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Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be. To be. Welcome to another bonus episode of the Techmeme Ride Home podcast, another portfolio profile episode. This one's unique so far in these portfolio profile episodes. Let me introduce my guest first. We're talking today to Kara Bornstein-Marin. Kara, thanks for coming on again to the show.
Thanks for having me. Excited to share some learnings. Yes, this is going to be a show of learnings because when I conceived of doing portfolio profile episodes, it's not just talking my book or doing promo for companies we invested. The idea was that this would be a way for people to follow the whole life cycle of a company from when we get invested to evolving the product, fighting product market fit, raising rounds, etc. But that also includes companies that do not make it.
As people know, VC investing is a power law sort of thing where the majority of your investments do not make it. And unfortunately, Kara's company, which we invested in, I don't know, two years ago now, maybe more than that, has shut down. Kara is here to, as she said, tell us her learnings. And to do that, Kara, I think we should start from the very beginning. You have been on the show. We have talked about this before, but remind us, start from the moment that you're like, hey,
this is a good idea. Maybe I should do this. Literally the inception of what would become a stashpad. But what was the first idea and when did you know I'm going to do this? So before stashpad, I was a software engineer at Twilio. And while I was there, there was one thing that I noticed just about myself and where I draw energy, which is talking to customers.
And so whenever I was pulled into customer calls where there was an engineer on the other side, and something wasn't quite working on our end, and we could tweak something and then get a big deal going together, I was like, this is amazing. And so that made me really excited to pursue entrepreneurship
if I saw like a problem that I was excited to go after. And so kind of not too long after I realized that that was giving me so much energy, I started to notice a problem around knowledge management for software engineers. And pretty much every software engineer is going to agree, knowledge sharing knowledge management, it's a pain point. And so the question is, well, how do you want to
go about doing this? And so the first insight, which was kind of like when we really first started the company, it was called BiteBase before it was called stashpad, was the idea that engineers largely weren't writing to a wiki because they didn't know if it was helpful, the things would always fall out of date, they didn't want to have the all sorts of things. They wanted the burden
of giving it up to date. And what they were doing was writing to personal notes instead in order to keep track of all that important company knowledge that they would need to do their jobs effectively. And something that we noticed when we did a bunch of research is like over 90% of software developers were using like a really bare bones notepad. So like Apple notes, notepad.txt, else, whatever on their local machines. And it was really disorganized and just kind of felt like
they were doing it wrong. And so what we started with was the concept of making like a power developer notepad. Ultimately, this became called stashpad lists. And the idea was to give you the immediacy that you had when using like notepad on your desktop. But then designed in such a way that it would be organized by default. And so this gets into like company inception starting point.
So kind of like with this insight and we had a little bit of like news coverage that we were able to get, we got into TechSARS to pursue this idea and do a bunch of customer research. And so we did TechSARS narrow down the ICP. It's going to be more senior software developers who value this. And using my network from Twilio, my co-founders network from Nextdoor, and the TechSARS network, we went to like engineering leaders to start told them what we wanted
to build and use that to raise that under the being a $1.8 million round. And that's kind of when we got off to the races and grew the team a bunch. I could pause there because the story continues. So for sure. So good idea. You raised around off of the idea, did you have a prototype or was it still sort of like pre-product that you were able to raise that round? We had a very minimal prototype.
But it was honestly not very intuitive. So when we, I don't remember if we did a demo with you, but I remember some of our investors, we did, yeah, with some of our investors who did end up investing. We did a demo where we gave the whole concept, but then they tried it out and like it, it was, there was a lot of work to do to make it really intuitive. So we'd see them clicking in the wrong places. So really kind of prototype level product. Like that meme of the designer and
the person putting the shapes in the wrong place. Yeah. So you raised the round and so what are we talking about? Like six months, a year to build out like what the product that you think it's going to be is going to be, does that sound like the right timeline to you? Around that. I don't remember exactly. But something like that, we got the team together and I want to work to really
deliver on the vision for that product. So again, I, I, I, you know, I've found a company's before, but one of the things that I say a lot is that when I was writing my book, I would outline a chapter and then I would sit down to write it and the chapter would immediately go in a different direction. And I was always wondering, who's writing here if it's not me? Like, but a, a product, a,
a company is completely more complex than that. So was there as you're doing, as you're building out the product in that year, does it change even before you get feedback from users, even before, like does, does the product evolve because as you're building it, you're saying, you know what, our original idea for this kind of, we should really go over here. Just give me a sense of where you able to go A to B like you planned or did it evolve as you're building.
