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Interviews with world-class startup founders about their unique paths to uncover tactical insights they've learned about how to fundraise, grow, validate, hire, scale, and lead teams while building your startup.
Get full access to detailed takeaways on each episode, additional case studies, and more at join.foundingjourney.com
We went from having over the course of 3 years, we got to a 1000 users to we were getting a 1000 people signed up dead.
Michael Houck:That's Adam Alpert. He got into Y Combinator and raised over 3,000,000 for his hiring startup, Pangea. And now he says he might never need to raise money again.
Adam Alpert:You can build a hyper efficient, scalable business without raising tens of 1,000,000 of dollars.
Michael Houck:But things weren't always going so well. After failing to get into accelerators and multiple pivots, he leaned on
Michael Houck:stoic philosophy to keep going.
Adam Alpert:And we tend to focus on or get upset by things that happen in our life that we actually have no control of. Doing so is a waste of energy and waste of time.
Michael Houck:He told me what he's learned about hiring from facilitating thousands of fractional hires, the thought exercise that every founder should use to sanity check their priorities and expenses, and why founders should build an SVP, not an MVP. This is Adam Alpert's founding journey. Adam, what's up, man? Thanks for coming on.
Adam Alpert:Thank you so much for having me.
Michael Houck:I wanna talk about accelerators. Right? So you did an incubator at Brown, and then you did y c and another accelerator after that. Why why do 3? Why do so many of those types of experiences?
Michael Houck:Well,
Adam Alpert:first off, not all accelerators are created equal or have similar models. We've done 4 accelerators, but only one of them took equity, so that was what YC. Before we did YC, you know, what when I think it's helpful to go back to the beginning a bit. You know, when I when I started Pangea, I was coming straight out of college. So, you know, and trying to think about any possible way to get this thing off the ground.
Adam Alpert:So the first accelerator that we did was actually an accelerated program put on by Brown. And, typically, this is one that you do, like, in between your, like, junior and senior year, your sophomore to junior year. It's like a summer it's like a thing to do during the summer kind of instead of an internship. And my cofounder and I, our our hack was to actually do it postgrad because it gave us this, like, gave us a bit of structure, you know, after graduating and started working on the company. And, you know, from there, we were, you know, we we we were in Providence, Rhode Island, exactly the, like, start up center of the world.
Adam Alpert:You know, we had no money, and I was just trying to think about any possible resource that we could participate in or or or or kind of mine to to help us keep moving forward. So, you know, we kept kind of, like, leapfrogging from first, it was Brown's Accelerator, then it was a local social impact accelerator called Social Enterprise Greenhouse, which gave us free co working space for a year. And then ultimately, we ultimately, we worked our way up to mass challenge, which is a a more well known accelerator program. And they they were running at the time a Rhode Island specific cohort. Again, it was no equity.
Adam Alpert:Right? It was just an opportunity to meet other amazing founders and get a platform. Right? I think that as a founder, it is your responsibility to, like, bring home the bacon for the team. Right?
Adam Alpert:So anything that's gonna get you, you know, an audience, anything that's gonna surround the company and your team with with really smart, driven, ambitious people generally is a is a thing worth doing. So we leapfrogged throughout these programs, got a bunch of free co workings, didn't pay for office space for, like, 3 3 years. And then ultimately, we were in a place to get into YC and and and raise money. And I think it's a very different journey to get to YC than than most founders take. A lot a lot of founders, you know, are, like, at the idea stage when they when they join YC.
Adam Alpert:Right? And it's just 2 founders and and and a vision and, you know, they leave their jobs and, you know, they're just getting things started. But, you know, we really had to earn our way in, and it took us a while to get there.
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Michael Houck:Yeah. I mean, mass challenge, also well known name, MassChallenge YC. Both, I think, the first time you applied, you guys actually didn't get in. So it really has been sort of a gradual gradual journey. Tell me about sort of why it made sense to sort of keep going back to that route and why it was so valuable to be part of these communities and these these accelerators.
Adam Alpert:Yeah. Well, I I think a lot of people put too much, like, stake in an accelerator acceptance or rejection. Right? We we got rejected from mass challenge two times before before we got in. Right?
Adam Alpert:Mhmm. And and each time we got rejected, it it's you know, they actually gave you some feedback, and they gave you, like, your score in Rubik. And and it helped us ultimately refine what we were building. Again, we were super young and hadn't really been immersed in the start. I didn't come from an entrepreneurial background.
Adam Alpert:I was a filmmaker. So I had we are figuring out all of this ourselves. You know, and that that feedback was helpful, but some people will only do their startup if they get accepted into YC or some accelerator program. And I don't and I I think that's a missed opportunity. I mean, most successful startups don't go through an accelerator program.
Adam Alpert:You look at most successful companies today, like, they didn't do some program. I mean, there's plenty that obviously did YCAM. They never would know. We know a lot of them. But for us, it was about, you know, getting a feedback and sticking with it.
Adam Alpert:Like, we at the end of the day, we really felt like we were onto something and and felt like we could bring some serious value in the world of recruiting and hiring and staffing and early career development. So we kept at it. And, yeah, we act you know, ultimately, when we applied to YC the first time, we'd actually raised a a half a $1,000,000 pre seed. We got an article in TechCrunch. It was at the beginning of COVID.
Adam Alpert:At the time, we were a a college student freelancing platform, so we were helping college students find remote jobs. And in April of 2 2020, this was, like, we went gangbusters. Right? We we went from having, you know, over the course of 3 years, we got to a 1000 users to we were getting a 1000 people signed up And we we went into the wise we got we got a YC interview that that month, and we went in there and I had print out a chart, and it was a hockey stick graph of our user sign ups. And I and I picked it up, and I was like, look.
Adam Alpert:And they said, put that away. Right? We we know that college students need jobs, but you have to convince us why companies wanna hire college students. And at that point in time, we actually didn't have a great answer. We we our transaction volume was was pretty low.
Adam Alpert:It was, like, a $1,000 a month or a couple $1,000 a month. And, we got rejected. We didn't get in you know, that we had had at that point, we had raised half a 1000000. We were committed, and, you know, we had 10 months of runway or something, a bit more than that. So we just, you know, put our heads down.
Adam Alpert:We said, alright. Well, people wanna use our we we believe that people wanna use our product. We have all these people signing up, so let's see what we can just do on our own. And over the course of the next 5 months or so, we took it from $1,000 in monthly revenue to 40,000 dollars in monthly monthly revenue. And we reapplied to to YC.
Adam Alpert:And, and this time, you know, we we got another interview, and they asked us what changed. And, you know, I think I, you know, I I called our interview, his name was Tim Brady, who was the, like, first COO of of Yahoo. And I said, well, Jim, you rejected us 5 months ago. We wanted to prove you wrong. So and here we are.
Adam Alpert:And and we got into YC, and that was a game changer. And we haven't done another program since, but if you're, you know, someone who's thinking about getting started or net early phase, or maybe you don't, you know, you're not in SF or New York or have access to, you know, these networks necessarily. I I think that accelerators can be incredibly impactful, especially ones that don't take equity. Right? So if there's, like, a local accelerator, then you can get in and it's you get to do it for free, oftentimes, there's very little to lose.
Adam Alpert:Right? It's just you're getting access to a co working space, you have to meet some new people, and it gives you a deadline and some structure to work towards, which I think is one of the most valuable part of any accelerator program is it has an end date. Right? So any accelerator program you get in and there's some date where it ends, it's the thing that makes it different than an incubator, right, which is just kind of a co working space. And it's saying, hey, between now in the next 90 days, you know, what can you do that's gonna make an impact on your venture?
Adam Alpert:So that way when you present to a room full of people and you can showcase what you what you've done. And there's nothing necessarily unique about YC that makes you more able to get a lot done in 90 days than another accelerator. So I'm I'm very I'm very pro accelerator. I'm very pro taking advantage of any resource that you can kind of bring to your disposal and taking advantage of.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I mean, one thing you mentioned there that I I wanna go back to real quick is some founders will say they only gonna do their startup if they get into YC. Like, they're like, oh, the brand of YC, I need that to validate that I can be a founder and I'm gonna have success. It's gonna be worth the opportunity cost. Right?
Michael Houck:In my mind, getting rejected and then coming back and saying, I'm gonna prove you wrong and then actually doing it, that mindset is so different than the mindset of the person who will only do it if they get the the validation. And I think that that's the really a big part of the difference of who who should be a founder and who maybe should go into consulting or into banking or or something like that. Like, what are your thoughts on on that sort of founder mindset
Adam Alpert:shift? Real founders don't wait for permission. Right? Real founders don't wait for someone to give them the thumbs up or the affirmation. Right?
