Maximize Your Product Hunt Launch & Ensure High-Value Relationships with Investors, w/ Samiur Rahman

Samir, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Justin. How's it going?

It's going well. I'm excited to talk about Heyday. I've been playing with this a little bit in this free trial you give to people, and it's very interesting. Just can you explain what Heyday is for people who aren't familiar though, Samir?

Heyday is basically an assistant that tries to capture everything that you're doing and then tries to bring that back to you at the right moments. Our goal is to be like an artificial assistant for your memory. And kind of for the folks who don't love to do all the organizing, we try to, try to like do it predictively and bring it to you at the times that we think it'll be most useful.

It's definitely a fascinating product. And one of the things on the website, it says, it's like, close all your tabs. Like, no, seriously. And you're just, you're just like, yeah, because everyone has like, I have like tabs of tabs right now. I probably have like 100 tabs. So I understand the product. There's obviously a clear need for this. Take me through the inception, like the beginning of this. Why start this company in the first place, Samir?

Oh, wow. So this is currently— Heyday is currently in a— is like a pivot from a previous company Sam, my co-founder, and I worked on called Journal. And so both of us had started on Journal like 4+ years ago. And my background is in machine learning. I'd seen, like, I'd been a head of machine learning at a company called Mattermark where we'd applied some like novel machine learning to search problems. And then we were like excited about trying to apply that kind of technology to people's own information. Like everyone's got like stuff all over the place in Google Docs and Gmail and Slack and all that stuff. So like, could we like make some, a unique search experience for everyone across all this stuff, all the places that they have all their things in. And so that was like kind of like the beginnings of Journal. Journal became more and more undifferentiated, like Notion. I would say like Notion, but worse in many ways. And so we shut it down like early last year and we were like, well, what do we wanna do? We still, we love working with each other. And really we're like, I think we're onto something. We've had tens of thousands of people like try Journal, but not like we weren't actually delivering on the promise or like the needs that they were looking for. And what they were really looking for was, hey, like I've tried, like I have friends who like love their Notion setup, their Roam setup. And like they were like, they spend like hours on a weekend watching videos, like perfecting their setup to like organize their information. But I don't wanna do that. And so like we were, there's like a huge amount of people who were looking for something like that, but Journal really wasn't solving their problem enough for them to stick around. And we were like, okay, well what if we went back to the drawing board on the, on a similar problem, but just start from the, the, like the concept of we're gonna be way more automated. We're gonna try to fit in with your workflow. Rather than trying to have you learn a new app or a new place to get set up. And we're gonna take it from there. And so that's kind of how Heyday started. And you can kind of see why we're so extension heavy.

Okay, there's something I wanna unpack there though, 'cause we can't just gloss over that. So even with Journal, a lot of founders, it's like, at what point do you shut down? At what point do you pivot? When do you change? Just take me through at the time you shut down Journal, the conversations with you and Sam, what you were talking about, where the company was at, where you're like, all right, we have to shut it down. 'Cause it's not an easy decision to stop something. Just take me through what you were seeing at least at that time.

Yeah. I mean, so we'd gotten to this point where we were figuring out ways to bring in lots of new users and we were getting at one point tens of thousands of monthly active users. We'd even raised a bridge round between our seed and we were hoping our Series A. And at one point we just realized that actually it's just like all these users are eventually churning off and they're not sticking around. And we ourselves were just not as excited about where the product evolved to because it had become more and more like all the other products, like all the other productivity tools. And so it was both a mix of, honestly, it was probably too late. We probably, if we were being less stubborn or didn't want to, I don't know, make it work, we probably could have paid attention to the signs even earlier than we did. But the signs were basically like, It wasn't catching, like the engagement wasn't catching. And it was a freemium tool. One of the things that we did with Heyday from the get-go was it's a paid-only tool with a free trial. Whereas like Journal was like a freemium tool where we have like tons of people try to use it on a free basis, but then like very few of them converted into paying users.

With that decision too, so everyone's gonna go through that same type of thing around pricing, business model, et cetera. So you knew from the beginning, you're like, okay, Heyday gonna be paid, we're gonna have a free trial. That was clear. Did you know right away with this idea what the product had to be? Like, I'm just curious the progression of that over time. But starting with the beginning of it, like, did you know kind of what you already had to build?