So I think probably we should have, and this is a learning, we should have evolved it more strongly and we, we tried to do that later on in the company, but it didn't end up working out. We were, so our process was, we were, we were lucky to be working with a very talented designer. And so as like we, we went through the full process of like doing wireframes and seeing what people expected off of those and then developing and getting tons of feedback. And so it, it followed
the idea of a power tool. I think one of the places where we went wrong is we were fortunate to have some really wonderful people who were really amazing early adopters. And we over indexed a bit on like the feedback of like one person or two people in order to then kind of go in the weeds on something that wasn't then ultimately validating the product. So an example is like, oh, you need
Linux support, right? Or you need support for images when in reality, we understand that certain use cases need support for images, but we probably could have been running over other ones instead. And so I think that's for me a key learning is like, I love that customer feedback. I love the energy of working with earlier adopters who are like willing to take the risk of putting time
and important information into a startup that could shut down like we did. But we needed to be a little more rigorous with like kind of, okay, even in this pre-launch phase, it's not taking off. There's something promising. Why is it not taking off? And are we, are we making sure we're building against that hypothesis versus building against what we know people are saying they would like, but we're not actually sure that we'll, we don't have conviction that that's going to change
the trajectory. So because what I was kind of almost leading us to is I've seen a lot of times where when people are just purely building, they stick to the vision and then when they get the first adopters and they get the feedback and the product is completely something else. And they're like, you know what? We kind of had an inkling. It was going there, but we stuck to
our guns. We stuck to our vision. You're saying almost the opposite that maybe if you had stuck more to the original vision or was more disciplined in terms of, yeah, tell me. I think if we, yeah, it's a great question. I think we did stick to the vision of making a power notepad. The what the power notepad looked like was a little different than we envisioned, but somewhat similar in that it wasn't like another option could have been make a notepad that's just
built on slack instead of like a native app, right? So we overall did stick with the vision, but what I think we, we went wrong with is like, what are the main hypotheses we have as to why this should exist? So like capture now organized later. That was the whole like ethos of stashpad lists. And if it's not, if we're not getting like a really high hit rate with who we think our target ICP is, then adding long tail features to get to like feature completion of like a Microsoft product
is probably not going to do it. And so we kind of like sat with the long tail feature completion to long, which we didn't do in our second product. But yeah, I don't know if that that's okay. So because we have to get to it's originally bite-based, but it becomes stashpad. But okay, so let's get to after that year, the product has been developed and you start to send it out into the
world. And as you're mentioning, even when you're developing, you're not feeling like you're getting traction, but then because I've experienced this, what happens when you put a product out and people are like, yeah, that's cool. And then you look at the logs and they're like, yeah, but they never
came back to the degree that you want to go into detail about that. Like, if that's what happened, or again, I don't want to put words in your mouth, when you're actually Hello World and then the world kind of it doesn't jump up and say Hello Back, what does that feel like and what do you think at that point? Yeah, so the and one thing I'll say also disclaimer for things that are a little older in the company history, I may be misremembering it because it's been a few years,
but the more recent we'll know. But this, this I can remember, I feel pretty vividly. So, so we launched on product hunt this first version. The feedback was pretty positive and we got a bunch of buds. It came on the podcast, found some people who were really excited about it. And then something that we saw was we just weren't growing all that much. And this was in this like summer of
