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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
When my startup raised $10,000,000 from Andreessen Horowitz, we knew we were onto something big, but it didn't start out that way. I convinced 19 friends to come live with me in Tulum at the height of the pandemic. We had fun, and the New York Times even wrote about us. But mostly, we were fighting power outages and trying to get our new startups off the ground. Those friends became my community and kick started the coliving membership we ran around the world.
Michael Houck:It taught me a valuable lesson. Your community is the key to your success. In this episode, you'll hear how I built a beloved brand alongside our community. Seriously, someone even got a tattoo on our logo. You'll also hear more stories and advice from founders like Tyler Denk, Steven Colonis, Sam Korcos, and more on how to leverage your own community and network.
Michael Houck:I'm Michael Hauck, and this is founding journey. Building an audience is a full time job, or at least it can feel like that when you're busy running your startup. But with AI making software easier to build, getting distribution is more important than ever. I can help. After growing my LinkedIn to over 40,000 followers and having a 100,000 across all platforms as well as a 60,000 subscriber newsletter, I know how impactful having an audience can be when you're building a startup these days.
Michael Houck:So I started Megaphone Studios, a content agency specifically designed for founders and their startups. Think of us like your startup's chief content officer. We turn your linkedin, x or newsletter into a machine for lead generation, follower growth and building your influence as a thought leader in your space. Our process is super lightweight for you while still delivering content that only you uniquely could write and our plans are flexible with no long term lock in because we know how fast things can change at startups. Oh and and I brought my buddy Blake Emal along to help me run the business.
Michael Houck:He has even more followers than I do. So email me at hauk@megaphone.network and mention the pot for a 1st month discount. The founder of TikTok said that if you want to start a community, you need to think about it like a country. You give it a name, you establish values, and you create an economy. Then show people that your community offers them opportunity, status, and a better life.
Michael Houck:Use your resources to prop up early converts. Make their success visible. Imagine being a European back in the 1600, who got a letter from your neighbor after they moved to America, and they got all this land for free and they were rich. You'd think to yourself, I could do that too and make the move. TikTok did this by identifying and king making early stars like Charli D'Amelio and Bryce Hall by sending their content to millions and millions of people generating millions of followers and notoriety.
Michael Houck:Gradually, you'll want to start king making less and less and letting organic market dynamics take over. But by then, the impact has happened. People know about your community and they want to join it. Tyler Denk, the founder of Beehive, told me how he encouraged investors and big creators to move on to his platform early on.
Tyler Denk:I think there were 2 main things. 1 is kind of a cheat code that I'd recommend a lot of founders doing, which is finding angel investors who are your target audience. And so when entering a very competitive market, like I wasn't naive, I was fully aware that we had the least polished product, by far the worst product on the market by nature of being a few weeks old. But when we raised our seed round, we actually raised from different strategic angels who had a newsletter on a competing platform. So really aligned the incentives of, 1, you just wrote a 15 to a $100,000 check, so you are backing us, you believe in us, and we kind of need your help now more than ever to build some early momentum.
Tyler Denk:So a very simple ask in the early days was to have a lot of our angel investors move their newsletter over to BeHive. So we had I mean, for example, Liquidity, the the MEW account on, Instagram and whatever. He was using another competitor, had a 100,000 subscribers. At the time, I didn't even know that we could handle a 100,000 emails being sent at once, and he moved over no hesitation and gave us, like, a ton of credibility. So that's one that's I think a lot of founders should lean into when possible.
Tyler Denk:And then the other thing that we did was, like, really lean on our credibility. And so I was the 2nd employee at Morning Brew and built a lot of the product, the engineering, the growth tools that led to the success of Morning Brew. My 2 co founders were also software engineers there as well. And so in the early days when the product wasn't up to snuff with the competition, you're kind of selling the vision of, we already did this. We built this at Morning Brew, and we're building the same tools but better for you.
