Episode 4 - Oana Manolache of Introvoke.com #backcatalogue

Welcome to the Canopy Founder Friday series.

In Episode #4 of our back catalogue series we are joined by Oana Manolache who is the CEO and Co-Founder of Introvoke.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/oana-m-manolache/ 

•  Developing a live streaming events platform from scratch
• Taking the leap of faith from the safety of corporate to startup life
• From Europe to  Boston and beyond
• Learning to just start, rather than wait for perfection.

 Share in her gifts of wisdom and experience & join us as we seek to discover what makes this inspiring founder tick.

Co hosts Stewart Noakes, Tijana Momirov, Pedro Guimaraes  

Note: this episode was first recorded as a webinar in January 2020 and converted to a podcast so we could all enjoy it away from our screens.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to the Founder Friday podcast series from Canopy, where we interview inspiring entrepreneurs and innovators about their experiences and seek to find out what makes them tick. This series was recorded live as a webinar and then converted into a podcast so we can all enjoy it away from our screens. All right, let's dive into this episode.

SPEAKER_04: 0:23

Hey, everybody. Thanks very much for joining us today. We're split across the world in a great remote working kind of moment today. And I'm very pleased to have Oana here from Boston, my second favorite city in the entire world and where I got married. So very happy to always meet people from Boston. And thank you for being here, Oana. Thank you for inviting me. And obviously on the panel, we've got Tiana today, and we'll bring in other people from the audience as we go. So just to start then, Tiana, do you want to introduce yourself? Good

SPEAKER_01: 0:48

morning, everybody. So yes, I'm Tiana. Nice to be here today. My background is in software engineering. And in recent years, I've been focusing on product management for tech startups. So everything product-related problems, solution, validation of the idea, implementation, growth, etc. So I'm really looking forward to hearing one interesting founder story about the problem being solved and the growth that's been happening. Let's hear the story from Oana.

SPEAKER_04: 1:14

So Oana, obviously I and Canopy are raving fans of what you do because we're using it in all of our demo nights. So thank you very much for the different dimensions you're bringing to our work. So I wonder if you could start by sharing with everybody the inspiration for Introvert. What got you going on this?

SPEAKER_02: 1:29

Yeah, well, Well, first of all, thank you for being such an advocate of our platform, Stuart. And it's definitely amazing to see your events live. I know all my team is watching them, actually.

SPEAKER_04: 1:39

That's great.

SPEAKER_02: 1:40

That's a gift that you're giving to us as well. It started in a very unusual way, I feel like, the story of IntraVogue. My background is in marketing and I spent, actually, I did the transition from corporate to the startup world after seven years spent in technology, working for HP, various roles, coming here to the US as well from the UK where initially I started my career and I actually started a different type of startup. It was actually a food business and I knew nothing about food and I just built a model and I was really passionate about like the potential and the idea. And I realized at that point after a few months building it, so at least I didn't spend a huge amount of time before I realized that just because an idea is good, that doesn't mean you should be the one who should do it. And in the whole process of building the startup that at some when it was called the big lunch. I was going to a lot of the startup events and they weren't necessarily about food. It was all kinds of tech and some other bits as well. And there were so many events happening around Boston. I kept getting invited to so many events in Silicon Valley, New York. And these were people like speakers that really I wanted to see, but I just couldn't go because I couldn't spend seven hours jumping on a plane, going there and coming back. It was so much hassle. And even around Boston, there were so many events happening at the same time. And everybody I was talking to that that we can't actually get to that event or get the knowledge from that event. Although the panels are taking time out of their business, even organizers are putting so much effort in making it happen, but we couldn't go because of like different connections. So that's when I came with the idea of let's allow organizers to live stream their events so that everybody else can benefit from their wonderful content that they already are putting out and to make it easy for them because there's so many platforms out there that are not necessarily built for this. They're more social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn or so, but not something that actually is catered to the organizers and that makes live streaming more like a strategic tool for them, as well as for the entrepreneurs and founders to be able to find content easily that they're actually looking for. And this is how I started IntroVoke.

