Take off ( Leaving OAK)
TLDR, my buddy Eli and I are from High School are building a tech startup within the Creator Economy. We’re calling it Diffusion — think of it like Pocket meets Pinterest or Pinterest meets Substack. I don't know; I can’t decide which one sticks yet.
I was SUPER drunk and came across a Tik-Tok from @launchhouse, claiming to be where ‘founders come to create,’ applied, interviewed, and accepted. After selling my co-founder on the idea, raising to get down to LA, and lots of f***k up’s — we’re traveling to LA today.
We’re currently sitting at our terminal at OAK airport writing this together. We’ll be living in a house with at least 20 other people. We’re not too sure how we feel about the experience; very skeptical about what we will get. It has to be legit, but part of us, mostly me, can’t believe that we got into this incubator based on an idea. Like, is living with 20 other people really going to prove that value? Will the people even provide value? Welp- that’s what we came to find out.
We’re boarding in 25 minutes, and our main focus is around bringing awareness to our platform and generate demand + hype for our MVP launch. Before we can fully enjoy the reaps of our labor, we have to get our hands dirty.
Step 1 — finish up our user personas; this makes it easy for us to understand our user's needs and pains, message accordingly, and build for them. I’ve spun up two personas based on the feedback sessions that I’ve had with self-labeled creatives + people in my network. I’ll be honest, and our personas are a working hypothesis at this point; the volume of our sessions has been sad. 55 people total have volunteered to chat with us and learn about our idea.
The responses, though, have been very positive. My hesitancy comes from looking at the competition through their blogs and sees they’ve reached the 100’s.
We’re big believers in growing your community and building with your early adopters, so if we’re able to find our tribe, grassroots our way to attention, we should be fine.
Welp, time to board, gtg.
Arrival to Launch House
We finally put our Marketing Strategy on paper — the thought came to me while on the plane — content, social media, guerilla, and earned marketing. Pull some, if not all, of the levers to get both awareness and bring people through our funnel until they download.
We’ve made it to LA; we arrived at LAX around 1:30 from OAK; it was a relatively short flight.
We met one of our housemates via the slack → Samee; he’s building an NFT marketplace for creators, you can think NBA TopShot. He’s from Maryland, an absolute badass; within a couple of minutes, I could tell he was insanely smart. We ordered an Uber, 55 minutes, and spent more than half of that in traffic. Like Samee said, “ at least we get to experience the local culture this early in the trip.” LOL yeah, dude, you’re not wrong!
So, there we went, Samee, Elijah, and Myself, in an Uber on the way to our creator mansion in Beverly Hills. On our way there — we spit a little bit of game — test the waters. In other words, tell me what the hell you’re building; what’s your pitch? I’m happy that I gave it some practice because If not — we would have died this whole day. Once we got out of the pitches — he was super curious to hear about my opinions on growth & metrics, so I gave him my two senses. Luckily — we’re both nerds, so I listened to his crypto talk & he listened to my growth talk. He set some high expectations for the people.
So, we get to the house; it’s so nice. The first thing we gotta do take our test to make sure that we didn’t get COVID on our way here. I swabbed my nose and started balling, oof. But once we passed that, we walked into a community of people having conversations at the kitchen table, on the couches, by the pool, grinding on their laptop, or napping.
Luis (community guy) showed us our room. Yeah, we bunk bedding, sleeping with four other dudes in one room — sounds like Christmas came early [lol]. We finally got to meet Charles; that guy is the best; he’s working on a mobile game called Wrestling GM. Not only is it that he’s smart, but he’s also just such a G; he gets it. But anyway, the tour house, we saw the views, we used the elevators, all standard shit. The rest of the day was really getting to the point of introductions; we went around and introduced with everybody that we could see. ‘Oh hi, my name is tony!’ ‘ wait, what are you working on?’ ‘ you’re cofounders.. from where?’ etc., etc., so on. Honestly, it was kind of nice to be around a ton of new people.
At 6:30, we had a champagne toast on the rooftop where we did just that — drink some champagne, eat some chipotle, and once again introduced ourselves to people. We met Alex from tryshowtime.com; he’s working on Instagram for NFT’s; once he broke the idea down, I knew that it was something really cool. As a result, he already picked around $7M worth of funding to build this out.
Once everything died down, we thought we would chill and hop in the hot tub, right? Nope. We already mentioned that the vibe was insane, around 11 pm, and people were brainstorming in circles, writing code, and doing work. Eli and I and we held on for the r; we’re going to go ham.
We hopped online and were able to bump out granular customer personas + marketing strategy. We didn’t sleep until 2:30 am, but hey, that’s why we’re here. To launch.
We’re going to bring you on this journey via Twitter with our roses/thorns, weekly blogs, and bi-weekly vlogs. Roses and Thorns are the plus/negatives of the day; we’re forcing ourselves to be ultra-reflective during this time, you know, a little bit of growth. 😉 So stay tuned on here to get our weekly updates but follow us closely on Twitter.
Follow the team@diffusionme
Follow me, the Biz Guy @tonyplasencia3
Follow Eli, the dev @_elijah_d_r
