I am a co-founder and CEO at a chat-based hiring network called Pearl (usepearl.com) Focused on the startup world. You tell us what you're looking for, and we'll introduce you to hiring managers / founders at startups that match your interests. It's kinda like lunchclub but for recruiting purposes. Before this I was running a small ecommerce shop. Before that I was a student at UCLA. That's where I first met my now co-founder. We're both technical. Been building for about a year now. The tech behind this is custom conversation management software, with some NLP stuff sprinkled in. We've bootstrapped the whole way till now. Now that the tech is more stable, we've gone out and raised money to accelerate. Ask me about: * Co-founding a company, finding a co-founder * Our tech stack choices, NLP * Raising money for your startup * Qs about the startup hiring landscape #startup #ama
how’d you get your first customers?
honestly? twitter.
Curious about this actually - did you respond to tweets saying “we made a thing, see if you find it useful,” and gather momentum from there? Or were you cold DMing people? Or both?
Where to find a tech co founder if I’m of a strong marketing and business background?
Well for me it was college. An environment concentrated with a lot of smart ambitious people. Beyond that I've seen a lot of co-founders meet while working together at a tech company. There's also more external services like this: https://www.startupschool.org/cofounder-matching
PM me
Congrats OP!
Thank you sir! Hopefully I'll be coming back here to announce IPO or something 😅
Haha will wait! Actually mind if I dm?
assuming you have cofounders that all meet the resume bar (ex faang / stripe, deeply technical, etc). is it easy to raise without having made money? just send a couple cold emails and you'll get a meeting? i have no idea how the discovery process works
The answer to this depends on your network. Mine was unfortunately pretty weak :/ so it was honestly hard af. Felt like giving up many times. We raised pre-revenue, but we had a few thousand users and a few dozen company clients, so there was some traction to speak of - without that there would have been zero chance for us. I had to do over 100 calls to pull this off. The first 20 were garbage because the pitch was really weak when I started. What ended up helping us a lot was opening up a syndicate on angellist and taking in smaller checks (1k - 5k) from accredited investors who just didn't have a ton of capital to deploy, but were really enthusiastic. Once they bought in, we took intros into their network and that's where the big money came from.
Great idea with angellist. Rich people have rich friends
😂
Damnnn….so salty! Keep grinding OP. Congrats
Funding origin? 500k is a strong seed round but fairly small to either market or hite people, what are you using the money for?
I'd consider it our pre-seed. It came from a bunch of individual angel investors. People we had met / been introduced to over the course of our journey so far. People who had thought we were building something cool, but were waiting for the right moment. None of it is institutional capital yet. We're going to make one full-time engineering hire, and a part time ops hire. And we're gonna pay ourselves. Plus some money for growth / marketing experiments. That's pretty much it.
Ever thought of hiring offshore?
Good luck OP. have 2 questions. - What’s conversation management software? - I’m non-engineer. What can I bring to table to convince someone technical to co found with? Thanks
Thanks for the questions. 1. Software that helps us manage thousands of concurrent conversations with a small team of humans. We triage inbound messages: those that are parsable with NLP are handled by our tech, those that are too complicated are sent to an inbox in our interface for our team to handle. More info here: https://pearljobs.notion.site/Pearl-How-it-Works-adab47e48619436dbe85a88d21bd2b4d 2. My co-founder is a much better engineer than I am. In order to get people like him on board I think it's important to show some level of technical competency yourself. You don't have to be an expert programmer, but teaching yourself the basics such that you can start building stuff on your own is really important imo. That's what I did. My first version was super crappy, but it helped demonstrate that I was capable enough to figure things out. So when my co-founder joined it was more of an acceleration than a start from zero. Beyond that, you'll of course want to bring the non-tech skills needed for a startup to succeed. I think this generally comprises of (1) Product skills (deciding what to build, which audience to target, and how to iterate on it) and (2) communication skills - pitching and being the PR person.
Thanks! This gives me reassurance I’m on the right path by teaching myself the basics of programming in my field. Interesting stuff about the NLP also.
Tech stack choices for nlp
We use a custom trained BERT model for the complicated stuff (like question detection). And for very simple stuff, we save our sanity and just go plain off the shelf. For instance we use Wit.ai (by facebook) for a yes/no parser. I'd say we'll be ready for more intense custom stuff after another few months. For now we just need to nail the basics.
$500k is too small. If you were a senior engineer earning 500k per year, you won't accept such low investment
That's probably why so many founders are in their twenties like me
Yep. If you can persuade some senior engineers give up their high TC and join your company for much less equity (than you), it is already a big success. For the same reason, I usually won't recommend a senior eng work for a early stage startup.
TC?
I paid myself nothing for the first full year. was barely getting by on the ecommerce shop i was running. It was stressful af honestly. Now that we've raised I pay myself 50k, which is on the low end for this level, but I'm used to being frugal lol
If you raised a round of funding, you must have a valuation. What is your stake times the valuation?