SPEAKER_04: 3:54

Oh, fantastic. Obviously, you know, Canopy started life in Boston, so I can really empathize with that. can't get to all the events in any given day or week some days you know seven different events you can go to all at the same time in different parts of the city it's just impossible yeah so tiana what do you think of this what questions have you got to start with

SPEAKER_01: 4:12

i really liked one point that the one i mentioned is that that even if the idea is good doesn't mean you should be the one implementing it and i like that point really much and i think it's really useful for the founders to consider because very often when i work with founder founders in my consulting i feel of course i'm joking when i say this like i feel a little bit like i life coach like trying to decide like is this the idea I want to proceed with you know with the person I work with so I think it's really useful that Ioana mentioned this and it's good for the founders to think about this like is this something that I feel aligned with something that I really want to push through so maybe Ioana if you can tell us more about this like various businesses but how did you decide how did you feel that this is the one you should proceed with how did you feel this alignment problem you noticed the solution and you personally and your values

SPEAKER_02: 4:57

I feel like you kind of have to follow your passion I know it sounds like a cliche by now follow your passion everything will happen but it's true because if you don't follow your passion then entrepreneurship is hard and I haven't been doing this too long probably about a year and a bit now but it is really hard and talking to other entrepreneurs I've been doing it for 10 years if you don't do something that you're good at that you're passionate about that you like to do in an industry that you like then it's going to be difficult to wake up in the morning and have all those like roller coaster doubts. Is it working? Is it worth it? And all those questions. And the food business that I built initially, it was the business model was good. So I actually sold in the idea stage. I sold the assets that I built at the beginning, but I realized that I was not passionate about the industry. I didn't really, it wasn't me who should have been doing that. And I was talking a lot about technology and I was very much involved in that aspect, probably because of my background with HP as well. It was hard because it's difficult to realize as an entrepreneur that something that you've been working on for so long it's actually not necessarily something that is going to go forward with you but I think it's important to realize early on and kind of have that self-assessment at all times while you're going with your entrepreneurship because obviously the sooner you realize that it's not something that works for you also the sooner that you can do something that you're really passionate about and Intervoke was at the back of my mind for a few months so it wasn't like I finished it completely it was at the back of my mind. And I started talking to people before we even had a name. And when they were asking, what's your company name? I'm like, well, I shall come back to you on that because you were kind of, is this going to work? What's in my head? The

SPEAKER_01: 6:41

feeling was already there. Yeah. I really found it to be a very good point.

SPEAKER_04: 6:48

What does introvert mean?

SPEAKER_02: 6:49

It actually doesn't really mean necessarily something. What we wanted to do initially with this, we catered to pitch competitions to start with, but then we realized that the need was was bigger than just the pitch competitions and initially our motto was thought-provoking introductions that's kind of how we started it and we had a dot-com which is always useful

SPEAKER_04: 7:10

and so i want to ask you a question in a second about um your sort of personal network and you know what brought you to boston specifically and kind of your heritage stuff but um before that i just wanted to reflect you know from a canopy perspective we've run events all over the world demo nights all over the world and what you're doing for us you know you solved the problem for yourself but you you also solved a problem for us which is when we did facebook streaming or even youtube streaming what we were doing was putting stuff into the bubble we already had and yes the recordings were there but they were watched by the same people that already came to the demo nights or already knew the people because that's why they were at our facebook side and what we've got as a dimension from you which we really appreciate which is why i'm mentioning it is new people looking at the stuff new opportunities arising for the startups and a legacy of new people watching it all the time which we just couldn't create ourselves before so thank you very much for that and thank you for the opportunities it's bringing to the startups as a result. That's why we've become ramping fans because it's actually working. And I think every event so far that we've used it, the audience has pretty much doubled in size as a result of the Intervoke attendance. So even our biggest one during Web Summit, we had sort of 220 people in the room and I think we had something like 500 different views and unique views and stuff from the Intervoke platform. So that was very cool.

SPEAKER_02: 8:23

Yeah, it's amazing to see how people connect with this. We've been lucky to see a good traction in the very early days. We launched in May last year now, May 2019. And only in three months, we had content creators, as we call them, customers streaming from three different continents, US, America, Europe, and Africa. And it's absolutely amazing to see the differences in styles of events and to see people from literally all over the world tuning into these events and learning and even sometimes continuing their discussion after the event has finished on the chat. Because the subject can be so interesting. Oh,

SPEAKER_04: 9:01

fantastic. So as you know, that, you know, the goal of these interviews is really to kind of get out the wisdom from people like yourself who are going through this journey and kind of provide lifting experiences that people can build upon. So one of the questions I wanted to ask you today was you're obviously not originally from Boston. What was the reason that took you to Boston? And then how do you find like the personal professional networks there to support you in this journey?