2021. And so what we did was we wanted to understand like we had a hypothesis of our ICP being like a senior software engineer, but that's actually really vague because there's like all sorts of different kinds of engineers and all sorts of different kinds of people who may have an engineering role, whatever. And so we wanted to try because we saw that we weren't growing that well, we wanted to try to bring out who values it the most. And so we did a very painful pricing change
in January. I think I have the years, right? Where we took what was a very generous freemium plan. And we made it basically you have to pay if you're really using it. And so this lost us some customer trust. So in retrospect, we definitely should have grandfathered in existing people because you can always find more people. But it did help us narrow down an ICP. And so something that we saw with the pricing change that took us a little bit of time to actually identify this longer than I
would have liked is yes, it's senior software developers. It's specifically senior software developers with ADHD. Usually they are like 40 to 45 years old. They're looking for things like bullet journal or get things done. And then they came across us and then they're like yes. And so it's solving a real problem for them. It's not just like oh I could use some other notes. It's like
I need a system because I am a really smart usually dude. And I want to I need a way to handle a high volume of information at work as I'm like in a more senior role and pulled into more meetings. That I can stand on top of. So it pulled out that ICP. Two two questions on that. Number one, when you're talking about growth, you're talking about literally user adoption. But are you also
measuring like people's time, you know, creating notes, things like that? Like there's a difference between getting new users and then users that are actually right, highly engaged in coming back again and again. Yeah. So we I would say that both. So before the pricing change, we were seeing kind of like you're saying like there there were some people who loved it, but it really wasn't wasn't taking off. And then after the pricing change, we also weren't taking off, which we can
get into. But what we found was that like if you were paying for the product, you often were using it a lot. And of course there were exceptions where people pay and then kind of forget about it. But for the most part, that was a good way to like indicate you're committed to this and getting value from it. And then it would be reflected in the engagement usage. Well, and then the second thing about that is it's interesting that the changing the pricing was like a forcing
mechanism almost to help you find your ideal customer. But you keep talking about like identifying down to age, ADHD or whatever. Even if it's in a general way, how did you get that customer, that demographic data of your, how did you do that research? So that's a great question. So so the ADHD insight came from just maybe there were like in like a three week period, there were like around 10 people who emailed me something on the lines of like this is so helpful to me,
this changed my life because I have ADHD. And like it's probably super random. Probably no one else has ADHD. He's that. But I was like, okay, this is interesting. And so he started like looking for that more as we were talking to customers and seeing if that was something that resonated. And as far as their years of experience, some of it was honestly just like because we were at a pretty small scale, like looking them up on LinkedIn, be like, oh, you have like 15 years of experience.
Okay, interesting. That that's telling us something. And when we talk to them asking them, oh, how do you find out about new tools? How do you find out about us? Oh, I was searching for bullet journal and then this came up in the Reddit thread or something like that. Okay, so at this point is this the point where okay, you're out in the market, you've identified your ideal customer, but you don't know that this is the ideal product for them. Maybe take me to the next
step for the evolution from bite base to stashpad. And if this fits in the narrative, if you're seeing the initial uptake is not what you want, what sort of levers did you pull to try? You're mentioning people finding you on Reddit threads and things like that. Did you try you know ads? You know, no, yeah, not really. But tell me the story. Yeah. So bite base to stashpad, it was really just a rename where we'd like that stash out of verb and it was about like
capturing fast. And so that was a rename that was in our initial launch. So bite base never had like a full launch in that way. So you were always you were always going to change the branding. Okay. So we so we change the branding to stashpad. And then as far as kind of trying to get it to grow, we try to hold a bunch of different channels. So let's see if I can remember, I should have pulled up my notes from this. Let's see, what did we try?
