Dejan Pralica - CEO of SoleSavy

All of you sneakerheads are going to love this episode of Founder Journey. Dion Perlica is co founder and CEO of Soul Savvy, a community of sneaker lovers. We're going to talk about the joy of collecting the global growth of the sneakerhead community and how members of the community are impacting and changing each other's lives above and beyond just sneakers. Dion and his team built a tech company without a technical co founder. So we're also going to talk about the ingenuity of stitching together a number of free resources and products services to build out a platform of their own.

3, 2, 1.

The entire shoe industry is on fire right now. Especially high end sneakers. Really cool to have. Dion Pralika from Soul Savvy Co founder CEO. Soul Savvy is a marketplace for shoe nerds, sneaker heads. There's so many different terminology for it, but Dion, welcome to Founder Journey. Please tell us a little bit about yourself and then tell us about this world of sneakers.

I am indeed a sneakerhead. I'm probably a sneaker nerd too, but we're gonna stick with Sneakerhead for the sake of the conversation. Yeah, I'm the co founder CEO of Soul Savvy. We're not a marketplace yet. Currently we're community subscription platform for people who love sneakers. We wanted to create something that value users lives and that value we distinguish through community time and saving money and that's what we're trying to build. We've bootstrapped an incredible company and now we're looking to build the future through product and technology.

And when did you guys start Soul Savvy?

The idea came together February of 2018. We spent six, seven months kind of doing the thinking, planning part of the business.

So fairly new. Still it's two years and you got a Covid year in there, so we won't count it.

But Covid came out three years, my man.

But I would imagine that during COVID Soul Savvy probably did fairly well in terms of community and nobody could do anything else. And so people are spending a lot more time online, a lot more time talking to people online. So how did that translate?

Yeah, that's very true. It was both sides of that, right. So we had people who were like, well, I don't have anything else as far as engagement, interaction, community. So being a part of Soul Savvy is even more important to me. Even though if I'm not buying sneakers, I can still talk to other people and feel a sense of connection online. If I can't do that in person. But at the same time, we have people who had no money, who were broke, who lose the jobs, who had to make ends meet, and a $30 a month subscription was just not feasible, even if we were offering a temporary discount to help keep some of our longer customers around. Ultimately, they have priorities. So it came with its good and it's bad, and it was challenging, and we've been balancing that act. So is it fair to say that it helped us boom last year? Probably. But at the same time, it came with its challenges throughout.

So definitely some people benefited, but other people got hurt. By Covid and sounds like a lot of the people that were near and dear to your heart, the ones that were there at the beginning when Seoul savvy was starting, the ones that you really appreciate for sticking it out, may needed a little bit of a hand to continue. Right.

And a lot of. A lot of people stuck around. We weren't. We weren't losing. It was just, you know, someone might join and then like, two weeks later lose their job. Right. There was a lot of turnover in people's lives. I think a lot of companies experienced that same type of challenge through the pandemic. Oh, man. Like, just opening and closing their doors and subscriptions going up and down. And everyone went through it to some degree. I don't think anyone was. Anyone was immune to it.

So I want to take a step away from Soul Savvy itself and talk about you as a sneakerhead. Where did your passion for sneakers and your inauguration into the sneakerhead community come from?

Yeah, I mean, it was a slow build. It wasn't like I became a sneakerhead overnight. I played basketball at Terry Fox Secondary. Obviously. Big name associated the school. I believe in one of my years, in my junior year, the team was sponsored by Nike. And that was when I remember getting, like, my first pair of sneakers. That, like, felt special to me. This was at a time my parents were. We immigrated to Canada. They had no money. Like, buying sneakers as a kid was go to sport, check, buy one, get one free, or buy one, get one half off. And that's what you guys would get. Like, find something on that wall. It was never anything more than that. It was just, like, functionality to wear shoes.

Yeah. I remember for me, it was like, yeah, you. You want a pair of Adidas, but you're gonna get Adidos from Zellers. So the knockoffs, you're not getting Pumas, you're getting Pimas or whatnot.

