Welcome to this last episode of the series that I decided to call « I almost forgot why I got into tech »
In this series, I've shared already in the first three episodes:
* How I started, why I got into tech. If you remember: the magic, Apple, Steve Jobs (and so) on as a kid. 👦
* How I got lost as well as a freelancer wanting to always get more money.
* I also shared about the questions I asked myself to be really deeply aligned, have a "why" and have something to be ready to focus on for the next 10 years. This introspection phase that I did when I was alone.
* I've shared about the product that I want to do. The all-in-one B2B tool for content consumption.
Four big problems to solve:
* First of all, how professionals can better find good content?
* Second, how they can consume it in a better and smarter way.
* Third, how can we recall content when needed easily? And also smartly (thanks to AI).
* Fourth problem: How to leverage the content you consume for your work to:
* Become a better worker or a better entrepreneur
* Share with your colleagues the learnings that you got from the content you consumed: the books you read, the videos you watch the podcasts you listen to…
In this very last episode, I will go a bit deeper into the ideas and key differentiators that I have in mind, for this tool that I want to build.
And also share a bit about the type of company I want to build.
So for instance, is it VC backed? Do I want to raise funds? Do I want to bootstrap, do I want to hire people? Et cetera.
So again, we are talking about a tool that helps you consume content, read articles, watch videos listen to podcasts in an all-in-one tool that is really simple, powered by AI…
And... A B2B tool, actually.
Why B2B?
Why is it interesting to address companies, instead of just individuals?
There are two reasons for that:
1. It makes a ton of sense from the user experience point of view
If we are talking about professional content: things you are watching just because you love your job, and you're curious about how to get better, how to improve as a professional…
Well, to me, that sounds logical that you want to have all of that centralized in a single tool and not mixed with memes that you could see on Twitter (for instance) just, after a super interesting Tweet that could serve your career.
You can think about this tool as a filter that acts as your safe place on the internet when you want to consume content… That will actually be interesting and useful for you.
What's nice is that right now we have ways to analyze content beforehand, and to make sure that content is filtered out if it's not something interesting.
(Of course, consuming memes, and anything funny is cool — I have nothing against that.)
But one of the problems (the first problem that I've identified) is that people struggle to filter out the noise and find signals on the internet (when it comes to professional content, again).
For that reason, I believe that creating a specific tool for that specific purpose is really interesting.
The tool to augment Specific Knowledge
Speaking about specific reminds me of what Naval calls “Specific Knowledge”, and basically the tool is the tool to augment specific knowledge.
Not only your specific knowledge but the specific knowledge of the entire company you are building, working at…
2. Sharing is caring
And this is precisely where it gets awesome actually to me, because not only do you have a tool that centralizes and simplifies everything when it comes to consuming content for your career.
I believe that sharing this knowledge (not only capturing it for you, but also sharing it with your colleagues) and being able to take action from it is precisely what the tool should be helping you to do.
An example: highlighting a podcast, and sharing Gems
Let's say you are listening to a podcast with a ton of insights that could be useful for you at some point in your work.
Well, the thing you can imagine is that you can highlight this podcast.
(So yes, you can highlight audio because we have a universal highlighting system… But that's not it!)
I believe that the end vision of the tool is that not only does it help you take action from those highlights…
… Meaning that you can have them automatically transformed, re-written and available in your Notion, as if you were writing notes while listening to the episode.
(That's the first step.)
But not only you can get insights and capture knowledge faster, better, and stronger.
But you can also share it with your team, your colleagues, and people working with you and around you.
What you can imagine, is to have a feed for your team or your company with all the gems, all the highlights from every content that everyone at the company consumed recently.
The extracted knowledge gets shared and everyone can easily access it and eventually make it something actionable and useful for work.
This way, the whole company's knowledge increases faster.
At the end of the day (in my opinion) it is one of the most important things for companies: to have their employees getting better every day. Getting smarter, and getting more efficient at work.
Nowadays, the way we're doing this (at least in the tech industry) is precisely by consuming content (and the podcast is a really good example of that).
So I won't get much into the details of the other differentiators, because I want also just to show, to make it live, not to tell that much.
