Founders Focus

Accepted! Now What?

Episode Summary

YearOne co-founders Sam and Stephen Ajayi discuss being accepted into an accelerator and the journey through the experience.

Episode Notes

YearOne co-founders Sam Ajayi and Stephen Ajayi join Scott on Founders Focus to discuss being accepted into an accelerator and the journey through the experience. Learn how they started with a core problem and solution and how those morphed into the business YearOne is today. 

YearOne helps individuals coming out of code schools land incredible jobs and support them through their early careers in technology companies.

Dive deeper into the episode here: http://bit.ly/359GzNt

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Episode Transcription

Scott Case  0:00  

Welcome to Founders Focus, a podcast made for founders by founders. I'm Scott Case, CEO and co founder of Upside, and I created Founders Focus to help share free resources and actionable advice. Together we're building a community for business leaders, entrepreneurs and founders to come together to tackle today's challenges. This podcast is powered by my awesome team at Upside. Please visit foundersfocus.com to join the live video sessions or to catch up on past topics. 

Scott Case  0:27  

Please let me introduce our co hosts for today. Stephen and Sam Ajayi are the co founders of YearOne. And they're going to talk about, primarily today we're gonna cover off on accelerator programs, but we'll start with having let's see Sam, introduce himself, give a little bit of his background, and then we'll pass it over to Stephen, and we'll get things started. So welcome to both of you. We're glad you're here.

Sam Ajayi  0:57  

Thanks for having me. Yeah, so my name is Sam, I'm the CTO of YearOne. Prior to this, I was an architect in Portland, Oregon, doing mostly mixed use residential buildings. Stephen was always in tech, and had been asking me to get in there knowing that my design skills would be highly utilized in that field and seeing good ways that can transfer. So I went ahead and did a boot camp, became a UX UI designer. And now I'm the CPO.

Scott Case  1:29  

And I see CPO, you mean Chief Product Officer, is that right? 

Sam Ajayi  1:33  

Correct.

Scott Case  1:34  

Which is different than C3PO, which is a robot from the Star Wars universe.

Sam Ajayi  1:39  

Exactly. That's somebody I'm always trying to emulate, for sure.

Scott Case  1:44  

Stephen, how about you, what's your background?

Stephen Ajayi  1:47  

So for me, I got into tech. Before this I was pre med at Portland State University, and then decided to leave and become a software engineer by going to a coding boot camp. And then was in tech, doing software engineering, and then ultimately ended up being a VP of sales at a startup in the Bay Area before focusing full time on this problem. So that was my background.

Scott Case  2:14  

And before we wade into what you're working on now, was being an entrepreneur or starting your own thing something, and we'll start with you Stephen, that was kind of on your list of things to do? Or did you find yourself in it for some other reason?

Stephen Ajayi  2:32  

That's a really good question. So for me, I think I growing up, Sam's my brother so there's that, but we've always been talking back and forth about businesses. And so I had always grown up wanting to own a business or start a company. I remember talking about that. But I think as an adult, when I got older, I kind of decided that doctor route might be the thing that I want to do. So it took a little bit of readjusting before I decided that ultimately those childhood ambitions of owning a company was something I really still wanted to do.

Scott Case  3:08  

And Sam anything?

Sam Ajayi  3:11  

For me, it's funny because like I'm actually the older brother. But even in high school, I remember Stephen would always be like starting some sort of entrepreneurial effort, like he made his own shirt company. I remember that he did in high school, he was selling things that way. And I definitely did have that entrepreneurial background myself, I saw myself within architecture also, like just leadership roles just ended up taking precedence. So that was great. And things just kind of like worked out that way. And then I definitely had a lot of conversations with other people within the industry once we started getting into our fields more about possibly starting different firms together. And I had my own side business for a while too. So definitely, the entrepreneurial part has always been something that's with me, it's kind of more organic, not necessarily something that was like the calling, it just makes sense, right? Like it just made sense for what I was doing, like things just start to happen, the opportunities presented themselves, and then it just was something that I gravitated towards as I did more and more of it. 

Scott Case  4:19  

Got it. Okay. So, Stephen, you were accepted to TechStars 2020. I think it was Kansas City. What were you doing like the tail end of 2019? Did you apply to more than one accelerator? And if you can tell us a little bit about what your thought process was? Like what were you hoping to get out of it? Why did you choose to apply to an accelerator?