Yeah, yeah, no, definitely. And so it Just kind of built from there. I remember those shoes. I still have them in my garage. Graduated in 2006. Here and there, bought some. You know, as you grow and you have your money, you're working, you tend to buy things you like. I remember 2009 is a year that I. That really stuck out to me because of the pair of Jordan fives that I really wanted that I looked at the time and I was like, man, 300 bucks for this. This is crazy. First it was a two pack, I think 350. And I remember going, there's no way I'm spending 350 bucks on this. Like, that's insane. And like, obviously they're worth like a thousand dollars now each. Like, it's just. The industry has completely changed. And then around 2011, I started my first businesses.

And so what point did you go from functionality to collection? So I'm buying a pair of shoes and I want to wear them out. And then I'm able to play basketball, too. I'm buying a pair of shoes that they're sitting on a shelf.

I think I still buy everything with the intention of wearing it at some point. Personally. Yeah, as much as I'm definitely a collector, but I'm also like, I'm going to wear this because at that point, yeah, I mean, look, life is. There's a lot to go on in life. The last thing I need to do is add to my 400 pair sneaker collection with something I never have the intention of wearing. I think if I love it enough to buy it and look at it, I want to wear it. And that's how I operate. Not everyone's like that. Not every collector thinks that way. But that's how I'm going.

Yeah. Because I've got a friend, he's got 30 pairs of shoes, but I think the minimum price point on any one of them is 500 bucks. And so they're not ones that he's wearing, he's buying them, collecting them, and they're. They're on display. So totally different type of collector to what, what you are. But this is an industry that's blowing up around the world and it's not just like, again, geographically, third world countries, doesn't matter. Like, people are sneaker heads all over the world. And it's not just males, it's females. It's lgbtq. Like, the dynamics is all over the map. And this is where soul savvy really comes in, is you've built a community, you've allowed people to get together and talk about what they're passionate about. In this case, it's shoes.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's that common touch point that people have. Right. It's whatever you are, it could be anything. Doesn't have to be sneakers for us, it's obvious sneakers. But it's that idea of something that you love, that you want to engage with other people who also love that, who are inherently going to appreciate you and that topic for what it is and not. There's no judgment around that. Right. And for sneakerheads, it's, you know, we don't know a lot of people locally to us who are sneakerheads, like, we are. So being able to come into a community and a platform like ours and just meet other people who inherently get you at your core is something really special. It's like that idea of finding friends online, which is hard after you leave high school. How many. I mean, how many friends do you still have from high school? And how do you meet new friends? Where does that happen? Right. That's part of something we're trying to. Trying to build.

And can you maybe talk about.

Some.

Of the more interesting things that you saw pop up in the community that you were like, wow, I never would have thought soul savvy would be used in this way or these type of things would be happening in the community that we built.

Yeah, it's the downs, the ups in life, but especially the downs in life that people experience. I've seen people pop in, and I have Covid and I'm having a really hard time. My girlfriend just broke up with me after I proposed to her, and I'm just devastated someone's died in my family. It's these, like, really these moments where people should normally kind of run and hide and they want to alone and don't want to talk to them about it. They're coming to the community and having those conversations out in the open and in public because they feel like, again, they have a sense of belonging and a sense of community, that these are people they can reach out to for advice and feedback. And I never expected that. You know, I can see people celebrating the wins in life, just being so excited about it that they'll post a bit about it. But something that, like, inherently, like, might make you want to cry, that you would now talk to in a public channel with a thousand other people is very hard to do. And I think that says a lot about the community that we do build, that people can feel that sense of trust with everyone else.

Wow.

It was really, really powerful Right. And all done in just a few years. But you did this without a technical co founder. And so you are a tech company, you're building a platform, you're building hopefully a marketplace and financial transactions and whatnot down the path. But you've been doing this without a technical co founder. So kind of walk us through the challenges and maybe the benefits of not having a technical co founder.

