Episode with Bruno and Louise (Co-Founders of Hera)

Hello everybody. Welcome to yet another episode of Build in Public Show, and I am your host, KP. Today I am super thrilled to have 2 amazing entrepreneurs, Luiz and Bruno.

Hi, KP.

Hi, KP. Thanks for having us.

Of course, the pleasure is mine. So Luiz and Bruno are both the co-founders of a startup I personally invested in, so I'm very excited about what they're working on. I've been connected to them for maybe 6, 7 months now. Their startup is Hera, hera.so. That's the domain. But I'll let them give a quick 30-second intro about themselves and then we'll talk about Hera. So Louise, why don't you introduce yourself?

Yeah, sure. So I'm Louise. I have myself a business background. Out of school, I studied in finance and then I joined a healthcare startup in Paris called Innato as a customer success manager. And there I had the chance to broaden and broaden my scope little by little. Which I think is what got me interested in entrepreneurship. So finally, I decided to do it 2 years after working in that startup. And so here I am, 1 year after building Hera.

Awesome. And what do you do at Hera?

At Hera, I'm mostly responsible for the community, I would say. So growing and nurturing the community of users and like, yeah, acquiring new users, make them make sure that they use the product and love the product as much as we do.

Awesome. Bruno, what about you?

Yeah. So I have an engineering background on my side, mostly in machine learning and computer science. And I basically, after a few years as a data scientist, I joined the same startup basically 2 weeks before Louise, first as an engineer. And then I became like product manager there. And I think like personally, it's the best way to become obsessed with starting a company. Like a product manager was really eye-opening for me as a job spanning across so many different facets of the company, I must say, but mostly responsible for the product and like executing the vision we have for the company and trying to make that concrete in the product while taking into account all the feedback we are fortunate to get from the community Louis was mentioning.

Awesome. So we've kind of touched on a few parts about Hera, but Louis, would you want to give us a formal introduction to what Hera does and who is it for?

Yeah, sure. So what we want to do with Hera is basically replacing Google Calendar. We want to build the calendar of next Which is made for distributed teams across time zones, potentially working remotely and doing virtual meetings. And we want to make these teams successful. So it's mostly towards— today our community is mostly made of co-founders and like top managers, let's say. And the goal is for us to start with these people, this persona, and then grow within teams and really support the distributed teams to work well together and embrace, I would say, this new Flexibility, like making sure people can work on what they want to work on and make sure that they hit their priorities in the week through their calendar, basically.

Awesome. I mean, one of my favorite parts about Hera when I first came across what you were doing was the fact that it was such a horizontal play, which means it kind of can span across all departments and divisions within businesses. So like the TAM is as big as you can imagine, right? Kind of like the same way you think about email, same way you think about Google Calendar, of course. But what I loved, you know, from a focus perspective was that although the TAM is, you know, hypothetically as big as you can imagine, you had a very clear focus and wedge to go to market, you know, with. And so that was something that I thought was quite impressive. And maybe there's a lesson there for founders, you know, who are thinking about, okay, I want to build a product that may apply to a lot of departments or a lot of divisions, a lot of personas, but we're going to start with one core niche persona. So tell me, walk us through And, you know, if you can recall, you know, the early discussions around how you arrived at choosing one persona over everything. Both of you, either of you can take

that. I can take that. But I just want to go back on what you just said. I think it's super important. Having a narrow focus does not mean you're sure of this focus. Like, it doesn't mean that you have de-risked everything about this initial trajectory, like direction you want to put in your company. But we found with Luis that it's vastly more efficient for us to have like a very strong direction that we want to de-risk as quickly as possible versus trying to be everything for everyone. And like, it takes 5 years to realize that you're nothing to most of them. And so very beginning of the company, we wanted to be very focused on one core value proposition, try to push it as far as possible, and then see where we are. And so initially, actually, we had a very strong focus on not taking Mainly because we were coming out of quarantine. We spent our days in Zoom meetings, and we wanted to reduce the frictions for people that spending their days in virtual meetings. And taking notes in meetings is one of these recurring pains. So we had a very strong focus on note-taking. We pushed that for 3 months, basically from February to May. We were fortunate to join Y Combinator at that time. And during YC, we realized our positioning was a bit off, mainly because we were not replacing a given tool. So people were still using Google Calendar and still using And so we were kind of like adding another tool to the endless list of tools you're using. And that's why we pivoted at the end of the summer towards building a fully fledged calendar built for distributed teams, as we mentioned. And now our strong focus at the moment is how can we make sharing your availabilities and like sharing windows on your time as efficient and as playful as possible.

