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Building the "Ultimate Funding Stack" aka software that helps entrepreneurs source investors, run an efficient fundraise, and update investors. Try it out for free at www.foundersuite.com
Listen in as groundbreaking leaders discuss what they have learned. Discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research, articles and lessons that shaped their journey. Hosted by: Kevin Horek, Gregg Oldring, & Jon Larson.
Gregg Oldring: Welcome to the learner.co show hosted by Kevin horic and his fellow learner co-founders listen in is groundbreaking leaders discuss what they've learned, discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research articles, and lessons that shaped their journey to listen to past episodes and find links to all sources of learning mentioned. Visit learner.co that's learner with two L's dot co.
Kevin Horek: Welcome back to the show today. We have Nathan Bechard, he's the founder and CEO at founder sweet John and Greg, what are you looking forward to learning from Nathan today?
Jon Larson: Oh, I'm always interested in VCs and the way they look at the world, I'm interested in his journey and how he got to where he is today.
Gregg Oldring: Yeah. I actually had the pleasure of like sitting in one of his sessions and, Nathan was, I have, I have maybe unhealthy, maybe healthy skepticism types of people in the type of work that Nathan's in. He really struck me as a totally genuine guy and very thoughtful and yeah, I'm keen to see what his journey has been to get them to that place where he can win over a skeptic like me. So that'd be good.
Kevin Horek: Yeah. Very cool. I think some of the stories and experience and advice that he'll share, I've always found really useful when I've had him or talked to him in the past. I'm really excited to kind of dive deeper and some of his learnings along the way and see what he thinks the space or the venture capital space is right now. All right. Oh, on with the show, Nathan, welcome to the show.
Nathan Beckord: Thanks for having me love it.
Kevin Horek: Yeah. I'm excited to have you on the show. We always have a great conversation and I thought what's, let's try it again. Maybe before we get into founder suites and all the other stuff that you're involved with, do you maybe want to give us a quick background on yourself and start off where you grew up?
Nathan Beckord: Sure. I grew up in a little mountain town called Estes park, Colorado, which was up by Rocky mountain national park. Moved down to Boulder, Colorado, and lived there through high school and enjoyed Boulder, which is now this super hip town and all the tech companies are moving to, and then went out to school at Santa Clara university in Silicon valley. That's where I got my start into entrepreneurship. So.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. Walk us through your university career and how you actually got into being an entrepreneur and helping startups because I think it's a really fascinating story.
Nathan Beckord: Yeah. Well, so one of the funny little things I, I talk about is I always was hustling even as a kid, I never wanted to work like a, a regular job. I always had some hustles going on. I had pretty permissive parents and I could order, they would let me order like Chinese throwing stars and nunchucks and things like that through like Kung Fu magazine, which I would then sell to kids whose parents weren't so permissive. And I remember another hustle. I shouldn't say this or almost verus to say this, but I would sell hotdogs at the Colorado university, CU football games. I had a man on the inside who had packed the hot dogs into the box. I would traipse up and down the steps selling the hot dogs and he would, he was, he's supposed to pack in like 10 hotdogs. Then, would there two or three bucks each I'd bring back 20 bucks, but he would pack it in like 14 hot dogs and then we'd go sell 14 hot dogs and being bringing back the 20 bucks or whatever.
Nathan Beckord: We'd split the Delta there getting into the gray zone. I probably shouldn't say that story really, but always had a hustle going on and, just wanted to kinda be my own boss. I think that obviously led to starting startups, but then after college got distracted going into investment banking, which was pretty cool too. Cause it was helping entrepreneurs raise capital. Right? That's where I got the taste of helping companies go public during the.com boom. I spent a little time in JP Morgan's private placement group, helping companies raise like later stage rounds. That's what the private placement group does and then went off and acted as a consultant for about a decade. Helping companies raise early stage rounds, kind of took the playbook from JP Morgan and applied it to early stage. It can valley startups helping them raise capital. That was the little short story before launching founder street.
Nathan Beckord: Okay.
Kevin Horek: What made you transition into doing your own startup as well?
Nathan Beckord: I really wanted to be an entrepreneur. I, just love the energy of entrepreneurs and startups and the chaos and the creativity and all the good, bad and ugly that goes along with it. When I actually went away, I skipped a part. I went away to university of Texas Austin and got my MBA degree there and I tried to start a startup there. We got some licensed to clinical trial software coming out of MD Anderson cancer center. I tried to start a startup around that, but I had no passion for, or no knowledge or no real interest in clinical trial software. And the thing failed. So, after that came back to Silicon valley and just started like coming up with ideas for startups, none of them were very good. One day just had this idea like, Hey, I know how to raise for a company. Why not build software for raising capital?