Well, it's basically like pick what challenge you want to deal with. Right. We were in the business of creating an audience and a community. So we had customers and revenue versus going into and then building product for that audience that we've found and acquired who are part of our ecosystem versus the flip of that, which is spending a bunch of money to build something that we think people want because we've tested it and we have an idea of what people are looking for and then ultimately finding out that they don't, they don't want to be a part of that at all. And that's. You're going to have challenges on both sides of that. Right. I not being, I mean, I can write HTML css. I don't think that qualifies as technical anymore. I've graduated out of that. But you know, the co founders, we're not technical. Right. So our approach was what can we do to give our business head start? And that was building audience, building a customer base. Right. You don't need hundreds of thousands of dollars in IP to build an audience, a loyal audience. Right. That will pay for a product. You can do that at any point. You just have to get started and think about it strategically. So that's the approach we took. And now that we have the funding, we have real revenue, we can go out and build that product and have that feedback loop of thousands of customers to help us literally build the perfect thing because they are our stakeholders and they're invested in who we are. So there's challenges on both sides. Right. Obviously we had to piece together where we are, what we got to now with no tech on board, no technical staff, really just freelancing it. So it has its challenges, but also its perks.

And speaking about stitching things together and looking at different ways to grow your community, you guys hacked together pretty stable and robust platform and you guys did it with free tools. Again, no technical heavy weights on your team. So you guys were either doing it yourself, learning yourself, or maybe hiring some contractors come in and help you piecemeal here and there. But to walk us maybe through that of how you've put together to stitch together all these different tools, free tools that you can leverage to build your platform.

Yeah. It's like, this is a great time to start a business because you have all of these different services, free or paid, in some perspective, that can help you get started. You don't need to build an email marketing tool like you would have had to have done 15 years ago. Right. Like you want to start up a business. Everything you need, almost everything you need, is at your disposal. Right. You've got the mailchimps, the active campaigns of the world. You've got Stripe for payments, you've got different membership tools for collecting revenue. If you want to do courses, lessons, someone's built something already to help you get started. And that's how we built our mvp. So instead of building a chat platform community for sneakerheads, we said, what's up there? So I looked at Slack, Discord, Mattermost, looked at the different tools, open source, paid, and picked one and said, okay, let's rock with it. And that's how we ended up on Slack on a free plan. There's just so much at our disposal right now that I feel like, why reinvent the wheel when you can just pay someone a hundred bucks a month for their service? That's tons of time, money and resources have went into creating that and you can just integrate it and rock with it from there. So I'm a big believer of building that way. You know, it's the, the. I hate to poke fun at Quibi, but, like, you know, they thought they had the perfect solution and spent hundreds of millions of dollars and then everyone.

Was like, no, they spent billions.

I don't know if they spent the billions just yet, but you know what I'm saying, Right? Like, they, you know, they were so confident that they had a winner that they didn't stop to actually, actually think and test that out. And you can blame Covid, but that's the opposite approach of what we've taken. Right. It's slow and steady. Find 100 people who really believe in what you're building and iterate from there and build up and scale up to a wider net of users.

Yeah. And I guess the key here is making sure that you actually own the users. You own the ultimate data. And so there's platforms that you can leverage that can expedite the way that you're able to get traction with users and build out the data pool that you need to validate your business, then go for it. But at some point you feel that you do need to kind of flip it on its head. And now start to build an infrastructure that allows you to do things that you weren't able to do before.

Yeah, absolutely. Especially if scale and growth are top of mind. But yeah, there's a lot to help you get started. You just need to be. You do need to own that audience. So it's like one thing to say, hey, I have a million followers on Twitter or Instagram. But like, how do you get that audience out? It's better to click that somewhere else, whether that's a substack or something that, you know, we were built on WordPress and a membership plugin that was a hundred bucks. Like, I can export that whole database and import it into anything else. Import over when we need to. Right. So owning that audience is really important.

Yeah. I want to take a circle back to you and your journey. And we can go past outside of soul savvy if you want. But what would you say has been the biggest challenge or struggle for you? What's kept you up at night?

