Million Dollar Exits Ep.6 with Igor Krasnik: Why Your Startup Is A Media Company

Hello everybody. I'm KP and welcome to Million Dollar Exits, a special segment on my main show, the Build in Public podcast. In this interview series, I sit down with founders who went from an idea to building a business and then eventually selling it for over $1 million. Hence the name Million Dollar Exits. This is something I'm very passionate about and curious about at this point in my career. I want to learn and share all the insights, mindset shifts, lessons, and non-obvious tips that are part of this unique journey journey with the next wave of founders who wanna take this path as well. So buckle up and get ready to be inspired and informed. Here's a special shout out to our episode sponsor, paralect.com. Billion-dollar ideas come from every possible niche. If you're a busy domain expert in marketing, sales, finances, or healthcare, and don't wanna spend 6 months just to build an MVP, you'll find Paralect super valuable. Paralect is a venture studio built to design, build, and launch a product for you that is ready to sell in under 2 months. Start with no-code or go full-stack right away. Simply focus on growing your early adopter community and build in public, and they'll take care of the rest. Build your million-dollar startup with paralect.com. P-A-R-A-L-E-C-T.com. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Million Dollar Exits podcast. I'm your host, K.P., and today I have a very, very special guest joining from Poland. Igor joining us from Paralect. And first of all, welcome to the show, Igor.

Hey, super happy to be here on the other side of the screen.

Right. And I'm smiling widely and grinning because Igor, in many ways, one of the big advocates for this podcast, especially this segment called Million Dollar Exits. Parallelect, as you guys know, if you've been listening to this for the last 5, 6 episodes, Parallelect is a repeat sponsor, you know, and I'm grateful for your trust and the way you reached out. And it was such a, I think, collaborative, organic connection that we just had with the podcast and the fact that you were building Parallelect and you saw it was a natural extension to your marketing campaigns. And so just want to put it out there, Igor and Parallelect team has been the most fun to work with. Super easy, fun, and, you know, just kind of like the kind of people that you want if you want to build a startup and want some expert guidance and people who've done this before. I know that's kind of what Parallect does anyway. So maybe that's my segue into asking you, what is Parallect? Tell the audience a little bit about the origin and the story.

Yeah, yeah. Thank you very much. So Parallect is a startup studio and I am CTO in this startup studio. So it's a service company. We're selling product engineering as a service. We're partnering with typically early-stage, non-technical founders rather to build their first version of the product, to launch it, and typically Typically raise funds after it, the pre-seed funds, or rather we partner with more later-stage founders when they experience some delivery issues. So probably they built the product, but their team doesn't perform or they can't hit some milestones. So that's where we fit into, or like launch a new product. So that's what we're doing. And we use all these like profits, not huge, but still profits that we have and reinvest them into fun startup activities that we'll probably talk with you more later. Yeah.

I'm excited to dive into those. So you've been— you said it's kind of like a service company, you know, for people who want to build products like software products. What are some kinds of— let's say you said non-technical founders, but what are some specific personas that typically you work with that you tend to attract for Parallelic?

Yeah. So I can talk about like our ideal clients. So ideal client would be basically a person who will make it without us. So basically someone who don't need us because it's challenging It means that we are targeting right people that are out of our league, so we need to work hard to prove that we actually need it and so on. So that's our ideal customer, and what it means, it's a serial entrepreneur who already launched some company, probably sold it, or is running it in parallel. So they know already how products are built there. We are pretty sure that the product will grow, so we can overinvest into these products. So that's the ideal customer, and we usually got them through a network. So our clients introduced us to other people like But from organic search or from our programs, we normally attract more early-stage people without actual knowledge. So they are the tough one to work with because you need to actually prove, even if they have money, you don't want to spend a lot of time to work with a person who wants to grow a product who will be mad at you. So we'll need to figure out how to find these great founders even if they have money. So that's our challenge. And the reason why I'm saying non-technical, because we found out through the years that it's the best fit for us because we are technical, we know how to do technical stuff, we built technical products, so we already proved it. I think we are pretty decent in architecture, in the data, now in no-code. So we are pretty confident in this part, but we are not confident in marketing and sales. So that's the help that we need. Right. So we're trying to find this best fit when founder is great in sales and marketing, really pushy, energetic, can sell stuff, who is confident And what they're doing, who can lead the team genuinely without pushing them. So that's like the best fit for us. And so I have these founders.

