- Duration: 39 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01J5E8WDZRX4FVQRBE5Y83Y533 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J5E8WDZRX4FVQRBE5Y83Y533)
Transcript
[Orri Bogdan]: Wait, I have to rejoin my camera. Hold on. [Jason Park]: Hello. Hello. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Orri Bogdan]: This time I see his email. [Jason Park]: He’s going to run exactly on time because you gave him a notice. [Orri Bogdan]: Yes, sir. [Jason Park]: Hello. [Michael Houck]: Hey, what’s up guys? How are you doing? I’m a little tired and sweaty. I just got done a five-mile walk. So excuse me if I’m a little tired here. [Jason Park]: Oh, man. Do you normally do a five-mile walk on a Friday afternoon? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I try every day, man. I got my little treadmill desk right under me here. [Jason Park]: Oh, you got a standing desk situation. Love that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, back-to-backs are the best time to just grind it out, you know? [Hunter Randolph]: Yeah, that’s true. [Orri Bogdan]: So I’ll just, I guess I don’t want to talk too much for this call. I already know Hauk a lot, so I don’t think there’s no need, but I just wanted you to meet the team. I wanted to lift up, have an opportunity to kind of understand more about you. Maybe you can give a quick intro on yourself. And then, yeah, we’ve been doing a lot really fast, working with some cool people. I’m sure they can help fill you in. And yeah, I’m just, I would like to talk at least for this call and just listen and have you guys kind of just a nice little intro for each other. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Yeah, no, excited. Good to meet all you guys. And yeah, let’s go around, do intros. I can go first. So yeah, so I’m Hauk. I worked in big tech for a while, Uber and Airbnb, was part of the early team at Uber Eats, and then eventually product manager at Airbnb, helped build Airbnb Plus. Got laid off during the pandemic, along with basically our whole team. And built a company called Launch House. Grew that for about two, two and a half years. We raised a Series A from Andreessen Horowitz and some other great investors. Raised a venture fund as well, invested in about 50 startups out of that. And then I left the company around the end of 2022. And since then been building at first by just personal brand and like media company around that. So, you know, social audience newsletter goes out to 80,000 founders every week. We have a membership on top of that as well. And then more recently, a tool called Megaphone to help people go viral on social media. We drive big influencers in your niche to go comment and engage with your content to drive more impressions to it. And that’s been fun to build. We have a ghostwriting agency that we built on top of that as well. And so, not doing the venture golf thing right now, and so just doing a bunch of different bootstrap businesses and having fun. [Hunter Randolph]: Well, I’ll take it away next. I’m Hunter. I started out as a social media goblin, just helping various people or tech companies or whoever reach their audience, find virality. Then I started doing some community work, some community building, which is fun because, you know, you’re able to engage with community members a lot more than you can with followers. That seemed like the natural next step. And now this thing we’re building now I feel like is a step even deeper into connectivity and getting people excited about meeting each other. So that’s kind of my progression. Social media, community, and then deep connection. And, you know, just… What were you doing on social? [Michael Houck]: I’m curious about how people… [Hunter Randolph]: So, to give you the brief overview of my social media philosophy, is anyone who claims that they can maximize reach by Knowing the right hashtags, knowing the right time of day to post, knowing all that shit. That’s all bullshit and anyone who says that is scamming you. There is only one way to do well on social media, and that is make good content. And so basically, I dive deep into video analytics, post analytics, and figure out what needs to get changed post over post to make the content better, which 100 times out of 100 correlates to a video getting a lot of views. And so I just helped train people in what makes a video good and watchable and engaging. And that’s all. [Michael Houck]: Love it. What makes a video good, watchable, and engaging? As someone who’s about to get into TikTok, what should I be doing? [Hunter Randolph]: Okay. So, I mean, the basic thing is to make a video good and engaging, it can’t be longer than it needs to. When you finish editing and it’s your final length, take five seconds off of it somewhere. Cutting the ends, make it five seconds shorter, The hook is important. And most importantly, the analytics you get from TikTok or from Instagram are so powerful. And if you look at after, you know, after two seconds, your viewership drops. All right, your hook sucked. Like it’s very easy to tell what about your video sucked by looking at the analytics and just change that. And you’ll learn very quickly. But, you know, funny, educational, people want to get women, make money, laugh, learn something. If you can do any of those four things or all of them, you’ll be fine. [Michael Houck]: Love