Building a consumer app’s MVP and how to fundraise with Zest’s Jake Gutstein | E1889

31 Jan 2024 · 56 min

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In short

Podcast Summary: This Week in Startups - Episode E1889 with Jake Gutstein

Episode Overview Host: Jason Calacanis Guest: Jake Gutstein, Co-founder and CEO of Zest Focus: Building a consumer app’s MVP, fundraising, and the journey of Zest, a cooking app designed to help users learn how to cook through gamification and personalized learning.

Key Sponsors

  • Vanta: Provides compliance automation for startups.
  • MEV: Offers software development support for startups.
  • Paintbrush Loan: Startup financing without equity loss.

Episode Highlights

Introduction to Zest

  • Concept: Zest is likened to "Duolingo for cooking," aiming to tackle the challenges faced by people learning to cook.
  • Inspiration: Jake's personal experience with cooking prompted by a kitchen mishap that required help from friends.

Development Journey

  • MVP Creation: Initially created a Google form for customized meal plans, which served as Zest's MVP.
  • Testing Phase: Engaged friends to validate concept and assess willingness to pay.
  • Feedback Challenges: Realized that friendly feedback often lacked honesty and clarity, leading to a need for broader testing.

Team Formation

  • Co-founders: The founding team consisted of four members, with Jake recruiting a technical co-founder through personal connections.
  • Working Structure: The team operated as a "club," meeting weekly to brainstorm and divide work while maintaining full-time jobs.

Fundraising Insights

  • Initial Funding: Raised $100,000 to transition from side hustle to full-time commitment.
  • Ambiguity Aversion: Highlighted the fear and uncertainty associated with fundraising and entrepreneurship.
  • Investor Meetings: Met with over 130 investors, emphasizing that the fundraising journey is unique to each founder and dependent on various factors like product, team, and market.

Product Development and Launch

  • App Features: The app includes skill assessments, gamification elements, and in-recipe chef tips to enhance learning.
  • Ongoing Iterations: Approach to product development focuses on continuous improvement rather than a single "big launch."

Future Plans

  • Goals:
  • Enhance the gamification aspect of the app.
  • Develop a comprehensive operating system for food management.
  • Explore and solidify acquisition channels.

Key Takeaways

  • Consumer Learning: The app responds to the need for structured, engaging cooking education, distinct from existing content that lacks educational value.
  • Feedback Mechanism: Engaging with real users outside of personal networks is critical for obtaining honest and usable feedback.
  • Community and Support: Utilizing mentorship and networks can significantly impact the startup journey, as illustrated by Jake's connections leading to essential resources.
  • Investment Dynamics: Understanding investor concerns and effectively communicating the value proposition is vital for successful fundraising.

Conclusion Jake Gutstein’s journey with Zest illustrates the complexities of launching a consumer app and the importance of community engagement, user feedback, and adaptability in the startup ecosystem. The episode serves as a valuable resource for aspiring entrepreneurs and those looking to understand the intricacies of product development and fundraising in the tech landscape.

Additional Resources

  • Zest App: [zestapp.co](https://zestapp.co)
  • Vanta: [vanta.com/twist](https://vanta.com/twist)
  • MEV: [mev.com/twist](http://mev.com/twist)
  • Paintbrush Loan: [getpaintbrush.com](http://getpaintbrush.com)

Follow Jake Gutstein

  • Twitter: [@GutsteinJake](https://twitter.com/GutsteinJake)
  • LinkedIn: [Jake Gutstein](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-gutstein)

Follow Jason Calacanis

  • Twitter: [@jason](https://twitter.com/jason)
  • Instagram: [jason](https://www.instagram.com/jason)
  • LinkedIn: [Jason Calacanis](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis)

Subscribe to the Podcast

  • Apple Podcasts: [This Week in Startups](https://rb.gy/v19fcp)
  • YouTube: [This Week in Startups](https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin)

This summary encapsulates the essential discussions and insights from the episode, making it easier for listeners and entrepreneurs to grasp the key concepts and strategies shared by Jake Gutstein and Jason Calacanis.

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Transcript

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0:00Anybody that is a first time fundraiser, there is no golden goose. There is no perfect formula for going about this. Everyone's an N of one, at least in my experience. And I'm then going to speak for my own bias, but every experience is different. And so there are our best practices. Launches scorecard system for sourcing investors, a really good way to get on the phone with 130 different people. But the way to go about doing this, there is no right way. And it's going to unfold the way that it's meant to unfold. It's going to be a winding road. Then once you're on the tracks, if venture backed is the way that the business should be going if that's right for your business, then various factors start to take over a little bit more.

0:37This Week in Startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get$1 ,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. Next, Mev. Tired of the dev shop rollercoaster? Mev is your reliable technical partner offering a well-established software development process designed to consistently deliver unparalleled value to their clients. Get$30 ,000 off your first three months at mev.com slash twist. and the paintbrush loan is the earliest startup financing on the internet no pitch deck no business plan and no warm intros plus you get to keep your equity visit get paintbrush.com to see if you qualify for a fifty thousand dollar startup loan in less than two minutes all right everybody welcome back you guys know i like to have my portfolio founders here on the program from time to time.

1:43And I'm really excited to have our next guest on the program because he got an amazing response to his startup when he was in our accelerator, that accelerators called the launch accelerator. I'm joined by Jake Gutstein. He is the co founder and CEO of a company called zest, which is an app that helps people learn how to cook, you can think of it like Duolingo for cooking. And I thought what a clever idea. I wonder if that's going to get any traction and it has gotten traction and people love this app. And again, Jake went through our Accelerator's 29th cohort. Jake, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me on, Jason.

2:22So tell everybody a little bit about, and you came to the Accelerator. Were you at Founder University before that, our pre-Accelerator? Or did you come directly to the Accelerator? We applied directly into the Accelerator. Great. So tell everybody about how you came up with this idea and then how it's been going and what the app helps people do. Yeah, well, I studied engineering as an undergrad, but I found my passion in entrepreneurship. I started multiple companies as an undergrad. I ultimately sold one by the end of my senior year, but graduating school didn't have anything to go into. So I was in management consulting, was working the hours that it entailed.