SPEAKER_02: 9:25

No, I'm not from Boston. I'm I grew up in London. I moved to the US with my previous company, HP. I was lucky enough for them to support me through the transition and they've been fantastic. And after I realized I wanted to start the entrepreneurship world, I moved to Boston because Boston felt I did a lot of research and it was Silicon Valley, New York or Boston pretty much if I wanted to build like a successful entrepreneurship community here in kind of the US. So Boston felt the closest, more personally because coming from London is more of a European city. And I was so pleasantly surprised, honestly, with the entrepreneurship community here. It feels very tight. So I think looking at my journey where I'm going to go next from Boston, I think the most I'm going to miss the startup community. It's more of a feeling of everybody kind of knows each other or knows someone who you need and they're incredibly open to support through the whole thing. And I think for IntroVote was a really good place to launch because our customers here, our mentors are incredibly open and we've launched and learned in the process with them. So when we launched in May, it only took us about, two months to build the MVP. So when we launched, we knew that we wanted to first, instead of getting like the subscription and the money in, it was kind of to build the product with our selected customers. And Boston made it happen very nicely because all our customers here were very helpful with feedback and kind of guiding us to get to the product that we feel that is worth to a global audience.

SPEAKER_04: 11:05

Fantastic. Well, obviously I'm a raving fan of Boston as well. And the ecosystem, I get what you're talking about with the vibe there. So we've got a new panelist just joined us. So Pedro's joining us all the way from Alphagete near Lisbon in Portugal. Pedro, have you got a question you'd like to bring to Awana?

SPEAKER_03: 11:19

What do you think was the single main factor that on the early stage of your business made you see or made you think I'm on the right pathway?

SPEAKER_02: 11:27

That's a very good question. I feel like those triggers and those factors are changing as we go. And we put some kind of assumptions that we're testing along the way. So first, when we launched the MVP, before we put any more engineering and marketing and so on. We had a few assumptions, like let's test these and see that if we're getting the amount of traction that we were looking for. And we're constantly changing those assumptions and testing more and more to kind of continue working. It's like paving our road as we go. But at the same time, we have some kind of clear objectives on more on the longer way, like a year from now where we would like to be. And we are always kind of getting together and assessing if in those timelines or in those most moment we are, where we would like to be, or if we should be continuing what we're doing. So far, I was happy to see our assumptions and our objectives overly exceeded from a traction perspective. And now we are launching actually this month, we are starting the subscriptions and we're starting getting revenue in from our customers. And we have new assumptions and seeing if they're indeed willing to pay and then going next to the next level of engineering, like the digital tickets. So we're having kind of constant objectives that we're trying to if we're achieving and if we're not then what would be the cause it might not necessarily be our business idea it could be potentially our marketing that is not done right or it could be the engineering that maybe needs some refinement from a customer experience perspective

SPEAKER_04: 12:55

so one of my friends he traveled from the US wearing his Google t-shirt and he said everywhere he went in the airport he would get one of three things happen to him either man working at Google must be amazing do you work at Google what's going on or he'd get somebody saying Google sucks absolutely every time I tell stuff in, I get the wrong request coming up. And the third one would always be a feature request. And you've come to a room where we're probably all going to have feature requests for you today, right? So as you're testing out new things, my feature request is I want people to be able to vote on stuff. I want like this sentiment thing where people on the screen can be saying, I love this startup. I love this startup. And then when we're doing demo nights that you could almost have like a voting thing between all of the demos, which is my favorite demo for today. I

SPEAKER_01: 13:35

wanted to ask about the first time, the first time the product was used to stream an event. What were your expectations about the reactions from the event organizers and the viewers of the streaming and what the reactions actually were?

SPEAKER_04: 13:50

Were you there the first time? Were you in the room while other people were doing the streaming or were you remote?

SPEAKER_02: 13:55

I was definitely

SPEAKER_01: 13:56

there.

SPEAKER_02: 13:56

It was actually the launch of our company. We launched on the 22nd of May here in Boston at the Founder& Co. event and we gathered about 150 people to the event, investors, panelists. It was a pitch event slash panel panel discussion. And I was definitely there because as part of our MVP, we didn't have the app at that point launched. We wanted to build an MVP. You know, someone said to me, if you're not ashamed of your MVP, you launched too late. And we were definitely ashamed with our MVP because the platform was okay to work. And we didn't have an app, so we couldn't stream with a phone. We were streaming with a camera that was plugged into the laptop. We were streaming through OPS at that point. And we've done that. We've that for about three months until we actually launched the app and we went to every single event and we talked to every single content creator we talked to everybody at the event if they're going to be watching it so it was a huge learning curve for us at the beginning it was frustrating going to so many events but I realized that it was so key because otherwise we wouldn't have known what an event organizer has to go through and all the logistics behind it and also to think about live streaming and how can we make that process easy We are for them. And that's how we came up with the app. And this is how we built the app, knowing exactly what they will need during the event and what they don't need as information. Everything worked great on the launch. We had a few mishaps at the beginning. In the morning, we were still kind of setting things into production from an engineering perspective. But until the evening, everything was ready. And the expectation from the event creators was kind of met. It was absolutely amazing to see them adopting this and now getting a second nature for them. the viewers we had people tuned in from all over the world of course not as many at the beginning i think we had about 50 and we felt that it was such a big number at that point but it was the first time that people ever heard about introvox so one thing that we learned is that it takes longer to get consumers and viewers engaged on boards than we thought it would so if anyone is building like a consumer app or like a viewer platform or something like that I would kind of warn that consumers are not easy to keep engaged and to get them to try your product. So it was a lot of like marketing and a lot of understanding and consumer behavior and consumer journey from our side to go through that learning curve.