I default to the last year. Raising money through a pandemic is very challenging. You know, we went out on the fundraising trail in March, April of 2020, and that was like, when I think everyone thought the world was going to end. And it was like, do we have enough toilet paper to get through the rest of 2020? And just panic ensued, I think everywhere, especially in the venture capital world. And now that made it really hard to raise capital, especially for a company that is operating in unique spaces. One being sneakers, two being community. I remember meetings where I was like, community, you don't have a product you want me to invest in Community. Whereas the mindset around that the past year has really, really changed. I think now people are like, no, you need to build audience and community to have successful business. That should be one of the core pillars of creating a company now. And that's what we were doing a year ago. It's just the mindset. Covid has shifted that. So while fundraising is always a challenge, no matter how easy it might look or people see, hey, we've raised a million, 2 million, $3 million. Whatever it might be, it's hard. It's always going to be challenging. But for me, throwing on a pandemic made it extra challenging because I was like, honestly, 200 no's. I took tons of meetings from April to July, just no after, no after, no after, no after, no. And that wears on you because you're just like, oh, am I wrong? Is this a bad idea? Maybe I shouldn't do this business. You Start to question kind of what's going on. And obviously that, you know, it gets to you. And I got to the point where it's like, August 1st, I just took two weeks off. I was like, fuck it, I don't want to talk to any VCs. I want to think about fundraising money. I'm gonna go just enjoy, enjoy some time away with the family. Came, came back at it, and then everything kind of started happening there, started clicking from there for us.

So again, those 200 no's, you, from an entrepreneur and founders perspective, you might be in a situation where you've had a couple mediocre meetings and then you get a good one and you feel confident by yourself. And then you go into your next meeting and it's like somebody shitting all over you. How do you keep yourself sane? I know you took yourself to the limit and you need to take a step back and give yourself a break from it in August. But in that journey, what did you do to keep yourself motivated or keep yourself focused on what you want to accomplish?

I mean, the business itself, right, being, you know, if, you know, an investor questioned the idea, the legitimacy of it, to be able to go back into the business that we were building and our community ultimately and, you know, see that validation of the Yenyu, I am right, these people are wrong. Because no great company is built off a bunch of yeses. It takes challenging the norm. It's why one of our investors believes in narrative violations. And I think that's what we are. And when you're violating that narrative, it's really hard for people to understand. So for me, it was just, I mean, obviously I'm very passionate about what we're building, what we're doing. I know our customers are. So I had that kind of support system behind me of like, no, we are building a great business. And I have that proof with all our customers and what we're doing. And obviously I love the space, so, you know, easier said than done. It's not the same for everyone, but that's kind of where I went back to it.

Okay, and let's go back to the actual journey of getting those calls and meetings again. Pandemic. Everybody was kind of freaked out that, okay, things are locking down, there's no more travel, how am I going to meet investors? I can't go to a pitch event, I can't go to networking events. How did you navigate that and how were you able to secure those meetings and those zoom calls?

Yeah, so we joined an accelerator in April as well. Jason Calacanis LAUNCH ACCELERATOR so that was obviously a big boost for us because it opened up their network. We did every Thursday we did a pitch session. It was usually myself and five other companies. Ten to 15 investors would show up, we'd all pitch, there'd be conversations, questions, they'd vote on their top ones. So I'd have 15 contacts there. So we were always every week practicing the pitch and taking investment questions. And at the same time I would reach out to different investors.

And so the accelerator pitches, those are all done via Zoom. And then do you feel that you were able to adjust because pitching in person is very different than pitching on Zoom.

I never pitched in person, so I personally only know pitching on Zoom life. Like, I don't even know what. Yeah, I don't even know. I have no idea. I've only done Zoom. I've raised every dollar that we have through Zoom meetings. I've not met any of my investors in person. Personally, I couldn't imagine the amount of time I would have had to have wasted to do this. I think this was for the better and I think finding that probably like 80, 20 split of 80% zoom, 20% to go close or to really make sure it's a fit or finalize the deal is where it should be versus all this in person nonsense, which just seems inefficient. But yeah, I did it all on Zoom.

Um, yeah, yeah, definitely in person. It's harder to get the meetings. But you said you did 200 meetings. You probably would have maxed out at 100 in person.