Stephen Ajayi  4:44  

In 2019 I applied to this program here in Portland, Oregon. That's called Pie. So it's the point incubator experiment and it's kind of a startup accelerator as well. So it's almost like a pre-accelerator is maybe the best way to put it. And so that meant that it's a collaboration between some tech companies in Portland, Oregon, and then the entrepreneurial effort of people within the Oregon Community to basically work on an idea and see if you can start to scale that idea. And so I was working on that. So I was at a company here in Portland called puppet working on Q&A platform to solve this same sort of issue. And that's what we applied to TechStars with. So we actually applied to TechStars with the traction we had met there through Pie. And ultimately, we met Lisa, who's our Managing Director at TechStars Kansas City. She liked the idea and was like, I think that the idea you're pitching is great, I think that we need to re-tweak everything else. And so it was kind of that situation where you have like what people say you should love the problem, but not necessarily the solution. And you're trying to iterate towards finding something that's scalable, and it's a repeatable business, it was one of those sorts of things. So we actually ended up getting into TechStars really on the idea of what we can build more so than what we had actually built previously.

Scott Case  6:16  

So what was it that you pitch to TechStars? What was the idea that came out of the pie kind of pre accelerator? And were you working on that at that time by yourself?

Stephen Ajayi  6:26  

Yeah. So at the time, I was working on it by myself. Sam was still not entirely sure that that was like going to be the right thing. So we had conversations about it. And he had just at the time graduated from his coding boot camp and started to look for work. And so it just kind of organically sort of happened that once we got into TechStars, and we had a little bit of a conversation around that slightly before, we decided that we're gonna team up and work on this. So that was kind of the way that that transpired. But if I remember right, the thing I pitched Lisa was, our ideas changed so many times. The thing I pitched Lisa on was like there's this massive problem in tech about diversity and getting more people into software engineering. There's definitely bottlenecks within the process. And maybe one of those issues is, when there's new developers getting into space, they're not able to get help on like Q&A sites the way they would like to because Stack Overflow, other mediums are not as friendly as they should be to new engineers. So simply people coming from underrepresented groups, women, people of color, so maybe if we build a better Q&A platform that'll solve this problem. And Lisa asked a bunch of questions and ultimately was like, I think that you're onto something but I'm not sure that the solution that you're building is the right solution, let's think about it but we'll accept you into TechStars.

Scott Case  7:58  

And so it sounds like the business wasn't like fully formed at that point. You had some ideas, a rough zone problem statement that you're trying to tackle. So were you surprised that TechStars accepted you and said yes?

Stephen Ajayi  8:18  

Yes. So I guess we were surprised that we were able to get in based off of ultimately the idea that we could be the conduit that kind of help and supported candidates, which is after our conversation, that's the only thing we came up with, and plus Lisa was like, well that seems like what you're saying to me. And so we were a little surprised that we were able to get in based off that and that was strong enough and that everything else beforehand just kind of didn't really matter as much. So it was interesting.

Scott Case  8:50  

So I got a question in the chat that I'll post to Sam first and then you Stephen. You both are career switchers, right? Stephen, you were in med school. Sam, you were an architect. You went through coding boot camps. Had you done any software development at all prior to that? Had you taken any classes in high school or college? Do you have any experience doing software? And, Sam, I'll start with you.

Sam Ajayi  9:14  

For me, no. I mean I had done some stuff, like just like looking up stuff as far as like software development, but my main focus was design aspect of that. So user experience design, and that's where my background lends itself so, I was always doing a lot of those things, and that's one of the reasons that I actually chose that part to go into. I did a lot of research and informational interviews with a lot of people that I had great contacts with in Portland, as far as like, does this make sense? Like how would you transfer into this field from an architecture background? Does that make sense, right? And ultimately, what I found was like, Yes, so that's great, like a lot of the skills you have would transfer, and a lot of things that you're doing right now makes a lot of sense for that career transition. So, for me, I specifically chose user experience, because I think that had a lot to do with my previous experience and then I always had the idea of then going into like front end design like from that, or front end engineering as a next step, but it was always like that design background that's what drew me to tech

Scott Case  10:21  

And when you're designing software products, there's a lot that's tightly coupled between the user experience and the technology. So did you pick up some some of the software development or the web development pieces along the way? Is that kind of how the program worked?

