The journey of a founder who navigated both a viral campaign leading to a customer purge and a complete AI startup reset, highlighting.
The journey of a founder who navigated both a viral campaign leading to a customer purge and a complete AI startup reset, highlighting the psychological resilience required in entrepreneurship. It delves into the founder’s varied background, from technical execution and early entrepreneurial ventures to social impact work, showcasing a unique blend of experiences that shaped his approach to startup challenges.
Right after this this viral campaign where we put up these billboards that said still hiring humans, we went into raising our series A. And we had a great partner come in, Scale Ventures. I'll give a shout out to Max and Andy, our partners there. They are phenomenal. And part of why I shout them out is because what comes next in the story. We're at 2 million of revenue and we look like we're a really hot company, but when you look under the hood, you start to realize we didn't have product market fit. What we actually had was attention market fit. We had a lot of people that were paying attention to us, and because of that, we were getting people that were trying our technology. But we weren't really winning deals because we were driving business value. We had a lot of people that were trying to do spam calls, which we really don't support, white labelers, so people who said, "Hey, I
want to take your platform, slap my logo on it, and then resell it." We didn't have these big enterprises we really wanted to sell to. And so we fired 50% of our customers. We went under a million dollars of revenue, and that led us be able to reset and focus and say, "Hey, we're actually going to really get tight in who we want to sell to." And Scale Venture Partners, I'll give them a shout out, did not blink. Most venture funds I think would have been horrified to find that out, but they were actually really on board, and it's one of the things that I tell to any younger founders I talk to or earlier stage is you should never be shy to do what you have to do to win. We have it on big letters in our wall in the office here. For what can be, you must let go of what is. And we fundamentally believe that here, especially in AI. You have to be willing to walk away from what you have to get
to where you need to go. Now, talking about you were talking about the office and, you know, the the culture