Business Tips fro a Y-combinator alumnus

Okay.

So hello, Alex. Welcome.

Thank you. Good to see you.

So good to see you. By the way, just for everybody to know here, you know, Alex, you're a veteran in the, in the ad tech space. So I'm very excited because I think you have a lot to share as far as tech industry is concerned. And to be honest, when I first got to know about you, I knew that, you know, we had this common workspace Addictive, but then when I learned and researched more, I realized that I knew a teeny tiny aspect of who you are actually. So I'm very, very, very excited to speak to you today. First reason why I wanted to bring you here on this podcast is because I would like— I know that you were— you started in 2008 as an entrepreneur while you were studying.

I see. It was a side hustle that I had. So I was doing websites for companies when I was a student. So I was in 2008, it was 18, 17 and 18. So I only started websites. I think our first real company was 2012.

2012. Okay.

Yeah.

So I read that about you that you started your company as it was a side hustle, as you mentioned. But I did see that you managed to scale it to— how much was that? $60K, $80K? Somewhere along the lines?

The websites? I can't remember. It was Probably north of that, but I don't know if I, if I kept my LinkedIn up to date, but it was probably, yeah, it was probably north of that, uh, fairly quickly. Uh, it wasn't any sort of SaaS. It was really, you know, build a website, uh, charge for it, charge for maintenance, which was great. And, and then repeat, rinse and repeat, ask for referrals and kind of, uh, that was a good, good initiation to sales in general.

Yeah, exactly. But yeah, the second reason, as I was going to say, mostly I feel like us humans, the ones that have not ventured in, in the entrepreneurship space, we think of everything as singular. You know, what was that singular moment when this idea came to you? I wanted to talk about your experience because I know that you've evolved. You've been in the ad tech space and today you're doing something really cool with AI creators, um, in, in the UG space. So let's, let's go back to when you started and what motivated you to start with it while you were studying.

It's a great question. So I started actually even earlier. I never shared this publicly until a few days ago, but I have worked on a private beach in south of France when I was 14 and 15 years old. And in France, it's illegal to work until you're 16. And that's why I didn't necessarily share it publicly. Now I think I'm off the hook. It's been long enough. And, um, and so that gave me a lot of confidence into talking to people. Uh, having a job was exciting. Making money was exciting. I was paying— I was paid a lot, uh, for, for my age and actually paid a lot, period. And, um, so that, that gave me an initial point, initial starting point. And after that, I just started to See, okay, I actually know how to do websites. It would be cool to use the fact that I've been very used to talking to people and customers. Let's try to sell them websites and see if it's just the website. I did one website for my dad for free and I liked it. I was like, let's see if I can do this for other people and kind of started very organically where people asked me for a website and kind of That was a good like student hustle and paid for a few things. And it's only after that I met, I was like really lucky enough to meet 2 amazing founders in my school, in my university. And then they elevated me to a new level. And that's when we started a real company together.

Interesting. And going back to this, was that an agency when you were helping with websites or was that like a side hustle?

Well, there were people part-time that were helping me here and there that I was paying. I don't necessarily want to classify it as an agency or a side hustle in the sense that it's very hard to define what that was. It was basically me, my computer, and some part-time consultants, and we were building a website every now and then for a client that wanted a website. So call it an agency or call it a side hustle, it's like the truth is somewhere in between.

Yeah.

But it wasn't a full-time occupation for sure. I was studying in a software engineering school, so it was more so a side hustle by that definition. But I was operating as an agency where we actually did a lot of the work that an agency would do. So yeah, somewhere in between.

And why did you choose specifically ecommerce and event websites back then? I'm just trying to understand, you know, what were you thinking back then?

Oh, I wasn't that picky. It was whoever wanted to work with me, I would take. E-commerce, actually, there is a— it was an introduction from a friend to a C-level executive who needed the website redone for a small company. And it kind of, you know, once you do one, it's easier to get another because you have the experience and you can showcase like, this is what we did for this person.

Yeah.

So kind of started on a random note, and then I honed in on the initial successes we had.

I see. Okay. And then you also had a couple of side projects and I was seeing that I actually tried to look for it, UberStats. But I wanted to ask, like, I saw that you got a lot of traction there. How did that happen? Was that— did you try some marketing gimmick or how did you spread the word around this project of yours?

