Startup Foundations

Melissa Pancoast is the founder and CEO of The Beans, an app helping people manage their finances in stressfree way. Melissa actually started her career as a teacher, but eventually left that behind to study how people think and feel about money at Oxford. Partially as a result of the she ended up starting The Beans, which is aimed to simplify financial management for middle-class Americans.

In our conversation with Melissa we talk about why she decided to name her Startup “The Beans”, and how is her product different from many other fintech products in the personal finance management space.

We also talk about Melissa’s background, her stint as a teacher, working for early-stage digital health startup, founding an AI-focused venture fund Comet Labs and studies at Oxford, where she researched how people interact with money. We talk in depth about reasons why fin-tech still hasn’t quite solved the finance management problem for many people, and how impactful solving number one stressor in America could be.

Melissa takes us through her experiences of looking for a co-founder, finding one, and eventually splitting up. She also talks about her takeaways from the fundraising process and shares valuable tips for founders out there who are at the beginning of their journey.

Kerry Schrader is the CEO and co-founder of Mixtroz, a mobile app boosting event engagement by helping attendees make virtual and in-person connections. Kerry is the 37th black female founder to ever raise $1M+ in a venture-backed pre-seed round.

We talk about what Mixtroz is, how it works and how event organizers can use it to boost their gathering’s engagement. Kerry details the inner workings of the app, and how it can be customized to fit different scenarios and use cases.

Kerry shares an amazing backstory behind Mixtroz, and how the idea for the app was born over a phone conversation with her daughter Ashley (now her co-founder). We dig deeper into how Kerry, as a non-technical co-founder, has found developers to carry out her vision for the product.

Kerry also shares interesting insights about the startup ecosystem in Birmingham, Alabama, and discusses her many experiences with fundraising for Mixtroz, winning a couple of pitching competitions, and getting into a startup accelerator. We talk about the fundraising landscape for female founders of color and why certain things get more funded than others.

Alec Hartman is the co-founder and CEO of Welcome Homes, a startup streamlining the way people buy homes online. Alec was also a co-founder in a now publicly traded company Digital Ocean, that provides cloud infrastructure that helps businesses build and scale software applications.

Alec, a Florida native, talked to us about the evolution of the startup ecosystem in Miami and Florida, and how both city and the state situation have changed for tech people over the recent years.

Alec also discusses the origin story of Welcome Homes and shares a detailed market analysis that made him and his team start the company in a space that very few startups ever dare to disrupt. We go over the business rationale behind creating a company that builds customizable homes that are available to purchase online.

We also discuss how Alec’s company is making contractors’ lives easier and what level of technology people expect in their homes at the moment. Alec also shares his valuable insights regarding the housing market in the times of remote work and discusses how regulatory compliance and municipal codes impact the pricing and feasibility of certain homes.

We also talk about Alec’s startup journey, early days of tech in NYC and how Techstars program helped him build Digital Ocean.

Natalie Barbu is the co-founder and CEO of Rella, a startup building software to help influencers and content creators manage and expand their business. Natalie is also an experienced content creator, with over 350,000 followers across platforms like Youtube and Instagram.

We talked to Natalie about how the idea for Rella came about, and how her background as a content creator and influencer helped her find the right pain-points to solve. We also dive deeper into the life of content creators and discuss the ins and outs of the business, along with the landscape of tools offered by different social media platforms.

Natalie also shares her thoughts on the evolution, growth and the future of influencer marketing and discusses some of the problematic aspects of the business, like analytics. Natalie also talks about meeting her co-founders and how she managed to start a software company, without prior technical experience.

This time on Startup Foundations we speak with Luke Deka, the CEO and co-founder of Growbots, a Polish startup building software to automate outbound email outreach and streamline lead generation for SMBs.

Luke talks to us about the in’s and out’s of Growbots product, and how their software is helping companies automate and scale their sales efforts. We also discuss the origin story of Growbots, and how it evolved over the years, trying out different strategies for customer acquisition, fundraising and the product development.

Luke and Greg also talk about the art of pricing your product the right way, and Luke shares the pricing changes they went through as a company and what eventually helped them bring their bottom line in shape.

We also delve deeper into the startup ecosystem in Poland, and how the landscape for startups has evolved over the years. We cover the challenges of running an European startup in the US, and discuss interesting startups coming out of Poland.

