- Eric Mijakovsky, a partner at Y Combinator, is conducting live office hours with Startup School companies
- He starts the session with JC from Boxcore, but JC doesn't respond, so they move on to Helen from Jovial
- Helen explains that Jovial helps software developers vet potential projects and clients, offering both a SaaS tool and a service
- Eric advises Helen to focus on getting as many paying customers as possible before building too much process or product
- Helen mentions that she already has paying customers in a pilot and asks for advice on managing customer expectations and balancing sales and order fulfillment
- Eric recommends being transparent with customers about success metrics during the pilot and working quickly to align expectations and deliver results
- He suggests putting the success criteria in the pilot contract and using it as a basis for transitioning customers to a paid, recurring service
- Helen agrees to improve communication and aims to close or make progress on potential projects in the next two weeks

- The speaker wants to close two deals and plans to follow up in two weeks.
- They discuss a company called Cognitive that has developed an app for connecting patients with therapists.
- The app allows patients to record their emotions and thoughts, which therapists can use during sessions.
- The company has 150,000 signups and 45 active subscribers.
- The speaker advises the company to focus on converting free users to paid users and suggests using analytics to track user behavior.
- The company has collected 30,000 therapist emails and has attempted an email marketing campaign with low conversion rates.
- The speaker recommends personal outreach to potential customers.

- The speaker suggests picking up the phone to make sales with a smaller number of customers
- They recommend contacting therapists who already have clients using the app to pitch the benefits of paid subscriptions
- The speaker advises taking notes during phone calls to improve the pitch and gather feedback
- The goal for the next 2 weeks is to sell more annual subscriptions, aiming for at least 10 sales
- The next part of the video discusses a company called Hotspot and their focus on matching hotels with travel influencers
- The speaker suggests focusing on a specific type of hotel for better product-market fit and offers strategies for building trust and increasing revenue growth
- A segmentation strategy is recommended to target the right hotels for collaboration with influencers, with a focus on Latin America.

- The video discusses the importance of segmentation and targeting specific customer groups for a product.
- The speaker suggests running experiments to test hypotheses about different customer segments.
- They recommend reaching out to potential customers through phone calls, WhatsApp, or video calls to gather real-time feedback.
- The focus is on finding a small segment that will be a good match for the product and conducting outreach to test the conversion rate.
- The speaker suggests focusing on regions like Southeast Asia and South Africa, targeting small properties that may not have large marketing budgets.
- The company mentioned in the video is Dreamlist, an online wishlist and registry platform that allows users to add larger items and collaborate with others for special occasions. They currently have 17,000 users and generate revenue through affiliate marketing.

- The website is targeted towards individuals who want to create wish lists for special occasions.
- The company makes money through affiliate fees when items are purchased from affiliated retailers.
- The main challenge is finding alternative business models for consumer startups that do not rely on advertising.
- The company has seen success with foundations as power users, but tracking revenue from them is difficult.
- The video discusses the importance of data tracking and suggests improving landing pages and visuals on the website.
- The goal for the next two weeks is to launch new features and increase the number of baby registries created.
- The website's vision of being a free, privacy-free, and ad-free wishlist is not effectively communicated on the front page.

- The person in the video is discussing their business, Burlocks.com, which helps people set and achieve their goals.
- They currently have 15 users and are making $220 MRR (monthly recurring revenue).
- The current model involves the founder personally calling each user every week to set goals and track progress.
- They are looking for ways to scale their business as they are unable to handle more calls.
- They are considering two new models: a coach model where users are connected with someone who can help them achieve their goals, and a family and friends model where users are paired with someone they know to set and track goals together.
- They are in the process of building out the new model and plan to launch it by March 1st.
- They are aiming to have 30 users (15 old, 15 new) using the new model.

- The speaker discusses the challenge of getting new users to sign up for an app and suggests that people need to understand the value they will get from it.
- They recommend spending time talking directly to friends and family to manually onboard them and ensure they understand how to use the app.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of doing things that don't scale at the beginning and gradually finding ways to automate the onboarding process.
- The goal is to launch the app with 30 users.
- The speaker concludes by mentioning the usefulness of setting two-week goals and suggests doing another session in the future.

