#25. Startup reflections
It's 15 months since I started working on CastRooms - the startup that I co-founded with Mitali - full time in April 2022. We're bringing the energy of crowds to music livestreaming and - honestly - it has been a intense trip.
I’ve felt weirdly blocked from working in the open at CastRooms - and given how much my brain is focused on CastRooms there hasn’t been much else to write about.
Working in the open has been a big part of my life over the last decade. It's how I process things that I'm learning. It's how I try and give back to the communities that nurtured my career. And it's how I connect with the world outside our four person team and my tiny work-from-home office. This life can get lonely at times.
Sure, working in the open is tricky when things are commercially sensitive. But that's not the whole story. I’ve also been feeling a ghost pressure not to say things that might make us less attractive to investors. The work is so intense that there's barely time take a breath, let alone reflect. And the journey is so up and down that in the lows - when I'm overflowing with doubt - the last thing I want to do is share anything.
But thanks to the wonders of a one week holiday at the end of May I've been in a great place recently. And with that comes a growing desire to reflect. So here goes.
Looking back to April 2022 it feels like I had a naive view - or perhaps, more kindly, a narrow one-dimensional view - of what it meant to do a startup. Something about my background in the design world manifested as the simplistic belief that if you can make an experience so powerful that people love it then everything else will fall into place. 15 months later it's clear that building this kind of experience is necessary but nowhere near sufficient. There’s so much more going on that I was missing.
One big thing that I was late to realise is just how important it is to have protectable technology. If you're going to raise investment from venture capitalists they care way more about protectable technology than I realised. I kind of thought that would happen naturally as we figured out the experience and grew. But the question we get asked all the time is "what’s stopping someone from copying you?". It's taken us a while to have a good answer to that question.
Another big thing that I was missed was the importance of early revenue. My lazy mental model of consumer startups was that they started with loss-making growth and strapped on revenue years later. Like - Facebook didn't figure out its advertising platform for years, YouTube didn't put video ads on everything for ages, Spotify still doesn't make money, and on and on. These stories now seem like wishful thinking and even straight-up denial! Perhaps in the heyday of low interest rates and high investor confidence this attitude would have been....fine?....but it's definitely not OK today.
This all came to a head when we wrote our first pitchdeck and started pitching investors. In the same week that Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. Fun fun fun.
Writing a pitchdeck is hard because you have to tie together answers from many angles into one story. I can write, I can communicate, I can think - but putting together our pitchdeck is one of the hardest things I've ever done. Sure those 12 slides don't look like hard work! But they're the pretty little desert island that only exists as the tip of an undersea mountain of thought stretching to the continental shelf below.
These things have made the last six months of pitching investors a wild ride. There were highs. There were (many) lows. And there was utter dejection at times.
But…
…despite all of this…
…I've kinda loved the last six months.
I've slowly realised that everyone knows you're going through this process of figuring it out. No one knows it all. People expect you to struggle with it. So it's not about knowing it all upfront. Instead it's about letting the experience - the sometimes bruising experience! - teach you what's wrong and what you need to do to address it.
And that is EXACTLY like the design world that I come from. In the design world you have an idea, make a thing, put it in front of people, and observe people reacting to it to figure out how to make it better. In the startup world it's the same process with different objects - a business rather than a design, investors as well as users, months rather than weeks for the iteration cycles, revenue rather than delight as the metric.
So here we are, 15 months later, iterating CastRooms based on what we've learned along the way. A radical go-to-market pivot refocused on early revenue. A deep understanding of how to build and protect our unique tech. A beautiful pitchdeck that gets more compelling each time we update it. A vibrant pipeline bursting with wild commercial opportunities. And - of course - a core product that our users love.
Yes, it’s stretched me to my limits. Yes, it gives me the fear. But the thing I love to do most is to figure out what’s wrong with my mental models and then go about adjusting them to a new reality. CastRooms is definitely the vehicle for that :)
Originally posted on Substack along with Are we not drawn onward to new erA, These Times / Past Present Future, Some Assembly Required, two egg omelette. Say hello or ask questions on @myddelton.