3:02And the problem, I guess, found me, I had the fire department called on me for just like eviscerating a DiGiorno pizza in my oven. Oh, great. Which to me was like almost a call for agency. I lacked the agency to really fix that problem. So the way I went about doing that is I got on the phone with one of my close friends from undergrad. He ultimately became my co-founder and was an accomplished comedian and performer. So, you know, not the worst person to be on the phone with for a long time. He was also the best home cook I knew. And he started coaching me through how to get better at cooking.

3:34and in the process I realized he was up ahead on the curve for me but he was experiencing the exact same pain points so those bells started to go off I asked him if he'd be interested in founding a company and what are those pain points what is the pain point that you don't know how to cook well yeah but what we realized is that generally people go about learning how to cook and really one of two ways, younger people, you cook from, you learn from influencers online, your Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or you will cook from online publications or blogs. So New York Times Cooking, Bon Appetit. And ideally those give you a streamlined and affordable and accessible and easy way to learn how to cook yourself.

4:18But what we found was with influencer content, it's highly entertaining, but it's not educational. People watch hundreds of hours of this content. They step into their kitchen, they can't apply anything. and then when it comes to cooking from online publications these blogs every recipe is like reading a chapter in a textbook every different recipe it's like a different chapter in a different textbook very difficult to inventory your knowledge very difficult to know what you want to learn next and how to get there i'm not so so tick tock's too short not dense enough and they lack detail i've seen that watching a short on twitter they're just like here's my perfect recipe bang bang bang bang bang bang bang and here's something beautiful and you're like wait a second and then online i had the same experience you have which is i just want to you know sear some salmon here and i'm reading war and peace it's why are there a thousand words in here on the history of salmon and and i just want to cook the damn salmon what's that why do i need your great aunt's life story to get to this salmon exactly exactly let me cook the salmon yeah uh and so you then decide you want to try to build a better mousetrap as it were a better solution and then you decide what did you do multiple tests did you think about doing youtube videos something in between the two how did you come up with a format or a product because that's you have the problem set you have an observation about what is available in the market and what's frustrating about it but now as a founder you got to conceive of a product so take us through that product creation story and process.

5:52Right. So we were working full time, but we kind of have a screw loose. And so what we were doing in our free time was basically creating a Google form that we would send out to people. And if they wanted to use it, they would pay us. And then we would create a custom meal plan that would essentially allow you to achieve your goals. And we did that in Google Slides. So like we would send you your meals that way. And then we would send you a grocery list over text. Got it. So you decided to test this with, tell us what you're what you like to eat a form of some kind and then give them a PowerPoint, basically a Google slide, and a checklist for shopping.

6:30That was your MVP, your minimum viable product. And how do people respond to those two things? I mean, what we got was that there was a willingness to pay or at least we were crazy enough to perceive that there is a signal that there was a willingness to pay. And so leaned into that quite a bit more built out the team. So we actually we did this. And I know that this breaks a cardinal rule of founder you. And if we were to do it again, we'd follow the steps of founder, we did it without a technical co founder at the time. Well, so you when you did it, you did a low code, no code version of it, which is just, hey, here's a Google form.

7:05But you know what, that doesn't break the rule of founder university that's actually a good way to just learn in the eric reese lean startup concept or before that steve blank with his startup engine concept of um what's the minimum viable product and what question do we need to answer the question you wanted to answer was would people pay for a meal plan and recipes and you got the answer to that right right and actually that's a fantastic way of putting it because we were essentially doing a meal plan at that point and through these mvps what we learned is the we refine that white space to learning to actually being on a path learning more about food itself um which we didn't know going in and so that was also a critical learning right before we jumped off and actually decided to develop a solution uh and so then somehow you go from you know this mvp concept hey here's a meal plan here's your list of what to buy you get dozens of people to try doing that or a half dozen people how many people did this mvp that was i i think that it's somewhere in between what you just outlined so put it in the teens 20s and yeah we had to acquire those customers you just emailed your friends emailed the friends and asked them to email their friends that was we took the one extra step where and some people took pity on you and decided to give you 10 bucks or 20 bucks to do this right which is also the number one thing is that was the that was the number one waste of time when we were starting off is the people that take pity on you do not give you usable product insights because they're not actually buying the product.

8:37This isn't how it would behave in the wild. And so we actually threw ourselves on a wild goose chase kind of following those pity buys for a while before we realized that we had to refine it. Got it. This is why maybe buying some advertising on Facebook, sending those people to a landing page, people you don't know, they are going to be savages. They're going to give you super critical product feedback. They're going to say like, why would i pay you ten dollars for something i can get free on youtube but gordon rancy has an omelet video or whatever it is right they're going to give you hardcore brutal candid feedback whereas your friends are going to be like oh my god this is amazing it changed my life here's 20 bucks and you're not getting any signal as to should this product exist in the world right all right listen selling software is hard it's hard right now right 2022 2023 it's been a grind 2024, it's going to be hard too.

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10:01They also automate up to 90 % compliance for GDPR, HIPAA, and more. You can't afford to lose out on major customers because of silly stuff like lacking compliance. Just work with Vanta. Get your compliance automated and tight. Tight is right. Close those big deals, the lighthouse deals that send all the other customers to you. Here's the call to action. It's very simple. Vanta is going to give you$1 ,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's vanta.com slash twist to collect$1 ,000 off your sock too. So how do you go to the next level and get actual product feedback from actual customers who you don't know?

10:36And how did you come upon the concept for the app in this journey of triangulating? I like where we're going with this. You're triangulating and trying to build a product. What's the next product on this journey? Yeah, it's kind of so I, I think I like to take inventory every so often on the key skills that I think that I've learned along the journey. And one of the kind of five that I currently have has been this idea of uncovering demand. So if you remove your product, the supply from the market itself, people will behave, they have a latent need for something, or otherwise you'll build something and no one will buy it.

