SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Disco Helps Hundreds of Customers Facilitate Live Learning, Can They Beat Hopin?
18 Mar 2022
Chapter 1: What is Disco and how does it help knowledge creators?
And I mean, are you close to getting to the point where you're doing like 5 or 10 million in creator ticket sales per month? Or what's the metric you're trying to hit there?
Yeah, I would say... So we have some creators that are on track to do 7 figures this year.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Candice Factor.
She's the co-founder of Disco.co, a platform for knowledge creators to build a live learning empire. She's also a serial tech entrepreneur who has a passion for learning and community. Before launching Disco, she scaled Wattpad to 80 million users, making it the world's largest platform for creators to share their stories. Wattpad was sold in January 2021 for $660 million.
Candice, you ready to take us to the top?
Absolutely.
All right. So give us some more clues here. What was your role at Wattpad and how did that role help you discover the need for Disco?
Absolutely. So I joined Wattpad. I was the first non-technical employee and I joined to help scale the business. So I was the head of business and the global general manager. And it was so great to be able to work with such talented founders to... bring something that was really social and engaging to something that, you know, we always thought of as, you know, isolated, which was reading, right?
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Chapter 2: What lessons from Wattpad influenced the creation of Disco?
Lots of interesting folks from Shopify, Lambda School, Solana, Endeavor, very interesting people who are participating.
So smart round, great capital. Was that your only round today or have you raised other capital pre-seed maybe?
Yeah, we raised a pre-seed round. We raised a safe as well because there was a lot of interest and we'll be sharing some further funding.
When was that pre-seed round closed? Was that in 2020?
That was in 2020.
Okay, so first year in business, really. So 2020, and how much was that for?
That was just a friends and family 750K round.
Did you get Alan and Ivan? I do.
I have Ivan as an investor. I'm a huge fan of the Wattpad team. Also, the head of product, Tarun Sekdeva is an investor.
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Chapter 3: Why did the founder leave Wattpad to start Disco?
Yeah, I would say we're really early, right? So we were, we're quite early in our, in our evolution of even being live off our waitlist. So, you know, we anticipate lots of people will switch over, but we're just not sharing. I see. I see. I see.
Okay. That makes perfect sense. By the way, everyone has to start from zero. So it's fair to say like maybe under a hundred on the $85 a month plan, you're just now launching your storytelling around and you're still learning.
Yeah, I mean, we have a significant number of pro plans and enterprise plans, but absolutely growing a lot. And what's interesting is a lot of people prefer just paying you a set amount of money per month.
Totally, it makes complete sense. That's why I ask. It makes complete sense to me. Do you guys care about valuation right now, specifically your valuation? Do you think you might raise soon or sell a portion of the company? There is no other tool on the internet that you can use to get a better and higher valuation than FounderPath's new valuation tool.
We have over 253 deals that went down over the past 30 days, all the revenue numbers, all the valuations, and the multiplier. That way you can go filter the data, find companies that are your same size, what they sold or raised for or at, and then use those as comparables in your decks to argue and debate and get.
a higher valuation and less dilution, which is the name of the game, less dilution. Check it out today at founderpath.com forward slash products. That's plural forward slash valuations. Again, both plural founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations. Can you tell me the percentage? So you have hundreds of customers. Can you tell me the percentage split of the pie?
Like is it 50 50 or 90 10 or
Yeah. I would say it's about in the range of between 30% to 50%.
30% to 50% are on the SaaS fee?
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Chapter 4: How is Disco funded and what is its funding strategy?
I love that. Number three, favorite online tool for building disco besides your own?
Well, Slack went down yesterday and I was mind blown about as to how much of an essential tool that is for our remote first team. So we are a remote first company. My co-founder lives in Costa Rica. I live in Canada and our team is all over North America. And quite frankly, we were quite dumbfounded on how essential Slack has been in our business in our communication.
All right. Slack number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
A lot. I believe deeply in good sleep. So I think I must sleep for at least eight hours a night.
Love that. And what's your situation, Candice? Married, single, kiddos?
All of it. So married, two kids, nine and 12, puppy. So yeah, full on.
And can I ask how old you are?
Yeah, I'm going to be 44 next week.
So cool. And the reason I ask is for context. So now take us back to your 20 year old self. What's something you wish that she knew?
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