Yeah. So for context, UberStats was a project where you log into your Uber account and it would tell you how much you've spent in your lifetime on Uber and in every currency and so on, but really like the total amount. And it was a side project over a weekend. It was very fun to work on. And I did this to myself initially, like for myself, because I had a debate with a friend because apparently I was taking Uber too often.

Okay.

And there was no way at the time to figure out how much you spend in Uber. So that's why I started it. It started as a joke, or as a bet rather, with my friends. I said, no, no, I'm not a big spender on Uber, and they were saying yes. I did this for myself and I realized, wow, I spend so much more than I thought. And so I polished over the weekend, I polished the project, and I put it on Product Hunt as the only source of marketing.

Mm-hmm.

For the product. However, one sort of a funny trick that got me most of the traffic is that we were missing a viral loop. So how do we get, or a K-factor, like how do we get users to refer other users to the product? And I decided to tap into people's ego. And we, I say we, it was only one person. So I was, I had a leaderboard.

Right.

And so when you had your account, when you logged in and you could see how much you spent, we could rank you based on all of the other users as to like, are you the number 1 spender on Uber? Are you number 3? Are you number 167,000? And then we made an image that was generated from those leaderboards to show where you are in the ranking. And then people posted that to Twitter. and other social media channels. And so like, look, I'm the number like 127th spender worldwide on Uber. And that got a lot of activity. So I can't remember the data. I think it's on my LinkedIn, but it's, I believe we hit a million users pretty fast or maybe a few hundred thousand users. I can't remember, but it was significant for the short amount of time that it had. And then some press picked it up. So we had, I think Business Insider wrote an article about it, and then other press articles wrote an article about it. And so that drove additional, you know, additional traffic.

That's pretty cool.

And all of that led to traffic after that.

That's pretty cool. I mean, you tapped into the UGC thing back then.

Yeah, it turns out. Yeah, that's a good point.

I really wanted to bring this up because, you know, from the— from based on my research about, about your different ventures, it seems like Virality, network effect, these are some, some of, some of the things that you've really tried to, to leverage. And it's, it's, it's interesting to see that you also try practicing it on your side projects.

Yeah, I didn't necessarily— it wasn't something I had designed from the get-go. Initially it was just like, hey, let's get people to see how much they spent. But really, every time, as soon as you get a user, like, I feel like the first question you naturally tend to ask yourself, at least I do, is how do I get the next 10 ones? And so I don't think from it as a virality perspective necessarily, but just, okay, how do we add more buckets of users for every user we onboard? And something very similar happened with a side project I had done for Gary Vee. So he's an entrepreneur from New York and he— I built a search engine for him. He didn't know I saved it for him. I built a search engine for me to search through his videos what he said. And so you could type, for example, in my search engine, you could type like Instagram, and then it would look through all of the videos that he produced. And every time he said Instagram, we would show you a link with that video and the moment in the video where he said Instagram. And so if you're trying to remember like, oh, I know Gary talked about X, Y, and Z, but I He does a million videos. I don't know where he talked about this. In our search engine, you can find this information in a few seconds. And here the viral hack was just emailing Gary. I didn't know him at the time, but emailing Gary and be like, Gary, I built this awesome search engine for you. I hope you like it. And then instantly he put it on his website. He connected me with his teams. He put it on his website. He talked about it on YouTube and so on. And so again, we hit like, I believe it was 1.5 million at peak users, which again, you think about it from a virality perspective, I think from just like, how do we get buckets of users on the product? And there was no viral loop. The viral loop was just, let's tap into an existing community.

Yeah, I totally see that. Like tap into the existing community and see how you can scale it from there. So there's some niche tapping in there, right?

100%.

Okay. And then when did MotionLead come into the picture? I believe after that?

Correct. So it was, it was before the Gary Vee project. I can't remember if I did the Uber project after or before, but it came in, we started in 2013. And we, it was, I believe it was April of 2013. And then we incorporated in September of 2013. And then 4 months after that, we went through YC in January of 2014 in the Winter '14 batch. And that's when MotionLead, really in September when we incorporated, we had our first client day one, a big client, and that kind of kickstarted the activity for MotionLead.

Yeah, and then it was acquired by, I believe, Addictive, and you moved to the US, and that's something that I really wanted to talk about because you moving to the US, did you have exposure Before you moved for business purposes? What's your background about that?