No, I mean, we knew that people wanted help with the, like, the feeling of lostness while they're like going about their day sometimes with like, they're doing a ton of research, like, Sometimes they feel like, yeah, I read about this, I can't find that thing. Or like, what else could be useful for me from my past work in this instance? And like, the people who do that really well have like this system where they're tagging everything and everything's getting saved away and they can just like go look it up. But most people don't wanna put in the upfront effort. And so like, we wanted to help those people. Now, how that would work, like, We also, like I said, we had like a strong philosophy around it had to fit in with your existing workflow where you wouldn't have to like change your behavior too much to get most of the value. So like we were from the get-go pretty like, like, how do we extend people's existing workflows? So that part was pretty much kind of figured out from the beginning, but like the rest of it.

Right.

Is a lot of like, well, we could borrow a lot of the ideas that we had from Journal around search and we're really good at that. How do we, instead of starting from complete scratch, what can we use that did work from there? And so it's a mix of many things. And then the other big thing was we wanted to, having it be a paid product gives us a hard proxy for actually understanding if we're delivering value or not, right? Like, yeah, so like, you know, once you start seeing that kind of like actually work, uh, and like having a decent conversion rate in your trials to paid, then you're like, okay, I think we're actually onto something.

Yeah. And from that too, so you had tens of thousands of users though previously, so you already kind of had known that you had some data, some insights, whatever, users. Did you know the segment that you were going after and did you have a pretty clear idea of that when you started or you just had to figure that out too as you kind of moved along?

Definitely had to figure it out. We had a hypothesis, right? We thought anyone who did a ton of research and had to do something with that reading to produce something, but that's a pretty broad set of people. So we started with some groups that didn't end up ultimately actually working out, like UX researchers, designers, and to an extent product managers we thought would be really great fits. But like the nature of what we've, what we are really good at is like bringing something back from like a decent amount of time back in, in your past. And turns out like the way that the research being resurfaced from the past worked didn't really actually help designers, product managers as much because they were diving into one topic deeply for a couple months and then moving on to a different topic.

Yeah.

And so if you brought something up for them from like 3 months ago, it's like not as helpful as it is to like, The entrepreneur or the writer, the VC or investment analyst who's keeping track of a single area of research for months or years. And if you're bringing something back to them that they read previously, that seems to be way more valuable.

Yeah, I think about that right away in terms of Heyday with 2 things. One being the newsletter. So we have a newsletter. It's like we always have resources, we always have future of work Reads and everything as well. And so looking back at like the things we've already either already seen before or forgot to put in or didn't like already like looked at that. I was like, okay, that's pretty interesting. Pretty useful. Second thing being like, we are focused too at future of work. And so for us it's like seeing what we already viewed in future of work. It's like, what's the trend from now? That makes total sense. So even looking at Zen today, like I wanna go back in a second, but today just thinking of that same type of issue and problem in terms of customer, what is the customer today? Have you, what's the idea you have around like who that person is today? Now you're a little bit further along.

Yeah, I'd say like there's, 2 or 3 customer profiles that really resonate with Heyday. It's like an entrepreneur or a founder of any kind. So it could be like we've seen solo entrepreneurs who are running a consulting business or even startup founders that are working on a high-growth company. And it turns out they're reading so many different topics at any given time. And they're voracious readers who turn that into strategy or writing or something like that, that category of people just get a lot of value from Heyday. And they also typically happen to be a little bit less organized and more kind of bring it all in and then spit it all out kind of. So we happen to work really well for them. And then the other big category is like content marketer, writer. So people who are reading a lot, but then writing their own content out of that. Surprisingly, in a weird way, content marketing is an interesting fit because a lot of times their job is to take previous content and then create link trees and link graphs that help with SEO and stuff like that. And so we're pretty useful in bringing back old content to link to. And so that happens a little bit naturally and helps them out with their job. So those 2 categories are ones that we see a lot of people in our paying user base in, but also the investment analysts, not less VCs, but more like Public market analysts who are like reading about industries and things like that. That that's another profile that yeah, we do well with.

Yeah, that makes makes a ton of sense. And one of the things that I noticed is randomly to go back to, but even thinking about these customer profiles, then you're going back just taking a giant step back with journal and everything you're doing working with Sam. I'm curious how you started to work with Sam, and then also obviously it went well enough to start another company. But so many founders I talk to are trying to find a co-founder or like that's. This process is so tiring. How'd you meet Sam? And also, how'd you know, like, okay, I wanna work with this guy?

