Timing is everything w/ Nash Ahmed

is gonna be there. All the smoke's gonna be there, Black Tech, Green Money's gonna be there. Get tickets today at black Effact dot com, Forward Last Podcast Festival. Will Lucas here. We're gonna go back just a little bit and introduced to my guy Nash, a man who's a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Undocked, an AI meeting platform built for the future of work, and he embought a year so ago. He raised a one point six million dollars seed round to put some fuel

in the tank to grow the business. And I asked Nash, but how previously before he found it Undocked, He found himself running multiple small businesses at one time, and how running those businesses led him to founding this company. Yeah, the second wave of multiple businesses was running into because they're all tangentially related. So I was in the telecommunications industry and there would be an opportunity. I'm like, well, this business doesn't do it, but it looks easy enough.

It looks like there's a lot of money in this so uh yeah, I'm gonna try it. I'm gonna try it, and I end up starting to businesses. One was a voice over IP company and the other it was an infrastructure company, so literally installing the fiber optic cable that

runs to your house. Um, you believe as I've read in the concept of shipping fast and getting getting your thing out into the wild as quickly as possible, And how important, how important has been has building in the public eye, you know, and making mistakes in public you know, and iterating in full view been to the success you've

achieved so far. It's the best for saying function you could have, especially for someone like me who has two major problems with giving things to the world that you're building. I uh, procrastinate and I'm a perfectionist, right so that gives me every reason to say this is not ready for consumption yet. So I have songs that I've made ten years ago or started ten years ago, and I'm like, that trumpet is not hitting. Do it again, do it again,

find another person to play this melody like. So doing something in public with like public deadlines is huge for me. I've started doing that. You'll see we we had an event November twelve. We're having another event, uh February seventeen. We're having another event uh May twelve. So whatever I'm planning, it's going to happen, and it has to happen because it's out in the public eye. So it's a very good forcing function for me to make sure that I

keep building and delivering and not waiting for perfection. So so you encourage people too, even if they haven't, you know, told the world the whole thing, put it out. I have not that something is happening on this day. Yes, I've only given uh tidbits of the big picture publicly, but like I said, I'm calling it progressive disclosure of

what the startup UH fully is. So I encourage just even if you start with your your friends and your family, just telling them like, hey, I'm working on this, So the next time you speak, we're gonna say, hey, Will, how's that thing you're working on going? And that's just more motivation to to put it out there for sure? Do you think that's just for people who have, you know,

this idea, they's got to be perfect? Or do you do you encourage anybody you know, whether or not they they're going a hundred miles an hour thus miles an hour, or if they're just afraid to put it out who do you think? Who do you advise that too? Well, I'll tell your idea is definitely not going to be perfect. There's a high likelihood that your idea is going to be wrong and you're gonna end up building something else. So that's why you kind of have to just get started.

But if you're a person that has a lot of ideas like I did, at least spend a little bit of time filtering through those ideas and putting some logic and reasoning behind why you think this idea of yours is better than the next idea. There is no excuse to ever work on an idea that isn't your best idea. If you don't think it's your best idea. If you don't think it's your biggest idea, if you don't think it's your thing that's going to get you widespread impact,

don't work on that one. Work on your best idea, period. And that's what I did. It took me almost a year talking about procrastination and perfectionists to select which startup I actually wanted to work on, and then when I narrowed it down to two, I launched them or I registered them both and was planning to work on them simultaneously until I can make a decision. So I have that like crippling disorder where I just like, yeah, but I selected on DOC, and uh, that was the right

decision for sure. I want to dig in on that because you know, I think that's a really, really good piece of advice and to only work on your best idea. So I would imagine there's like two groups of people. That's people who have they know what that best idea and there's people who are trying to figure out what that best idea is. Um for those ones that are trying to figure out, I would imagine you would say work on things like you did until you figure out

which one is the best idea. How do you know when it's the best ideas because you came up with, oh, this is the this is the one I want to do, or the market told you right. Uh, it could be either or sometimes you have to do have to go

with your gut. But for me, it was a lot of It was almost fifty different ideas and websites that I had started, and for me, it was which one do I genuinely think can have the biggest impact, the biggest distribution, and then the biggest financial outcome for myself and also one that I was excited to work on. It was a big problem for myself and it was

