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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 saw this from the beginning, a $1,000,000,000 opportunity.
Michael Houck:That's Adam Brinkley. By we, he means him and his 7 cofounders. They'd raised over a $137,000,000 for their startup pitch, But then they realized that it'd be better as a cash flowing business. Something wasn't working. And we
Adam Renklint:came to an agreement with our investors to kind of refinance the company by giving back a lot of the money.
Michael Houck:He opened up and told me what made him realize that venture capital wasn't the right path. Also, how he kept the company motivated after having to lay off 2 thirds of the team, and what goes into a great pitch deck. This is Adam Renklund's founding journey.
Michael Houck:Alright, Adam. So I guess let's just dive in. I had 2 co founders on my last venture back company, but Pitch was started with, I believe, 8 total founders. You know, we had 3 in total and everything was super chaotic. Decision making gets harder the more people you add to it.
Michael Houck:I can only imagine what having you plus 7 other people must have been like. What did you implement to sort of make it possible to keep shipping quickly and also keep everyone on the same page?
Adam Renklint:Yeah. So I think one of the most important things about having 8 cofounders, is or 7 cofounders for me is that you should know each other for a long time before you go into this kind of marriage. So we had been friends and worked together for almost a decade before we started Pitch. So we knew we we knew we could trust each other under pressure. We knew what, each of our strength and strengths and weaknesses were.
Adam Renklint:Division of labor, once we started, felt fairly simple. Of course, it it there were also times when we were all of, like, in a room together debating over a decision, and and then now it gets heated. I think that's, you know, one of the famous Steve Jobs quotes that you create great things when you have some friction. You need that friction to to kind of bring out the best in everyone. I think what really helped us also is that we had our let's call it there, our main cofounder or main founder, Christian, who had been the CEO of of company we previously worked together at, 6 Mundekinde that made Mundekinde List.
Adam Renklint:And he was the one who brought us all together. He hosted the first dinner, and we said we were gonna start something together. So it wasn't like we were 8 cofounders on an equal footing from the beginning, but he was kind of pulling us in in that direction, and we were happy to follow him. And then over time, other roles crystallized. So I joined when we started this, I thought I would be an engineer.
Adam Renklint:That's what I wanted to do. But immediately, we needed to hire some people, make some architectural decisions, things like that, and that just kind of landed naturally with me. We we figured out how to divide things up that we are not creating islands. We're talking a lot. Yeah.
Adam Renklint:Like I said in the beginning, it really helps if if you have people that you know really well so you can speak very openly about things. Because there are gonna be things where you don't agree, where you have to make a decision that half of you are unsatisfied with, so you have to be able to talk openly about that and then, you know, put it to rest and move on and not have resentment grow or anything. So I think that is definitely a recipe for, like, long term unhappiness.
Michael Houck:Wanna get more insights like that? Each week, I actually interview multiple founders. For the ones who don't join the podcast, I write up a case study and share it with all founding journey members. I also write weekly tactical dives, share startup opportunities, and analyze trends that I've noticed. We've also got a community of founders and investor and pitch deck database and more fun stuff, like over $60,000 in perks and discounts to help you build, grow, and raise capital for your startup.
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Michael Houck:Yeah. I totally agree. And you are the CEO now, and you started out obviously as the CTO for, I think, 6 years. And I've heard you talk about sort of the importance of being a product CEO, product focused CEO, since you've taken over that role. Obviously, that comes through in the product itself.
Michael Houck:You guys have built pitches beautifully designed. The UX is really good. Users are seem super happy, at least I am as a user. What are sort of the upsides and downsides of being a product led CEO? And maybe said differently, having a company with a product led CEO?
Adam Renklint:Yeah. So I think looking at what what could be alternatives, is that you have a very sales driven, business driven CEO. And I think the upside of that is that you get really good at creating partnerships with other companies. Whereas, if you have a product product driven and CEO, product driven company leadership, like, you tend to focus quite a lot on just making the best possible product and then, you know, getting the distribution to get it out to people, but hoping that the product will speak for itself, which I think that approach works quite well with the idea of product led growth. Right?
Adam Renklint:That you create these viral loops that spread the product among people as opposed to, you know, having a very strong sense for where should we place ads. I think it goes further than just being a product led CEO. At least in Pitch's case, we built up a product driven team. So when we were hiring for engineers, one of the things that we were testing for in in interviews was the, can you name your favorite product? Can you describe why you love it?