But AI in my opinion should not be "on top" of an existing tool. Meaning, the tool is AI-native and leverages AI for anything, actually that is done inside the tool:
* Whether it is to filter out the noise (as we discussed previously) but also to help with consuming content, extracting knowledge, and even sharing it with colleagues.
And finally, the third differentiator (that has not been done yet) that doesn't exist either on the market, is that there isn't a tool that is really universal.
→ That works with any content source and any format, with all the tools that we are used to use for content consumption.
And I believe that the day we have that tool that works with anything is AI-native, universal, and B2B, we will win.
And that will not be a small win. But a really big one.
Of course, that's not happening tomorrow and that's also one of the reasons I think it's really cool to work on that.
So that's a wrap on the idea of making it awesome for individuals, but specifically for individuals working within companies, so they can:
* Not only get the most from any content they consume in a professional goal
* But also share it with their colleagues, and thus augment the whole company's intelligence.
What kind of company?
Finding balance
Is it bootstrapped? Is it alone? VC-backed, with funds, or anything?
Of course, this is one of the most difficult questions to answer.
And something that I find also super difficult is to find a balance and I believe that those questions are all about balance actually.
I think it is useless to say,
"Okay, so we are a 100% bootstrap company, and this will never change”
Because if you need or, have the opportunity to raise funds, and that it is interesting for you and your company, well, why prevent yourself from doing so?
Profitability = infinite runway
But I still believe that creating a profitable company that makes revenue and creates an infinity runway is the best way to go.
Another thing that I find stupid is always wanting more and raising too much funds, at stupid valuation (just because it's fancy).
I really want to play long-term and keep the company alive for as long as possible.
Even if it doesn't make a lot of revenue or doesn't have a really fast and impressive growth in the beginning because we don't have the money to spend to accelerate or anything.
I want to create something healthy that runs on the long term and to do so, you don't need a lot of money.
…But still getting help
But I also think that I need help. And I want to have a team around me.
Because it's almost impossible to create a product that is really (really) awesome alone, bootstrapped — without any help.
Plus (to be honest) I don't have the experience of building such products.
So I will need to learn from the best, again.
And for that, I think a bit of money is necessary.
🌱 A seed, a test
So the goal for me is to raise a first-round - seed - with business angels, mostly.
With people really interested in the subjects, that could be helpful for the company and interesting for us to have on board.
Many people in the tech industry are interested in it.
If you are someone interested in this and the business angel feel free to reach out. You can email me at any time: [email protected]
Let's build a first product.
Let's keep discussing with customers and users. Let's stay as close as possible from them and in one to three years, we'll have a first idea of how we execute, if the market is big enough, interesting enough, what the traction is like.
And many, many, many more things, I guess.
Hiring or not hiring?
I guess you guessed it. As I said, I need help. So that means recruiting people.
But I believe that hiring to much can be one of the biggest trap you can fall into when you start your company, or start to grow, especially if you raise money.
So I want to be really careful with that.
And I am also convinced that you really don't need to have a big team to create big things.
Especially now (with AI) because we can leverage it to automate so much things — and it is only going to get faster and faster.
I even heard a podcast recently that was sharing about the idea of a billion-dollar company with three employees, only. That is pretty awesome when you think about it.
The example: Customer.io
But more seriously the company I really want to take an example from is Customer.io.
It's a B2B mailing too, and they created a specific term for how they built the company.
Really nice company, with more than 50 millions in annual recurring revenue, really awesome, full-remote.
You won't hear much about Customer.io, but believe me they're doing really well.
The product is awesome, the culture is awesome. That's really my example.
« Fundstrapping »
I have a huge admiration for Customer.io's CEO, and he invented a term for how he built his company because Customer.io raised funds, but as little as possible and really in a smart and healthy way, in my opinion.
They raised at the beginning and after that, they always strove to become profitable as quickly as possible and I believe that it's simply the right thing to do.
So "Fundstrapping": awesome idea.
And there are many more examples, like Figma, Notion who grew really in a healthy way without hiring our fundraising too much too early.
Just creating a nice product, reaching Product Market Fit, and then raising to accelerate growth. Not to kickstart everything or like burn cash (or I don't even know exactly why).