SPEAKER_03: 16:25

I have a question for you following the same areas. Do you have put in place any, or not, any process to, on a regular basis, listen to your actual and potential users, both on the side of the speakers and and on the people that actually are going to listen to them, whatever it's being broadcast.

SPEAKER_02: 16:46

To listen in terms of talk to them about their experience?

SPEAKER_03: 16:51

Receive feedback, receive inputs, receive suggestions, whatever. If you have a process to do that.

SPEAKER_02: 16:56

Of course. I mean, with some of these content creators, I'm being on a regular basis in contact with them. I ask for feedback. And so as a process, we're actually just kicking off the process in January now when we are launching the subscription. There two ways. One is going to be for content creators because at this point we have a number that we can kind of handle or we know the ones that are most prominent and active users of our platform from a content creator perspective. And we have a qualitative survey form that is going to go to our content creators that we're going to follow up personally with all the key ones to understand when they're using it, their educational process with the platform and any concerns from even a technical perspective so we're going to be launching that in January and from our viewers the same from February onwards we'll have next to you where they're watching the videos live it's more of a quantitative type of survey where they like what they're seeing and also everything is working well for them from a platform experience perspective so these are the two points that we're looking to start with at least now in All

SPEAKER_04: 18:10

right. Tell us the worst thing that's happened in the first year.

SPEAKER_02: 18:16

In terms of the platform itself, there were times when I must admit that I felt that we should have been a bit more further with our engineering process, like product development. So there were times when you were expecting for... Actually, no, the time that is very much in front of like 200 people and we were at the beginning very early on and we tried to get people to... for one of the pitch competitions and everybody in the booth scanned the QR code and logging didn't work. Like something so basic, logging didn't work. And it was a bit frustrating because obviously we were very early on and we realized that it wasn't logging not working for everybody. It was a specific time when logging wasn't working. If you weren't putting www in front and if you were logging it with Facebook on an Android, not an iPhone, it was just a

SPEAKER_05: 19:08

specific

SPEAKER_02: 19:09

time when logging wasn't working. And I had my engineer with me in the room and they saw me kind of melting as I was on the stage talking to people and presenting and getting them to vote for the pitch competition. That made me think of how much testing we need to do. So it was a learning curve in the end, but it did not feel good in the moment, I must say. We've put extra testing in place on different platforms, on different other situations, but that was definitely a low point for us. And it's also, I feel personally, it was a journey because the transition from corporate to startup was

SPEAKER_05: 19:41

It

SPEAKER_02: 19:43

was more challenging than I thought it would be. So budgets were much smaller. I couldn't get the agency that I wanted to in marketing or like getting access to the resources that I would use in terms of like internal and external. So I think there were a lot of moments.

SPEAKER_04: 19:57

There's no support line, right? When you're doing your own startup, there's no support line. Welcome to the

SPEAKER_03: 20:02

jungle.

SPEAKER_02: 20:05

Indeed, yes. So there were like, it was personally and also platform wise, a few kind of low points through the journey. but I think it's important too. There's strength in the low points because in the moment it feels really bad, but then looking back, I'm sad to say that, but I'm happy that it actually happened because we learned early on a few things that we needed to put in place.

SPEAKER_04: 20:25

Fantastic. Well, I'm going to ask you a question in a second about co-founders and how that's all working for you. But Tiana, what are you thinking at the moment? You've been quiet for a few minutes there.

SPEAKER_01: 20:33

I was thinking about the future challenges. What do you expect as you're challenging the near future? Something like a technical nature or... or marketing or something internal, like how you organize your structure with the co-founders and collaborators. But what do you think in the next phase, like we are starting a new year, like let's say in this year, going to be the most crucial challenge or objective?

