00:02:57 · Henry Innis
[00:02:57] S0: I have no idea. I think it's probably more a function of culture. Like like like their culture is just so radically different. The only thing... Like, we we have a lot in common with them, but there's a lot that's different. I mean, I think as a founder, that's probably the thing I noticed the most, coming over there, their just way of doing business is very different. The intensity is very different. So what's easier and what's harder over there? What's easier is is it's much easier to to win business in my opinion if it particularly if they have the best product. It's much easier to kind of, you know, draw like a focus on an outcome and have like very quick conversations. The meeting culture is much better. Yeah. But I think what's harder is to work, like when something's going really wrong, it's harder to work through something constructively, like you're more likely to just be dropped and stuff like that. You're far less likely to get constructive feedback. I find like, like people are just more willing just to move on and and things like that. And I think people are far less like... They're far more binary in the way that they do things. So I think it's actually kind of harder to some degree to get like early product market fit signals, what you're doing well, what you're doing badly and stuff like that. So I think it's kind of like that's why there's almost a bit more of a valley of death early in The US scene and why they take maybe a little bit more capital longer to get to is potentially because of that, because an Australian will kind of tell you, work through and kind of, you know, give you a bit more, bit more like what I would call guiding feedback versus an American I think would just go this is great and then go away So it seems like how you guys built the business starting in Australia first kind of reaching PMF here and then going up to states probably I don't... It's like what's the stupid... Let's show what you got.
00:04:40 · Adam, Sachin, Henry Innis
[00:04:40] S2: We're, we don't really know how to [00:04:43] S1: talk about ourselves, but, [00:04:44] S0: yeah, so we're flipping these, flipping this shit. What's going on here? What's going on at Kindling? Yeah. Kindling. Okay. Sorry. Got the name right. I thought it was kind of kindling. So what's going on at Kindling? What's the first four months been like? What have you been doing? [00:04:58] S2: Yeah. Yeah. I think like it can sort of be summarized with us trying to find, like, exactly what are our pillars of content that we're gonna be producing for the world. Obviously, we're doing... We've got this huge focus on media in the first year, and we've got a whole bunch of shit that we're putting out there, ranging from documentaries, which are gonna be starting next week, podcasts, the building public podcast, vlogs, and just working out like, what is that content market fit? So basically PMF for a startup, we see
00:05:26 · Sachin
[00:05:26] S1: it as content market fit. And... Yeah. Yeah. Our strategy is, is that the media is the distribution arm of the business, and we'd wanna to cash flow positive as quickly as possible. We're actually doing pretty well on the revenue front, like that's been something that's going really positive. But to get it to the next level, we've kind of found this opportunity in documentaries that we're testing out at the moment. There's people that are charging founders like 60 to $70 for a pretty shitty documentary, And one of the big bets we have is that people are sick of interview podcasts. Discoverability on like new forms of media is harder, so you have to go algorithmic platforms first, and that's YouTube. So you essentially have to do well on YouTube because no one's scrolling through Spotify looking for new podcasts. They may get recommendations, but they're not finding them that way. And to go to do well at YouTube, you need to produce something that's worth watching. And so people could sit here and watch our very pretty faces for a while on YouTube, but we think the next generation of that is having cool b roll. Maybe it's you were walking through New York. Maybe it's you talking to customers. And that's like the next generation was when... If someone's investing that time to watch a twenty, thirty minute YouTube video, we need to make it worth their time with the storytelling and the visuals.
00:06:28 · Adam, Sachin, S3
[00:06:28] S2: Yeah. So we're just taking a quick break from the podcast, and we're here with our friend Ryan from Zed Law who's building a legal marketplace. And he's absolutely obsessed with helping startups access the top talent in legal. When we first got a coffee with Ryan, we thought [00:06:42] S1: he had something special. He had this kind of maniacal intensity intensity about really solving this problem properly. And it's something that we both resonate with. When I was in venture capital, I saw so many founders get burned by expensive law firms, and this was their runway. This was, you know, sometimes they mortgage their house and they were getting burnt with lawyers that didn't really do a good job. When did you first kind of realize that this was a problem? [00:07:01] S3: I think what we realized that for a while. I think other law firms have realized the same thing, but what we are trying to do is go, okay, well, founders at the early stage of their businesses don't wanna spend money on lawyers. Why should they? And so what we do is basically go, okay, lawyers that were a top tier firm have left. They're somewhere else. It could be a portfolio company. We're connecting those lawyers up to founders and they they just get startups in a way which lawyers and law firms don't. [00:07:26] S1: Yeah. That's that's fascinating. And what do you think has been the biggest challenge right now in building your business?
00:07:26 · Sachin, S3, Adam, Henry Innis
[00:07:26] S1: Yeah. That's that's fascinating. And what do you think has been the biggest challenge right now in building your business? [00:07:31] S3: I think it's getting... Like, the demand is outstrip supply right now. So, like, we are looking for top tier lawyers who are at startups who are happy to be connected to founders. Yeah. That's a good [00:07:42] S1: problem to have. And how can people find you? Zed.law. Just go to [00:07:45] S3: the website, zed.law is the best way to get in touch. [00:07:52] S2: And so like our mission is that we want to make the best tech content in the world. And we're just really trying to understand where the park is moving with it. How do [00:07:59] S0: you know objectively what you do? Like, because like early on in my business, right? Like it was very easy to bullshit myself and just sit there and I used to call it shit, fighting farts. Yeah. Like, you know, like you kind of get high on your own supply a bit. Like, you know, you're you're like sitting there and you're building stuff. How do you know objectively, like you're moving and improving week to week and stuff like that? Like what metrics do
00:08:23 · Adam
[00:08:23] S2: you look at? Yeah. I think like... So on on the media side, like, there is a lot of objective metrics, which are just updated all the time, which is amazing because you can run so many experiments. Like, for example, view count is just a really obvious one on certain channels. You can look at click rate of certain videos. You can look at retention. And so you can change like a title or thumbnail for a video, and you can see these like really instant AB tests. You can do all the same thing on social media, which is really, really great. But then there's probably something that's quite underrated about just in person feedback. How does someone's eyes light up when they talk about a certain type of content, or does it light up at all? For example, is... I think, like, what we're really trying to do is that you wanna get that first, like, you know, a thousand or 10,000, like, really true fans, people that absolutely love you. And I don't know if you get those true fans by people just liking your content, but by people absolutely loving it. And then you can see those reactions. Like, we're at an event on Friday with, like, 60 fans, and you could see certain people's reactions and their eyes really light up when they talk about this vlog or this podcast. And so that sort of like non data driven metrics can be really helpful as well.