11:14And so what we did is we essentially started to look into, yeah, you ask 10 people if they want to learn how to cook eight or nine of them are going to say yes but who actually learns how to cook like and when really was the key question like when does somebody decide that they want to learn how to cook and we were doing this all the while uh we had brought on a technical co-founder omrit and we were building a version of the app itself got it so you decided hey we should figure out when somebody needs to learn to cook because when you ask people if they want to cook it's like hey do you want to learn how to play guitar do you want to learn how to be a black belt and take one dough.

11:50It's like, well, yeah, I would love to be a black belt and take one dough, play guitar, and be able to cook a great meal. But you actually have to take that step. And you got a co founder along the way. So how did you and your other co founder, find your technical co founder? So we're a founding team of four. So we have three that were doing this, it almost essentially started as a club. I like it, like, we're meeting once a week on Sunday at the beginning, running these things and then divvy up the work, come back on next Sunday. What did you get done? And you were working your full-time jobs at the time.

12:22So this was a side hustle. Right. Exactly. Right. And it was like, I think that maybe as it was heating up, then we started doing Sunday, Thursday. It's like when in the week can we. You kind of made it like a fun little club for yourselves. I've never heard of a founder doing this. What a clever idea. Yeah. It was, it was a blast, but ultimately you do reach a point. In my case, I felt like we were doing a suboptimal job on the startup. We had proved out concept, but then at that point, we're working too slowly. And I'm also doing a suboptimal job at my full-time job because I'm starting to focus way more of my energy on this thing.

12:55And so what we did as a team, we gave ourselves three months to find how much funding we needed to survive for 12 months and a path forward at development. We were able to put together the first, build a financial model, essentially projected out what we would need for 12 months to run just really bare bones, did that and turned up Scoured Earth for a technical co-founder. I talked, I think that who we ended up hiring honestly illustrates this the best. Amr Saini is our CTO. He is fantastic. I can speak about him for a very, very long time. But who Amr was to me was he was my co-founders, landlords, roommates, boyfriend.

13:37co-founders, landlords, roommates, boyfriend. So only like three hops away. Yeah. Right, right. That's how deep in the Rolodex you have to go. And so like just imagining the conversations where I'm humiliating myself with like my family friends. Yeah. Like interviewing them. Do you know a programmer? Does anybody know a developer? Right. And what we did is ultimately we had a list of, call it six qualified and interested candidates from that process. and Amrit blew him out of the water like he was the person and he wanted to be at a startup he had a full-time job at that time or he wanted to be an entrepreneur so when you said hey we want you to come on this adventure that was exciting to him yeah entirely right so Amrit's background he led a product team to exit in the past um and was on the beach essentially for the four or five years prior now the company he built it was a crm in the funeral home industry and so I think that how uplifting.

14:34Yeah, this is a nice little counterbalance to that. So we have life and death. So but this is a super important thing for people. It's getting easier to learn to code, it's getting with co pilots. And you know, AI eventually is going to help people make better startups. And then you have the no code movement, which is absolutely fantastic. There are extraordinary no code tools and the no code tools, combined with MVPs made in forms and type form and zapier and all this kind of stuff those are all now colliding with co-pilots and gpts helping people write code but you still want to have a technical co-founder because now you've got an owner in the business who will drive it and has equity incentives and i think the mistake people make is they think all developers are just either servants who you know just you just pay them and it doesn't matter if they're owners that's not true like a great restaurant if the chef is an owner they're going to take a different level of pride a different level of ownership as opposed to being a surf and a hired gun you want the the the chef who has a mission and who really wants this beautiful food to exist in this world this experience you want the developer who wants that beautiful product to exist in the world and people underestimate to make developers, I think, wanting to be entrepreneurial and wanting to be their own bosses and wanting to make decisions because when they're just just quote unquote developers or just writing code, they kind of just get told what to do.

16:06And they get looked at like the person who is like a plumber. Like, you know, I'm just paying you to fix the pipes here. So did you have that experience? I think? Yeah. And well, number one is I appreciate the analogy in food that doesn't go unnoticed. And I think that you honestly speak to this brilliantly. When you talk about the team of five that gets done today, what a team of 15 or 20 over a decade ago would have had to get done. I always feel like it's speaking directly to me. And that only functions if you have an owner who's technical. That can only get done. Omrit leverages these AI tools heavily.

16:44We all do however we can within the functions of our team. But it just helps us move better faster. So now you've got the four co-founders. founders you're doing your uh side hustle club i'll call it the side hustle club thursday and sundays what what an awesome concept you came up with there it's exciting it's fun but of course it's going to get frustrating why aren't we doing this every day we're starting to get traction so you you all decide to go all in but you have to so to speak but you have to get some cash because people might have things like rent or they need food or they might have student debt so how do you make that jump from side hustle?

17:22Hey, we're all getting great salaries to Oh, we're giving up salaries, we need, you know, whatever it is 5k a month, draw 10k a month, draw, you know, different people are different stations in life. So how do you make that jump as a team? Yeah, so for us, again, I, that was problem number two to overcome, let's call it opportunity, opportunity to to solve. And it what we looked at was essentially taking those elements that you just mentioned into consideration, plus give us a little bit of leeway to actually be able to invest into the business, not just like into ourselves to sustain the business.

17:55How much do we need to get by? And that number was around$100 ,000. And we raised that. $100 ,000 total, just$100 ,000 to get you through a couple of months or so. Correct. You know, it's funny, actually, I was just catching up with a friend about this, because where we are at as a business, everything is always as it always feels like it is existential, it always feels like, you know, you never know what's going to happen next. I truly feel like the number one thing that prevents people from founding a company is not risk aversion, but rather ambiguity aversion. And that lack of knowledge about their uncertainty, or what's going to be an outcome.