on the back burner for quite some time. And then I'm literally living the experience where like I need to solve this problem that I have and nothing else exists. That was a moment for me that was like, Okay, I need to build something and I've already had this idea and now I'm going to execute on that. So yeah, not all of your ideas are good. So I can easily look back at a third of those ideas and say they are holy trash? Right now? Is this because you you found out later they were trash? How did

you go through that process of distance so recently. Bias is something that you deal within data, but it's also something you deal with with yourself. That that moment, that initial in sighting moment that you come up with any idea you're like, yeah, that sounds good. Revisit that idea in six months to see if you're like, Okay, I mean it's cool, I guess, or maybe somebody might do it, but uh yeah, giving it some time to marinate is

very important. UM, talk about this a building a startum, not specifically undocked, but period step by step, because if I understand, UM, what's your opportunity was with undock was you know? Cale Calendar synchronization is just the first step in master plan, I would imagine, right, And I read

a story about where you come out. You came out the gate thinking you could replace all the big boys like Gmail, Slack, you, Zoom, Trelo, you know immediately and but how important is it for startups to take out chunks on their journey and as they do the smaller things well scale from there. I think that's huge. That's one of the biggest lessons that I learned because I was stubborn in the beginning, I was like, no, I know, I know, I can build this huge platform that's going

to be better than all of them. And one investor reached out to me and was interested, and they said, but you're competing with X, y Z before you've even released your product. It's like, you don't much money you're gonna need. This doesn't sound realistic, And I didn't believe him. Then I was like, no, I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do it. It took me a good six to nine months before I started to pare down the

short term scope of the product. And you're just you're just limited in in capital, you're limited in engineering resources, you're limited in time. You're limited in how well you can solve more than one problem. Like calendar ing and scheduling is such a deep, deep, nuanced problem. But I could spend the next ten years if I wanted to building the best scheduling or calendar application, if I thought that was the most valuable thing. So, uh, it's really

really tough. And this is another thing where if you take a step back from it. So if I would have started and say, hey, here's my big idea, and then started working on it, just take a step back for like a week and talk about the realities of building this giant, monolithic app. It wasn't going to happen out of the gate. It was gonna a long, long, long,

long time. And if I would have actually made that decision to pare it down even three months sooner, two months sooner, a month sooner, I could be a month, two months, three months, five months, six months further along. So definitely definitely recommend that we're still building a really big application, um, but not quite as big just yet.

So how do you advise other entrepreneurs and even yourself looking back and in that discipline, because I would imagine you think, well, if I just build this little nugget, like what, how does that make progress in the marketplace when people have all these other options. Yeah, for me, it was definitely just like pure hubrists thinking I got this not out and I'm hearing from multiple people just like, hey, just just strink it a little bit, like I was doing. Email.

Email is so so so hard to build, and there are companies that are have spent like Superhumans are really good email application. They've been buil holding it for five, six, seven years and they're still improving just email. UM. For for me, I guess I probably wouldn't assume most people are just overly competent in their ability to build something like that. They just might think it's a really good

idea and someone should do it. And you see that a lot like the all in one solution is like the first thing UH founders gravitate to because like, oh, I have all these problems. What if I build one thing that solves all these problems? And that's usually going

to be the wrong solution. UM. One thing I love, UM that I've I've read that you've said before is you know, entrepreneurs need to learn how to talk about their business, right and UM, And that there's a difference between talking how you talk about your business at a bootstrapping stage, um, and versus when you're at a fundraising stage.

And so let's take this step by step. So, how how can entrepreneurs at the bootstrapping stage, and even those who don't plan to raise maybe they're building a lifestyle company, UM, how can they learn to introduce their product or their company to other people who have no idea what they're doing. Yeah, I'm actually going through a third phase and I'm I'm I don't say recalculating, I am studying this phase and learnings like in uh put it down in writing and

repeat it later down the line. I'll get into that in a second. But the first thing I think you need to do is have and I say this to a lot of founders that I meet with, is have something really exciting about what you're building, even if it's like a sock company or something. Have something really really exciting for you, exciting way to tell it to your your friends, exciting way to tell it to potential customers.