Yeah, so super lucky. I was head of machine learning at that company called Manamark that I was telling you about. Like, I don't know if you've heard about the company, but like old company, like working on private company database basically. So I was early hired there and Sam was like the first marketing hire there. So we worked together at a different startup before we actually started our own thing. And actually, like, one of the big things was that Sam and I are like— Sam's one of my best friends. So like, it doesn't always go well to work with your best friends, but like, it can if you're compatible in both like your work environment and you can be like actually supportive to each other in like a personal way. That can be like a really, really good fit. So when we started Journal, we worked together for a little over a year, I would say, at Mattermark. And we just knew, hey, we respect each other at work, we have different skill sets, and we were really good friends. So those are as good of information you can get about potentially being a fit as you can hope for.

Yeah.

And when you know that you failed at something and you still like the person, a lot that you work with, that's a pretty strong indicator that you want to keep working with this person. So at the end of Journal, we just knew, hey, we want to keep working together. And one of the other things is, I was kind of hinting at, we have different skill sets. I have an engineering machine learning background. He has a marketing content sale.

Yeah.

Customer success, that kind of background. But also our personalities are different enough that we mesh really well together and like have like this sort of 1+ 1= 3 effect. Yeah. So I'm more of like a kind of crazy, like throw out 20 different ideas, like, like, and like 2 of them are probably good. And Sam's really good at like narrowing, helping me narrow stuff down to like focus on 2 or 3 different things. And sometimes Sam might be like really good, He might become tunnel-visioned at running at one goal because he's really focused on making progress, but it might be the wrong thing to make progress on. And I'm really good at helping him see the forest for the trees.

Yeah.

And so we just work really well together where we kind of have strengths that balance each other's weaknesses out. You know, it's been years now, so like, hopefully the combination leads to success this time around.

So Sam writes the Twitter threads and you give him crap for it. That's basically how this all works.

Oh, 100%. Yeah, definitely. Actually, one of the things that, like, Sam is phenomenal at writing. I'm like, very, like, I can't like actually write that well. Or if I do, it takes so long, whereas like I can bullshit forever. Uh, and so that's why I'm doing the podcast interview and he's doing the Twitter threads.

I love it. I love the yin and yang there. I love the teamwork. It's perfect. And I, as soon as I did this research for this, I was like, oh, I have to bring that up. Uh, 'cause I think that's perfect in terms of how it goes. One thing I'm curious about with what you talked about and everything with so far with Heyday, how did you actually go to market with this? How'd you acquire your first early customers? Take me through that.

Yeah, we're still in the couple hundreds of paying users and still figuring out our go-to-market, to be perfectly honest. We're literally in this stage where we have enough data to show that the product is working, churn is low, we can convert people at a 10%-ish rate from trial to paid. So we're happy about those things, but now we have to figure out how to do the top of funnel.

Yeah.

I don't know. But like the, we kind of, I would say like we have like our existing pool of people who like liked us from Journal and from other like social media and like our own channels. That was like our initial like alpha beta testing like cohorts around like January of this year was when we were like, okay, cool. The product's getting good enough that we should do like some sort of soft public launch.

Mm-hmm.

So then we still like, we're like trickling in users from doing things like sponsoring a Substack that we knew like the readership would be a good, like, good, like potential user base for us. But that was still like a slow trickle. And then some random events kind of like spiked us. So for example, We had an author, a writer from Fast Company who found out about us through a Substack that we sponsored, who started becoming a user and was like, oh, this is really cool. I wanna write about it. We did a half an hour interview and he then wrote this huge feature on Fast Company that drove more than doubled our trials.

That's amazing.

So that was a huge spike that brought in a whole bunch of people that we weren't actively targeting. And so that gave us a big initial test of like, well, is this gonna work in a slightly broader user base? Right. And then in April, we decided to do a full Product Hunt launch. And that was another big driver of new users. So we've had this kind of spiky drive kind of do unscalable things, some luck, some to drive the initial user base. And now we're like, okay, cool, we're reasonably confident about the product. We need to figure out scalable ways to gain users. And so now it's like we're trying to figure out how to go from 0.1 to 1, I would say. And we're about to start testing out Facebook ads and What are other like broader partnerships maybe with communities that we can try? Is there like, we now are starting to have a big enough user base that having a referral program might be a meaningful boost. So all these different, like more scalable things are stuff that we're trying, but honestly, I don't know what's gonna work yet. Okay. Okay.