Adam Renklint:And, hopefully, the the answer is not always, although it often is. Can you look at a product and and have an emotion around it? Can you articulate why something is better or worse? Because then we can make sure that it's not just designers making screens that product managers has told them to do and then engineers implementing, but you all come together and collaborate on creating something. And that means that everyone is wearing some form of product hat all the time.
Adam Renklint:And in the new rebooted pitch since I took over and we also shrunk a lot in size, we do product discussions in the whole company together. We're 37 people, so we just, you know, meet all of us, talk about different opportunities and features on a board. It's actually a pitch presentation, but we talk about it from different perspectives. So one of the most valuable functions for me as a product driven CEO is our customer facing teams. Because they are the ones that spend the most times with current and future customers and can really help us go beyond what people say that they need to really uncover what are the the real pain points that we can solve for and make a product that hopefully feels not just useful because that's a baseline, but also really delightful, something that you enjoy using.
Michael Houck:I guess, if you were to go back to before you became CEO, c CEO is obviously a very different job than CTO. Right? So I think a lot of people listening to this might be either first time CEOs who were engineers or maybe people who are transitioning into the CEO role like you did from CTO. What should they know about being a good CEO that maybe isn't obvious coming from a technical background?
Adam Renklint:Yeah. That's a good question. Still learning, I would say. One thing that is mostly the same is that if you're founding a company or if you're part of leading a company, your most important thing is people. To talk to people, to I think something that many people have to go through is you are suddenly in a spot where people look at you for answers, and it's easy, I think, to panic in that moment and then try to invent everything yourself.
Adam Renklint:But hopefully, you've you've built a great team or you're on the verge of building a great team that can help complete you. I think that's also one thing. I promise I'm not a huge Steve Jobs nerd, but another thing that he said in a in a famous college yeah. Video from a college is, you know, you should hire people to tell you what to do. If you're not doing that, you are you're doing something wrong.
Adam Renklint:You're kind of building it for your ego. It's okay to have a vision and bring people along, but it has to become something more than what you yourself can imagine. So listening to people and being able to articulate your vision in a way that invites others to say 1 +1 equals 3, I think that is a a really important skill set, not just for the CEO, but everyone who is on some kind of leading position inside a company, but especially the CEO. I think another thing that I do a lot as a product driven CEO, I use products all the time. Like, it's so easy to forget that because you have an idea of what you're building.
Adam Renklint:I think you have to kinda test your assumptions all the time. There are so many great things out there. Not even not talking about just trying out your competitors, but, of course, you should absolutely do that. But also way different kinds of software to just both get a feel for or strengthen your taste and what is good and bad, but also get a feel for trends that are coming or or maybe trends that are going the wrong way and you wanna counteract.
Michael Houck:And
Adam Renklint:I think everyone every company that finds themselves being at the forefront at some point of setting a trend, you take linear as a famous example, right, with the the black, purple, a spaCy website. As soon as people start copying it, that means, you know, they've caught up with you, and you need to go somewhere else. So I think that's really important part of just browsing around and and feeling what does the the product landscape look like in total.
Michael Houck:Interesting to hear you bring up Linear because as I was, you know, preparing for this episode, I came back to linear in my mind a lot. Linear is obviously very famous for their design and their UX, their usability. I get that same sense from you guys and from what you've built with Pitch. Very beautiful product. User experience is great.
Michael Houck:Is that was that a conscious choice? And if so, you know, how do you think about that usability being a differentiator for you guys either from the early days, or is that something that just sort of emerged in the culture of the company in the long term?
Adam Renklint:No. That was very, very conscious. So before we started Pitch, we worked together, I think, for 5 years on a product called Wunderlist, which was pretty, like, hyped in a in a previous cycle of this startup carousel. The team that, so I was just an engineer back then, but the team that, Christian and the other founders have built up were really really product centric and design centric. We were really design driven to the point where, you know, we would we would, design things before we figured out how they should work a little bit.
Adam Renklint:So maybe to a halt to a degree, but everything looked and felt amazing. And then we were acquired by Microsoft, and most of us spent around 2 years in there. And there is giant company that has loads of resources, but also a lot of bureaucracy to get anything done. You need a lot of people to put their stamp on your paper. So when we started Pitch, we we had the idea of first of all, before we even had the product idea, we just wanted to get together and work on something together and make sure we could have lunch together a few times a week.
