Dan Novaes
speaker
169 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Dan Novaes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This app was the first ever app that basically created Instagram as like an exchange system, meaning you could upload your photo. And you could like someone's photo or you can follow them and you get a certain amount of coins for those actions. Or you can just buy coins. At the time, the way the algorithm worked on Instagram is the most likes, most follows gets to the popular page.
Once you get to the popular page, you get a ton of organic reach. It doesn't work like that anymore. This app basically was the first time that you could do that without bots. And this app went out. And the first day it came out, there was like four hours left in the day. And every 24 hours, the clock resets. And it made like $700. I thought it was a glitch.
I was like, someone came in here and probably went insane about that. The next day, I see it rising through the charts.
know we're at like number four you know in the paid charts and uh the next day it made like 12 grand right and then the next day it made 20 grand right and it was just organically growing you know had this really nice viral loop um and then we were the 65th highest grossing app in the entire app store and so every day we're making like 20 000 profit you know on this product um and it got to a point that i was like look i think you should drop out of school
we should keep building other apps. And he's like, listen, I can't get a visa because I don't have a college degree. And so he's like, if we raise an investment round, we can get a special visa called the O1A visa. It's like people of extraordinary ability. And so then I went out to go try and raise money. And we were able to raise $1.5 million.
We got Mark Cuban to become an advisor in the business as well at the time. And he dropped out of school. And then we started this company. Three or four months into that app, Facebook tried to sue us. They sent us a cease and desist. They didn't actually sue us because we were using their private API. They didn't like what we were doing. And so we adjusted the way that that worked.
But ultimately, that's how we got started in software and then ran a lot of different apps
know through the years and you know that kind of led to you know what we do now with mode is kind of all that learning all those different businesses um and uh we sold a lot of parts a lot of the app studio and apps to you know other people along the way um but that's kind of like the story of those you know early 20s uh and and you know the pivots along the way all right just so so for those of folks that are listening right how many dogs did you have i mean did you guys just literally go on a streak of winners or did you were there a couple just dogs
I mean, the app builder was a dog and the entire thesis of that business. Um, it's not that it was like that business. Some people made it work. Like I, I just like, wasn't built to be a founder. I think like that, because I was like, I've always been a mass consumer founder. I would say like every business I've ever operated has been like a B2C business focused on getting consumers in the door.
That's like what I'm good at. That's what I like to do. Um, and so, uh, that's, So that didn't work. And then you have this consumer app, and that did, and that prevented the capital. Then we were like, oh, okay, let's make all these other apps. And we did these celebrity apps. We were the first ones to use. We were going Vine kids. At the time, Vine was big.
So we were really ahead of a lot of trends. And some of them made that money, but not to the scale of that first InstaLiker app. And that was actually a big life lesson, I would say, because if we just would have focused on some of the core value props that we were doing, instead of wanting to aim for a billion-dollar outcome, instead of a several million,
or a figure but i was like so enamored with billion dollar outcome billionaire outcome um and i just couldn't make it happen and so uh eventually though uh it did lead to what became this business so i would say probably like 20 dude like honestly this company has almost failed 20 different times um and even even knew as early as a few years ago like you're still dealing with those ups and downs
Um, because it's anything but easy, you know, and then do you see when you think something's going great?
Um, you know, in 2021, 2022, we had like an insane, even with node, our current business, like an insane growth rate and everything's going because at the time we were making a ton of revenue off of like, you know, crypto companies and, uh, financial like neobanks that were super high valued and money's cheap. So everyone's go public.
So they're spending a ton of money on marketing and that's how we make money is, you know, brands paying us effectively for marketing. And, uh, In 2022, FTX happens, all this other stuff happens. Voyager goes bankrupt. That was one of our biggest clients. They owned this millions of dollars. And suddenly my revenue goes away and my business almost like, you know, tanks.
So that idea wasn't a dog, but it was also like the concept of what we were doing was working, but the market landscape changed. And, you know, the errors that I made was like revenue concentration. Like, oh, if 70% of your revenue is coming from like, you know, six or seven different people and then they're all in the same industry, something happens. It can completely take you down.
That's a problem. And so you learn these things along the way of diversification and how to build a business so that you don't fail. And I think every year that you don't die effectively, the likelihood of your success infinitely scales because you just get so much wiser, you know what I mean, of how you operate.
Yeah, with Mode. So this is how essentially it started. We had created a concept. So obviously, we were in the app builder space. We kind of went from the start of the app boom, which was everyone wants an app, to everyone's like, We don't need any more apps. Honestly, if the restaurant down the street gets an app, I'm going to have to freak out. You know what I mean?
I don't want to download that app. And so then I was like, oh, OK, well, we should build a super app that brings all these services in one place. And then we focused specifically on media at the time. And so what ours specifically did was we aggregated all the music services into one place. So SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube, all that stuff.
And it was this idea of multimedia, all the super apps, all these apps within it. Ultimately, it didn't work. There was only one type of user using it. And this is actually how the idea started, is that we asked these people, why are you using this product? And they all had one thing in common.
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