Hi, I’m Tony. I’m writing this week’s recap to start it off. I thought this made sense in terms of format, but Elijah will post next week and add his own sauce. It’s basically an A|B test.
We’re now one week into our four-week experience of where we live in a $34M mansion in Beverly Hills with 20 plus other entrepreneurs and creators that are either starting their own company or in the process of doing so.
So let’s start by breaking down our first week at the infamous launch house with our roses/thorns:
Roses
- Met some super dope investors at the social → maybe I made some solid connections -? I was able to hold very sustainable and good conversations. They spit out $’s for the company & gave me their numbers.
- I’ve received excellent feedback on diffusion to the point where people are actually building with me as we’re talking about the product and direction.
- We received design help from #advisor; he’s super open to taking on the full project as long as he has full design freedom + shares. Ok, dude, whatever. We finished our persona’s and go-to-market, which has been one of our bigger blocks.
Thornes
- Both Elijah & I have been in our heads thinking about our place in the world and, of course, our families.
- So now I have to raise money? How much? How do I do that? I’ll do it, but I really have no clue how to do it.
- Can we move as fast as we need? We’ve been struggling to find somebody to get our web assets done, get content out, and find interviewees. I want this to blow up.
We’ve received so much good feedback on the idea, make hot progress on our MVP, and start creating and working on our company rituals.
If you want the depth; be my guest & read down below 👇
Monday
I was able to help some of the Launch House companies with a couple of things that felt super dope. I helped the gals over at Scoops figure out their Product Stack, i.e., company mission, product mission, etc., which allowed us to brainstorm their MVP planning, which they finished while we were sitting together. 😉
BUT Eli and I didn’t get much done on this day for diffusion. We met in the AM & it sounded like he was super behind on his full-time job as a full-stack developer, so he had to focus on that. I’m a career/life/talent optimization coach — I help companies figure out how to utilize their talent to reach their business goals and help people figure stuff out, like their life or career. So I had to get our content marketing + buyer personas.
I guess that can be our challenge; how do we set up a system to do both FTE work and work on diffusion as much as we can?
Once the day was done, maybe like 7:30 pm, we winded down in the hot tub, and we were up until 3 AM, literally a shit-show. I did no work — I mean not anything tangible, but I’ll be honest, I was super happy to meet people and head into the first week.
Tuesday
The day went through quickly, and I focused a lot on getting my stuff done for my buddy Ed. Lol, Once again, how the hell does I fit diffusion into my workstream.
I had to secure a partnership/friendship with the folks over dive. Chat. Michelle is really cool — we met over a Twitter DM, and we decided to meet up. I thought this would be a good opportunity to create a partnership on a company level and a content level. Serendipity, right?
I got back home and met with Elijah — we were scheduled to have a ‘how to use Twitter’ and ‘ how to use tik-take talks, so we sat through that for around two hours. Look, I’ll post the little learnings on here to exchange for your undying loyalty, fair?
Your bio is like a landing page, you should tell people why they should care about following you and why they should follow you. If you have cool companies or cool projects put them in your bio it’s credibility which then turns into social proof which then turns into followers, magic!
Do you admire somebody? Step One is to go through their followers and load your feed with those people who seem equally as interesting as the people you follow. Once you’ve done that, keep it simple, look at their lists, create lists based on the people they follow and topics they enjoyed to feed the brain. Twitter is the invisible college.
After that talk — Eli and I were grinding until 2 am. We had to do a couple of things for our Full-time jobs before we could even get onto diffusion.
Elijah managed to bump out the base of the google chrome extension within that time, so now we’re literally one week ahead of schedule. In the meantime — I did some research into the creator economy and got ready to build a thread the next day, created our content planning schedule, and started.
Wednesday
Wednesday was an interesting day. For the first time during the workday …. I like relaxed? I mean, seriously… by mid-day, I was literally in the pool. But before then, Eli and I had a two-hour sales meeting to get him on the right path with his pitch. Elijah is a dev, nothing wrong with that, but I wouldn’t say that he has been pressured to present/pitch/ talk about a product or with other folks very often, and that’s fine.
We covered the sales basics → of what a funnel vs. a flywheel is? What’s the goal of a cold email? What is a sales process? Top-down vs. bottom-up communication. Last but not least — pitch diffusion. I was genuinely impressed by how quickly he could pick up the pitch and add his own sauce to it. His mind was absolutely blown when I taught him top-down communication, so we’ve decided that he will be practicing when it relates to work. Once done with our little meeting — I thought it would be a great idea to meet with Laya, the CEO of shoplook.io. They’re similar to us in a sense a) creator-focused & b) Pinterest iteration (mood boards). She’s been rather successful — 1M MAU, raised from 500 startups, and full-blown NFX, so I needed to learn from her. We’ve set up a demo + brainstorm session for next week, but we were able to get into the roots of Diffusion. I explained the product strategy, go-to-market, and vision of the company — she loved it and thought we should get some funding. She thinks we have a strong vision as long as we figure out the monetization strategy ‘; the monetization strategies in consumers are broken unless it’s freemium, so maybe give that a shot. She’s totally not wrong, and I’ve thought about it as a pricing lever + microtransactions, but we will see. By the end of the conversation — I was able to think… About something that may be useful at the end of all of this. Diffusion breaks the creator platforms by touching all arms of the platforms: Content Discovery, Create Community, Creators as Business, and Commerce. [see below]
When Laya and I were done — I noticed that Alex, you remember, the guy from the last blog was a little stressed, so I went to go chat it up with him. His company has grown so fast from 2 to 7, and the problem that’s come is he’s never running a dev team; how does he do that?