Sam Ajayi  10:38  

Exactly. Right.

Scott Case  10:40  

Got it. Okay. And Stephen, how about you? You were busy planning to be a doctor, and then you went into a coding school? Had you had any background before that?

Stephen Ajayi  10:54  

I took one sort of like early CS class as an elective during college and loved that class. And so that was a great experience there. And I ultimately ended up just like writing a bunch of Python scripts in my free time. So I was finding that I was like studying regular stuff I supposed to be studying and then spending a lot of my free time just like writing Python scripts in college. So that's what led me to decide to ultimately go to a coding boot camp was like I was, it was an outstanding amount of my time that was going towards just like writing code that was just mine. So that's why I decided to go into software engineering full time.

Scott Case  11:34  

So you kind of had a little light background in it, found more enthusiasm for it, and then decided to go and get some more formal training or education around it. 

Stephen Ajayi  11:44  

Exactly. 

Scott Case  11:45  

Okay. Excellent. All right. So, Sam, Stephen calls you and says, I've got great news, we've been accepted to TechStars. Then what happened?

Sam Ajayi  11:56  

Right, I mean I was just like, okay because I mean obviously like we're very close, so I had known his entire journey from beforehand. It's funny because the one thing he didn't mention is like, even when he was doing that first part with pie, there was still parts of the journey that Stephen was working on as far as like placing candidates and doing like research for like matchmaking with other companies in Portland and then code schools, and kind of like getting that bridge together that he was also working on that ended up and eventually being what we decided to do at YearOne, I think Lisa obviously was fundamental in helping us kind of put those pieces together. And like Stephen said, I was always interested in working with him on some level, we had a lot of other ideas that we get thrown around and so, with the backing of this and we had talked about it a lot, it's like, okay so obviously we've got something behind us here and we've got a catalyst, we've got something moving us, we've got a good idea, we're in a good position to make this work. Like, if we're ever going to do this, we should do this now. So for me, it was excitement. It was great. It was a lot of pressure. But it was also like here we go, we're gonna do this thing. So I was excited, I was a little bit nervous, I knew that we were going to definitely be in a big arena with a lot of other people that were doing great things. And so I was looking forward to it. But definitely like that making sure that we were on the right path was that we were just ready for that challenge.

Scott Case  13:29  

So you went in with a loose idea. You had a market, hey these tech firms need more diverse candidates, coding schools producing a lot of candidates that could be a fit but the bridge wasn't there, and sounds like Stephen was doing a little bit of that ad hoc prior to all this. So you're in week one of TechStars. And I'll open it up to I guess, Stephen, why don't you start? You start in week one. You've got this idea. What was that first week lLike? Because I think it was a 10 or 12 week program you were in?

Stephen Ajayi  14:06  

Yeah. So I think week one was Sam and I, because we got into the program and we were like the earliest company in our cohort. And so I think week one was Sam and I and kind of thinking through how are we going to try to address this problem, like what are we doing and like some imposter syndrome there I guess a little bit about whether or not we were too early. And we talked to Lisa about it a lot and then realized that other companies had done what we were doing in TechStars before so it wasn't unprecedented, but we were just trying to figure out like how we can learn and quickly iterate to build something or get something out into the marketplace. And so that's kind of what Sam and I had most of our conversations around was like, how do we quickly test our assumptions and get something out the door.

Scott Case  14:55  

Okay, and so I guess sort of knowing what you know now having gone through the whole program, and I'll ask Sam first, is there anything you would do differently? Knowing what I know now, here's how we would have used the time differently or taken advantage of something differently. What are the things that come to mind? Maybe pick one? And then we'll have Stephen pick one, and then we'll go from there.

Sam Ajayi  15:24  

I think it would have just been like really just test as many things as quickly as possible. So as many ideas as you get, because the thing with TechStars is like the first week I think was really about getting primed, really understanding the cohort dynamics, seeing what other people were doing, understanding who you were working with, who else was in the cohort, what their business where, and trying to understand the dynamics of the group, and how you could learn from each other. And then it was like getting ready for mentor madness, right. So like you're getting all of this different perspective on your company, and how you can grow that and things that you can do to change it. So really, I think going forward now, if we were to do this again, I would already be in that mindset of like, okay let's test as many things as we can to make sure that this thing is viable, that what we're building is viable, that the avenues that we want to take it are the ones that we actually want to go forward. So test and test often is what I would get from that.

