Building A Silicon Valley Startup As A Scrappy Immigrant (feat. Michelle Marcelline)

So you heard about this Forbes 30 Under 30 and you needed to go get a photoshoot?

Yes.

And then what happened?

So we tried to find a photographer here in San Francisco, but upon searching, the cheapest photographer we could find was $2,000 per hour. So yeah, that's not— that's just not possible. So we decided to just rent the equipment from Amazon and buy our own backdrop, which is very, very affordable. Decided to do our first shot, sent it to the Forbes team, and they were like, nope, go run a photo shoot. But then we asked, um, what's wrong with it? And then they gave us some feedback. So it's like building in public, right? Right. Listen to the feedback. We decided to iterate again, and thankfully upon the second iteration, we managed to do it. We took it in our apartment, so if you see the raw files, then you could have seen our desks and our living room basically. But then they decided to— but they, yeah, they cropped it.

They cropped that. 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 in public. 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. Now buckle up and get ready for our latest episode. Hello everybody. I'm KP and welcome to yet another episode of Building Public Podcast. Today, I'm joined by a very young and talented and high-caliber, high-potential, high-promise founder joining us from Silicon Valley, from SF. And, you know, I want to let her introduce herself and talk about the startup that she's building. Welcome to the show, Michelle Marceline.

Thank you so much, KP. I'm honored to be here.

Why don't you give us a quick— why don't you give the audience a quick 30-second, 60-second intro about who you are, and then let's talk about TypeDream.

Of course. My name is Michelle. I was born and raised in Indonesia. I moved to the US in 2015 for college. And after I graduated from college, I've been building startups ever since. And the latest one is—

Fantastic. And what is the latest startup you're working on?

Typedream. It's a no-code website builder with a Notion-like interface. So if you're familiar with Notion, you must like Typedream.

The common threads that you and I both have, Michelle, is no-code.

Yes.

Of course, being an immigrant to the US, because, you know, I talk about this a lot on my podcast. I moved here in 2011 as an Indian immigrant, like a student, just like you, on an F-1 visa. You know, I don't know how many people know here about that. And, you know, so the struggles that the visa maze that people talk about has been fascinating and sometimes exhausting, and I'm sure you can relate. And the third thing that I think you and I have in common Apart from these 2 is around the principles of building in public and being super open and vulnerable on Twitter and sharing the journey, you know, chapter by chapter. I love that about you. And I think I've seen your O-1 visa, you know, announcement and like the way the whole thread kind of unpacked your story. And it was so beautiful to watch. And I was rooting for you from then.

Yeah. Thank you for that.

Yeah. So let's dive into your backstory a little bit, because I've read a little on the internet that this is not your first startup. You know, TypeDream is the latest one, but of course you had built something else before that got acquired. Like, I want to understand like where— first of all, let's talk about the first ever startup you created and bring us to the present from there.

Okay. Let's do that. So I would say it will go all the way back to 2015. So first year of college, that's where I met my co-founders for the first time. It was in our first computer science class in college. We were grouped to build school projects together, but ever since then we've been building projects outside of school together. That led to the first startup we built right out of college, which is Robinhood for Southeast Asia. in which we wanted to allow Southeast Asians to trade US stocks because the stocks there are not as appealing as US stocks. We got into Y Combinator with that idea as well. But after a few months of pursuing that idea, we decided that we needed to move on because the regulations were pretty hard to get, like the licenses and everything.

Right.

So we moved on to our second idea, which is Cotter. It's a passwordless Authentication, so to allow you to add login and sign up to your websites without any code.

Wow!

That's the how we got into no code as well.

Right.

Actually.

So what what was the genesis behind Carter? Like what made you? What was the origin story of you know why you wanted to build passwordless auth?

So when we built the first idea Robinhood for Indonesia, we realized that authentication in developing countries, including Indonesia and. Most Southeast Asian countries are quite different than the one in the U.S., such that people there don't use email and password; they use phone number and one-time password instead. So we kind of built the thing for ourselves. But when we pitched our app, like stock trading app, to our potential partners, the partners were impressed with how we handled our login.

