Building A Command Center For Communities (feat. Threado Team)

And that was my introduction to community building when community building was not a buzzword at that point in time.

Why don't you give us a quick update on the announcement with Thredo as a company?

Sure. 3 announcements, right? So the first one—

Abhishek, what was your point of entry into Thredo story? Like what

made you— Automations. Like automation is what brings Thredo to life. And you can, like, it's so fascinating to see the complex workflows you can built and how it provides value to the end customer.

What do you have in mind to kind of carry the torch forward?

Yeah, I think the first and fundamental thing that runs across the team is, is, is to provide value to people.

Hey everybody, welcome to the Building Public Podcast.

I'm your host KP, and on this show, I interview world-class entrepreneurs, ambitious startup founders, creators, and builders on the internet who are boldly building the future This podcast is my excuse to take you all on a curious journey to understand, learn, and hopefully be inspired by the worldviews, insights, and stories of these fabulous people changing the world. So far, I've gotten the rare privilege to sit down with incredible guests like Gary Vee, Alexis Ohanian, Kat Cole, Sahil Lavingia, and many more leaders. So check out the full podcast listing at buildingpublicpodcast.com. And I'm excited to share with you today, Now buckle up and get ready for our latest episode.

Hello, welcome everybody to the Building Public Podcast. I'm your host KP, and I'm thrilled to bring a brand new team, a startup, um, to the pod today. Um, joining me will be Pramod the CEO of— co-founder and CEO of Thredo. We have Abhishek joining me, again, CTO, co-founder of Thredo. And then we got Sharath, you know, now a second-time guest on the pod, Sharath Kuruganti joining us, the head of community at Thredo. Welcome to the show, guys.

Thanks a lot, KP. This is a first for us as well. So So looking forward to this session. Yeah.

Yeah, thank you.

I'm excited. I've been hearing about Thredo mostly through Sharath. He's been biting my ear off about the updates, the story, and what you're building, the vision. And so, of course, a lot of my audience knows that Sharath's a close friend of mine. So, that's really the context there. But today in this interview, I really wanted to kind of dig deeper into the backstory of how Thredo came along, came about. about and, you know, promote how you explored various ideas before landing on, you know, the gold mine that Thredo is. And, you know, how you recruited your first customer, first paying customers, how you built up the first MVP. You know, we got Abhishek to talk about roadmap, maybe some of the technical stuff, and Sharath to cover, you know, what community initiatives have been exciting so far and what's next. So, or also I have, I know we have an announcement that you wanna share, promote. And, you know, with the audience, so super excited to get there. So, for folks who may have never heard about Thredo, give us a quick intro. Give us a 30-second, 60-second intro, what Thredo is and what problem it's solving.

Sure. Thanks, KP. And in a nutshell, Thredo is the command center for community builders. What we've built is a platform that you can plug into Slack, Discord, Discourse, Twitter, or GitHub. We built this product for community builders, community managers, community teams to get insights on what's really happening in the community and help them save time, automate operational tasks so that, you know, we can take care of the member workflows and everything and they can focus on actual community building, right? So our early partners really love how actionable the dashboard is. We've built it for the community operators. A lot of tools are built for decision makers. I think like, you know, we wanted to be that companion app for community builders, and that's what Thetos stands for.

I love that. I think especially with the clarity around the user persona that you described, which is community builders, community operators, I think that's an underserved niche in my view. So I'm really excited that you're building tooling for them to, you know, operate at a better level. I also know that there is an announcement that you've been sitting on, and I don't want to wait until the end of the episode for that good news to be shared. So, why don't you give us a quick update on the announcement with Thredo as a company?