Nathan Beckord: If you remember, like, I don't know, the decade ago, mark Andreessen, who's now a very famous venture. Capitalist came out with a statement, software is eating the world, meaning like every industry is going to be touched or taken over by software. Right. And so that was sort of inspirational. Like, yeah, why don't I build software for raising capital? There really isn't much that exists here in this space. That was what led me to ultimately launching founder street.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. What is founder sweet and how has it evolved since the beginning?
Nathan Beckord: It is today a collection of what are we about five or six apps, five or six different products. We have a database of investors. We think about like, how do you, how does it start raise capital where you kind of mapped tools to each step of the process? Right? Step one is you build a target list of investors. We've got a database of 208,000 investors to help you build that target list. Step two, you load them, you do the research, you load them all into a CRM to help manage all the activities and discussions that go on. When you're raising capital step three, we've got pitch deck, hosting, investor updates, and email outreach tools to really do the communications with investors as you're out there pitching and hustling and sending out, a regular monthly update and sending out your pitch deck, we've got tools for that.
Nathan Beckord: As you make progress with your fundraise and get into like due diligence, that's when you're getting into our data room product. We've got a data room where you can upload documents, create folders and put your confidential information like intellectual property or your product roadmap or your financials. You can share that with investors and you can mark, who can view them, who can download all that good stuff. Last but not least, we've got a collection of downloadable templates. These are pitch decks, term sheets, cap tables. These are things that you'll need as you get this round going. One last piece, once you've raised money, we've got a collection called founders market, which is just discounts on other products that you'll typically use. Once you raise money, things like payroll and recruiting and stuff like that. So that's what it is today. When we first launched to your other question, when we first launched, it was a completely different set of tools.
Nathan Beckord: It was actually a bunch of tools, literally taking the name, founder suite, literally, and building a bunch of tools for founders that we thought they needed, like an idea validation tool. We had a marketing PR kind of CRM for that. We had a competitive tracker, we had an investor CRM and we had a few other things. That was the kind of vision of like a whole set of tools for founders generally speaking. It's actually funny, I'm wearing a t-shirt right now, today that I dug up from the bottom of the closet and the tagline is tools to get startup s**t done, but it's a great tagline, right? I mean, it's a clever title and people love it, but it doesn't really mean anything. Right. What does that mean? We, the original incarnation set of tools like was a bunch of different stuff. None of them were really that good and it just didn't really mean anything to people.
Nathan Beckord: We really doubled down on the fundraising piece, the capital raise piece, and now our tagline is much more boring it's software to raise capital, but it's much more descriptive,
Kevin Horek: Sure. You always have really good learnings and you obviously pivoted the product. How have you learned some of this stuff? Are you like an avid book reader listening to podcasts, trial and error, all those things, or how do you traditionally learn.
Nathan Beckord: Probably more trial and error than I should, because I think there's great value and wisdom and learning from the mistakes of others rather than doing it yourself. Like many founders, I'm also just stubborn. I think I know the right answer probably way more than I do and I just want to do it. Right. Definitely good healthy element of trial and error. I think podcasts are also really good, ? Cause you can just hear it direct from the horse's mouth of how people did X, Y, Z fill in the blank. There's whatever you're trying to achieve. Sales fundraising, recruiting, there's a podcast or hundreds of podcasts for that. Right. I think pug guesses are great ways to learn. Then, just last but not least it's kind of old school, but I like to read the wall street journal. Yeah. There's a lot of good content and it covers a variety of stuff.
Nathan Beckord: Obviously it's not just startup focused, but it just gives you a good business sense of how people even reading. Here's a, here's a one little thing I love to do that is pretty obscure. I love reading the obituaries in the wall street journal. They're covering these guys and gals who recently died of course, but they're almost all, founders of the world's largest poultry farm or whatever it is. Just hearing like the stories of how people kind of got going and the challenges they overcome I think is really exciting. So yeah, those are a few places.
Kevin Horek: No, that's actually really fascinating. I find like I was always skeptical of the apple news plus, but I signed up for like all that apple services and just throw it just comes bundled in there and I've actually been reading more and more of like the wall street journal and some of these kind of traditional news sources just because of like, you're right. Like they have these really good, it's like really good. I find, I don't know. Maybe.
Nathan Beckord: I I'm praying that they, that their business model is working for them because I feel like it is one of the last and there's a couple places out there I'd kind of put New York times, LA times, Washington post. I mean, there's a handful of them in that same general category where they have real staff writers who go deep on topics and they spend weeks, months investigating topics and going deep. Right. Which you just don't get on blogs or medium posts. You might have great medium posts, but they don't have the luxury of going deep, like true authentic reporters do. I hope the kind of traditional media model survives because it's got that deep reporting, which is so valuable. No.