Adam Alpert:I think it feels good when you get that affirmation. Obviously, it feels great if you can, you know, you could be working at Google or some, you know, big company and YC's gives you that voter approval. So they give you, you know, half of my dollars, so it's you know, they derisk it a lot. But I think this is true in, you know, in in in for for building things and and bringing things together is you don't always need to wait for permission. Right?
Adam Alpert:Like, you you are honestly the biggest impediment towards your own success and your own growth. Right? Like, what's stopping you from just doing it? Right? So, I mean, I'll give you, like, another small example, anecdote.
Adam Alpert:I love skiing. I love snowboarding. I live in New York. It isn't exactly the ski and snowboard capital of the world. I'm also a filmmaker.
Adam Alpert:Right? I actually I started Pangaea because I was a freelance videographer in college who wanted to find more freelance video projects and gigs. Now we have Pangaea. So I was I was looking to go I love documentaries and I love ski documentaries, I love ski films, and I was looking I just went on Google last week to see if I could find any ski films playing playing in New York and I was surprised, but I I couldn't find any or the ones that there had been 1 or 2 that happened back in September, which doesn't do me any good now in the middle of November. So I was like, oh, that's kinda lame.
Adam Alpert:But what what's stopping me what's stopping me from just renting out a theater and inviting a bunch of my friends and just doing my own screening? And then I asked myself again, what's stopping me? And I was like, well, actually nothing. So I reached out to a bunch of theaters, and now I've rented out a movie theater. I'm in touch with a bunch of independent film directors, and we're putting on an a one night ski film festival in Brooklyn next month.
Adam Alpert:Woah. This is this is my free time.
Michael Houck:When's the when when is it? Can we give us
Adam Alpert:the details? It's gonna be it's December 19th.
Michael Houck:K.
Adam Alpert:We're calling it the the 1st annual NY ski. It's an it's an evening of ski films, and then we're gonna do a ski trip up, you know, somewhere in Lake Vermonter, New Hampshire or upstate New York, this blinger as well. But I mentioned this story because it's it's like a smaller, more well scoped example than, like, starting a company. But, like, no one gave me permission to go rent out a theater and, like, host this film night. It's just something that I wanted to do.
Adam Alpert:I had a vision for it, and I wanted to put together. And I think that we are all presented with these type of opportunities every day, every week, every month. Now listen, we can't, you know, jump at every idea that pops into our head. We it's impossible. But I think I'll I'll to most people don't take that risk.
Adam Alpert:Right? Or sometimes there is that good idea once a quarter. And it's like nothing's stopping you from doing that. Like, if you wanna do it, go do it. You can make it happen.
Adam Alpert:There's nothing that makes anyone else in the world who's done something more special or more capable than you. Like, if they can do it, why can't you do it? And it's okay to take a risk. It's okay if things don't quite work out. But if you don't take that risk, you don't take that chance, it's like you're guaranteed not to work out.
Adam Alpert:So that you're it's immediately, it's impossible if you don't give it a shot. And they obviously, the same thing is true with the start up. Right? If you are gonna wait for permission or some external validation from, like, an investor or, you know, the press, you're never gonna, you know, make progress. You know, I think that if anything, you should seek validation from users and customers.
Adam Alpert:That ultimately is, you know and and if they haven't told you no, right, a 100 times, then it you haven't validated or invalidated. YC is not gonna validate or invalidate you. And raising a pre seed or seed is not what you show it at for validation or invalidation. And we now live in a world where there are so many of these low code, no code tools. You have Typeform, you have Airtable, you have these things that aren't even coding, but you can you know, with Zap, you can have a website, you can have an intake form, you could drop it into a database, you could ping ChatChipt, we send an email.
Adam Alpert:You can create like a pretty well flushed out experience, you know, just by connecting together these different tools for under a $100 and in a couple of hours. Right? So it's actually never been easier in the history of humanity to, like, get started with something. And I think people sometimes think about building some app, building something, building some crazy AI, some something that's gonna require a half $1,000,000 and take 5 years to build. And so, actually, what can you do to validate that customers need this thing, and how can you do it in in a weekend or in a couple weeks?
Adam Alpert:And if you focus on that, everything else will come. If you focus on that, you build an audience and you get some revenue in, you get a sense of what the product is, you'll have an easier time getting into a y combinator. You have an easier time raising money from another investor. Right? And and the score will take care of itself.
Adam Alpert:Right? Just by focusing on what's really important, which is, you know, building something that people want.
Michael Houck:I couldn't agree more. I put that so well. All you need is sort of the intrinsic belief and intrinsic motivation and the the belief in yourself, and the tools are getting more and more accessible and and easier to use. So you kinda hit on something at the end there that I I I wanna talk about, which is a lot of people talk about MVPs, right, and revival products. You talk about SVPs.
Michael Houck:I've never heard this before before we got connected here, but tell me what what's an SVP, and and why should founders, build them instead?
Adam Alpert:Yeah. So, you know, MVP is something that's become popularized with the, you know, the the the lean startup kind of school of thought. Right? There's a lot of debate around us in in the founder world. But for those of you who don't know, MVP is what's the minimum viable product?
Adam Alpert:What's the smallest thing you can build to validate or invalidate a hypothesis? Now I think that a lot of people when thinking about MVP get really focused on the product part. Right? So it's still its product. Right?
Adam Alpert:And they think, but it's still an app. It's still a piece of technology. It's still something I need to go raise a half $1,000,000 to build the MVP, something like that. When in reality, an MVP can be like a Figma prototype. It could be a landing page.
Adam Alpert:It could be a type form Airtable. You do it manually in an Excel sheet or a Google Sheet. Right? So I I have this concept called an SDP, and and I used to talk about this being, you know, the s being like a reliable product. Right?
Adam Alpert:Like, what's like the good. I don't think it's like a helpful okay. We do you we understand, like, what goes into, like, the pretty minimal version, but what's, like, the that you could build that actually does deliver some kind of value. Right? And it can literally be like you pick up the phone and you call me, you know, you're looking to hire someone, you call me, and then I call 20 people, and then I, like, send an email, connect to you both.
Adam Alpert:Right? And that's like the viable way, you know, I could and obviously, we use technology and all that, but you could literally do it just like like an old school staffing agency. Right? So have a product or if you wanna be careful with your language, simplest viable product. Right?
Adam Alpert:And and when I when I when I scope this for folks, I say, building an SVP, you shouldn't touch a line of code. It shouldn't take you more than 2 days to build something and it should cost you less than $100. Right? So what can you do for $100 in 2 days without having to code anything, right? Or if you can code, what can you code in 2 days for a $100 to actually validate or create some actual, like, proof of concept after you get something to start working that you could literally put in a user's hands and they can get a sense of it.
Adam Alpert:And it just gets you talking to users at the end of the day. It doesn't need to be the thing that's the scalable version of it or the prettiest version of it. But when it's super simple, it's easy to make something that's still smooth. Right? So I I really encourage a lot of founders.
Adam Alpert:And, again, because we get so in our heads, we think about all the things that can go wrong. Right? We we talk ourselves out of the, well, I'm not gonna rent out a movie theater and do a film night because when it happens if I, like, you know, if I can't get a movie theater to say yes, or if I can't sell out tickets, or I lose a bunch of money doing it, we get in our heads. Right? And, honestly, the more complexity there is, the more things that can go wrong.
Adam Alpert:Right? Elon Musk was once asked, what's like what's like the best part? Like, talk about engineering. What's the best thing? Right?
Adam Alpert:And and he said the best part is no part because parts break and parts require maintenance. Right? So the best part is actually a part that you don't need. Right? So when thinking about an SVP, it's like you remove all these things that can break actually, and it it makes it easier to build an actual smooth experience.
Adam Alpert:And, it's really helpful, especially when talking to aspiring founders or maybe founders who are nontechnical who feel like they're stuck. It's like, I have an idea, but I need to build this thing. In order to build this thing, I need to go raise money. Right? But they may have a hard time raising money because they don't have the ton of expertise and they're gonna show.
Adam Alpert:So they're, like, stuck in this loop. For us sometimes, I've met these people and they've been, like, in that loop for years. Right? They've been, like, for years, they have some idea. And if I if they if they can just convince a tech a tech cofounder to build it for free or or convince an investor to give them a $1,000,000, like, it'll all come through.
Adam Alpert:And I'm like, you need to see you're just creating excuses now. Right? You could have last weekend, like, thought your ask yourself, how could I what could I do in a weekend? What could I do for a $100 to actually create something that creates value? I can do with my own capabilities without you need help from someone.
Adam Alpert:And then they're actually able to go and do it, and they're able to kind of keep moving. So I'm a huge believer in SVP. It's kind of a riff on the MVPs, but people don't people actually misunderstand MVP. And and when I say is it doesn't have to need to be a product. It just needs to be, like, I I it it could be manual.