Christina Gilbert is a co-founder of OneSchema, a Y-Combinator-backed startup working on data importing tools for SaaS companies. OneSchema was a part of the YC’s S21 cohort, and ever since has been gaining a lot of traction, supplying a well-researched product, that solves many pain points for “system of record” companies that deal with extensive databases.

Christina talks to us about the customer base or OneSchema, and delves deeper into the features of their product. She also speaks on the process of finding her co-founder, Andrew Luo, and the origin story behind OneSchema.

We discuss the challenges of building data import tools and the future roadmap for OneSchema, including building multi-file data migrations. Christina also shares her thoughts the value of going through Y Combinator and how it’s been helpful in getting their first customers for OneSchema.

Christina also tells us how they were able to gain significant traction quickly and walks us through their product discovery process for OneSchema, and shares useful insights regarding fundraising and product building.

Richard White is a serial entrepreneur, founder & CEO of Fathom and previously User Voice. Richard’s current company is a Y-Combinator backed startup, working on a video plugin that enables recording and managing highlights from Zoom calls.

In our conversation with Richard, we dig deeper into his current venture Fathom Video. We talk about the problem its trying to solve, which is, simply put, note-taking during sales and customer support calls. Richard also discusses potential use cases for their software and addresses the risks related to building a product that is so closely connected to one specific platform.

We also discuss Richard’s fascinating startup journey, which starts with working on Kiko along with Justin Kan and Emmet Shear (who went on to found Twitch), going through the very first Y Combinator batch in 2005, selling Kiko on eBay for quarter million dollars, and eventually founding his first company User Voice.

The User Voice days were still early days of startups in general, and Richard tells hilarious story of finding one of his co-founders on Craigslist. He also speaks on the division of labour between him and other co-founders, building the first MVP, incorporating and their first fundraising efforts.

Richard also talks about his experience of doing Y Combinator as a repeat founder and shares battle-tested advice to first-time founders.

Jayce Hafner is the CEO and co-founder of FarmRaise, a startup streamlining the process for agricultural grants and funding. As someone who grew up on a family’s farm, Jayce knows how difficult getting farm funding can be. Hence her decision to build FarmRaise and improve the access to funding for modernizing farm operations.

In our conversation with Jayce, we dig deeper into the funding situation of small and medium American farms, as well as Jayce's story and how she ended up building FarmRaise.

Jayce talks about how she met her co-founder while doing MBA research for her agricultural business studies, and how they've eventually decided to found FarmRaise. Jayce also shares how they've been able to leverage social media to get the initial traction with their customers.

We also discuss the innovation happening in the agricultural space, and what software tools are useful for farmers. Jayce shares her insights regarding the future of the agriculture and food tech industry and highlights the most important challenges lying ahead of us.

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Nathan Morris is the co-founder and Chief Culture Officer of Filevine, a legal-tech company building software solutions to help law firms manage their clients’ projects and documents. Nathan was a practicing attorney before realizing how many processes in the legal space can be improved with digitization. He decided to start Filevine along with fellow legal practitioners Jim Blake and Ryan Anderson, and solve many problems that came with an out-of-date way of doing things.

In our conversation we discuss the initial vision behind Filevine, how the Iron Man movies inspired the original MVP, and how Nathan’s company got their first paying customers. We also discuss the importance of customer feedback and the balancing act between staying on track with the product vision and satisfying feature requests from customers.

Nathan also shares how they approached convincing legacy software users to switch, and speaks on the evolution and future of products in the legal tech space. We also discuss Filevine’s acquisition of Outlaw, and how Nathan views the challenge of integrating another company’s technology and culture into your own.

Ema Rouf is the co-founder of pave.dev - a fintech startup building cashflow API to analyze risk and build financial experiences. We talk about what pave.dev is building, and how their API helps other fintech companies understand and process their consumers’ financial data.

Ema also shares the founding story of pave.dev, and takes us back to her ad tech days, where she worked with her husband on social shopping widgets for Facebook. Ema also shares her take on what it's like being married to your co-founder and how that influences fundraising.

We also chat about the process of building pave.dev during the pandemic, getting the first customers, and what's next on the roadmap.