Sure. I've been waiting to do that. There are actually 3 announcements, right? So, the first one is, yeah, so we are announcing today our seed round of $3.1 million. We've got some amazing investors on board. So the round has been led by Vertex Ventures. They were one of the first investors in Grab and a leading VC firm in the India and Southeast Asia region and globally as well. There's Gemba Capital, Speciale Invest, PointOne, and we have over 30 angels who participated in our seed round as well. So these include— Wow. Deepinder Goyal, Pankaj Chaddha, who are founders at Zomato where I worked earlier, Krishnan R.R. from Chargebee. You know, we have Abhishek Goyal from Traction, Anish Reddy from Capillary, and several other marquee angel investors. So really happy to have a very supportive set of investors on board who really wish for us to succeed and believe in the space. And which leads me to the second announcement, right? The second one is that we are live now. After being in beta with a handful of customers, we opened up our access just a few weeks back with our waitlist. We received some great response and we've taken our product live. So you can head over to thredo.com in a matter of clicks. connect your community and really start delighting your community members. And the third announcement is we are going live in just a matter of like a couple of days. So on August 2nd, we're going live on Product Hunt. So definitely do check out Thredo and share your feedback. You know, with Sharath also coming in and taking a leaf out of your book, KP, we are building this in public. So would love feedback in public as well. And yeah, looking forward to exciting next few weeks from here.

Nice. Love it. Again, you packed a lot of great points into that answer there, Pramod. My favorite part from what I heard so far is, you know, one, it's now open, it's public, right? And there will be evolution of the product. Of course, what it is today will not be what it will be in 6, 7 months or even a year. But the journey is happening in public now. So there's no escape, which is great. You know, that's how, you know, we all learn and that's how we get feedback and get better. And as founders and as founding team, and as you know, everybody on the team as well, I think it's a net-net positive thing because it's going to help you develop thick skin over the long run, right? So this is awesome. Super excited for you guys. We'll plug in the Product Hunt launch in the show notes. We'll plug in the link to your website, thredup.com, in the show notes, but also a fascinating summary of like all the great stalwarts who came together for your fundraising round. You know, it's a great cosign coming from the India Southeast ecosystem for you. Also talks— seems to me that it speaks volumes of the social capital and reputation, goodwill you built, you know, in that ecosystem. But that leads me to my next question, which is, what were you doing before Thredo? I'm very curious about your backstory and, you know, the startup or a company that you worked at before and what you did there.

Yeah, sure. So I have an engineering qualification. So like, you know, did my engineering at IIT Kharagpur and then moved on to Bain. So spent 3 years, like my first 3 years in professional career at Bain, and that's where I was fortunate enough to meet the founders of Zomato. So literally saw Zomato take birth as a weekend project there. That was my introduction to the, you know, you could say the Indian startup space as well. So saw it sort of grow from a weekend project to a full-blown startup. And I was looking to move on from Bain at that point in 2010. And Deepinder and Pankaj had an opportunity on the marketing side. So like, you know, for me, I was taking a leap of faith. I'd worked with them before and I was really curious on what they were building. So it was a no-brainer to just join them and experience the journey. I had not thought about where we will be or like, you know, so on. It was just a leap of faith. And so yeah, initially I thought I'd be there for a couple of years, but it ended up being 8 and a half overall. Thoroughly enjoyed my journey there, joined to build out the marketing team and the user growth side of things and did that for majority of my time there. Like I was VP marketing at Zomato for the longest period of time during my 8.5-year journey. I'd say it was a very nonlinear experience of helping build a marketing team, like growing the user base from a few thousands of users to millions and helping set up Zomato in different markets. That gave me a lot of like understanding of how to think about user growth, how to leverage content and community to get users growing. So, we had a very strong content and community playbook that formed the backbone of Zomato. And at our peak, this is pre-2016, we had 35 community managers across the globe. who were basically like the sole focus was how do we add value to our customers? How do we help them add value to each other? And that was my introduction to community building when community building was not a buzzword at that point in time. Right. So that's like my background on like the journey at Zomato. And I moved on in 2019, took a break after that for a year and a half when I explored multiple ideas before starting Thredo.

Love that backstory. Also love how you were slightly ahead of the curve with community building and even exploring and experimenting with that space. So while we have these 2 guests here, I'm also going to throw some questions at them so we can keep this more of a broader conversation. So Abhishek, what was your point of entry into Thredo story? Like what made you get excited about what, you know, Pramod was doing and what brought you into the team?