Yeah, you know, thanks for sharing. But I have the— while you were sharing sort of like this ideal client in some of this context, what sprung up to me was a notion, a concept that I've been riffing on for a while where I think that every creator, you know, who's amassed a pretty decent-sized audience and who has trust with the audience, and not just talking about like, you know, like superficial influencers who don't have trust, right? But like people who have an audience, so they have attention and trust. You know, I think every creator could benefit from having a SaaS product or some version of a scalable digital product, an app. I think that's like an unexplored territory in my view, because as we see the rise of creator economy, you know, we see a lot of people like Justin Welsh, we see a lot of people, he's on LinkedIn, I think pretty big on LinkedIn. There's a lot of them like that, right? There's so many niches. You know, there's Miss Excel who is in TikTok, she's blowing up. A lot of creators like that, I think they try to monetize through Things I feel like that are not super scalable, like t-shirts or, you know, like merch and, you know, dumb shit mostly. Right. And I think if they had great partners like you guys, you know, who understood, who understood technology, understood product building because of the fact that they have an amazing network and marketing unfair advantage, I think it's a natural opportunity to not only collaborate but also create a lot of great products for the world. Example that comes to mind, Igor, is think about like James Clear, if you know him.

Like, yeah, I know him. Atomic Habits.

I love the book. I love the book. I think I read it like every, almost every, every year. Like, it's like my Bible next to my nightstand. extent. But if James Clear, who I think almost has a million people in his subscribers list, if he decides to build a habit app and I use a meditation app called Simple Habit, but I have no attachment to it, it's just one of the many things I just use. But if James Clear had his own app, 100%, I would switch, right? Because I feel like I owe death to him because he's such a— he's changed my life. And I think so there's the need where I think a lot of creators like him, if they come to a realization that they could They don't have to code, they don't have to go learn no-code and AI themselves, you know, because I imagine he's busy. He wants to do speaking gigs, he wants to do all these other things. They could simply partner up and build a SaaS app, you know, and I'm like, that's a missed opportunity if you don't, if they don't.

Definitely, definitely. And I'm glad that you mentioned this because it's something that we discovered not so a long time ago. So again, we're originally developers, so we're a bit slow understanding some like marketing sales concepts, but it's definitely something that we want to explore and double down more like on this like influencer types of partnerships, and to be honest, it's a really difficult way. So I'm posting daily to Twitter, I still like have a small account, but I really value Twitter, and I met a lot of great people and clients from there, even on this size of audience. So I know that if somebody has this audience, and especially if they have already info products, so that's the sweet spot to jump in. It's probably a difficult, different type of partnership, so it shouldn't be like pay money to us so we build it. So it should be something, let's build it and share the revenue.

Yeah, revenue share or something like that.

Yeah. And unfortunately we don't have like a case study yet, but we're doing like a few experiments here and there based on that. So for example,

I feel like that would be— I'm just curious because I don't think of any because there's— think like there's an infinite number of service agencies, right? Dev shops, right? If you go to lemon.io, there's like, I don't know, a million developers. You know, there's so many developers, so many dev shops, so many offshore agencies. I think I haven't come across a service agency that specifically niches down and says, you know what, we partner up with creators who have an audience and trust and we build SaaS products for creators. I think that could be an interesting niche nobody explored. You may need early, like some good wins initially, some small wins, but it would be an interesting case study to explore. Like even to a creator to pitch them, you could say you already have an audience which is an asset, you know, build an app that would serve them and add value to them and then go from idea to exit on MicroAcquire or Acquire.com and we'll help you and we'll do our share. I think it's a no-brainer. Yeah. But if somebody pitched that to me, I'm like, you know, as long as I find the app to be something that is fun, you know, something that I want to do. So anyway, so I don't know if— so have you heard about my software product called Leaderbird?

No, sorry.

Yeah. So this is like a month ago. So, you know, I run the fellowship called Building Public Fellowship, right? And so one of the— one of our fellows is a Ruby on Rails developer and he's become very close to me, a good friend of mine, Zach. And I think he worked with 37signals and like Jason Fried and like DHH and those people. But anyway, so he's a seasoned developer. developer. And then we were like, just one day we were just shooting the shit, like randomly just talking about some stuff. And then I had a Google Doc— sorry, Google Sheets template where I was tracking in my fellowship how many people are tweeting every day and how many tweets are they making and who's on a streak, who's on a hot streak, and that kind of stuff. And he said, KP, you know, I can spin this up like into an app. And I asked, uh, could you do this like in a day? Like, I don't want to overcomplicate it. He said, yeah. So next morning I wake up and he already spun it up, you know, quick little lightweight app. And once we shared that internally with the 20 people in our fellowship, everybody used it almost every single day. And I think after like 15 days, people were like addicted to that. They're seeing their screenshots of like their, you know, the streaks and stuff. And I got the idea that maybe we should just bring this out to the public, you know, to the normal Twitter and like other people. And so the idea is called Leaderbird, like it's a leaderboard, but like bird is Twitter. And so it's called leaderbird.co and I spin it up quickly. And that is where I realized the power of having an audience and trust because— Okay. And I got amazing feedback right away, which 4 years ago I wouldn't have gotten that feedback. I would have had to really like beg people and like to test, be a beta tester and so on. But one difference, one unique thing that I did was I had a Stripe checkout page even on the landing page, even with no code, like even before we announced the actual MVP. And so I think I got like 4 or 5 paid customers immediately within the first day. And so now we have 22 paid customers. It's a small, tiny—

Oh, congratulations.