SPEAKER_02: 20:55

Our objective challenge for this year is we're kicking off our revenue model now. We've been learning from our content creators for about six months. We refined everything and we're kicking it off in two ways. One is this month as we're launching the subscriptions. And from an engineering perspective, in building everything that gives value to those subscriptions from analytics dashboards that are incredibly complex so that we're going towards making each of the marketing tool for our customers to all the other features that we're actually building for subscriptions and then as we're launching a digital ticket in April where our content creators will have the opportunity to charge for the events that they're charging in person and also charge for them online both to build for It's going to be a big development year for us, making this platform the best there is. Also riding on the streaming trend that, of course, is being driven by the music industry. But I still feel that the professional space, entrepreneurship, business from a live streaming perspective is still not even started yet. So it's still a lot to explore here. But of course, our friends in the other industries are helping us. us a lot by growing the streaming trend as a whole. It's a lot about the development and building a solid team that will help us get to the next level that we already have a five-year plan, but of course we want to go through the first year first.

SPEAKER_01: 22:27

So just summing up, so you would say it would be the technical aspect of the business that is going to be the next challenge?

SPEAKER_02: 22:32

Yes, that's our objective to build our platform into something that we think is going to be a great value for content creators and also viewers. And we're also kicking off marketing. So it's going to be an interesting transition to see now kicking off our paid social media marketing and some other tactics that we have in place, how much we can grow user-based wise as well. We want to grow 10x for this year with what we had last year, which is a pretty ambitious plan that we have, but I'm confident that we can do with the right people in place. I have a few people in marketing that are helping us and hopefully with my back as well we can put together like a solid campaign and initiative and I know our content creators and you Stuart you're doing a fantastic job letting everybody know that you're live streaming so that people know where to see you but we also want to bring the viewers ourselves to the platform which will benefit all our content creators equally

SPEAKER_03: 23:31

fantastic Pedro please go ahead yes I have two questions I was in line for the second one the first one is being us on a collaborative world how do you see partnerships as a driver to your expansion

SPEAKER_02: 23:45

yes so it depends on what you mean by partnerships

SPEAKER_03: 23:49

I left it open to allow you to to show us the way

SPEAKER_02: 23:52

indeed yes right now it's we did think about partnerships and that's part of our plan we're focusing right now on the technology but I do think there is a possibility of partnerships from collecting so many like pitches from pitch competitions and so on it could be a level of partnerships with investment firms or big firms where they could actually get access to all the pitches that are happening across the world. We're already having a library of thousands of different entrepreneurs pitching. So there's something that could be in place. Partnerships in a sponsorship way could come from other service providers of the startup and entrepreneurship world, such as the T-Bank, or other startups. We don't have partnerships with these companies yet. I'm just giving examples of what other companies could potentially partner with us considering the amount of entrepreneurs and startups that have on the platform. And from a technology perspective as well, we are keeping our minds open. We are in the live streaming space, not in the webinar space, which are although connected, different technologies and different platforms and different usages, we are keeping our minds open in terms of a partnership with a webinar art provider down the road if we're not building the technology ourselves in the end.

SPEAKER_03: 25:16

Fantastic. It's not a tricky question. I'm just focused on I truly believe that companies are a result of talent and opportunities and action. The question is just focusing on soft skills. How do you think that your soft skills and mainly your team's soft skills are helping at this stage developing the business?

SPEAKER_02: 25:39

That's a really good question. I feel like like my team is so balanced and I'm lucky to know to have known these controls for a long time so I'm the CEO and founder I have a CTO who's been building this in an absolutely amazing way two other engineers that worked on the platform in different capacities considering my experience I'm more on the big business side and so easy to get into like the actual expertise rather than thinking about the soft skills that you're definitely right we are we're kind of balancing each other out in terms of how outgoing we are. I like the networking bit. I like the relationship building, B2B and kind of getting to know the customers. Some of the other people in my team, they're not necessarily more introverts, but they're more comfortable with like internal teams. So it's great to see how they're bringing a lot of value to like the team spirit and getting people to kind of work very well with each other. And I'm keeping the relationship spirit outside of our company, stakeholders such as customers, mentors, and so on. It was a learning curve with all of us understanding where we're good at, who should go to the networking events, who should speak to different people depending on the level of trust and expertise. So that was a tricky question. It's a very good

SPEAKER_04: 27:02

one. Thank you. So tell us a little bit more about the team then. How did you all find yourselves together and have the team, who you got as a co-founder and who has the equities? between them if you don't mind talking about that