Yeah. So, it turns out I was born in Boston, but I never lived in the US until the time where I moved for MotionLead initially. So, I moved from MotionLead to San Francisco. And then for the acquisition of Addictive, flew back to Paris, lived in Paris for 8 months where I studied as well in Paris. prior to that. And so I moved back to Paris for 8 months and then moved back to the US. So 8 months later, the acquisition, to open up the Addictive US office with, at the time, my co-founder Louis. And so we moved to New York after the acquisition. But prior to that, I have never lived in the US, but I did come to summer camp.

Oh, really?

Uh, in the US with the ambition— my grandparents were living in the US and the ambition was I was growing up in France. French are not the most English savvy people. And, uh, I think my parents knew that. And so they wanted me to learn English at the source. And so they sent me every summer, uh, at a summer camp, like YMCA summer camp to learn English and have fun there.

Ah, okay. Okay. So good exposure for you there.

Yeah, it was great.

Yeah, why I was asking this is because, you know, many companies want, want to get into the US market. And so I wanted to know for you how hard it was as a startup, especially— I don't know how well it was known by the US market, you know, because I guess it's harder. What is your take on that?

Yeah, we think it's a mix of being very lucky and prepping correctly. So, there's a few things that we did. The first with Xavier and Emilien, so the founders of Addictive. The first is, and with Louis also who worked on this launch, the first thing we did was we wanted to work with customers from the US, from France. I mean, the customers were from the US and we were based in France.

Right.

And the idea was like, let's launch the US activity with a few customers. Let's not make a big splash, let's not hire a team, let's just try to get a few customers from the US to validate there's demand for our product in this market. So we worked by night, a lot of the times by night, from France to work with US customers. And sometimes I remember very vividly, Luis and myself were in the office, in the Addictive office in Opera at the time.

Oh, that one.

Yeah. A good old favorite office. And so we, we were stopping work by night when people started showing up in the office in the morning. And this was our cue, oh, we might need to sleep. So let's go to sleep at 9:00 AM and then we'll wake up later. So like we had these like quite often, the like work by night, it allows us to secure a few customers.

Mm-hmm.

It allows us to secure revenue and establish that there's demand in the US. And only then we moved to New York because we already had customers, we already had revenue, we knew we had demand, we had already tested the messaging and so on, and the value prop, which is very expensive to do if you're testing from the US because it might take 1 iteration to get right, it might take 27 iterations to get right.

Right.

But because we did it in France and we traveled every now and then, like I just flew to the US. to meet with customers. On my LinkedIn, I had put that I live in San Francisco. And so people were talking to me like I live in San Francisco.

Oh, mm-hmm.

So, so like these, these things helped. And then we had to do an expedited immersion. So to this day, I tell this story often where I had in my bathroom and bedroom, I had printed pictures of people that I wanted to work with. like our prospects.

Okay.

Because at events, like if I was going to an event at a mobile ad tech event, I knew no one there. And if you don't know anyone and there's 1,000 people in a room, you can't talk to 1,000 people. And so it's very hard to figure out who you wanna really talk to. And so I had photos and company name. And so I knew if I were to see that person at an event, I knew that That's a person I would want to talk to because they're in my like photo board. So that's kind of a—

This is really interesting. How many pictures did you have in the bathroom?

Oh, north of 300, like a lot.

Whoa. But I think—

It looked like a serial killer apartment at some point.

I bet. I believe, you know, remembering the names of people makes a great impact. You know, if they see you and you can recollect the name, I think that's, that's a great thing to do.

It was a great hack for us, uh, certainly. And we, uh, you know, I didn't necessarily remember all 300, but I knew, I knew a good amount of them. And I knew that if I saw a face, even if I can't put a name to it, I knew that that face was relevant for what we were doing. And so that, that helped a lot to get the first, to get the first competition going because One very simple example that I can share is that I met with a woman from the photos. So I recognized her. I knew what vertical she was in. So she was a social gambling app. And when she talked to me, she's like, oh, who do you work with? And I could have said, oh, we work with non-gaming, gaming, lifestyle, whatever. What I said was, oh, we focus on social gambling. And so instantly it was a click for her. It's like, oh, interesting. If you do this, like, I'm probably interested in what you're gonna say next. So it's like those things, right? So I didn't necessarily need to remember the name, more so what vertical, what company they're in, so I can adapt the pitch without asking them, where do you work at? Oh, you work— oh, you know what, it happens that we're also specializing on that vertical.

This is so interesting. You know, I've never heard of advice like this, but I think This, this is people's management in a way, you know, you being able to know how to manage people. And I— that's, uh, it's a crucial aspect of running a business, something that we often overlook, I believe.