Yeah. So yeah, so I'll also give a slightly backstory about myself. So I've been a computer science engineer. I was backend engineer into Java and building CRM systems. for multinational clients. And, uh, but yeah, I always had this thing to build my own startup. So I took a break from, uh, coding and did my MBA, uh, went into like IT consulting, got that business experience. And finally in 2015, I, uh, quit my job to start my own company. Uh, so that time I extremely like, uh, interested into how social interaction takes place on digital platforms. So I wanted to build a better platform so that people can, uh, publish content easily. And not only that, they— everybody on the internet can come and consume it more easily, can interact on it, collaborate more in a much better manner. So improving the engagement on online content. So started building that, but I made a big mistake. I like drastically underestimated the effort it's gonna take me to build that. So I jumped into single-handedly tried to build the entire system myself, failed at it. So, so I thought, okay, let's go back, like work for a few startups, and then come back after a few years. So between 2015 and 2020, like, I worked for 3 startups, uh, built their entire, like, tech product and, uh, and tech teams also. And in 2020, I thought, now I am again ready to take a shot again at, uh, building a company of my own. And that is when I started— I didn't want to make the same mistake again, so I started looking for a co-founder. And through one of my friends, I met Pramod. So yeah, when he like described the idea about building something for the community, that immediately struck me. I thought, okay, this is exactly my area which I'm extremely passionate about. It will give me a chance to work on something where I can like help maybe improving the online experiences of how people like interact on digital platforms. So I immediately said yes. And also like over a period of time, I think it was super like working with Pramod was like super collaborative and I enjoyed every bit of it. So yeah, I think—

The rest is history.

Yeah.

So it seems like a theme that I've noticed, you know, and then we'll get to it in a second where, you know, working with Pramod is collaborative. And I think it's been a theme that I've noticed. So Sharath, back to you. What was your entry point to Threedom? What got you super excited about the potential here?

Yeah, I feel it was like, what, January 2022, the beginning of this year. I heard Threedom for the first time when they approached me to hunt one of their side projects, which was actually very weird because I usually get requests from people that, hey, can you hunt my startup? And these guys are like building side projects, like, you know, on steroids. I'm like, what the fuck? This is new to me as well. So kind of like hopped on a call with them and then I kind of understand they're kind of creating value first before even selling anything. That one impression actually kind of added more reasons for me to like join the team. But yeah, long story short, that was my first interaction. And the second interaction was I was one of the first guests, I guess, for the show Community Hour, which you were on as well. It's kind of like felt really authentic. These folks, they're not trying to like, you know, sell anything or they're not trying to like, you know, make a big splash over it. They're just making human conversations, which is the second impression I had like interacting with the team. And when I was actually looking after my transition from On Deck, I've spoke to like more than 70 to 100 founders and like literally like 5 to 10% people actually get why they're building community and Pramod was one of them. And I was like, hopped on a call with him and he was more passionate about like doing things and he never sold me the product. He was like, what initiatives can we do together? What kind of value you've learned working at teams like Product Hunt and On Deck before? So he's kind of like very curious. So Overall, I think, you know, these impressions added, like compounded over time, and it made me like a no-brainer decision. I felt like once we were synced, aligned with what we want to do together in the next few months, years, and I was like, yes, let's hop on the joyride and to like, you know, create something memorable, something meaningful for the rest of our lives as well. So. I joined recently. It's been like 3 and a half weeks so far, but I've been working with the team. That's why I say this often, like, it's very collaborative. It's not like I'm not taking orders or then I'm not giving orders. It's more like, feels like a rally, like, you know, you shoot your shot. They kind of come back with, you know, some feedback, you know, it's kind of like very collaborative that way. So that's why I love I love like each and every day so far and looking forward for, you know, doing great things here.

Seems like you're off to a great start is what I'm feeling. So back to you, Pramod, a lot of founders who might be listening to this, you know, may have been in your shoes in 2019, 2020 when you were exploring the, what they call idea maze, right? What is the right startup for me? What is the right idea that I should explore and go all in on? What was your journey like? First of all, end to end in a nutshell, were you all— did you already know that Thredo was your idea and like that's what you wanted to do? Or did you hop, you know, from one to the other? And so that's the, you know, summary of what was the journey. And then more importantly, what were some key lessons that you can reflect on?