Adam Renklint:Corona put an end to that, but we still enjoyed working together. And it was a very explicit decision from the beginning that we should focus on building something that just feels great to use. Because a lot of, I think, was true back then and it's still true, a lot of software that people use really extensively to drive their business is just completely boring and lacks personality, and it all looks the same. I think it's it becomes a competitive edge where you can stand out. Doesn't mean that you have to do everything, that everything has to be unique.
Adam Renklint:You should have an opinion about how things should work. You should think about what you want the world to look like and then try to build a software that enables that. And for us, that was, you know, having been in Microsoft and having required all these stamps, one of the first things we decided for pitch was everyone should have access to to everything inside the workspace, and you can change stuff. So trust by default, but then you have version history for everything. So in case something goes wrong, and, you know, as programmers and product makers, we know that that will happen, you can go back and restore another state.
Michael Houck:When you're operating that way, it sounds like you're also thinking about shipping quickly. It's not just about making sure everything's polished. It's about doing so within a framework, within a way that you can still get product out there quickly and use those hands quickly. Because I think a lot of people fall victim to having to make that choice, but it sounds like you guys are trying to do both sides of that at the same time. It sounds like it's working.
Adam Renklint:That that was also something that that was important from the beginning and has been ever since. Like, we started building pitch for ourselves, and I think that's a great way to start because then you you can rely a lot on your own taste. But as the product grows, the complexity around it grows, your target audience hopefully also grows with, you know, shipping more and more. I think it becomes more and more important to get really fast feedback on everything. So, I mean, we like to you know, there's this famous idea of an MVP that have kind of been bastardized to mean something with low quality often.
Adam Renklint:There's another version of it, which I think people call minimal minimum lovable product. What is the smallest thing that you can build that someone understands what it's supposed to do and they can do it, but it also makes you feel happy and engaged about doing it. So I think that is the ideal part, ideal goal for building a new feature or or product to try to get to to that part as quickly as possible. And I think for that to feel seamless and easy, you often have to build your own tools for it. I mean, nowadays, I think there is more than when we started, but one of the first things that we bought built for instance was just immediate deploys of every change so that for any small change, you can just give a URL to someone in the marketing team or a designer to check what does that feel like in real life.
Adam Renklint:You don't have to pull down the git repo and then try to make the compiler work. And that way, you can just have ideas. You you make those changes quickly, and then you you try to experience the result rather than reason about it in theory. Because I think that's where people get stuck with this chasing for perfect. You're doing a bunch of things and you think about what effect they would have, and then you layer more assumptions on top of that.
Adam Renklint:And eventually, you come up with something, but it's pretty far away from where you started. Right? We can have this cycle of have an idea, try it out, see see what the reaction is, and then go back to make another change. If that is a lot faster and also a lot safer than locking yourself into a cave for a while and, you know, just hope we can work with, like, a perfect thing.
Michael Houck:It was interesting for me to hear you say that you guys started pitch because it was something that you needed and that you wanted to build for yourselves. I agree that's a great way to start something new. But at the same time, presentation software is not a new market. Right? There have been long standing players in this market.
Michael Houck:So I'm curious, what was the opportunity that you saw early on enough? And, also, why did that market seem like most appealing for for the group?
Adam Renklint:So we were actually looking at different ideas, trying to figure out something that is both a a good market opportunity, but also something that excited us that that we could, you know, get behind emotionally. And while we were at Microsoft, you know, I've already ranted a few times about how how corporate it was. And that's how a lot of companies work. You create a lot of presentations, to get buy in from a lot of people. The issue is and also so that's just the internal use case.
Adam Renklint:A huge part of our world runs on people putting their thoughts on decks and showing it to other people to get funding, to make sales, to drive political decisions. But it's all done in tools that haven't really reimagined the format they're in since since people were using overhead projectors, like, 30 years ago. And we found that we can trace a a life cycle of a presentation that is not represented at all in software. So you would start in a notes app somewhere, and then you would go over to PowerPoint or Keynote and try to put that all of that in there. You would then have a file that you have to email or or, maybe send it over Slack or HipChat to someone, and they will make some edits and send it back.
Adam Renklint:And then at some point, you're gonna take all of this work and then export it into a PDF that you distribute some other way, and then hope that someone replies to you and tells you what they thought of what you created. So our our initial idea was what if we can unbundle the Office Suite, like, unbundle PowerPoint from the Office Suite, and then rebundle that to to care for the whole life cycle of a presentation. So it starts with your ideas and more importantly. So we have the whole editing experience where you should not be able you should not have to send things around. You should just how I described it in the early days is that I wanna create a wormhole for everyone who's working on a presentation to just transport to the same computer.