- Eric Mijakovsky from Y Combinator conducts live office hours with Startup School companies.
- Helen from Jovial seeks advice on managing customer expectations and increasing sales.
- Cognitive, an app connecting patients with therapists, aims to convert free users to paid users.
- Hotspot focuses on matching hotels with travel influencers and targeting specific customer groups.
- Dreamlist, an online wishlist platform, aims to find alternative business models to advertising.
- Burlocks.com helps people set and achieve goals and plans to launch new models.
- The importance of understanding value and manually onboarding users is emphasized.
- Setting two-week goals and future sessions are recommended.

I'm a partner here at Y Combinator, and I'm the course facilitator for Startup School.

Welcome to a new experiment that we're going to try to do.

We're going to do live office hours with as many companies as we can from Startup School in the next hour.

At YC, 1 of the things that we do with our companies is we usually have around 10 to 15 minutes every week or 2 where we talk through problems that founders are having and try to apply the kind of common YC wisdom to the specific problem that they may be encountering.

So without any further ado, there are a couple of people on this call, and we're just going to start doing office hours.

So the first person will be JC from Boxcore.

Thank you so much for this time, appreciate it.

Why don't you start by telling me what you're working on?

Well, Jovial actually rescues software developers from pointless sales calls by vetting potential projects and clients.

Let me try to parse that and make sure I understand.

Yes, we go a little bit deeper than that.

Pretty much at the end of the day, we're providing their own business development rep, you know, or sales development rep, depending on what

So it's like a contract or outsource salesperson, like I'm an engineer, I build some software, I don't really want to do the sales myself, so I hire you to do the sales, or hire your company?

Pretty much, I help software development consultants, so they're already in the whole business ownership role, so they code too, but they want to really be more efficient with their time, so they use Jovial to kind of like start those conversations with potential companies and projects, and just really qualify both the customer and the actual product.

And would you say that your service, is your product a service or is it software or like?

So it will be a SaaS tool that can help them streamline their own sales themselves when they don't need us.

To be in the conversation, but also it's a service as an add on.

We have some customers that we actually, actually paying customers in a pilot.

So we are testing out some theories, testing out some processes, failing, but also learning along the way and improving along the way.

No 1 failed yet, so I'm just, fingers crossed.

I was curious, through your experience with Pebble, I was wondering maybe you could provide any insight and advice on managing and also balancing customer expectations, order fulfillment, and also without skipping a beat for sales.

So it's like how to organize your time, how to plan what you work on next, right?

Yes, in a way, but also just really, because I'm in a pilot, so I have to manage those customer expectations and make sure I deliver on the value prop right at the end of

But at the same time, I also need to continue sales.

So my general recommendation, like companies, this is a totally normal problem, like as a founder, Are you a solo founder or do you have other people?

You're like coding, you're building the site, you're doing the sales, you're helping the customer.

The heuristic that I use generally is to try to get as many sales as possible, to get as many customers who are paying money in exchange for using your product or service, and then switch into how do I fulfill this.

The error here usually is to try to build too much process and too much product before you actually have a customer who's paying to use it.

And so if you set your first goal to be get a paying customer for something, and then you flip into, okay, now that I have this customer, how do I make them as happy as possible?

How do I, you know, build the service, how do I deliver the service to them so they're happy?

How do I make sure that they tell their friends?

So as long as you're doing that, as long as you're bringing in a paying customer first, you always will be working on the right thing because generally the customer knows what they want.

You can assume that they're going to lead you in a direction where other customers are as well.

How are you going to get, when are you going to get your first customer?

have a pilot, and they're only, they are all paying customers.

I'm, So how much does each customer pay you?

So we did a one-time fee just for the pilot.

So that way I could work out some kinks and see what's worked and what doesn't work kind of thing.

So 1 of my recommendations here is to be as transparent as possible with those first customers on what success looks like during the pilot.

Do you have some metrics that the customer has outlined to say, here's what a really good, successful pilot will look like?

Is that a question or that's what you're saying?

Like, have you talked about that with your customers?

So we had to find the metric of success kind of thing.

So it was more of like we made the agreement.

And it was for me to go out and do that, right?

So, as I proceed with that, I started seeing that certain expectations they had wasn't really in reality.

So I would bring that up with the customers soon to make sure that they can expect the reality that's going to happen, that you're going to deliver for them.