Yeah, sure. Yeah, it was not like super clear when I moved out what I had been doing. Definitely not the case. And Thredo was not even in picture, I think, until 2020. So the first 1.5 years, I just felt every idea that came was like, this is it. And let's go build it. And I had like 6 ideas like that. So yeah. Wow. I don't know if I'd recommend the same journey right now, but it worked for me, thankfully. But a few things that I'd say from that phase was it's important to go through that phase and take time to find what you really want to do. Because if you have constraints on, hey, okay, I need to do it in 2 months or so, then you might not explore the full potential. So that was important for me to give myself that runway, like how any founder thinks of, like, for the startup runway. Like, for me personally, it was important to give runway to— really land on that idea, right? So that was super important when I started out. Then it was more of just letting myself go in different directions. I think like, I would say getting lost in different directions and then reflecting back is what happened. But when I was in the moment, it always felt like this idea was great. I think in hindsight, those 6 other ideas where they have potential, I've seen startups take off in those spaces, but I probably was not the right founder to take take on that problem because I didn't experience those problems myself. It is not in my DNA or like, you know, I didn't have passion in that space. So while fundamentally I could understand, okay, there is an opportunity there, but I, you know, within a month or so, or like after some time, I'd feel like it's not something that I should be pursuing. And yeah, so I think it's super important to give that space for yourself to explore. Second, I think like have an eye for what you could call as founder market fit. Like what's the overlap between what you have done, what problems you faced, what are you passionate about, that's even more important. So, and I think that's consistent with the other founders that I've spoken to as well. Like, you know, because it's a long marathon, right, you know, that you are going into. If you're not passionate about it, then maybe it's not the right thing to start into, right? But anyway, there's no right or wrong there, but I just felt that it's better to pick a problem which I have experienced and was passionate about. So when pandemic hit, it was a reset time for me. And at that point it was 1.5 years post-Zomato. I was literally thinking like, you know, what's really happening in my life? And then went back to the whiteboard and these were the frameworks or like the guardrails which I put on deciding what I should do next. And the other aspect was the problem itself, like, you know, solve a problem that is big, that's large, and that's growing, right? And if you combine that with the context that you have from past, and I think it is important for me to understand the persona, like, you know, be that persona myself in the past. So Yeah, those are some of the learnings from that phase. And then I started Thredo after that. Right. And I started Thredo as a side project, to be honest. So I was just like, actually some of the previous ideas I was waiting for a tech co-founder and never really found. So, but I could have done a better job at that point with using no-code tools. I actually went the route of learning to code and build the first version of Thredo. And I wish I had met Abhishek many months earlier than, like, you know, we met like a few months late. And I think it would have been great if we had met like, you know, a few months earlier when I was starting ThredUp.

Have you taken a Loom video or downloaded like a recording of your first MVP to keep it in like the gallery for Hall of Fame of how great it looked or how bad it looked?

I do have, there's a photo somewhere. I have screenshots, I have videos. I was on top of the moon, right? I wasn't a coder before. So even the shittiest version of the product, like, seemed like an achievement. So I sent it to my wife and I'm celebrating with my friends.

So another lesson that you shared, or learning you shared with me privately, which I wanted to explore with you here was around how you felt a sense of idea pull versus idea push on some of the other ideas versus what you felt with Thredo. Can you double-click on that and share what that is about and how founders should keep an eye out for that?

Yeah, sure. Actually, that was the initial phase of Thredo and around the time when I met Abhishek as well. So, Prior to that, like I had built this MVP and we had a different product and, you know, we spoke to, like I spoke to like, you know, multiple community builders and that product needed the community builders to like switch the platform. Like we were a forum-based product at that point. And while people acknowledged the problem, I think the solution that we had was not the right way to approach it. So, one of the principles that I realized after that is, you know, be passionate about the space and the problem, but not wedded to the solution. So as we spoke to like, I think it was about 70 community builders, we just realized that there was this friction on the feedback would be like, this is a great product, but, you know, they just wanted to be nice to me and not really say no, but they would not switch to the product, right? So that happened often. And they just felt that too much effort had to go in to really get someone to log in and like set up their community on that product, right? So when Abhishek and I met, we brainstormed that, hey, here, okay, let's take a step back. Here's what we are seeing in the space, right? Where are the opportunities? What are the problems that we are hearing? How should we even think like from first principles to solve this? And it emerged that, you know, there are n number of tools today where engagement happens, right? And in the community space. So it's not really about creating another platform. And that is what we felt that, you know, the right way to think about it is what fundamental problems are community builders facing and members facing in communities? Let's try and solve that. And let's go where the market is, right? So if we are seeing an explosion of communities on Discord, Slack, and, you know, other platforms, let's start building there. So we actually went back to these community builders or community leaders who we'd spoken to. And I was part of On Deck around the same time, the On Deck community builders cohort. So that gave me a great— Right. playground to actually validate this new direction that we were taking. And we just saw a pull that, hey, like, you know, this will be great. I just want to try the product. Do you have a prototype? Right? So they're more curious. They were asking about like a product which was just on a whiteboard. And almost everyone said that they— we never had that response before, right? There was no pull. There was no excitement in the eyes. They wanted to like really get the product as quickly as possible. So I think that was a key learning for me. I think even now we do customer discovery calls on a weekly basis, primarily to validate, hey, where are we seeing that pull? Where are we seeing that excitement? And use those signals to prioritize a roadmap, right? That's super important.