I definitely wanna geek out about that in like 2 minutes, but first I have to go back. So Product Hunt. You decide you wanna go on a Product Hunt launch. A lot of people have gone through that. It's a big spike and typically goes down from there, but it can be significant to get users to get feedback and everything. So how long did you plan for that in terms of Product Hunt launch? How did that go? Any numbers on that? Just take me through anything you can say about it for other founders who are going through the same thing.

Absolutely. And actually would love to offer help to any founders who are gonna do a Product Hunt launch, 'cause I would say Sam and I did like a pretty good job on our product hot launch, and there's a bunch of strategies that go into it that we can be helpful with.

We have about 100 founders in the Disco Grind community that I'm sure some of them will end up going through product hunt. So we may have to take you up on that, but go ahead.

We would love to help. So one, we went through a bunch of different things. Like in the end, we ended up being product of the day, product of the week, product of the month. And so like there are a bunch of different unlocks you get for each of those things. So product of the day is obviously like you get traffic throughout your day. Product of the week, you actually get put into a newsletter and that gives you another big spike the next week because you're the featured product of the week. And then if you're a product of the month, that's less like an event, but also you just get to use as a badge. for lots of other things. It's on our website and stuff like that.

Yeah.

And so we worked probably like we did, we planned our product launch over a month, but more intensely, probably like 2 weeks up to the launch. One of the things, and this is like, I know maybe VCs don't wanna hear this, but they're emotionally driven. So we kind of timed our product launch to be around the same time that we were launching our fundraise. So that if we managed to get buzz going with the Product Hunt launch, it would definitely help. And I don't know if it, absence of data, but it definitely didn't hurt to have a really good Product Hunt launch.

Of course.

And it's also a great place to have your existing customers drop quotes so that you can, we've reused a lot of the quotes that they've put into Product Hunt. on our website as testimonials. And so it's a moment to, if you have a big enough user base, it's a moment to really be able to use it to leverage getting even more people. So one thing I would say is if you don't have at least 100 excited people, then maybe it's too early.

Yeah.

People who are out to vouch for you and in a real way, because what will happen is their comments and their Engagement will drive the next set of people. The other thing is we stayed up for 24 hours for our product launch day because we were essentially engaging with everything that was coming in. So we wanted to keep engagement super high. We wanted to make sure our— So here's another trick that we did. We had our community and our user base and we marked geolocation, marked where they are. And then at midnight we started hitting people from Asia. So if midnight Pacific time, people are up in Asia. So how can you drive consistent velocity in your activity? Maybe figure out when your community is gonna be the most engaged and most ready to engage and like use those times in your benefit. So all that went like really well and we probably ended up getting a total of, you know, 1,000 to 2,000 new trials, which is a decent amount for us given our size. Over the course of like 2 to 3 weeks. And it was like the first 2, first week was just like a pretty consistent bump. And then when it showed up in the newsletter, it was another consistent bump that showed up. And a lot of those users are still paying users. So they converted really well. So definitely worth doing. And if you worth putting in some effort to do it right.

Okay. And part of that you mentioned around that with, I appreciate sharing all that by the way. So timing that with raising a fund, raising from VCs. So you did raise $6.5 million. Take me through that fundraise. I wanna get to the acquisition side of like more of how you thinking about that, but obviously this fuels that raising capital. And so take me through more of that in terms of how that fundraise went, how you approach that. I'd be curious to know.

Yeah. So we get to March, like mid-March, and I think like Sam and I have like a walk where we both are like freaking out where like, hey, we've only got like 4 to 5 months of runway left.

And so we're gonna— Mm-hmm.

We need to figure this out now. Within like 2 weeks, we basically went from freaking out to like getting like a narrative on paper, getting a draft deck done. We had worked with an amazing branding agency for our like Kind of brand guidelines, everything. We reached out to them and like, hey, would you guys be up for like helping us like design our deck? And they were like totally up, like they were up for a limited engagement for that. It was like a 1-week sprucing up, like taking like a basic deck and making it beautiful kind of situation. And I think it was totally worth like spending some money on something like that.

Who was it? If you're willing to share.

Oh, absolutely. I, they are the vendor That I— the best vendor I've ever worked with across my whole career. So I will go to bat for them. They're Order Design from New York.

Okay, I will make sure that people know that.