Interesting.

So once we decided we couldn't pursue with the stock trading app, we thought why not white label this one? This product instead, right? Yeah, so that was how Cotter was born.

Very smart. And I can relate to the OTP part because even in India, it baffles me that a lot of the— when I go back and visit, my mind's become so Americanized that I assume that everyone's got an email, but actually everyone's just got a cell phone number, right? And it's like WhatsApp is crushing it in India. I'm sure it's the same in Indonesia. Yeah. And so a lot of the times I noticed this with my sister, if you know, who's in India, and if you're like, you know, signing up for, I don't know, some retailer, some, you know, Nike discounts or whatever, it's always, they ask you a phone number and it's OTP through the phone number. I'm like, wow. So it was very interesting how the same email one time sort of like here we have the magic link, right? With Notion has magic link and so on. I think there it's more so a, you know, it's based on SMS. So it's very smart. Now, how did you scale that? What were your, like, what was your journey around like growing that, you know, product?

At first we targeted developers. So like regular companies, we hadn't heard about no-code back then. So we just targeted regular companies in developing countries, mostly in Southeast Asia, because that's our domain expertise. But after doing like quite a lot of B2B sales, we realized that first we don't have any B2B sales experience since we just got out of college. And the second one is that developers don't like to use other companies' service. They like to build everything in-house because they can.

Right.

And that is how we discovered this whole new market of no-code, in which people would rather build and ship as quickly as possible, and they would pay for other services if they need to. Right. And so we branched ourselves to becoming— to target no-code. So we built like plugins for Webflow, Bubble, and other website builders so people can add login and sign up to their sites. And some, like during around late 2020 or early 2021, people started asking for plugins for Notion.

Right.

So we were confused, why would you need sign up or log in for Notion,

right?

Turns out people say that, oh yeah, we use Notion to build our websites,

right?

That got us more confused. I mean, there are lots of other website builders out there. Why did you choose Notion, right? Then they said, we just love Notion so much because the interface is very familiar,

right?

Like Google Docs or Microsoft Word. And who cannot use Google Docs or Microsoft Word, right? Right. Whereas To them, Webflow and Bubble still has some learning curve to tackle. It's not as straightforward as a note-taking app.

Right.

And then, so we decided to dig deeper because we thought, oh, there's an opportunity here. Right. We decided to dig deeper by interviewing them and asking them what is needed from Notion as a website builder that Notion doesn't have, because there must be, right? Notion is a note-taking app. If you were to use this as a website builder, then There must be something else needed. And they mentioned like 2 very important points. First one is buttons. Every website needs a button, need a CTA, but there is no default way to make that. There's some hacky way, like as a workaround, but there's no default way. And then the second one is a navigation bar, a menu bar, which is like a core component of a website, but Notion doesn't have that. Yeah, that's right. And again, there's a hacky way, but no intuitive way to do it. So yeah, I think we've validated our market enough and we didn't only interview one or two users. We decided to look for more websites built on Notion and reach out to them.

Right.

After getting enough validation, we decided to build TypeDream, which is an independent no-code website builder, but with the Notion interface.

Very cool. I love it. I think, you know, the making sure that you're talking to customers from the get-go and really plugging in the holes and the gaps that, you know, that exist in the market is the classic, you know, founder advice, right? So great job there. The other thing, I mean, of course I relate to both of those points. Like I think around the fact that there, there are so many, I mean, I've built maybe like 7 or 8 Webflow websites and I've used Squarespace before. I still have a Squarespace website. But something about Notion is so appealing. And, and, and ever since I started using Notion as a website builder sort of like interface, I think I have like 6 or 7, you know, um, low-key Notion-based sites. Like there's one thing called nocodecheatsheet.com that I built using Notion. And then, you know, there's like a numerous number— like now there's so many, like I think there's twitter— tweetcheatsheet.com, a few others that I just for fun, because it's so like documenting stuff within Notion is so easy. And when you have like a great template looking thing, you just want to have a little, you know, like a navigation or a button, you know, and just make it, make it and make it pretty and make it look like a website, right? So that's definitely a great insight. Now let's, let's talk about where you are today. Like that seems like that's your MVP or the first foray into the Notion market. Like where's TypeDream today?