Conclusion on hiring people: getting help means recruiting people.
But again, not too much. Not too crazy.
I want to create a small, unique, remote, but really humanly connected and supportive team. I believe that things are nice when everyone (more or less) knows everyone else in the company.
That's also more human to me… to have People who know each other, basically.
A long-term game, with long-term people
Because simply, I just want to share the adventure.
I believe we are tackling an amazing problem to address. That will be super important to solve in the next decade.
So if you are interested or if you know someone (or if you know someone who knows someone…) feel free to reach out and to discuss.
I'm searching (first) for a technical co-founder.
Even though I've learned coding recently, I still need to learn.
I don't have enough experience to create something that will work at scale.
I believe I will be involved directly in coding on this startup, but I still need help from a technical confounder.
And I want to share that adventure, that mindset, that vision with someone that will be beside me tackling these issues I've been discussing in those fourth first episodes.
And eventually one marketer
To share our message, story, and values with as many people as possible, because if we just spread the word, we've already done half of the path. Even before creating the solution.
And finally: a founding product designer/manager that is also concerned by the problems we want to solve, and interested in this.
So again, if you know someone or know someone who knows someone, please call me.
The idea is to be here in 10 years, doing the same thing.
I'm able to say that because it is the thing that makes the most sense to me anyway.
And I know that because of the introspection I did and shared with you as well. I hope this is at least a bit inspiring for you. You might want to do that solo trip to Asia as well, to answer those deep questions inside you.
But yeah, I will search in this space for a while. Pivot, if needed. And try again and again, for as long as possible, basically.
Try. Fail. Pivot. Repeat.
Maybe the product market fit will not come from a better reader. Maybe it will. I don't know. I know it's hard to monetize such products.
And right now, my main focus is content consumption, because I believe that it is the biggest paradox right now. But it could be about so many different things.
Like creating the entire suite of tools to have employees more focused and healthier in their digital lives.
So here, I'm thinking about feed blockers, even app blockers... But again, in B2B.
Also, of course, when you speak about consuming content, you have “the other side” which is creators. And creators are massively paying for tools to help them publish and create content.
Working on anything else closely related to having a healthier digital life or learning better is interesting to me. And I will be super happy to work on that anyway.
And by the way, startups work like that. Pivoting is nice and the best stories we know about startups are often about pivoting, as well.
The most important criteria is (by far) the team.
I'm of course still in this position (and I will always be) of learning.
If there is one thing that I know is that I know nothing.
The content consumption paradox:
There is this sentence that says:
You are what you eat.
And content is food for the brain, basically.
So what you consume is what you think.
And what you think is also who you are.
A generation of unfocused workers.
Trapped by their own curiosity
The problem is that we lost intentionality when it comes to consuming content.
We scroll endlessly and mindlessly.
And consuming too much content, and having too much information has made me sick. Several times.
And I know that it's making people sick more and more, as well.
But the paradox is that 95% of what I've learned comes from this content I consumed.
And I deeply believe that the best learnings come from experience and curiosity that you have.
And so… From consuming content.
I mean, it's real, you're not the average of the 5 people you spend the most of your time with anymore.
Because today we almost consume as much content as we discuss with people.
You are the average of the five creators you are most consuming content from.
That's facts.
My end goal is to build the B2B tool for that.
* Slack is how your company shares messages.
* Notion is how your company shares documents.
* But there is nothing for how your company shares insights.
For how employees consume content, collect knowledge, and share it together.
That's what this is all about. Nothing more. ❤️
Final thoughts
I have in front of me a quote from Naval Ravikant (again):
Learn to sell, learn to build. You'll be unstoppable.
And when I look backward, I think I'm not good either at selling or building.
But at something weird at the edge of both. And this is what “Growth” is all about.
Well, at least I know that I'm not bad at growing B2B companies (because of my previous experience).
And there are those problems I want to solve, that we discussed. That never have been really solved. Or at least only tried in B2C.
So that looks like an opportunity… And I am jumping on it!
And I will be documenting my journey every week on this podcast.
Now that's a promise that I do to myself — today. And to you.
See you in 100 episodes.
Bye.
Victor
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