Yeah.

I know that you have this image of being a very hardworking person, like all the people that we know commonly. I want to know from you, um, if you were to start your own venture what does it take to get there to a level at which you want? You know, hard work, smart work, people often talk about it. And I've seen you openly talking about hard work in a positive way. So.

Yeah, it's a very hard question because the— it's a great question, but it's a very hard question because the— I don't know that anyone has a playbook for what you need to do, um, to, to build a successful company. And I would argue, you know, if you look at the best incubators in the world, so Y Combinator, they still have no idea how to build a playbook. They've optimized to increase the chances of success, but they're still very far from 100% success rate. So if they— and they have the most data, the biggest dataset in the world. So if they haven't figured it out, then— And then you look at founders that are— that have built billion-dollar businesses in the past, and they launch a new venture, and it Oftentimes doesn't work. So it's very hard to say like what it takes. What I think about at least, and so this is not necessarily advice, but more so what I tell myself, is there are a certain number of cycles you can go through as a company until you run out of cash.

Mm-hmm.

So I think of those as bullets to use or as like ammo to use. So if you have, let's say, $1 million in the bank as a company, and you're burning $100,000 a month, you have 10 months ahead of you. That represents 10 bullets. If you think of a bullet as a month, it represents 10 cycles. What can you do to make sure that you can do as many iterations on your company as possible before you run out of cash to find a product that works and to find evidence that There's, there's something there. And so for me, the, the number of hours is not necessarily as important as just accelerating that cycle of iteration. And so the way I do this is number of hours, but others might argue, you know, you can do less, fewer hours, but be more productive and so on. I'm thinking it's a race against myself.

Yeah.

So every minute that I don't race, I'm using ammo, using a bullet on something that's not meaningful, and that's just going to get me further away from my goal.

Yeah.

So again, I don't know if that's advice. I think a lot of people function differently, but certainly I think if you have 24 hours in a day, say you sleep 6, it leaves 18 hours in a day. Maybe an hour and a half per day for food. Intake, that's, you know, you're left with 16.5 hours. Maybe take a break every now and then, leaves you with like 15.5 to 16.5, um, to 16 hours. Okay, cool, you have 16 hours to play with.

I love this idea actually, cycles. Thinking of— I mean, having a timeline and thinking in terms of the cash flow and the cash burn. I think this brings somehow momentum. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it could build momentum, right? Because You see that time is running, so you have to meet up with the expectations in order to survive.

Yeah, 100%. And look, it's funny, we recently— our BD person, his name is Jacob, awesome dude. He— we recently came back from a trip to Cyprus. We had a conference in Cyprus, so it wasn't beach and towels, but we came back from the conference and said, in Cyprus, and we had booked a lot of demos after the conference. And we opened up— when we came back to San Francisco, Cyprus and San Francisco has 10 hours difference, right?

Right.

And we, we opened up our Calendly, so our calendars, uh, at 5 AM every day to make sure that people can book calls at 5 AM and 5:30 and 6 and 6:30 and 7 and so on. Um, and we did this to accelerate the cycle And what we did the math afterwards on how many weeks we saved, and we saved 5 weeks of cycle because we were starting earlier. We were able to do 32 demo calls in a week. And the problem with Cypress is because of the time difference, they can't do calls at 9:00 AM San Francisco time.

Correct.

So let's say you started at 8:00 AM or 8:30, you can do only 1 or 2 calls in the day.

Yeah.

We had 32 demos to book, so that's 16 days. And then there's other calls as well, right? So we did the math and it was like approximately 5 weeks that we saved just by doing those calls earlier. So yeah, so I think reducing the number of cycles or accelerating and increasing the number of cycles you can afford to do, is, is probably the one thing I would focus on early stage.

Certainly. And also, you know, you talked about different timelines, so I think even in that case it holds true even more, you being more conscious about the cycles. In your experience, I mean, the way you've worked, and I know that, uh, what has helped you close deals, especially when you did not have a proof of concept when you just started? Because I think that's a blocker for many early-stage entrepreneurs, uh, closing deals. when they do not really have network effect, any proof of concept? How do you go about it? What did you do?