Tyler Denk:And maybe it's not there today. But if you believe and follow the success of Morning Brew, you're kind of selling the narrative and the vision of what's to come, and that buys you a bit of patience with your users. So it's kind of the combination between those 2.
Michael Houck:Yes. I hear the comments already in my head. It's true that not everyone has existing relationships with investors or big creators to come join their community, but you can still do the things you need to build useful relationships. Like Andrew Young did, His answer was to just go out and network a lot. He went from working a 300 k big tech job at Google that was cushy but unfulfilling to now being a founder where every day is a unique thrill by creating serendipity for himself.
Michael Houck:He started by simply throwing happy hours and dinners for tech workers, founders, and investors in New York. He started small, but he did enough of them where he was able to build up a sense of community among the people who would come back time and time again. And this prepared him to build something of his own.
Andrew Yeung:The obvious thing is, like, advice. So I just had coffee with, one of the cofounders of Lyft for the company, Zimride, that became Lyft. He's in New York visiting. And I just asked them questions for, like, half an hour. I'm like, what would you do if you're me?
Andrew Yeung:Like, you know, what kind of business do you think I should build? What do you think I should be doing differently? All these, you know, basic questions. And he's just seen it all from his peer group. And he's just seen, you know, I think every path forward almost every path forward for me as a business owner and entrepreneur is probably mapped out.
Andrew Yeung:It's been done before. And I just I just can't see what those paths are because, like, I don't have peers that have achieved that level of success. And so, you know, talking to the people that have have seen it happen and understanding playbooks is is really helpful. That's number 1. And and then 2 is, like, I guess, when when you're when you're down, it helps to speak with another founder and know that, you know, they're share they share the same problems and just, you know, go into the sauna together to, you know, be emotionally be there for each other.
Andrew Yeung:But the the first thing is, I think and you probably have so much of this, but the first thing is so important. It's people who have seen who look at you and your type of business and your vision and being, like, not in a discouraging way, but in a way being, like, I've I've seen this happen in, like, these three variations to, like, a $10,000,000 business or a $100,000,000 business. And here's, like, what you have to do. Just focus on these three things. And I think you can do it, and I've seen it happen, like, 80% of the time.
Andrew Yeung:And that's
Andrew Yeung:I think that's really encouraging. When I start to lean into it more
Andrew Yeung:and when I start to tell more people that I was When I start to lean into it more and when I start to tell more people that I was gonna start my own company, that activated all these networks that I didn't know existed. And so people made introductions. And through those introductions, let's say I closed, like, presales. And so when I had left Google on day 1, I had a soft landing spot where I'd add revenue immediately.
Andrew Yeung:Because
Andrew Yeung:I actually couldn't make money while I was at Google because of my Visa, while I was at Facebook, and I couldn't do that thing where, oh, I'll make a 100 k from my side project before I quit, you know, and I have this, you know, soft cushion. I couldn't do that. It was a hard cutoff. So I thought my way of doing it was, like, do getting precommits and getting LOIs and stuff, and that's exactly what it did. Really just solving my own problem.
Andrew Yeung:I was, like, I was lonely. I needed friends. It was COVID. Things were all shut down, and I just needed to make friends. And so I did it in a very authentic way and in a really fulfilling way.
Andrew Yeung:That's why I think the events resonated with people because they're like this host, you know, feels like he has the right intentions. And in a city like New York, it it was just incredible how many interesting people I could meet just by hosting a dinner. At least coming from, like, Toronto or China, I'd never met the type of people I met, you know, in New York before. I didn't think it could turn into anything. I didn't think it would turn into a business.
Andrew Yeung:I didn't see the value of bringing together a group of series a CEOs, at all, but I just wanted to meet them and, like, learn from them. And I also thought just, like, fanboy, that was cool. You know, meeting the cofounder of Duolingo is really cool. So that was it. Just, like, wanted to make friends.
Andrew Yeung:And I I think for the, you know, for the 1st 2 years, that's all I told people. I I got invited to be on the podcast and stuff and tell my story, and I was like, I just wanna make friends. And these are just meetups for friends to make more friends. And then, you know, a year ago, I I that's kind of like a hard pivot where I'm, like, focusing on founders, investors, and, like, tech professionals.
