That actually looks so crazy. >> Heading to Hog Patch. >> Oh, dude. That's my spot. >> Happy Friday. >> Okay, so we're on our way to Hog Patch, which I think it's the co-working space by Post Hog. and we're going to meet up with some other creators, some startup founders I think from YC and the Founders Inc. batch. We're in a Whimo right now and yeah, I think this is Brian's first Whimo, right? >> Yep. >> It's pretty good. >> Yeah. But this is uh very convenient for filming cuz I'm usually very awkward if there's a driver right here. So, this is like a little mini recording studio we have. >> How's it going, driver? >> Going well, Brian. Yeah. Who do you mean? >> We're going to meet up with uh Will Wang and Mickey. So, these are two creators you guys probably are also watching, too. Will Wayne makes super aesthetic videos. He's the reason I have this camera right here. So, if you notice the quality has increased compared to my other videos, you can thank him. I don't even know how to describe Mickey's content to be honest. Just really educational, super smart guy, really good builder. I mean, I guess I don't even know how to describe my content to be honest, but we have very similar content. Stripe sessions is also happening this week. So, a ton of builders, founders have all flown in from everywhere this week. There's so many people that we have to meet up with. So, this is abnormal, but I think it's because of Stripe sessions. >> How are you, brother, dude? >> Good. I bought your camera. >> Oh, yeah. FX30. Yeah. Yeah. Sick. He's actually set up. >> Okay. A little bit about the event. This was actually an event hosted by Posogen Convex, mainly for people in the current YC batch and the Founders Inc. Canopy program to learn more about content creation. Myself, Will, and Mickey did a little panel talking about what it's like to be a content creator. And then we got to hang out and talk to all the founders. I'm probably going to say this a thousand times in this video, but the energy here is so different. Everyone is really passionate about what they're working on. And I felt nothing but inspired talking to these founders. And unexpectedly, Tim, the co-founder and co-CEO of Post Hog, was actually at the event. If you're not familiar with Post Hog, it's the analytics platform I've been using for years in every one of my apps. I've talked about them a ton on this channel. I'm also pretty sure they're a billion-dollar company. So, I asked, "Is it possible for me to interview Tim?" As you can imagine, he's incredibly busy, but he had 15 minutes, and I was lucky enough to record it. The main thing I wanted to ask is, "What is it actually like to raise money?" Because I've been bootstrapping every app I've ever built. So, I wanted an honest opinion. What's the lifestyle like? What would he tell someone in my position? Does he have any advice if I wanted to raise money? And what does he think about bootstrapping in general? So, here's my conversation with Tim. >> Yeah, thanks for taking the time, Tim. Appreciate it. >> For my audience that knows me, like I have a bunch of apps. I'm like known as a solo developer, Bootstrap guy. I don't want a team. I feel like you're kind of living in a whole other world. Um, and if I am being honest, like I feel like I don't know enough to talk about it. That's kind of why I came to SF was to talk to builders, people who've raised money, just to figure out, is this something I should consider? What are some of the pros and cons? What was the reason you guys chose to raise money? Maybe start with that. >> Um, so we thought about bootstrapping and we bootstrap for the first 6 months. Um, and I think it's a really very legit option and I think the right option for a lot of people. I think it depends on the kind of company you want to build, right? If we build something in a very competitive space, >> it would have been very hard to bootstrap that because we wouldn't have been able to make the investment. That makes sense. We needed to make our >> Were there any mistakes that you guys made early on or just recently just in terms of fundraising or deploying the capital or something that you're allowed to talk about that would try to help me maybe or anyone watching try to avoid some of these things? >> So, I think the horror stories that you hear with fundraising, it's often working with the wrong people, right? So you you work with an investor who has the wrong incentives or the wrong um idea about what it means to invest in companies. One of the great things I think about the SF ecosystem and especially I think the YC ecosystem that we came from is there's a lot of uh lot to be lost you know by investor from screwing over the years one of the things we always talk about is we never want to raise from like European VCs and there's nothing you know wrong with European VCs on their own but but I think the incentives are just kind of wrong in terms of what they care about and how they think the return is going to happen frankly just like get good advice from a lawyer is really boring but like often I think first- time founders don't know what the standards are for a lot of this stuff. If you're, you know, building like a really hot AI startup, you probably have a lot of leverage, right? And that leverage may disappear and in too much time. We don't know, but you can ask for certain terms that maybe otherwise you couldn't have. So, I think you should get a really good lawyer. Like, don't try to negotiate this yourself cuz the thing about getting a good lawyer who's seen a lot of these deals is they just know what's standing sort of thing. And you're paying, you know, I think a typical series A probably is like maybe 100 grand in legal fees now. They're kind of worth it, you know, for a top because they've seen 000 series A. So they know what they can ask for, know what they can push for. And so one of the things that we did as well is like just talk to our lawyers and go here's how much leverage we think we have in this negotiation. >> Okay. Okay. >> And so what do you think we can push for given that? Right? You probably want to try not to give away a board seat if you can. But even in later rounds, okay, you give away a board seat, but can you structure things so that you still remain in control, right? Like sometimes people will push for two founder board seats, two investor board seats independent, that kind of means you lost control, right? you push for more founder control on the board side. And then there's all sorts of, you know, we can have a very long conversation about the sort of intricacies of like, >> you know, voting control and and all this other stuff. Again, that's just what you want to talk to to a lawyer about, but there's a lot of ways in which you can tilt things towards yourself or towards it. >> Has your lifestyle been what you anticipated after raising money or is it so much harder? Is it easier? Like >> kind of comes back to the control thing, right? So, um I think a lot of people end up being very stressed throughout the companies they're running or if they're not in control of their business or they're working with investors who um are pushing the wrong things on them, right? Like maybe your investors are pushing you to do enterprise sales when you think you should be selling to smaller companies, right? I see. Oh, okay. And