Back in the Saddle - Kyle and Martina

Martina and Kyle, Co-Founders of Stacklist, are back after a short hiatus focusing on the Stacklist product and company. 

They share some of the ups-and-downs of the past few months, thoughts and learnings, and some new updates. 

They also reveal their participation in Blue Startups Cohort #17 in Hawaii. 

Listen in for an honest conversation about the challenges of user growth, investment, and the next steps for Stacklist.

Transcript

0:06

Cheers back in the studio. We're back. Welcome, welcome. We're back in the studio. Not much is going on right? Since we recorded last. Everything. Pretty chill. Everything just as expected. Like goodness. Summer vibes, just chilling, doing nothing. Summer vibes, life of a startup, so, oh my goodness. Let's see where to start. Well, the hiatus, we took a couple of months off really. I don't know how to explain, how do you explain the break? I'll turn this one over to you. Oh my God. How to explain everything that happened. Yeah, thanks. The hard ones are for me, and then just enjoy the leftovers. You got this. Well, how to explain crazy. Okay, so we've shrunk down again, we've been fighting to survival. We've been trying to figure out what to do next. We've been trying to figure out the investments. We've been trying to figure out people, what do we do, how do we do it, how do we position, and basically all the startup things that you do every month, right? Every. Half day, every other hour. Yeah, it's been quite a journey. So I bet you the last time that we recorded was probably March or April. So we started this year often our really good foot. We sort of came off of our first big investment in December, and then we started in January coming back from kind of the break, big push on mobile and just, oh, user acquisition. We started doing marketing. We did hit our 10,000 users, I think around March. Found a really good clip for advertising and I think we had, at our best day, we had 220 users sign up in one day. But what's funny about that is when you set a goal for something like 10,000 users and then you hit it and you go, yeah, but that's not the real thing that we need to focus on. And then really, you're right, the focus on the fundraising round and closed a number of other investments, but it became clear pretty quick. I think that the positioning that we had for filling up the platform with 10,000 members and once there was some buzz, even Instagram, Instagram and Facebook. We had just people creating content. There was a lot of buzz, but it wasn't the thing. They. Weren't sticking around. That was the issue. We had a lot of users and we hit that goal, but it was like, but we weren't paying customers. We want revenue. Yeah, I felt good about the fact that we had 10,000 users going through the platform and there weren't any blips. There weren't any issues there any. The platform was staying steady, thanks to you, and it was working, but you're right. It's one of those that, and I think we've had a good tranche of, I think it's between 800 and a thousand sort of daily users, but it wasn't the core set of people that were sort of in it and excited about it. So a lot of testers, a lot of people testing and seeing what they thought and things like that. What else? I'm trying to think. In sort of April or May, I think April was the big month. When everything. Goes so fast these days, that. Seems like eight. Months ago. Each days it has a gazillion things. Yeah, eight months ago to a year. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing how in this sort of entrepreneurial journey, you can wake up and go, my gosh, this, we're going to get it. This is going to be amazing. And then by about 11:00 AM you're like, I don't know. I don't know. Is this thing going, okay, is this going to work? And then somehow I'll have a conversation like mid to late afternoon, and then I'm like, yes, this is the thing. This is, it's such a roller coaster. Oh, I'd tell you what was interesting is we hit this period in, I think about April or May, where we had a lot of people sort of making UGC content and we had people trying the platform, but it felt like we sort of fell into a bit of an echo chamber where everyone was liking everyone's posts, but it wasn't turning into core usage and upgrades and paid users on the platform. And so we literally stopped all advertising and all UGC and all social and everything and kind of reset. It's like we climbed back down the mountain and went, okay, let's reassess everything. No. It was crazy. How do you feel about that period? The sort. Of it fit position? Because the internet is crazy today. Yeah, mine is too. I wouldn't be surprised if. I dunno, it's what you said. The roller coaster of everything. I guess each day is a roller coaster of emotions, of things you do, of pivoting, of making it happen. And basically, I dunno, it's one day you think, okay, this is all perfect, it makes sense. We'll hit our next milestone in two hours basically and it'll be all amazing. And then it's like, I dunno, maybe we are not doing something right. Right. Yeah. I would say though that I'm glad that, I think we've always had a fairly flexible team that's come with us and hopefully it reflects from our flexibility and ability to pivot and make changes and sometimes hard changes when needed. I feel pretty good about the fact that we were headed down a pretty good path and we found what we thought was some good advertising and we thought we found some really good social cohorts that were coming along with us, but it all wasn't sort of driving against the goal. And so we just stopped all of it and sort of went all the way back to zero. And now I feel like we are literally back at zero. Just sort of was that the investors. Calling in for giving us a bunch of money? So. We are good. I don't know. What would you say is sort of the biggest. Lessons? Oh my God. From the past few months. Broke up. Did you break up? Yeah, I did. I did. It's like I'm in the. What would you say. Is I don't have internet anymore. What would I say is. What would you say is the biggest learnings from the past three months. That you don't count on anything until it's really happening and it's there that everything is prone to mistakes and not delivering and stuff like that, that we have to depend on ourselves basically and have the strong faith in the two of us more than anything. So I think that's my biggest learning from the past couple of months. Yep. Yeah, no, similarly I think I've, even though I feel like I've developed a pretty good, strong feeling from my gut also, I don't know, it can mess with you. And I feel like I went through a period also of feeling low or confused or where are we going or what are we doing? And it's interesting riding through that. Never once did I sort of lose that vision of what the end goal and end result will be, but it did feel like I sort of went through a period of, I don't know, just grappling with the uncertainty and what it would be like if we went all