Scott Case  16:23  

And would you have started that process before actually the program starting? So you find out and there's a few weeks between, would you recommend like getting ahead of it a little?

Sam Ajayi  16:36  

Yes, I would. I mean, it depends on the size of the scale and the problem. But I would say, yeah get as many things as you can tested so that you have that much more to share with the people that are mentoring you, to have that feedback, and then build off of that as well.

Scott Case  16:51  

Stephen, what would you add? What's the other things that you learned that if you had to do again, you'd do differently?

Stephen Ajayi  17:00  

I think that for me, I thought that getting into TechStars when we did was like an amazing experience to like have all the resources and all the cohort with us, especially to think through our process of how we went to test things quickly. So it almost made me re evaluate the way that I had gone about testing other assumptions previous to TechStars, because I think echoing what Sam said, I think I spent a lot of time writing code and no one cared about that code essentially. So you like build products that no one actually wants. But there's like easier and cheaper, faster ways to test an assumption. And so I think that because we got to TechStars when we got into the program, it allowed us to really test things early and often. And I think that I would have done that before getting into the program. But I think that we got into the program the right time, if that makes sense. So that may be a little bit of a convoluted answer, but it just felt like we got in at the right time. I would just kind of echo that I could have saved myself a lot of time in terms of like our entrepreneurial journey because time is not nearly necessarily indicative of progress.

Scott Case  18:19  

I think that your point about can you test things earlier, can you avoid writing a lot of software or building a lot of things, I often talk about can you do it with a pencil and a phone and not much more, some sticky notes, right? Can you get something going that gives you a feedback loop early in the process? And we often get stuck thinking, Oh, we got to build some kind of software. But even now, there's so many great tools out there to knock out a landing page quickly or to test something with something on Google. It's  easy to get caught up in writing code. I have a kind of a follow up to that. As you kind of move through the accelerator process, the typical goal of an accelerator is to kind of refine things and get to a place where you either are scaling or starting to scale, in your case, you needed to figure out what the basic value proposition was and get some feedback against it. So what were the biggest challenges moving through the customer kind of acquisition side of the equation, like where in that process, so I think the program kicked off in the beginning of August timeframe so the first couple of weeks you're just trying to figure it out, you then move through and you're getting after, all right, we've got a proposition, we got a product, we've done some validation--what was it like to land that first customer and how did that go?

Stephen Ajayi  19:54  

Yeah. So similar to this idea of like testing and testing with as little as you possibly can to see what the value proposition is really or if that value proposition resonates, we didn't have any like code that we had written or anything like that. So we were actually just talking to as many CTOs and founders as we possibly could about this problem, seeing what they were kind of doing internally and then seeing if we could provide value in that process. And so ultimately getting a customer and our customer acquisition was like, if we can talk to a ton of founders, we can talk to a ton of CTOs, maybe we can share our idea of helping them find mutually promising codeschool grads, and then also supporting those codeschool grads for six months after they get hired, or for some period after they get hired. Maybe that'll resonate, and let's see if someone would be willing to pay us for that service. And so that's what we ultimately did. And then we were able to get $200,000 worth of secured contracts before we graduated from TechStars. So that's the way we kind of did that without writing any code, not doing anything there except for just having those conversations. So that's kind of the way we approach that problem.

Scott Case  21:13  

So from a testing standpoint, when you describe testing, your primary objective is actually talking to customers or prospects and getting feedback from them. And in your case, did you end up building any, Sam I'll ask you, any kind of user experience at all-- a website, a landing page, some special copy? What was the lightweight stuff that you produced along the way?

Sam Ajayi  21:46  

That's a great question. So our MVP was just that. It was a landing page. And that was obviously like, we needed customers, right? So Stephen was talking about, like that's what we had to do as far as like, this would be a viable business. But the main thing was like we needed to also make sure that we had that quality of candidate, could we actually get that, right? And how hard would that be? And so that was the main thing that we tested was like, how do we reach these codeschool grads? Can we get that quality of candidate into our pipeline. Would they even like find this to be a viable thing, especially not knowing who we were? And so one of the first things we did, like, right, when TechStars started, I think like the first week, we did have a landing page, we had some copy and we tested out just like a quick way to get like resume feedback to codeschool grads. So to see like, could we even find people that would be interested in this, and then we could look at those resumes and see all these people that we could actually have at some point that we can get into some roles that people would be willing to look at. And we found that that actually was great, we had quite a few people like sign up for that. And so we knew that we could do that at scale, with that little bit of time that we took to do that. And so what we did in TechStars that was really, and Lisa was pivotal in this, like helping us to talk to the right people and refine that copy and refine how it was that we propositioned that to both companies and candidates to get them then to come onto our platform, and then finding ways to get into those codeschools themselves working with them directly that have their candidates apply to us, then get them into a great job. So our user experience was mostly like a very manual process to begin with, just to test what it was. And then we figured we would then go ahead and start building on our platform, building out those processes. So that all of that would be contained within our own site.