SPEAKER_02: 27:13

yes so right now we are we're still in the process of establishing exactly equity I started the company as a sole founder initially and I realized that obviously I didn't have the skills of building the live streaming technology so I brought on board our CTO who's had this experience for a very long time and we've been working together for probably about a month until we realized that in order to meet the deadline that We've set to launch the company. We need some more people on board. So we brought some technology consultants that we know. There were some people that we knew, but they came as a capacity of more like a project-based rather than full-time in our company because they already have full-time jobs. But they were incredibly seasoned. Their background is Microsoft and Intel. They've been building this work. In my team, I had over 20 years of experience across engineers, and they made a really good team. I feel that the biggest learning in the transition in building this company up was building the team and how to keep them motivated and how to understand who can work in a startup environment and who can't because startup environment is definitely very challenging. It's late nights, it's early mornings, it's like doubts. Is this ever going to work? So we came together with kind of a set objective, which was very helpful to see even from the people that were kind of part-time and on a project-based base stayed up with us until 4 a.m. in the morning or nights in a row. I think if you would cut us, it would be coffee running through our veins. It was very good to see that level of commitment from them. And one of them actually stayed as a consultant on board even after the project has finished and still is helping us on a project-based until potentially we can bring him on board full-time once we have, of course, the money to pay him and the stability of the company to get to that point.

SPEAKER_04: 29:10

Fantastic. Fantastic. So you're looking to raise funds this year?

SPEAKER_02: 29:13

Yes, I was looking to raise a round of funds. We're still considering exactly when because we decided to bootstrap until we launched revenue models because I feel like it's important for us to validate these assumptions and get revenue into our company. And also it's important for our investors to, it gives us an extra belief that this works well because traction so far has been amazing. We've been lucky to see great traction, but it's important construction. So we want to do that in a bootstrapping way and then to get the money when we're ready to extremely skyrocket and say, okay, this is definitely everything is working and we just need to skyrocket from here on. Our costs are very low because of my good team that built the technology with solutions and they built it from scratch. We don't necessarily need it and I'm okay to run pretty lean for a couple of more months until or at least we launch the subscription and virtual tickets.

SPEAKER_04: 30:14

I mean, for me, I think there's a huge alignment with equity crowdfunding, and that's a bit more European than it is American. But I think, you know, if you were raising funds through an equity crowdfunding platform and also aligning with an equity crowdfunding platform for the future, it could be very interesting. Diana, what have you got? We've probably got time for a couple more questions each. Why don't you kick

SPEAKER_01: 30:32

us towards the end? We were discussing a lot about the theme, so I had one more question regarding the theme structure. How do you bridge this gap between the business and the tech? Because this is also something that happens very often as an issue. So you have the people focusing on the business, growing the business, like developing the idea, getting the investments, thinking about marketing strategies, and then you have the techie part of the team and focusing solely on the features. And very often there is a gap between the two. So how do you bridge this gap?

SPEAKER_02: 30:59

Indeed. I probably was lucky that my CTO has an understanding of business and I have an understanding of tech. So we kind of overlap at some point. I have a stand-up with my team every evening apart from Friday. Friday is no work evening in any circumstance. Of course, unless we have like an emergency with a client, but as a company culture, we want to keep Friday free for everybody to disconnect because we work so hard. And in the standups that we have, we talk about technology, kind of the pre-planning that we're doing, the features that we're building, but we're also talking about the business because I think why for me, it's important to understand, of course, leading the whole company, I need to know everything that is happening in technology But I also think that it's important for everybody at any level to understand what we're doing from a business perspective because it fuels them with energy. It's like, all right, we're getting customers or this is what they want. It has to be 100%. It has to be a full connection between engineering and business because otherwise the engineering team will not understand why they're building what they're building. And my CTO is constantly challenging me. Like, why are we building in the future? Why is this the right that we're following? How is this helping our customers? So is the constant asking of why we're building or why we're going towards a certain kind of product development? And from my perspective, of course, it's important to understand how the technology works because I need to know what I'm asking for my team and I can't ask things that are not possible, things that happen in a week or, and also to understand the cost and the opportunity cost as well, how much it would cost us to actually not do something So it has to be an overlap. And there's, again, like, business and engineering. There has to be an overlap between the two and kind of meet each other halfway. Because working in silo, I just can't see that working successfully.

SPEAKER_01: 32:58

That's amazing. Really cool that you, like, keep the whole team aligned with the big picture and the idea. Because it happens very often, even within very small teams in startups of, like, five people in total, that these guys happens with so that's good

SPEAKER_04: 33:12

so we just had a nice question coming through the chat from monica thank you very much for that and she says your platform is for startupers do you have any success stories to share where the platform connected a startup with an investor