Yeah, I think that's a fantastic learning. You know, a lot of founders, you know, it's like a rite of passage that they have to go through this, you know, learning moment to really you know, cement this in their head. Thanks for sharing. So let's jump topics here. I have a community question, then I'll come back to some roadmap questions for Abhishek. So community-wise, Sharath, you mentioned you really were fascinated by and taken aback by the side project as a growth lever approach that Thredo, you know, Thredo has been doing. What specific community initiatives have impressed you so far? And what do you have in mind to kind of carry the torch forward?

Yeah, I think the first and fundamental thing that runs across the team is to provide value to people, you know, not to like how Pramod was mentioning, see that aha moment like in their eyes and, you know, kind of like awe them once in a while. So the side project-led growth, was like a fantastic gateway to get into customer, like near to them. And some of the initiatives that attracted me is fundamentally the community hour they're doing monthly once, and they're collaborating with CMX India. They're doing like multiple events before I joined and making that hell out of noise in the community by just inviting a lot of other community builders is something that really attracted me. And I feel like no one else is kind of amplifying that way. They more like dive deeper into, you know, products or like, you know, things of that nature. But it's all about empowering founders to build more communities, creators to build more communities.

I have a thing here I wanted to write off fresh off of my hand. David Sacks famously said, don't build a product, build a movement. I feel like, you know, it's so rare that we see founders who can actually execute that playbook. It's very hard to pull that off, right? Like Tesla is not a product or a car. It's a movement to go EV first and also make EV sexy. That's the movement. And if you see some of the greatest, like, I think it's very, very hard to break through to the top 1% of startups. It's easy to start a startup because today, 2022, you have all these tools. Everybody's got a startup, but it's so hard to build a story that people want to rally behind. People want to be a piece of that story.

Absolutely.

And I think that's where what I enjoyed just, you know, from afar and the reason why I'm doing this podcast with you guys is that very few startups actually at a DNA level understand that storytelling aspect, that narrative aspect, the movement. And even in the very early days, this is just a seed level. I know this is not like year 10, this is just year 1 or 2. I feel like you guys have an instinctive understanding of what it takes to build that story at a global level. And again, this is not a regional, like some small-time story. This is a global story, I think, that we can aspire to. Again, of course, it's not going to be perfect, but it's worth a shot, I think.

Absolutely.

It's about time.

It's about time. And very few companies, startups in this particular space, they're making noise, but not in the right way. So, it's just that thin layer, right? There is a very you know, you have to be very intentional. And Pramod and the rest of the team are like very intentional every move they make. And that's why I was like, okay, instantly hooked to it. And I feel the future, what we're trying to do—

What plans do you— I'm curious about, yeah, what plans do you have the next 2, 3 quarters?

Sure. I feel we are heavily moving towards creating a category, meaning In the community space, we want to own a category, create, own, and dominate that category. Just like how— Love it. Take Drift as an example. They've created conversational marketing as a category, owned it, dominated it. So we're kind of in the process of—

Even Maven.

Maven, yeah.

Maven created CBCs as a category and dominated and owned it.