you know the wrong investors will push for that push for that too early. And so that's why it's really important to figure out who you work with. We've been very lucky. We've had really great investors who've been supportive. again investors telling you to hire lots of fancy execs, >> right? That's actually one way that people lose control of their business is they have a bunch of execs running around who they don't trust, they don't actually like. Um, yeah, ultimately again depending on the control bit, but it's your company. You should you should be the one making those decisions. I think often when people are unhappy with their businesses when they made that trade-off incorrectly or whatever, right? >> Got it. Okay. Okay. And so, yeah. So, so that's, you know, part of it. I think maybe one of the things you're asking about is, you know, how does the the financial bit of it work, right? Like this depends on your investor. A good investor would want you to start off. They want you to make a decent salary so that you can focus on the things that you should focus on. There's a great Matt mockery page. It's online. It's like a blog post or something where he talks about having kids as a CEO. And again, this is a more of a later stage thing. You know, if you're having kids, like you need like this insane number of kind of nannies and night nurses and household managers and whatever. Like his point is like the company should pay for that, right? the company should pay for you to be able to focus on building a really big company. And so again, good investors understand that stuff. I think a bad investor will want you to be starving. But yeah, if you're maybe bringing it down more towards the early stage, like if you're stressed about taking them bus or taking an Uber, that's decision power that really you should be spending on the business, right? A good investor, look at this. Like no investors ever asked apart from maybe in D like how much we pay ourselves. Some people take the piss, some people pay themselves way too much and see the company as a piggy bank. And yeah, you should be focused on increasing the equity value. >> But also again, like SF is an expensive city to live. >> You don't want to live in a really dodgy area with safe once you raise some money, it's totally reasonable to pay yourself enough to be able to get, you know, a decent apartment somewhere, be able to just take an Uber where you need to, etc. I think that is actually probably a misconception that I had for a while, which was like if you raise money, especially if you're coming from like a a big tech company or something like that, you're going to have to take a pay cut. You're going to take a pay cut, you're going to do this. So, that not necessarily true depending on I guess the investors. >> Again, I I I think if you're saving I think the the rule of thumb like if you're saving a lot of money, you're probably uh paying yourself too much. investors want you to be focused on the business, not on >> kind of personal on your personal problems or the other thing that people uh probably don't talk about enough publicly is just secondaries, right? Okay. Yeah. >> And and so one of the things that people I think a misconception with bootstrap versus VC is that if you're a bootstrap business, you know, you can take out money immediately, whatever. If you're a VC back business, you're going to be working for a very long time until maybe there's an IPO and then you can cash out. The reality is kind of keeping it generic. But I think most people that get to like your series B, series C. Often investors want you to take out a bit of money kind of again for the same reason because you know they want you to be focused on the business. They want you to not be stressed about your personal life and they want you to take certain risks with the business and if you're so worried about preserving the value that you're not taking big bets. That's way worse for the business and the investor than you being able to take some big bets. Secondaries are just a way basically it's a line incentive to get like it aligns the investor. This is maybe the nuance that people don't get about the bootstrap thing is like you have to build a big business if you take BC money investors want you to be able to take secondaries at a certain stage sometimes now I think people taking money at C stage which I think is pretty punchy sometimes happens series A but I think series B series C is pretty common and people will take some money off the table and again it aligns incentives because your investor want you make a big moonshot right you probably want to do that but if all your net worth is in the business you're less likely to do that so >> I think secondary These are another thing that people often when they're talking about the bootstrap non bootstrap thing like the answer is then the liquidity only happens at the very end right more now it can happen >> okay that's actually new to me I've heard about secondaries I didn't understand that that's something that people do to like kind of >> and and again I incentive and we've done secondary rounds for employees before as well so even employees it's often it means that they can get >> Oh interesting okay okay I wish we had more time but I appreciate it yeah thank you so much for taking the time thanks so much Yep. Believe it or not, we don't show confidence as much as we should. Now, who prefers rock? >> Oh, yeah. >> Did you live in >> My life has been changed again every single video. >> 5.5. We're not on this, bro. You're cooking. >> Yeah. No, you need to draw everything right now. >> You need to drop. Have you heard of claw code, >> dude? I love claw code. Have you heard of I love claw code. >> I think you look like a guy who will make a quad code video. >> I look like a guy being in a quad code ad color. >> Now I'm walking. I'm going to be like, did you push straight to broad right now? People are flying in like Korea. >> This is your life. You got camera guy for >> practicing. She's cooking. >> Hey, what's up? >> She's cooking. >> Just practicing too. >> Another building that's like five stories. That's where all the portfolio teams are at. So, this is the first roast one of your apps. >> Oh my god. >> Just bought this camera a week ago >> to look like a good boy. >> Yeah. I've been using the DJI Pocket 3 and then uh I just upgraded to this cuz um I'm going to start doing some Inerson events and stuff. So >> Oh, nice. >> Yeah. Yeah. I was like, "Oh, I should do this here." >> So this you you guys work together? >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I brought him in for the camera, but he's like we went to college together. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm actually doing a um >> Okay. This part was completely unexpected. I ended up meeting Mark Lou. If you don't know who Mark is, he's one of the biggest indie hackers out there. He's a solo dev and probably the main person I look up to in the space. He happened to be in town for Stripe sessions. And this morning, I saw he was hosting a meetup at a park. So, I went and over a 100 indie hackers actually showed up. If I'm being honest, I mainly came to SF to talk to VCbacked founders, people raising money, building fast growing companies. So having this indie hacker bootstrapper meetup come out of nowhere felt almost like a sign like the universe telling me I should just keep solo bootstrapping my apps. I talked to a bunch of incredible builders all fully bootstrapped and the vibe was completely different than the day before. Not in a bad way just very different. Less conversations about scaling founder meetups and raising and more talk about building. I also got to talk to Mark and his wife Wanji and a huge shout out to them for putting this together. >> We're probably the only people in San Francisco who did not did not raise money but we're ALL PROFITABLE HERE. I THINK IT'S A BIG ROUND OF applause for us. >> All right, so we are outside of Whisper Flow. There's the logo. I guess that's the only sign. I think they just moved into this office recently. So, I don't see a sign here. But, uh, yeah, we're going to go talk to some of their engineers and I think their CTO and ask them what it's like building a fast growing company. Most of you guys probably recognize whislow because I talk about them all the time on my videos. It's like the best way to talk to cloud code and cursor and honestly just dictate everything. >> Uh we tried to on iOS right we can actually get a little bit more that makes sense. One of the interesting things about the engineering stuff is like we're on four platforms. some Mac, Windows, Android, they're like completely different. >> I got a tour of the office which they just moved into and I had the opportunity to sit down with Sahes, their co-founder and CTO. There were two main things I wanted to ask him. Similar to him, I wanted to hear more about the VCbacked lifestyle, but the second thing I wanted to ask was about how they built such an incredible product. I can't prove it, but I feel like Whisflow has one of the best retention graphs, and it's genuinely such a sticky product. With him being the CTO, I wanted to know how they pulled this off. So, here's my conversation with Sahes. When you guys decided to start the company, were you guys ever considering bootstrapping it or was it always like this is something that we need to raise money for? >> We started as a hardware neuroscience R&D company. >> Okay. >> It's very hard to get hardware, neuroscience, R&D to market for hundreds of thousands of people without actually having some level of VC back funding. So for us, it was a clearer decision from the start. >> What do you think about bootstrapping versus raising money? I think the most important thing in either world is to try to build something where you believe you have a sound business model. So one of the advantages of bootstrapping is you know you have a sound business model because you're not operating off of externally injected cash. One of the failure modes of being VC backed is you can hide a broken business model behind VC dollars. How quickly you want to grow and how big your product ambition is over time is a really big part of it. >> Okay. Like for us, we want to work on a combination of training better and better voice models for voice input, but then building towards next generation human computer interaction, which looks like using voice to drive actions across your operating system. Doing that in a way that's sticky, growing the product to, you know, hundreds of millions to billions of users who can use it every day. All of those things require building a really, really talented team really quickly in parallel. And so that requires capital. Is there a reason that you guys feel like I want to build something this big or something that grows this fast? Why were you guys so drawn to that idea? >> It's a mix of delusional belief that it's possible to do these kinds of things and some bit of capability of actually being able to tackle those kinds of problems that motivates us to take a crack at it >> and in some ways a little bit of a sense of responsibility too. If I feel like I have those capabilities, I want to be able to use it to build things that people find useful and that fit their lives. And >> Got it. Okay. >> That can help just a little bit. >> It sounds like you have a really good motivation for it. To be honest, I've talked to some other founders and I feel like they just want to build a really fast growing company because it's cool or that's what everyone wants to do. What do you think in general about I don't even remember what to call it like not founder lararing but like you know what I mean? Or at least from the outside it does seem like there's a lot of people who are founder laring here. >> SF is a spectrum. I tend to think almost all of the most impactful businesses in the valley tend to get built because the people starting companies care deeply about the problem they're solving. I think that's the source of the motivation for myself and my co-founder. Like my co-founder was building voice assistants and voice interfaces since he was like 12 years old. >> Okay. >> Literally since he was 12 years old and so he's been obsessed with this problem for like a decade and a half just cuz he cares about it. I would probably take a hunch that OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, all these places are built because the founders have some personal experience of a problem they really really care about solving. >> Um, there's totally a segment of SF that's founder as a lifestyle. As many companies that are founder as a lifestyle get off the ground because it's not it's not a great lifestyle choice. >> Okay. >> Uh, it's uh very fulfilling. It's very rewarding, but it's not a fun way of park. >> Okay. Wait, can you tell me more about that? cuz I think that's like personally for the longest time I just wanted to build a lifestyle business. Seeing people raise money and be founders, it just looks so exciting and like really cool. You're saying that that lifestyle might not look like that. Like what's the >> um the lifestyle in the sense of to be a successful venture scale founder, I have to continuously look at our business and say, "Hey, how can I make this thing go even faster?" And so there's a perpetual dissatisfaction that I almost have to have with the state of things continuously. Okay. >> Um, and a perpetual paranoia in the sense of like only the paranoid survive, if you've heard of that book. Not like I'm panicking or anything of that sort, but very much always being on that's a part of it. And a huge amount of tolerance. The amount of random stuff that gets flung >> in your face in the middle of being focused on something else is very high. >> Do you have any advice on helping people in the journey whether they should actually raise money for something? If you just had to pick like maybe one or two things to help them determine what they should do like what would what would that be? >> There's kind of two things that are important. First is do you really care about the problem and would you be happy working on that problem for 5 years 10 years? If you are then it's like probably worth it and if not then I would avoid it because the problem hopefully will stay constant over time. If you can do that then as motivating even through all the up and down. And then the second is how big is the market? That's not something that I I'd say I fully appreciated until more recently where how big is the market is the ultimate determiner of what can the venture scale outcome be. If the thing