Michael Houck:Originally, I did this too. After getting laid off from Airbnb at the start of the pandemic, I said yes to every even potentially interesting coffee chat, catch up, or anything else that was put in front of me. It's how I met my eventual co founders, roommates, connections to investors, members of our community, and just good friends. Then when I started Launch House, we got some haters because we were living in a big mansion in Tulum altogether, while everyone else was stuck at home back in the US in their apartments due to COVID restrictions. But mostly what we attracted was a long list of people who wanted to join, our first term sheet, offers to do a reality TV show with major networks, and a social media following that we used to kick start the community.
Michael Houck:And we were able to do that because we'd invested in building our networks ahead of time. But the best way to build a community around your product is actually just to have a product that does it for you. Stephen Galanis, the co founder of Cameo, can explain.
Steven Galanis:We have a really unique marketplace insofar as our supply side are famous. They have tens of 1,000 or 100 of 1,000 or millions of followers on x on Instagram, Snap on whatever platform, TikTok, whatever platform they're using. So unlike a driver in Uber that joins, like, our supply can beget their own demand, but that's a really interesting part of our flywheel. So, like, the way that Cameo works was we would go and get somebody new to come on the platform. We'd give them a link, Cameo.com/theirusername.
Steven Galanis:We would then tell them to tweet that link out, which would drive people to their direct booking page. We never told people to promote cameo itself or but we told people, like, let your fans know. Right? The best way to get to your fans is if you share it, like, that's gonna be better than anything we can do. And our business model, makes sense because you make 3 times as much as we do from every video.
Steven Galanis:So if you win, we win. Right. And we're going to create the tools to make it so easy for you to do this, to connect with your fans, to build deeper relationships, to be supported by them. But and because we're going to aggregate a bunch of talent that are going to share disparate networks. And one thing we didn't know when we started, but we found out to be true pretty quickly is that most of these are bought as gifts, right?
Steven Galanis:So 80 plus percent of cameos are bought for other people. So if what may end up happening is that your girlfriend might follow 1 of the real housewives come to the page and then find someone on the Chicago bears that like you would like, and that's kind of how the marketplace works. So it's a rising tide that we've solved boats and the network effects were pretty apparent quickly. I mean, the Lincoln bio thing was huge, right? Like now, when you think of Lincoln bio, you think of Laketree, you think of of others.
Steven Galanis:But we were kind of the first company that that I was aware of that was really pushing like, hey, you have this link in your Instagram bio, put it there or right when we started, Instagram swipe ups were a new feature. Right. So you couldn't post a link in a story before that. So there were just a lot of these tactics that ended up being really important from us from a distribution perspective. And the other thing that we realized right away was that there's this inherent, like, k factor in every cameo video.
Steven Galanis:Right? So I buy for you. Like, I send you the video, then you're going to show it to a bunch of people. There's a watermark on it. Right?
Steven Galanis:So we would always say every cameo becomes a commercial for the next one. And for us, we've always tried to maintain even though we don't directly, like, oversee the quality of the video in the marketplace, we've always said that we want content that's good enough to share. Right? Because if you get a cameo and it's not if if I buy a cameo for you and I don't like it that much and I don't send it to you, like, it's so costly because if I give a great one that you send and then you send it to all the people, you put it on your Twitter, you you send it to all your friends, it goes in a group chat. Suddenly, there's, like, 100 or thousands of people that are seeing every single order that got made.
Steven Galanis:And that's one of the things that really got our flywheel going.
Michael Houck:Let's be real, though. That's a best case scenario. Building a product whose organic flywheels work as well as cameos is hard. Instead, use the big small big framework. First, lay out a big vision for solving a problem in society.