Scott Case  23:44  

A question from our audience -- Did you have any challenges getting feedback, either from the employer side of the equation, or from the coding schools or coding school graduates? Stephen, what was rough numbers? Did you reach out to 100 people and get three to talk to you? Did you reach out to three people and get through? Like, how robust was that?

Stephen Ajayi  24:09  

Yeah. So we have like a two sided marketplace. So fundamentally, I guess we have on one side, we have a supply, which is codeschool students who are graduating from these programs. And on the other end, we have demand, which is the companies and employers who are hiring. So we want to make those hires possible for our candidates. And so we had different experiences on both. So on one end, we quickly tried to test this with employers to see if they would give us roles that we could put on to our site and basically get on hand and flow into basically try to be the supply to fill those roles. And so that took hundreds of emails, I can't remember exactly how many right now, but it was a lot of business development. I'm just like trying to reach out to founders and trying to reach out to CTOs and say, Hey, we can solve this problem for you, would you be willing to grab 30 minutes on a calendar and talk to us? So we had a open rate that was pretty good. But then the follow through on that was not great. So it just means you have to send volume to fix that problem. And then on the other end, we thought if we have the jobs or really great opportunities at companies that would result in the candidates that we wanted to see in our pipeline. And so that proved to be true. So that was an easier side of the marketplace to do there. And so we were able to see how many people ultimately applied to be in our process. So it was like 360 codeschool grads, who ultimately end up applying to fill in those roles for the companies we had goals for.

Scott Case  25:54  

Sam, when you think about that two sided marketplace and Stephen just said your core idea was, hey, let's get a little bit of demand and then let's see if we can get the supply to follow along. What assumptions did you identify or the two or three assumptions you identified that were important for you to validate to give you confidence you had a business idea that was worth pursuing?

Sam Ajayi  26:26  

Right. So one would be like that we would be able to get those applicants either from the code schools to work with us directly, or that it wouldn't be hard to get those code school grads if they didn't, so we definitely were hoping that it wouldn't be adversarial. And we wanted to put that in a certain way that we are obviously helping and benefiting code schools to do that. Second would be the jobs that we are actually placing were things that code school grads would be interested in doing. So if the top level candidates would want these jobs that we would place on our job board. And then also making sure that, again since we're so early, that code school grads coming through, we didn't post those jobs necessarily like at the beginning so we had them come through and then they saw, so when people actually come through knowing that there's opportunities for them and then trust that we would help them with those jobs. And we were able to validate all of those.

Scott Case  27:28  

Got it. And did you have to invest? Is one of the questions. Did you invest in any kind of either paid advertising? Let's just talk about that. Did you have to invest any cash or capital in any of your experiments from a sort of beyond your time? Did you run any paid ads? Did you have to do anything that required hard capital outlays?

Sam Ajayi  27:59  

So we didn't actually run any paid ads. In TechStars, we actually had quite a few classes where people came through and talked about Facebook Analytics and Google Analytics and how we could also use those to our advantage. We wanted to really hone what it was that we were trying to specify there before we started putting money out there and see if we could actually get that influx of interest without paying for that to see if we did so we were actually very fortunate in the fact that we didn't have to pay for any of those at all. 

Scott Case  28:32  

So how did you get people to show up?

Sam Ajayi  28:34  

We literally just reached out to code schools, said we have opportunities for you, and that was enough that they were like, they'll share this with our alumni or current grads. And they did and we had a lot of people apply to our application process.