Order.Design. Like, I love them. Like, they're the best. Um, and, uh, so we went and then we coincided our kind of like Product Hunt launch to be like with the first week of meetings. So do the standard thing if you've been around fundraising before, get the meeting set up in 2 weeks and then make sure that you run through your initial, kind of do them all concurrently so you can move the whole process along as fast as possible. And I've raised money for Journal and I've been in early stage startups before, So I know the process of fundraising. This is the easiest fundraise I'd ever— just lucky for us, honestly. We had one of our top-tier targets who ended up being the lead for the round, which is Spark Capital. We met with them on the Wednesday for the first time of the first week that we were fundraising, met with the whole partnership on Thursday, and by Friday we had a term sheet. So within a week, it's crazy. I don't even know how that happened. It's all luck, but it worked out so that we didn't want to take up— we then pushed along everyone else to move along quicker. But honestly, we spent more time with Kevin at Spark and we're just like, we just love this guy. And we just ended up finishing up the round really quickly.

On that note, okay, we just love this guy. Like, why? What is it about him? 'Cause there's a lot of founders who are going out, investors are like, okay, what am I even looking for? One, it's like step one is like get capital from like, can I get capital at all? But 2, it's like you obviously wanna try to pick who you can work with for a very long time. What is it about Kevin and Spark?

So one, it's, I have an affinity and a bias towards VCs who've done it themselves before. So like, have they been operators in the past? So Kevin was an SVP at Twitter, like joined early on and like had worked with them for like almost 8 years before he left to do Spark, to work at Spark. He's all— and from my previous experience at Journal, one of the most annoying things is to have an early like lead partner leave to do something else.

Yeah.

So I was really curious about like, hey, like Kevin, are you sticking around at Spark? Like, are we gonna be working together for more than just 2 years, like max. And so like that, we got a lot of clarity on. He's been doing it for like 7, 8 years now. He's like, yeah, I'm done with being an operator. I did it. I've got kids. This is like, I love helping people like you, but I don't feel the itch to go back to it anymore, which I know a lot of people do.

Yeah.

And like, super excited for them, but it also makes it harder for a long-term partnership. Right. And then The other thing is just like this intangible quality of like, how well do you get along? So like, are you gonna be like, is it, are you excited to call them when you're in trouble? Like for help? Like, are you like, do you like hanging out with them and like sharing in the good and the bad? Like that kind of stuff makes it so that like you're gonna get more value from this person rather than kind of just like shooting them a monthly email or doing quarterly board meetings and it's like a formality, but you're not really like— Using them for anything else.

Yeah.

And then the other stuff was just like, Kevin just got it, like what we were trying to do. He's invested in, like Spark has invested in Grammarly. He's invested in other like productivity tools like Remarkable that I'm like a huge fan of. And so there's like a lot of like shared understanding of like what we're trying to do.

Yeah.

Like I would say those are like the, the big things that like really made it and like he was, The other thing that I respect a lot is like someone who gets really excited and just moves fast. Like, so the fact that they can go from like first meeting to like do 2 more meetings and then do the like term sheet in like 2 and a half days is like how we like to move for like how we hire people. So like, I like the quickness of like moving through a process is, it was just impressive. So like, it's cool to see. Yeah.

All those things.

Yeah.

And especially like I mentioned, like if you can find that person that has the VCs that have that, or the operators, whether it be bringing in strategic angels for your round or whatever it is. So you, so you have them on the table is important, but especially for your lead clearly, because that's going to be a big part of what you're working with them on. And, uh, coming back to what we were talking about, going from this kind of one-off product hunt launch, like those types of things versus you're thinking about sustainable growth. Just take me through, because you're in it right now, so it's perfect. Take me through how you're even like starting to think about You said you start testing maybe Facebook ads. How are you even starting to think about acquisition as you're looking at getting to this point of more sustainable growth? I would love to hear more about that.

Yeah, man, it's tough. 'Cause like, so—

Walk me through it. Thought process.

At the very, at the highest level, it's like we need to, we're a paid product, right? So we need to make the numbers work. So our CAC can't be higher than our LTV. Even though we expect our LTV to go up, like prices to go up, we're gonna have team plans, whatever. But like, we wanna be a sustainable business that's not like VC funded, but default alive.

Yeah. Default alive.