that you're building is a broad enough problem that over time it can become bigger and bigger in terms of the impact that it has on people's lives, that's a good candidate for raising money versus bootstrapping it. >> You guys genuinely have probably one of the best products that I've seen. I don't know what the retention is, but I'm assuming it's extremely high. Everyone I send to Whisflow is just like they're still using it like months later. Do you think you guys have got lucky with that or do you have any advice on how to build something that sticky? >> It's always a combination of luck and skill. >> Mhm. >> So, we actually started building our voice interface is building a voice assistant that could do lots of stuff like it could say, "Oh, book me a dinner with my friend, you know, 2 days from now nearby." >> And the thing that we all noticed internally is we all tested the application. >> Okay. >> We didn't use it frequently. >> Okay. Oh, so you guys were testing but you weren't using the product. Okay. And this is a really important distinction. It's like maybe not that obvious the first time. I've always wanted to love whatever I build >> and so I get attached to it >> and then I use it as a tester of the new feature and then I think I'm using it and in reality I'm not. I'm just adding in dictation was the first thing that we built where we realized that all of us were just shifting our behavioral patterns. We realized the handful of key things that made it sticky. There's like four or five key things that make it super sticky >> that we identified and then we doubled and tripled down on those things. That's what made it work. Like for example, the first version was a Chrome extension. Like 80% of our users turned off of it cuz then they tried to use it when they weren't in a Chrome app. >> I see. >> And then they got annoyed and then they gave up cuz they couldn't build the habit everywhere. >> Okay. >> And it was as simple as that. So from that perspective, I think it was very much as you build products, especially for selling to consumers or individuals, step one is almost always getting engagement and retention, right? If you get a thing that's sticky, then you can think about activation, >> right? >> What fraction of new users can you get to use it? If you get that right, then you can think about growth and getting more people into your funnel. And if you solve that, then you can think about monetization. I think the thing that we did right with the first product was get a simple thing that was really sticky that actually shifted behaviors. M and every time we think about new features that we want to launch at scale and really put effort into it comes from that kind of magic moment of figuring out, hey, how do I get this thing to be super sticky and super engaging that really fits into people's lives and then layer on more and more from there. >> Got it. Okay, >> that's kind of the product approach that we take. I think that's one that it actually is true of almost every sticky consumer product. >> They solve it in that order and they solve each of them really, really, really well. What are the most important metrics that I should care about? I guess aside from revenue or actually yeah, is that an interesting metric or like what what's the most important metrics that >> revenue is the last metric we care about? >> Interesting. Okay. Okay. Interesting. >> Uh always engagement first. >> So what's the depth of engagement people have with it? >> Okay. >> And using that to create a retention curve so you know what engagement people have to hit to stick around forever. >> Okay. Okay. >> Then using that to create essentially activation curves of figuring out what helps people get to a point of stickiness. Okay, >> then using that to figure out I think growth is kind of separate once you figure those three things out and growth has its own set of metrics to look at >> I think simpler to define and then monetization comes after that right if you start from something sticky that's super highly engaging that has that retention >> everything else follows that makes sense >> whereas if you don't start with that it's going to be very hard >> the number one thing that I look at right now at this point is week one retention that's like all I care about like am I looking at the wrong thing >> all of those metrics are predictors of what you want longterm, which is essentially week 12, week 24 retention. >> Oh, okay. >> And so the goal is to look at a retention curve where your x-axis is time and your y-axis is the percentage of people who stick around. Okay? And the goal is to find the elbow. After what point do you stop seeing things change? And you can use that as the point of different outcomes. So for example, we see different things once a user has crossed a thousand words spoken or 200 words spoken or 2,000, we'll know different things about how likely they are to stick around forever. Oh, interesting. >> And so the goal is to identify what's that threshold where you know, hey, after this point, people will stick around forever. Otherwise, before that, if you haven't gotten there, it's just about depth of engagement. What gets people to keep coming back a lot over and over and over again. So, there's a very big difference if somebody opens your app once a day. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Or once a week >> versus if they're opening it 20 times a day. Those two don't they're not the same thing. I see. If somebody's coming and looking at your thing 20 times a day, you you figured out something that they actually really really care about versus something that they'll probably forget about over time. >> What did you guys track to like >> for us it's words dictated? >> Words dictated. >> How much have you spoken to your computer? We also track number of dictations, but really words dictated is pretty good. >> Were you guys just trying to move the needle on that? Like you guys were like, let's try to increase this or were you guys like how did you use that metric? >> So that was actually after we found that we were pretty sticky. >> Okay. >> Right. Internally. So we use that to figure out are we sticky externally. What we try to do with more and more people over time is figure out how do we get them to their aha moment faster >> so that they can get there. >> Did that change early on cuz you said that you did that when the product was sticky but I feel like a lot of people including myself we do not have a product as sticky as whisper flow. What were you guys looking at early on to even just get to that stickiness point or was it just there was nothing. You guys are just trying to build a really good product. >> It was all qualitative. I tend to think that for most highle feedback, >> just seeing five people use a product will tell you so much about what they'll do or don't do. >> Okay? >> Like even for onboarding, watch somebody on board, they'll they'll get confused at some screen and they'll click around and they'll do some funny stuff and that's usually enough to learn what the next revision should be. >> Okay. Okay. >> And so it's qualitative to get that initial phase of stickiness. For us, a lot of that was internal. And with our first 100 external users, like some of my friends who I said turned off of it because they couldn't use it outside