Micro SaaS. Yeah. And it's fun, you know. So again, it doesn't take too much of my time. It's like maybe like an hour a week, but I feel like more creators should try this thing.

So first of all, we'll need to do something with you now. Yeah. It's the first thought. Second, I actually saw this page, so I remember it now, and it has a lot of similarities with the products that I'm building actually. Really? Or at least like philosophical similarities, like not functional. So it's pretty cool. And also one thing that you mentioned, you mentioned Lemon.io. I also want to give a shout out to Alexander because he was a guy who actually showed me Twitter and building public community. So I was subscribed to his newsletter and he was sharing these revenue goals and I just replied back like, man, it's so awesome. And we eventually met with him and he showed me My First Million podcast, which is also great that I'm still watching till the day, Twitter and stuff like that. And I started learning building in public. I

love Alexander too. I think he's also, by the way, not my podcast, but he sponsored my newsletter, KP's Column.

Yeah, actually, I learned from him that you need to sponsor, guys.

What's that?

I think I learned it from him. Like, I saw a lot of sponsorship, and even like in the first Milan, he sponsored it and he said that the performance was great. So, it's probably something that I learned from him.

So, let's actually talk about this, right? So, this is something that I think 3 years ago, 4 years ago, I would have I would have not— I don't think I would have gotten the real essence of why sponsorships are important. Yeah, because often, like, you know, the default mindset people think is that a sponsorship, you have to really calculate the ROI, right? But you can't think like that when it comes to people. You can think like that when it comes to platforms. For example, if I'm doing SEO on Google, then okay, then I really care about CPC, like, you know, like all that optimization, over-optimization, because it's a platform. Like there's a billion searches every day, right? More than a billion.

That's how it works, right?

Yeah. So there's like a lot of focus on transactional ROI. You know mindset. But when it comes to sponsoring, let's say newsletters or creators or podcasts, I learned this only recently. And because now I'm on the other side where I'm the creator, right? So now I'm like I get the I get the the the sponsors that I have, including you guys, Igor Lemon. I have massive respect for them because they took shots on me before I become the next big thing. So it's not the ROI of that particular edition. You know, like when for example, like he sponsored something in January. Like it's not the ROI of oh Alexander sponsored KP's newsletter on January 14th and like. What's the clicks on that? No, it's like for two years I'll be singing songs about him, right? It's like it's crazy. And so believing in someone and taking a bet on a creator is similar to like take putting a two thousand dollars check in Tesla in two thousand nine, right? You're gonna reap a lot of rewards in the long run. You know, I see this a lot of the times, like with my first million. Somebody they they really respect, really care. They'll remember the early days. You know, like Danny Miranda is a great podcaster. I don't know if you guys know him. Yeah, but I went. He did. I think he's like at four hundred or something now. He's he's like. A phenomenon. He's gonna be the next Joe Rogan. I know this, and he's young, so he's got a lot of time. He did like 400 podcasts or something episodes, but I built a relationship with him like when he was so early, and till today he and I we exchange DMs. We talk like this. That little investment of my 15 minutes time with him or 20 minutes or whatever is now a friendship. That's how I feel about I think you know what Alexander is trying to do because you know you guys are like in Poland. I'm in Atlanta. Like how do we come together to create value for you know entrepreneurs or founders? I think it's through these small things. You know it's some collaboration, some sponsorships. Some promotion or whatever, you know.

So yeah, definitely. Yeah, let me add here. So first of all, I really appreciate your thinking because I thought you, you're already kind of big creator, so probably you're already used to this kind of like payments, so it won't be exciting for you. And it's really great that you explain it the way because it also opens my eyes and I now can understand how other people feel about it, right?

Because it's as a creator, like I said, it's As a creator, it's so different, right? Because as a creator, you're almost like a small business owner. And so you really would respect the first— if you open a restaurant in Warsaw, you would respect the first 100 people who paid for you and then ate there, right? And after a while, when you hit scale, like when you hit like McDonald's, you don't care. But initially it matters a lot. So I think I try my best the same way. Like when I have a Product Hunt client or when I have a like a Series A startup like Coda or Glide or someone, they come to me and they're like, hey, we want to sponsor. I always go and get some other younger creators and smaller creators and sponsor them because I know what it feels like, you know, it's like so amazing for them and I know that feeling. So it's like, you know, and it's also the money will travel, that ROI is, like I said earlier, it's not just about the clicks, you know, it's reputation.

