This content was created by Tim Draper. This content was uploaded by Tim Draper. This is a YouTube video titled "Knowing Your Investor and Monitoring Your Users | CEO of Levo, Caroline Ghosn" (uploaded 2015-06-16). It contains an English dialog featuring Caroline Ghosn and at least one other participant (labeled here as Speaker B) in a Q&A or office-hours style discussion. Caroline advises founders on fundraising strategy (how to target investors and research prior backers) and on user analytics and retention—recommending practices like capturing emails, tagging users, using Mixpanel to trace user paths, cohort analysis, and keeping daily metric visibility as a founder.
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The fact of the matter is, is that you can't rely on the fact that your investor is your target demo. But your investors are really smart. The people you're gonna talk to are really smart. And they don't need to be your target user to empathize with what it is that you're gonna serve for your target user. But what you do need to do is look at the investment landscape and understand who's invested in stuff like this before. So if I look at this and I look at, OK, well, who's invested in Behance before? Who's invested in LinkedIn before? Who's invested in things that I think are interesting And similar-ish, to the point where they've gone through the trouble of proving, like, points A through C to someone, and I can pick up at D instead of picking up at A. Yeah. So I would just, like, take a list of companies that you think are similar to what you do, even if they're not in the same space. I mean, for us, it could be a company that creates online learning about, I don't know, like, pools. It doesn't matter. The point is that the online learning and the business model is a really important part of the equation we want someone to understand. So if you've already gone through the trouble of going through that equation for another product, then you're saving me time. And you're filtering yourself. So I know that you are a warmer lead than a random investor. So I would say 90% of the work you do in fundraising happens before you talk to anybody. When you're successful. Let me correct that. Yeah, go ahead.
So I have a question about more analytics stuff.
Yeah. So let's say you can see that people are dropping off at one certain page.
How do you actually go after those people and say, hey, why did you drop off that page? Is there a particular platform you use, or is there some sort of tracking tool that allows you to reach back out? You know what I mean?
Yeah. So for us, we capture their email up front. So if they're dropping off, I know exactly who they are. And then we can go back and harass them as many times as we need to, like show up to their home and give them flowers.
Which email is tied to that person? Do you know what I'm saying?
Yeah. Like, it's dropped. So the way that we've set up our— we use Mixpanel. And we set up our tracking such that I can follow a specific user path by their unique user ID from the second they land on the site. Yeah. So I would just say that you want to tag your users. And the easiest way to do that is to force them to give you their email. And then pick up from that point where they have a unique ID and understand what they're doing. Because then you get this really powerful cohort analysis. And the best case scenario is you say, people who come for the first time and watch Office Hours are our most loyal users. That's not true, actually. It's one of the groups that are the most loyal users. But you can start to identify, like, which side door to the house is the most powerful, 'cause you might want that to be your front door.
Got it.
Yeah. But data's everything. And we wasted a lot of time and energy by not looking at enough data. And I would say, like, one piece of advice to you is, as the leader, as someone who's on the founding team, you need to know what your people are doing all the time. Like, you need to have Mixpanel open in a tab on your computer at all times. And people need to be able to look you in the eye and ask you, like, how many people came to your site yesterday? You need to be able to answer that question. And even to a certain point, right? Now we have 30 employees, and we're at a very different point. But I still understand, like, the basic metrics on a pretty much day-by-day basis around our goals for the year.