Right. So like, so we're like, we're like, those are like the parameters that we set ourselves. It's like, hey, like how do we know what is a viable channel for us? It's that we get like enough volume with like the numbers actually working for us. And so like, The problem with their Substack strategy is it's not enough volume. There's not enough eyeballs across all the possible newsletters and Substack to even really make up the— we have a target for in the next 6 months getting to 5,000 trials a month. And so right now we're at 600 trials a month. So that's like a 10x basically.

Yeah. Yeah.

To get to like, to 10x, you're gonna like need to figure out a channel that you don't have right now, I think. Rather than like a channel that you're, you can like grow in magnitude. Like we don't have, so what we were, we're initially we tried to do the ads ourselves and found out we're terrible at doing ads and also the software sucks and like, it's just like a mess. And so we found, somehow lucked into like talking to this like really great firm that we're trying out and we're gonna see how it goes.

Yeah.

Who are experts at like running, like creating new creative, running experiments, like figuring out what works and delivering on that. And like they, you know, we shared our like target, CAC and target volume? And they're like, yeah, should be doable. And at least that's what we wanna do. So we're working with them. If that works, that's, well, we don't need anything else. Obviously all the other experiments we're still running because—

Of course.

You can't bet on one thing and just work, have it work. So we'll see. We're ramping up that experiment. The other things we're like, okay, well, what are Like unscalable things we can do right now that might feed like the flywheel of something more scalable. So we're thinking, well, how do we— are there communities of folks that we can engage with that will end up being like people who create some user-generated content using Hay Day that once we have like shareable content, they will be people who will bring in more trials. And so we're trying out an experiment with a few folks who write on Twitter and they do long threads. What if they were either plugging Hay Day or using Hay Day to collect information and saying, hey, here's a collation of resources that I used to research for this thing. So like lots of like really specific things to like the generic, like if ads work, they work and like you just kind of pump money into it.

Like raise more capital and spend more on that. With that, with the ads, I was at a paid acquisition company previously and had seen how much they're testing creative, how much they're testing ads. And obviously if you're trying to do it in-house, it's a lot, but an agency costs a lot more. So there's that trade-off. Take me through like that in terms of finding an agency, deciding on that. And obviously if the numbers work out in terms of actually performing it, you're fine with paying it cuz you just, you keep, you make more than you put in, so it's fine. But like take me through even just deciding on an agency. There's obviously infinite number, but people have suggestions typically and stuff. I'm curious on how you find one.

Yeah. So we, it's mostly like it came through a referral to be honest. And then we looked at like other, and we kind of like did like some background vetting and like found out like Yeah, these guys really know what they're doing. And they'd worked on a lot of companies that are similar to us in the kind of prosumer sort of product realm.

Yeah.

So they seemed to know that realm. What we were, in terms of validating, we basically said, hey, we'd love to run a 3-month experiment with you. And if you're hitting targets or getting close, we'd love to keep doing it. And the way that we think about it, it's sort of like over 3 months, it'll cost some amount of money, but honestly not that much. But it's like we kind of think of these as bets that we're placing. And if the numbers can work out, so for example, just going through, these are not exact numbers, but I'll just say example numbers.

Okay.

We're saying we want to get to 5,000 trials a month. We are very okay with going up to, if we're doing this ourselves, we would be very okay going up to a $20 acquisition cost per trial. So that would be like we'd spend $100,000 a month acquiring those users.

Yeah.

And if the ad agency is saying, hey, we can get you down to $12 per LTV and we're only charging Like $20,000 a month, that means it'd be like $60,000 plus $20,000. And so they're actually saving us $20,000 based on like what the max that we would pay. And so if they can make that work, that's great. There we go.

Yeah.

So you have to kind of like kind of do the math. You gotta do the math to figure out like, is this like worth doing for you? And Then, then you say, is it worth taking a shot?

Yeah, I was just gonna say that's like everything, right? It's just you're taking these bets constantly in startup world. It's just your, which bets are you gonna take when? And like, how much is the bet?

And the nice thing about like working with an agency is that you are not using as much of your time to take the bet.

Yeah.

Which, which your time is maybe the most valuable thing at a, at a company of 5 people. It's like, like, you know, me and Sam's time is like the most valuable thing. And so if we can like have someone who are also way better than us at what they're about to experiment on, do run the experiment for us. Like, hey, totally worth it.