18:37It's highly uncertain, you don't have a revenue stream yet. You know, if you're working at Netflix, you got a quarter million subscribers, it's not going down to a million subscribers the next day is even if it has the worst year ever it's going to go down 10 right so we were catching up and what i what really true was true was that was as existential as it ever possibly could be was essentially like we put it on the line i don't really know we couldn't really cut back or be more lean we you know you always can but that was when it was as our backs were as up against the walls as they possibly could be so you accept reality as a founder you have to accept it it's not even to me it's you can't live in the past or future it's you control input that's it that really i i think that people become beholden to hitting metrics but the reality is that's a time machine you're looking at you're looking at a time machine you don't have the luxury to right now and so what we do is just what can we get done for us we fix on time in a certain period of time and then get that done do your job and ideally the right thing happens but you can't control for whether or not it's to your point so you do your sprints in two week sprints 10 day sprints five day sprints what do you do yeah so we we actually um this is comes from the 37 signals camp i that dhh pod that's Awesome.

20:05DHH is classic, yeah. He and Jason Free just like hold real estate. I like fanboy about them. Great entrepreneurs. And they've done it by bootstrapping in a very authentic way, right? So there's a lot of lessons there for founders. And what they have done in terms of building is rather than fixing on a product launch, you really have two controls. You can build a product to launch or you can fix on time, which is another limited resource. So what we do is we do six weeks, and that's long enough that you can build something substantial, short enough that you can see the end of it. And over the course of those six weeks, you have to make trade-offs to be able to ship what we commit to at the beginning of it.

20:46And that's kind of how we run. And so it's a bit of a longer sprint cycle, but we feel like we move faster that way. A lot of founders are great at going from zero to one. This takes vision, creativity, hustle, all that great stuff. But those same people often struggle with going from one to 100. If you want to scale and you want to do it efficiently, you're going to need process and you need structure. And that starts with your product. So if your startup needs a more structured engineering approach, you need to check out MEV. MEV helps businesses build and maintain their products faster and more effectively.

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21:56That's right. Get 10 ,000 off per month right now at mev.com slash twist. That's mev.com slash twist for$30 ,000 off your first three months. Oh, it's a good time for us to show the product that you got going and then talk a little bit about maybe coming to the accelerator and then fundraising and how that's all gone for you. Yeah, yeah, that'd be great. Oh, and this is your presentation from the accelerator. We focus in the accelerator really on mastering your presentation to investors. And hopefully we did a good job of that with you and you met a lot of investors. That's how I hope so. Is that or something else?

22:29But I don't really, I can't, hard to pin down the other thing. Very dust, maybe. But I think, so this is just the product demo. If you prefer to me. No, no, product demo is great. Let's just show people. And me, you can talk a little bit about how you present it to investors along the way. Sure. Awesome. So of course, at this point, you know, but we're building Duolingo for cooking with Zest. And the way that that actually functionally works is people come into the app itself. They take a skill assessment, which places them in a level based on their current level of knowledge. So in this case, this user gets placed in level two.

23:01It's all about getting the basics in level two. So say they want to cook a soup, they might cook our Thai curry soup. And within that, they'll learn things like the way that you cut your ingredients actually impacts the way they cook, that though it may seem counterintuitive, intimidating, cleaning as you go is a really important part of the cooking process. And we teach that through digestible slides, through tap quizzes, and then you have green in-recipe chef tips, which come up, they reinforce those lessons that you just learned and allow you to internalize them for later use. So now flash forward to today for this user, they might be on level six, they might be learning things like the complexities of flavor.

23:36And within that, if they want to cook a soup, they might cook our beef ramen. and in the beef ramen they'll learn about the science behind flavor extraction and fusion the idea behind concentrating flavors the reduction the idea behind braising a meat in a flavorful liquid now that's like the basic skeleton of how people use this using it their lives around food are totally changing they cook four times a week save over 500 a month and get to take care of the people that they care about while doing something that's fairly productive for them um so that's the short and it's got gamification built into it you go up levels and you you've added minimized it.

24:10So you're you are taking a little bit from the tick tocks, which is bite size content, little tips like, hey, here's cleaning as you go something I always talk about when I'm teaching my daughters about cooking, hey, look, we put the pasta in the water, we've now got it's capellini, we got three, four minutes here to make it all Dante, we could wipe the counter down, we could throw away the box of pasta, we could set up the colander to do there's things you can do with that downtime. And as people level up, that's got to be addicting, right? It keeps people engaged. And you mentioned there, part of the value proposition and the metrics you're tracking there is the money saved.

24:45And so that's super interesting. For one person, it might be super motivating to hit level six, right? For another person, saving$500, ordering DoorDash or Uber Eats or Postmates, that could be very exciting because they could redeploy that$6 ,000 a year to something else. And then finally, you had the non-financial reward, but the incredible feeling of taking care of and building nourishing food for people. What I really love about that slide is you understand that there's a multitude of reasons of why somebody might engage with zest. And you learned that when did you learn that intuitively? How did you learn that that's what people are responding to in your product?

25:28And then did one of those become a North Star? Or how do you think about incorporating that into the product those learnings so so it's a great question it all trickles down from the that when moment that we were talking about earlier so when we were going to market with that first version of zest as omar was building it we were conducting a series of interviews and what we were looking at was people who throughout the pandemic learned how to cook and did it successfully didn't know how did you find those users to interview a fantastic website it's called respondent.io so respondent yep dot io you can people it's a two-sided marketplace.

26:04Researchers come on and offer certain queries and then people can sign up for user interviews as long as they meet the criteria. Amazing. So congratulations to Respondent.io for getting a free plug on the show. You earned it. So it's earned media, right? How did you find Respondent.io? So I always like to ask founders because you find the right tool, man, it could unlock anything, right? You start using Coda, Notion, you know some of these tools are just so powerful you know they put you on second or third base and if you don't know about them oh my god you know you're stuck in the dugout so how did you find out about this tool right so that is um through two people we were talking about dhh and jason freed earlier and in the reason i know them is through two people in particular so neil sales griffin who was actually on twist a while back back when you know you guys were starting off was my entrepreneurship professor in college.