Kevin Horek: 100%. So this is kind of related question. What have you learned in your kind of personal life or outside of business that you've been able to apply back into your business life?
Nathan Beckord: Oh, it's great question. I think just kind of taking, I mean, I think back to like when I was in my twenties and trying to hatch businesses, I tried to do another startup that was doing like web design in the late nineties when the internet was just blowing up and it didn't take off. And, I think where I'm going with this is having kind of a longer term perspective two years to your business and to your kind of life and knowing that, the overall, if you kind of take a 50,000 foot view or take a step back and look at your trajectory, hopefully the graph is going in the, up to the right direction. If you zoom in on it, right, there's going to be all these ups and downs in that line and even pretty dramatic, right. When you zoom in. And, and, but I think my younger self took every little setback or every little hiccup and bumps in the road or, whatever, just super personal and the stress level of course was more than need to be.
Nathan Beckord: I think you kind of taking that like zoom outlook from time to time and we're like, all right, are we going in the overall right direction? The business, it might have a bad week, bad month, but overall, is it like going in the right direction? Are we growing customers generally getting happier over time, even though in the moment someone's angry at me because they can't, send out their investor update or something like that. Yeah, I'd say kind of that bigger perspective, which is hard sometimes to get,
Kevin Horek: I think that's actually really good advice. I want to dive deeper into advice for founders at any stage raising money, because, well, obviously you built the tool around this, you consulted a bunch on this. I would consider you a subject matter expert in this space.
Nathan Beckord: Okay. Thanks. Well, I hope so by now, if I'm not, then I'm screwed. What's the question just with some good advice for, yeah. I think, things I always knew or learned, kind of from the investment banking days and then more recent learnings, I'll talk about to sure. I always knew that I maybe learned investment banking are the importance of really putting in the time to build and qualify a good list of investors. I think a lot of founders kind of skip this step or they shortchange this step. I think we always talk about fundraising as a sales process. You're basically building a pipeline of investor targets and you're engaging with them. You're ultimately trying to drive all these investor targets towards a, a close towards a yes or no. That's very similar to how, B2B sale people conduct their business. Something that really good salespeople do is they spend a lot of time researching their targets, prioritizing them, qualifying them, making sure their targets are good fits for them and really focusing their time and energy on, the targets or prospects that are the best fit.
Nathan Beckord: I think that's something that founders can do a better job off. A lot of founders have never raised capital before, and they just want to download a list and start blasting emails out to that list. I tell them that's not the right way to do it. Better to spend the time to create a shorter list maybe instead of 500 it's 300 or 200, or even a hundred of really highly qualified investor targets there. Actually, if you do that homework and put it in that time and identify the right people that invest in your sector, your stage, your geographic preference, all that good stuff, they're actually going to be eager to hear from you. Whereas if you're doing poorly qualified outreach to investors, you're just going to get flagged as spam or people are going to get upset with you. Right? So that's something I've always known.
Nathan Beckord: I'd say the other thing I've kind of learned the importance of more and more over time is of building relationships. Even though this is a sales process and it's somewhat transactional, you're also, you're not just selling a product. You're actually forming a relationship with investors. That's probably going to last five to eight years or sometimes longer. The sooner you can initiate this relationship building process, even like to fellow founders, six to 12 months before you plan to raise money, the better when you can reach out to investors, get them familiar with what you're doing and start updating them this where I'm always pushing our investor update product to our customers, like send out a company update once a month or whenever there's news to investors that you're nurturing these relationships with. By the time you're actually ready to raise capital six months later, or 12 months later, they've followed along with your journey.
Nathan Beckord: They've seen you make progress. They've seen you overcome roadblocks. They've seen you get some press. They've seen you have an ability to grow the team, to recruit people, whatever it is they've seen progress be made. There are going to be a lot more comfortable writing a check and that takes some foresight, right? Because you kind of have to start that relationship building process way in advance. Whereas a lot of founders, like I need money yesterday, let me start spamming investors.
Kevin Horek: Sure. How do you, or what advice do you give to people to actually start those opening conversations with investors when you're not looking for money and you just want to start sending them updates?
Nathan Beckord: Yeah. It's, and this is another thing that I think is so beautiful about this approach is it's much more of a soft sell or a soft ask. And let me give an example. If I've identified you as an investor in my space, and I just come barreling at you saying, here's my pitch, here's our business plan. And here's our data room. Do you want to invest? You're kind of getting rushed to the altar, right? If I, instead, I come at you and I say, Hey, I'm, I've been following you on Twitter for a while. I know you've done some pretty interesting deals in our space. Here's what we're doing. I'm solving the pain of, raising capital through software, et cetera. I'm not raising money right now, but I would love to add you to our company update distribution list. We write a one-page company update super short.