Search ads influencers going on podcasts. We did podcasts. We did. We did like some experiments with influencers exactly on TikTok and Twitter. And you're paying, right? For when you're doing influencers and stuff like that, you're that's a marketing spend at this point. Uh, kind of we never spent that much on it. We did it. We did us a paid
version. And then we realized that if we really wanted to do influencer marketing, well, we needed to actually get them influencers using the product because otherwise it comes across and authentic. Um, so in that case, then it ends up not really being paid and you can do an affiliate program. We considered, um, we did product count launch was a big thing for us. We were able to get a bunch of organic press, uh, which was was helpful. Also, um, but we kind of, and there,
there is a lesson and I'm working on growth now in my new role. Uh, there's a lesson of like, okay, you want to find your right channel and focus and stuff like that. Um, but at the same time, this was like, we had tried a bunch of things and it wasn't, it wasn't picking up. And so that also is like an early sign like, like any growth channel that's like reasonably right for your
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So any lever that you pull is not getting uptake and so what do you think at this point and tell me how you're thinking evolved and how the product evolves and how you get to sort of the end state of what we recently had. So we realized that like ADHD might be something that we could lean into for marketing stuff like it's a way of targeting people and finding them. My co-founder and I to our knowledge do not have ADHD so we didn't feel super authentic jumping
into that community. So we were hesitant there and then at the same time as we were thinking through on our own the market size because we had taken venture capital funding and with some of our investors we were thinking that we weren't confident that the market would be big enough and in retrospect perhaps it actually is like I think it's a real ADHD is like a lot more prevalent than than we realize but we we were concerned about the market size and and concerned
about our ability to authentically go after that market. At this point something that we considered and maybe should have considered more rigorously I think we really should have considered more rigorously is we have this ICP of like people who by the way we love working with so much
and it's so special to get to work with the early adopters and and for some people their notes system was a top priority but for others it wasn't and so what what I wish we had done at that point was be open-minded to other problems that have nothing to do with notes that we could
have solved for these customers like understanding just what their P1 was but as we were doing the customer conversations we still tended to skew more towards things that are running down in note-note style and so we did find what I think was a bigger opportunity which is what we pivoted to I could talk about that but still ultimately ran into like not not being a top priority for
who we were targeting. So if this is reductive please correct me immediately but what you eventually pivoted to is what I would call sort of like a skinny version of a Google Doc where it's not tied to an account you can literally send a link and collaborate without having to have accounts or
sign up or whatever and listen I was not in the target market for what originally you were building but when you pivoted to that Chris and I used it a lot and so I actually so as from an investor perspective you know I invested in the idea that I liked that you originally pitched and you pivoted
to something that I was like hey I even liked this more so but to bring it back to you to the founder perspective you're pivoting to something that you did you just say that you made that choice because you thought it was a larger addressable market or did you also have some data from customer like what was the what was the call that said we're going to pivot to this was it's seeing what
users were doing or was it more a bet on an addressable market. So this is actually I really find I think even in retrospect so so basically to get Sasha's list to grow we were like classic let's just try team right and so it was all about personal notes but we're like let's
try to get some team adoption because this was a fully monetized product basically no free tier and so we wanted to get teams using it and so as I was doing discovery and quotes calls aka trying to figure out what to build so that I could sell it to people something that kept coming up is
when it comes to team notes we officially use notion or confluence um but everything is happening in Google Docs and at the same time Google Docs doesn't have my dark mode which I love and it doesn't have very good markdown which we ultimately learned was the
thing people love the most about our first product Sasha Publis and even more than that especially for an ADHD mind the comments is really overwhelming the links are getting lost all the time and when it comes to like quickly collaborating these permissions are getting in the way where I can't
jump in with someone fast enough so I end up using like weird things like slack dms for meeting notes and brainstorming and so basically we uh we I did a whole bunch of customer calls like let's say like the last like seven or eight weeks of the year um and I was sharing the notes from
that with my teammates and we had an interesting thing happen which was um my co-founder looking at those notes and and the recorded calls was like okay I feel like there's something here of like a Google Docs alternative and I think it would actually be pretty lightweight for us to build it
given what we already know how to build from our time building Sasha Publis um and so over the holidays he built a prototype he came back into the office early January presented it to our two teammates and one of our teammates was being very critical of it and and like not too into him we're