SPEAKER_02: 33:24

i've been asked that so many times and i actually don't have a story when that happened purely because we didn't actually follow up as much on the people that were on the platform pitching and that's something that we definitely need to do to understand how people who pitched on platform connected with if they had like a successful business but I do have a story where one of the founders here in Boston Emily from Hollerhype who's a dear friend of mine and she's building an awesome company as well so if you want to check her out as well she pitched at one of our early live stream events on the platform and she was able to share this with her personal supporters first of all like people in her personal life who wanted to see her pitch but also with her mentors she was already getting funded from some of her investors. She just closed her rounds. And it was a great way. She actually emailed me separately. It was a great way for her to keep her mentors and investors updated with what she was doing, the fact that she was pitching the events, the fact that she was getting her idea out there to get feedback afterwards from her mentors and other advisors on how to do it better. And also she managed to kind of work on a relationship after that with a great brand strategist that helped her her, we find her brand, we find her pitch and her presentation. And you could definitely see that because she pitched again at one of our live stream events and her presentation has changed and she was absolutely amazing at pitching her company better as a result of that.

SPEAKER_03: 34:57

Pedro, you look like you've got a question coming. What you got? Yeah, my final one, I promise. Congratulations for the amazing result in such a small amount of time. Would you share with us just one secret of your success, a tip?

SPEAKER_02: 35:08

I feel like the tip is I read something the other day and that really inspired me. You have to start it. It's no matter if you're having doubts, no matter if you're scared, no matter if you don't think it's going to work, if you think it's going to work, it's important to just start it. Just do it because you will have to learn along the way rather than wait for a very long time to have something perfect. Have something that is good enough at the beginning and learn what perfect means because what you think that perfect means, it might not be what your customers are actually looking for. That's why we launched with an MVP very early on. And I must admit at the beginning, that was very frustrating. We weren't more far along and we weren't more developed when we just launched. But I am so happy we did launch when we launched, although it was so imperfect and logging didn't work at the very beginning. You just have to start it and learn and get a lot of feedback and be humble and say, It's okay not to be perfect and not to know it all and push yourself outside of the comfort zone and ask for what perfect means for the people that you're building this platform for. That's been at least my experience.

SPEAKER_04: 36:23

Thank you. So kind of related to Pedro's question, something I wanted to ask you is do you perceive that it is more difficult for you as a female founder than it would be if you were male, particularly in Boston, which is regarded as quite a male-dominated city. It's a sports town. It's got a lot of things going on that are very male centric. So is it more difficult or do you perceive it to be more

SPEAKER_02: 36:44

difficult? Definitely sports town. I mean, patriots have been dominating the discussions for a few years now. But I know that Statistically, and I know a lot of female founders that have experienced some great inequalities and situations that really should not happen anymore in this day and age. Personally, there's certain encounters when I'm with a CTO events. They always think that he's the CEO of the company and that I work for him rather than the other way around. There's like smaller situations, but so far the advisors, mentors, founders that I've surrounded myself with did not make me feel like that in any way, apart from obviously the very smaller situations. So I suppose I've been lucky not to feel that type of pressure. And I've been an advocate for women-built tech as well. So I talk to a lot of female founders in tech that are fantastic at building it. And I'm also part of The Wing. The Wing is only in London in Europe, but hopefully they're going to take some place. But it's a fantastic co-working space that initially started as for women, but they're doing some great efforts to kind of level the play field. And I connected with some incredible females there, not just founders. And that's another thing that I feel like as a founder, you should not surround yourself with just founders and entrepreneurs. Meet people that are strong in all areas. And that opened my eyes at the wing because I met incredible journalists or like people in medicine or, you know, in all kinds of fields or fashion or creatives that are not necessarily in the tech startup world, but you learn so much from because they have completely different experiences from you and that you can leverage and kind of share. So that was one of the things. It's indeed not easy necessarily to be a female in tech, especially in certain discussions, but I feel like Boston is changing massively and that feeling doesn't exist as much as it used to be anymore.

SPEAKER_04: 38:45

What do you think about this, Tiana? You're obviously a woman in tech as well. I just

SPEAKER_01: 38:48

wanted to point out one more amazing point that Tiana mentioned there right now. When we talk about networking, we always talk about connecting to, as we say, like-minded people, people who are in the same field, like tech in this case, founders, startups. But we very often forget that we can learn so much and gain a perspective from people who are in different fields, like journalists or fashionistas, whatever you mentioned. But in general, also like small entrepreneurs developing like a bakery, you know, it's entrepreneurship as well. So I think it's really amazing what Oana is saying, that when we think about networking, we should try try to connect to various different people and regarding the issue of like female founders and I would say that it's getting better like I have many women that are founders I'm in touch with and I would say it is getting better for sure there are challenges because it's still a minority whenever you're a minority you you get attention sometimes good sometimes bad there is a lot of pressure there is a lot of imposter syndrome cases many things like that but I would say that it's getting better and these organizations like women in tech and different kinds of events that I also join sometimes I will also a member of One Mastermind for women entrepreneurs. And I think it helps because, you know, you just share a little bit, you feel stronger together and more free to maybe risk and try some things that you wouldn't normally if you would be a little alone. So I think that the support network is getting stronger and the situation is getting better. So I'm quite positive and nice to see the example of Oana for sure. Yeah, indeed. You're very

SPEAKER_02: 40:15

right.