27:03And he was the one that turned me on to all of this. Essentially kind of unlocked my mind to what I could be doing rather than kind of what the current of undergrad can lead you into. And then Bob Mesta, who has been a fantastic mentor of ours as well. So Bob created the Jobs to Be Done framework for product development alongside Clayton Christensen. And he also, he works, he's the CEO of a company called Rewired Group, they're a consultancy that works with major companies. And Bob uses them, respondent for his interviews, sent them our way, and we never looked back. This was like a number one, because sourcing those interviews is really hard, and this just happened.

27:44That's why I asked. And so you were lucky enough to have great mentors. Those great mentors had frameworks or thoughts. So here's the Rewired Group and Bob's group there to talk about the jtbd jobs to be done framework that helps you understand why and how people buy products really cool um and so you were able to understand product development in a way that you know you didn't have to reinvent the wheel here so you get these folks on a call and then what do you ask them and how do you you learn all this information that becomes the product uh value proposition essentially so this is the fun part with respondent is made for the scripted this is kind of a hack that you have to pull on it um we don't have a script we go in and we talk to them about their journey essentially do our best calc anderson press and like go after just leading them to best understand because this is honestly why i like entrepreneurship in general uh create making the abstract concrete is one way to say it the other the seemingly irrational there's always a rational reason if you talk to the person and so understanding that journey and the best way to do that is without a script you just go in you you put it around a moment when i talk about the when for us it was learning how to cook knowing that there was that successful outcome so this is one of the use cases where it works and then as long as you ask them what what did you ask them like as your first question or two um getting started you start broad and then really want to trigger the memory when did you start learning how to cook um one comes back that um well it was during the pandemic i what's the first thing that you made bagels why did you start making bagels right it's like yeah right exactly so you do this naturally um but what i found i you know i didn't know anything coming out i'm like you see the way you only have to say one word bagels and if you if it has a question mark at the end the way i said it now if you say bagels well that actually has a little question mark but bagels say more or tell me more why bagels right or why why bagels really and they're like oh no no bagels are incredible you know like it's actually not that hard and i missed my brooklyn bagels or something right that's so fascinating you're saying somebody was making bagels from scratch right just and that's the first thing that they made now they're a proficient cook who cooks habitual wow but i mean to start at bagels is so right that was one of so that's one of the four things that we came to realize are like a trigger and that is uh providing for going from a heavily socialized environment to a less socialized moving from being around a lot of people to being around very few and wanting to then provide for people got it and so you see so you found out through the bagel interview and other interviews that there was a social component to this and people wanted to cook for other people you were thinking hey somebody wants to cook for themselves because they burnt their pizza that was your right experience but for this person's experience was i want to make bagels and invite people over for sunday brunch and show off maybe or give them this great bagel experience i made homemade bagels which by the way when i smoke meats in my smoker my great joy in life you can only if i'm smoking a 15 pound brisket it gets down to 9 10 pounds i'm only eating a pound of that or two max over the next week the other eight i'm slicing up and giving to friends and it's my great joy hey here's my brisket they oh when can i get another brisket right in the other kind of so you start to see contrast in the stories as well as similarities and the other version of this that's like the fun house mirror version is you have people providing for their significant others that's the one that we call out in that product demo and what it is is like i'm living on my own and i eat four day old chicken and rice and it works for me but i serve that to the person I care about, all of a sudden it's like FBI's most wanted.

31:34Like you're that partner. That's how you provide for the person that you care about the most on a consistent basis. You see like they draw on these similar emotional or emotional elements, but the social element of it is slightly different. And so kind of playing with those components there. Oh, and Neil Sales Griffin, he was from Code Academy. That's right. Oh, wow. That was a long time ago. That's episode 230. For those of you counting at home, man, that episode is 11 years ago. My Lord, I've been doing this for a long time. You know, he remembers he's driving him around in the Tesla. Yeah, that is so crazy to think about how long ago this was.

32:18This is the old set. What a walk down memory lane for those of you who are watching. This is the old set in Santa Monica. And here's Neil. And this is 11 years ago. We got 6 ,000 views on this video back in the day. And what an archive this week in startups has turned out to be. Crazy. Listen, not every business is venture scale. If you're not, you won't be able to raise money from VCs. We all know that. And not everybody has a rich family member to do their friends and family round. So if you want to jumpstart your business with$50 ,000, let me tell you about Painbrush Loans. Painbrush has created a new kind of loan product.

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32:55They connect idea stage startups with bank capital. So you don't need to give up any equity and there's no pitch deck or revenue required. And the Paintbrush loan is available at the idea stage. In fact, you can apply the moment you incorporate your company. Monthly repayment is a flat, predictable amount, which makes cash flow planning really simple. So here's your call to action. If you're a founder in the US, go to getpaintbrush.com to see if you qualify for a$50 ,000 startup loan in less than two minutes. That's get paintbrush.com to see if you qualify in less than two minutes. So you get all this product information and then you start realizing, hey, there are there are reasons why people are there's a social aspect taking care of people being the host saving money and being healthier.

33:42Right. And the gamification obviously is kind of built in. Is there one that is working more than others right now? And have you found any other value props that you didn't expect? Yeah, I think that the one that honestly, what we did is we have a playbook, but we went live with this version of the app. And we just started speaking to kind of these moments that we saw in most of them resonated very well. So we build with these four in mind, we haven't necessarily needed to deprioritize any of the moments, any of the moments to date. Got it. uh so now you get the product you launch it what do you learn at launch and then how do you start thinking about having a launch product in the market and then maybe when you came to our accelerator and maybe talk about that experience either of those you can go whichever direction you like i'm not sure what happened next in this story here for yeah um there's a weird thing particularly i i think listen everybody's experience is an avalan so i'm going to speak from my own bias.