Adam Renklint:We're working on one mainframe together. Nowadays, real time collaboration is table stakes, but 6, 7 years ago, it was still it didn't exist everywhere. And so you're co collaborating on this, hopefully, beautiful artifact that tells the story that you want to tell in a very compelling way. And instead then of exporting a PDF and maybe submit paying for a subscription to doc stand or something like this to make sure that you understand that that someone reads it, you put that all in one tool where you can create multiple links from one presentation, send them out, see does anyone even open this? Do they get past that slide where I have this complicated question?
Adam Renklint:If you have a funding deck, does everyone bail where I say how much I want to raise? Gather all these kind of data points to make sure that there's a again, I'm getting back to the feedback loops. Right? You need to have some kind of loop to make with of information to get better. And this was just it was lacking in the tools that existed.
Adam Renklint:It was possible, but really complicated, and you you need to have to, you know, stitch things together. So Pitch brought that all into one tool. That's that's also why many people choose Pitch today because they have some kind of use case that really drives their business where the return of making a better deck, a more compelling deck, is really high. That makes a lot
Michael Houck:of sense. That's what I've heard from a lot of founders as well. I'm curious though about the the market. Like, you know, originally, I know you guys looked at this as a as a venture scale market, and that's the opportunity you wanted to go after. Right?
Michael Houck:I think for a while, you raised an $85,000,000 series b in 2021, if memory serves. But I think since then, you guys have sort of changed the direction of the company, sort of the aspiration of the company. Can you talk to me about that decision and how you guys figured it out between yourselves, how you communicated to investors and employees, all that stuff.
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Adam Renklint:Yeah. So so we we saw this from the beginning as a huge, like, a $1,000,000,000 opportunity. I think one thing that we underestimated is the power of suites. I mentioned before, like, unbundling the Office Suite. But, so many companies that we work with, they have Office 365, where they have a Google subscription.
Adam Renklint:So for one thing that we underestimated was the amount of leverage that you need to have for people to introduce another tool that does the job better. But if it doesn't do the job better for something that is really valuable to you, then you're probably not gonna invest into it. So, we thought that we would be able to capture a huge amount of, let's say, internal use cases where people create decks for each other. But what we found was that there's just not enough willingness to make those decks great because the the difference between a okay deck and a great deck is not that huge. But where we did find a lot of strong traction is anyone who's using a deck in some kind of external way, where where this design collateral that you create is really helping driving your business, customer facing teams, design agencies that make your proposals, founders that make that are doing fundraising, like, really high stakes moments where the deck is one huge part of, are you gonna make it or not?
Adam Renklint:So with that in mind, we realized during last year as as our growth was flattening out, we had built quite a big team trying to build out a very wide presentation platform that could cater to a whole bunch of different use cases. But we realized that that it just wasn't there, and we were faced with the the decision. Like, do we wind down completely, because it's the original thesis is not holding up? Or do we try to take a different perspective of this on this look at the the users where we do have strong traction, the the the markets where this kind of high return of investment is really worth the investment. And we came to an agreement with our, investors to kind of refinance the company by giving giving back a lot of the money that we had raised.
Adam Renklint:And in return, we could change, a lot of the the financial terms about from, our fundraising, like liquidation preference and things like that. So we could set with that with the help of our investors and to say that we're we're great in all of this, we're able to put the company in a spot where the definition of success is is very different in terms of, size where so we we don't have to become a $1,000,000,000 company in order for the, yeah, for the company to pay for itself, really. That doesn't mean that we does we don't have, like, long term aspirations. But since we did the reboot in January, we've been really focused on talking to people that are in our target user group to understand their pain points and and, again, this life cycle of the presentation, as opposed to what we were doing, let's say, a year prior, which was, you know, trying to speak to as many people at possible at the same time. So I think in in many ways, it's also made life a lot simpler and less stressful for everyone who's working on pitch.
Adam Renklint:Because we can imagine our target users now. They are clearly defined. We know them. We talk to them every week. And before, it was more, you know, everyone in the world who has opened PowerPoint.
Adam Renklint:It's hard hard to imagine those people.