Well, there's a few things I can say. The first is that no one is— no one has the perfect— like, no one goes selling a product early stage and goes in there with like, oh yeah, we have the perfect thing. It's, it's everyone is in the same boat. And so it's just a matter of self-confidence of, okay, well, what are your goals? My goal is to sell a product and to make sure that we can build the best possible company in the world. Okay, cool. To do that, you need to get clients. Okay, cool. To get clients, you need to pitch. And so it becomes, you break down a bigger problem, a big problem into smaller problems. And I think about, okay, well, I'm gonna get punched in that meeting. Right? I'm gonna get a no, and it's gonna be an ugly no. It's not gonna even be a polite no. And I had this actually just last week, even 2 weeks ago, the worst meeting of my life.

Ouch.

I had the most difficult meeting of my life where I actually had to take a few minutes to breathe through at the end to be like, okay, let's just reset the clock here. So I think it's understanding what's the worst that can happen. And the worst that can happen is you get a no, and the worst that can happen is you get an ugly no, and that's it. And then you realize, okay, well, I'm gonna get an ugly no, but let me sure— let me make sure I get feedback. Let me make sure it's a useful no. And if you flip it that way, then you think, okay, well, whatever happens, I'm gonna, I'm gonna come out winning because I'm gonna learn. Maybe I'll close them, even better. And if I don't, then I'll learn. So like, that's the first thing. The second thing is Having luck. Again, I think luck is a very important part of it.

Yeah.

And knowing how to generate luck or trigger luck or attract luck. A lot of my friends tell me I'm very lucky. It's true. And so luck is a component. And 3 is just asking the right questions to our prospects. And it's all about understanding, tell me your pain points, walk me through your workflow. And let's see what pain points you have, and I'll tell you if my product solves one of these pain points. So we're not selling a product, we're selling a solution to a headache that they have. And so those 3 things are the things I think about constantly. And if you're, you know, convinced that your product is solving a headache, then I think you should be able to go in there and sell.

I think this is solid advice, especially the first 2 points that you mentioned. A, you know, not being afraid of losing a deal and just knowing that you would learn something at the end of the day if you receive solid feedback and then asking the right questions. So you receive the feedback and you ask the right questions. So you already have a lot of information to iterate on, on your offer, I believe.

Yeah. And don't get me wrong, you need to come prepared, right? So you need to know your shit. You need to know what you're talking about. You need to know the market. And so the person in front of you needs to understand they're sitting across the table from someone who understands them and who knows what they're talking about.

Right.

And there's a lot of selling made in just a human connection of, do they understand my world? And it basically comes down to if they understand my world and they're telling me this solution works, it's almost like, you know, 80% of the sale. And so you need to know your numbers, you need to know your markets, you need to know your pain points and your customers. So you need to come in prepared. But with that, that's just the first step.

Indeed, indeed. Alex, I know that you are an investor and you've invested in more than 200 companies, I believe, more than 200 for sure.

Yeah, somewhere up there.

I really have a couple of investment-related questions. I mean, for somebody who is seeking investment at an early stage, what kind of investors should one seek for? What is that advice that they should know in order to— because you're not going to go after Any kind of investor, or even incubators and accelerators? What could one keep in mind about that?

For early-stage companies, so if their goal is to attract cap— first of all, I would say, especially in this market, it's to try to build your product without raising capital, or at least like to delay. I'm not saying you should not raise ever, that's on a case-by-case basis, but at least to delay the raising until Mm-hmm. And so you're either a repeat founder and you'll get support from investors because you've gone through this before. But if you're a first-time founder, it's harder to— it's much harder to attract external capital if you haven't proven something. With the evolution of tools out there, it's much easier today, and every day that goes by, it becomes even easier. It's much easier to create a product even if you don't know how to code, even if you don't have an engineering background, and so on. And investors expect founders to roll up their sleeves and to do the work.

Right.

So there's no more excuse today to not build like an MVP, except in some very rare instances, like if you're in the defense military or something like that. But there's no excuse in not having an MVP and not having like 3 customers.

Yeah.

And so if someone comes to me and says, hey, I want you to invest because I want to build a product, an app, a business, I'm like, okay, show me what you've done so far. And they tell me, which happens a lot, like, oh no, I first want to raise and with that money I'll hire engineers and we'll build the product. It's like automatic no-go.

Yeah.

Because you haven't proven that you can hustle and you can figure it out. So that's, Like the very first thing. And then regarding accelerators, most accelerators are not creating any value.

Yeah, I had this conversation with Emilia today.

Oh, okay, that's funny.

Yeah, but also you, you've spoken about it, you know. Uh, I remember in one of your talks you said like just some of the people just want to get it, get, get into an incubator or an accelerator just for getting into it.

