If you’ve spent any length of time around the Communitech Hub over the past few years, you might recognize the guys in the two photos above.
On the left is Ivan Lukianchuk, best known as founder of Will Pwn 4 Food, a gaming-for-money platform and Cohort 1 alum from our HYPERDRIVE accelerator program. A die-hard metal fan, he stands out for his exclusively black attire.
On the right is Matt Gardner, who co-founded Groupnotes, a Cohort 2 HYPERDRIVE company that enabled friends to share digital sticky notes on web pages. His signature wardrobe item is a pair of orange pants, which he and his co-founders wear to startup events.
Both were among startup entrepreneurs to take the stage at this week’s Mic Nite at the Starlight in Waterloo – but neither pitched the companies for which they were known. They pitched entirely new ones, because the old ones failed.
Lukianchuk, whose snappy Will Pwn 4 Food pitches won contests and opened some potentially big doors, has moved on to develop This Is Your Out, a simple Bluetooth device you can activate to call your mobile phone to get you out of sticky social situations. He’ll be launching a Kickstarter campaign soon.
Gardner and his team, meanwhile, turned what was left of Groupnotes into a platform that allows you to co-watch a Netflix show with a distant friend and chat about it. Then, less than two months ago, they dropped that to pursue Videostream, which lets you stream locally stored video through a Chromecast device. Videostream’s Chrome app has racked up 73,000 users in five weeks.
While plenty of intriguing new companies pitched at Mic Nite, I found myself most curious about these two guys’ deepening journey into serial entrepreneurship, and what they’ve learned along the way.
After the pitching wound down and The Honey Badgers overtook the stage, I caught up with Lukianchuk and Gardner for separate Q+As at the back of the club.
Ivan Lukianchuk, founder, This Is Your Out
Q – Tell me about your new venture.
A – It’s called This Is Your Out, and the product is called TIYO.
It’s just a little Bluetooth keyfob. It’s got a single button and has a single function – it gets you out of social situations. So, you hit the button in your pocket stealthily. Thirty seconds later you get a phone call, and that’s your escape route. We let you customize the caller ID; we play a script so you don’t have to think about the lie.
Q – You earned a reputation as a great pitcher with Will Pwn 4 Food, and now you’re at it again.
A – I’ve won a number of awards. I won best pitch at the (International) Startup Festival in 2013; I won Startup Smackdown with Brad Feld. I’ve done a bunch of other things. But yeah, everyone was talking me up; they say ‘You’re the best pitch guy.’
They told me about this event yesterday and I only started designing this pitch an hour before I came to the event, so I’m happy it came out so well.
Q – Still, that didn’t translate into traction for Will Pwn 4 Food. What have you learned about the limits of how far a good pitch will get you?
A – I’m probably very qualified to talk about that. My pitch has taken me all over the place. It’s taken me to Vancouver to pitch at GrowLab; it’s taken me to the Startup Festival in Montreal; I mean, probably, the pitch helped me get an interview at Y Combinator. I was first on deck for Demo Day because they said I had the strongest pitch.
So, pitches are great, because they get you notoriety; people know who you are; it gives you good practice. But they don’t necessarily get you anything.
I’ve done countless pitch events. I’ve won big pitch competitions, and I don’t think any of them have ever gotten me money or anything real.
Maybe my company wasn’t far enough along.
I met another guy along the way, from the generation before me, and he won all the pitch competitions. He won at Canada 3.0 and he’d done all these things. And he realized, ‘I’m spending all this time pitching and I’m getting nothing. I’ve just got to sit down, do work and get customers. That’s the only thing that matters.’
People will like you and investors might look at you, but at the end of the day, you’re running a business and you need customers.
It’s a means to an end and it helps increase the brand, but my customers aren't the investors. They’re the people out there who don’t even know what business is, necessarily; they just play video games.
Q – What are you doing differently with This Is Your Out?
A – I’ve learned a lot.
I knew when I started Will Pwn 4 Food that it would be incredibly difficult and hard. It’s a very complex business. It was going to be just a pain. And I was like, ‘I’m going to do it and that’s going to keep other people out; that’s my advantage.’
It’s been a slog and it’s been tough, and almost five years later, I’ve learned to prove out your idea early, as cheaply as you can.
I spent my life’s savings and maxed out two credit cards to get to a prototype, and I got my first round of investment the day before I would have gone bankrupt. So, I was very lucky.