the way back down to just you and me and we had to get side gigs or we had to get other things and the whole process got really slow and we could only do little incremental things when we can. And I don't know, I grappled with that a bit, but what's really interesting is that I feel like the universe has a way of coming together in such an interesting way. Last Friday was like everything just sort of hit and the puzzle pieces came together and things just started and a totally new direction. And I'm always in awe when things like that happen. I think for me it's the biggest issue when we shrunk down and when we are doing even maybe side gigs or stuff to survive is what you mentioned. The speed of it, it all slows down and it's like I need that sense of things are happening, things are moving. I'm deploying stuff. We are talking to investors, something some bits and pieces that are missing when things slow down. So that's the biggest for me. Like, oh my god, nothing's happening when it's not actually true. I think you and I get twitchy when things aren't moving. If it's been a two week period and there's not material movement in both the platform and the investments and then the story and the partnerships and all those sort of things, then I just get a little antsy. I think I had the biggest version of that this past. Week. I agree completely. Two months. Well now we're in a totally new chapter. Do you want to announce what the new chapter is? Aloha. Yeah, yeah, of course. So Aloha. Aloha, Mahalo. Yeah. We are moving for two months in person across the world. 12 hour difference from where I am at the moment, so it'll be really fun in Blue Hawaii startup in their cohort 17. I think I have huge expectations. So yeah, it'll be definitely a big new chapter for us. This is one that we've been sitting on for a little while that now I'm excited that we can actually announce Blue Startups. This is their 17th cohort. I love the history behind Blue Startups. One of the principal founders was the gentleman that secured the rights for Tetris back in the day and even had a movie made about it. Let go to, lemme see if I can, hold on. I have this little pocket game boy sort of retro clone. Look at this. Hold on, lemme see if I can do it. Nice. But that part's so cool and nostalgic For me, what was fun was when we were talking about, when we were going through the process of doing the paperwork and things like that, I got a phone call and the caller ID was Tetris incorporated. The 12-year-old meet was like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. But yeah, so excited to really go through with this group. There are, what was it? I think there's like nine or 10 of us going through this cohort and taking 12 weeks. We actually just started yesterday for our first official meeting and workshops and then we'll be, so this week we're remote and next week we're remote and then the week after that we will be on onsite in Honolulu and then we'll be there for eight weeks and then it ends eight weeks. That's amazing. The only thing I can think with eight weeks is I'm just For eight weeks. Oh, it's going to be fine. You're just going to laugh and laugh and laugh and. Cry and cry. No. No. I think by the end we're going to have killer tans. We're going to be both just surfers. We're going to be like, I don't know dude in hang 10, that's very California, but we'll have learned the customs. I'm only going to be wearing flip flops all the time from here on out. Maybe you get rid of black and white. Maybe you introduce. Some color in your. Wardrobe. That's right. I got to get really bright aloha shirts. No, but I'm excited. I feel like this is such a good new chapter and it was like, it just fell right at the exact time that it should have really between yesterday, July 14th and September 14th, which is right around when the cohort sort of officially ends is our really specific three month focus on user feedback, getting new members and doing user testing and user feedback from those members and really hopefully finding, not just say that we're going to find our product market fit in three months, but really finding a lot of good learnings and hypothesis that we feel really, really strong about what our product market fit is For stack list product market fits. I feel like we have a few. For me, for me personally, I would say I think everything has a bigger picture and I dunno, I believe in that life gives you stuff that you need to do in that moment. So for me it's like this couldn't be in the better life moment than I am at the moment. So it's also plays part how we get their family stuff, personal stuff, professional stuff. It's all coming together in the perfect timing. So I'm really, really excited for this one. Plus I get to learn all the stuff that I don't know. Since I'm a tech person, I really look forward to learning all of this economics and marketing and all the stuff that I really miss in my portfolio. So it'll be amazing. I think you bring up a good point. I think for the next three months I think we could switch, I could vibe code stack list, like the platform and then if you want to take pitch decks and investor meetings and a lot of the user acquisition kind of go to market stuff, I'm good with that. I get really good at Cursor and lovable. I think we're going to be. In a good spot. All good. Yeah, definitely. Well, I'm excited and I think with this new chapter, I think we're going to find some really interesting people to, I hope we get a chance to interview some of the people that we work with on Blue Startups, some other, we're going to learn from a lot of other founders and company team members and I think I want to make a commitment that we're going to be much better about this new, I don't want to call it season seasons of this podcast seems funny, but taking more time to sort of record the journey and document this process. Even if we're the only ones that listen to this, it's going to be quite a thing to be able to have this kind of documented journey. Yeah, no, for sure. We'll shoot like crazy. We'll become influencers, startup influencers. I think we will. That's our new motto. I'm going to get crazy sunglasses and I'm just going to be walking down the beach talking about how to make a hundred million doing this. And this is my program. This is my class. You can buy my class now. Alright. Yeah, that's it. That's what we are selling, right? Yeah. All of a sudden we're not even doing staff list anymore. We're selling influencer classes. Well, all right, this is it. New chapter, July 15th. We're marking this one week and four days we'll be on site and yeah, maybe we'll do a little diary entry on that date to celebrate. I guess I'll see you soon. Yeah, exactly. For our third time. Amazing. All right, well here we go. Off to the next chapter. Did it hang. I'm back. I guess I'll see you soon, right? Yeah, that sounds good. I think there was a big blip, right? Right in the middle there. And take two. All right, well, I'll see you soon. See you, son.