Scott Case  28:49  

One of the things that a lot of entrepreneurs can miss sometimes is that if you have something that is in high demand, especially in a two sided marketplace, on both sides, on the supply and the demand, you tend to not need a lot of advertising because you're hitting a key sore spot or pain point that resonates very quickly, right. So you didn't have to ask them to send it out to their code school grads, they did it on their own, because they need to place those code school grads and if you're a way to get higher placement, that speaks volumes to the Code School. So for those of you who are starting a business or thinking about running tests, the key thing, which you're looking for is, does this resonate enough for it to kind of take off on its own and that doesn't mean you can't use media and advertising to accelerate it. But if it doesn't hit a sore spot, it's going to be that much harder to move things along. 

Scott Case  29:51  

Stephen, you brought something up, I think it was you but even if it wasn't you we're going to make you answer the question anyway. And that is, you talked a little bit about something called mentor madness that TechStars does. And I think it's one of the core benefits to a number of accelerator programs is their mentoring strategy. So can you talk a little bit about what mentor madness was? And what were some of the advantages that getting those relationships set up did to bring the business along?

Stephen Ajayi  30:29  

Yeah. So mentor madness is basically, I want to say it's like two weeks when you're basically having meetings every day, they're I think 15 minute meetings. And I think we did like 89. Or maybe 100, something like that

Scott Case  30:47  

Wait. You had 89 to 100 meetings in the span of two weeks?

Stephen Ajayi  30:54  

Yeah. So you basically pitch someone your idea, because they don't know what you're working on, they talk to everyone in the cohort. So you pitch them what you're working on. And then pretty quickly, they dig into kind of their expertise and try to give you feedback on things that they might be helping you with or concerns they might have. So this ranges from like CTOs and CEOs and founders of small and large companies to venture capitalists as well. And so you're just pitching a bunch of different people and getting feedback on what you're working on. And I think that for us, one of the core things that we also felt like we had to address was, could we get high quality jobs, where they weren't like apprenticeship programs or they weren't on internships. Could you actually get people in the pipeline of bootcamp grads actually end up at software engineering roles at companies? And so that is something that we took away from that was we kind of had some expectations in the market for what code school grads could do that we thought were a little bit below the actual market quality. So could we get companies to sign up that didn't typically hire code school grads, and that seemed to be one of the takeaways that a lot of mentors had for us was, you kinda have to get those companies who are not hiring or looking at codeschool grads right now to actually start looking at those candidates. So that's going to be a big problem for you to solve.

Scott Case  32:21  

So prior to TechStars, how many outside, let's call mentors or prospects, how many people had you spoken to about your this core idea prior to coming to TechStars--rough estimate?

Sam Ajayi  32:43  

50? Maybe.

Scott Case  32:45  

Over the course of what period of time?

Stephen Ajayi  32:48  

Several months. I would say from January till May, probably like 100, probably like 50 at that point. It accelerated, going through mentor madness.

Scott Case  33:07  

I think that the big benefit, obviously, one of the benefits of TechStars is they've got that mentor network, they kind of bring them together, and then they queue things up. But one of the things that I find a lot of founders get stuck on is they don't realize that anybody on this zoom right now, anybody listening to the podcast, watching this on YouTube, you could have 100 meetings in the next two weeks, if you decided that that was the most important thing for you to go do. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs get hung up on, for whatever reason, not wanting to do it. And in the case of TechStars, they kind of force you through that crucible. But I just want to put a fine point on it. When you use your numbers, you have five months to get 50. And two weeks to get 100. And so the more that if you're trying to test and you're trying to get validation for your ideas, pushing yourself to do whatever you have to do, if you have to send out 10,000 emails, figure out how to send out 10,000 emails to get the 100 people that are going to talk to you about what it is you want to talk about, you've got to put the work in. And if you don't do it, you kind of can't get across that line. And it's something that's missed. 

Scott Case  34:21  

So I want to take you through you graduate from TechStars, you mentioned earlier that you landed a bunch of kind of customer contracts. Where is the business like right now? What are the key things you're working on? And maybe Sam, you can talk a little bit about where the product development is. And then Steven maybe where the overall business is right now?