This time, with This Is Your Out, I’ve picked very low-hanging fruit. It’s super simple. From a hardware and software point of view, I can build it all myself or with help. I can test the idea on Kickstarter and suddenly have customers and income, or it doesn’t work, I’ve tested the idea and I move on to the next one.
That’s what I learned. Make sure you’ve got something that’s not too complex; that’s easy to test, cheap to test. End of the day, I’ll probably have spent $10,000 getting to a point where I’m out on Kickstarter. Worst case, I learned about hardware, I learned about Kickstarter and I’ve got a business expense for my income tax.
Q – I take it the TIYO is not a very complicated device.
A – Oh no, it’s very simple. It’s pretty much a subset of existing devices. I’ve wrapped it in a different way and branded it and said, ‘Listen, the technology’s been here to do this for years. Why is no one doing it?’
Everyone’s got the problem, so let’s throw it out there. I’m sure it’ll be copied within weeks or days, but you get the brand, you sell some units and you see where it goes.
It may not be a huge startup; it may just be a business with a product, but it’s something that keeps the serial entrepreneur in me going and learning and getting income to do what I want to do.
There’s a million ways it could go. It’s an API to the internet; you hit the button and I can make it do anything you want.
Q – Why didn’t you just quit and go get a job after Will Pwn 4 Food?
A – That’s my worst nightmare.
I had four different offers from startups to join as a partner and get paid actual money. I tested out one for a little bit, for three months. I had some equity; it wasn’t a lot but it wasn’t insignificant. I was getting paid six figures, was promised bonuses and expense accounts, working for a very prestigious individual.
Three months in, I said, ‘I can’t do it; this is not for me. If it’s going to preclude me from working on TIYO or any of my own ideas, it’s not worth it.’
And that’s when I knew I’m an entrepreneur. I’d just quit a six-figure job, and I’d just bought a house and finally had some stability. But, I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do, and unless I’m running the show, or I truly believe in the product and the team, that’s what it takes to really bring me out there.
I’ve been contracting, which I can do; I have the skills and I’ve been making money doing it, but it’s all a means to an end, to survive and do what I love.
Matt Gardner, co-founder, Videostream
Q – What happened to Groupnotes?
A – We shut that down shortly after HYPERDRIVE, the actual product, Groupnotes, and we came out with something similar. We took our learning from Groupnotes, turned that into another product and took a better stab at what we were trying to do with Groupnotes, from the ground up.
It was built on a lot of code that was being repurposed for something and it wasn’t meant to be. So we were like, ‘We need to redo this; the name doesn’t make sense any more; new product.’
We did a two-week sprint and put it out, and got good traction and really good stick, but it was hard to onboard people. Growth was hard, stick was easy, activation was long, so then we saw a trend in that one.
Basically people were using this thing – you can annotate websites still; you can share things instantly and have conversations on sites now, like, live IMs.
So people were using it and they would watch How I Met Your Mother on streaming sites together, and they’d say ‘three, two, one, go’ and they’d both hit Play and they’d talk about the show as they watched it.
We thought it was really neat, so we did a lot of digging and validation and we found out that there’s a lot of people in long-distance relationships, or are friends who don’t see each other a lot, or some people who just really like the same shows who watch Netflix together online, going ‘three, two, one, go’ and they run Skype. But it would be very problematic.
So we actually built sort of the first co-watching platform. We kept videos perfectly in sync to 18 milliseconds, while you had Skype on top of the videos, so you and your friends could talk about whatever you wanted, in big groups if you wanted. And we actually have it running in beta on Netflix right now, which is really cool.
But then we got Chromecasts; we all bought Chromecasts and we had, like, eight in the house. And one weekend, as it happened, (two team members) got really mad at something I said: ‘If I download a video on my computer, I can’t make it go to my Chromecast natively.’
And so, they did what developers do and they coded something, and they threw it up online, and they told a couple of people, ‘Hey, this thing is cool, we’re using it.’ And by Monday, we had, like, 10,000 users.
So, we dropped everything with our other stuff, and said, ‘This is our thing now. This is the most traction we’ve had and it’s growing massively.’
And it picked up, because we started developing that, refining that and fixing bugs, and we even hired a new guy to work on it.
It’s only been five weeks and we’re at more than 70,000 users. But in the middle of that, Chromecast released in another 11 countries beyond the U.S., so we hit market timing perfectly. So, our downloads are about 3,000 a day, like clockwork now, and they don’t fall.