So TypeDream today is no longer only for static sites. So previously you can only build landing pages, personal sites, anything static. But in a week, actually, we're planning to launch our second iteration of TypeDream, which is the ability for you to display anything with data, like database connection.

Right.

So you can build something like blogs, directory, knowledge base, in which you only need to design your page once. And you can simply display that your data beautifully on your site.

Wow.

So it's kind of like a CMS? Yeah, it is CMS. Wow.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

That's awesome. I feel like, you know, the, the Ghost market, right? The, you know, if you've heard of ghost.org, I think it's massive, but there's still a learning curve to kind of like, you know, learn how to use Ghost, especially as a non-developer. And I think that's a huge market gap that maybe you guys can fill given you're already doing static stuff. Right.

Yes.

The static stuff to me is kind of like, you know, it's, it's, it comes in the same line as simple pinpoint, like website builder solutions that are like simple, like, like Linktree and like simple stuff. Right. But then when you move to dynamic and, and CMS stuff, then you get into blogs, like to your point, or even e-commerce maybe, you know, and galleries and stuff like that. So it's very exciting. It gets into the whole like Squarespace, you know, you know, TAM. However, as we know, Squarespace is, I don't know, $30 to $20 billion market cap. So it's like there's a huge opportunity there. So fascinating. Very excited. Keep me posted. I'd love to, you know, if you guys are on Product Hunt, hit me up on that day. I'd love to leave a comment or check it out and give you some social capital. So

thank you so much for that, KP.

Of course. So let's talk about your YC journey. You know, I'm excited about, because you did just mention that you got into YC with another idea. Now,

yes,

did you get into YC again for TypeDream, or were you referring to the, the same time?

That same time. So in YC, you can pivot multiple times, right? They are okay with it because from as far as I know, and according to my conversations with them, with the partners, and with our— my other YC batchmates, YC mostly invest in the founders,

right,

and not in the idea. Because ideas can, like, people morph all the time, but team is what matters as an early stage company.

Right. Yeah. Well said. I want to ask you about that. Like how, you know, if someone had no prior founder experience but wanted to get into YC, what advice do you have for them?

I also didn't have any founder experience before getting into YC. I would say you will figure it out as you go. What matters to YC is how you can convince them that you and your co-founders will stick together through thick and thin. And how we convinced the YC partners was at the time of applying to YC, I was already building multiple projects with my co-founders for 4 years throughout college.

Wow.

And we've stuck together for that amount of time. So yeah.

Awesome. Now, what was YC like? You know, what are some things that YC is world-class at? You know, I mean, if in other words, pitch YC to me.

Okay. YC was an amazing experience for us. And I believe that it'll be a life-changing experience for other founders too. If you are just getting started, if you're super early, and you don't have both Capital, like enough capital to go, and connections. In our case, why it's very important to us can be broken down into 3 parts. The first one is because we're super early, we're not experienced at the time, so we didn't even know simple stuff. Like when we wanted to build our trading app for Southeast Asia, our Robinhood, we spent multiple weeks on building an app for iOS. Android and for web. And just through our first ever meeting with our group partner, they gave us a clarity in which they asked us, okay, what's your target market and what do they use there? Like, what are most of their phones? If it's an Android, just focus on Android and validate your idea first before spending weeks and weeks developing apps for iOS and web. Yeah. So if you're inexperienced, then they will give you clarity like that. Whatever you share, they will have enough experience to tell you, don't do that, validate your idea, talk to your customers. That was really, really important to us. And then the second one, fundraising. I'm not lying about this one. But once you have the YC brand, it's like a kid going into Stanford.

Mm-hmm.

Once you have the Stanford brand, it's I don't know, but it's definitely way easier for you to find jobs, right? Compared to—

Right.

If you don't have that brand. Same with YC. Once you have that brand, I'm not kidding, but you can raise at a really good valuation just because you have the YC brand.