It has to be. There's so much noise out there in the world that if your thing isn't exciting, it's never going to take off. So find something exciting about your your business. Uh. I spent a lot of time in my accelerator working on a one line description of the company, and that like her sometimes like, but no, I can't just say all of it in one line. But find something exciting about your business that you can

iterate in one line. You can message somebody to say, Hey, this is what I'm building and they're like, oh, really, really really cool. So that's like the first hurdle, Like, is it something that's exciting for people, and that doesn't always play like if you're a climate tech company, that's

only going to excite a certain number of people. But if you're building a consumer app or a B two B app, something has to be exciting about what you're building in the in the early bootstrapping phase, it helps you stay positive about your idea. It helps you track interest from customers, and helps you recruit employees too. I had the easiest time recruiting. I still have a pretty easy time recruiting when we talk about what we're building. UM,

So I think that's really important. But when you move into the fundraising stage, before you get it, before you get there. So let's look that's because it's really interesting when you said, you know, you spent you know a lot of time just working on one sentence at least six weeks. Wow. Yeah, And it changed and it fluctuated, and in the times you get frustrated and you're like why am I doing this? I think after week three and I was like, I'm not changing this sentence again,

Like it doesn't matter, it does not matter. And ultimately that one sentence wasn't what turned into business excitement or fundraising all other stuff, but it was able. It was giving you an opportunity to distill what you're working on. If you cannot distill it in one sentence, is going to be very hard to get people excited. So and I would imagine and it's every word matters. When when you're down to one sentence, yes, we learned, uh better,

fewer words, right, and try to enroll some excitement. So actually, don't even use the line anymore. But it was a line that worked over and over and over again. Yeah. It was instantly scheduled meetings without ever looking at a calendar, right, and then just wrinkles people's brain like what do you wait? How instant meeting schedule of no calendar? Tell me more?

Every single time. And I was in a cohort with twelve other companies, and when I would give that line, regardless of the audience, room full of investors, potential customers, partners, all the questions, not all, some of the questions, A good chunk of the questions would come to me because it piqued their interests, like this is a problem. You stated what the problem was, You tell me how fast you're gonna do it, and then you gave me this novel away that's just like wrinkling my brain and I

don't like quite understand. I figure out, what what is this? What is this? And I used that over and over and over and over and over and over again. And I did use it like in my demo investor pitch, like as a one liar to start it. And I also used it in our our launch thing, but from like month four, two months, seven, eight, nine, ten, didn't use it at all. But it was like the starting for it's the kindling, right, and I can always refer back to that too. And did that one line that's

six weeks that you spent on that one line? Where how much progress did you make? Like did you raise your first dollar with that? Like? Where did it get you? No?

Did not raise the first dollar. Um, it got me a lot of places because the way I was talking about the business going into the accelerator was it was not great, it was not great, and I was trying to fit a mouthful in and and say that this this this this this this this this this this this um it gave me uh again, like good framing and good confidence when I delivered that line, and it was

the lead in for my investments. So when we started doing our presentations to investors and we had a demo day, like that was the like the thing that people remember about that, well, two lines that people remembered about the presentation. So I think it put me in a really good place going into the investment. And if everybody, anybody asked, you know, what is it you're working on, which is a common question you get, it's also like an accelerated question.

They say what are you working on? And they always want a one sentence answer. That's the answer you give. And so how how much would you estimate that most opportunities are lost because people don't spend that time working on that You're you're losing of people even just from like the fact that they're no longer going to pay attention to whatever it is coming out of your mouth. After that, it's it's like eyes glazing over, not interested.

And there's some people and this is again I was one of those people that you'll ask for like, hey, what is it you're working on? And then they're the only answer they can give you is like a five minute answer. Actually said this for probably a good six to nine months when I started the business. It's like I can't explain what I'm working on in a couple of sentences. But if you give me an hour, I guarantee you're gonna want to use the product and invest.

And they're like, yeah, but you're not. You're not You're not not getting an hour here. So um, it's very it's very very very important. It'll change, it evolve. It doesn't necessarily matter if that's the one right intents, but the fact that you're able to distill what you do and make it exciting and interesting in one sense, that you can use that over and over and over. And

that's what the accelerator made us do. So whenever we met a new mentor new potential partner, customer, or investor, like that was the line, and that that was the line that was critiqued. So by the end of it, anybody that came into for critiquing just said, yeah, it's good, I'm interested to tell me more. And that's all you want. Your goal of telling people what your businesses or what you're doing is for them to say, tell me more. Okay.