Michael Houck:You get spread super thin going that route. I'm curious. When you first brought this up to investors, how did they reshow
Adam Renklint:how did they react? Well, so so they think that a lot of people saw their riding on the wall a little bit, that something wasn't working. This was also during a time where Christian, our main cofounder, had stepped away from the business because of illness for a while. So we were our leadership team was kind of trying to fill his shoes altogether while he was away. And I just felt that that we were pushing and pushing, and it didn't really we didn't we didn't get anywhere with it.
Adam Renklint:You didn't get any extra momentum from from pushing hard. And our investors and our board saw that as well. A quite easy discussion. Of course, figuring out the actual terms took a little bit longer, but and, like, getting everyone on board on the general idea, I think, was was very easy. So I think maybe that's if I should try to pat myself on the back or or our founding theme is that we chose investors really well, working with Blue Yard and and Index and Lakestar.
Adam Renklint:And and in each of those firms, we also had really good people being our partners. And I think they also saw VCs have the benefit of looking at many different companies at the same time, and they saw that this was kind of a trend that was happening where you basically have a few choices. 1 is to wind down completely. The other is to try to sell off what you have, the IP or the brand or whatever. And the third choice is to try to take a new perspective on what you're doing, and see if you get it to work in another way.
Adam Renklint:And this, of course, means in a way that they're also, you call it, underwriting. Like, they're they're accepting that they've lost some of their money. I think that, again, that helps if you have very reasonable people that you're working with that understand that the v in VC doesn't stand for a short return, but it is venture. Right? It is risky.
Michael Houck:What did you guys do to sort of what do you look for in investors early on that gave you the confidence that, you know, they are these people who do kind of understand how the startup world works and that these things happen and, you know, maybe they've been around the block.
Adam Renklint:What what did you look for? One of the most important thing to look for itself there are I think there are different ways where this relationship can happen, like and there's some asymmetry to it. If if you don't have a name, if you don't have any reputation already as a founder, it can be hard to to get into the office of a VC. Right? You probably have less of a choice.
Adam Renklint:You can be less picky to get that initial funding to just build a product and show that you have an idea worth paying on. I think in our case, it was a little bit different because Christian, or my my cofounder, after he and his cofounders had sold Wunderlist, he also started doing some venture capital, some investments, and made a name for himself in that scene. So we actually had a very easy time to get into those rooms to talk to people. And that mean meant for us, we could be a lot more picky with finding the right partner that we felt would be maybe a great addition to our board that can help challenge us, or that that is just a great person to have a little bit more on the side that can help you with partnerships or, you know, making connections. And, again, I think looking for people that are good people and are reasonable people is really important.
Adam Renklint:It's the same whether you're considering going yeah. Letting someone invest in your company or if you're hiring someone, or if you're thinking about someone as a cofounder. Like, you have to find a way to to build up some trust really fast. And I think the way that that Christian started that, and how I was doing it with him the whole time is also to be very open about what is working and what is not, not try to put on, a show too much. And there, you will also see pretty early in the early conversations that people respond to that if they are in turn also open with their feedback.
Adam Renklint:I think that that is maybe the the most important thing. And another thing is when you show someone your product, if you have something already, which you hopefully do, do they get excited about it? Like, do they get excited about the product or just about the potential return of capital, which, you know, they are, of course, in their business, they are, of course, excited about that, but it's such a important relationship that you will want to have someone that really looks at what you're have been building and then can come with the ideas and can understand the the vision that you have. That you shouldn't overlook that.
Michael Houck:I I think you've got more of the sales gene in you than, than you give yourself credit for because I think when you're doing sales and partnerships, being super authentic and and being upfront and looking for that stuff is, is very important. So give yourself some more credit there, man.
Adam Renklint:Well, I'm European. We like to to stay humble.
Michael Houck:So I guess the other side of all this is that, obviously, when you're scaling super fast and you're raising $85,000,000 in a single round, you know, as you mentioned, you're sort of hiring really broadly and you're hiring people to explore new areas and things like that. But then when you come back and you're like, alright, let's focus on our core customer, things change and founders have to make really hard decisions around,
Adam Renklint:you know, who to keep on
Michael Houck:the team and and and layoffs and things like that. I think, how do you keep the rest of the team motivated when you go through something like that?
Adam Renklint:I think that's probably the most important question about not doing such a a reboot like we did. So we we actually had 2 rounds where we shrunk the company. So first, end of 22, we went down from 160 to a 120 something people, because we could just see that the traction was pretty we were losing that momentum a little bit, and we just need to be smarter. And we did some we did a lot of things right there. We also did some things not great necessarily with how we handled the whole transition.
