EP 104: How'd you invest $1.5m in 40 different companies?

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Oh, man, it's a lengthy bio because I've started a lot of companies on a lot of different topics over the years, a bunch of them in total. How many? How many total? Really a lot. I mean, I'm involved in, right now, I'm an investor in more than 40 companies, and I'm really close and active in five companies that we're building.

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The one I run is called Notable, and we're launching this new one called the Notel, which is a hosted workspace around New York and then around the U.S., Okay, great.

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The thing that we hit on that's really been working well is just cleverly using the app stores, the different app stores that exist. And so we have only launched one thing. We launched one thing. It's called Notes for Chrome. It's for the Chrome browser, K-N-O-T-E-S.

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And we stuck it in the Chrome browser and we started trial ballooning it with a few friends and then testing out the different little mechanisms for launching apps. An actual app is far easier to market than a web service or some kind of subscription or some other kind of abstract idea.

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People discover it in the stores and they start downloading it and people see it on somebody else's laptop and they think about getting it. And then there's a lot more opportunities to actually talk it up and link to it. So Lifehacker just covered us and we got like 5,000 downloads in a couple weeks. Okay, so let's dive into that for a second. How did the Lifehacker feature, how did that happen?

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Did you network with somebody and get the article placed? How did that work? You know, I just wrote a post on Medium about this yesterday. And so whoever's listening can follow up in the nuts and bolts, grainy detail of it all. But like the biggest... We put it in the Chrome store. There was a check crunch in it. And then finally, a few months after that, Lifehacker wrote a post about it.

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The deputy editor had heard about it from me mentioning it to him just on Twitter. I probably just pinged 20 or 30 different writers that I thought were interested in productivity over the course of a couple of months as we were refining the beta. And then one Monday morning, there was just a post up.

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I mean, there's a story that journalists rely on that happens in the media itself, and you have to engineer it if you're thoughtful. So yeah, we were being intentional in the steps we were taking. So you just recently launched it. What was launch date again of Notable? So the Notes Chrome extension about 90 days ago. So let's see, it's October. So it was like July something. Okay.

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And how many total free users do you have now? 15,000. 15,000. And is there a paid plan you're trying to get them to upgrade to? No, not yet. I mean, the thing that we launched is just a little toy, right? Like it was a trial balloon to see if we could do it before. An extension for Chrome, you know, there are not too many businesses where that's like the center of what they do.

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And the product that we have is a really broad-ranging product. There are pieces of it on iPhone and on Android and in the actual web and email integrations and Gmail and Dropbox and tons of other stuff that we've been building. So the first little piece that we teased out there to users is just a test of our little launch mechanism.

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But as people start using it and putting notes in it and collaborating on it, it'll be a platform that people are working on. And it'll look a lot like other productivity or enterprise kind of teamwork software over time in terms of the way the business works.

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But for now, I think our idea is just to get people going, see if it works well for them, get their engagement high so they're writing lots of notes and working with other people on it, starting to download the other apps and things as those are ready and they get launched. And once there's a lot of activity, then we'll figure out exactly which direction we want to take.

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But there are 50 people working on the project at different levels. 5-0 or 1-5? Amal, you've raised a million. It's a free product. You have 15 to 20 full-time employees and then another 30 who are part-time.

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If you have 20 full-time employees and let's say on average you're paying them $60,000 a year or $5,000 a month, does that mean you're spending about $100,000 per month and just burn at a minimum? No, much less. About two-thirds less than that. This is the great secret of the Ship While You Sleep book. And it's totally contrarian to the way a lot of people build their companies.

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So I think it's important to explore ways to find talent wherever it is and take the benefit of folks who will have more flexible schedules, maybe work fewer hours so you don't have to buy them for full time. Oh, so these 20 people are not full time then? But they don't earn the 60 grand that you were speculating. There is a wide range of compensation levels for folks.

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Okay, so are these people overseas then? They're obviously not in the U.S.? Oh, okay, got it. We have people in 12 different time zones. Got it. Okay, good, good, good. That's more helpful. So these are not like 20 people in New York developers that you're paying market rate, which would be super expensive. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Okay, Top Tribe, don't forget, for your chance to win $100 right here on the podcast every Monday, you simply have to subscribe to the show on iTunes. Do that now and then text me that you've done that to 703-431-2709. Again, subscribe on iTunes now, then text me that you've done it at 703-431-2709. Got it. Okay, very cool. Hey, I want to read that book. Top Tribe, you should check it out too.

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This is maybe not you directly, but there are people listening going, I need to raise from one angel and I need about $35,000. It's probably not you, but tell me the story since you've done it. What should they approach you like? How should they approach you? Well, I mean, here's the way that somebody should raise money. You should raise one to two years of financing, not money.

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certain dollar amount, that one to two years should be enough to achieve something really meaningful. Meaningful means enough to go raise a Series A, where a Series A is something that's hard to do. You'd have to have accomplished something really real. What it implies is one to two years and achieving that meaningful end result gives you one or two shots at doing it.

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So even if you think you could accomplish that amazing end result in nine months, you need to raise double that amount of time's worth. And that'll end up being $500,000 or a million dollars, something like that, at least. It'll be whoever it's from, whether it's...

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if you have a fund there they might put in 250 or 500 but you'll still end up with a bunch of other names involved so it's going to be a club or a team of people who are backing you not one person and all those people are going to slowly sort of take shape together there won't be like one and the next and the next all following the lead of one of them and

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The way to get to these people is to already know them. And if you don't already know them, then you should already know someone who knows them. And it's a painful, annoying reverse induction process. But you need to become well known to folks and you need to establish trust with folks. And have that trust before you need it.