Sam Ajayi  34:43  

Yeah, so the product is great, it's moving along. So we did our first process right after TechStars or like during TechStars/end of TechStars. And like I said it was very manual process. We're starting to automate a lot of those things. Now we're starting to build out a platform that will then start to take on a lot of those things as well. And we're just highlighting those key points that we're seeing as far as the indicators like how do we hone this then to be more more beneficial to candidates in our business, obviously at the bottom line, so like, how can we start to signal and notify or notice where better candidates will be matched to companies based off of their previous skills? Like from what geographies are we seeing, or code schools or what type of code schools are better fit for certain types of industries, so things like that. So I started to really delve into the data and understand our market very well. So we're starting to do that. And just continually iterating like it's funny, because we only know life through TechStars together as a business, so it's already just like a very different I think trajectory than most companies as far as like, you know, you go through TechStars and it's a lot of work on top of the business. Like we only knew, that's how we started. So for us, like after TechStars was really interesting. Because it was like, okay, there's like less structure around all the stuff that you had to do plus do the business. So it gave us a lot more time. Right now product is just moving forward as far as like just starting to like really hone in on those pieces that we learned in TechStars that we understood would be like the biggest points that would make us more successful going forward as far as placing candidates.

Scott Case  36:22  

And, Stephen, from overall business standpoint, where the business at?

Stephen Ajayi  36:27  

Yeah, so I think high level, we're making revenue, which is great. So that's always a good thing for the company. And then I think on top of that, we are seeing that we are kind of solving the problem we wanted to fundamentally solve, which is getting more companies who are not typically looking at codeschool grads, getting those candidates into their pipeline, and also seeing successful hires there. We're also seeing that we're getting higher than average salary for codeschool grads as well. So I think the national average is like $66,000. We're currently at like $105 for the places we've made. So good progress there as well. And so now we're doing our second batch of candidates that were reaching out to code schools to and getting candidates into our pipeline that's going to get to companies for January, as companies are starting to do hiring towards the end of this year and then beginning of next year, and getting more clients. So in all those ways, we're seeing progress. And now we're looking towards how we make sure this is a marketplace that is valuable for both candidates and for companies, but also making sure that we don't lose ourselves in this process where we end up just being a supply chain, but ultimate support gets lost in there. So we also want to make sure that we're also still supporting these candidates through their first year of work in software engineering. So that's what we're thinking about high level as we continue on through less than a year.

Scott Case  38:02  

That's awesome. One of the things that has been absent from this conversation, which makes me happy because I think it's something that gets lost in when people think about accelerator programs, they often think about capital, and oh we're going to go through this accelerator program and magically there's going to be a pot of money at the end of it. And it's just not the case. The big deal about it is actually maturing your business very quickly. And then if raising capital is the right thing to do, so be it. Have you talked about capital? Is it something that you are planning to bootstrap? You don't know yet? Where are you on that part of it?

Stephen Ajayi  38:39  

So we are going to be raising some capital this year. And so we're in the process of doing that. But I think that  similar to your point, I think that since we started out in TechStars really kind of focused on this revenue of like, how do we make revenue or get commitments for revenue and like, how do we move that along? We're always thinking about how we actually make sure that business is moving in the right way so we're not reliant on that capital to scale. So I think capital is great, but also can be and I think that you've also warned us about this, capital is great but it also can kind of push things down the road that you don't have to worry about when you don't have capital. Because if you don't have the capital to do a bunch of adspend to try to get customers then you have to figure out other ways to do that. So I think that we are really focused on how we can build our revenue, even if we're raising capital. So those two things are in tandem, not just like one or the other.

Scott Case  39:47  

I have one final question for you. You were planning to move to Kansas City in order to take this on? Was that the plan? Go live there for 12 weeks or so. 

Stephen Ajayi 40:00

Yeah, that was the plan.

Scott Case 40:02

And you didn’t do it. I think this was the first TechStars program that was done entirely virtually.

Stephen Ajayi 40:08

Yeah. I think they have another accelerator that was a TechStars Anywhere program that was remote. But, this was the first time that this program had been remote because of COVID and everything else going on.

Scott Case 40:25

Thank you. We’re a little bit overtime, but it was a great conversation. Thank you both for spending time with us today to talk about your experience in an accelerator and particularly excited about it because of your particular journey, the state of your business at the beginning and the state of it at the end and how you’ve gone from there. Really really appreciate your time. Thanks for being here today.

Scott Case 40:49

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Founders Focus. What did you think? You got any feedback for us? Got a topic that you'd like us to discuss, or maybe a future co host? We'd love to hear from you. Just hit me up on LinkedIn at T Scott Case and join us at foundersfocus.com to stay up to date with the latest episodes. And join us live every week at our Founders Focus sessions. Hope to see you there.