like okay uh but it turns out that over the holidays he had built exactly the same thing basically just taking not my suggestion of building it but just the customer notes and seeing like Google Docs Google Docs Google Docs Google Docs and it's really aggravating and and so the team kind of just
naturally got really excited behind this idea um and so we decided to go go full force with it and one of the data points that let us that decision is we started with the prototype that my co-founder had built over the holidays and I started giving it to a bunch of friends some of our
investors and some of the immediate response was positive some was very lukewarm um but in any case we then started to watch the usage data come in and so unlike with the first product where the usage was not close to what we wanted this really had growing usage and so we thought that we were
onto something pretty interesting um I was gonna ask about the almost the morale question how how big is the team it was for at that point when you and that point is for we we had been eight at our peak but um you said that everybody got excited about it is that true I'm not asking you to air
dirty laundry but to the extent that even you as one of the founders you're like okay I'm giving up my original idea my original baby kind of um and I'm just give me the sense of a team like that when you pivot and then our people coming on board because not to use this word take this in
the spirit it's intended uh people are desperate because it's like well we didn't get traction with this we got to find something that we throw against the wall and sticks what is what is the dynamic of a team that's pivoting even from your perspective where it's like well we're not doing
what I set out to do how do you how do you all like get the juice to then go in a different direction I think yeah it's a great question I think we felt we felt disappointed by the traction that we were seeing for the first product and at the same time we were still getting like a handful of
new paying customers each week and like a trickling of like really really enthusiastic like this changed my life and I still I it makes me like sad that I still I'm getting emails like that like oh this is like I really it's really really bad for me that this is gone now and so we were getting
some validating things there but it really was just flat and so we were all feeling a little bit or I could speak for myself and my perception of my teammates like we're checking away at this how long is it going to take for this to start to take off and and just feeling kind of down there um
and then when it came to this different concept it started as an experiment so we were the we were we decided to sprint towards a product and launch and just see how how much growth we could get um and the idea was we would try multiple experiments if we wanted to and so this we chose
as our main experiment but we were like when we made the choice we were we were open to like like I said should we build it on Slack should we build some like open to a whole bunch of different things and then I think with the initial customer feedback here feeling so different from
the first product and the usage data coming in so differently and even the team internally just having a love for the product in a way that like they liked the previous one but it wasn't as simple and just singing um we were one of my teammates said it's the most energized he had been
since the days started and company well let me let me pause you there because okay you said that you're seeing more uptake um the uh your the team is excited about it but I want to underline in a pivot uh for founders especially but I don't know for a whole team um there's a there's a
there's a death of what the original idea was that you know if you recruit people to the company I buy into this company and then six months later yeah we're doing this and that's something that is you know people sometimes get deep into the psychology and the the psychiatry of being in a
startup but there's something that a team and a founder has to you have to internalize the death of the original idea and some people can do that well and then other times I see founders and and and uh founding teams where it's like they're almost two because the original idea didn't work
they're almost two willing to abandon it and they abandoned they throw too much out with the baby out with the bathwater because yeah but you're you're animating spirit of that idea you shouldn't you know it's complicated but if you could speak a little bit to like that sort of
you're you're on a mission you're evangelist for this great idea and then guess what we're gonna do this and how do you internalize that and make that sort of like that morning period that you might have to have or the transition in your head yeah yeah I think so for us and and perhaps
in retrospect like we I think I think in retrospect when we saw Sachsford lists slowing down post launch we should have just taken that ICP and ditch the notes face all together and then saw just like what general problem we could have gone after um but we didn't do that and so for us even those Sachsford docs was an entirely new product and had like a very different uh even even different positioning and things like that it still was going after the original problem of solving knowledge
management and so like what started with like okay people don't write to the wiki they're capturing in personal notes then became okay we kind of lost at that and I'll say we obsidian was doing really well I'll give a shout out to bear which is also who we're using so we're we're losing at
that and we're like okay where else is knowledge happening where we could have an impact and that was in google docs and so even though it was a new thing it's not personal notes it's collaborative it's a very different vibe and way that it's used um it it still is continuing the vision we have