Exactly. And we're in the process of like finding that that hook. And that's why we're creating a hell of a lot of noise with launching, opening up with the product to the public, taking these calls on a weekly basis and introducing ourselves to like, you know, wide variety of startups and, you know, creators. So on and so forth. So the first step I want to do is in that process, I want to bring people who've created categories, especially in the community space and want to do like a podcast. So inspired by you, want to like create a podcast within That's like the step one, share these stories to empower founders. The further down the line, we want to like, we have like CommunityOS as a kind of like a resource right now, which is kind of like very high value, but it's kind of like underappreciated as of now. But I want to like, you know, convert that into like a 7 or 8 week course, kind of build like a— Nice. Like a lengthy process where we make people involved with us and we help them build a community in the process of like take office hours, like inviting experts like yourself or, you know, helping them, like handholding them to like, you know, go from A to Z in their journey of building a community. And somewhere down the line, want to plug Thredo, but that's not the goal. The goal is to like empower more founders to like do things. So on the same topic—

Sorry, finish your thought. I have something to say.

Yeah. So on the same topic, we want to do some other initiatives like community hackathons, which were never done before. It's kind of like a week-long hackathon where we involve community builders to participate, where they can compete with each other, like, you know, take, grab those small wins to go to the end goal. Eventually, I want to do like a super peer program slash like an ambassador program championing the ambassadors. I have also thought about, which I think I never heard of, some kind of like community Oscar awards where we kind of reward people, right, in this space, best startups.

Similar to Golden Kitties from Product Hunt.

Yeah, similar to Golden Kitties, how they actually empower makers. We want to empower community builders, you know, with a larger goal. So there is a lot on the plate. We're just like, kind of like I said, the goal is to create a category and we're making moves towards that goal. And yeah, excited to like, you know, kickstart these things with the folks.

Thank you, Sharad. That was a great insight into what is coming down the line with the community at Thredo. So let's switch gears and go back to product and engineering. Abhishek, what is an exciting feature? What's one specific or one or two specific examples that you have in mind about features that you guys shipped in the last 6, 7 months that you're excited about?

Yeah, yeah. So I think almost all the features are quite interesting and exciting to build, but if I have to pick a couple, like one of the key, like, highly complex and challenging things which we built at Thredo is the core data integration platform. So right now we are able to integrate with Slack, Discord, GitHub, Discourse and Twitter, and we are able to ingest live real-time events from all these external systems at a very high scale and able to update Thredo at real time and show that to our end users. So that platform is quite— I mean, it's taken a lot of effort to build, and it's still quite challenging to maintain. So, so that is one. And the other thing is automations. Like, automation is what brings Threedo to life. And you can— like, it's so fascinating to see the complex workflows you can build and how it provides value to the end customer. So I think automation is one of the more most loved features which all of our customers enjoy.

That's awesome. So, wanted to throw some light on you and engineering as well, because I feel like Threoda's got such a sexy potential with community going on and there's marketing, there was all this side project-led marketing. And I think wanted to make sure that even product and engineering is the unsung heroes are appreciated too. So, back to your promote, we just announced The latest round, you know, you just talked about that at the beginning. Can you give us an insight into how this fundraising round came about? What were one or two lessons or key learnings you have that, you know, you want to share with people who are also fundraising?

Sure. It's a couple of things to set context. So we were initially bootstrapped, right? So the— and this is an important question, I think, for founders is when

For how long were you bootstrapped?