34:44But we never felt like we were launching, per se. It was just kind of the first of a bunch of rapid iterations that we're still kind of in the middle of spiraling towards. And so I think that it's just kind of a prototyping and nothing's finished mentality that has been constant. I like to say this is true of the processes through which we run the business and then how the business is performing itself. This is the worst or the best worst possible version of this product that we have um and it's just kind of getting better from that perspective um on the launch side of things well you you tweeted in april um i'm investing in i believe it was five companies over the next 30 days apply here yep um oh great those tweets were that's how i acquire customers i'm investing in companies would you like money and you were like huh he's an investor i've watched his podcast and he has money well this is like i mean you talk about the focus thing but then you know launch stands out right away because of i we're talking catching up i was catching up nick and john earlier and it's just the operation is so it's just you get on first of all you get on with on this is my experience i hop on with andre he is extremely associate andre started as a researcher skipped the analyst phase went right to associate one of the fastest uh ascensions in our organization yeah here and it i because he just is he has this unbelievably pleasant demeanor balanced with no nonsense into cutting to exactly what he wants to know with our product within 48 hours i was on with jackie and then we had our decision like pretty quickly after that so we started to um move move and to translate what you just said you see a tweet for me no i just want to recap it because for me this is now product discovery i'm now on a client call so i'm fascinated by how our 21 person organization that invests a million dollars a month in startups or so and invest in 100 new companies a year and maybe 50 existing portfolio companies we do a re-op with every year something in that range um you see a tweet from me then you apply then you get on the phone with an associate andre he is incredibly deft and uh no bs in get and understanding your product and you felt heard by him right and let's also and he was positive you said it was positive he's a positive person but launch has a very specific way you'll people see as they go through the program that you are to present information.

37:24Someone who had never been through launch might not present information that way. And Andre was able to essentially steer me into that very easily such that even by the time I was on with Jackie, I was like, oh, they probably want more of this and less of that. And I was able to kind of almost... And what did you perceive? More of what and less of what? I'm curious. More concision. Just as punchy as I possibly could make it and focus. So the more so being concise and right yeah really getting to the heart of the matter not superfluous information that's interesting um that you got that vibe from our first call we for people who don't know we do what's called an introductory call and we do an incredibly large number of these a year uh thousands of these introductory calls a year and we try to get to the heart of the matter of the startup and we really try to understand the vision of the founders because one of the pieces of feedback i got early in my career was jason didn't understand our vision When we started asking people to review us as investors, he didn't get it.

38:24You know, and I think this is when you don't invest in a company and we don't invest in 199 out of 200 companies that apply for funding. So the 199 are not going to feel so good about us because we passed, but we want them to feel at least that we understood their vision. And then we had this negative piece of feedback that kept coming back about me. She didn't understand our vision. and i realized i came across as a bit arrogant um which is not how i want to come across so i started saying to people founders when i talked to them and i trained my team to do this may i repeat back to you your vision for your company and if you just do that you ask permission to repeat back the vision and we say okay so you're doing this it's subscription model right okay and it's duolingo okay and it's called zest and it's gamified and it's ten dollars a month and it's sixty dollars a year and you got a four co-founders one technical co-founder did i get everything right just by doing that the person feels heard and the objection we didn't get it went away overnight with just that one tweak and it's a 30 second moment in the call and you know what it was good for me and everybody else in the team to have a device may i repeat back to you your vision for zest it gave us added a little humility but it also confirmed for us that we did actually know it and that we didn't make a mistake it's so interesting from a meta meta standpoint looking at that because it provides the it provides you also a two-piece of it what the founder is able to draw contrast there so no because or yeah yeah you nailed it or or no you didn't get it and here's why in from i assume the launch standpoint then you can gauge focus because if i can answer and if i can tell you in a short way where you were off or why you're so spot on then all of a sudden you're actually i would say the bets might even get better and so well we want to make really thoughtful bets our job is to bet on founders and we bet on teams that make products that delight customers when we were evaluating you and your team we're like four person team we got one technical person you're a management consultant i don't remember exactly what your other two founders did but it was like a really good team of builders i remember when they brought you to me i was like snap yes and then we said product wise the product looks pretty good like even in the early stages it was a well-designed product and i'm a design guy so i was like this is designed pretty well and then we thought well the customers really like it you had some early customer traction i remember and so product a team builds a product delights customers you had all three and you had four co-founders and you were builders and you had a little bit of product velocity something else we look for so then you're 48 hours later on the phone with jackie who's a managing director you basically skip a level go right to the top she's able to make a decision andre's able to make a decision too just needs to get approval on it um so he can make a decision hey i want to invest in this we just want to make sure but jackie You could just go for it with a 100K check.

41:28And so then next thing you know, you're in the program. And we got that done in under a week. So we applied right after you filled the 7th for the April cohort, 28. And so we basically, we matriculated in, but for the summer. Perfect. Perfect. That's great to know. That's great. And then, so in the process of going through the accelerator, I think it's 14, 16 weeks or so. I don't know if you did 16 weeks or 14 weeks this time around. 14 weeks. 14 weeks you do 14 weeks we introduce you a ton of investors hopefully and uh yeah you did well with investors uh yeah i mean it is high octane the way that launch goes about doing it you're on weekly you i mean you put everybody on the spot on those calls i don't know how much i'm allowed to say everything sure okay right right so like our cohort is presenting to a room full of investors who then give us live, candid feedback.

42:24One of the really difficult things when it comes to fundraising a venture round, so I sold my first business, but it was not venture backed. And the first time that you go out to raise money, it's very difficult to gauge the feedback. You launch one provided systems for that, but then two, you're getting so much feedback so quickly that you can just so quickly throw out elements that aren't working, seven elements that are and charge forward. And then the other side is obviously just deal flow, right? Like just getting as many people across the desk as possible. We talked about - How many investors did you need to meet with in order to raise money for your company?