It's remarkable how you've been able to observe, distill, and react quickly to customer feedback. This

is the power of agile. And it's

right,

I think.

And I think, you know, it's, it's as, I mean, as someone who, you know, who's sort of backed you, and I think, you know, my, my, what I'm bullish about is both of you. I don't care what you end up creating and what— I don't care what Hera ends up becoming because I think you're smart enough to figure out what is right for the core niche of, you know, audience you want to serve. But it's been so awesome watching from the outside in the transformation and the, you know, and the adjustments the positioning has taken, right? So if you want to share one or two reflections How did you do the customer discovery, Louise? I know you're very close with the community. You know, you're always conversing with them, talking with them. You know, what do you think that you have done differently that has led you to a smarter, a more informed position of where you are today?

Yeah, well, I think if we go back to February, so first line of code was written 1st of February, probably like the really the beginning of the month. 3 months after, we were opening a private beta. Yeah, we were onboarding users. And from the get-go, we created this Slack workspace with like, and it was funny because when I was writing an article the other day, and I was finding back those screenshots from the first users onboarded and welcomed on the Slack community. So it was like 10 users probably in February and March, like really a small set of users with whom we had interacted before during interviews that we had done a few months before. And so directly we decided to put the product in the hands of the users. So it was a very shaky product, like 3 weeks of code. So Bruno is super strong at coding, but still it was very early. And I think this is the secret sauce, let's say, like having people testing your product from the get-go, from the beginning, and feeling, you know, like working with us. Like we were doing at the beginning, we were really doing product workshop with these 10 users. Like we'd talk to them every day on Slack, but we would also do kind of product workshop with them from time to time for like 30 minutes where we would show them the spec and discuss with them. And we're very lucky because the first users of Hera were, a lot of them were product managers. So it was great to have them discuss this with us. The secret sauce at the beginning, like making, yeah, making sure we like have the product tested by users. And then we continued doing that. So we still have this Slack community. I'm talking to users every day. Basically, I think it's like 90% of my time, probably talking to users on the Slack, calling them like 10-minute call to get feedback on a specific thing. And so I think people really feel engaged on Hera because their feedback are heard and we're really co-building the product with them. And I think this is the goal for us, really not building a product on our end and then giving it to users. It's really co-building a product. They are feeling heard and like, yeah, listened to. And so, yeah, I think that's the secret sauce.

Wall of separation between you and the community has broken down.

Yeah,

right. And there's this phrase that I've been using a lot called co-creating with your audience.

Yeah.

In your case, you're co-building with your target customers, right? Which is fantastic. And it reminds me of another YC company. You know, it's kind of now folklore, you know, celebrated like it's some mythology where early days of Stripe, if you guys remember, or if you read about this, both the Collison brothers used to physically carry their MacBook to their customers and install Stripe code, 3 lines or 4 lines of JavaScript on their customers' machines by themselves manually, like, right, going to the customer, talking to them right next to them and watching them work, watching them— do their workflow.

It's actually pretty close to what we try to do right now. Like Luis is onboarding every single user with a 20-minute call. And the first thing we do is have them close the Google Calendar tab. Like we try to reset their habits and like walk them through the new products. And it's a fantastic way to close the feedback loop and get very raw insights on how users understand your product.

There's this concept that I share in some of my coaching and advising sessions called the empathy gap. And oftentimes founders who are building for personas personas that they have no empathy in fail. That's because they just don't have the instincts that the target persona, you know, has. For example, that's why there's this concept of founder-market fit, right? So important to have someone, especially if I see 2 startups and the one founding team is trying to build for somebody that's far of a reach compared to another founding team that is solving almost their own problem, 9 out of 10 times the second team will win.

Yeah.