Right.

And then the third one, connection. If your business is B2B especially, your first few customers would probably be your YC batchmates. Aside from that, again, once you have the YC brand, it's easier for you to just network with people because they see higher, like you are seen highly. And then, yeah, I would say those 3 things.

Right now. So you were there for 3 months. Were you there in person?

3 months. Yes, in person. But the demo day was online because of COVID

COVID, right? Yeah. I mean, what was one special memory you had from You know, your time there? Anything that stands out? Anything that's specific that, you know, with your co-founders, all of you coding away, hacking away something in the night, or any, any fun memory that you can recollect?

I would say the most memorable thing that we got in YC is it was just any other dinners we had every Tuesday, but that Tuesday the guest was the Airbnb co-founders. So we were—

wow.

Amazing how,

right,

like we're now so close just because we got into YC. It's very cool.

That sounds surreal. Yeah, it sounds fun. So let's zoom past that and, and get to your product launch, right? You guys had— this is like July or June 2021, you had a massive product launch.

Yes, July 2021.

Yeah, congrats on that. That was epic. I, I saw that. So let's talk about that. Like, I think there— I have a question around What are some underrated aspects of a Product Hunt launch playbook? What are some things that were non-obvious to you in the beginning that were super important in your, in the playbook that you had when you launched?

Okay. So if I read other people's playbooks or even Product Hunt's guide itself, they mostly focus on the launch day itself. So like making the assets beautiful, making the blurb straightforward and stuff like that. But I believe that what is underrated is the effort prior to the launch. And I believe that it is done through building in public, in which you build an audience before that, you talk to your potential customers, you iterate your product based on their feedback, and then the launch. Because once you have a big community, then the launch is just natural. They will naturally support your launch, right?

Right, right. Noelle said, I mean, you're— this is music to my ears, as you know, right? This is exactly what I've been preaching and talking about all the time. So, and I loved how, like I said at the beginning, I loved how you've embraced the building in public principles in your own unique way, right? And so that's what I wanted to maybe double-click on here. Let's talk about some building in public experiments that you tried out and the ones that actually worked.

The ones that actually worked are the ones that come from me as a founder and not from the company's account, because we also do, do building in public from both my— the founder's account and from the company's account. And that's because I feel like people will love to hear other people's story more than a company story, because a company will indirectly be marketing, like, right? Is it or not? People will think that you're doing some kind of a marketing thing. But with founders, you're just talking to people, you know, candidly. And I share more about my journey, my successes, failures, almost everything there. So I believe that if I fail, then people shouldn't fail from the same reason as I did, because why would people waste their time for that? And I did that because I also read other people's Build in Public thread, and I learned from their journey and not repeat their mistakes.

I love it. I see the larger-than-self purpose, you know, in what you're doing, you know, which is admirable. So let's talk about some growth channels. Like, so are you using Twitter I mean, you talked about building in public through your personal account. So I'm assuming this is in reference to your Twitter account, right? Your personal account. Have you tried YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn? Like, I'm curious about all these growth channels personally, you know, cause I haven't tried much of other things, but I want to in 2022. So definitely would love to see if you have any experience with there, any experiments you ran.

No experiments with other channels yet, but it's also my 2022 goal to tap into TikTok.

Right.

Yes,

I think you would crush it on TikTok. I'm hearing great things about TikTok, that there's a new wave of like founder content. And apparently, like, I mean, this is like super surreal when I heard about it. The people are saying like there's a whole, you know, segment of people who are not going to Google for product discovery or product recommendations. They're not even going to YouTube or not even going to Twitter. or Product Hunt. They're going directly to TikTok for product discovery. And I'm fascinated by that because I was like, wow, that— because, you know, remember like 5, 6 years ago, if you wanted like product discovery, like every time you thought about Product Hunt, right?

Yes.

But apparently now there's a lot of content on TikTok around tools, infrastructure, platforms, SaaS products and ideas, you know, that you can use. So I'm really fascinated myself too. There's a lot of founder content there.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah, very cool. Awesome. So let's talk a little bit around your Forbes 30 Under 30, you know, recognition. Congratulations there.