We rolled out a companion Android app a week ago, and that’s already passed 10,000, so you have remote control for it.
We bought a domain, made some URLs, made some logos and just went with it. It’s called Videostream; it’s at getvideostream.com. We’ve just been hustling to keep up with demand for features and fixes, and we’ve done some monetization tests.
We’re rolling out heavier monetization in the next couple of weeks, as well as some improvements.
Q – What has the time been like since you finished the HYPERDRIVE sprint almost a year ago?
A – We have the office down the street from HYPERDRIVE. We never wanted to go far.
After we finished HYPERDRIVE, we sort of took stock. We were all from different places; none of us were from here. We said, ‘OK, where do you guys want to build the company? We’ve got investment, we can get an office, we’ve got runway.’ And everyone said, ‘I don’t want to leave.’
So we got a bigger house, with room to make the main floor an office. We even have the fifth guy, our employee, who lives with us, too. We convinced him that would be an awesome idea.
So we have six people now; one lives offsite and five of us live together in the house.
The year between Groupnotes and now was hectic. We were just trying stuff, throwing stuff against the wall, making better and better guesses, learning from our users, getting more and more religious about following our analytics and not our guts, and learning a ton.
We basically started really doing startups properly when we got into HYPERDRIVE, so it’s been a lot of learning in the last year. It feels good to finally hit something that might have promise.
Q – What’s the biggest difference between your approach to Videostream and your approach to Groupnotes?
A – With Groupnotes we did stuff, and we don’t really remember why we did the stuff. We were doing annotations on web pages and we thought it was super important that, like, one week we spent making sure everyone could customize the colour of the sticky notes. And now we’re like, ‘Why did we think that would change anything?’
Our platform was dying, and we thought colours were going to save it. We weren’t looking at the right level of analytics, the right granularity, the right amount of data and making informed decisions.
We weren’t getting out of the house enough. We weren’t going to talk to our users and potential users and talk to people who left.
So, every single review we have on any store, which is probably over 600 now, we’ve messaged every single person this time. Good, bad, medium – we talk to them, and we Google Hangout them. We track them down on the internet and we’re like, why didn’t you like it? Why did you like it? How could we fix it? What are the problems?
That’s how we’re learning from this one.
We look at the numbers more than anything. We don’t take guesses. We do tests.
We figured out how to wield our own split-testing framework for a Google Chrome app that didn’t exist. But we knew we had to be able to do stuff like that, because that’s what we’ve learned.
Q – As Ivan Lukianchuk says, a great pitch only gets you so far. What do you think?
A – At the end of the day, people are going to look at your numbers. This is the first time I’ve had numbers to drop. I’ve never been able to say, ‘We have 70,000 people in five weeks’ before. It feels really good.
The next step for us is, can we make some money off them? I think we can, which is nice for the space we’re in. You get a subscription model going and it’s happy.
That, again, is being tested.
We’re doing smokescreen tests right now where we throw up features – we’re testing features by not building them, and asking people if they would pay for them. We make it look like you can buy it right now, and when you try to pay for it, we say, ‘Just kidding; it’s going to be free when we make it,’ because we’re not going to build it until people put in their credit card.
Q – What would you tell a company that’s at the stage you were when you launched Groupnotes?
A – That’s tough. Our learning has come from all over the place.
Test changes. Make as little code as you can to test the impact, and look for big changes. If you make a change, you should be looking for a sway.
When you make a change, it should make a big dent; it can’t be a little dent. So, your changes all need to be informed.
You can make a gut guess, and if it’s going to be quick to code and test, do it, but don’t be afraid to rip that right out, even though you wanted it. Maybe no one else did.
That’s something we did (with Groupnotes). We built features for us that nobody wanted, and we didn’t help our numbers. And then we would never remove the feature, which was dumb, because it just cluttered our platform up until it was almost unusable.
Since then we’ve gotten much better.
Q – I see you still have the orange pants.
A – We still have the pants; it’s always still the pants.
Every product we’ve released has had orange in the logo. I like it. When we’re in an app list, no one’s ever orange. That’s why we picked it in the first place, because everyone’s blue.
Anthony Reinhart is Communitech’s Director of Editorial Strategy and senior staff writer. View from the ‘Loo is a weekly look at the issues, people and events that shape Waterloo Region’s technology sector.