going after knowledge management it was your core animating principle of of knowledge management by the way I just want to say real quick because we keep using ICP so if if people don't know what that means it's ideal customer profile um okay so can you take me to going to stashpad as the thin
google docs client to um almost where we are now your optimistic things are getting traction and then what happens how long is this period from then to let's say two months ago what is that a year maybe a year and a half around a year I think so so basically I'd January
2020 three 2024 I guess yeah January 2024 it's recent I hope we uh we start sharing the first version of sashpad docs with friends our network our investors and stuff like that and our seeing usage grow so we're feeling optimistic about it the team sprints together to do a strong
relaunch as we can for March and meanwhile we're like runway is low so we're knowing we're going to need to fundraise and so we need to have really strong metrics and and the launch itself goes pretty well uh so like we didn't we didn't get featured as number one on product hunt but we were the
feature the next day which at the time probably now it's even more was going out to 800,000 people and so that was a massive reach and we see we see usage checking up um now one thing I should I should say is one of the bets for sashpad docs was growth over everything else and we'll worry about
monetization kind of after with the idea of fundraising off of really good growth metrics and some of the reasoning there is sashpad lists we feel to a certain extent that the reason that it failed isn't because of our pricing model but it definitely wasn't helping us grow and it wasn't
a great pricing model so we went the other direction let's focus on growth um and so then what ended up happening is like I had two months post launch again growth is not like it's growing more than our previous product for sure but it's not super super strong and it's definitely not
showing enough to fundraise off of and when we dug into it what we were learning is that we kind of had these initial adopters largely like tech leads and stuff like that who really loved what we were building and they were sharing docs with people on their team with external collaborators some
of that um but when they shared a doc with someone that person they shared with usually didn't care that much if it was a Google doc a sashpad doc they were they just didn't care and so it kind of ended there um it's not it wasn't that classic hotmail model where everybody that got an email from hotmail signed up for hotmail you didn't get that sort of uh a flywheel effect got it no is there do you have a theory on why that didn't happen?
So in talking to people who were that kind of like second layer out um docs just were not a top priority to them they had bigger fish to fry and so I think I think ultimately and this is for both uh both product iterations by the company like notes and docs for the people who we are targeting
is just not a top priority um not in a way that we could produce a big enough differential in our when you say that not a top priority in the sense that that's not something that is top of mind oh that's a problem I need to solve I'll pay for that or is this already solved for them so they're not
necessarily in the market for a solution? For most people they who I've talked to at least they are in the market for a solution uh but they're kind of getting by okay enough with what they have and they're there are problems that are param fire problems before this and so I think that's
where like some of the ADHD uh segment comes into play where a neurodiverse population might become more interested in productivity tooling because it can be a burning problem and it can really make an enormous difference in their ability to be effective at work um we didn't lean lean fully
into that um and I and from what we were seeing especially looking to get like we have that first person sharing right we even had some people who were sharing with 50 to 100 people all the time right and still we're not seeing that next level it's because that that that second layer just right
at a high rate was not a hundred people you're not getting 30 people also saying hey this is a tool that I'll use to um before we get to obviously the ultimate question which you know I'm gonna I'm gonna ask um this is sort of jumping ahead but what do you think ultimately killed the company was
it the runway because you have a limited runway and um because you're not showing the growth to be able to raise on is that why no you're shaking your head so please what's your theory I think uh so so in the end we raised two and a half million dollars for a sash pad um we I think we overhired
early on uh because we didn't have product market fit and we kind of did did the move of fund raising and thinking that that was signs of product market fit of early market fit which it is not wait wait wait wait underline that um raising is not a sign of product market fit so you're saying
because and even in yeah because people are giving you money you're saying that you made the assumption that that's I think that especially because and I didn't share this the way how our our first fund raise went our main fund raise which was one point eight million uh was it started by me
showing my former colleagues from Trilio who also had been an engineering at the concept and pitching them on the problem and all of that and so a lot of our like the beginning of our fund raise the first several hundred thousand came from people who used to be in our ICP but were no longer in our
ICP and so I think especially with that combined with them the excitement and validation of uh fun raising we kind of saw you used to be in my ICP and there's all this validation of fundraising we're on to something if we just build it right and in fact that that was not um that's that definitely
