The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:10:33 · Harry Stebbings, Matteo Franceschetti
[00:10:33] S1: How did you think about that channel addition? Because I see so many founders try and be everywhere to everyone. How do you think about I [00:10:40] S0: disagree with that. So you need to go one channel at a time. I was even talking to a common friend recently who was asking me about that, and say, Okay, can I go in all these channels? How much money should I put? Should I start putting 100 ks in each of them? And I say, No, no. You go one by one. You start with Meta. It's probably the biggest and the one that you should prove the fastest. And you start with, based on the size of the company, a certain amount per week. You set the cap to the CAC that you want to achieve, and then from there, you start scaling only if you are within CAC. Because otherwise, you start throwing money out of the window. Your growth people, they will always want to faster, and so they will always want to spend more, and then you start losing control. And what happens? Then, let's say, by the end of the year, you realize you screw up, and so you start pulling back, and then the following year, you're not growing year over year because you're spending less. And so you need to be disciplined now if you want to be successful next year and keep growing year over year. [00:11:33] S1: It's really interesting about how you kind of gamify growth numbers, because you're right, you spend, you get 400% growth, you pull back hard, you Good get 70 luck fundraising when you're going from 400 to We
00:11:33 · Harry Stebbings, Matteo Franceschetti
[00:11:33] S1: It's really interesting about how you kind of gamify growth numbers, because you're right, you spend, you get 400% growth, you pull back hard, you Good get 70 luck fundraising when you're going from 400 to We [00:11:44] S0: could be growing 50% more if we wanted year over year this year just by spending more, but then next year you're in trouble because your CAC is upside down. [00:11:52] S1: Do we care about economics from day one? You said there about start with matter. Do we care about economics from day one in terms of optimization? Or actually is it like, hey, customers are engaging, they're liking product. If we're doing a one to one, you know, for every dollar we spend, we're getting a dollar back. Great, or should we be looking for optimal returns early? [00:12:12] S0: Well, in our case, we look at immediate payback period. This is actually something where Keith was really pushy, and he was correct since day one. So he wanted us to have an immediate payback period, and then we have what we call contribution margin, so what is the margin on day zero? Then we have a subscription, and the subscription will compound on top of that. But we want to have that contribution profit on day one to be really healthy. If we were compressing that, we could be growing 50% more, but then the business wouldn't be public ready or as healthy as [00:12:45] S1: it is today. What would you most like to do if economics were not a part of your business? It could
00:12:45 · Harry Stebbings, Matteo Franceschetti
[00:12:45] S1: it is today. What would you most like to do if economics were not a part of your business? It could [00:12:50] S0: be massively increase the quality of a certain point. It could be pour fuel on the fire on that like never before. Take economics aside. Well, you could reduce prices, and I think we will see an acceleration, or you could just deploy probably more into marketing, which is probably what I would prefer. I'm never a fan of compressing prices. You know what Andreessen says, that if you have a great product, people will pay for it. But at our stage as a company, even if we start fairly large, brand awareness is still probably the biggest bottleneck. You have [00:13:21] S1: a subscription business as well, which obviously really provides a lot of juice to your margins. Because you have an upfront cost in the thousands, it's a relatively expensive product [00:13:31] S0: for a lot [00:13:32] S1: of people, do you just inherently have very low churn rates on your subscription product because you have the buy in of multiple thousand dollars invested upfront? [00:13:39] S0: Yeah. It's world class. Our churn is the lowest of any company you can think of. [00:13:44] S1: What is the churn? [00:13:47] S0: It's in the single digit, low single digit yearly churn. Even if you compare it to other companies in the wearable space that are going public, we are better than them. [00:13:58] S1: Who could that be? [00:13:59] S0: Who could that be? I don't know, dude. [00:14:01] S1: That's absolutely hilarious. Yeah. [00:14:04] S0: But it's world class. It's like unseen.
00:14:04 · Matteo Franceschetti, Harry Stebbings
[00:14:04] S0: But it's world class. It's like unseen. [00:14:06] S1: Going back to the channels, and I'm sorry for focusing on channels, I'm a real murderer about channels. Has your Google spend changed in the wake of bluntly AI and AI driven search impacting so much? [00:14:17] S0: Yes. And so we introduced a new channel that now we monitor that is literally what we call AI SEO. Now, the report that I receive weekly, twice a week, there is also AI SEO, and so we see how we rank in AI searches. [00:14:32] S1: What percent of traffic today is from AI searches? [00:14:36] S0: I don't have a number for that. I can check, but it keeps growing. [00:14:39] S1: But is it like 1% or like 20%? [00:14:42] S0: Probably somewhere in the middle. But then we start seeing an impact on Google. Our assumption is that Google is behaving differently because of AI searches. [00:14:50] S1: What was your biggest channel mistake? Where did you spend money that you shouldn't have done, and you're like, Ugh, I learned a lot of lessons from this? [00:14:58] S0: Out of home. Everything depends on the scale of the business in that country. So we try to do a campaign, an out of home campaign in The Middle East, but we're not ready yet. So if we were doing an out of home campaign in New York, where we are decently known, it would perform very differently than the same campaign in The Middle East where we just launched a year ago. And so those are the things I'm learning that I didn't know.
00:14:58 · Matteo Franceschetti, Harry Stebbings
[00:14:58] S0: Out of home. Everything depends on the scale of the business in that country. So we try to do a campaign, an out of home campaign in The Middle East, but we're not ready yet. So if we were doing an out of home campaign in New York, where we are decently known, it would perform very differently than the same campaign in The Middle East where we just launched a year ago. And so those are the things I'm learning that I didn't know. [00:15:23] S1: When are you big enough to do out of home? Because I think one thing that we've seen in the last, you know, two years, so to speak, is tech companies realizing the importance of brand marketing. Out of home, football shirt sponsorships, you name it, and it supposedly performing well. How big do you have to be to do out of home? [00:15:39] S0: I don't think there is a hard number, but you want to be a brand that is decently well known. And so I make it up. If 100 people see that ad on the street, I don't know, 5% of them knows the brand. And so that is one of the other things that we monitor, that is this aided and unaided brand awareness, to understand how many people know the brand. And if they know the brand, they know what the brand does. [00:16:05] S1: How much did you spend on out of home?
00:16:05 · Harry Stebbings, Matteo Franceschetti
[00:16:05] S1: How much did you spend on out of home? [00:16:07] S0: Nothing, no. But we created a track now that goes around Silicon Valley, and so you can book the track, it comes to your home, and you can try the product live. So this track has a bedroom built in in the back of the track, but now the track also goes to specific events or to specific areas during the weekend where there are many people, and we are seeing pretty good success because there are a lot of people that wanted to try our product, but they couldn't. And now when they see the track, they just get into the track and try the product and bite. [00:16:39] S1: That's a phenomenal channel, and it doesn't... And you're gonna have, like, high conversion rate on that. [00:16:43] S0: Yeah. It's doing pretty well. [00:16:45] S1: That's fascinating. I... I'm I'm also really impressed that TikTok works for you because TikTok is freaking hard. [00:16:50] S0: Yeah. It was now working in the past, then we kept iterating, and it just started working six months ago. [00:16:56] S1: How big is the marketing budget today? [00:16:58] S0: In the hundreds of millions. [00:16:59] S1: In the hundreds of millions?