Nathan Beckord: We send it out once a month. I would love to add you to our list. You get an early peek at what, we're, what we're building here. And, you get early access or a sneak peek, right. That's really playing to investors like FOMO, right? Investors make money by identifying companies before other investors do and getting into those companies. So you're tapping it. It's a very low bar for the ask. I'm simply asking your permission to send you a one-page update once a month. That's all I'm asking from you and investors are often inclined to say yes to that. Whereas again, I'm rushing you with my pitch deck and a 40 page business plan, and trying to get you to make a decision in a week or two weeks is just a poor way to do it in many cases.
Kevin Horek: No, I think that's really good advice. I'm curious, what other things do you see maybe founders do all the time that they probably shouldn't do, or you haven't seen, worked as well as maybe it should, that you tell people to not do so much.
Nathan Beckord: Yeah. We've covered a couple of the big ones, going out with a spray and pray approach, not doing your research, not curating and qualifying your list. I'd say also this is sounds obvious, but it's probably one of the top five reasons I see startups fail is their pitch is just really confusing and bad and cluttered, and they, it's hard to build your own pitch deck. I find, right? Cause you've been thinking about this problem for maybe five years, 10 years, who knows, right? You have maybe domain experience from working in the space. I find that people make these dense, complicated pitch decks that investors, on the other hand, the audience you're creating this deck for, they all have add, they have very short attention spans and they want to be able to flip through something on their iPhone in like 40 seconds or less. There's a mismatch between the material you're putting out for your pitch and the audience expectations.
Nathan Beckord: Having just, so turn that around. How do you make that better? Just having a really crystal clear, super simple, almost minimalist pitch deck that just covers the story arc in a really simple, clear way. You can get you unpeel the layers of the onion later with that investor and all the nitty gritty about your business, but just having something super simple, I'd say one of the key thing that a lot of founders maybe screw up on is they just never get momentum going for their deal. I always talk about how there's such a correlation between your speed at fundraising and your tempo and your momentum and the likelihood you are to get funded and founders, it, they're busy, right? They're building product, they're hustling with customers and sales and all the other stuff that founders do fundraising is often a big distraction and time sink.
Nathan Beckord: They don't really put in the time necessary to get momentum going. Then, two months turns into four months, turns into six months, eight months, and the deal starts to just kind of get stale. I see this with quite a few and investors can sense that immediately they can smell when a deal does not have momentum or worse when it's kind of gotten stale. Right? So that's key. If you're going to fundraise, you've got to carve off, carve things off your plate, clear your plate. You can kind of go all in on fundraising for, a couple months and that's sometimes hard for founders to do.
Kevin Horek: When you say momentum, what does that mean to you? Why do you tell founders that should mean to them?
Nathan Beckord: Yeah. Yeah. That's actually a great question. That can mean different things depending on the stage of your fundraise. In the early days you could probably put a, I could, this would be a great graph, kind of a timeline of what does momentum mean at different stages in the early stages. It means how many meetings are you having? So I do this funding, hex talk. One of the things I say is like, you should, investors are always going to ask you, how's the round coming together. And that's their way of probing. Does this thing have momentum or not? To the extent you can answer that question with something like it's coming together, pretty good. We just started fundraising last week, I've got 10 meetings set up this week. I've got 12 pitch meetings set up next week. We're trying to run a pretty tight process here.
Nathan Beckord: I've got our data room set up already hoping to collect first indications of interest or term sheets by, a month from now. To close this out three weeks after that, something like that. That's signaling that you're really running this pretty professionally, that you've got interest because investors are taking meetings with you, right? You're packing. There was a great podcast guests we had on our podcast not long ago, who talked about calendar density, how many meetings do you have packed on each week? Right? You want to build calendar density. Now that's in the early days as you progress, you can replace how many meetings you have scheduled with something like it's going pretty well. We're about halfway through, I'm expecting four term sheets this week. I think I've got two more coming in next week. Or you can say something like, it's going pretty well. We're in diligence with six VC firms.
Nathan Beckord: I've got soft commitments from, another three who are looking for a lead investor, whatever it is, you can kind of map it out on your stage, right? Whether in diligence, where you're getting term sheets or so and so and so forth. And that's what momentum is, right. Interest from other parties.
Kevin Horek: You mentioned something that I want to dive deeper on. Cause I think what you said is really good advice, but you said something about you give them a deadline, which I think most founders won't do because they're scared to basically say, oh, in a month or whatever. Right.