43:00We met with over 130 people. Wow. Pretty great. We are, I think, up there in terms of... Listen, when I say consumer subscription app that teaches people how to cook, I can say this now because we just closed the round and now we get to speak got our own traction for the next 12 months but let's just say that a lot of people run for the hills or ran for the hills and so most people are not consumer consumer subscription some people don't like some people do we happen to like it we've seen it we've had great success with it multiple times but some people are like the churn's too high we actually had a conversation about this on all in recently and i was trying to explain to the my besties like hey you know netflix a hell of a business disney plus a hell of a business spotify heck of a business when you get that large amount of subscription yeah i know there's churn issues with consumers but overall these are very meaningful businesses i believe and i believe there's going to be hundreds of businesses that have millions of subscribers and um you know like i think new york times is proving this to people um by putting a bundle of things together and you know it's a jury still out but i think this is a wonderful business you have i think there's a million people who will pay you 60 a year for this and you will get to you know 60 million in revenue i I think I believe that.

44:11You and I both, and that's the beginning. But I look at, I don't know if you remember the first time that we met in San Francisco and you and I had the chance to walk, you were hearing FounderU pitches. And so we walked from the launch site to the FounderU site. And really, you broke it down. It's CAC, it's LTV, and it's the payback period. How long does it take for you to get that money back? And for me then, a lot of this is an articulation gap, I think, in fundraising. And so I was sitting down and I was speaking French in a room full of people that only speak English. And once you're able to kind of articulate both the vision side that you're speaking to, I mean, you come from this operator background, though.

44:46But also, then you're able to articulate kind of the right brain and you have that left brain going. So you have to educate investors on why their objections maybe weren't valid here or just how the architecture of your business works. I would say even more, I had to de-risk the areas that their minds were going to jump to. in my mind doesn't think like that because if i if i spent all of my time thinking about not what i i i live i live in the in the trees right i just start speaking to the forest quite a bit more and i understand what the name of the forest was um a bit more well yeah i mean there are and different there there are all kinds of different investors some investors make the decision on the product they use the product they're like this product is awesome i'm gonna bet on it does anybody know who made this product right and literally they'll work backwards from the product whoever made this i'm giving them money because i love it so much other people are just like i love this team and it's like well this product is a little janky and it's like not very polished and they're just like whatever i really connect with these founders other people are like i heard this customer and this market size and there's a demand i'm going to work backwards to find the products that are servicing that market and then which like bill girly was looking for somebody in a marketplace that was doing transportation work backwards found a bunch of different players and made his bet on Uber.

46:04So, you know, there are different factors, there are different investors and you have to qualify them, right? This is such a good, anybody that is first, a first time fundraiser needs, there is no golden goose. There is no perfect formula for going about this. Everyone's an N of one, at least in my experience. And I'm then going to speak for my own bias, but every experience is different. And so there are our best practices launches scorecard system for sourcing investors, a really good way to get on the phone with 130 different people. But it's the way to go about doing this there is no right way and it's going to unfold the way that it's meant to unfold it's going to be it's going to be a winding road then once you're on the tracks if venture backed is the way that the business should be going if that's right for your business then various four factors start to take over a little more what do you have to prove now you you've you know you have a year runway or more um you've got you know i think tens of thousands of dollars a month in revenue, it's clear people want the product, you've got some audience.

47:01Over the next year, what are you going to try to accomplish with the money you've been given and the time you've been given? Yeah, really three things. So we're looking at making the game more cohesive. You spoke to the gamification elements, what's a unifying theory that links this all together and puts us on a track to building something more in depth and greater. The second is building a really solid operating system around food, we want to be the end to end resource that people turn to when it comes to how they manage their food in their kitchen, retaining people through like a classic B2B SaaS strategy.

47:31It makes less sense for me to leave than it makes for me to just stay on. And then the thirdly, starting to invest in these channels of acquisition. Right now we acquire through two organic channels and one paid channel that we've tested a little bit. How can we de-risk that such that if it comes time, if fundraising is the right route for us moving forward as well, which probably will be then are have we de-risked the business to the point where people want to either up their bet or bring on some new people who we've been talking to or met along the way i like it i like it and so you mentioned earlier tiktok um you're mentioning organic growth channels which are really good because if you can figure out an organic one right you know the cost is your time but you're not handing a bunch of money over to facebook or instagram or google which let's face it there are higher priced products like i think duolingo i don't know how much they charge but they might charge more there have been people who are charging a lot of money for their products which means they have a higher cac with cooking maybe you have a harder time um and you don't have tons of money around to burn is tiktok because tiktok has so many influencers so many views and the the content is compelling visually but doesn't actually deliver on uh you know the value prop that you deliver on is there not an arbitrage there to try to maybe hire a couple of these influencers to work for you or you know you know send people to the app hey if you want to learn more and have you tried those kind of ideas of tiktok or youtube shorts as a funnel um yeah i mean so this is an amazing point i the zest channel and i might you know i might get sent to jail by my co-founder graham who's been managing these for saying this but But essentially, those people that you're speaking to, these fluid influencers, they serve to build a tremendous amount of intent in our future users.

49:22And so people are watching this unbelievable cooking content all the time. Our channel does not really speak to them. That's not really what it's about. What it's about is calling out the fact that you're spending all this time watching these amazing things and you've lost agency over your own life. This is another reason that people join Zest, another critical moment for them, which is I work a job that is just not that great. I come home, I watch Love is Blind on Netflix. I'm scrolling through TikTok, looking at brilliant food, and I'm eating my Chipotle burrito. And it's like something's weird here.