For close to a year until we had a prototype of the current version of Thredo, right? So, but I think each founder's context is different. Each startup's context is different. Like for us, the approach that we'd taken was let's land on that pull, like, you know, from an idea standpoint that, you know, are we seeing that pull and, you know, have we landed on something that people want, like to the persona that we are building it for, and then get into a fundraise rather than raise to build product, right. And, but yeah, like it could be something different for others depending on the situation, right. So, but for us, yeah, that was a journey to get to that point and then do the fundraise. The fundraise process itself, I'd say, yeah, and we like with most things, we learn it like by doing obviously, but I think for founders, it's important to run it as a tight process. And we learned it from our angels and Abhishek Goel, for example, he was one of our first supporters, gave a lot of inputs on how we should think about fundraise. And my recommendation is always to run it like a tight process, like practice a lot. And it's important to be concise in packaging the value that you Like, you know, what you're building, what's the vision, what is the problem that you're solving versus just going into the details of it, right? So yeah, I mean, running it as a tight process. So, and then second, the, sorry, the last aspect is like, you know, I strongly believe in engineering serendipity. I think a lot of things that have happened at Thredo, be it, you know, how we started or even like, you know, Shalini who joined as the first employee or like finding Abhishek, you know, collaborating with Michael on side projects or even like finding Sharath, it was all like engineering serendipity, like, you know, being always like on, switched on and like looking for, I mean, like, you know, just being out there, like talking to people, getting signals and like, you know, the more you are open about what you're building, the more people will like either come back to you or give you some feedback, right? And with fundraising, that's what happened as well. So I happened to connect with Vishal, who was earlier at SoftBank, and he was my batchmate from IIT Kharagpur. I connected with him like after years, and he loved what we were thinking about and the idea. And over a weekend said that, yeah, he wanted to commit as an angel. And then he connected me to Piyush from Vortex. Vertex Ventures and then like, you know, had a chat with Peyush and, you know, multiple chats over a span of 3 days. And that's another thing that I think like has been consistent with Thredo is it's about engineering serendipity and also velocity, like being very intentional about things. And I really appreciate when other people are also very intentional. So it just, you just like are jamming and like things like, you know, keep happening. And with most of the investors that we have on board, we felt that like whether it is, you know, with Vertex as well, it was a matter of 3 days, we were available for multiple calls, and then we closed it extremely like, you know, quickly with whatever data was needed. Same with Gemba Capital, they were one of our earliest backers. And they were in touch with us since the early days. And the moment we decided to raise, like it was like, you know, in a span of I think 5 days, we had 3 meetings and we closed it. Yeah, so I think running it as a tight process, engineering serendipity and being very intentional and not— and some of the process is boring. Like, it's like you're pitching the same thing for like, you know, n number of times, but it's important to understand that the other person is hearing it for the first time. So you can't like, you know— It's new to them. So yeah, that was my—

No, one specific, I think—

sorry, but

no, thanks for sharing. One specific question that I think comes to mind, a lot of founders may struggle with this was, you know, would be around rejections. What was your, like, how did you handle rejections during fundraising?

Yeah, so I don't think it's just the fundraising part where you face rejections, right? Like, in a lot of the startup journey is like, There are more downs than ups, to be honest, right? And I think that's how it is. And the ups can be like a step change, right? So the concept of compounding applies here as well. So if you're at it, if you show up every day, it's not about like taking it personally. You just need to think about, okay, what could have gone better then, right? So I think like Abhishek and I had a very simple process after every meeting, we just like go over if it was a rejection, then what could have been done better? Like, you know, and we kept upping our pitch and like, you know, kept at it, kept at it, and then it worked. It's the same thing with the product. Like it's same thing with hiring right now or with any aspect of the business, I think. And we've also, one thing which we haven't really touched upon is we built a team which actually has this core DNA that they like show up every day. There are a lot of downs, but the ups are like accelerating and like, you know, it takes like— and that philosophy we apply here as well. Like whoever is coming on board, like who we hire, like, you know, the idea is can like we build the team that elevates itself and keeps going, right? So I think endurance is a core part of like startups. So yeah, I think it's fine. Like we're now very used to like rejections and I think it's more about learning from Awesome.

I love it. I mean, I think that's, you know, that brings us to almost the end of the podcast. If there's one thing I could maybe ask the 3 of you, you know, we can do a round robin and then we can wrap with that is, let's start with Sharath. You know, what's one message you have about Thredo that you want to share with community builders who might be listening to this, your target customers? That message could be about the team, about the vision. What are you excited about? Imagine you're speaking directly to the community managers or community builders who are listening to this. What would you say?

Well, that's a tough one. I didn't prepare for that. And thanks for— I had to throw in his zinger somewhere. Thanks for putting me, you know, taking the shot. I feel— This is a hot seat now. Let me think. I think we are just like, kind of, like I said, we are kind of like creating a category, you know, with product, with these community initiatives. And all we want is, you know, we want to like spend time with you, community managers, builders, creators, whoever it is, the founder. And we want to understand what you want. Fundamentally, we'll be like chasing you, asking, curious questions and specific questions so that we can solve your problems, right? So, I would say try Thredo, go to thredo.com. It's live. Everybody can access the platform, hook up your Slack, Discord, whatever the community you have, have that integration set up. And, you know, tell us what went bad and what you think is great for us so that we'll double down on that, like on that feedback and make the product better. And yeah, share the stories, you know, we'll be like also trying to like champion our customers. That's one thing I want to do is to highlight their case studies and how they use Thredo to like up their community game. But yeah, I feel like that's more importantly like that, you know, try Thredo and let us know.