Adam Alpert:You know? It could be super simple. It doesn't need to involve any tech at all. And I think it's a really helpful grounding concept. And frankly, it's something that we use internally at Pangaea all the time.
Adam Alpert:Whenever we're scoping out a new feature, a new direction, we ask ourselves, how can we do this with a type form in Airtable? And and like an API endpoint, like, we don't need to make any front end updates to our product. We can just, you know, we can what can we do in an hour, you know, to kind of address this problem? And honestly, it's caused us to rapidly accelerate our ability to ship new products because even the new product that we build is just so well scoped and so narrow, and it's so focused on driving impact that it's we've gotten out of our own way quite a
Michael Houck:bit. Do you think this helped you guys hit number 1 of the day and actually of the week too on on product top?
Adam Alpert:I think it did. I think it did. And with that, we didn't really do anything too fancy. I think we built a great product. We built a good audience.
Adam Alpert:Our community was super excited about it, and, you know, we just got lucky. Right? I I but I think I think people with product hunt put a little bit too much Mhmm. Emphasis on the product hunt. It's kind of like a thing that you can do to get some traffic to you know, if you can get to number 1, 2, 3 today, it's helpful.
Adam Alpert:We still got some traffic from it. But even like that, it's like an accelerator. It's like you can launch on Product Hunt and not get to the top 10 and still be a successful company. So, yeah, I I think I think the the Product Hunt we won, it was really all we cleared off our entire calendar the entire day and said all we're doing today is Product Hunt, and we're gonna make sure that everyone in our network knows that we're live on Product Hunt, and we're gonna spend literally every waking hour doing that until the clock is up. The curse of that was we ended up being number 1 of the day.
Adam Alpert:And once you're number 1 of the day, then you're in the running for number 1 of the week. So it was supposed to be a one day thing, ended up into a week long thing. And then by then, we were, like, number 3 for the month. So then it became the entire month of April was, like, we had to kinda keep our eyes on it. So it was kind of a blessing and a curse at the same time.
Michael Houck:Give me the tactical rundown. How does someone get to number 1 of the day on product hunt?
Adam Alpert:I mean, there's a number of things that go into a successful product hunt launch. I think making sure that your messaging is super clear, understanding who your audience is and, like, who's on product hunt, why they can find value in it. You need to launch at I think it's, like, you know, 12:01 AM Pacific time. So if you're East Coast, that's, like, 301 in the morning. So you have to, like, or yeah.
Adam Alpert:You have to get up, like, in the middle of night and, like, make the thing live and go and comment and, like, send us our letting people know about it, then generally, the teams in Europe have an early day, early mover advantage. So when and there's, like, European companies that go live, like, 3 AM EST is, like, it's, like, 9 AM for Europe. So they're awake. So you'll wake up and you'll be, like, 10th or 15th because because the European startups have just been, like, grinding at it already for, like, 9 hours. And I remember being really demoralized.
Adam Alpert:We woke up because it was supposed to be a big moment for us. And we were, like, 15th. And the top teams already have like 300 or 400 votes and it was just like an insurmountable difference. And, we said, oh, you know, we we cleared off our calendars today. We're just gonna get to it.
Adam Alpert:So we we, you know, did the thing. You know, started letting people know that we were live on product on texting. We sent a bunch of emails, posted on social media, and then I basically went on, like, LinkedIn sales navigator and just, like, went through my entire list of connections and was just sharing, hey, we're live on Polyton. Like, literally, like, this sent thousands of messages a day. And, we got a lot of support.
Adam Alpert:Not everyone always does support, but we got a lot of support. Ultimately, those European teams went to sleep. They thought they had it in the bag. And while they were asleep, we were awake, and we just were up until 3 in the morning just going at it. And every comment counts.
Adam Alpert:So every like counts, every comment counts, not every like is treated equally necessarily, but they do like new accounts. Just like creating a new account is a pain for people. It's not a frictionless process, let me tell you. And, yeah. I mean, listen.
Adam Alpert:You can do all those things and still not succeed. We tried launching again on Product Hunt this past year, and we we did give it quite as much love and attention, but we, you know, thought we knew what to do. And we had obviously been number 1 before. And the second time around, we just did it too as well. Right?
Adam Alpert:Maybe the day of the week or whatever it might have been or maybe we, you know, had gotten a lot of the support that we, you know, we already kind of asked for a lot of favors. And sometimes, like, Product Hunt will just, like, screw you over. Sometimes they'll just, like, they won't show you on the home page. Sometimes they'll, like, take votes away from you because other other teams that are fighting to to win number 1 will just, like, report you. It's a bit brutal out there.
Michael Houck:The rough world of of products on it, I had no idea we
Adam Alpert:could they'll report you like that. That's crazy. Yeah. There's a good website called Product Wars, and you can go on there and it'll show you, like, a graph like a line chart of, like like, vote counts throughout the day. And so if you're launching on Product Hunt, you definitely need to be on Product Wars and and, like, checking, like, your up votes and and comments per
Michael Houck:hour. Interesting. Did it has it been a a big, like, driver for you guys either on launch day or or since then, just driving customers?
Adam Alpert:I think it was helpful for us. It's always a boost around it. It's always a way just to honestly, it's a good excuse to kind of, like, tell your whole network that you exist. So I I we always see a bunch of traffic come in around our product launches, and then we still get, you know, months later, people find us on product. I don't know exactly how we get suggested or maybe we're, like, in we're somewhere in there, SEO or something.
Adam Alpert:So it it's it's helpful. But when you think about growth, right, as a start up, right, you think about your growth engine as a metaphor. Right? And you think about, you know, what makes a car go in the engine. Right?
Adam Alpert:You put gas in. Right? You have, like, the efficiency of of the motor, and you have, like, turbos. Right? And then you have, like, boosts.
Adam Alpert:Right? So product hunt is, like, you add a little bit of gas and it's, like, a little bit of a boost, but it's not, like, a long term efficient thing. Right? It's like one day, you just, like, throw a bunch of people in and that's kind of it. It's not really turbocharging growth.
Adam Alpert:It's not a long term sustainable thing for growth. It's just one of those things that it's like getting an article in press. Right? It's like it gets you a little bit more awareness. Right?
Adam Alpert:And all those things build up over time. So it's like one of the things that that that you should do, but it certainly isn't the only thing. I think people sometimes obsess about the power ton release and and and and maybe give it a bit more attention or value than than necessarily it it brings.
Michael Houck:I would a 100% agree with that. I think especially these days, I think people are having more success just, you know, having long term growth strategies that are sustainable. You can't launch on products on every day.
Adam Alpert:It's it's honestly just about having a great product and a great experience in solving a real a real, you know, need for for your for your users and making sure that you serve them well. I think I think one of my biggest lessons in just being an entrepreneur is focus on retention, focus on exceeding expectations of your clients. Because in this day and age, what gets people to your product is word-of-mouth. Right? And if you can if you can go out there, you can hustle for your first 10, 20, 30 customers.
Adam Alpert:Absolutely. You should be able to do that even if it's cold sales emails or LinkedIn outreach. But if those people actually have a great experience with you, they'll tell their friends and their colleagues and their acquaintances about you. And that's ultimately the what's those are the most valuable leads you want. You can do the product hunt release.
Adam Alpert:You can do SEO. You can you know, we get customers now that come through us through chat gpt, but the ones that actually convert the ones that actually convert into high ACD, high retention customers generally are relationship driven. Either they're getting referred to us or we're meeting them out in the world and it isn't about, like, getting thousands of new sign ups. So products and I think, you know, you got a you might get a bunch of people kind of kicking the tires, But, you know, they're they they might just be there to kick the tires and kinda see what what the thing does.
Michael Houck:Okay. You just mentioned you guys get customers through chat g p t. I think a lot of people would wanna know how you do that and how you sort of optimized, I guess, your SEO to be picked up by these AI bots? How how do you do that?
Adam Alpert:Yeah. Well, that's a great question. Obviously, the content that we're getting ranked on in ChatChappiti was, like, before anything came out. Right? And and the mild development times are are are are long.
Adam Alpert:Right? So, like, I think JACOBT is still only up to, like, last October or something in terms of what the LLM is actually trained on. I can now pull I can now do, like, web searches and things like that, which I'm not maybe that's the component that needs to be further studied. But from what I understand, we're actually part of the, LLM. Like, LLM, like, knows about us.
Adam Alpert:And and I think part of part about that is, like, when we and this is a blessing and a curse for us. Right? Like, for us, we start off being a college focused freelance platform, which is very distinct. It's very distinct from Upwork or Fiverr or these other platforms. So because we had that differentiation early on and we produce content, we raise money on that, They all learned about us.