Yeah, definitely. And I also want to add regarding the ROI, definitely we weren't looking at this way, like how many clicks it really brings and how many deals, because we thought that it's probably like not Not something that will happen quick, first of all, or not something that will bring us like huge money deals because we need to like sponsor more. So that's probably the way to go. But it's cool that it led us to like, basically when I was explaining that to you, I was explaining like what we are building. So you kind of know what we were doing. So we are staying in touch and yeah, we converted it into this podcast, which ROI is probably much bigger than what I paid already.

It's so funny because when you reached out, I feel like something happened 2 weeks ago and for some reason I was thinking about you. I was thinking like, you know what, we were doing a round of new guests, like a new list of people to invite for the next 20 episodes. And I said like, you know, I want to put Igor in the list because we had these email exchanges and I was like, I'm really curious about Parallax. I want to know more. And so here we are. So tell me a little bit more on— there's 2 other things you touched on earlier, right? Which is another tool called Momentum.

Momentum. Momentum, right.

And then something called Nano. What are these 2?

Right. So let's start from Momentum. So Momentum is a tool that I'm leading, that I founded, that I'm for the moment building and mostly promoting. But now I already have guys who help me to promote. But basically it's a tool to build in public. It's a set of tools to build in public, to be precise. And you mentioned a couple of things like creators, like not everyone understands tech even with no-code. So everyone says that no-code is easy. It's not. I mean, I can say that no-code is easy because I'm technical, I can build stuff.

There's a learning curve.

Yeah, but I understand that it's not easy. So the thing that we figure out with our new clients is that we have some awesome people who are really great in networking and sales and stuff, but they don't understand what Notion is. It's hard for them to open Figma. And it blew my mind. These things for me was always like, they are super clear. There is nothing simpler than that. And I said, okay, so we met on a call with the founder and he told me like, Notion thing was confusing and it opened my eyes. So that's like whom we target with Momentum, like really people who can do stuff, who can sell stuff, who can deliver, but who don't understand tech. So we'll give them some tools that will help them to launch their business as quick and cost-efficiently as possible. So what do you need like to launch a business? So we said that the first thing that you need to do is launch a landing page. Right. So Momentum should allow you to launch a landing page. And the way how we do it, we can say that it's a no-code builder for landing page, but in fact, the way how I say it, it's stupidly simple landing page builder. Nice. Because all you need to launch a landing page is just a name and tagline, and you click publish and it's already published. So it will be just name, tagline, and input with the collect emails forms. But here's the thing, you have like URL that you can share around, so you can start sharing this link around and you start collecting emails, and we have like analytics and Emails built in, so you can start collecting emails. You can't send emails at the moment, but you will be able to broadcast emails later. So here what it gives to you. So you have an idea, you can launch your page like in seconds, like sitting. You can start spreading link around, and we will like create content right how to distribute the page. Like probably like go to Twitter, probably to Reddit, probably to Instagram. So we'll create this kind of knowledge and try to automate it too. So it's like the first piece. Like the second piece that we say that you absolutely need for your business is building in public. So that's, I think, that's what is helpful for us to validate founders again. And we say that if you're serious about business, you should commit to streak like you mentioned. You should like post daily, not like to become a writer. It forces you to think about your thing daily. It forces you to be accountable, to set goals and so on. So we say that it's super important to have the schedule and to post to the social media. So we give a tool to kind of aggregate all these content that you create in all the places. So it can be a tweet, a LinkedIn post, a YouTube video. So Momentum, in Momentum you create a stream. Let's say, how is the startup called? Like Leadbird? Yeah, so you create a stream for Leadbird. You can create a landing page in 1 second. You can start featuring your post there and later you will be able to post from there to LinkedIn.

So it kind of creates a timeline or something?

Yes, it creates timeline and it embeds this timeline into your landing page. That's the idea. And you can bypass like using this landing page builder and you can just integrate like this wall into your website.

Yeah, I might try that actually. I want to try that because with Leadabird, I've been posting every day or maybe at least once in 2 days, 3 days. And so I do have individual tweets, you know, and I think they will make for a nice timeline view.

Yeah.

And so maybe I can like— so you're saying this whole timeline view could be an embed widget in like a card website or something like that?

Anywhere you want? Yeah, any website. Yeah, any website that allows you to embed like HTML code I think I will.

I definitely want to check this out now for that one.

Yeah. And the thing is, yeah, so we have one embedded in our Parallelic website that is built on Webflow like the same way. So every time, like when people are on the Parallelic website, they will see the latest updates from us. And we try to stimulate all the people from the teams to post. So it's really hard for people to post that. It's really a challenge to like to help them to do this. But when like everyone starts posting, magic happening. Like our website is always live. So everyone's building their stuff. Somebody submits logo, probably it's a Dribbble shot, I record a YouTube video, somebody writes on LinkedIn, they record a demo video from their product that they're building.