Adam Renklint:When we did the reboot now in in January, we took a lot of lessons from there of how to initially approach the topic, how to, like, practically perform it. I think when there is the news within the company that it's changing its size, may maybe not even so as dramatically as we did going from 100 and what we were, a 117 people down to less than 40, How you treat the people that are leaving will have a huge impact on how the peoples that are staying will feel. I think the initial feeling for someone who has has to stay will almost always be relief because, you know, it it's hard to lose your job. But once they're over that, that will just be be pressure upon them. Once they're over that, they will also look at how did you treat my friends over here.
Adam Renklint:So for us, that was really important that part of this reboot deal that we did with our investors, that we had ample funding for significant, severance packages that we were generous with, accelerating vesting on on shares that people had been allocated. I think in our case, we also tried to make it as simple as possible or rather easy. So we're we are a remote team with we were spread all over Europe and some people in Brazil and the US. So we had we had, shipped equipment everywhere. You know, people have these, like, Herman Miller chairs and their MacBooks and screens and everything.
Adam Renklint:So we just said, you can keep it. Just keep that. That's a parting gift because I think a lot of people also just have one computer. They have the the the computer that they use for work, that they use for everything. So trying to be as as generous generous and empathetic as possible with the people that have to leave, number 1.
Adam Renklint:The second part for us was you have to give people immediately a sense of purpose. And that is, for us, the whole company was dead. Like, that that was gone, and we needed to start over. So what I did was I had, first of all, we started with a new traditional, having a town hall once a week where the whole company gets together, and we make sure that to a little bit like this Seinfeld Christmas thing, Festivus. We're airing of grievances.
Adam Renklint:Right? And that and we can talk openly about what just happened and and also what's happening with our product. And then we set on a mission to get back to work as soon as possible to show ourselves and more importantly our customers that we didn't just applaud. We're able to run the product. We're able to make the hard decisions about maybe shutting some things off that we had to bet on, but it didn't really pan out yet so that we can stay really focused on on still delivering great service and great software.
Adam Renklint:We were worried there, of course, like, going from a 120 to a 100, to 40 people. Can we even run the same system? Like, we were just waiting to see, like, where where do the alerts start? I think we were very fortunate in that there weren't a lot of things that broke. The people that were forced to leave, they did great handover, and they were just let's say there were 1 or 2 things that where we ended up having to firefight a little bit.
Adam Renklint:For the most part, I think that, that worked out. And then to give a sense of more sense of purpose, I started talking about 2 things initially. 1 was simplifying the company. Because in a company that has scaled quickly, everyone feels the pain of of that. I don't processes.
Adam Renklint:Either you have too few of them, so no one knows what to do, or you're overreacting and you have too much of it to, kind of, standardize things and everything is hard to do. We were in the later the latter part here. So I just, told to my leadership team and the whole team, like, we're cutting almost all process. Like, now we're 40 people. If we need something, we could it's the size of a team that can be in one room and scream to each other if necessary.
Adam Renklint:So we try to get that feeling where we're focusing on doing things rather than finding the perfect you know, writing the perfect process document to explain how you would do it. That means also accepting that some things break, some things go go bad, but you you can fix it together. So that's one part. And the other was really refocusing on our customers and immediately going out to talking to them. And instead of so in the past year, we had been kind of on a journey of trying to solve this growth that didn't work out by reaching for unicorn features that would change everything.
Adam Renklint:But that is was at the expense of doing the things that that we knew would be impactful for our customers. Right? The the maybe smaller improvements, quality of life kind of things. So the 1st few months, we focused really only on that. Shipping fast, things that we know that people want to have, that they've been asking for, and that really helped get the team, like, moving in one direction, made them look really good.
Adam Renklint:And then there's there's another story about, you know, setting a goal about profitability and and being independent, which, we we were talking about as well. I think my answer is long enough already.
Michael Houck:No. We we can talk about that. One one thing I'm curious about first though is one of the hardest things founders need to do in that situation is kind of tread the line between giving enough space and gravity to what's going on right now versus painting an effective vision and a new vision of of where the company is gonna go in the future and getting people excited about being part of that. It sounds like you guys did a pretty good job in that. So I'm wondering if you have any advice for other founders who might be be going through this.