What's the different thing about the raising stage, about how you talk about your business. It starts with that ability, and that's something that investors will look at if you have the ability to, you know, succinctly distill what you're working on. But the conversation with investors is not the conversation you have with your friends and your family. It's not the conversation that you eventually ultimately have with customers

are already having with customers. They want to know about potential scale, right, They want to know about differentiation in the market. They want to know about your go to market, and they want to know that you have deep, deep, deep, deep deep product insights and know about your industry. And it's not about like listing off a bunch of facts that you read online. Is having a deep, deep, deep understanding of that. And that's one thing, but then you

have to learn how to convey that to investors. So we had our first two weeks of meetings with investors and it was like, oh, that's cool, that's cool, Not for us right now, not for us right now. And we almost considered like backing the truck up and waiting a few months to fundraise. Just kept getting at going

after it getting better refined. We would have like game day breakdowns of our investor calls after the call happened like, Okay, that answer was terrible, that answer was really long, that answer was irrelevant, that answer was not compelling. You have to be that real with yourself every single time, for his long until you start to get that interest, until those conversations start to go well. And that's what we

were doing. Breakdown if you had a twenty minute call or an hour long call, even if the call went great and they said they were interested, or if they're like, let keep us in a loop, same thing. Break it down what went well, what didn't go well. Some people suggest even writing down all the questions that you had, recording all the answers, listening back to that I didn't

do it. You know that deeply, have a pretty good memory, and I'm I'm brutal with myself, Like I'll get off a call an investoral like smile or say okay, cool, I get that to an answer, I'll say that was a terrible answer. That was a terrible, terrible, terrible answer. You have to be that real with yourself. I want to talk about more specifically on doc in the Future, that you saw when you started building this um so covid. You rarely get these moments when you're building something and

the world just accelerates to the future. You imagine gend when you thought of the idea, right, and um, so talk to me about how the pandemic and COVID remote work plays into your startup success because you've been building this for however long in the world just shot ahead, you know, eight years or ten years. It was wild. Like in my pitch deck before I started pitching investors was essentially the pitch deck to get into an accelerator.

I was talking about the future of remote and distributed work, and I say, it's coming, it's coming, It's on the rise. I know it's a small percentage, but it's coming. And when it gets here, it's here to stay. And I had like charts talking about seven And then we go to this accelerator. We come out of the accelerator, we start fundraising, and in the middle of a pandemic where everyone is literally forced to work at home, that end and of itself is not enough for market change and correction.

The reason it's so poignant and important for us is that it's better. It's just flat out better. It's a better And it was an eventuality that we were going to get to at some point there's a reason some people work from home because it was better for not for everyone, better for them. And I think eighty percent of knowledge work can be done remotely. So of the mean, not the fortune fire proners, not knowledge work, but eighty percent of knowledge workers will work remotely. That's fifty million

people in the United States that can work remotely. That's a third of the workforce right there. But now you're seeing people in other industries figure out how to work remotely. Like you would never think telemedicine could be a huge market, You would never think remote therapy could be a huge market. You would never think yoga would be a huge market online. But now you're discovering that, hey, I can get the

same thing. We're very similar, maybe even at a better cost, easier distribution for the vendors have to leave my house, right That is what's going to happen. That is going to be a large percentage of how work, entertainment is consumed and delivered in the future. And it just so happens that we're building a startup with that in mind, and then the pandemic happened. How do you how then

do you sell the future? Let me put it this way, so is it then pre covid you are specifically looking for investors who already get that this is coming, you know, like a freight train, or are you trying to convince people like, look, this is happening and then you come out with your data and then you that's your power point. Right, Oh no, there's there's definitely convincing. I can tell you.