Adam Alpert:So when you do, like, specific queries for, like, I wanna hire that college students in America, it's called with marketing, like, will come up. Apparently, it's not necessarily, you know, incredibly deterministic. And we don't really there's no data. We don't get any data out of these elements about, like, how we're ranking or how we're showing that, which would be a really interesting tool or feedback to get from Open the Eye. But, yeah, it's it's I think that there's definitely a world where this stuff really matters.
Adam Alpert:And, you know, it's we've actually invested a lot in SEO recently over the last, you know, couple months. And that might seem counterintuitive because everyone's like, well, SEO is dying. I mean, Google search is dying. Right? So, like, don't invest anything in SEO.
Adam Alpert:And I think people are actually very wrong. I think, you know, these LLMs are gonna continue to learn. They're gonna be based off of web content, how things rank. And, you know, I think that if you create great content, unique content, human generated content, content you that's, like, related to specific queries that's that has knowledge that might not already be in these LMS, you'll get picked up. You'll get picked up in in you know, maybe it's not today, but when, like, gpt 5 or gpt 41 comes out, whatever the next iteration is, you know, you hope that you can kind of be included in that.
Adam Alpert:So search is never going to die. The the the search experience might change, but, honestly, people are searching more than ever because of, like, how great Gemini and ChattyPT are. I find myself asking questions of these things probably more than I used to Google for things. And when you think about, like, query volume, this would be a really interesting metric to track. My hypothesis is query volume is growing significantly, and people are searching now more than ever.
Adam Alpert:So I think it's it's definitely a growing field in terms of, hey. Can I actually produce content for SEO that's, like, optimized to be picked up for LMS? I mean, I definitely think that is gonna become a core component to, like, producing content, but people still search, and they're searching now more than ever. And if you play it right, you start getting fed into these, like, LMS. And if you can make it in and be top of the query, that's not gonna be reranked every, like, couple months and it's potentially a huge growth halt growth unlock for you.
Michael Houck:Yeah. It's almost like the the function of SEO and the the content for SEO is is changing because people are interacting with that data in a new way through through a chatbot interface rather than through the list of links that show up on Google. But I totally hear you. The query volume is probably skyrocketing and should continue to skyrocket as the proliferation of of AI, grows. So, yeah, couldn't agree more.
Adam Alpert:What are
Michael Houck:your you say you've invested a lot in this over the past few months. What have you guys learned that other founders can can take away? Like, what what should people be doing for SEO that that they might not be?
Adam Alpert:I think that there's a couple of things. Right? I mean, for us, we we had a a pretty bloated website and site performance. This is a huge component. So, like, getting on the you gotta make sure you have all the technical stuff down.
Adam Alpert:Right? And then it's it's. Right? It's it's very rare that you, like, you produce a page that's all of a sudden starts netting results. Now people know that.
Adam Alpert:Now the interesting thing is that we've actually produced a lot of content in the last, like, month or 2, and it started getting ranked within a week. And we had a couple articles that started driving, like, thousands of of of page site like, visits to our site. And we could have never have predicted. Like, we would have never have thought that that page was gonna drive traffic, but it is. It's it's still driving traffic today.
Adam Alpert:So I think, yes, it is true. Like, generally, you're not gonna see results overnight or, like, in the short term, but SEO is really about the long game. And looking at it, seeing what's ranking, and then, you know, doubling down on what's working. So something that we're trying to do a lot of is we we we have a couple of unique SEO, call them projects. Right?
Adam Alpert:Like, different content, different approaches to page structures and content type. Some of it is related to the field of marketing and design. Some of it is related to hiring and our platform specifically, and other other pieces of it are about, like, interconnecting these things. And we're really and we have other ideas of things we wanna do. But when we start to see results on one of these pages or one of these, like, content types, we're trying to double down and expand.
Adam Alpert:So, like, one of the things we've done recently is doing pretty well is we create a list of keywords that were all related to, like, marketing design tools, kind of like a glossary of, like, here's all these tools, Riverside, which we're reporting on right now. Right? Canva, Figma. Right? Things that are just tools that marketers and designers use and trying to show a great content around these tools and explaining what they are and interconnecting them with other tools and then actually connecting those tools to, like, paint, like, our talent profiles and have those tools on them.
Adam Alpert:So it creates this, like, interconnectedness between our pages, right, and different kind of structures. So it's easy to crawl and and helps these algorithms and search, you know, helps them understand kind of what your site is an expert in. And that's actually started to to that's something new that we've been working on, and and we're already seeing some seeing some good results. I don't know if it's the highest intent traffic, but we definitely are seeing a a a huge spike in this traffic in general. And and we're believers that that's helpful because assuming these people are marketers or higher marketers or higher designers, right, they see Pangea, they end up on our site.
Adam Alpert:They they might stick in their brain. And and and a month or 2 from now when they're talking with a friend, they need to hire someone. Maybe, just maybe, you know, they'll remember us. Right? So, there's obviously a whole world of marketing in terms of, you know, retargeting and things like this.
Adam Alpert:But, yeah, I think I SEO is incredibly powerful and, you know, it's it's one of those things that we're seeing some early results on and that I know that the the greatest results of it will be in 12 months from now.
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Michael Houck:So how are you thinking about investing in growth channels, SEO, others in sort of the the world where pivots are totally possible and in some cases, like, can happen on a dime and be super frequent? Like, you know, you guys have pivoted a couple times over the course of the company. Most recently, you've niched down into some of these marketers and and designers. How do you think about investing in growth channels with that kind of backdrop?
Adam Alpert:Yeah. I used to be very, like, oh, we're gonna be on every channel and try everything and, like, run a bunch of experiments across channels and, like, figure out what's what's the best. And it it sounds great in theory. I think we were a little bit too early in a pre product market fit to see those kind of things pan out. Our current philosophy is 1 channel, 1 customer, 1 product.
Adam Alpert:I think a lot of founders have too many products, too many customer types, too many channels. And if you're less than a 1000000 in ARR, it's like you're trying to do too much. Right? And and I've been trying to challenge ourselves, like, can we, like, just place marketing talent with series b companies and meet these founders at events in New York. And and and or something.
Adam Alpert:Whatever whatever that whatever that channel might be. Can it just be email outbound? Can it just be podcast comic? Can it just be LinkedIn Outreach? Outreach?
Adam Alpert:Right? Can it just be x, y, and z? And, obviously, it is always generally a little bit of all of the above. And if you can't get to a $1,000,000 in ARR with a single customer and a single kind of offering, you probably don't have a big enough business to be pursuing in this space anyway. It could just it could be a good business, but, you know, we we always convince ourselves, like, we have to do every role, every function, every level of seniority.
Adam Alpert:Right? Every every scope of engagement. Right? Every price point for every type of customer, you know, who can find us from every possible channel. And it's just too many things when you're a team of, like, 3 people to manage.
Adam Alpert:So, yeah, I I I we we do get a lot of great word-of-mouth. You know? We get SEO traffic leads now. We I mean, a lot of people just, you know, by going out to things in here in in in the city. And, you know, we've really tried to focus in on, like, what type of things that we do.
Adam Alpert:I still struggle with this. I still I still like to say yes to to folks, but we're really, for instance, trying to get away from the, oh, I need someone I need to hire someone today for a project this week, and I have a budget of a $1,000. It's just not it's just not and they're an engineer. Right? That's just, like, outside the scope of we're looking we have talent that are high quality that are looking for 10, 20, 30 hour week engagements, and they are gonna last for 6 months.
Adam Alpert:Right? Like and also, like, if you're just thinking about the ACV of those two contracts, we're talking about a $1,000 ACV where, you know, we're netting a couple $100 versus, a contract that's, you know, 50 to $60,000. And now we're netting tens of 1,000 of dollars. So it's like and they take the same amount of effort. So do you wanna be working on, like, are you gonna get to $1,000,000 in ARR by closing an incremental couple $100 in net revenue at a time?
Adam Alpert:Or are you gonna get to $1,000,000 in ARR by focusing on contracts where you're netting $10,000 right? And all of a sudden it's like wow maybe it seems actually a lot easier to get to a $1,000,000 here on these like $10,000 contracts than the $1,000 contracts. So part of that's just making a choice, I think as a founder you you don't quite know who you serve yet or or what the value is, but I think that it's important to make that decision. And every single time that we've just made a decision about what we do or don't do, it's really helped us reach the next phase.
Michael Houck:Yeah. Okay. So that makes a ton of sense. Talk to me about those phases. Like, as you've made those decisions to sort of niche down, change the focus, even change the product early on, you know, this indicates to me that you probably know what works and what doesn't work well when you're pivoting, when you're changing course.