Yeah, working with someone who's obviously done it for multiple clients, right? So it's like they have that experience across different things and have more context, which is helpful. One other thing is like kind of tied to this in terms of you mentioned, like, you know, a budget, for instance, you're spending with this and mentioned raising capital earlier this year in 2022. Take me through because this environment currently in 2022 is kind of crazy. Markets are kind of crazy. How'd you think about runway, how much you need to actually raise for? Because there's been a lot of opinions on that. Some people are going crazy and saying like 3 years or 4 years, just like kind of wild. But also some people are like, okay, well, the normal 12 to 18 months is like a little less than you probably should today in today's market. How would you think about that for Hay Day though?

I'll tell you that we were raising for 18 months initially. Our round bubbled up and we got way more than we probably, like, we would've been happy with like 4, 4.5.

Yep.

And we ended up getting 6.5 and we're not changing our like spending plan. So that's the equivalent of way more like 27, 20, like 30 months. So like we're getting up to this, like what people are recommending now. When we were raising was like the last, it felt sort of like Like, um, you're running out of a burning building or like a building where the bomb's about to go off and you get out like right as like the building blows up and then you just like, you still, you're not dead, but you're like a little shaken up. Uh, that's how it like feels like it felt like at the time. So we got really lucky in our timing in that like it was the last maybe like month of froth, like still not, I wouldn't say frothy because like it's not like we raise like a ridiculous amount for our seed round, but like, it was easier than it probably would've been a month later.

Yeah.

So yeah, like I think a lot of it was just like, and we were at the time, we didn't know it was gonna blow up. Like I wouldn't have been like, there were some signs, some, a lot of people were talking about it. You never know. Everyone's been talking about like the bubble bursting for like 8 years now. So like, Why think it would be now? Anyway, so it was mostly planning towards the standard cycle, getting lucky and being able to raise more and then saying, you know what, we're not changing our spending plans, we just get to reserve. And that way, our goal is to hit Series A fundability within 15 months.

Yeah.

But if we take longer or if we hit it, but the market is still not great for Series A, Hey, we can just wait.

Or flexibility with that. Yeah. Wait, why didn't you just raise $350 million from Andreessen? Why didn't you just do that? Well, you know, was that on the table?

I mean, if it were, I would take it. Uh, I don't blame Adam Neumann.

You're not, you're not gonna not take it from Adam Neumann, right? Of course.

Like, it makes total—

it's funny hearing the opinions. Uh, I posted a thing on Twitter. I like hearing it. It's just funny. 'Cause there's a lot of different stuff going on where people are super serious. Some people are like crazy serious. Some people are like, oh, who cares? You raised. But it's my, I got my popcorn ready. I'm just enjoying. I'm like, okay.

It is a little fucking crazy to see like the Twitter discourse on this. Literally my whole feed is like full of this. And I'm also, and I'm both like, it's crazy to compare him to like Elizabeth Holmes. He did build like a, you know, actual business. Yeah.

That's the difference.

Yeah. That I use. Still. Yeah, still exactly. Still a product that I actually use.

Like, again, WeWork still works.

Dude kind of knew what he was doing, except for like he's a little crazy. Um, so like, but like, yeah, so like, I don't know, I could— I— this is— it didn't surprise me at all.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I was seeing it, it was like, it's not like you're like, oh my gosh, there's no way this could happen. Like, he obviously made it work. I mean, he did build a company, so that's like the interesting argument. It's like he built a Okay. This is the funniest thing.

At least a multi-billion dollar company. Exactly. Yeah.

And like, I know he lost money from the peak, but like, you can't, you can't say he didn't build a multi-billion dollar company. So at least that part's like interesting. Uh, but then obviously people are gonna be pretty pissed about like that money going to him versus maybe elsewhere. But there's a lot of feelings on that. I had to bring it up 'cause I thought it was funny. I like hearing other entrepreneurs just say it.

I, look, I, you know, I, I, I, I, Totally agree that there are a lot of people who are not getting money because of, like, their gender and their race.

100%.

But I don't know if that— like, I just think, like, replace Adam Neumann with a crazy woman of color and she did the same thing, I think she would have also been able to raise $350 million.

I agree with you on that. And I think the one— yeah, one of the arguments people, like, that exact thing that they're not saying is, like, They're not saying, oh, well, like you're talking about all these people who didn't raise money and I get it. It's like not fair in this industry why there's not more women getting funding. No people of color getting funding. But if they had built a multi-billion dollar company first—

That's not a fraud.