Because they have these thousands of micro decisions and this intuition that is so hard to collect on a Typeform survey. Right. You just have to really watch them or be with them or be them. Yeah. So the closer you are to the customer, the better. Always. Now, first founding story. You touched on your both professional backgrounds, but a lot of founders that I know are who are listening to this or who follow me on Twitter are on the fence and they are— they probably have an idea or two. They are currently working at another startup maybe, but they are— they're afraid to take the leap. What made you both to take the leap to be founders?

I think the co-founding team is like the first starting point, at least, at least for us. Like we We got lucky to work together for 2 years prior to Era. And so we kind of knew at the very basic level that we enjoyed working together and that we had complementary skill sets. So the question was more, what is the best idea to use our skills? But we knew we wanted to build something together at the end of our journey in the previous startup. So I think we definitely started with the team. And then the timing was very special in our case, because we were coming out of quarantine. And so we were kind of overwhelmed by the experience of being quarantined, spending days in Zoom. And so we were kind of like early believers of remote work, right? But we had horrible, like awful months of quarantine. So we were like, is this really what remote work is going to be for the next 5 years? And so, like, we knew something was off in the way remote work had been forcefully implemented during the pandemic. And so we started looking at this, and it's kind of a rabbit hole. Like, the more you look at the way people work remotely, the more you see what is off in the way people work in the office. And you immediately Istanbul, cross-meetings. And then we started talking to users. And then, like, I think we were hooked to the idea of being able to change their daily routine. I think it's core to what we do. You need to have this desire to change for the better, like the daily routine or daily workflows of people, at least in the productivity space. And so I think we got— tell me if you don't agree, Louise, but we got kind of hooked when we saw the first impact of our prototype, like only crappy code and people saying, oh, it saves me time every day. It's pretty addictive, I must say.

Yeah, I fully agree with you, Bruno. And I think also personally, because it's always a bit scary, right, to quit your full-time job.

Right.

You're secured into a full-time job. It's like reassuring. What I did, and I remember doing that, like I started to write on a paper, what were the risks to build a company? Like what can happen? What can turn wrong? Like, What's what's the risk? And it actually stayed belong because there is there is no real risk. I mean, we're you're gonna learn so much stuff in such a short time frame. Like you're gonna be have super high, super big lows as well. Like it's it's mind blowing, let's say. But there is no risk. There is no big risk. You shouldn't be afraid of failure because like you will always learn so much more, I believe, than a full time job. Like and if it turns to be like a failure, it wouldn't be a failure. But if it turns to— if you don't succeed as much as you would like to, I mean, it's, it's not, it's not a problem. You will have learned so many things. So I think people who are hesitating to like take the plunge to build a startup, I don't know, there's, there's no big risk. You're gonna meet with amazing people, learn so many different jobs. And this is what actually took me like, uh, got me interested in entrepreneurship as well. Like you have a big mountain in front of you, you don't know from where to But you just start by like, you start doing it. And little by little, you learn and you learn from other people. And today, especially with the Build in Public, it's great because you can have, you can learn about so many experiences from different people. So you're not alone. You shouldn't be afraid of being alone as well. There is a huge community of like entrepreneurs and we can talk about YC, of course, as well. But like, you're not alone, you're learning so much stuff. So no big risk. And I think you have to be rational. say like, okay, it's fine. It's gonna be okay.

Right. I love that you actually took the time to write it.

Can I disagree with it?

Yeah, go on. What is it?

No, no, I agree with what you just said, Luis, but I think I would not sugarcoat the loneliness of the job. It's definitely, you're not alone, but it's definitely more like lonelier than a full-time job, mainly because you have hundreds of problems. That's a tweet right there.

You're not alone, but you are lonelier than a full-time job. One other thing I want to ask, which is something that comes up in my conversations with people who are considering to start, is the financial insecurity, you know, the fear about, okay, I used to make whatever, $100K or $150K, you know, stable job. Now for at least the first 3 months or 6 months, you know, what is my situation like? What— how did you both address that? Or what's your advice? You know, even if it's not something that you addressed, but how should people prepare themselves for that?