SPEAKER_04: 40:16

Fantastic. All right. So you would recommend Boston as a startup ecosystem if somebody was going to do their first or their second startup Definitely,

SPEAKER_02: 40:25

yes. It's incredible, honestly. The amount of organizations and people that are willing to help and take time out of their schedules to give you valuable feedback. I'm really lucky to have started here. It's hard enough. Let's not make it harder. And

SPEAKER_04: 40:41

you mentioned at the start of the interview that you may be moving to a different city. Are you going to change your location now?

SPEAKER_02: 40:47

I feel like sometimes I'm very mean to myself. I put myself in very uncomfortable situations at all times. Every single time I feel a bit comfortable, I'm looking for the next challenge and may it be like professionally or personally. And I feel like once you move once, you can do it again. I think that I'm in the plan of looking at other possibilities where could this journey takes us next and also strategically for IntroVogue where what market would be very good for us to grow in the future as well. I'm focused obviously on building this successfully and making sure that my team is strong And at the end of the day, we're a technology company already being used in so many places of the world. So I travel a lot, but I do love traveling. So whatever is going to take me next.

SPEAKER_04: 41:33

So obviously, everybody on this call will have a recommendation about where you should go. But I'm just going to chip straight in there with Lisbon. Okay, just just so you've

SPEAKER_02: 41:40

got it.

SPEAKER_04: 41:43

Sorry if I stole your one there, Pedro, but I need to place it in there at the top of your list. All right. So but if you're choosing between Lisbon and Boston, for me, it's like there's nothing wrong with there. And there's nothing wrong with there. Is everything good? you know, you're not losing out on anything. Monica's making a vote for Prague there. I'm not sure, Monica, that you can compete with Lisbon, but I'm okay with Prague. It's a pretty cool place, right?

SPEAKER_05: 42:02

It's an

SPEAKER_04: 42:03

awesome place. I'm not sure what it's like for startups, right? Where would you recommend, Kiana? Where do you think Oana should go and grow this startup?

SPEAKER_01: 42:09

Definitely, you should visit Lisbon in spring. I spent a lot of time in Lisbon, usually in spring, and I plan to do the same this year. And we have Canopy headquarters over there, so I hope to see you there.

SPEAKER_02: 42:22

Yeah, I I love Lisbon and Portugal as a whole. I think it's an amazing country. I visited it in the summer and it was perfect.

SPEAKER_04: 42:29

Yeah, we're very lucky, right? Very lucky. So my thanks at the end of this call go to Steve Snyder at Gizmo for introducing us in the first place. It was very kind of him to connect us and that's led to all sorts of serendipity that's come off of that. So thank you, Steve, for watching today. So my last question for you is really simple. You know, it's kind of like the top tip thing, but it's if there's somebody who's a first time founder watching this call today, what do you going to tell him or her as the right thing to do as their first step? I mean, you've said you've just got to start, but what's the real thing you want to give them?

SPEAKER_02: 43:00

The first time is, I think it's important that if you're still working in a corporation and you're thinking what you should do, if you should make that jump, have the idea and validate it. It doesn't have to be a demo. It doesn't have to be something tangible, but validate it with the people and understand where the real need is and the then it's a leap of faith. Yeah, you'll just have to do it. It's going to be a roller coaster. It's going to be moments when you're going to think you're on top of the world and moments when you think nothing is working and all of this is happening within like 30 seconds. So just expect that a lot of that will happen and also be on top of your finances and on admin. I know it sounds boring, but make sure that you know how your company functions and equity and how you want to structure your company and also be realistic about your budget and how much money you have because you'll spend more than you think you will

SPEAKER_04: 43:57

okay thank you very much thank you Tiana thank you Pedro for joining and thank you everybody including Monica for joining on the audience really appreciate getting the gift of wisdom and experience that you've got to us today I want to thank you very much indeed

SPEAKER_02: 44:07

thank you so much for inviting me it's been great talking to you all

SPEAKER_04: 44:10

thank you see you everybody bon fin de semana bon fin de semana

SPEAKER_00: 44:14

cheers guys thank you for listening to the Founder Friday podcast series if you've enjoyed this episode please feel free to rate review and subscribe Thank you very much, everyone.