Because the next step after that is once you're aligned, once their expectations and your ability to deliver are aligned, you want to work through that pilot as quickly as possible so that they turn, like they're happy.

Like presumably, if their expectations are close or exceeded by what you're delivering, they're going to be happy, right?

And then you say, you're happy, we hit all of these things that you really that you really expected of this pilot, now we gotta flip this over into a paid, monthly, recurring service, Because that's your goal, right?

You don't want to have just a bunch of pilots.

You want to have all these customers that just every month they pay you.

1 of the tricks that I've seen some companies use is they've actually put that language, the success criterion, in the pilot contract so that it's very clear on both sides what success looks like.

And then when you hit those metrics, when you dazzle them with how good your product is, it's a very easy conversation to say, hey, remember we talked about what success looks like and I blew it away.

So it makes sense that we should do this as a full time like contract and they're like sure yeah okay like let's do that everything's working like let's let's sign the full contract.

I think you're right I definitely need to communicate a little bit more.

So the next 2 weeks is really to hopefully for the customers I have in my pilot to close or be close with those potential projects or at least be a little bit farther along in the discussion.

How many people do you want to close in the next 2 weeks?

So if I can, I have 2 that I really focus on that I really want them to close?

In 2 weeks, I'll email you, or you will email me.

And let's hear about those 2 new deals Helen thanks.

I'm really glad to get the chance to chat with you You too Okay, Thank you very much, Helen.

Why don't you tell me what's the name of your company?

We have a tool for cognitive psychology Connects patients with their therapies using a technique called the social not talk records where the patients record their emotions and their thoughts, And then their therapist can understand the pattern of their thoughts and deal with this during the sessions in person.

I'm going to try my best to kind of repeat back to you the key things that I heard.

And it's not meant to be like an evaluation of your company.

This is just like a good chance for someone else who just heard the pitch to just kind of repeat back to you what I think I heard.

So I heard that it's an app that connects patients to therapists.

Sounds like it's also got some journaling component or logging that they then may use during their sessions that they have.

What I was missing from this, usually during that kind of explanation, is what is the problem and how do you solve it?

I certainly was able to tell you what the app kind of does.

But I didn't get a sense, like, is this for the therapist, or is this for the patient?

The thing is that cognitive therapists already use, during the beginning of their treatments, a technique called the dysfunctional thought records.

So you're taking something that therapists and patients already do and you're making it digital.

We launched 5 years ago as a side project and we grew organically with a free version up to 150,000 signups.

And we have around 7,000 new signups every month.

So signups, whenever I hear the word signups, it's not usually a good sign.

Because signups, like, nobody makes money from signups.

So how many active users do you have on the app?

2 years ago we launched a premium version of a dashboard for the therapists where they can track the thoughts of their patients.

We got around 200 subscriptions, monthly subscriptions from therapists And we have 45 active subscribers to date.

How many DAUs or MAUs do you have on the free app?

We have about 20% of user-based activity in the month.

The reason why I wanted to get specific about that is oftentimes like as I'm hearing about as I'm hearing from a new company I kind of want to get a sense for what stage and what Kind of scale they're working with because the advice that I would give will kind of be tuned Specifically for where you're at.

So it sounds like you've got 30,000 MAUs on this app, But then you also have a second app, which is the 1 that you're starting to charge a subscription for.

app for the end users and there is 1 for the therapist.

So the therapist uses the app and then it talks or it connects to the app that the the patient is

It's like a dashboard, they can manage their patients in this dashboard.

How much do you charge per month, the therapist?

And we are trying to change the monthly subscription to an annual subscription.

Okay for new subscribers or for people who've already subscribed?

We're trying to convert our current users into annual users.

So, what we did so far was all basically, this customers we got were all organic.

We never tried to actively sell anything.

We just started to focus full time on the project some months ago.

And I don't know exactly how all this attention that we have with the app and convert them into paying users.

So just to make sure I understand, you're trying to think, how can I take the large number of free users you have on your plan and start to begin the conversion to paid?

It sounds like, you know, many people would love to have 30,000 MAUs.

So congratulations on getting it to the spot that you're in.

I think 1 of the things, do you have analytics like Mixpanel or Amplitude set up in your app?

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YC SUS: Eric Migicovsky hosts founder office hours