it. Yeah, smart approach. [Joseph Weinerman]: I’m Joseph. I’m the technical side of Hot Seat Founders Game. I’m a self-taught programmer. I built a… [Joseph Weinerman]: Actually, I built a strategy board game when I was younger and brought it to market. It’s called Forestation. It was like you had to build a forest, and the best forest at the end of the game wins. [Joseph Weinerman]: Can I still buy it? [Joseph Weinerman]: You can buy it. It’s not very… I’ve got like a thousand in my garage right now. [Michael Houck]: Hey, I’m on some site and you have a 7.2, so that’s better than like a two or a three minute. Very cool. [Jason Park]: Talking about intro my so I’ve had a pretty long and lengthy experience experiences moving around a lot of different states. I was a former little military brat. So I grew up originally in California. We’ve lived in Georgia, Germany, Texas, Utah, and Maine, Massachusetts, names on places. At this point, through the time, I’ve had a lot of different experiences. I’ve interned at a couple different startups. One was a super small startup. It’s a B2B farmer to grocer startup in Maine. I was one of the fifth employees as an intern. I’ve also worked as a retreat center volunteer at a Buddhist temple in Northern California for seven months of my life, where I was trying to figure myself out. I worked as an outdoor education instructor in Texas, in the litany of hospitality work, whether it be front facing or back house. Most recently, I kind of wrapped up Stint at MassChallenge, a startup accelerator based in Boston. It’s one of the oldest ones based in Boston at the moment because Y Combinator moved out and went all the way to the West Coast. So basically the oldest one in Boston right now. There, I was part of the early stage program as a manager. [Jason Park]: Looked through, I managed the sourcing, the mentor matchmaking, a lot of the platform and tools that the early stage program used, and did a lot of the data management and collection over there. So when it comes to early stage program, I did a lot of the data work and logistics that made that program function, as well as serving as a main point of contact for a lot of the early stage boards. That’s kind of how I met Orri. Our team’s small and mighty. We were like three or four people managing a squad of 200 folks, so. [Orri Bogdan]: I coached him, basically. That’s what happened. [Michael Houck]: Jason, I see that the Buddhist life was not for you. There’s no shaved head. [Jason Park]: I didn’t know that the vegetarian life wasn’t for me. You and me both. I can work 12 hours a day for six days a week without any pay. But the thing is, I can’t do that eating a vegetarian diet. And I’m like, I need my meats. And I’m like, a little bit of mindfulness stuff. [Michael Houck]: I’m good on being a Buddha as long as I can have a steak every now and then. [Jason Park]: Pretty much. I got it. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Well, cool. I mean, what questions do you guys have for me? What do you want to chat about? Throw it my way. [Jason Park]: Who wants to kick it off? Hunter Randolph? [Hunter Randolph]: Well, so I’m curious. So Orri, I imagine, has filled you in kind of on what we’re building and what it is. And we have, you know, a lot of things figured out, but the amount of things we don’t have figured out far surpass the amount of things we do have figured out. And I’m sure you’ve already given this lowdown to Orri a hundred times, but I would kind of love to hear your initial thoughts on what you kind of think of what we’re doing, poke some holes, because we’re in such an echo chamber where the problems that we’re thinking about just keep bouncing around. And I would love for someone who who isn’t in it 24-7 to kind of let us know why it sucks? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, I’m not going to say it sucks. I think it’s interesting. Otherwise, I would be on the call. But as far as, like, poking holes and stuff, yeah, look, I mean, I love playing Devil’s Advocate. I think the biggest sort of, like, unspoken, at least from what, I mean, Orri responded with his thoughts on this, but I’m curious to get your guys’ thoughts as well. The biggest unspoken sort of challenge to me is that, like, if I’m a founder, Right. We’re starting with founders. Obviously, we think that’s an attractive market for a few reasons. If I’m a founder, I’m super busy. I have 10 million priorities. Things are breaking all around me all the time. Really hard for me to spend my time on anything in the first place that’s not directly related to increasing my revenue or my product or whatever. So the Unspoken Challenge to me seems like, OK, it seems like we want the users to open the app, the founders to open the app in order to sort of like improve their rating. Or share their own thoughts and get feedback. In my mind, the number one and probably only reason that a super busy founder who’s going to have a high ELO score is going to open this in the first place is to get answers to their problems, right? Until they become like a really, really big founder. And then they’re like, Oh, I got some time I can get back to founders who are earlier than me. But if you’re just trying to scrap and grow, The answer there seems to be that it’s to add value to my business and my company and also my questions. And so I worry that there’s