Well, I think first we were super lucky to be in France. And so in France, you have very great incentives to start a company. You can have unemployment for quite a long period of time. So the financial risk on the short term, let's say on the first 12 months, are very low in France at least. And then I would say you can reason with acceptable losses. You can say, okay, I'm ready to dedicate the next 18 months to my company and I want to be profitable, or I want to have raised $1 million, whatever your trajectory is in the next 18 months. And I think actually, it's a great constraint. We've seen over and over companies raising a lot of funds and ending up losing momentum because they have just too much money. I'm not saying you should stay like without any money, but like, it's a good constraint to force you to validate your ideas quickly. Like if you have 12 months of runway, you have 12 months to validate your idea, basically.

Right. So let's go to the next chapter. So I think between this moment when you started Hera and YC happened, there was an inflection point, or at least one memorable moment according to me, which is you guys came into my orbit. I don't know how, but Luis like somehow DM'd me from out of the blues on Twitter and she said, KP, you know, and I, and you guys, I don't know if like, you know, you, you were not on the founder circuit that I typically am part of or not a part of On Deck. And Luis had like 40 followers or something on Twitter. Like, who is this Louise DMing me? And she said, she started asking advice about building in public. And there's a lot of appetite around community and building in public in growth that I saw in Louise, in you. So let's talk about that episode.

Yeah, I think Bruno and I are obsessed with talking to users, but I think it's something we really love to do. Like, we love talking to people. So I think I wanted us to be coached by someone who is better than us. Like, I think it was the starting point. Bruno and I, on each topic that we're working on, to be coached by someone like 10x, 20x, 100x better than us. And so we started with this Slack workspace and building this community. And then we got interested in that and like searching on the internet, what are the trends in building public space and stuff. And we found KP and we were like, okay, let's try it. Let's try to be coached by this guy. And so I just wrote a cold message, but it was probably my first DM on Twitter. Didn't really know how it worked either. And so I reached out to you. And then we had this training session with you, which was great. And I think you— we can talk about that later. But you gave us like so great advice for the building public. And I think it was something that we had inside us pretty naturally. And we needed someone to make it out there, like to express it. Right.

And actually, it's really, we were on the fence. You were saying a bit before, KP, that people will talk to you because they are on the fence of starting a startup. We were on the fence on building public. Like, we knew we wanted to do that, but we didn't have the confidence. And you just gave us this nudge to, hey, just do it for 30 days and you will see. It was the right advice for us.

Right. And just like with anything, that training session, you know, I walked away feeling like— I walked away feeling like, I don't know if I did enough justice. I shared all my story. I shared all the tips that I know. But so much about building in public is putting in the reps and sets. Like, you just really have to do it. It's like diet, right? You have to do it. So I walked away like, okay, you know, I gave my best. We'll see what happens, you know. And I remember the next interaction we had was again, Luis sliding into my DMs maybe like a month after and saying, KP, we got into YC. I was like, what? That's so cool. And I was so happy for both of you. And but to close the loop for the audience, ever since what I've seen both, you know, Luis and Bruno, more so Luis, is just phenomenal at being consistent on Twitter, on Medium, on whatever, in building in public. And I think, Luis, you should know I use you as my case study for my other founders and other, you know, Yeah, it's within On Deck and generally on Twitter as like, here's someone who started, who was on the fence or was early. And 'cause you really had like 45 followers. So many people assume that you need to have 10K, 20K, 30K followers to start building in public. I disagree. You should of course start small. Everybody starts with zero. I started with zero. Everybody starts with zero followers, but it's the practice of doing it. And your early experiments, I remember you were doing, you did some Threads that didn't blow up. Yeah. You did some interviews and some case study, I think Medium articles, again, didn't blow up. You tried LinkedIn. And my favorite part is that You just won't quit trying.

Yeah.

That's exactly the mantra. It's just don't quit trying. Keep going, keep going. And one of these recent days I noticed, I think one of your Medium articles or somebody shared it to me saying, hey, like, look at this startup called Hera. And I'm like, are you kidding me? I know them, right? So there's a funny way of how things can come around, you know, internationally, right? Like you're in France, I'm in the US, but there's a funny way of things can come around if you just know the right tactics and you just execute them, you know, over and over again. So, I mean, so it's been a fantastic experience watching from outside in, and I'm so proud of both of you. So going to YC, the whole journey, your reflections, what was it like? What do you remember about YC now that you're out of it?