Right? Like, I mean I, there was days where I 10, 15 meetings, I would just sit there, just back to back, I would just take any message you want to talk to me, want to hear who's interested and we go and we go through the business and I just turn into a pitching machine some days. But yeah, I think I personally, I'm glad it was like that. I couldn't imagine having to be away from home, flying, travel.

Yeah, there's definitely going to be a paradigm shift in the angel and VC world for the early stages for sure where you're level of investment. So you're putting up 10,000, 15,000, 25,000, maybe even a hundred thousand dollar check to some people won't be worth A, getting on plane themselves to go somewhere or B, leaving their offices to go to a pitch event or whatnot. It's just, hey, hit me up on Zoom. Show me a deck now. When you're making eight, nine figure check investments, that's totally Different. But let's go back to the again, the ups and downs. Like, so you get yourself to August, you've taken a break, you come back and things start clicking. What is it that you feel kind of just started to resonate with people? Was it the realization, okay, pandemic's over, or was there something more to it where there was a adoption of tech that's coming down the pipeline that's faster than was previously expected in E commerce? Like, what is it that you feel is a magic catalyst?

Yeah, you say pandemic is over, and I'm just like, man, we are still living it right now. Hopefully only a couple more months to go. But it was pandemic related for me. I think there was a shift in the mindset of how you can build a company. And I don't know where it came from, but I just feel like the light bulb went off of like, hey, no, you can build audience first. Community is an important part of, as far as like a distribution model goes for kind of building that, that network and that brand. I just felt like everyone started to get it. Or maybe it was the fact that I got that one. Yes. Which opened up the network to other people who thought like that person. I'm not sure you could think about it both ways, but I just feel like after being cooped up for five months, people realized, oh, I can understand how community is going to be very important to people's lives digitally and building those friendships online. Because social media, in my opinion, kind of sucks. And I think that's something that we can course correct and improve upon.

And how do you see that really functioning in terms of post pandemic? People are going to get back out into the real world. People are going to be doing physical things. Are they going to be less dependent on their community or is community going to be that much more ingrained in their lives moving forward?

Yeah, I think it kind of goes to some of the habits. Basically, it's forming new habits for people. You know, we talk about how Covid is moving E commerce forward three, four, five years subscriptions, all this difference, all these different habits are being built. I think there's going to be a rush in the summer where people are available to do more and then it'll balance itself out throughout the rest of the year because they have built those habits around how they shop, how they act, what they do, where they wit, and that's not going to just go back to normal. I think we've kind of accelerated to something we might have hit in Five or six, seven years, personally. And I think that's just friendships and bonding online, not just sneakers. I just mean like in general. I think that's something people will want because now it's like, you know, instead of the dating, finding someone to date, it's like, hey, how can I meet other people who have a beer with who I just know I'll get along with? Because we meet these certain character traits or we have a history. Right. I think that's something that's going to fundamentally change in social media and Covid's helped bring that to light.

Yeah, I definitely think that there's a lot of research already been done that there's this huge pent up demand to go and spend money and travel and experience physical things. But the retail side of things is really going to pick back up quite a bit because people have money and they want to spend it. And definitely I see shoes as, as a market that a lot of people are going to either jump back into or start exploring for the first time.

Yeah, the sneaker industry never slowed down. Yeah, I think I bought more sneakers in the last 12 months than I normally do in a 12 month span, which is pretty insane for someone who leaves the house once a week to get groceries.

Well, I think a lot of people.

Ditch the suit and tie and the pencil skirts and blouses and then more casual attire. And what goes better with your new lemons and a pair of Nikes or Adidas?

Yeah, absolutely.

Diana, you've been awesome with your time. We want to kind of wrap this up with three questions. Three questions. First one, is an app or a tool that you found indispensable in your journey as an entrepreneur?

Yeah, I am very, very heavy on email. I use email as a to do list. I do all my work through email. Just how I stay organized and functional. So I don't know that I could have gotten through the last year without Superhuman. I couldn't imagine what my inbox would have been like juggling what I did without that app and platform and service. That's the best $30 subscription I've ever paid my life. And I find it super, super worthwhile for someone who's heavy on email.

And how is it Superhuman different than Gmail for our audience? Because I think a lot of people either haven't heard of it or they haven't experienced something themselves.