of Chrome, I didn't need to instrument to know that they turned off of it. They just told me, "Hey, I stopped using it. I kept trying to use it in my native Slack app and I kept use it and it annoyed me, so I deleted it." Got it. >> Okay, fair enough. >> Yeah. Do you think if you tried to track words dictated for day or the metric you guys are looking at too early that would have been detrimental? >> I think we had it probably, but it wasn't the primary thing that we were iterating off. It was too slow. >> Okay. For anyone that's trying to build a really good product, like what would your one piece of advice be? >> Build something that you want for yourself and keep iterating to make it better and better for you. You're going to be very tolerant of a crappy version of something that you want for yourself. And then if you keep getting rid of every little annoying thing about it, chances are there are other people like you out there in the world and you can build it for them. This is what we did for ourselves and this is what we continue to do. And it's something that makes building fun because you can build a thing that you want. Then you figure out how to make scale over time. >> There is a lot of stuff I didn't realize you guys were really looking at early on to try to help you guys build such a good product. But yeah, thank you so much for for coming on. I appreciate it. >> Thank you for all your thoughtful questions. >> Yeah, for sure. >> Maybe I'll set. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Zuks FM. >> I don't think I Yeah. >> Climb it. >> Oh, we got a three-minute ride. So, >> three minute ride. >> Yeah. >> What is this? Emergency. >> Holy crap. >> Oh my god. >> Oh, did it? Oh, >> bike lane. Bike lane. Oh, >> that's so interesting. So, this is just glass and then >> Yeah. What is this? Like belt. >> That's a camera. A camera. Oh, there's USBC charging and then I guess Oh, this is Oh, oh, wireless charger. Look at that. >> Damn. Wow. Look at that thing. That that was uh 3 minutes >> potentially around like what kind of help you have a YouTube channel. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's the channel? >> It's just my name Chris Kroy. Many of subs. Many of subs. >> Conspiracy theory or actually I don't think it's conspiracy theory. I think it's been confirmed is that their naming scheme was based off of the coffee blends from that place. >> Are you serious? >> Yeah. Wait, are you talking about this logo like that? >> Yeah, that that that's what they had on the apron. They had a slightly different version of it. I don't know if it was as like uh Postcript Coffee. >> Postcript Coffee >> and they're gone though. >> They re they rebranded. I think I think they're still called Postcript. I think maybe some other VC took over or something. >> Yeah, it was like the go one of the go-to cafes for the Jackson Square releases. >> It's actually called OpenAI now. >> That cafe Open AI. >> Next, I stopped by Grapile. Greile is an AI code review platform. I've talked about them in my workflow video, but I genuinely cannot ship code without using them now. They built an incredible product, a very fast growing company, and they did it with a much smaller team than the other companies I've visited so far. I got to interview Doc, who is the CEO of Grapile. He's by far the youngest person I was going to interview. So, I was really curious what kind of perspective he was going to have. I mainly wanted to talk about VC, raising money. I wanted to know what he'd wish he'd known before he started. And similar to Whisper Flow, Greile has such a good product and I wanted to ask him how they pulled this off. I asked him stuff like metrics and I was actually surprised by the answers he gave. But let's jump into it. Here's my conversation with Doc. Also, I don't know if you're comfortable telling them your age, but like >> Oh, yeah. That's fine. >> Okay. Okay. I'm 24. >> Yeah, he's 24. That's so crazy. And he's built >> geriatric in Silicon Valley. >> Oh my god. >> But he's built such an insane company at such an early age. And I feel like this is what Silicon Valley is basically. And this is your first time raising money, right? >> It is. Yes. >> Why did you choose to go that route or was this something you could have bootstrapped or No, not really. >> I went to school in Atlanta, very removed from Silicon Valley. Georgia Tech as a fantastic computer science program, but most people from the school, at least at the time, would go into big tech. Today, it's much more common for people to explore joining or starting companies or working on sort of independent projects. But I got introduced to this world that is in Silicon Valley where people are given capital to work on ambitious things. And that idea was very appealing to me and uh so we decided to move out here. Funny story, I actually didn't even occur to me that one could bootstrap a >> Oh, really? Okay. It was because of there's I think the the cultural zeitgeist around raising money and starting companies is so entrenched. There's like stories of lionized stories of founders raising large amounts of money. I think a lot of technology press seems to cover raising money. >> Now that you know that bootstrap was an option, would that have changed anything for you? >> So I think there there's kind of two separate questions here. One is like would I have wanted to bootstrap a company? I think that bootstrapping is so much harder from what I can tell and there's so many things that are easier for us because we have upfront capital. And the second thing is I think there is a set of very ambitious ideas that are very exciting to work on where so we'll you know code validation the amount of code written in the world is very large there's a lot of economic value in validating that code and figuring out if it's correct and so on and because this opportunity is very large and the potential size of a company that could successfully take the market is very very large. Um this is a very exciting space for very ambitious founders and an exciting space for very uh sort of uh very good investors with large amounts of capital. Let's say if we were to bootstrap a company in this space, someone would compete with us with vastly more resources because America is a efficient market for entrepreneurship. And so I think most ideas that can be venture funded will be venture funded and that makes it hard for you to compete. There are examples of people beating competition with vastly more capital, but it's very rare for companies that are completely self-funded through their own revenue to be able to beat companies that have raised any amount of outside capital. >> Is there anything that was surprising to you that you did not expect now that you've been doing it? >> I think the biggest thing was I just didn't know how hard it was going to be. I I probably wouldn't have started if I knew. >> Um and I think and kind of point I don't think I can see myself starting another company in my lifetime. This is the company and and this have to do whatever I can to make this work cuz I don't want to go back to not having market fit. It's very difficult to explain to someone what product market fit is like uh that hasn't experienced it. And I think a lot of people try to describe to me what it was like and and there were moments in time