Nathan Beckord: I should clarify that because I actually don't think you give a deadline, like, okay. I think giving what you're aiming for, like, we are aiming to get our first term sheets by the end of the month, because I think that the risk of an actual deadline is that deadline comes and goes and you don't have a term sheet by that point. Other investors, like, I thought you were gonna have a term sheet, but now what do those other investors know that I don't know? They can get cold feet from that. Right. I wouldn't actually have a hard dates and deadlines, but kind of signaling that you're having that you have a game plan, right? You're trying to get all your first round pitch meetings done in the weeks, one through three. Then, second round weeks, three, four, and five. Then, first set of term sheets in by week six or seven, something like that.
Nathan Beckord: I've seen one of the way to kind of create deadlines . Let me give you an example. Okay. I'm forgetting the name of the company. It was a life science, kind of a biotech life science founder we had on our podcast and she had a panel. This is pretty scientific stuff they're doing. She had a, a panel of like scientific advisors. These are, high profile PhDs that were advising the company. She told all the investors like we're going to run two sessions with our scientific advisors. If you have any questions about the technology, the science behind this, we're going to do two sessions. One session is on, whatever, March 11th and the next one's March 18th. And, we want all interested investors to attend one of these sessions. They were kind of forcing the hint like here's. It was, if investors were interested, they had to sign up for one of those two sessions.
Nathan Beckord: Basically, I thought it was kind of interesting way of like creating some decision process in the cycle without actually forcing investors to commit to a term sheet. Right. They had to kind of commit to one of these sessions or be out of the process. I thought it was kind of clever.
Kevin Horek: Did it work though?
Nathan Beckord: Well, yeah, it did. It, it did. It worked and she, maybe there's some survivorship bias there, cause it worked for her. Maybe this wouldn't work for others, but I thought it was kinda interesting. Right. She was valuing these advisors time. Cause these are high people and just kind of forcing investors to S or get off the pot, one of these two dates. And I thought it was good. So.
Kevin Horek: That's interesting advice because I think, especially in that case where you actually need somebody that really knows the science to sit down, they, and they're probably really busy. Like I get investors are busy too, but it's kind of playing they're both sides are busy, so you need to make one of these work or you're probably not going to be able to invest in this anyway. Right.
Nathan Beckord: Yeah, exactly.
Kevin Horek: Fascinating. Okay. So,
Nathan Beckord: Also just discovering who is serious about the company who's seriously interested in, who is just kicking tires? A lot of investors will kick tires and kind of, I don't want to say string you along, but they'll kind of, they won't say no, but they're not really saying yes either. If you can't make one of these sessions, I've given you plenty of notice, advanced notice on it, you're probably not serious. So I thought that was kinda interesting.
Kevin Horek: Interesting is there for that you've seen work where investors are kind of on the fence still to maybe get them to pick a side.
Nathan Beckord: This is a good question too, cause it's like, it's those, you know when you have momentum things start to just move fast and investors start to react faster, but there's a lot of startups get kind of caught in the no man's land or where they don't really have momentum yet. They don't have the leverage, the negotiating leverage to kind of force a timeline. I think the only real remedy there is to keep filling your pipeline, keep doing the research, keep getting, intros and outreach to additional investors to keep your pipeline full, basically. Right. Keep filling the pipeline and hopefully finding some investors that are believers. One of the great things I heard from another founder on our podcast one time is that he described it as fundraising is like the search for believers. In other words, you're not trying to convince investors of your worthiness, but you're just trying to find people who kind of already believe or who are seeking, your thesis.
Nathan Beckord: I thought it was really interesting. Right. Sure it kind of, it's almost analogous to you just have to kiss enough to find a, to find the prince. That sounds weird, but what I'm saying? Yeah. I know what you mean. And I think that's it. If you're, if you don't have momentum yet you just gotta keep filling your pipeline, researching investors, getting the interest to them and just keep setting up meetings and driving more down your pipe.
Kevin Horek: How, what do you, what advice do you give for people getting to getting those actual intros though?
Nathan Beckord: Yes. Good question. This is another place where I think a lot of founders get stuck. If you've in a perfect world, you've paid it forward, you paid your dues, you've networked your way in your industry. You have a lot of good relationships that you can then lean on for intros, right? Sometimes this is just tapping your own personal network, or sometimes it's mapping out how you're connected to investors through LinkedIn, trying to find that one to sometimes even third degree connections to the target investor that you can lean on for an intro. The other little hack that I talk about, if you don't have a strong network to start with, or sometimes we get people who've moved here from Australia or Lithuania or whatever, and they just don't have a network, already the hack is to find the target investor, look at what they've invested in the last six months to a year, reach out cold to those.
