Zander Adell pitches Doorman, which delivers packages to your door until midnight in one-hour windows. He shares mantras from three years of failures at 500 Startups, including why you should always state your URL when pitching and how to stay calm while constantly fixing things.
Chapters
My name is Xander. I started a company called Doorman 3 years ago, almost exactly 3 years ago. I have my phone in my hand because I have a few notes. Anyway, so I am— I've just been in this shit longer than a lot of you have. I— that just— so purely by time, I know a few things, but all of it, I figured it out by doing it wrong like 10 times, so. There are probably a lot of things you guys know that I don't. So, I was told that this is the speed and strength module. I don't know what a module is, but I'm part of it. Where entrepreneurs share their stories and best practices for building products, getting initial traction, successes and failures of strategies, and raising money. which I think is just speaker prep for say whatever you want. So that's nice. I kind of appreciate that. And so I thought about it. I was like, what? So I can just say whatever I want. I can talk about anything, because this is just say startup stuff, is what that sentence means. And so I started thinking about, like, what— if I'm just going to say startup stuff, like, what really helps? Because everyone here, I guess, is in a different State. One person pitched me their company. Who else wants to pitch their company really quick? Go for it. Stand up. I'm gonna do the Dave McClure thing.
So it's a pleasure to meet you. I'm André from Brazil. And you know Brazilians love to party, right?
I do.
Yeah, so there is a $1.1 billion market for ticket sales in Brazil, and but 40% of the tickets that go to market are unsold.
Wow.
Yeah, so our company is called Investfest. It's a platform to help event producers drive their sales and lower their marketing costs by allowing every, every person to sell tickets and Refer friends, and, and give feedback on the events that they're going to. So it allows everyone to be a salesperson. Cool.
What's the URL?
investfest.com.br.
Good. Always say the URL. That's the Dave McClure paddle that he beats us with. I was a— I did 500 Startups about a year ago. No, I think it was 2 years ago.
OK.
So without further ado, I'll just sort of keep this around so that I can refer to any notes I have. So I figured I would just say some of the mantras that I found were helpful in surviving the nightmare that is trying to start a company. It is, you know, it goes really, really bad. You have little spikes of excitement. The entire time you're learning a massive amount. But there is so much chaos as a founder and so many things that you are expected to be brilliant at instantly all the time that surviving it isn't something that is naturally going to, or that naturally came to me. And I found myself kind of with these little phrases and metaphors that slowly helped me at least guide through the tornado that you're in. So I figured I would tell you some of them. I had never— and I was super excited about this because I sort of tell these mantras to people all the time, but it was a nice excuse to just put them into one place. One format and kind of take the images that I had in my head and see if I could, in 10 seconds of Googling, find images that kind of looked like those and make a deck for you in, like, one day. So I figured I would start out— so Doorman— I'll pitch my company to you. Doorman provides package delivery until midnight, 7 days a week. So instead of getting a missed delivery sticker on your door for all those packages you purchase online, or having to drag packages home from work, Now you can get packages delivered right to your front door till midnight, 7 days a week in 1-hour windows with our handy-dandy mobile app available for iOS and Android, and you can find out more at doorman.co. That's my little pitch. I figured I would give you, this isn't, I was like, oh, I'll just put up a picture of the company or something, but I thought it was more funny to give you an actual screenshot. In the back you can see Slack, of course. And then across the top, you can see some several dozen of tabs, which are always open. I'm sure yours looks like this as well. But this is just kind of part of the nightmare. I also thought it would be interesting to talk about the fact that there's like 10 things wrong with the front of our website right now. And I'm sure there is with yours too, and there always will be. That's a weird old— free image we found on the internet that we've been using forever. I went to a conference, 3 other companies had that same woman up there doing the exact same thing. She's completely famous, no one has any idea who she is. If you look at our little tagline there, I pointed this out to our lovely marketing team the other day, that actually there's nothing unique about what that says about our company. UPS does. They get packages from your favorite online retailer. So there's always like 100 things wrong, and you're never going to get it all right. And the key is to just stay sane and stay calm and continue fixing things, because they will always be broken. Thank you.