So can I just tell you, this might be a bigger idea than even the build in public or I mean, not build in public. Sorry, what was the first one? The landing page stuff. Because a content aggregator that sources from Dribbble, YouTube, Twitter embeds, LinkedIn, I don't think exists as a feed. Think about that. I don't think it exists. And like you said, like a lot of the teams would love to have something like this. You know, I was at On Deck, we had 350 people and I'm pretty sure among 350 people, at least 25% of them were creating content every day, which would be valuable to have if they're tagged properly. I think it would be valuable to have in a nice feed and like we don't have to do the work of trying to come up with, you know, like, like, you know, like trying to like curate and go and get this and like put it in a static website and then like refresh it, right? Yeah, it's a live, like real-time feed.

Yeah. So just to clarify, so it's not automatically like fetches it from your social networks, but it's by intentions. So you need to create it, like you need to keep it like really nice because you

don't want like all the stuff from Twitter

I

think that's what I'm wondering, if maybe some one person is the curator and I guess they could like based on this, based on maybe some tags or categorization, maybe some AI, I don't know. They can like say, okay, here's 80 tweets from my team. I mean, not tweets, 80 content pieces from my team from all sources. I'm going to put 4 of them on the feed. Like, you see what I mean? Like an approval system. Like I'm going to say maybe the marketer could just say approve, approve, approve, approve, and they will be on the—

Yeah, that's nice. Yeah, we actually were doing something similar with Parallelict accounts. So basically people were submitting their posts and we were trying to figure out how we can repurpose It and post it from our account.

Cool. So anyways, I got commented.

Yeah, it's not, so it's a pirate. So I can like bring you to the really black hole of what we're building because so the thing that I mentioned, it's like it's not one product, it's a set of products. So we have for now 3 products. So one is Page, it's a landing page builder. Second is Wave, it's simple analytics. If you use Splitbee, it's a straight clone of Splitbee and I can talk about it more. And the third one is the core product, is the actual feed. Like you mentioned, it's a bigger idea and we think that's where all the fun stuff will be happening. But the thing is that we're going back again to our mission. So we want to allow people to launch and grow the business as efficiently as possible. Let's go like, what will be the next step? So you now have a landing page, you now post on social media, now you need to send emails. So usually you use like tools like, I don't know, like SendGrid, MailerLite. Like SendGrid. So we'll build a stupid simple like version of this tool in Momentum too. So it won't be like super like advanced, but it It will allow us to do basic stuff like talk with people and create threads. Like another tool will be definitely like writing blog posts. And the thing is, when we have all this like content already in our system, we can create blog posts out of these tweets. So that's where the fun is starting to kick in. Wow. So that's where we're moving and we're building like every like feature as actual like micro products. And we want these micro products to be led by different people. So for example, we have designer who wants to lead a product that will be a stupid simple Canva, like so you can create Open Graph images, you can create social media images, right? Like in 10 seconds, it will be just enough. Just enough. Like nothing like fancy, but just enough. So that's like the momentum thing.

But so that's this, like you said, it's a suite, like a platform of products, not just one. And then you're about to announce Nano, right? Starts May 1st. Tell me more about that.

Right. So Nano is the natural extension of Parallax. Let me tell you how it started. So we were in Turkey. with our CEO Dmitry and we were discussing like what will be the next step for Parallax. And then when we actually stated our mission, so our mission is to make everyone in our community, including partners, clients, and team, an owner of $1 million startups.

Nice.

So that's a big mission. So we didn't accomplish it. It's our mission. So we are on the way to it and everything that we're doing is around this mission. So Momentum in this case, it allows you to build, it provides you technology to like build these $1 million startups. And Nano, Nana is like, it's a community piece around like building startups. So to build startup, you definitely need like people, you need network, you need fellow founders, you need clients, you need to talk all along. So with Nana, we're trying to build an actual community of early-stage founders who communicate with each other, bid on stuff, and turn it into a venture capital pipeline. So basically it will be the process that will bring you from $0 to $1 billion startup. So now we have like Momentum as a technology. that will be used to run NANA. And NANA is an organization, like, that people who run it, like, I know, who can help to advise startups and so on. So the first phase of this NANA pipeline called GRID, it's a 30-day program in May. And the only rule of the program is that you need to post daily in social media. Right. I think that's the main rule. There are a few others, like meeting with other people. And I'm a big fan of enforcing it in the organization because I think that's what keeps just like growing, not selling. But yeah, so we are building a community and this pipeline that we'll build every day, 30 days straight. And everyone who make it to the end, they will get a prize from us. It will be another product, info product that we are building called Kickstart. It's discounts for tech products like Notion, GitHub, and so on. So everyone who made it to the end, they will get the discounts and we will invite best people to the second phase called Bootcamp. So the goal of this first phase, the The goal of the 30-day phase will be to grow waitlist. So people will be building valuable data and grow waitlist. The goal of the second part of bootcamp will be to make first sales. Probably we'll shift it early, probably somebody will make it early, but the absolute goal of the bootcamp will be to get first sales. So we'll help like more with like design, probably build some no-code prototype. Right. Something needed to like make first sales. And the final step will be an accelerator. It's something that we already running for 2 years. So it will be already an equity-based program. So we'll offer like best startups from bootcamp to switch to this accelerator program when we will assign a big team working like on their product and targeting fundraise.