Nathan Beckord: Some of those founders that the investor has invested in and get a dialogue going with them. It can be a very kind of simple, Hey, I'm I see so-and-so investor invested in new. I'd love to just hop on a quick zoom. I've been following her for a long time and I'm really interested in what she's doing and how she's been involved in your startup. Can we just have a quick zoom to, pick your brain a little about this and you get a dialogue going with those founders that the investor invested in. It's okay to ask that founder for the intro. That's a pretty good like back channel way of getting those interests. Founders are pretty good about helping other founders and that investor, s and trust that founder. It's a really good way of getting an intro if you don't have a network already.
Kevin Horek: Oh, that's really good advice. You host a podcast and you mentioned a few times throughout the show so far. What is it called and what types of people do you have on it?
Nathan Beckord: Yeah, thanks for the plug opportunity. It's called how I raised it. It's simply interviews with founders who raised capital and we've actually expanded it . Now we've also got some VCs on there and how they raise like their funds. We've got a family officer's fund to funds on there but really it's just goes deep into how XYZ founder raise capital for the startup. We talk about what the business does and then get into the actual tactics and believe it or not, I kind of thought I knew everything about fundraising. There are so many ways people fundraise that it just boggles my mind. I mean, they, all, many of them have a common thread. Like some of the things we've already talked about, building those relationships in advance, doing the research, all that good stuff, but there's also a lot of just variants and how people have raise capital.
Nathan Beckord: It's pretty interesting.
Kevin Horek: Can you give us a couple of quick examples?
Nathan Beckord: Yeah. Like, so there, I love that biotech story of the woman who had the really good process and used her advisory team to create some deadlines. I thought that was kind of cool. We had another guy on not too long ago, who worked, I'm trying to remember the exact tactics here, but he basically worked the angel group network or this angel group circuits. I mean, there are a couple hundred angel groups, probably even in the thousands around the world, even here in Silicon valley, there's like sand hill angels. There's band of angels. There's like life science angels, right? There's all these different angel groups, Keiretsu forum has chapters all over the place. There's all these angel groups all over the place. A lot of the format of these angel groups is they'll have startups apply. They usually like the startups to get referred in and then the startups go through a screening process and they pitch to all the members and then members can decide to invest or not.
Nathan Beckord: This guy would go on, I think it was gust and find like the, a couple people on the senior team at each angel group. He would go like, I'm trying to remember exact details. He would LinkedIn friend one or two of them and say, Hey, I'm interested in pitching the group. They, and they would usually say, oh, here's the URL to apply. He would go back to that and say, XYZ referred him. It was slightly , in that gray zone of whatever, but it worked in it often, was enough to get them nudged above like the cold applicants, because he was name dropping that someone, from the angel group who he connected with on LinkedIn was referring them. So I thought that was pretty interesting.
Kevin Horek: It is interesting that you say that because I've had a similar experience before where I'm connected with somebody on LinkedIn, but I've never actually even talked to them or exchange messages with them. Someone will say, Hey, so-and-so from this company, can we chat? And it's like, sure. Sometimes it's being like to their benefits. Sometimes it's been to my benefit. And it's interesting. Just how like, yes, we're connected in that kind of weird gray area. It's kind of, it's worked for me before. So I think that's actually really smart.
Nathan Beckord: That's good. I know LinkedIn's funny. It's I used to be super careful in like cultivating my connections and I would only accept invites from people I kind of really truly knew or had actual meetings with. Now it's just kind of becoming, like you are like many people. I think I probably don't really know at least half of my LinkedIn network anymore. You know,
Kevin Horek: I would say, I probably know, like a quarter, maybe a 10th. I was the person that was adding people early on. I was like, oh, this might be useful down the road. And it's been useful, I would say. So I'm curious. You always have some funny and maybe not so funny stories about kind of the failures, the highs and lows of actually running a startup. I think you're a great person to give some perspective on that space. You kind of mentioned it earlier with the chart and, stressing out about kind of some really low points.
Nathan Beckord: Yeah. Well, I mean, Jesus, it's funny that we're having this conversation right now because I mentioned this before I'd call, here's a low point. Like I have almost all the entire engineering team in Ukraine and as we're recording this Ukraine being bombed by Russia, I would have never guessed in a million years that one of the many risks of my startup is going to be Putin invading Ukraine, right. Like a hundred percent who can forecast that of all the things that can go wrong with your startup. Even the fact that I have all these Ukrainian engineers wasn't by design and I just kind of fell into it. There's, we, we I'll tell you a little story behind that. Like we actually maybe was in our second year, we raised some money and then we spent that money rebuilding the platform and had a mix of like United States and some Polish and some Australian engineering team.