Michael Houck:Make it as ambitious and easy to understand as possible. Then, constrain it. What's the smallest thing you can do to prove your first assumption? Don't try to build a car right away, instead build a skateboard that works even if you think you know what the car is gonna look. Focus on building a machine that can execute against goals effectively and learning from your customers.
Michael Houck:This stage is crucial for understanding who the core community for your product will be. As the business grows and stabilizes, start thinking about the car again. Scale your user base and aim for the big vision. Dara Lajevardian, cofounder of Delphi, can explain.
Dara Ladjevardian:Yeah. I think big, small, big is is great, especially when you're doing something new because you don't know what you don't know. We've learned a lot by seeing how people think about Delphi, how they use the product. I would actually say we're still a little bit wide. Like, our ICP is knowledge based professionals, which could include consultants, include CEOs of knowledge based businesses, coaches, experts, content creators, course creators, influencers.
Dara Ladjevardian:But, we've we've narrowed it down to that. So, yeah, I think big, small, big is is definitely useful. Yeah. It's it's casting a wide net and, you know, seeing what is the right group that can lead you to the full market. Because ordering is obviously very important.
Dara Ladjevardian:I think I read a story about, you know, how Pinterest found some, like, design community at a conference, and they were the right initial group. And with Instagram, it was like these artsy photographers. And so for us, we found, like, these niche expert course creators who have these conferences and they host these being wide in general is I think AI is very good at being horizontal. If you just build a cloning tool for fitness coaches, it's gonna really suck to change your architecture. And you the the architecture you wanna build is a is a tool that can how you think and direct that in a certain direction versus, you know, just scaling fitness expertise.
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 deep dives, share start up 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.
Michael Houck:Go to join.foundingjourney.com to get access. Once you have customers, you need to keep them engaged. Your community will die without active engagement from you. You're the glue. In our case, we lived with our customers for weeks or even months at a time, and that was a huge factor in how quickly we learned and how quickly we were able to go from 0 to a $12,000,000 series a.
Michael Houck:Sam Korcos, founder of Levels, shares what they do to build community and why just talking to users is so important.
Sam Corcos:A community is a challenging term just because everyone everyone I've talked to seems to have a different definition of what that term means. I think for us, we do regular community calls where everyone can ask questions. Often, we'll have an expert involved. We try to just get feedback as much as we can. We've had different initiatives in the past where we try to do more just direct member to member interactions within bubbles.
Sam Corcos:And I don't think we've cracked the code on it yet, but it does feel like there's really something there. I think it's especially important when you have a mission driven company like we do on solving the metabolic health crisis. This is a huge a huge problem that's global in scale. And so having people who understand that who are bought in, I think is is really important to being able to deliver on the goal. You should talk to your customers and find out what they wanna do.
Sam Corcos:I think in certain products, community will be a great growth lever because that's what people wanna do. That's how people wanna engage.
Michael Houck:Community for your users is one thing, but you need community too. Being a founder is hard. It's tiring, and it's lonely. You don't really have an outlet. Venting to employees, customers, investors is usually a bad idea.
Michael Houck:Zaid Ali, founder of Valley, joined a few founder communities, including mine, and told me what made those experiences so invaluable when he was getting his start up off the ground.
Zayd Ali:I think they're incredibly valuable, especially if you're not a, quote, like, in network founder. So for me, like, I'd never never started a venture backed company before. Yes. I'd have this bootstrap services company, which at that time, nobody in the valley really really valued. I think that's now starting to change.
Zayd Ali:But, but, yeah, I I didn't have a fancy degree. I wasn't technical, and so I would have networked founder. I needed a way to jump start to the network of Silicon Valley investors, founders get into that bubble. So the first place that that obviously offered that to be in was Watch House. That was an incredible experience, and I think the biggest benefit there is you there are very few places where you will have more focus and be surrounded by more energetic and purpose driven individuals and intellect.
Zayd Ali:Right? I think just being able to surround yourself with incredibly intelligent people who have that same gene, that same bug of wanting to go and create is something you don't get when you're not in a lost house or an antler or a y combinator. And I think there's tremendous value in being around those types of people. And seeing what you can accomplish in a 4 week program, in a 6 week program. What I find is that a lot of I say founders, but people in general, I don't think they know what that next gear looks like.