We got into this accelerator. We got investment for this concelerator on the premise that we're building software that's for scheduling meetings and hosting meetings, which is good for anyone, but particularly for remote and distributed teams, was our premise. Right. We heard from people within the accelerator early on before the pandemic. We would bring up the remote aspect and distribute aspect. They would say, I don't buy that. It's a very small segment of the market. I'm like, I

know today, right, but just compare the two experiences. It's going to come. It's going to happen in some large percentage, not but six. Even if it was you're talking about taking the market and quadrupling it in the next two years or something. Even if it's right, it's going to be much much much larger than that now that people have experienced it, And I thought it would take a hundred years, a hundred years to get to the place where it's just normal because it's better, and I'm an

efficiency guy. It's more if I don't have to commute, Yeah, three or four days out of the week, why right, So, yeah, there was still some So we had people that believed in the product, didn't necessarily believe that remote and distributed work was the future or that it was anywhere near closed to happen. You probably have same skeptics on the like the self driving which is proven to be true.

They'll say, you know, self driving cars or two or three years away, and then you have a skeptics saying, yeah, you're ten fifteen years away from that being a reality. That just keeps happening, keeps happening, keeps happening, and it will keep happening until somebody says we're gonna have a self driving car in two years, and then detractor is gonna say you won't for ten years, and then two

years later self driving cars are on the roof. That's what's happening for us right now with remote work, And so what are some of those keys you learned about selling the future to people who might be skeptics early that other people can apply to their journey. I'm still learning, and it's a challenge to sell people on things that they either don't believe or have an experience, or think it's a far, far far away future, right And I think the going back to building excitement number one is

very very important. Then also give them something that's familiar to them, like build a bridge to the eventuality of it, like right now on my website. And I do this intentionally. I don't talk about remote work, I don't talk about distributed work. I talk about you have a problem scheduling meetings because of calendar application. That's going to help you with that. But they don't realize and they will in the next four months when we have our big, big

big unveil what part of the movement they're joining. But right now, for us, we do focus on early what we call early innovators, sorry innovators and early adopters. Those are people that are willing to use this type of product, they're using something similar already, or they know they have a problem, they're willing to try anything to solve it and you need to focus on that segment for as

long as humanly possible. So again, even if you're selling like sucks, don't go to Miami as your first market and try to convince them that sucks. Help checked your feet for whatever reason, because that's not the person you want to talk to. You go to like Minnesota or Alaska and sell your socks right out. The socks companies, by the way, are our counterparts are non melinated friends.

UM don't have as much trouble raising a million dollars plus as we do, and so many of us get stuck at raising nothing or you know, getting a twenty on a check or maybe a five hundred thousand not a seed round. Um. And as you've come through this recently successfully, you know raising your one point six million, walk me through the process you activated to get that million plus that you find other people get stuck at.

I'm always clear when I when I say this, I did not run a process, and I don't have the best of advice for garnering interest from investors. I can give your advice about talking to them, but my process was essentially, Hey, I'm working on this really cool thing and it's super futuristic. And like it works and it's awesome. Here's a picture, look at it, right, and then the investment interests to step cup. Let me let me rephrase that,

because this is something you can replicate challenging. I did put out again a very compelling framing of my business on video right, and I also took time to make sure that my pitch deck looked very, very good. So when I sent, I had investors see my pitch deck before, like very early on, and say, this looks like a series A, series B pitch deck in terms of professionalism, sinkness, messaging,

like get that stuff right. You already have so many strikes against Let me let me rephrase that, because I don't want people think they you don't. You don't have any strikes against you. What you do not have is the benefit of the doubt from anybody that you're about to sit across. So you try to remove as much doubt as humanly possible, be super on point with everything that you're putting in front of them to get in

the door. Initially. Now, the good advice, and this is what I was planning to do, is you're going to struggle and just face it, So don't compare yourself to the what do you say, less melidated, non melodated, don't compare yourself going through the accelerator, Like, yeah, you're gonna probably need to meet, you know, between fifty and seventy investors to raise you around. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna need to meet between two hundred and fifty and three

investors to raise my round. So I'm hearing the number, right, I'm multiplying it by five. That's how I'm thinking. So I'm putting putting a list together at three different buckets of people. I'm like, Okay, these people were in New York. There in New York their early stage. That's the best connection that I can garner with these people. I'm going to start there, right. And then there's the bigger list