Adam Renklint:Few thoughts around that. One is we tried to make sure that we can be as open as possible outwards, about what's happening. So it doesn't feel like we have one tone inside the company and another outs towards, our customers. We're very super cheerful and, you know, this is the best thing that ever happened to us. We get in that in that kind of situation, really, you have to be respectful that everyone that is forced to leave, they have put their blood and sweat and tears, maybe not so dramatic, but they they they put a lot of their effort into something, and then suddenly they're they're being asked to leave.
Adam Renklint:So it's if they see you talking about things in this too cheerful way, it's gonna be really hurtful. Be being open that you don't have to have them speak with different voices and different rooms. I think it makes the whole thing a lot easier. The other thing that we did was we kind of we decided for a period where we would would allow morning. We would lean into kind of reflecting on what has happened and and just processing it for the team that stayed.
Adam Renklint:So it was about 1 1 week period where, like on Monday, we announced that everything was happening. By the end of Monday, it was done. And then the next 4 days was mostly about having 1 on ones and, you know, talking it through. And I think we also had a an all hands where I just talked everything through again with everyone. Since we were changing our company so dramatically, and a lot of people had signed up for this fast growing thing, and that was the reason they they wanted to be there.
Adam Renklint:You're going to the moon, and now we were saying, well, actually, just getting to orbit is going to be our our new goal. It's a very different goal. So we because we had done this deal with our investors to have enough capital to pay a generous severance package, we offered that also to the people that that we had selected to stay. So everyone who got those 4 days to think about it, do I really want to stay, or would I rather just, you know, call it quits and and and search for something new? And, we had, I think, 2 people that made that decision.
Adam Renklint:2 2 people that have been with us almost since the start that were maybe done with the whole whole thing and, you know, didn't want to jump on a different carousel another time with us. Yeah. So at the end of that week, we had gone through a very quick life cycle of, like, the stages of of grieving, and everyone who was left at the company had decided it, which meant that the the following Monday, it felt very natural for us to get to work, to to start thinking about the things that I mentioned before about, you know, corporate thing hyper focusing on our customers because they rely on us. And if we we can't take too much time and let, you know, the page of duty alerts just hang, we need to, you know, guarantee good service, good customer service. Yeah.
Adam Renklint:So I think that those were the things that worked for us.
Michael Houck:It sounds like you guys really thought about your employees first and foremost, which is which is really important. It says a lot. Okay. I wanna talk about fundraising a little bit too. You guys obviously have been super successful raising a bunch before you refocus the company, and also a lot of people use your product for fundraising.
Michael Houck:So I imagine you have some insights based on that. I'm curious, sort of, what do you think the most common mistakes that founders are making when they're going out and fundraising are maybe specifically with their deck?
Adam Renklint:Yeah. So I think you see a lot of deck that are just incomplete, I would say. Every type of fundraising, let's say, every stage that you're at, they require slightly different things, and there are different expectations from VCs who just have to imagine that a VC, they're they're not looking at your company only, but they're looking at, you know, I don't know, a 100 companies over a month and do a lot of pattern matching. So to make sure that you, first of all, get in front of the eyes of not just the the first person looking at your deck, but more people, maybe you have to actually follow a pretty specific format of what to include, a story line that that fits to each stage where, you know, if you're a past series a, you you should not you should not forget to include your product, for instance. I think that is something that seen people do.
Adam Renklint:Like, they they don't they don't show their product. You know, that's also, like, product driven founder. I wanna put the the product front and center. But if you're proud of it and you you try to show it, then it'll, kinda shine through. I think another thing that, is fairly common, it is to have an ambiguous ask at the end.
Adam Renklint:So if,
Michael Houck:I
Adam Renklint:can see how this happened. If you're not super confident, like, you're you're trying to just get in the room and talk to someone, your ask might be, the range might be very big. But I think to in order for someone else like, what you're trying to do is for someone else, just read through all of this and then picture what what this thing could be 5, 10 years in the future. So I think being as specific as possible about how much money do you want, sort of what you're willing to give away for that, and how how you would spend it. I think that is, like, a really important piece of that is somehow often missing.
Adam Renklint:I think I saw a a deck very recently that was really specific about that, and I could just it was also a pretty technical product. So I could really imagine what does this look like 2 years from now. Okay. Things go well, which, you know, hopefully, they do. Those are those are the the most important things that I've seen.