So that's awesome. Thanks. Thanks for sharing. I feel like you're taking the founders through the journey, right? You're going from 0 to 1 and then, you know, like the MVP is out and then the first sale, first customer. So you're kind of making a business more and more real, you know, from just an idea. So I actually had a question, Igor. 2 questions I had. One was, what is the tech scene in Poland like? You know, I feel like there is a There's a lot of developers, like really smart developers and like a lot of energy like that I can sense from way far away, miles away in Poland. What's happening? What's in the water?

Yeah, I'm not here for a long time, but I can definitely confirm that something is stirring there because I'm following a few really like big people on Twitter, like from the indie scene. I can mention Alex from Get Baked. I think she's from Wroclaw. We also like used to tag like people from Poland on Twitter and there are really Decent, like indie hackers living here. Also attended some conference hosted by Amplitude, and it was great. So it was a great talk, then networking event, a lot of great people. So I can recommend. So it's a great country and not like expensive prices, great people, great startups.

What's your favorite thing about— how long have you been in Poland so far?

I actually just here for 3 weeks, but I'm here from time to time, but I moved here like 3 weeks ago.

Yeah, fully finally moved here, right? Yeah. What's your favorite thing about where you are now?

So I lived in Georgia for the last year and it's a really different kind of country. I mean, the country of Georgia. And so the people there are really like, they are spontaneous, they're energetic, they're really— it's in their nationality and they're super friendly. I really love Georgia. Shout out Georgia. Here in Poland, people are more like, they not that expressive, so they're more probably old school. Yeah, yeah. But I really love anyway that people are really like happy, like they're smiling, they're like walking in parks, there are really a lot of like bicycles or like families running. It just feels like really like a cool, like a family vibe or something. And another thing is you can like buy everything in Poland. I mean, there is a lot of shops like from China, from the States, from Europe, And I bought a lot of gear like to record videos here in YouTube. So I have camera and a light here. I bought some nice devices. So I'm in Georgia. You don't have like big brands or technology so much. So I'm trying to like buy a lot of products to create stuff.

Like you can like have a fantastic studio now, right? Like a full setup.

Yeah, I'll try to.

Yeah. So tell me also about the VC funding scene, you know, especially the pre-seed and seed. I mean, in the US, of course, you have the Y Combinator. The Techstars. And of course, there's so many hubs. There's the New York scene, there's the Chicago scene, of course, the Bay Area. Atlanta has a bit of a B2B and fintech scene. There's not a lot of B2C here, very few. So I think every region has their own sort of like VC scene. You know, what is Poland like? Have you been able to figure it out yet?

Not actually. But the thing is that our customers are from the United States, most of them. So we're still working with the same founders, like from YC, from Beyond Deck. And they raise from the funds from United States, like generally.

Did you have any Undec founders? Because you know, I I was at Undec for.

I think you know that fellow, someone who was on YC programs and Beyond Dec programs. He said that Beyond Dec is much more like family, like compared to YC. So nice.

That's cool. Yeah, that's awesome. So yeah, so I think back to what you were saying earlier that the most of the entrepreneurs you serve are raising from around the world, from you know, from U.S. and U.K. and everywhere.

Gotcha. So for now, like as Like this fundraising thing was the same. So the last year it was pretty tough. So it was really tough. It forced us to do a lot of changes. These changes are still going. Like we have like really tough challenges in company to like to secure ourselves like for the future. Like for example, we're trying to increase the number of sales calls 10 times and we're trying to do the same for the cost of MVP. Yeah. So somehow we need to build MVP like twice as less money. So we changed our offer and because of this slowdown in funding, we changed our offer a lot during the last year. We lowered our prices, so we tried to introduce a subscription-based model when you subscribe to the team and we now promoting this offer more. And basically we are trying, okay, so founders have an option to hire a CTO, what it will cost them, what will be the salary, what will be the equity, how can we compare it to CTO and be better than them. And we have a lot of legacy resources to be better than average CTO, let's say. So we changed a lot and we used to take contracts around, I know, like $70K for MVP and 3 months of building something. And we switched to— so now our prices are somewhere around $15K for starters. It can be lower and we're trying to build MVPs in under 2 months. And by MVP, I mean, like, really, like, fully full product. So it makes sense to build it once it's already validated. So we changed a lot and now we introduced this offer. We're trying to assign people to more projects, basically to let more startups in and try to create something which is less expensive and potentially we can automate and productize and sell as a product.