It's

very cool to watch the story. I love the, uh, I think there was a little, I mean, I can't exactly remember, but I feel like you kind of were showing how scrappy and bootstrapped your team was, you know, that you couldn't just— talk us a little bit about that. You had sent an email about this Forbes 30 Under 30 and you needed to go get a photo shoot.

Yes.

And then what happened?

So we tried to find a photographer here in San Francisco, but upon searching, the cheapest photographer we could find was $2,000 per hour.

With the studio, I bet, right?

Yeah, photo studio and the photographer. You have to book both of them separately. But we have 5 co-founders, so we'll have, like, let's say, 10 minutes for the group photo. And then, I don't know, 10 minutes each for each one of us. That sums up to 1 hour. And we're not camera ready such that we can just pose whenever, like regular models. We would need to think how to pose. We're not natural like that in front of the camera. So, yeah, that's just not possible. So we decided to just rent the equipment from Amazon. And buy our own backdrop, which is like very, very affordable. Decided to do our first shot, sent it to the Forbes team and they were like, nope, go rent a photographer. But then we asked, um, what's wrong with it? And then they gave us some feedback. So it's like building in public, right? Listen to the feedback. We decided to iterate again. And thankfully upon the second iteration, we managed to do it.

That's so fun. I mean, did they know what you were doing? Did they know that you were like iterating, kind of like bootstrapping, trying to get this? Photoshoot done by the team?

I believe so, because we still had to send the raw files to them.

Right.

And we took it in our apartment. So if you see the raw files, then you could have seen our desks and our living room basically. But then they decided to— but they, yeah, they cropped it.

They cropped out. Hey, that's pretty cool of them to like, you know, roll with it. Right. Cause they didn't like, I mean, it looks like they were not super high-strung about the backdrops and whatnot, but they came out really great. I looked at them just earlier. The yellow background and the gold background, I think is fantastic. So, you know, that was, that was a fun story. I loved it. So let's also touch on your, I mean, O-1 journey and that whole thread that you wrote. The O-1 visa is what I'm referring to here for the folks who haven't ever heard about the visa category O-1. Congrats on that. Thank you. It's a pretty, you know, I know a lot of folks in On Deck and a lot of folks in YC, a lot of folks on my Twitter follow me and, you know, who I chat with. who have been aspiring for that visa category and wanted to get in. And there's a lot of confusion around this, as I'm sure you know this. And I think a lot of even self-doubt, you know, around, am I even like extraordinary to be qualified? Which to me is ludicrous because, you know, I believe that, you know, I believe that it shouldn't be that— like, it shouldn't— you shouldn't compare yourself with like some Serena Williams or something.

Yes.

You know, but let's talk about it. So congrats on it.

Thank you.

You're welcome. And give me a little backstory of what that visa category is for those— for the audience who doesn't know about it, and why you needed that visa and what it meant to you, and then what it means now for your company, because now you're stable.

Yes. So the first point, what is an O-1 visa? So O-1 visa is an extraordinary ability visa. I know it sounds And like, who would think themselves as extraordinary? Right. But we consulted with a few YC founders who are also immigrants, and they recommended us to get this visa. And that is how we know how extraordinary we needed to be.

Right.

By comparing ourselves to them, which is more concrete than comparing myself to athletes. Right.

Right. Or Nobel Prize winners or something. Yeah.

Right. This visa can like O-1A are for our startup founders. O-1B, I believe, are for artists, athletes, and similar professions. So we consulted with the with other YC founders who were also immigrants, and they recommended us a lawyer to work with. And we decided to work with this lawyer. They're super great, and the five of us got it, which is a very huge deal because I know if One got it, then okay, it's good. But all 5 of us with very similar background, we must be doing something right, right?

Right. How long did it take to go from application to final announcement?

Technically, if you have everything, then you can just pay for— you can just collect all of your documents in a week or 2 and apply. You can always pay for an expedite in which you get a decision yes or no in 2 weeks. But it took us 6 to 9 months, and that's because we basically had to work.