I can start with one of the biggest things I remember is how we got into YC. I don't know if you heard about that story, but it's quite funny, I would say. So it's about persistence. Yes, it's again, like, it's about persistence. Like, don't be afraid to fail and like persist. So we did the early applications. We did the first interview in January. We didn't have the product yet. We have like, we had specs and stuff. So we did this interview, 10-minute interview, and then the partners wanted to test the product, but we didn't have any product. So for one week, Bruno coded like crazy to have something for them to download and to try out. And so we sent them the link to the download, and then we didn't have— we didn't hear back from them for months because we really— Wow. We knew afterwards that the partner who tried to download the product got a bug because of Hera, and like, we crashed— it crashed Google Calendar. Like, it's right on his computer. Right. So he did try to download Hera but couldn't do it. And so every week Bruno would send emails to them with an update on Hera. Hey, this month, this week we shipped this feature. Here is what it looks like now. And we showed them our progress over like 3 months until Gustave reached out to us and said, okay, let's have a call. And we did that call. Gustave still had this bug on his computer. Bruno took control of the computer. He debugged Gustave live. Like, he took control of Gustave's computer, debugged the stuff. And like, at the end, we did like a demo then of Hera. And at the end of the call, Gustave said, okay, you're in. And it was starting 2 weeks after. So I think this was memorable, like, WAC experience, of course, as well. But like, until we got into WAC was memorable as well.

That's an incredible experience and memory too, right? I mean, also the fact that despite not hearing any response from them, the fact that both of you started, kept going and kept emailing, kept sharing updates. Oh my God. It's, it's so underrated.

Yeah, exactly. And Bruno, you can talk about the YC experience.

Yeah, sure, sure. So we had a special YC experience because everything was full remote, right? So I think on this aspect, we got some, like, this experience is definitely different from the physical one. What I, what we really liked about what I see is that first, they set the right level of ambition for a startup. And it's something maybe more natural for American entrepreneurs. But I feel like in France, we are not always educated, let's say, to have this massive level of ambition of we can change the daily lives of millions of people. And so the first thing is that they kind of reset what you think you can achieve in a year. So I really like that. And by the way, so they kind of force you to have this very aggressive objective for your startup. And having these crazy objectives forces you you to be laser focused and only think about what makes my company move in the right direction. So definitely super helpful. And also what is funny is that I think YC is the first community incubator, like community-driven incubator, because their only motto is make something people want. And so they spend their days teaching you about talking to users and like getting actionable feedback. And so actually it was a great way for us to double down on this community we were building at the time. And it's a great way to remind entrepreneurs that it's a good thing to go fast, but it's useless if you don't have a tight feedback loop to kind of adjust your positioning, your product, whatever. So yeah, that was fantastic for us. And it was also amazing because they gave us access to the US network, both from a user's perspective, investor's perspective, like advisor. It's a big family and people are very helpful. Right.

I'm also curious how you felt about the YC culture of just, you know, paying it forward, just helping, you know, with no expectations, just, you know, always willing to— I mean, that's something that I noticed when I came from, you know, I was in Atlanta, mostly used to Atlanta ecosystem. And, you know, not— that's— I mean, the south, the south of the US, it's not a big tech hub compared to California, you know, New York, for example. So I was a little taken aback when I would interact with someone from YC, or now of course, when I joined On Deck, I was shocked at the California ethos they have. It's not California. I think it's not a region thing, but it's more of a cultural thing. It's more of an ethos, a personal belief, the spirit of service and just helping with no expectations, I think was mind-blowing to me, you know, when I found out. Did you have, you know, bits of that through your experience too?

Yeah, totally. Especially every week we had this because now the, like the YC promos are very big. Like we were probably 350 companies, something So it's harder and harder to have everyone at the same, like, in the same space. So we had subsections. And every week, we would regroup with like 15 other founders or something like this. And we would go through a bunch of questions that the partner would ask. And everyone should like tell about his objectives, what's, what is he struggling with, like, for if he needs help with something. And one by one, everyone would like tell this during a few minutes, and then other people would have help, give advice and stuff. And it's crazy, like the power of this, because every week, you know that you're gonna have support from the other founders in a dedicated session. And you're gonna be able to help as well. I remember, Bruno, you made an introduction for a client for one of the YC companies. Like you, we got like introductions to users, to investors and stuff. So it's really, really, I agree with you, KP, like mind-blowing, the power of help and how people like help each other out and everything. It's crazy.