Adam Renklint:I think one thing maybe one thing to add, this is where also mentioning pitch. Like, one of the things that we saw, pretty early on was that, of course, the people were using Dexmade and pitch to fundraise. And this this idea I mentioned before that you just create something and send it out into the void, it's really hard. Right? It's like, you know, you're a musician and just upload your tunes to Spotify, and you never you never get to know if someone even listened to it.
Adam Renklint:So using whether it is pitch in the presentation analytics that we have in there or some other tool that does the same, being able to track if people get to the end. If they get to the ask, I think is a really important part of about how you distribute it. Because more likely than not, you're not actually gonna get it right the first time. Same as with a product. Right?
Adam Renklint:Like, if you go into a cave and try to make it perfect, you're gonna come out with something that is far from your vision, probably. So fundraising is also yeah. It's a sales process as you mentioned before, but it I think when it's when it's the best, it's very iterative. So you don't send send your thing out to everyone all at once, but you pick a few people, you send it out. And even if you get a no, try to get some feedback or at least look at the presentation analytics to see if they got to the end.
Adam Renklint:And then you try to tighten that and, like, work in that feedback loop so that, eventually, someone sees your deck and their jaw drops.
Michael Houck:Really quick before we head into the kinda rapid fire outro that we do here. I would imagine your perspective on this is that a well designed deck is better than a poorly designed deck based on the fact that you guys build pitch. I'm curious, like, make the case for that viewpoint because I've heard some people make the opposite case. So curious, curious what the case for it would be.
Adam Renklint:Well, so I think we live in a world of, like, visuals everywhere, saturated visuals. So it's really important to try to stand out. The majority of text look terrible. So just by virtue of putting enough effort into it that people will go like, oh, well, this looks really professional or well designed. You're already one step ahead of the average person trying to raise money.
Adam Renklint:I do think there is a lesson to be learned about over designing it, which is, you know, why I would recommend a a first time founder or someone who is not a designer themselves to actually use templates and then customize them rather than, you know, trying to do it from scratch. Yeah. And really focus on on the story over the visuals, but use a tool that helps you get the visuals kinda crisp and nice from the beginning. And I think that that we see that also with our customers that are not necessarily in fundraising situations, but that do pitching every day, creative agencies or customer facing teams, that the return of investment of doing that is is really high. We actually had one customer that that came to us recently.
Adam Renklint:It was a creative agency or a design agency, And they have heard about Pitch because they lost a pitch to another agency that was using Pitch. And the beauty of the deck, the design of it was stated as being, like, one of the major decision points. So they really got told by their potential client. Like, the reason you lost to this other person is because they had a a better looking deck.
Michael Houck:It should be pretty yeah.
Adam Renklint:As someone who would create that software, that's pretty amazing to hear.
Michael Houck:That must be amazing to hear. I love that. Yeah. I mean, I use pitch for context for my, pitch deck template that I share out with all the readers of my my newsletter and everything. So I can totally see how that that plays a part.
Michael Houck:Let's do the RapidFire outro. So name an investor that you guys have worked with who other founders should take capital from and and why.
Adam Renklint:So I would say, Kieran O'Leary from Blue Yard Capital. So Blue Yard is is really in the European fund. He was also an investor in Wunderlist for another fund before. And he's just one of the people had a really amazing vision for what the future of computing will be like. So a great, discussion partner.
Adam Renklint:Yeah. Cannot recommend him enough.
Michael Houck:What's one thing that you would change about the startup world?
Adam Renklint:Oh, one thing.
Michael Houck:Just one.
Adam Renklint:Just one. Yeah. Well, I think there is much too much posturing and trying to, look look more successful than you are and way too little vulnerability and, openness.
Michael Houck:I couldn't agree more. Say it all the time. What's your number one piece of advice for a
Adam Renklint:first time founder? Stay calm. It's never as bad as it seems, and it's never as good as it seems. And if you just keep going, it will feel better.
Michael Houck:Don't die. Right? Yeah. It'll be alive. Yeah.
Michael Houck:No. Adam, thanks for joining us, man. This was really great. Where can people find you? Obviously, they can find pitch@pitch.com, but where can they find you online?
Adam Renklint:So I have my Twitter or or my text. I think that's where I hang out online most, so it's just slash Adam Rankland, just my name.
Michael Houck:Cool. Everybody go follow this guy. Check out Pitch. Use it for your decks. And, yeah, we'll see you next time.
Michael Houck:Thanks.
Adam Renklint:Thanks for having me. Bye.
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.
Michael Houck:As a brand new podcast, this is the best way for us to get out there and founders to find us. See you next time.