was not product market fit if there's one thing I've learned about investing in my personal life it's that steady wins the race today's episode is sponsored by acorns acorns makes it easy to start automatically saving and investing for you your kids and your retirement you don't need a lot of
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firm LZ legal services LLC. Okay so I interrupted you what is your theory for what ultimately led to killed the company before I asked the ultimate question. So so so I don't think it was fundraising I think that the difficulty that we would have trying to fundraise towards the end we and we did have trying to fundraise at the end of the company was really just a reflection of
the limited growth that we were seeing but it wasn't that wasn't the cause the cause was the limited growth and to me to me reflecting on it it really comes down to not solving a top priority problem for our ICP and for a large enough ICP and some of that is the problem choice to begin with
which is like being in the notes and docs space some of it is also just like are you able to actually offer something that's a hundred expeter and so for a sash pad docs I I love the product but it's definitely leaning into simplicity and so for some people it was better for a decent of people it was better but it wasn't a hundred expeter that I it was really going to get a long term firewall going so to me that's that's where we went wrong is not going to the ICP and figuring out
what is the top priority problem and letting go of anything in notes and docs and trying to solve that. So here's the ultimate question that I've been hinting at which I prepped you for before we talked but to the degree that you're willing to get personal about this like how and when do you decide to shut down your startup even if if it's a mechanism that you saw something and you're like well that's it it's over or the vibe shift or or how does your how do you come to the conclusion that
we got to pull the plug. So so for us docs was really a bet on growth and we had we had decent growth we had 50,000 docs created in just a couple of months but as we were getting towards the end and we're seeing okay after two months the growth isn't continuing to go up we knew that that was a
serious problem and so once we saw that growth we were we once we saw a growth slowing down despite the product being so optimized for growth we we knew that that we weren't going somewhere good and so at that point we did one more attempt at trying to find an ICP that may
value it even higher and we found something interesting it happened to be like copy writers who we hadn't marketed to at all some of whom would would pay us a hundred even three hundred dollars a month for what we had built if we tweaked it a little bit so there was something there
but at that point to pursue that market that's not my background we knew very little about it we would be starting with a lot of unknowns already far in on sashkad and yeah we knew it it was time is there a personal time when you like wake up in the morning and be like
that's it I'm saying this as a person that's done that you know if you look in the mirror in the morning and you're like you know it time to wrap it up like what is what is that like or is that a gradual thing that just is sort of like the the frog boiling thing I think that's a good question
so for me and my co-founder it was we both had moments where we had pause and those pauses like the pause at the end of last year led to major pivots and major changes and so whenever we're pausing and saying we're not on a good track and and our time is valuable right so if we're not
on a good track we're not on a good track we either make some changes or if there are no changes left to make like in the end it felt like we really had turned over not every stone but a lot of stones um we just knew it was time to call it um but it's really just kind of that feeling you got
that uh we're pushing a boulder up a hill it's not going and I do think like if we had spent x amount of time more on it we could have gotten it going but x could be a really long time and uh we don't have the funding to do that and we we we have tried so many other ideas like with x
being before if that makes sense that we just um we we lost conviction uh in the underlying like knowledge management hypothesis and our way of going after it um yeah um you might have already said this so you can repeat it if you want but uh the final question before we find
out what you're up to now um is there one learning lesson takeaway bumper sticker uh that you learned from um these last few years doing this um that you would pass on to someone that is about to start a company right now yeah so I'd say I would say two things so one is I think uh ultimately
where we went wrong is is in the problem validation where yes knowledge management is a problem uh but it's a difficult problem to solve uh and the way that we were going about it didn't wasn't effective and one thing actually that someone had told me is like look at the comps in
the space like especially for personal notes there's ever note so that's like your best scenario as you become ever note right and that's not that's not great that's not an amazing scenario yeah I mean better than our scenario by a lot but yeah but um but looking at comps in the space is probably
a good idea um but just starting with being really open to problems for the i.c.p where I think ultimately we were limited by sticking to strongly to notes and docs and not taking those customers who were talking to you and saying okay forget this what's going on tell me about today and what
what are the real problems that like right now you're losing sleepover and then let's see if there are patterns in there and if we could solve it so to me that's the big just like the fundamental choice of the problem I had had flaws in it for us so that's the big learning there um
the the second big learning I would say to anyone starting out and this is from someone who just shut down so it's raw and that was sad and it really sucked is it was an incredible experience and the people that I got to know and learn from along the way like Brian on this podcast it was