Michael Houck:So, you know, how can you do that without sort of putting off your users?
Adam Alpert:You might very well put off your users. That is one thing I'll just I'll I'll I just wanna bring up first before I say, here's how to do it without, you know, putting off your users is sometimes you make these decisions and and part of that is a decision to, like, no longer serve part of the people that you have previously served. And I'll say, it's totally okay. It's your company. You get to choose who you serve.
Adam Alpert:Right? This isn't I mean, unless you're running a nonprofit and you have some big endowment and people gave you money, right, with the social like, this is not that. I'm not talking about Etsy. This is like you're a founder of a tech startup. Right?
Adam Alpert:If you wanna change product. Yeah. You might piss off some folks. That's life. Right?
Adam Alpert:Like, you need to focus on who you wanna serve. I have fired companies. I fired clients. I have fired people that we've worked with, basically, because I'm like, you're just not really a fit for what we're trying to do anymore. You came here looking for to hire you know, the first one was we started off initially, and we were, like, a college student focused platform.
Adam Alpert:Right? So it was all about hiring college students. And we had, like, unpaid opportunities. Like, there used to be the there used to be the option for people to post a paid job or, like, an unpaid internship. Okay?
Adam Alpert:And at one point, we made a decision to, like, get rid of the unpaid internships. And I'll tell you that pissed off a lot of people. That pissed off companies, and it also pissed off talent. Because some of the talent were like, I'm going to work for free. I'll do anything, and I understand it.
Adam Alpert:But I was like, that's not how we're gonna turn to switch to big business. We don't believe in unpaid internships. Yes. There is a value to it. It's a different different podcast, you know, subject.
Adam Alpert:But that ultimately is, like, we're not gonna be a successful company doing unpaid internships, and we didn't feel good charging the companies some amount of fee and then giving the talent nothing, which there are other companies in the space that do. So we made that decision, and, yeah, we lost some companies, but guess what? We weren't making any money off of them. So and and in that process, we ended up attracting more high quality talent and focusing more on companies that had similar values to us. So that's an example of, honestly, like, yeah, we put off some people, but in making that choice, we actually attracted a lot more folks that were aligned with with with our values.
Adam Alpert:And still to this day, we have the same thing. Like, we, everything is paid. Our our our hour we we're trying to have these, like, minimum hourly rates on our platform. $50 an hour and up. It's all about quality.
Adam Alpert:And, yeah, there are companies that come saying, no. I don't wanna pay $50 an hour. My budget is is 18 an hour or, like, $5 an hour. Like, I wanna that's what that's what I'm gonna pay. I'm like, that's not our that's not we wanna do.
Adam Alpert:Right? Because because, honestly, when we put those jobs out on our platform, then the talent that are the 75 or a $100 or a $100 an hour talent, they see the $15 an hour job, and they're like, this is not the platform that I wanna spend time on. So they delete their account or they never come back. Right? And then a week later, when I have a job that's willing to spend a $100, a client doesn't wanna spend a 100, the talent's gone.
Adam Alpert:So you need to make these decisions, and it's okay. You can't serve everyone. It's a typical, you know, first time founder challenge, right, or dilemma of, like, you don't wanna say no to people, you wanna say yes to everyone and believe you can kind of serve everyone like you're like, but you can't, and you shouldn't. Now over time, you can grow and expand, but it's really important to have, like, that one customer, or at least, like, one type of engagement that you're you know, it's okay. I think trying to serve, like, a series a and a series b and a yeah.
Adam Alpert:Maybe you can kind of, you know, have a a a number of different client type of clients, but they should generally be using your product in the same way. So, yeah, I mean, it's it's there's definitely been times where we, like, put off folks, but then interestingly, like, when we pivoted from being a college student platform to being a more of a professional platform, yeah, we met we did lose some some companies that were only here to hire, like, college students. But ultimately, over the last 2 years, a lot of them have come back because, actually, they're I liked working with you guys, and I now need someone who isn't a college student. I need someone who has 5 years of experience, and I wanna work with you. And they've become really amazing clients of ours down down the road.
Adam Alpert:So it's okay saying no to folks. It's important to especially when it's about business. Right? So, you know, we have a number of old clients who, like, literally we're making no money off of, and it's like, yeah, you wanna keep helping them. But, you know, with our we've made a lot changes to our business model, our process, it's much more it's it's just people are happier with it now, and we're making more money now.
Adam Alpert:So and that'll be good in the long run because we can stay alive. We're gonna get the break even, you know, before we run into money. And that's ultimately what it's about. Like, you if if refusing to change or refusing to focus is the is the thing that's gonna cause the company to die, like, don't don't be noble. Like, this is don't don't you're not in that no one cares at the end of the day.
Adam Alpert:If if your company dies because you refuse to shift who you were focused on, then, like, what good does that do anybody?
Michael Houck:Yeah. It's a net negative for society masquerading as some noble pursuit. So if a founder's in that scenario, you know, how can they recognize that? How do they know that they're too broad? How do they know that it's time to pivot or or niche down or
Adam Alpert:or anything like that? Here's the thought exercise that I like to do. Let's say that you sold your company tomorrow to a new owner. K. And and you're that new owner.
Adam Alpert:So let's say you sold a company to yourself and you're stepping into your business without like and it's day 0 again. And you don't have any of the founder baggage, and you can look at it with clear eyes and say and be like, okay. You're smart. Here's, like, you're listening to this. You're running a company.
Adam Alpert:You're smart. You know the space that you're in. I reckon you're actually you're incredibly capable and there's you actually know what you need to do. So the thought exercise that I like to do is say, alright. I'm I sold a company to myself.
Adam Alpert:I'm the new CEO of the company. Like and if I were looking at this, honestly, as if I was, like, in college again, like, doing a case study in, like, entrepreneurship or business I mean, I was a history major, but I did some entrepreneurship classes. You do a case study. Like, what are the things that you would tell this company to do to get back on a to get back on a path towards growth and prop? What would you what would you advise?
Adam Alpert:What would you encourage them to do? Right? And I have found that to actually be an incredibly helpful thing to do. It forces me to be really honest with myself, have a bit of separation, and then, you know, actually lay out what I think is right for the business. And the reason why we don't do these things is they're oftentimes hard.
Adam Alpert:Like, hard decisions are hard, like and they cause pain. But you talk to any founder that increase their margin. You talk to any founder that leaned up their team. You talk to any founder that, like, pivoted, right, and decided to focus on a new thing, you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who regretted making that decision. Right?
Adam Alpert:We oftentimes put these things off for way too long, and it causes more pain in the in the long run. So I think it's important to make hard decisions as quickly as you can, as soon as you have clarity on them and keep moving forward. And if you come into your company as if, like, you're the new owner of it, you can oftentimes see that decision more clearly. And And if you really ask yourself, like, well, why haven't you done it already? You can you can start to feel yourself making excuses that maybe aren't based in good business.
Michael Houck:That's a great thought exercise. I would I would recommend any founder do that. That sounds I never thought of that before, but it's really smart. Is it applicable the other way? So is it applicable to a scenario where, you know, maybe you're too niche down?
Michael Houck:Maybe you're focusing on something that is never gonna become a big market, has no chance of becoming a big business. Can you apply it that way too?
Adam Alpert:Yeah. I think you need to. I think that I think that we as founders, you know, we do this thing where hopefully you you go all in and and and and you put the the blinders on. Right? Right?
Adam Alpert:Like, you're a racehorse, and you put then you're just dead focused. And it's super important to do that. And and for for an extended period of time. Right? I don't know what maybe it's, you know, an accelerated program of 3 months at the very least, you know, and hopefully it's hopefully it's 3 years.
Adam Alpert:But I think it's important to sometimes step back out of what you've been building and think about what has changed in the world. What are you excited about? What's happening? Right? And you might pivot your business as a result of this.
Adam Alpert:But I think a lot of founders don't spend after they're a couple years in their business, don't spend nearly enough time revisiting their thinking about what's changing in the world and what does that mean, and if they're building in the right space, sometimes the companies that that people build are great opportunities to learn and expand the muscle. And it's it's it's so rare that the first company that you do is the thing that, you know, creates generational wealth. If we use that as just like a as like a as like a goal. Right? Because I think that people would hope that, like, success with a startup, you know, at some level is financial at some point in your life.
Adam Alpert:Right? But so rarely is that your first one. Right? And there might very well be a tendency of people working on their first start up for too long. I don't know.
Adam Alpert:I mean, I can have mine for, like, seven and a half years, so I don't know what that says about me. But I but at the same time, I think that things have been going really well recently. So I do think that it's important to step back, ask yourself what's changing the world, and just, you know, continue to talk to other founders that are building different companies and ask them what they think is changing in the world. You know, at some point, you'll build your 2nd company and hopefully you're a 3rd. And it's much more likely that that second or third company is gonna be the thing that, you know, leads to a significant financial outcome than the first.