when we thought we kind of had it and it was just very clear once we did have product market fit that any of the earlier times when we thought we did were not real. If you have it, you'll know >> and if you're not sure, you don't have it. And I think that is very true. Are there any mistakes that really stick in your head out that you really wish you could tell your past self or anyone else who's watching if they plan on starting a company like Reptile? >> Yeah, I think it took us a long time to internalize that you have to spend a lot of time with your users. And second, we internalize that it is much better to build something for yourself or for people you know than to build something for a hypothetical third person. I think the transition was actually us realizing that the thing that we were doing before was not working. >> Okay. >> I think that you can trick yourself into thinking that things are working for a long long long time. And there was a piece of feedback that we got when we first so soon Bashant and I moved to San Francisco in 2023 with this idea of sort of you know whatever with a backpack and a dream or whatever and and we kind of wanted to uh to to create something really great and uh it always almost felt like something was working. It was we were we almost had a customer we almost had this we almost had revenue. We got this piece of advice that we were writing these monthly investor updates. I forget who it was, but someone said at the top of the investor update, put revenue equals and just put like the literal number of dollars you made that month. And to a great degree, revenue is a proxy for how much value you it's a floor of how much value you're creating for users. Yes, there there's many unethical ways to get revenue. For the most part, I like to think that businesses are fundamentally good. And when people make money from their business, it's usually because they're creating value for someone that is happy enough to pay them and is getting enough value for the product to pay them. And so putting revenue equals and putting an actual number at the top is forces this amount of discipline. And since then and you know it's been two and a half years we haven't missed a single month. We always send an investor update every single month. It's always on the first of the the next month and it always has at the top line exactly how much revenue we make. I think that forcing yourself to be extremely honest about what isn't isn't working creates a lot of positive decisionm which in our case was realizing that this we were at a time working on customer feedback software for consumer goods companies which is just like you know like we were called to we didn't know anything about any of this stuff and when we realized it wasn't working we're like wow we're not going to be able to make money in this space. We don't know anything about it. We need to work on something where we have some potential to have a unique insight or have some differentiated opinion. >> I have some choices to make whether I should continue bootstrapping some of the stuff I'm doing or raise VC. I think a lot of people who are watching might be in the similar situation. Has the lifestyle been different than you imagined it would be? >> One thing is is sort of at all times kind of while you're bootstrapping the company, it's a two-way door and you can just decide at any point to raise money. If you realize either a it's going to be hard to succeed and create a big business without it or you just change your mind of what you want to do, maybe the thing that you want to say, I I actually don't really just want some large amount of cash flow for myself. I actually want to create a really large business. >> And you have to know that your financial outcomes might be like meaningfully worse if you raise VC than if you didn't. And that's something you kind of be okay with. And you have to realize that you're you're switching the the risk and reward profile of your career. From a lifestyle perspective, I think in in software and technology in general is extreme winner take all market. Salesforce is 10 times bigger than HubSpot and there really isn't a third CRM and Uber is 10 times bigger than Lyft and there really isn't a third ride share company. It tends to be the case that if you do something really well, you get to do it for everyone. If a market is very lucrative, then it's usually the case that a lot of smart people are going to be trying to take the whole market. So if you're the third best, you might as well not try it in the first place. It's quite difficult to be the third best. So, I think that if you're going to go do the VC route, which implicitly means that you're trying to create a really, really large business, I think you kind of have to believe it'll be the only thing you do and and you're and you're you're playing to win. And to a great degree, I think having started this company right out of college was to to some degree an advantage because my co-founders and I have had never sort of experienced working life. Like we were called students, but we were sort of studying all the time and working on the startup stuff on the side and like not sleeping very much. There are many disadvantages of being very young when you start trying a company. Lack of experience often times lack of judgment. It is harder to recruit really great people early on. Less so in Silicon Valley where I think there's less dogma around age but in general there are some disadvantages but I think the advantage a lot of the advantages in the shape of like you you have no expectations around lifestyle. You're perfectly fine and I basically shared a room for a long long time because we were totally okay with this. We barely had enough money to pay ourselves and we're still roommates to this day. And that is a thing where like it would be harder for us to uh to live with this lifestyle with limited resources and pouring ourselves completely entirely into our work. I think it would be harder if we had these very sort of complete slides. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. It's like it's way harder to hit do that downgrade like in terms of lifestyle versus like the other way around. That makes sense. Okay. You guys have built in my opinion like an insanely sticky product. It is so good. Are there any key metrics that you guys looked at early on? >> One of our strengths uh early on was that we were very per efficient with how we operated. We we always picked sort of the exactly right amount of effort and exactly right share of quality and velocity and so we actually didn't measure anything for a long time because we were kind of using the product ourselves and we're thinking this is clearly bad and we don't need to create like a elaborate eval machine to be able to tell it's bad. It it is bad. You're looking at it and it's bad. You should at least get it to a place where we think it's good and then we show it to users. users think it's good before we start to get to a point we measure it. It was only several months and hundreds of customers later that we were at a place where customers were telling us that things were a little bit off but it was like harder to discern exactly what was wrong and so then we started to create more elaborate eval infrastructure but early on it was extremely vibes based