That's like Gmail is like. Superhuman is like email on crack. It's just, it's feature rich, it's efficient, it's speedy. Everything that you that you would need to be efficient and organized is there and done perfectly and built from the ground up. So it's very fast. It does everything you need to do and honestly, just every single feature is so well thought out and thought it from the perspective of like how can I make doing X better in email? They just went and did it and they're constantly iterating to improve that. Whereas I feel like the Gmail infrastructure in this system for the most part hasn't really changed, they've just tweaked it here and there. But I think the core of it is the same whereas Superhuman, they just built from the ground up around what it means to use email.

Yeah, I'm definitely a heavy email user as well and running multiple companies, but yeah, I live in my email inbox. My team will tell you that. What about in terms of. Our second question is in terms of building a new company, you guys are fairly still new, but if you were to start again 2021, what advice would you give to your future self or your new self? New entrepreneur?

Yeah, I mean it would be something along the lines of slow and steady. I don't think you need to rush, I don't think you need to get your first thousand customers in 30 days or 60 days, really. Just take your time understanding what you're trying to build. Don't think you have the answers because you don't. You definitely don't have a clue. As good as an idea as you think you have. Once you get started, it's going to change and evolve. So just start from somewhere and don't feel like you have to achieve all these things in a short amount of time. So for me it's patience. I think when I look back to, you know, for us it's only been two and a half years maybe since we officially launched. We've achieved a lot and that was because again, we took our time, we were patient, we reinvested slowly, we didn't try to hit any crazy milestones. We were just trying to build the best company. So I say we've been at this for two and a half years, but I would say 16 months of that was just purely around trying to understand who we are, what we're trying to do and improving on that slowly until we felt we were ready to really ramp that up. So yeah, patience.

Yeah, I think you guys, you guys hit that inflection point. Hit that inflection point where what's working, what's. Who you are and who you are and now it's time to Put gas on the fire.

Yeah, well, yeah, we've, for us, I feel like we've hit the next stage of that, which is we know who we are and what we want to build. Now it's polishing that even more. I think there's like evolutions to that polish and that just comes with growth just as a person. Like, look, when you were 20, you thought you were the smartest person on earth. When you turned 25, you thought you were the smartest person on earth and there's nothing else you could learn. You turn 30, it's just you keep growing and improving and learning and learning. There's never a point where you're the best version of you. And I think the same thing to a business. So, you know, if you go into it on day one thinking this is what it's going to be like on day 365, you're just setting yourself up on failure because you're going to use preconceived notions for what you should be doing instead of reacting and learning from what's happening as you, as you build that business.

No, it's great, great point there. And finally, what is it that our audience can do for you? You're building a great platform, great community, but how can our audience help you?

Yeah, well, if you're a sneaker head, obviously, or if you're into sneakers or want to get into sneakers or curious, check us out. We're doing a lot of great things for all different types of users in the community, whether that's novice or experienced. There's something for everyone. But mostly hiring is very difficult, especially in engineering. If, if you can help us hire. We have job postings up on soulsavvy.reruiti.com, 1V, 2E's. We spell Soul savvy wrong. Take a look at the jobs we have open. If you know anyone who's qualified or who could be a good fit, especially if they're sneakerhead or into sneakers, understand the culture. We would love intros and have them apply. So that would be my biggest ask.

And are you guys open to hiring anybody from anywhere in the world or are you looking for only people in your backyard?

We are fully remote. I think at this stage we want to keep that within North America at least. So somewhere in that some PST to EST time frame.

All right, so North American based, but remote is the way to go moving forward.

We are 25 employees, completely remotely distributed. So LA, Toronto, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Vancouver, obviously. Yeah, we're everywhere right now.

Awesome. So anybody out there looking for a new place to hang your hat as an engineer or any, any type of role at all. Soul savvy for the sneaker heads for the non sneaker heads. Check it out. Dion, this has been awesome. Love looking at your collection back there. And I look, look forward to seeing soul savvy kind of dominate the sneaker market.

Thank you.

No, I appreciate it. It was my pleasure.

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