Yeah, like they're playing the startup game, right? So what is the startup game? You raise capital or you go to an incubator. You hire people, like you don't really build product, you're just playing the startup game. And incubators, they give you money, so it's great. So at least you think it's great. I would argue most accelerators are probably distracting value, not creating value. It's not just neutral because they actually suck your time.

Yeah.

And the time as an early stage founder is the most important asset you have. You probably don't have a lot of money. You probably don't have a lot of clients, probably don't have a lot of employees. All you have is time. And these can be a real time suck. So I think that's why I would say most, not all, but the vast majority of accelerators are just destructive of value.

When some of them approach you and they talk about numbers, you know, metrics, which kind of metrics and numbers you think are most important? Because homework is important. And sometimes you miss the key numbers that you need to communicate to an investor.

So it depends on what stage we're talking about here. If the founder is early stage, pre-seed, yeah, like pre-seed, they just started, you know, and they have some kind of like traction. What you need to show early on, you either have a trajectory where you have a lot of customers, And then awesome, then you don't even need an investor. But most of the times what happens is you have a few customers and you want to make sure that you have like 3 to 10 customers that are very happy with your product. And it's much better to have 10 customers or even 3 customers that are very happy with your product.

Right.

Than having 50 customers that are kind of churning halfway through. And a way to evaluate You know, happiness of customer. You can think of NPS.

Yeah.

As a very simple solution. You can think of retention if you're a paid product. But it's like anything over 30, 35 NPS out of 100. If you think of anything above 30, 35 NPS puts you in a good spot where it's like, okay, you're actually building a product that creates value and you can start charging for it. trying to get more clients. So I would look at, yep, NPS above 30 is probably where I put the threshold.

NPS above 30, okay. Hmm. So when, yeah, okay. I see MVP and then obviously being able to show that the customers, the little pool of customers that you have, they're happy with it.

Yeah, because it's not, at this stage, it's not about showing how many clients you have. It's showing you've built a product that made 10 people happy. or 10 businesses happy. And chances are, if those 10 businesses are happy, you'll find more businesses that are just like them. And at least you've shown you've been able to identify a problem, you've been able to offer a solution that has been accepted by some clients. That's already a huge step because a lot of companies don't get to that point.

I totally agree. And on that note, I want this one last question about your venture, new venture. it's pretty interesting, you know, AI creators for the US space. Um, could you expand more on that? And how did you apply the idea of MVP? Because, you know, in the market out there, people are— there are 2 kinds of people. Some are hesitant about AI actors and some are very pro because obviously there are a lot of logical reasons behind it. How did you see it and how— what kind of response did you receive in the market so far?

Uh, so regarding MVP, we started with human actors. And I think the peak pain was when we had a studio where actors were coming in and they were recording. So we were doing short-form content to drive user acquisition installs. So installs for mobile apps.

Right.

And so we had a studio and actors were coming into that studio and we were telling the actor, hey, when you come in for an hour, record 20 hooks. So 20, like 5-second videos that says something to start the video off. Record 20 hooks and then record 5 segments in the middle and then record 20 call to actions in the end. Like a call to action could be download now, it could be go check it out on the App Store, it could be here's the referral code, it could be whatever. And we edited those manually. We have an awesome team who took all this footage, took all the hooks, made all the variations. So hook 1 with the base, with the call to action 1, hook 2 with the base and the call to action 1, and all of those variations. And if you think about the way we use AI, it's at least in our company, Pooldata.ai, it's really about automating a process that has been done very manually, plus So that's just the stitching part, the editing part, and so on, plus converting people into digital replicas. So we had the problem. I own a mobile app studio. The mobile app— we own 22 apps. The mobile app studio needed content for user acquisition. We were doing this whole situation with actors coming in the studio. We solved the problem for ourselves. So we built the MVP for ourselves at first. It worked. And then we decided to expand to, hey, if we can do it for ourselves, let's do it for other customers too. And that's where we saw success with other customers and where we decided to focus on Poolday as a company. So it's kind of how we think about MVP, or at least how I thought about MVP for Poolday. But it wasn't like it was a prepared plan. It was an organic transition from what we were doing manually to, hey, we can do this No, I love that.

And especially the fact that you can do A/B testing as well. Yeah. As a marketer, as a marketer myself.

That's right, go ahead.