of just seed investors. And then I had a smaller list of angel investors that I knew of that I was going to reach out to. So put your list together and then hammer it so hard all at once. If you think your fundraising process is going to take six months, twelve months, it very may very well take that long. Do all of the work in two weeks. In three weeks, reach out to every do nothing else. Shut off your phone and your email. If you have to reach out to every single one of those investors

in succession, get in front of as many as humanly possible. Again, have as many meetings in a row as possible, and practice and be honest with yourself. When you have a bad answer, don't show up to the next meeting with that same bad answer. If you have a meeting at eleven am and you felt you did poorly on an answer, and you have another meeting at noon, you should already have a new answer prepared. Right, A short and I don't do this very problem like pocket, be very short

with your You don't need to keep explaining it. So if you're the question is like, um, why is your product different bullet one bullet to bullet three? Next question? Right, So just be ready, be a machine in this and you will get through it. So I don't want to say that you're um your disadvantage or discounted in any way. You do not have the benefit of the doubt. But you can get that from them by showing up prepared. How did you know one point six million was the

number you needed? Because I did you set out for a rounder number like one point five and you got another hundred, or you set out for two million and you fell shot up by four hundred. I how did one point six happened? I started off with seven fifties, seven hundred fifty thousand. I was convinced to do a million because I said, that's really not enough for what you want to do. But it was and it is

more than enough. So I set out to raise a million dollars and after getting to about nine hundred thousand, like confirmed it was just a snowball. And this was again, this was for me, in my opinion, a factor of showing up prepared and even I started my first meeting like the last week of May and had a pitch deck. I probably changed my pitch deck four or five times in four or five weeks and just kept improving it,

kept improving it, and kept improving it. But the answer has just got so much better, so much sharper, that by the time I got to the end of the process, this is just five or six weeks later. I got yes is on almost every single meeting, and I had to turn around to my co founders and say, hey, now we're telling everybody no, We're like no, no, I know, I set this meeting with you two weeks ago. But yeah, the round closed, it's over, it's done. I only needed

a million. I only planned to raise a million, and we ended up getting I originally stopped at one point three because like, this is all we need, more than what we need. But then another investor came in at the last minute, um, and they were interested early on, but they had to reschedule for like two or three weeks later, but we ended up squeezing them and that's how we got to one point six. So it wasn't

nice round number looking for one million. But when you have investors that are super interested in the business, they that's no thing that if you have the opportunity and you can choose your investors, and I said this, which was scary, but I'm like, if you're investing in this business because you think it's a scheduling company and should stay a scheduling company, because it could be a billion dollar business, as Callardy has proven by being a scheduling company,

you're investing in the wrong founder. I am not building scheduling only company, and I want people along for the ride, even at the earliest stages that are not going to push back on that, and almost all of our investors stay shooed their word on believing in the bigger, bigger, bigger vision. So um yeah, that was a very very interesting time and that it just felt bizarre because the tide in the very beginning was cool, I like, what you're working on, let us know, keep us in the loop.

And the tide after that, towards the end was can we write to check? Can we writer check? Can and writer check have too much money? And then after you have too much money, they're still saying either existing investors that were in the round three weeks ago for a certain amounts saying can I double that investment? Can I

add another check to that investment? And it's a bizarre I don't know if I'll ever well, we're experiencing it right now, but after this, I don't know if I'll ever feel to be in that comfortable of a position from a fundraising perspective, as fundraising is hard, and I was fully prepared and I had my doubts that we'd be able to raise in six months. I was like, oh, we're going through the typical process. If it takes six months,

i'm gonna work twice as hard. But it's gonna take me six months, and it took you know, six eight weeks to get it done. And you and you attribute that to pounding out the work in the early days is of fundraising. Yeah, yeah, Like I said, my my co founder even suggested, like, let's pause the meetings and pick them up in a couple of months, And I said no. And I just also started taking to all the calls by myself like maybe he's right, Maybe he's so,

let's not use both of our time for this. And I just hammered it, hammered it, hammered it, and hammered you just got you just you just gotta do it. You gotta pound through it. You're gonna even if you have a successful round and your company is obviously worth every penny that the investors are putting in, you're gonna get a lot of news. You're going to get it. You're gonna get more nose than yes. This period, Luber got more nose than yes? Is Google got more nos