Adam Alpert:And but the first is really the way that you learn how to do everything to begin with to to put yourself in a position for the second or the third. I think there's probably, the worst is escaping me, But there are too many founders that build a company that learn all the skills that it would take to become a successful founder that don't quite make it successfully and burn out and then leave the startup world and and go back to corporate. And when they're now the ones that have the right skills and and, honestly, if they were to put their minds onto something else, they could probably make it incredibly successful.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I don't know what the word for that is either, but I think just keeping going. Not even necessarily at the same idea to your point. You know, maybe it makes sense to shut something down and move on to something new and start fresh. But keeping yourself motivated and having that intrinsic motivation we're talking about earlier, I think is, is really important because not a lot of people know how to build great businesses.
Michael Houck:We look at everybody in the world. There's just just a small set of human beings and using that knowledge can be viable for yourself, for the people around you, for your community, and everything like that. Actually, on that note, you know, you I've noticed a thread throughout your this conversation and throughout your career more broadly around community. Right? You know, you joined Kairos.
Michael Houck:You used community as a go to market strategy for Pangea. You've started a New York City Founders Club that we haven't talked about more recently. And a couple of times this conversation, you've you've referenced community as well. Why is that been such an emphasis for you, so far and how do you think it's helped you as a founder?
Adam Alpert:Well, people are everything. People are everything. Right? I mean, you you build for people. You you build with people.
Adam Alpert:And without community, I mean, at a broad sense, there's, like, there's no purpose in anything. That's right? Like and so I think it's important to kind of, like, get yourself out there and be involved and think about who you're building for. You know? Like, humans are social creatures.
Adam Alpert:Like, this whole idea of, like, a business and, like, building products, and, like, sharing in a market is, like, predicated on there being other people to be in the market with you. It's to me, like, to like, we are a community. We are a society. Like, we are a part of a community whether or not you think you are or are not. You know?
Adam Alpert:And maybe how you define it is is different. So, I mean, my my philosophy on life is very much like, there's no way to not be in community at some level. Like, we are all part of a community in in in some shape or form, even if it's just by being a human being. And, you know, you don't talk to anyone ever. So, community is obvious, like, really important to me.
Adam Alpert:I think that I've been working on being just intentional about who I'm in community with. They say that you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. So I'm just I really wanna surround myself with people who I have similar values with, people who I'm inspired from, and people who bring out the best version of myself. So yeah. So YC was great.
Adam Alpert:Kairos was good. And and now I'm working on the this this this new community in New York called the New York City Founders Club. You know? And and was born actually out of, you know, a friendship that I developed with 2 of my fellow YC batchmates who are founders of other companies. And, you know, building a company is a lonely journey.
Adam Alpert:A lot of people don't understand it. Your family, they don't understand it. Your friends from college, they don't quite understand it. Your boyfriend, girlfriend, they they might not understand it. They might they might not.
Adam Alpert:They support you, I'm sure. Right? But building a being a founder is lonely, and community helps us address that. It helps surround us with people who we can learn from and build relationships with, and maybe they become customers. Maybe they're inspiration for a new idea of a new direction you can go.
Adam Alpert:And maybe there's people that you can spend some time with. Right? So, I'm big on community. I'm build on I'm I'm big on just relationships and and big on being intentional about who you spend your time with.
Michael Houck:You guys also use community really well as as a go to market because you guys have I mean, correct me if the number's wrong. Maybe it's grown a bit since then, but I think, like, 75,000 creative workers in your community, freelancers, fractional people to power Pangea. Right? How did that happen? That's that's a huge number.
Michael Houck:75,000 is huge. How do you make that happen? And sort of what does that mean? Can you scale that indefinitely to grow the business to true venture scale? What's the what's the vision there?
Adam Alpert:Yeah. I mean, it's taken it's taken us time to get there, obviously. I think word-of-mouth is important. Again, for everyone who finds value and hears about us, there's the opportunity that can share it with more folks. I know that that community number size sounds great, but, you know, you compare it to, like, Indeed or LinkedIn, it's like a drop in the bucket.
Adam Alpert:So the the thing the thing that for me is I don't really care about venture scale anymore. Like, I don't really care about pleasing new investors. I care about pleasing our our users and our customers. And and if that leads to a lot of growth and more money, then great. But for us, it's not quality.
Adam Alpert:Right? You can have you can have you can double that. You can go from 75,000 to a 150,000. But it's like, well, who are the who who's that incremental 75,000? Right?
Adam Alpert:And I really care about who they are, right, and what they're capable of than just you have an account on Pangea. Right? Clients come to us because of the quality of the people they can find in our network, in our community. It's the capability. It's the reliability.
Adam Alpert:It's the communication ability. It's the hunger. It's their ambition. It's their creativity. Right?
Adam Alpert:It's the fact that to find these people on LinkedIn or Upwork or Indeed, it just takes so much time. Right? So our value add is actually being able to sift through that and and surfacing up the top 1%. So of that of that 75,000, who are the top 750? Right?
Adam Alpert:And you can think about it this way. If we had the 750 of the top top people on our platform and, you know, their hourly rate was a $100 an hour and they were all doing 15 hours a week for us, and that's, you know, 4 weeks a month, that would be, almost a half a $1,000,000 of of transaction volume, you know, a month. My quick math. So, like and that's a great business. That's a really good business, and you don't need to have a 1,000, you know, talent profiles.
Adam Alpert:So I care most about quality, and that's that's that's the problem to be solved at the moment. That's why we're putting a lot of
Michael Houck:effort in terms of and we're using a bunch of AI as
Adam Alpert:well in terms of, you know, of all the the folks in our network, who's the best fit for what and and making sure that they connect as quickly as possible. So, yeah, I'm proud of 55 or 75 k plus, but I'm trying to break my addiction of vanity metrics and focus on the metrics that matter. Right? I used to be super pumped about how many colleges. It was 1800.
Adam Alpert:We had 1800. We had over 1800 schools represented on Pangea, and it was, like, on a website and something I can mention in conversation, and it would impress people. But I don't care about impressing people. I care about building a successful business. I want people who use Banshee to find real value with it.
Adam Alpert:And for us to spore around, I'd rather have 1,000 more incredible type, like, a caliber, top caliber talent on our platform who are 100 of dollars an hour, then I do just doubling the revenue numbers because some VC somewhere is gonna see that I'm gonna invest as a result.
Michael Houck:I would imagine that that's pretty valuable to other founders sort of that. What makes that what makes someone hit that quality bar? Because a lot of founders, you know, in a lot of cases, their first time hiring people. Right? They go from being managers or even just ICs at companies to or college students themselves to to being a founder to hire a whole team.
Michael Houck:What do you know from seeing thousands of these, you know, fractional hiring situations play out that they should keep in mind for for hiring in general?
Adam Alpert:How about criteria of what's important to you? You know, when my cofounder and I, when men are first hire, we sat down and we said, what are, like, the four things that we care about in a candidate? We were hiring a designer. Part of it was the aesthetic. Part of it was their, you know, thought thinking, thought process.
Adam Alpert:Some of that was, like, their output, their hustle, like, how are they like, are they gonna be really reliable and communicate? I think there's one other one, maybe compatibility. And we just did a when we talked to candidates, we had a blind blind ranking process and we would you know, I would give them a score, my cofounder would give them a score 1 through 5, and then we wouldn't talk about it. And then after the interview, we would, like, reveal our impressions. And we would see where we aligned and see where we didn't align, and that was really helpful to us in our process.
Adam Alpert:It helped us hone in more on, like, what we thought was good and what wasn't good. And mean, they're not making a great hiring decision as a result. Before we hired, we had them do a you know, we we brought them in on kind of a a trial basis. Right? And this is something that I talk to founders about all the time is you can interview.
Adam Alpert:You can have multiple rounds of interviews. You can have multiple rounds of technical, whatever it might be. But until you work with somebody, right, you really don't know. And there's no hack. Right?
Adam Alpert:Our our hack is we make it as easy as possible for you to bring someone in as an hourly consultant and work together on a project and see if it makes sense. And then if it does, you can bring them in full time contract to hire. And that that honestly, that's, like, why sees how to. It's like they say, if you can, hire them as a freelancer first for a couple of weeks, for a couple of months, and actually assign them work and work with them. Right?
Adam Alpert:It reduces some of the risk for them if they have a full time job. They can kinda work with you part time. Not everyone is willing to do this. A lot of our talent at Pangea are, which is another reason why we have a lot of companies who like using us because we make that easy. So my hack is, yeah, have a process, have a rubric, understand what's important to you.