Oh, that was well said. I know you were not prepared for it, but, you know, maybe Pramod can now, you know, add some flavor to this too. Pramod, what do

you Yeah, I'll let Abhishek go first and then me take it.

Okay, let's go, Abhishek. He's passing the hot seat to you, man. Let's go.

Yeah, I mean, see, I don't know, I mean, what's the right thing to say, but what I obsess over every day, like how can I build a platform which can make it super easy for anyone to start a community? And run and scale it. So this is what I think each and every day. And if, yeah, if I have to go and pitch Threadle to anybody, I'll just say that we will make it super easy for you to start a community, to run your community, and make it super easy to grow your, let's say, your business on top of your community. That would be my message.

That's awesome.

Pramod, what about you?

Bring it home.

Yeah. So No pressure. Community building is like hard. And I've like, even at Zomato, like when I didn't know it was community building, but, you know, it involved like brick-by-brick building, like it would take 6 to 18 months for the community to really take off. So it takes a lot of time and effort. And I think any community builder is really a superhero in a sense, right? And they take on a lot. They're literally enabling connections, enabling people to add value to each other, working in the background to do that. And I think they deserve a lot of unfair advantages. And that's what we are, we've built a great team to actually help do that, right? It's a hard problem to solve, but it's an essential problem to solve today because community is a core, like it's a must-have for every company or every organization, right? So, like, if you look at any category, products are similar, but the network effects is what, like, you know, builds the long-lasting companies, right? So, these people, like community builders who do it day and night and they need better, like, infrastructure, better tools, better education, better support. And we want to be not just, like, from a product standpoint, but we want to be that you know, like we want to champion like community builders, right? And be there for them no matter what, right? So that's like just my message that, yeah, like, you know, we are there for the long run helping community builders really succeed. And that's what we'd love to see, like a future where every business is community-led and yeah, let's make it happen.

Love that. Thank you for sharing it. And, you know, it's inspired me a little bit. You know, I just got a little goosebumps when you said that towards the end, how they're like superheroes in the struggle, because I've been in those shoes. I built several no-code communities and sometimes the creator communities, and now I'm starting one more here at Day One.

So that's so true. It takes a lot of time, a lot more than people actually think. And it's lost. A lot of the work is actually underappreciated even within your own community because they, you know, they get value and they, you know, maybe they'll say a little thank you here and there, but majority of the lion's share of the work that you put in is you're doing it because you love the community. You're not expecting a thank you. You're just doing it because it's the right thing to do and you want to help them. And so it's usually underappreciated and to have a company in the niche who actually gets this and to even speak the language at this level, I think is already a massive differentiator in my view. The other thing that came to mind when I thought about the way you phrased the last part, Pramod, and hopefully this can be an odd star in a good way, is I think up until Stripe came around, there was no one Like there was no, like there was no developer-friendly company. I think the world has ever seen the way that Stripe has done it, right? Stripe is the world's most developer-friendly company, partly because they get it. They're not, they're not doing it for the flash or the hype. I think they simply deeply get it. And so they built the infrastructure that removes any amount of hassle from developers around the world. And they started with payments, of course, but they have Atlas. They have so many suite of products eventually. That basically I, the way the moment I think about developer-friendly tools, Stripe comes to mind, even though there's millions of others. I think there's an opportunity here for Thredo to create something like that for community builders. And it's a tiny niche now. It's not as big as developers, but in the next 10 years, 15, 20 years, I think community builders, community operators will become such a powerful function within a company and organization that they will require this level of tooling expansion and evolution. And so you guys are Perfectly positioned for that potential, for that promise. It's a gigantic Herculean, you know, responsibility and task, but I'm pumped for you and all of you that you are taking up such an inspiring thing to do and rooting for you from, from, from the sidelines. All right. Thanks everybody for joining. Thank you, Abhishek. Thank you, Sharath. Thank you, Pramod. And we'll call this a wrap.

Good. Thanks for having us, KP.