Nathan Beckord: We basically kind of ran out of money for a little while. For even a couple months, this is like four years ago or something, five years ago, we had basically no engineering team and yet we still had of subscription revenue flowing and it was very slowly growing. Yeah, I remember like kind of flying, it's almost like flying without a parachute or something or jumping without a parachute where we had no engineering team for a few months. Finally like, okay, I think we have enough saved up where I can actually hire like a part-time engineer, but I'm really strict or, restricted on what I can afford. That's what led me to hiring like my first Ukrainian engineer. They turned out to be so darn good. Hardworking that I just kept adding more to the Ukrainian team, never intentionally set out to build a Ukrainian development team, but they're just awesome.
Nathan Beckord: And, and here we are, in 2022 where Russia is trying to take over Ukraine. So what do you do though? What do you do? Right. It's like, I don't know.
Kevin Horek: No, I, yeah. I, I don't know. I don't, yeah. We'll have to see how that plays out right in the next few weeks or months or hopefully days it's out, but I don't think so,
Nathan Beckord: Yeah. I mean, I guess the only lesson, maybe if you can take a lesson away from, this is like, if you can afford it, spread your critical systems, like engineering around , have some us, some Irish, some Ukraine, some India and whatever it may be. Right. Just so you're not dependent on anyone territory, I guess.
Kevin Horek: No, that's fair. Well, and I also think it gives different perspectives. The more people you have from different parts of the world. Right.
Nathan Beckord: That's true. Yeah.
Kevin Horek: How, I guess, like, how is your team doing in Ukraine? Like have you talked to them or are you just kind of,
Nathan Beckord: We we've messenger constantly. Yeah. And it's crazy. They're sending me pictures. I mean, they're all doing pretty well, knock on wood, but they're like huddled down in the basement with like jars of pickled food preparing for a long time, hold out if needed. I'm sure they're making the best of it. They've got strong spirits, but I'm sure it's also very stressful. They can hear, they can hear air sirens and things like that. Right. Just imagine trying to get your work done. Or one of my top engineers has a, I think she's like three or four year old. Imagine soothing your four year old as the air sirens are going off. Like it's tough, but they're all doing pretty good as we speak, knock on what?
Kevin Horek: Yeah. I don't know how I would handle that. So, yeah. But I'm curious. What other advice do you give to people though, to pull through some of these challenging situations? Because a lot of people, this is when they quit their startup, even if they have a bunch of momentum and things to be consumed, to be going well or have had a startup for a number of years.
Nathan Beckord: Yeah. I mean, I think it, the answer almost goes back to before you even launch a stop. Okay. Something that you just absolutely love. Like I, like I told you, I tried to start a clinical trial software startup. I had no real interest in that. I was bored by it. I didn't want to go to clinical trial software conferences and present are, what I mean? It wasn't into it in any way, shape or form, whereas I'm really into helping startups raise capital. I mean, it's really fun for me. I like, I've probably read a thousand blog posts about raising capital and all the white Combinator, Paul Graham posts and everything. Right. And I still find it interesting. I mean, my medium, my inbox from medium, there's a daily like synopsis of a bunch of articles. It's mostly venture capital or startup related stuff. I still find interest in this, five years later.
Nathan Beckord: Basically you gotta to pick something you're really pretty passionate about because it is going to be hard. You need that passion to carry you through the dark days, through the hard times, and even just needed that passion. You don't get bored a year or two into it because most jobs do take several years to really get going. You know?
Kevin Horek: No, I, I think that's really good advice. There anything else that you see founders maybe do all the time that you see doesn't work that they should stop doing?
Nathan Beckord: Oh man, that's a good question.
Kevin Horek: We'll do more.
Nathan Beckord: Do more of us. Let's take that one. I think when in doubt, when you're in doubt of what you should either be focusing on or spending your time on, go back to talking to customers, right. That is always a good fallback plan when you're in doubt of what you should be working on next or building, or even just, getting to know customers just as so valuable and kind of the mistake I made in those early days, I told you about like our original product suite, that founder street was, it was a mess. It was a bunch of stuff. I had no real interest in. I don't know anything about PR and marketing. Why am I building a CRM trying to solve that? I didn't talk to customers enough on what they wanted or what they really cared about. It wasn't until we kind of zeroed in on the fundraising piece and then really engaged with our customers on that we really got into it.