Yeah,

for our application, such that they require us to be a judge and at their startup. Yeah, like,

uh,

so we had to apply to hackathons and wait for them to actually host a hackathon, right? Right. We had to be a member of prestigious organizations. Y Combinator and On Deck are some examples. But yeah, we have to work on it as well because one is not enough. We had to have some PRs, like publications. So, but thankfully at the time Typebeam was covered in Tech in Asia as well as in Forbes. So yeah, we had to wait 6 to 9 months for everything, for to complete everything. But let's say you already have all that, then it's as simple as collecting all the documents that Of submitting it to the lawyer,

right? Yeah, I mean, it's also another underrated— I feel like it's another underrated topic, even a category as such, for immigrants in America, because I think a lot of people don't even think about the O-1 category. A lot of them are so focused on H-1B or, you know, EB-1, EB-2, all these other categories. But I only learned about it, I think, 2, 3 years ago, and I've been here for 11 years. And so it's like one of the underrated categories, you know. So

yeah,

I'm hoping, you know, through your story and through like a lot of stories that I, you know, publicly talk about, I'm hoping to bring more spotlight into that category. Because just like you said, you know, I think America, you know, as a country and the economy could benefit from, you know, high-caliber immigrants, you know, who are not shackled by all kinds of like stupid visa categories that are very limiting and they're not really helping them to start companies or build or create more jobs. So I think O-1 is a great path, and I think it should be more celebrated and publicized even more.

Yes, I know that the EB-3 is probably a more stable option because it's a green card, right? But O-1 is a really recommended path as well, because although it's only for 3 years, but you can technically renew it forever.

Right.

Yeah,

you can keep renewing. Yeah,

yeah,

that's right. Awesome. So, you know, what's top of mind for you in the next quarter? Like, what are you focusing on personally, and what are you focusing on as a company?

Personally, I would love to finally start building in public on TikTok because, as you mentioned, there's a new generation of people, probably the new Gen Zs, in which they treat TikTok as their main search engine. For the company, I would say we want to make efforts on Web3 because it's an up-and-coming category, and I believe that the entire internet will eventually move towards Web3 in, I would say, 10 years because it's not an easy step, right? Right. But we have started efforts on that, and we want to continue on that. The efforts that we've started is 6 months ago, people wanted to purchase NFTs, right? I don't know if they understand it at all or not, but they wanted to jump on the hype train and purchase NFTs and display that somewhere as their identity.

Right.

So we enabled that by allowing them to embed their NFTs to their personal site. So in your personal site, you can showcase the NFTs you have. After that, It, the popularity shifted into people trying to make their own NFTs and allow their community to mint it. So we enabled a one-page website with a mint button for people to do that. No code.

Right.

Web3 is still a new space and we're still constantly following what's happening there. So our next iteration would be sign up or login, but using your token or NFT.

Okay.

Yeah. By connecting your MetaMask and confirming whether or not you have the token. So right now, if you want to log into YC, you'll have to have an email and YC password. But now if you, let's say you have one YC token, then you can log into YC. Something like that.

Fascinating. Yeah. I think it's a very novel and like nascent, you know, technology space. And like, just like you said, it's going to be a big shift for all of us to get into. That new model. It'll happen. I think it'll just maybe take time, just like the 1999-2000 dot-com era, right? It took time. It was not overnight.

Exactly.

But it is happening. I do definitely love the ease of use of the MetaMask logins. It's just been so fascinating. Like, anytime you have to log in, you can just use MetaMask and boom, you don't need to remember your password.

Yes.

So it's been Refreshing, you know, thing. So awesome, you know, really excited for all the developments that you just described, you know, excited for your personal journey and, you know, more billion public experiments. Keep me posted. Would love to, you know, track, follow you and see your TikTok experiments as well, and then maybe get on there myself, you know, uh, when I get some time. And wishing all the best for TypeDream too.

Thank you so much, KP.

Awesome, thanks for being here.

Thank you, I'm honored to be here.