just the experience of my lifetime so I had so much fun doing and I was very stressed uh but it was so much fun and so rewarding to get to know so many super smart people uh both investors and customers who I otherwise never would have met and got into learn from um and I couldn't
couldn't be more grateful for the opportunity so enjoy it because it's I think it's a really special thing also just in our industry people are so generous with their time uh and uh lending an ear and wanting to problem solve together and it's it's just been such a fun experience despite
not having the outcome that we want indeed uh but that is it's all in the game as they say in uh the wire um so Cara Borenstein Marin what are you doing now what is your next thing um yeah yeah so this this is a fun one and not not something I was exactly expecting
because coming out of being a founder like uh as any founder will know and non-founders to your identity is pretty tied up in in what you work him what you work on is really important because you spend a lot of time on it and really want it to be successful and so I was worried as I started
looking for what I was going to do next that there wouldn't be anything that I was really excited about and so I started talking to a bunch of uh people um and one thing that got me really excited was I wanted to think about because stashpad uh ultimately wasn't solving a burning problem
for enough people I really wanted to work on something that's solving a burning problem with smart people um and for myself I was a customer uh of uh my my now employer uh where what I had wanted to do was as a founder I was doing customer outreach and I was manually sending emails
to do this and someone on my team found that instead of manually sending emails you could get the same deliverability with um this startup and it would cost $500 a month but you'd get even better email deliverability and sequences and all of that so it's kind of like a founder power tool for
email um and then I came across this other tool relay.app which is where I work now and instead of $500 I could set up the same thing for 10 uh and so uh that's uh if I was willing to pay $500 it's clearly something that was really solving a need for me um and what relay.app is is a modern
automation tool that just makes it uh very easy it's very intuitive to automate different parts of your workflow so I was using it on top of Gmail you can also use it on top of Slack um and 100 plus other apps so if you if you want to check it out I guess is the the CTA you can check it out at relay.app or you can uh reach out to me either on twitter, caro jacklin, caro underscore jacklin or at my new email address caro at relay.app. Uh I lied I got one more for you. Oh yeah.
Job searching after your startup has gone under um what was your experience there um and do you have any best practices for that? We we work in an industry where again in quotes failure is not necessarily failure its experience but what did you find about going onto a new thing um and advice for people that are in in those shoes? Yeah so so the first thing uh was just thinking about what do I want? Uh and so for me I felt lucky like even though I'm really sad to have shut
down stashpad I didn't feel burned out. I like I enjoyed my day to day like I enjoyed getting up and going to work on this thing so I was like how can I have a job that looks kind of like this? And so for me um that meant either like product management at a at a larger company relay is pretty small um or going into something that's more across disciplinary like growth at an earlier stage company um and so given that uh it just like we had made investor pipelines in the past my co-founder
made a list of like companies with roles open that he thought could be interesting and that was kind of helpful for brainstorming and then what really ended up um being most impactful for for both us is like once we got excited by certain companies um and even before learning about companies
uh we would just talk to people in our network who we had just built authentic relationships with by grinding it out for a number of years and we were like hey this is this is what I'm doing I really want to work on a top priority problem with smart people um who do you think I should talk to
you and those conversations um I think again this ties into just uh at least in my experience people in the tech industry being so open to um to talking if you're vulnerable and also varies specific with your asks and like prepare well for the the conversation um and that kind of series of networking um is what led for both of us to our next roles okay so uh to close that again uh how can people get in touch with you relay dot app um but to get in touch with you personally um repeat
that for us so either cara underscore Jacqueline jacq el i and e at at on twitter or cara at relay dot app um email me and remind me to put that in there cara with a c um uh i'll put that in the show notes uh cara this is actually i this is i'mronic i invested through the fun the fun is invested
we wanted it all to work out um but also this was my vision for doing this from the very beginning was to be warts and all and learnings and um these were the mistakes we made this this this i'm so thankful to you for coming on and doing this episode just how we did it like this this was this
was kind of an episode that i envisioned happening one day and and it this was been beautiful from my perspective that's that's what i love to hear from from investors who i lost money that's what i'm going for yeah well listen um well we'll we'll all get them next time um cara
thanks for coming on and sincerely thanks for for being that honest and open about all this thanks for and this is fun you've worked hard to build your brand so i settle for one size off its brand of clothing lands and outfitters create a peril your employees will truly want to wear the
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