So that brings me to one of the last segments that I wanted to touch on with you, which is the rise of AI. I'm curious, what are your predictions and perspectives on AI? Have you been playing with OpenAI APIs and like just the ChatGPT and stuff like that.

Okay, yeah, so I'm pretty lame here, so my focus all around like network and marketing recently. But cool thing that we have like basically we have like guys who play in the CTO role inside the company now and they're doing all this AI stuff. So I'm not that used to, but I'm kind of okay with it. I see how it will transform Momentum because like it's what we're building. So now we're generating like a page with one tagline, we will generate the full page out of this tagline. So I see what will happen. I'm not feeling like too much FOMO, so I think we're good with it because as long as people are practicing it, working on it, and so on. But I think like the product industry will change like really a lot like in the following year. So we'll see, we already see like products that kind of can make a design, kind of can make a product to be there, but they are not like they're good. So you can play with them, But you can't grow a business with them yet. I think in 3 months we'll have a huge number of products to choose from. And in about a year we will see really someone who made it, someone who created this platform. And it's a bit scary.

I mean— Does it remind you of anything? Does it remind you of any time in the past, maybe 10, 15 years, where there was such an explosion of new products into the market?

I don't know, not at my age. I think the closest is still Web3 thing. So it was weird kind of, and it was kind of changing everything, but this time I think it's for serious. So I definitely see the practical implementation of it. I am a believer in blockchain. I really admire the technology and the philosophical thoughts that it sparks. But AI is more real at this point. Yeah, absolutely.

So I think the closest thing that comes to my mind, Igor, is maybe the Apple App Store explosion. When the first App Store was announced, I remember there was an app for everything. That was actually the commercial. Apple ran a commercial that said there's an app for that, right? And they would have all kinds of weird, not just But like the developers, there's a lot of creative developers came out and then they would create like— I remember there was like an app that would be like, I think it was like a cigarette lighter or something. And like you would just like, you can move the phone and then it would like the flame of the light would go whichever direction. And by the way, at that time we thought that was so crazy. It was like, whoa, that's so crazy. And so there were so many apps like that and like so many dumb apps that came out, an explosion of apps in the early days of App Store. And of course over time I think it stabilized itself. So I think maybe AI is going to be like that, you know?

Yeah, but it's like the way how I think So it will definitely change the roles in the team, especially as we want to be cutting edge. We need to change these roles so that the one who will use AI definitely will succeed. Yeah, right. So what were the thoughts? Let me remember.

I think you were saying about, I guess, the explosion of these products. I think I'm very curious though. We have to see because like you said, there's so many founders now starting a lot of clone products that are the same thing. Let's say like voice transcription, the same voice transcription products, like 4 or 5, 6 of They're all using the same Whisper API from OpenAI. So we'll have to see which one of them will make it in the long run. But it's a great time. I think overall, I think it's a fantastic time to be living in.

That's what I wanted to say. So I think it will change the type of people who will be involved in building startups. So we see kind of like blow of this creator economy where you are in and that you're exploring a lot. And I think Naval said that internet will change the world drastically and most people do not still understand this. Yeah. I think it's still true, right? Like in 5 years. So we still don't see the power of the internet and think that AI will open it even further. So for the people who are not like, was like, learned some technology or had the access like to go to university or stuff, but there are a lot of like really smart people who now with the use of AI, with no-code, they can do like crazy stuff and it opens like the world for them. So I think we should double down on like the people who probably not technical, but they suffered something through life. Probably, I don't know, they moved from one city to another, they were fired from one job, they opened a coffee shop, they failed. I think that's the type of people who will be successful. So entrepreneurs, like artists, like creators. So we're trying to find like these people like to join our team. So that's how the ones who can, who are not like really focused on technology or on like things and processes, but who want to create something, who create change, who can like use, utilize this technology to create change. So that's the thing. What will be changing, right? And with all these layoffs, so it just confirms that.

Yeah. Well, so I actually— sorry to switch topics, but I have to ask you this because you mentioned Naval. And I think in our emails we were talking about how much I love Naval and how much we both share the same admiration towards him. What about him really stands out for you? Like, where was the— what was the inflection point or what were some interesting learnings that you took away from watching him or reading about him and following him?