Adam Alpert:You you might have to compromise a bit, but it'll allow you to stack rank candidates. And then, ultimately, it's okay to, like, hire someone, bring them in hourly, and if it's not a good fit, move on. And it can take some time to find the right one, but, you know, they say it's, like, hire, hire, slow, fire, fast. And I think that having a process, bringing someone out in hourly is slow, and if it's not a good fit, you can you can end it and you can move on. And I think that's really hard to do when you're, like, trying to make, like, a I'm gonna make a w two higher right now.
Adam Alpert:Right off the bat, I've had 300 for you, and I'm gonna offer you some huge salary and expect you to, like, knock out of the park. It's really hard to get right on the first go. So and now with, like, AI and and with how companies are being built, I'd argue that you can put off hiring for for quite a while. You can get away with with, you know, augmenting yourself with AI in a lot of ways or bringing in someone fractionally to kinda help move things forward. Like, there's there's generally a lot of stuff you can do before you get to, like, hiring someone full time.
Michael Houck:Yeah. And you even see, you know, not that they're the biggest company in the world, but you do see bigger companies doing this. You know, linear is a great example. I think they exclusively do these work trials, and that's what they call these work trials now. I completely agree with you.
Michael Houck:More companies should adopt this as long as they can find good candidates who are willing to to to do so. I guess, what sort of made you so bullish on this trend to kinda go all in on it with Pangea?
Adam Alpert:I equate it to, like it's like cloud computing. Right? If you go back to, you know, the era before, like, AWS, you know, when you were deploying, you know, a new product, you had to, like, buy a server and have that thing plugged into your living room and that's running all the time. Right? Like and regardless of what the what what was needed, you know, and the machine, you know, got gets old and and slow after this in time, but you have this thing kind of running all the time.
Adam Alpert:And and one of the things that, like, cloud computing, you know, it was why it's been such such such a game changer is and people don't really talk about it anymore. We just take it for granted, but this is is a brand new thing, like, in the last decade, is you can kinda scale it up. You can scale it down. You pay for what you use. Right?
Adam Alpert:You need a micro machine, a bigger machine, you can add RAM, you can add storage, you can spin it up, you can use Kubernetes to create these micro containers that scale up, scale down, vertical horizontal, right, and you can align, like, what you're actually paying for with what you're actually using. And you can do the same thing with talent now to, you know, with a high with with with a height of your similarity. So, like, you don't need to, like, you have a need, you don't need to, like, just hire a full time person. Right? You can you can hire someone for 20 hours a week if that's what you need.
Adam Alpert:You can hire someone for 10 hours a week or 30 hours a week. You can hire them just hourly, so it could be 10 hours a week, 15, 20, it just goes up, it scales down as you need. Right? And I think that to us is so obvious. Right?
Adam Alpert:Like, what like, your needs as a company are the same as, like, your needs for compute. You know? Like, things grow, things change, like, things are different different times of day, different places. So while it might not be, you know, totally as commoditizable as, like, servers. Right?
Adam Alpert:Nor nor does it need to be or should it be. There's a lot of power in in terms of bringing in, like, an expert or a specialist for 10, 20 hours a week to run a channel for you who's better at it than anyone on your team is, and have this kind of more mixed or blended team. So you have this core team of dedicated full time w twos, you, your coat, your founding team, and then you start to augment and bring in factional folks, you know, particularly at the c stage in series a. And then you might go through a stage of like hyper growth series a, series b, series c where, you know, you have a really huge product roadmap and you have a lot of stuff you're trying to build on and it might make sense to just go and hire a 100 engineers and, you know, 20 design, whatever it might be. It's a lot of challenges in that, but, you know, there's there's, you know, the time and place for that.
Adam Alpert:But now we're working a lot with, like, series c, series d companies, right, who have that core team. They're a 1,000 person company, You know, they're not trying to hire another 1,000 people. You know, they're looking to bring in, other fractional or even full time contractors. Right? That you know, for a 12 month contract to to work with them.
Adam Alpert:So, yeah, we think it's a really exciting trend, the move towards fractional. And and fractional is also this historically was, like, you do what fractional is, like, a fractional executive, fractional CFO. And you had, like, fraction you had, like, good people who were, like, a fractional CFOs or, like, $1,000 an hour, And then you had, like, the freelancer, which is, like, a $50 an hour person. And there was, like, this big and that was, like, those are your options. You can get something cheap on Fiverr or you can, like, you know, hire a a fractional CFO.
Adam Alpert:And what we're what we're doing with and what we're seeing with Pangea is the extension of what fractional means and is to move beyond an executive in independent contributor. It's someone that's a manager of us channel on your team. Right? And they're a different caliber of talent than you would otherwise find on a freelancing platform, but they're not, you know, purely strategy. Right?
Adam Alpert:They're strategy and execution, strategy and execution. And it's someone who can get stuff done for you and think about what they're doing and if it's the most efficacious thing you're working on.
Michael Houck:Yeah. That sort of middle ground makes a ton of sense. It's probably the most valuable of those kind of three options for a lot of founders. You just sort of put somebody in a channel or an area of the business, let them own it, and that's all you need to do. And they you talk to them and you got it covered.
Michael Houck:So I can't believe we've talked about fundraising yet, but you mentioned that, you know, you're sort of over the VC process. If it happens, great. You're not really looking out for it. And I think you guys have raised a little over 3,000,000 historically. Why sour on it?
Michael Houck:And why not go down that and try to make the venture scale business?
Adam Alpert:Yeah. It's not that I'm sour on it. It's just that, like, if you can get to default alive and pride, which is profitable, right, without having to raise money, I think it honestly puts you in a you're in a better you don't have to raise, you don't have to sell, you don't have to shut down, you can just run it. Right? You can you can you you have a lot more agency in terms of what the future of the business is.
Adam Alpert:And ultimately, like, you have to get there eventually. Like, it might be easier to get there by scaling to, you know, raising a $100,000,000 and and going super big. Like, you know, there's definitely a a playbook there. Right, which is, you know, capture market share. Now we are in an incredibly competitive market.
Adam Alpert:We're in staffing and and recruiting. And there are thousands of staffing recruiting firms and platforms and and and a lot of the the startups in our space have just raised way too much money. They've just raised they've raised 30,000,000, 50,000,000, a 100,000,000. That's a lot of money in your capital stack. A lot of money.
Adam Alpert:Look at Toptal as a counter example. Toptal, unlike the other companies that raise 30, 40, 50,000,000 plus, they raised 2,000,000, 2 and a half million. That's all they ever raised. They raised less than us. They've never actually converted that note either.
Adam Alpert:Right? There's some issues around that. But, but Tasso, he literally that's it. And and, you know, you know, no one really knows what the numbers are today, but it's it's it's over a $100,000,000 a year business. I think everyone would agree it's over.
Adam Alpert:Whether it's a 100,000,000 or 600,000,000, right, there's up for debate. You can ask them yourself. But it's a successful business. Right? It has healthy margins.
Adam Alpert:It's tech enabled, and he's built a really successful tech enabled staffing company that just prints money. And he doesn't have any money to that he has to give back necessarily. So, you know, Sam Altman talks about how we're in the era of perhaps having the first company valued at over $1,000,000,000 and has a single employee. We're not there yet, but, you know, conceivably, it's it's it's there's no reason why it's impossible. Like, I don't think there's any physics limit physical limit.
Adam Alpert:So I'm just really I'm really hyped up on we're in this era where the way in which you run a business has fundamentally changed in the last 2 years. The the type of tooling that you've available to use has fundamentally changed. Right? I've been able to take our team from 12 people to 3 people, and we've grown revenue. We ship products faster, and and we've made a lot and and things are in a much better place than they were, you know, 2 years ago, and our burn is a fraction of what it was.
Adam Alpert:Right? So I'm a huge believer that you can build a hyper efficient, scalable business without raising tens of 1,000,000 of dollars, and I wanna prove that to myself. I wanna prove that to the world. And then if if if we figure out this thing that and and that that's and if capital becomes the impediment to growth, we'll raise more money. In our current state, capital isn't the impediment to growth.
Adam Alpert:One might argue that time is our biggest enemy. Amazing some more money would give us a bit more time. But you know what? Just like being in y c, I think it's good to have a clock running. I think it's it puts fire under your butt to make it work before time runs out.
Michael Houck:If you don't have that urgency, you have to force it on yourself every day and having that external clock can can help. You mentioned, not on this call, but you mentioned before that when you guys finished your first accelerator I wanna go back to that for a second. When you finished your first accelerator, you thought that funding would come in quickly. So if we're going down the traditional founder path, you're like, yes, we've done the accelerator. Now let's get funded and go conquer the world.