than yes? Is? Jeff Bezos probably not? He probably Like how do you know when you're getting those knows that maybe your email needs to adjust or maybe this is just the parting that wrong, Like what are you doing to iterate on your reach out? Well, I didn't have much of a reach out process, but what I did to iterate on the the answers and this like I'm studying, like the investors body language is all video calls, so I'm studying their their body language, their eye rolls, their size,

the types of questions that they're asking for it. I'll give a very specific example. In the beginning, all of our meetings, the entirety of the meeting was about product. Product, product, product, product, product. They couldn't even get off of product or like, well, what does it do well? How does it work well? How's it different from that? Are you sure it's different from that? Do people really care about that product? Product?

Produc product, pduct, proud product. I'm like, we're never going to get to investment if all they're doing is talking about this cool tool. They understand the problem so deeply. Their investors, all they do is have meetings. All they do with schedule meetings, so their understanding of it lead them down the path of all right, let's talk about this product, all right. So I'm like, how can we move off of the product and talk about the vision

later on? What we're building, talk about the market, size, the opportunity, why now, all these things that you need to get an investor on board with before they cut a check. So that was the first major problem that we called out right away, like we're only talking about product and comparing it to other products. We're not going to get anywhere with that. So that was how can I deliberately move it off? And I started taking my answer is for product questions and adding pivots to differentiation,

to market to vision on each of those answers. So if somebody asked me or why is it different than this, I would say, oh, because of this, this is this, And I think that's important because this market is only you know, five pc. This isn't any one of this market.

There's only you know, fifty million calendar automation tools, and in two years we believe there's gonna be five million calendar automate So that's was a deliberate pivoting of the way I'm answering a question to get it to talking about the money, the market, the opportunity, the big vision why it's a great business. So that's an example of iterating, iterating, iterating.

It is tough to iterate on outbound messaging. But if you're not getting any responses it hurts, does not hurt at all to change it and change it and if you get and this is also probably not something a lot of people are going to do, but I started asking our investors towards the very end, what interested you about on DOC even before they got to the final check, or where did you discover us? Like what made you want to to reach out? Because I was curious and

I want to repeat it. So right now in my fundraising I'm not fundraising, I mean right now, in the investor discussions that I'm having, they're all going so well, like too well, that I'm asking myself what is it? So I'm not even resting on the laurel that these conversations are going well. I'm saying, what is it about these conversations that are going well that I can not only replicate but refine and make it even better and

better and better. And I probably sent three messages to my co founders saying why do you think this is going well? And there's like, oh, it's because you have a great team and great mark. I'm like, that's not it. Oh, it's because you have a great product for I'm like, those are things are all true, but that's not why investors are frothing at the mouth. They've seen companies in the calendar in space, They've seen companies in the future

of work or conferencing space. They've definitely seen more accomplished founders than myself. And I'm looking at competitors in the space, like, oh, these two guys were at Facebook and they started a calendar company. This guy sold his company too. I'm not going to shout out the company. This guy sold his company to another big company three years ago, and now he started a calendaring company and he's not getting this level of interest. There's something in there about and I

figured it out by the way. I'm not going to spill the bean about the way I am positioning and

talking about the business. And I did not know what it was, but I had so much curiosity about finding out what that was that I've now been able to write it down, put it into a list, and make sure that every single conversation that I have, I reiterate that operationalized yes, yes, and it's it's it's going to be huge, Like I had I shouldn't say this publicly, But yeah, I had some very good meetings with investors this week, and it led me to like want to

figure And I spent all weekend thinking about it and reading and researching and like digging into mental models and frameworks and trying to figure out which ones that I'm using and why it's resoning with investors. You have to go that deep. You have to, or if you're a brad, just write it on a nappin and get your money. Black Tech Green Money is a production to Black vit Aff Road Tech When, the Black Effect podcast Network and

iHeart Media. Is produced by Morgan Dubon and me Little Lucas addition to productive support by Love Beach and Rissa Lewis. Special thank you to Michael Davis and Vanessa Serrano. Learn about my guests and other textistuff. As an innovative to a roads dot Com. Join your Black Tech Green Money, leave us a five star rating on iTunes, Go get your money. He's lock