I love that. So Turn me to the next chapter, which is your fundraising story. And I mean, if you have to summarize your fundraising story in maybe 3 key, you know, steps or 3 key milestones or inflection points, what would those be?

I'm gonna let Bruno answer. If I say, if I can say just one thing, it's again, persistence, right? Like, never-ending, like it's working for everything.

Yeah, I think persistence is like the core skill underpinning the entire journey as a As an entrepreneur.

Exactly.

At least our journey. Okay, so fundraising, we decided to raise a seed round of around $1.5 million at the end of YC, mainly because we were like going after this, like after this pivot, and we were going to pick up momentum in the short term. And I would say the key takeaways, the first one would be understand where you are as a company stage. It's very easy to get advice from people as if you were raising a Series A or as if you were raising a pre-seed. And basically, the The tactics for fundraising or the way you should approach your round heavily depend on where you are product-wise, metrics-wise. And so for us, it was a bit, let's say, complex because we were going out of this pivot. So we had this very new product with very, very new use cases. So what we realized is that it was way more efficient to start with the vision and to sell them really, like to explain to the investor the future we want to build, and then de-risk our execution capabilities by showing them the product we've built in 3 weeks, but instead of the other way around. That was pretty efficient. And then I would say, Right. Our persistence is always very useful in the sense that if you target investors you really want to have on your cap table, because they have invested in the same industry, or they have expertise, you should— like, we were reading every article from this investor and trying to really get a sense of who what gets him or her excited to be very relevant in the way we interact with them. And it has been very fruitful in a sense. And everybody likes to get personalized outreach or interactions. That helped a lot.

What's the third one? I think you said 3.

Is it persistence? Okay. I would say no. The third one is the team, at least at our stage. Basically, when you're at a seed round, you cannot sell like we are We don't have 2 years of metrics to show you, showing our crazy growth.

Right.

Everything is very early. So one thing that will stick is your team. Your problem might change, your solution might change, your target audience might change, but hopefully your co-founding team will stick. And so we really try to emphasize the strengths of our co-founding team and like what really ties us together and why we believe we have the right team to execute on this, on this mission.

Right. Oh yeah. Okay, cool. So let's do one more question and then we'll wrap it up. Okay. So that was fantastic, Bruno. Thanks for the fundraising journey takeaways. So where's Hera now? What does today look like? Do you have product announcement or do you have a latest waitlist that you wanna share with the audience?

Yeah, so we're still on waitlist. So basically over the past 2 months, we iterated with 20 users. We created a calendar committee with 20 people and they got like the very first version of the new product. And day after day, they got the new versions and iterated with these people. Now we have a waitlist to which people can sign up directly from the website. And I am personally onboarding every person from this waitlist one by one. If you make referrals, you will jump on the waitlist and I will onboard you sooner. So I'm onboarding around 30 to 40 users per week now. And we will launch publicly in February. So the goal now is really to get a bigger volume of feedback on usage before launching publicly. Once we have like a very good set of features. We start to have it now, but like, we will launch publicly in February. So we'll need all your support at this time. But currently, people can sign up on the waitlist and make referrals to jump, and I will onboard them with a big smile.

Awesome. So I will make sure that I include the link in the show notes. So the domain is once again, Hera, www.hera.so. But Louis, where can the audience find you on

So people can help me grow my audience and see how persistent I am on @loubays. It's L-O-U-B-A-Y-S-S.

And on my side, they can find me on Twitter mostly discussing products. Way behind Louise in terms of Twitter persistence, I must say. They can find me @bruvgr, B-R-U-V-G-R.

I'll include both your links on the show notes again. But hey, this is great. Thanks for popping in for a quick chat and talking about your stories and your journey and, and Hera.

Thanks a lot, KP.

Awesome. Sounds good.