Okay, so I was actually ignoring Naval for a long time. I knew that he was a big like a guy in the startup scene, but, uh, you know, you sometimes you avoid like popular things. Yeah, but I really like, uh, throughout these years I was like opening all these authors and I started to understand like this content thing, uh, the books like Mentes. So it was something that was surprising for me. So book can be so short, so practical. Why did I like waste so much time on different books? Right. Okay, so I, I started to understand that. Then I got, I think, to Derek Sivers. So Derek Sivers, like, I think is even more powerful figure for me. Yeah, more anti-figure. And at this point, I kind of understood Naval and all this simplicity of thoughts. I think it's genius that he can pack all this wisdom in this small amount of words. It's something that I'm trying to do, but he really nailed it. And why Naval is so important for us? Because he's a threat on how to be rich without being lucky. It can be used like a practical playbook for us. We even thought at one point that Nano website, it should just like include this thread from Naval and that's it. Like, that's the type of people that we're looking for. If you really like this idea, join us. If not, it's okay. Just do not join. And I think the one thing that I appreciate the most both in like Derek Sivers and Naval is this resourceful mindset, is that you should be able to like change the world even without resources. Don't say that someone is to blame. Don't say that you didn't have a budget. Don't say that technology didn't work out. Just do the things like be focused, understand what you want and move there. And definitely in Naval is the part of self-consciousness that who am I? Like what is my special skill? How do I make it like really a product for myself? How I can leverage it? What is the leverage is? So the things in And the concept like this, we really use them a lot in our company messaging. And we actually have a podcast, internal podcast every week. So every damn week our CEO talks with the whole company. So everybody invited to join. So every time he speaks about our mission, like that we want everyone, it's serious guys, we want everyone to be an owner of $1 million startup. And he talked about why do we want it. And we speak because that's what will help us to do a great service to clients and to live a better life. So we want to have fun, we want to build leverage, we want to have high exit. for a long time, and Naval can explain you all of this. Yeah. So it's definitely like something matching with our psychology. And I like how—

I have almost a similar sort of appreciation for him and his openness to even share that. Imagine if he didn't share that. Imagine if he didn't post that. I remember there was a time in 2018 or '19 when I used to follow like religiously everything that he wrote, every podcast appearance he was on. I even built an No-code project just to track all of the podcasts that he was on because he was on a bunch of them. Joe Rogan and a few other podcasts he was on at the same time. And what really stood out for me was that he was one of those people that could distill something that's so profound into a few words, like you said, but he would pierce through BS. There was no fluff. Yeah. You know, there's a sense of honesty and authenticity, and it felt like it was clearing the brain fog in my brain. It was just like, you know, it's just a sense of clarity you get. He explains wealth creation as a very clear game that you can play and have fun. It's not a, you know, shortcut thing or not a weird negative, greedy thing, but it's like, how do you go create the kind of wealth that you want to create by using leverage and so on?

So it was just eye-opening for me.

Yeah, I was like really, really for— I think it's just eye-opening for like a month. I was probably— I was just walking around like, wow, now I see the world in a different way, right?

Yeah. And one thing that turned me to Naval is also Jack from Visualize Value. And I knew that he built the whole company on top of that. So I thought, oh, it's actually working. And I heard that Justin Wales is referring Noelle, so he's also like taking things. So I thought again, oh, it's working again.

Yeah, he does. He does for sure. Awesome. Great, Igor. Thank you so much. This was fun. I couldn't believe the time just flew by. I appreciate you being on the show. I appreciate you sponsoring the podcast. But even beyond that, I think I appreciate you doing all of the things that you guys are doing for founders and entrepreneurs through the journey, not just the 0 to 1 phase, through Momentum, through Nano and Keep me in the loop. I'd love to continue supporting your projects and amplifying whenever I can.

Nice. Thank you very much for inviting me. And there are 2 things that I want to say. First, support creators. And I really was cool to support you, KP. And it was really great to hear that it means so a lot to you. Definitely will expand my sponsorship. So thank you. And all the guys that hear Hear this podcast, sponsor creators, it's important, it's high leverage, it will give you higher ROI. Don't listen to those who say otherwise. So it's the first thing. And the second, that we owe you this, like some small tool to build an audience. Let's build something fun and let's record it so it will keep us accountable. So

just, yeah, I'm down whenever. So thank you so much. And actually, do you want to plug Parallax? Where do people find Parallax? And also give the domains of other websites that you were referring to earlier? Sure.

So the main thing for us is still Parallelic. So you can find it at parallelic.com. So it's our startup studio where you can reach out to us. And if you have issues with your product, we can help you with that. Or if you want to build a product, we can just talk or we can quote you or we can discuss like revenue sharing. You have audience, so reach out to us. If you want to check out the early stage product that I'm building called Momentum, check the domain. It's ugly for a moment, but here it is. It's mmntm.build. So it's like Momentum without vowels. So check it out. We'll likely upgrade it in the near future. And follow my journey on Twitter. So I'm tweeting a lot, and I think you can find me just Igor Krasnik on Twitter. And thank you very much for listening.

I'm going to put all of this in the show notes as well so they can click into the link. Awesome. Thank you so much, Igor. Have a good one.

Yeah, thank you very much, Kipri. Bye-bye.

See ya.