No, as a marketer myself, I feel like there's a lot of value there because, you know, you decrease, as you say, the operational timeline for you to test different things and implement it.

Yeah, it takes— look, we did this, the same amount of work or the same amount of output, it used to take us about 3 weeks and now it takes us about an hour. Like, it took genuinely 1 hour to create the same content, like the same exact number of pieces of videos to display on networks, on ad networks. So if you go from 3 weeks to 1 hour, you take a few hours in the day and you have like 2 months of work done. that we used to do in the past at a fraction of the cost, of course. So certainly A/B testing is very, very powerful, and video A/B testing is hard. Video when actors are involved is much harder, and here we allow marketers to do this in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks.

Very nice. Alex, if you were to build your own dream team, if you were to start again, What kind of people would you like to have in your dream team? I'm asking this question because, you know, as, as an early-stage entrepreneur, it's mostly you. You're the CTO, you're the CMO, you're everybody yourself. So as entrepreneurs are trying to expand, what shall they look into a person when they are trying to hire? And obviously that depends on the position, but in general.

And I think that's the most important, it's to First of all, I'm lucky enough to have a co-founder, so I don't have to be the CTO. I would be a very bad CTO. But the key there is to solve for— a lot of people think about hiring in terms of like, oh, I assume I'll need this and that because most companies need this and that. Really what you want to do is hire to solve a problem that you have at the company level. And so you do this enough times manually, it's like, oh, I'm really wasting a lot of time doing this inefficient work and I'm not good at it and it could be done better and it's valuable to the company, let's hire someone to do that. And so for whatever role that is, I would first, I would encourage people to hire to solve problems, not hire because you have an investor who told you you need to hire people. And the second thing I would say is that it's really important, especially for the first 10, 20 people, It's really important for everyone to be aligned on what are we trying to do? Are we, you know, we're early stage, let's make sure that people understand. And look, we may not be doing a great job at that. It's just like, I don't know, time will tell. But it's important to align expectations from everyone. It's like, look, if you're early stage, could take you 3 years to get product market fit, could take you 5 years, could take you 6 months, could take you Forever. And so if everyone's aligned with the timeline and people are here for the journey, then that's awesome. Then you have the right team. If you're not here for the journey, then if things go well, then things will go well. But if things tank, then you'll have problems. So that's where, you know, I think alignment is important. And we have a rule actually that we used a lot when hiring, you know, if there's a doubt, there's no doubt. Meaning if there's ever a doubt in a candidate's ability to perform, then there's no doubt, then it's not the right candidate. So those are a couple of things that I try to keep in mind always.

And do you ever focus on a candidate's personal life? Because people never think about it. But when I say personal life, what is their zeal for life? What do they do other than work? What kind of a personality are they?

I— not necessarily a lot. So the reason that we— there's been studies around the fact that you potentially introduce bias by looking into their personal lives. Let's say that, you know, I love kitesurfing, and if I realize that a person also loves kitesurfing, it instantly, whether I want it or not, it builds a bond and it builds a lookalike, you know, model.

I'm like, yeah, we're similar.

Yeah, lookalike model. And people want to hire a copy of themselves usually. Like, it's very easy to fall in this where you just want to— you think you're great, you think you're the greatest, and so And so it's like, oh, this person is like me, I'm the greatest, so of course they will be the greatest. And so that's like, that's one way to go about it. So if there's ever questions about their personal life, I usually like to keep it around as evidence of something they said. So if they said, you know, that they're very disciplined, show me that you're disciplined. Like, how are— show me why you think you can say you're disciplined. And maybe they'll say, oh, discipline is good. I go to the gym every day at 5 AM.

Cool.

This is for the last 12 years I've done this. Okay, you're disciplined. So this is an aspect of personal life, but I'm less interested in what they're doing in their personal life and more so using that as evidence of something they say to back their claim for whatever it is that they're, you know, or like, I'm highly competitive and I like to win. Okay, what did you do?

That's how I think about it. Interesting. Yeah, a lot of candidates would say things, but it would be nice to just probe further and ask, what makes you think that you are X, Y, and Z? And yeah, I do agree that there might be some fallacy of association. If you like X and the other person likes X, you like the other person. Totally. Yeah. Alex, this was great. Thanks a lot for your time. I know that there is a lot to extract from you, so maybe Some other time we can have a dedicated session just on investment, but thanks a lot.

Anytime, happy to do it. Thank you so much for inviting and for setting it up. Loved it.

Cheers.

Bye-bye.