I think that allowed us to move very fast and be very honest around >> and and you know I think when you then you don't do premature measurements of the product and you kind of trust your instinct and one of my favorite things was uh from David Holes the founder of of midjourney where the way that the eval midjourney is that he has I think some number maybe it's like 12 prompts or something or maybe it's like 144 prompts and the prompts create an image and then a 12 x 12 grid of images appears on a screen on a huge projector in their office and David looks at each one of them and and and if they're good then that build passes and is published >> and that's how he tests models like he is the evol and you know that the is a little bit different that product is art it's harder to measure but uh I think that uh you can go remarkably far especially early on just kind of trusting your instinct and being honest with yourself and whether you're good or Okay, that's actually really good for me to hear because I feel like sometimes I have this imposter syndrome and I really feel like people watching sometimes early on they're like it seems wrong if I'm not tracking certain things or not looking at certain metrics but hearing that a company like Reptile or even like Midjourney they're doing some vibe based kind of stuff going on that's actually really good to hear that makes me feel less bad about doing that >> the thing that was also hammered into us especially by by YC early on was before product market fit your only problem as a company is that you don't have product market fit you have no other problems It's the the only thing you need to worry about. And um it you know your problems aren't that your recall or precision aren't high. It's that you don't have customers. It's always the problem. And then after product market fit, you start to get to problems two through 10,000. But you have to slot problem one first. It's the one that unlocks all the other problems. >> I think that's all the questions I got. Um but there's so much good stuff in there. Doc, I appreciate doc. Yes, >> doc. Okay. I appreciate you taking the time and stepping away from dinner. So yeah, to thank you so much. >> Yeah. Why you so articulate with 24 hours? Oh, just I practice and see. Yeah, just that's awesome. That's awesome. You guys are this young and then also the team is this small for the kind of impact you guys are having. That is so crazy to me to like see this in person. >> You know, other you know um party people. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Guess how much party does. >> Well, now that you say it, now I'm going to try to guess lower, but like >> I would guess like 30 40 probably. Okay. That's me lower. That's me lowering. Okay. Cuz I probably would get fired. He was hilarious. >> Yeah, >> I filmed this and then like I think Wait, who's the guy on the left? >> Arnold. >> Arnold. Okay, so he >> have to blur the he >> Oh, I remember we were like you were like, >> I don't know what this is. So, dude, I rewatched it when I was editing and I was like, "Dude, that is so funny." But I like didn't keep it in. >> I'm no Please send it to that. >> Okay, so the last startup office I visited was anything.com. Anything is a platform where you can go from prompt to fully working application. They're growing really fast and recently raised a big round. But here's the part I didn't know going in. They actually bootstrapped for the first year and a half. They got a few million revenue, completely lean before they ever took outside money. So far, everyone I've talked to raised money from the start. So, this was a conversation I was really excited about. I talked to Drew, the CEO and co-founder of anything. I obviously wanted to ask him about raising money, things he's learned, but I was also very excited to hear his opinion on bootstrapping and what I was doing with my portfolio of apps. Let's get into it. Here is my conversation with Droo. You are at what I would classify as a very fast growing startup. You guys raised venture capital and I wanted to hear about your experience doing that. >> So, we actually bootstrapped the company for the first like year and a half of running. >> Um, and got to a few million in revenue to bootstrap. Two things. one, we were like incredibly lean. It was just me and my co-founder and we had like much bigger ambitions. Okay. And so someone actually told this to me at the time and I thought it was great advice which was like, "Hey, can you quote a company of like the scale of ambitions that you're trying to create that didn't take outside funding?" And I tried really hard to come up with one that was at the similar size and ambitions of like what we're trying to do and the answer was no. And so it was really like that was like the deciding factor for us since taking money has been better than expected. I think it gives you more leverage to take things on. it comes with higher risk and the shot of failure, but I think that's kind of expected in the game that >> um you'll either be extremely big or you'll be a zero. In some ways, I think raising money takes a lot of middle options off the table, which is interesting. It's good and bad to that. And it kind of depends upon what you're optimizing for in terms of like final outcome to you that'd be meaningful or exciting or what you want to take on. >> Was there any mistakes that you can think of on fundraising, building like a VC bag company? >> Yeah, I mean, so so many. I've raised capital like three times and I think I've gotten better and better at it over time. But it's definitely a skill you learn. It's not something that I think anyone is first naturally good at. >> Got it. >> There's all these little mechanics, tons written about it, but fundamentally you're trying to go from no market for your company uh to a market for your company. >> And so one thing I like think I've just constantly underestimated is how much human psychology, managing the process, creating FOMO almost matters more than the fundamentals. Like don't get me wrong, you have to have fundamentally something interesting, but the difference between like a high valuation, a low valuation is a lot around like how you actually manage that process and orchestrate that. And not to say like you should play games, but that like a lot of how you control the process of information and how you control the process of getting a deal done is what ultimately determines whether something closes fast or slow. >> Got it. Okay. So, you think you learned that like the second, third time, like a lot more? I think I got lucky our first time we raised capital where we had a bunch of revenue and and we had an interesting compelling story and it was our first round ever. So it closed relatively quickly. Our second time was a brutal struggle. Um and it was because I made this mistake of not thinking enough about optimal times to raise why and then the third time was much much better just from learning some of these dynamics. I'll ask two specific questions to myself, but then also I feel like it's also questions that my audience has because a lot of people are either working on multiple apps and they're kind of trying to figure out should I just keep building on a portfolio of apps like just we're talking like small apps so nothing venture or focus on one and