A founder describes his first year building the company: extreme focus on product and distribution, replicating his office at home, and deliberately avoiding investors for eight or nine months. He set a one-year deadline to decide whether the venture would continue or shut down.
And do you have now, looking back in retrospect, is there, is there, you know, there's lots of founders that have that same journey, but very few founders actually succeed or take off. Is there something that you attribute your success to now, if it wasn't necessarily having this clear vision about where things were going to go and having full transparency into that?
Sure.
Was it something process or, or, um, process, extreme focus?
I think I was, uh, I don't think I've ever been more focused than that, you know, that first year, truthfully. You know, I moved to LA basically knowing not many people. All I did was go to work and go home, and even when I went home, I had a mattress and then my entire living room was a replica of what my office looked like at the science building. So, desk, chair, same desk, same chair, same monitor, whiteboard, And it was basically all work, no play for me. And so, you know, I was extremely focused on learning the industry, you know, developing a product, talking to players, talking to educators, talking to publishers, talking to state associations, talking to, you know, people who would become future employees, just trying to figure out how we could fit into the space and build a business. And during that time, by the way, that first year, I guess the first 8 or 9 months, I never talked to investors. You know, most people sort of come up with an idea, they do some initial work, and then they immediately try to start talking to investors to quote unquote build relationships for potential future raise. I spent zero time thinking about raising capital or talking to investors. I was super focused on putting the core of the business together and building from there, not raising a round. Okay.
And you were glad you did that, obviously, just to— that was the right call.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I, you know, it was— there was no other option for me. This was— I had a compressed timeline and I had to track against that.
And did you give yourself a short-term goal? Did you say at this point, I know you referenced a year before, but was there something in your mind where you were almost your own governing body where you said, you know, at this point in time, I'm either going to take off or kill? What I'm doing?
Yeah, no, look, in a year I figured, look, the business had to be off the ground, and so, um, it had to be a real thing. It wasn't, it wasn't, uh, we didn't even have an entity at the, at that point. It was just like, hey, whatever the core of the business is, which I defined as distribution, IP, and product, those are the things that I need to build against. So on the distribution side, I needed effective distribution into high schools, and I found that through NFHS and state associations. So I needed to get that contract signed. On the publisher side or the IP side, I needed to sign deals with publishers, and I needed those publishers to develop resources to build APIs that would actually enable online play. And then on the product side, like, I needed to hire engineers and, you know, product managers and designers, etc., product team to, you know, build the product, and then we needed to, like, take the product to market or at least get market feedback from the product. And so, You know, that was sort of the objective, and I just focused wholly on that.
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