Since not a dev — I didn’t think I would be super helpful for him at the moment but said during my time at Uber/Setter — the dev teams would tri-weekly standup to a) set expectations b) check on progress/help c) tie the loop and set expectations again. After talking with other devs in the house, it sounds like this is a best practice; who would’ve known I was right.
Overall, not a bad day, we’re building good chemistry, Eli and I, but also we’re finding the people for the rest of the month.
Thursday
Thursday was an absolutely amazing day. I’ll start from the end to the beginning to make it a little fun. Today we had this event scheduled called the Creator Dinner. Basically, we meet creators from youtube, tik-tok, and Instagram with 500k — 5M followers across platforms. AKA, a day for us to meet people for diffusion. Our target isn’t these people; rather, it’s nano-influencers & ‘self-labeled creatives, brands on a much smaller scale, who need tools to monetize and find their 100 true fans. Anyways, it was a big day for us, and my main focus was to find the investors in the room and do a little dancey-dance with them.
Without dropping any names — I met with a Venture Studio and two angels — I gave them the rundown on diffusion, the vision, the how, and the who. Guess what? They loved it — they asked how much I was raising, which I actually have no clue about. We parted ways, and I came away with their digits.
So challenge #1 — find out how much money we’re raising. Can I preface by saying that I was not excited to get to this point but super glad that I did?
The best part about meeting everybody was that this Product Manager, Ami, who works in the creator space, was building/ideating with me as I was pitching with him, saying like ‘ oh it would be cool if,’ ‘ yeah I agree, curation is so necessary,’ ‘ I can see something like this giving people the ability to monetize, who would use this? This is what I see’ — all good signs.
To make the day better- we had a one-hour meeting with our ‘Early Adopters.’ We’ve been able to wrangle a group of 5 ‘self-labeled creatives who love us and are excited for us to drop. We hadn’t chatted in about three weeks, so I thought I’d give them a rundown on both the go-to-market strategy, how we’ll get diffusion to people, and the customer persons, who exactly those people are. Not only did they see themselves in Angel, the creative, but they know a ton of Jamie, the nano-influencers. So, Agustin and Sebastian said that they’d start digging on those folks for us, but that means we had to pitch practice with them, so we did. Much like with Elijah — I gave them a high-level comparison, the value prop, vision, and product strategy as a simplified pitch. Next thing you know, Agustin is posting about us on his Instagram -> cue 4 sign-ups, baby!!!!
Friday
I’m super excited to build another week in the house. Let’s see where this takes us. Since this was one week in, and I’ll be honest, I was so hungover from the creator dinner; I had to keep it super light. I started my day by having a stand-up with Elijah on what we wanted to get done today and how the week treated us. It was a mental day week for him; we got into that in-depth during our night-time 1:1, where we share our roses/thorns of the day and week + make a plan to improve. Our goal throughout the day was to get our OKR’s for Launch done ( Objectives and Key Results), so no better way to do that than poolside, am I right? [pic above] Some Objectives we’ve got are as followed, I’m doing this so you will keep us accountable, so check it out:
Become customer-obsessed and understand the voice of the customer to increase retention & customer voice
a. Survey customer experience with a minimum of 20 users
b. Create a list of top 10 adopters & put it within a discord community
c. Conduct 10 early idea interviews with existing ICPs who are not users
Create content to support launch to increase reach
a. Launch content strategy,
b. Write 4 blog posts covering learnings, challenges, and doings at launch house
c. Write 21 daily roses/thorns for the top of funnel awareness on Twitter
d. 2 Vlogs to show what we did, how much fun we had, and what it looks like to be startup founders :)
Check-in on how we’re doing and keep us accountable.
Once we finished our OKR’s, we had a meeting with Jackson, he’s the Head Designer at Launch House, and he’s extremely bullish on Diffusion. To cut a long meeting short, he told us to write out the web asset mocks; he’ll come on as a design advisor, take care of our design project in exchange for creative freedom, and gave us marketing campaign ideas. Not bad, I think we’ve found ourselves a guy who can make us polished and pretty.
Friday consisted of relaxation and the pool — but I mean, can you blame me?
Summary
Wow. I had a blast of a week. I met many smart people from MIT/Yale/UofT, had interesting conversations, and got a ton of feedback on Diffusion. I was able to relax and kick back while still being pretty productive. I’ll be honest, I thought this place was a whole lotta bs, but I’m starting to think I’m wrong, and the future of living/learning is in the form of decentralized communities.
Stay tuned for next week’s letter — we have our first startup teardown, have 15 customer interviews, and hopefully have our google extension done!
Follow the team@diffusionme
Follow me, the Biz Guy @tonyplasencia3
Follow Eli, the dev @_elijah_d_r