49:51And so our channel right now, as it's built, is built to speak to that. If we're going to start partnering with creators, we're going to partner right now, you know, give me license to change this, should it change. But right now, the idea is partner less with food creators, more with people that speak to the moments in life that would lead somebody to want to learn how to cook. to the moments that we've spoken about through the course right you're lonely you want to have more friends i mean if you you want to have more laughs right like i love to cook and i love to have people over and i love to go to dinner because i like to laugh i like to have a conversation i like to be amongst people i'm a major extrovert and uh also it became a super weapon for me in terms of my business the fact that i was you know able to have dinner with people and host people for dinner like it actually became a wonderful superpower and being able to cook for people it's just such a great joy um if you're listening to this go download zest and pay for it on the app 60 bucks a year what is it 10 bucks a month yeah that's right okay just go pay for it buy it give us some feedback and uh listen continued success thanks for letting us invest in your company it's great to be on the journey with you and uh anything we can do to help uh at this point as we wrap up the episode give us a download give us a nice review on the app store write a little nice review after you play around in the app itself every yeah if you got 10 great reviews here uh with really good uh feedback we did our we did our job that would be huge that would be good yeah all right 100 yeah next time we'll do this over food yeah we'll do it over food um thanks for coming to the program thanks for all the candid feedback and we wish you great success and uh we'll see you all next time on this week's service bye bye hey everybody i talk to a lot of founders here on this week in startups and as an investor and they tell me the same thing over and over again they want two things from me more face time and money they want me to invest in their companies and they want to spend time together so we've been working here on a new meetup program we call it founder fridays and founder fridays are an event by founders for founders this is an event that is hosted in cities by people like you if you're listening to this week in startups, you're a founder.

52:01So what are you going to do at Founder Fridays, you're going to get together with other founders in your community, it could be four or five of you, it could be maybe up to 30 or view in a location, pick a cafe, pick a co working space, I like to go to a great Mexican joint or maybe a dim sum restaurant, you know, we can do shared food, have a couple of cocktails, maybe you do it on a Friday, you get together and you host it. Now, why is it important for founders to get together? Shouldn't you be at home just focusing? Shouldn't to be in the office just focusing on your startup? Well, if you get together with other founders, true founders who are in the arena building like you are, you're going to get a lot of value from that because you can trade notes with that other founder about what's working at your startup and what's not working.

52:43The truth is, if you're facing a problem, there are hundreds of founders out there who have probably solved it already. And instead of you banging your head against the wall, when you sit there and you talk to three or four founders, you're having some dim sum, you're splitting the quesadillas and fajitas. Somebody's going to say, oh, you know what? I had that same human resources problem. Oh, I had that same technical problem. Oh, I had that same marketing problem. And they might tell you about a tool or a service that'll solve that problem for you. This happens over and over and over again when I do Founder Fridays with our portfolio companies.

53:13Now we're going to give you that same experience, but here's what I need you to do. I need you to host this in your city. So you're going to go to thisweekinsartups.com slash meetups. That's it. and you'll see a landing page where you can sign up and you can say, I want to host in my city. Now your city may already be hosting. So you can just join that person. And what if you go to this event, and you learn some go to market strategy, that 10 x is your growth, that might unlock funding, or you might be talking to somebody and they say, Hey, I'm a marketplace to I'm not a competitive marketplace, your marketplace is for used cars, my marketplace is for hairstylists, whatever your jam is, whatever you're working on, but they give you some technique that you didn't know about to increase your supply side or get more demand in your marketplace.

53:52And you 10x your business. I see this happen all the time. And founders are like mutants, right? And I'm like Professor X here, I'm trying to put on Cerebro and find all the founder mutants in the world, and then have you get together and do your own little meetup. And here's what you're not going to have to deal with. You're not gonna have to deal with a bunch of service providers trying to sell you software or services. And you're not going to have to sit through a bunch of passive speakers you can listen to this week in startups and get the greatest speakers in the world on your own time and you're not going to have to pay for a ticket to a conference or get on a plane or fly somewhere no this is about having an intimate experience with five ten maybe two dozen other founders in your city please go to thisweekinstartups.com meetups if you are a founder this is for founders by founders only if you are not a founder this event is not for you you can start your own meetup for lawyers, accountants, recruiters.

54:47This is for founders by founders, we vet everybody to make sure you're a founder. And if you host it, it's a non commercial event. Our first founder Friday will start on February 2. So please mark your calendars. And we're going to do these on a rolling basis, you can join an existing meetup if it's already occurring in your city, or you and one or two other founders can start your own. We're using a wonderful piece of software that we've invested in called River, you can sign up for a River account just by going to this week in startups.com slash meetups. We've already got hosts and attendees lined up in San Francisco, New York City, Toronto, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, London, and even in India.

55:26So this is your chance to connect. And if you didn't hear your city name, you can start your city go to this week in startups.com slash meetups.

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Today’s show:

Zest's Jake Gutstein joins Jason to discuss his journey in creating the cooking app Zest (1:37). The two dive into how the Zest team formed (10:29), finding the right tools for your startup (25:24), Jake's experience in the Launch Accelerator program (33:27), and more!

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Timestamps:

(0:00) Zest’s Jake Gutstein joins Jason

(1:37) What prompted the creation of Zest and the initial concept and MVP for Zest

(9:22) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist

(10:29) The product development, initial testing, and finding a technical co-founder

(17:21) The decision to go full-time with Zest, the process of raising initial funding, and the importance of overcoming ambiguity and uncertainty

(20:54) MEV - Get $30,000 off your first three months at http://mev.com/twist

(22:05) Demo of Zest’s product

(25:24) Finding the right tools and mentors and the value propositions of Zest discovered through user research

(32:35) Paintbrush - Visit http://getpaintbrush.com to see if you qualify for a $50K startup loan in less than 2 minutes

(33:27) Product launch, approach to fundraising, and experience with the Launch Accelerator program

(46:48) Future plans and goals for Zest

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Mentioned on the show:

https://www.respondent.io

https://therewiredgroup.com

https://twitter.com/bmoesta

https://twitter.com/nealsales

https://twitter.com/jasonfried

https://twitter.com/dhh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LK6lKCKMQM

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Follow Jake:

X: https://twitter.com/GutsteinJake LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-gutstein Check out: https://zestapp.co

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Follow Jason:

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Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/jason⁠

LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis

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Thank you to our partners:

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Great 2023 interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland

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