Michael Houck:But that didn't happen. Right? And, you know, we talked a little bit earlier about founder resilience. I think that's probably the one of the best examples of a founder sort of being resilient that you can have. You're expecting a big fundamental step change in the history of the company.
Michael Houck:Doesn't happen. How do you doubt? What do you learn?
Adam Alpert:Ego death is real. Yeah. It goes back to where I'm at earlier, like, not needing permission and kind of being in a chicken and an egg. And I think for a while there, we were like, well, we just gotta keep trying and keep trying to convince people. Right?
Adam Alpert:Keep trying to convince and to keep working on it. But ultimately, there is nothing stopping us from launching. There is nothing stopping us because, you know, my cofounder is technical. Right? There was nothing stopping us from, like, literally I would just walk out to, like, the RISD library and set up a table and just hand out, like, little rubber duckies.
Adam Alpert:I got on Amazon that were, like, 10Β’ apiece, you know, and hand them out, you know, you sign up, you download my app, you know, here's a rubber ducky, and it was incredibly effective. And John would be their superior and people have a bug, we'd fix it. No. You don't need any permission. I mean, I think we got in trouble from a couple of schools a couple times, but you know what I mean?
Adam Alpert:Whatever. Until you get freaked out, you just you just show up and you can ask for forgiveness later. So I think we we had that in us of just, like, well, we had the we had a product, and we we had we were, you know, a couple blocks away from our users, and we just, like, would go and try to get users and get feedback and try to get them to use it. I don't know what is wrong with us in that we didn't give up. I think most people would have just been so cringe and and or or whatever, so embarrassed that you just, like, wouldn't you would have given up because it's definitely to to, you know, most of my friends post college went, you know, moved to New York City, got a job, were working in finance, whatever it might be.
Adam Alpert:And I was, like, still in Providence. Like, I didn't leave. Like, I was had a table on a college campus, like, trying to get people to download an app that, like, was very different than what it was today, and, like, not getting you know what I mean? And, like, literally doing anything to get, like, a couple users and, like, not getting revenue. Okay?
Adam Alpert:And it was it was hard. It was there were some really tough days, and there there was, you know, I have, I used to do a thing, like, you know, I I had a car up in Rhode Island and and whenever I was, you know, needed some space, I'd just go hop in my car. I'd hop on 195 going out east towards the cape. It's a nice highway. It's not overly traffic.
Adam Alpert:No one's out there. And I would just I I I would, I would open up Otter, which has, like, a voice it has, like, a you might know Otter if it's joined, like, a meeting room, but it's been they've been around for a while. Sorry if it's an app. And you could transcribe. So I would talk I would create voice memos, and I would talk about what was going on and and, like, just, like, talk to myself a bit.
Adam Alpert:And, I still have these recordings to this day. And I can't tell you how many recordings that I made in in 2017, 2018, 2019. I'm just saying, oh, it's too late. Like, we we've we're out of time. You know?
Adam Alpert:No one needs it. Like, blah blah. And, like, an almost, like, borderline defeat. You know? And, you know, a couple months ago by the end, we finally would hit someone.
Adam Alpert:We got into the next challenge. Right? And then again and and then 6 months later, we raised our 1st month, you know, and and it's a journey. It's like ups and downs, ups and downs, ups and downs. And and even on those early days, right, of, like, talking to students and, like, some of them would have a bad time.
Adam Alpert:Some of them had a great experience. A lot of people loved what we were doing. And it was honestly, that is what carried me through. Like, the the the the one conversation in 3 or 4, where people were really excited by what we're doing, and really encouraging, probably is the thing that gave us the encouragement to stick with it as long as we did.
Michael Houck:Yeah. Every founder needs a release. And, these days, you just open up the chat gpt app and just talk into it and let it let it tell you, what you're missing. Cool. Okay.
Michael Houck:One more quick one, and then we have a couple rapid fire outro questions. I wanna plug this. You did a TED talk on stoicism, and I think it's a great talk. I think more people should check it out. Give me the hyper condensed TLDR.
Michael Houck:Why should founders explore stoicism?
Adam Alpert:There are things that are inside your control, and there are things that are not. There are things that are in your control. And I think that we oftentimes confuse and or don't quite respect or understand what's in our control or what's out of our control. And we tend to focus on or get upset by things that happen in our life that we actually have no control over. Doing so is a waste of energy and waste of time.
Adam Alpert:Now we're humans. Right? So, I give you some forgiveness. I I get upset by things that are out of my control, this person honking in the street that's annoying me. You know what I mean?
Adam Alpert:And but it's if I can't con if I can't change anything about it, it's not worth letting your mind get upset about it. Like, you're causing that harm to yourself. You have a lot of agency up to these things. And in a startup in life, but in a startup, there's so much that's outside of your control. If an investor says yes or no, if a customer says yes or no, whatever it might be.
Adam Alpert:Right. You can't let that get the best of you. You have to focus on what you can't control, and that's how you respond. Right? It's what you choose to do next.
Adam Alpert:It's what you choose to do about it. And as a founder, that's incredibly important, and that's where you need to come back to, you know, because some days are amazing and some days are tough. But oftentimes, what makes them amazing or tough are things that are outside your control. So if you just focus on what you can do next or what incremental thing you can do each day just to push the ball forward a little bit, you'll find yourself with a lot more peace of mind, and I guarantee, a lot more progress to be shown.
Michael Houck:So simple, so good. People should definitely go check it out the full talk. Cool. Okay. We have a couple rapid fire out your questions we'd like to ask everybody.
Michael Houck:Number 1, name investor who other founders should take capital from and why. Lister Delgado is the managing director
Adam Alpert:of, Idea Fund. They're a small fund out of out of North Carolina and was, an early check for us. I mean, I love all my investors. I should name all and Underdog Labs, PJC. They're wonderful.
Adam Alpert:Daniel Rosin. We have a lot of amazing investors. Carson, he must and everybody. I mean, everyone we're taking money from for the for the for you know, has been so wonderful, and you should take money from them. But Lister has been great.
Adam Alpert:You know, he was the first, like, $1,000,000 check-in. And he you know, they they they took a board seat, which is, you know, early you know, oftentimes a board seat at a seat round is, you know, atypical. But, it's honestly been one of the best decisions. Right? He's been incredibly helpful.
Adam Alpert:He, we do, like, we we had for a while, we're doing biweekly, like, check ins and quarterly board meetings, and was always has always been super helpful, super supportive, never gotten our way, has made connections for us, and has been a really helpful person to bounce ideas around. I think people don't put enough, value on bringing in someone on the board at an earlier stage. I think it could be incredibly helpful. So I recommend taking money from idea fund.
Michael Houck:What's one thing that you would change about the startup world?
Adam Alpert:I think more people should respond to cold emails.
Michael Houck:Yeah? Yeah. What are they missing out on?
Adam Alpert:Everything. I think there's a lot of great products. I think there's a lot of great entrepreneurs who have great things, and they don't know how to get to market, and they send you cold emails, and it's so easy to too easy to say f off. I think I think I think I think probably back in the olden days, it was easier to kinda, like, you know, get meetings with folks. I think people I think there's a lot of spam in my email inbox too, so it's kind of hard to suss out who's legit and who's not.
Adam Alpert:But I think that if it was easier to spot, like, real startups doing real things in my inbox, I would be much more inclined to to take a 10 minute call. I'm invalidating it.
Michael Houck:What is your number one piece of advice for a first time founder? Founder?
Adam Alpert:Do it. Just do it. Just do it. There's no, like, per but, perfect is the enemy of getting off. Okay.
Adam Alpert:And last one, what is something that you believe that most people disagree with you about? I think you have a lot more agency and control over your attitude and your general feeling than people, like, let on. Like, if you're not happy about something in your life, you can change it.
Michael Houck:Cool. I love that. Speaks to some of the things we were talking about earlier too. Cool. Well, Adam, thanks so much for spending the time with me.
Michael Houck:If people wanna follow you, check you out, check out Pangea, where should they go?
Adam Alpert:I'm most active on LinkedIn, so just follow me on LinkedIn, Adam Alpert, and I post about New York. I post about Pangia and just founder stuff all the time. So, yeah, LinkedIn's the best.
Michael Houck:Cool. And if people wanna hire fractional folks, they should go to Pangia dot app.
Adam Alpert:Pangia, pangea.app, and click that little button that says start hiring.
Michael Houck:Cool, man. Thanks for coming on. Good to have you. Thank you, Michael.
Michael Houck:Thanks for listening. I write up my main takeaways from every conversation and make them available to all of our members at foundingjourney.com, along with a bunch of other perks and more content. If you found this conversation valuable, subscribe to Founding Journey on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or whatever your favorite podcast app is. I post a new episode every Thursday. Also, consider leaving us a rating or a review.
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