Zayd Ali:Like, when you really push yourself to a 100% capacity, what can you get done in 6 weeks? When it's a binary, you're getting funded and you have a a a ticket to building a true start up versus you get rejected. When your back's against the wall, what can you do in 6 weeks? And once you see what's possible in that time frame, it it reframes your mind so you're moving at a more consistent pace because you you understand what your potential looks like. And that's something I think an accelerator does really, really well.
Zayd Ali:I remember instead of the the first aid Antler, it was, be so good they can't ignore you. Right? That was the saying that they said over and over and over again. The essence of that, at least the way I interpreted it, was just compound that time. Right?
Zayd Ali:I wanted to prove that what I was doing week on week on week built on top of each other so I could draw this direct line of, hey. This is what you initially brought me in for, and this is where we are now. Right? It's very easy as a founder when you have a 1,000,000 different things that you need to do to create sort of this scatterplot of progress. It's very difficult to draw a direct sort of a to b line going up into the right.
Zayd Ali:And so for me, I sort of work backwards from where do I wanna be at the end of this 6 week program. And for me, it was I needed to have at least a 100 people on both sides of our marketplace because we are building a a social network for founders and investors. So that's where I needed to be. I need the products in users' hands, and then I needed to somehow get past this chicken and the egg problem and show that I can grow both sides of this marketplace. And so backwards from there, it was a pretty simple line that I needed to draw.
Zayd Ali:Number 1, I need to go build an MVP. So as a nontechnical founders, figured out how to use some no code tools with my then cofounder, Will. For any founders, Flutterflow, amazing. Take a look at it. It's a brilliant product, if you're nontechnical to go build web apps and mobile apps.
Zayd Ali:So, yeah, we built an MVP in a week. We then stress tested it, brought in a couple beta testers in week 2. Week 3, we got all the entire Antler cohort on our product, and we convinced Antler to say, hey. Screw your your start of day reports where we go around the room and talk about what we're doing. All of that is now gonna happen on Phish.
Zayd Ali:So we got them to adopt it internally. Week 3 is when we brought on a bunch of investors. Our pitch there was you invest in lines, not dots. You have a group of incredibly high signal founders here for in batch in residency. Come get some asymmetric information.
Zayd Ali:This is where the alpha is gonna be. Look at the companies that are breaking through the noise on Phish. We got some incredible investors on. Jay Cal joined with some other high high signal angels. And then from there, week 4, we started to make some introductions.
Zayd Ali:This was totally manual. Right? So connecting founders and investors on the platform wasn't happening in our app yet, but do things that don't scale. So we were just trying to make any mutual connections that we could. Week 5 was just pitch preparation, talking with the partners, trying to figure out sort of what scalability of the $1,000,000,000 outcome with Phish looked like.
Zayd Ali:And then at the end, it was it was IC. And so I could draw this very direct line if this is what you brought me to do. This is what I did. I told you that I would achieve this by the end of the of the, of the program, and this is what we have. Now ultimately, we ended up getting the investment and and Jeff, who's the the general partner there, he was like, say, I told you this when he joins.
Zayd Ali:I'm gonna tell you this again. I hate your business. It sucks. However, you did make a promise and you lived up to it, and that's a type of founder that we're looking at back. And and the pace, the speed, and the execution quality are are the things that we really care about.
Zayd Ali:Because if it's not gonna be this idea, it's gonna be something else. Like, those traits permeate around markets, around industries, whatever you end up doing. So we're gonna write you the check. And lo and behold, 6 months later, we ended up pivoting from Phish to to what we're building now, which is Valley.
Michael Houck:Community and your broader network should be looked at as a huge lever for your start up and for yourself. So don't sleep on the value of activating a close knit network around your product. It'll accelerate you more than you think. 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.
Michael Houck: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. 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.