spend a few years trying to really build that out. If you had to choose one of those two, what would you recommend? >> Yeah, it's it's so interesting. I've actually never been a good portfolio, but I think it actually depends way more on your personality. >> Okay. Okay. Um, like I'm the type of person that like when I get like locked onto something, it is my like 100% focus and >> I get like obsessive on it and I'm actually a really bad multitasker. But some people are just like amazing multitaskers. They can like zone in and so I think first is like know yourself like what are you good at? I've had two periods of my life where I've built a portfolio of apps. One was when I was a solarreneur myself before I raised the capital. >> I didn't know know that. >> Yeah. Okay. >> And I and even though I wasn't a good multitasker, I was good sequentially. And then the second was when Marcus and I like started our company and we like didn't quite know what we wanted to do. We know we want to play in software land and so we actually ended up just building a lot of different things. We also went pretty sequential in that in that way and just like focused in and then we killed ideas like really fast. So like you know we went a month or two three that and we couldn't really see the traction. >> Um and we learned a lot about like the market by building something getting it out there trying to land the first customers for it seeing how they're using it. Then we were pretty ruthless and like brutally honest and like this is not going well. And then when we landed on the idea for anything or a code generation system that let people build apps much faster, like revenue took off immediately. >> Interesting. >> Um, and so I think you can often feel the market pull. And if you're not feeling the market pull, then like you should decide to pivot away from it. I personally land a little bit more like the focus direction. And if you are going to run a portfolio, run a portfolio, but do it sequentially. >> Okay. That's actually the first time I've heard anyone specifically say just not a direct like this versus that, but it's like personality based. Now that you said that, I'm like, I agree with that. I think that makes sense. >> Some people are amazing at it. I mean, some people can like do like five apps in parallel and and I for what it's worth, I do think AI is making the portfolio easier than ever. Um, like I'm noticing myself inside the company and the number of things that I'm working on inside the company has definitely like increased with AI cuz there's a lot of leverage. Like you don't actually have to like physically go do every single thing. >> So, it might be like changing back to the portfolio direction as approach. you should do a portfolio to figure out if there's anything that you can be obsessed about. And if you don't know, maybe a portfolio helps. Um, but then as you start to like feel yourself get obsessed. Like there's not much that can beat someone obsessed >> about a problem or space or everything about it. Like if you're just thinking about it like 24/7, all angles of it, you're going to like run circles around the person in your space. >> Split focus >> doing split focus like as a portfolio. >> That makes sense. Okay. Bootstrap versus raising money. I know you said like depends on how fast you want to grow. What about in terms of lifestyle? >> Starting business of any type is hard. So I have like mad respect for anyone who bootstrapped or venturebacked, you should expect for it to be hard. I think people think like, oh, if I had a bunch of money, this would be way easier cuz then I have all these resources. And that's true in some senses. In the other sense, like the expectations for what success looks like, >> yeah, >> just go up dramatically. >> The hurdle you have to cross once you've taken someone else's money for it to be successful or useful um is there. And there's a lot of like SCOPs, I'd say, um, of like one path is better, the other path's better. I think they're each hard in their own way and and you should determine like what is the right outcome for you. >> Okay. Okay. Cool. We're limited on time, so he has to go. But if you want to see me do a long interview, just leave a comment and we'll we'll make it happen. But thanks so much for the time, D. Appreciate it. >> Thanks, Chris. >> Thanks for going over, man. Appreciate it. >> Specific enough. >> Oh, that's perfect. That's perfect. Okay, that was great. Right. What do you think? I did not know you like like bootstrapped. >> Yeah, I've been the solarpreneur. So, we're glowing for it. I went into this trip pretty lost, not knowing what direction I should take my apps and honestly my life. I think it's pretty clear after my conversations with Drew and then the conversations with Mark and the other indie hackers, I definitely want to keep bootstrapping and building a portfolio of apps. So, at least that's not going to change. But I will say my overall opinion of raising money has changed now. I don't think it makes sense for the stuff that I'm currently working on. But there was one thing that stood out among all the conversations, and it's that all of the founders I talked to were extremely missiondriven. And the majority of them didn't raise money just for the sake of raising money. They did it because it was the only way to execute their vision and the mission they wanted to carry out. I haven't talked about on this channel, but there are a few bigger things that I've always wanted to build and problems I've wanted to solve in the world, and I think raising money might make sense for those. And after these conversations, I am more than happy to keep that door open now. So, I'm going to call this trip a huge success. I hope you guys enjoyed this vlog. A huge shout out to Brian for filming for me. If you like the style of video, let me know. I am more than happy to make more vlogs like this. I spent a ridiculous amount of money on this camera and I have to make it back. A shout out to all of the people who took the time to talk to me and I will see you guys in the next one. Wait, wait. What' you say? >> Where are we going? >> We are going to the Claude No, we're going to the Code with Claude event. That's what it's called. Basically, it's Claude's developer conference. I think it's the first time that they're doing this and it's going to be a bunch of sessions. I think Boris and Cat Woo are going to be talking. Oh, I'm also excited to see uh The So, you can see him in person this time. Yeah, he was really nice when I talked to him. So, I don't think anyone will remember me, but I'll try to say hi to everyone I met last time. I just wrapped up my time at the Claude Code developer conference and I was actually thinking about putting it in this video, but I realized I think this needs a dedicated video. There was so much stuff that happened here. I learned so many different things and it just doesn't make sense for this current video. So, there will be a part two to the vlog where we're going to go over my time at the Cloud Code developer conference. I talked to Orus, Cat, Thoric, and a bunch of other people from the Cloud Code anthropic teams. So, if you're interested, subscribe and then stick around for that. But, thank you guys so much for watching this video, and I will see you guys in the next one.