Nathan Beckord: Now it's great because you start to build, relationships again, all goes back to relationships. You start to build relationships with customers who are giving you good feedback. They're taking meaningful time out of their day to write you notes or whatever it is. I was just down in Palm Springs last week and I got to meet one of our customers and went out for drinks and it was a guy I've never met before. We've mostly interacted on our customer support chat line, but he's always given me great feedback or another example. We're going to south by Southwest, like in a week or so. Another customer who I've never met before is going to pick me up at the airport. We're going to go out to Derrick, just getting to know people. Yeah. It's so cool. Right. I mean, these are just people I've kind of gotten to know through our app.
Nathan Beckord: Right. They're getting to know them face to face and getting that good feedback. Like those relationships just pay it, pay off in spades. So, you know. Yeah.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. Are you the one initiating these meetups? Are your customers a bit of both? Or how does that come to be?
Nathan Beckord: Oh gosh, it's a bit of both, to be honest, like we do one of the little, it's almost like in and out burger where you have all these, like off the menu, things you can order. One of our little off the menu, things is for our gold customers who are, paid subscribers, we'll do like a free 30 minute pitch deck review where we just kind of have them pitch their deck and we'll give feedback, but we're on zoom for half an hour kind of talking about their business. That's a great way to kind of get to know someone more. Yeah. It kinda just comes in various ways, ?
Kevin Horek: No, I, I think that's actually fascinating. That's actually really good advice that you do that, right. That you do, you actually sit on some customer support emails or chat like that sometimes.
Nathan Beckord: Okay. That's another thing I sit on a ton of customer support chat, and I probably given where we're at now probably should not do as much, but I still think there's a lot value in it because I'm hearing direct from the horse's mouth. A lot of it's could be just like outsourced probably to a, a lower person or even, a third party, some of the customer support. A lot of it is just really you're hearing where people are stuck or struggling or we're where they're confused. I think that's really valuable to have that direct line of communication. So, eventually you have to put in those layers between you and the customer. I think just as companies scale that becomes necessary. I think the longer you can hold out and still talk to customers, do some customer support. You hear some startups that even some of the senior engineers have to spend, whatever two hours a month answering direct customer support inquiries, just so they're still in touch with the ultimate end user.
Nathan Beckord: I think that's really valuable.
Kevin Horek: No, I think that's really good advice. People also love if they're talking to the founder and CEO, right?
Nathan Beckord: Yeah. That's funny. Here's a funny thing about that. Sometimes you'll have someone coming on and they're kind of in like abrasive hostile mode and they're just like bullies , I don't know this is crap. I want, I want my money back. They're just bullies. Somehow they connect the dots that maybe they're talking to me found her, which doesn't really mean much. I'm just another guy, but like, then their tone totally changes. They become like nice and like, oh, it's total. That which makes you feel bad for full-time customer support people. Yeah.
Kevin Horek: 100%. No, I always tried to be super nice to them because I know it's not their fault, but yes, I I've had that experience too, but yeah, no, very cool. Nathan, we're kind of coming to the end of the show. How about we close with mentioning where people can get more information about founder, suite, the podcast, and any other links you want to mention?
Nathan Beckord: Sure. Yeah, I appreciate that. Founder's suite is simply www dot F O U N D E R S U I T E founder suite. All one word, there is a free version of the software that you can play around with it. Doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but people have actually raised capital just using the free version. So check that out. And then I'm Nathan Bechard on LinkedIn. I'd love to connect with you, but maybe just mention you heard about it on Kevin show or just so I know where you're coming from. The last thing I would plug where, Twitter for it slash founder, suite Facebook for slash founder suite. We have this podcast I've mentioned called how I raised it and you can find that on Spotify, on iTunes SoundCloud also on YouTube, we have a pretty strong and growing YouTube channel, just search for founder suite.
Nathan Beckord: You'll see all our videos there, lots of good stuff, not only interviews with founders on how they raise capital and some VCs, but also some of our kind of special episodes, things like pitch, deck hacks or funding hacks and just stuff like that go into some real tactical stuff. So.
Kevin Horek: The founder's suite blog also has a lot of really good content too, that I've been, looking at and referencing and I think is also worth mentioning.
Nathan Beckord: Yeah. Thank you. Blog dot founder. Sweet.com. Check that out.
Kevin Horek: Perfect Nathan. Well, I really appreciate you again, taking the time to chat with me and have a good rest of your day.
Nathan Beckord: Thanks, Kevin. Always, always fun. Appreciate it over now. Thank you.
Kevin Horek: Thank you. Okay, bye.
Gregg Oldring: Thank you for tuning in to the learner.co show. If you're looking to be a guest, try out our app or want to get in touch, please visit learner with two L's at www.llearner.co. The music for the show is by electric mantra. Thanks for listening and keep on learning.