Yeah, exactly. Correct. Correct. That's like a different story and it's weird to think about, but it is like talking to founders on the podcast and every day in general, uh, it's interesting just to hear perspectives on that and like how people think about Them raising for your own companies and everything. It's just like there's so much a story, right?

Maybe I also have privilege, right? Like I, I, I, I'm in the Bay Area, like so maybe I'm not even sure. So I gotta admit that, like absolutely.

I so, but it's fun. It's fun to talk about. All right, as we wrap things up here with Heyday, just take me through where this is gonna go. So obviously you start this from Journal. You start with Sam. All right, we're gonna do this again. You raise some capital. You're trying to figure out this growth strategy. If it goes well, where does this go for Hay Day?

So I'll start with the furthest future, which you can either call utopian or dystopian. Do you watch Black Mirror much?

Oh, I've seen all of it. Every episode.

You've seen all of it? Do you remember the episode where the guy finds out that his wife's cheating on him by going through his memories?

Yeah. Going back.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that, but smarter is what we want Hay Day to be. where you can go back through every— our goal is to be the memory assistant. So problem with that, in my opinion, was that it recorded everything, but it wasn't great at surfacing stuff. You have to actually do the work.

Yeah.

But as we get to things like AR, VR actually being part of our normal lives, why shouldn't every conversation I have be recorded? And the next time I wanna talk about Or next time you wanna talk about founders' opinions on Adam Neumann, you'll be like, oh yeah, I talked to Samir about that. I wonder what he said.

Yeah.

And now you can do that with Zencastr auto-transcribing. Maybe that'll— but in the near future, we can do things like taking this audio transcription and putting it into Hay Day. But in the Longer-term future, it's like everyone's audio stream is always being saved and processed, maybe in video streams and things like that. And that's like one, that's like a product angle. The other more angle of how do we get value from our information? We are really excited about this concept called Hive Mind. So think like right now, Hay Day brings back your own own research from the past.

Yeah.

What about like, hey, teams of people, like Sam, me, and you are on a team, let's say, and I start looking into fundraising. And let's say I've never, I've never read for whatever reason anything about fundraising, but you have. And Hay Day can just like bring up like, hey, like, looks like you haven't done any work on fundraising, but like Justin's done a whole bunch of reading and here's like what he found last month. And that way, what we want to do is help people in trusted smaller groups be like a hive mind for each other where they can learn from each other ambiently rather than having to actually share active knowledge with each other.

Yeah.

That's this medium term that we're excited about. And that can extend in so many different ways. There's obviously companies as the hive mind. That totally makes sense. But it could be public groups too. If you've got a community group where people are interested in the same thing, they could be part of a hive mind. So we're excited about both the product aspect, getting more and more this AI that is getting as much from your memory as possible, but then the aspect of both collaborating on that, sharing that, and then having the business model leverage to work with companies to be like, hey, you can install this hive mind and here are the benefits. And a simple benefit would be a new person onboarding onto a company would instantly be able to, when they're searching in Google for Wi-Fi, I don't know why, whatever, they can search Wi-Fi password and without knowing where that doc is, it just shows up. Yeah.

That's interesting. I think there's a lot of applications obviously to that. And like selfishly in venture, that makes a lot of sense for teams who are trying to understand different things about industries. Uh, that makes a ton of sense. The audio part, again, selfishly for me, podcasting so many times is like 300-something episodes in my show, 60-something the other show, like 400+ episodes I've done. And to be able to go through the audio of all of that, to be like, who talked about go-to-market and everyone pulled— that is incredible to think about that being a possibility.

Yeah. Yeah. And like, yeah, we're excited about all these kinds of things. We're like, where are we missing like valuable things to resurface for people right now? It's like conversations and like, yeah, I mean, conversations is like a big one. So whether it's like a podcast or like, you know, even just like one-on-ones and like all of these like different conversations that you have on a daily basis.

Okay, we're gonna have a part two when you've done that.

And so fingers crossed we get to exactly.

We'll find a way to make sure you do. Where's the best place for people to learn learn more about Hay Day and connect with you as well if they'd like to?

So I would say Sam and I talk about a decent amount of Hay Day on Twitter. So if you wanted to follow us on Twitter and be more of like follow us on you know what we're doing, that's a good spot.

We'll link it up for sure.

And then obviously our website hayday.xyz. Uh, is like a good spot to find out a little bit more about what Heyday does.

Perfect. Thank you for your time today, Samir. Really appreciate it.

Thank you so much, Justin. Have a good one.