sort of a, like an Ouroboros type eating itself thing where, you know, I as a founder of X quality want tips from founders who are quality above me, but those founders want tips from founders who are quality above them. And so that’s my number one concern. How do we sell the company? How do we keep the high level founders engaged in the app and opening it on a daily basis? [Jason Park]: So part of the thinking, I mean, this is just my thinking right now, and it hasn’t really been cemented as an idea at the moment, was having like, when you do a group, no matter what, there’s going to be a bound of some sort with a higher ELO and a lower ELO within the group. There has to be some range, because I think that’s just a simple 100, can 100, never work out. And ideally, you don’t have too many high level founders coming into a low level group because if you do that, you burn your supply of high level founders who don’t really want to be there. However, if you give the option for folks when they first sign up into the app and then they’re narrowing down what they want to do, You don’t always want to log in as a, like, want to be on the hot seat, but you don’t want to, you don’t want to always be a problem solver either. I think if you give an option at the beginning, however, to be a problem solver or a hot seat, especially for the higher ELO folks through matching, what you want is for the higher level folks who only opt in as a problem solver to become part of the lower ELO groups. So one way of doing that is it’s a voluntary opt-in method because obviously if you’re as a problem solver, it’s a little bit less is a little bit less worrisome if you’re putting a lower level group because you’re in there to be helping. So if you opted in to problem solve, it doesn’t really matter if you’re in a higher or lower level group. And the thing is, the thinking is maybe out of 10 people who come into a group, 10 people who come into the app or a high ELO, maybe like eight of them really want advice, but two of them want to provide advice. You don’t need every single one of them to provide advice because you’re only tossing one or two into a lower ELO group. So our website, you can have a lower ELO group of five people and have one of them just be a high ELO, and it kind of balances things out a little bit. [Michael Houck]: Okay, let’s play that out a little bit more, right? So we have 10 people who are high ELO founders, and then we have a bunch of people who are lower, right? And within that group of 10, saying that two want to answer questions and give back and give tips, and eight others want to be in the hot seat, right? Does that mean that we create eight groups where high-level founders are in the hot seat and Only one or two of them get another high-level founder as they’re like other group members and the rest of your members on this [Orri Bogdan]: maybe so I was thinking about this a little bit early a little bit earlier Um, I was thinking that if we were able to make like a credit system where you essentially earn credits whether you win or lose They’ll earn more if you win And make it like a pot where the hot seat basically picks how much how many credits? Are in the pot when they enter the queue as the hot seat. So they pay for it and then they match them with certain people. We can make it so that the ELO range goes up. So you match with better people as the person in the hot seat if you put more credits up for grabs. So that way we can basically increase the stakes so that the competitiveness, what we’ve seen is that competitiveness is really key. For the game to work and people like it. So if we increase the stakes by then increasing the ELO range with better people, it’s okay because the hot seat founder might be an early founder, but they’ll pay more basically to benefit from other later founders advice. And the later founders are still having fun because they’re competing against other smart people. So even if the question is easy, they’re still competing to answer it best. So that was the thing I think. [Michael Houck]: I really like that. And I think that you can even maybe add on to that with like, if I’m a high level founder, it’s, you know, I need those extra credits or whatever we end up calling them. I need those extra credits so that I can make sure that the founders that I’m getting advice from are of a level that’s appealing to me. So that system is sort of the counterbalance where it becomes harder and therefore incentivizes them to go down and help the lower yellow founders. [Hunter Randolph]: I think something to consider as well is there is this big kind of uncertainty around what do we do with these super high-powered founders? How do we provide value for them? But to me, it feels like 95% of the people who are using this product aren’t going to be this crazy high-level founder. And so to me, it feels a little weird to be building something for them and adding all this complexity when most of the founders that we have now are people starting not massive things. They’re looking for funding and building it for those people who just want peer connections. Being founders is such a lonely journey. I think that will ultimately grow our base so much and then rolling in higher level founders into that will be an easier will be an easier fix, rather than starting from the top. [Orri Bogdan]: I also want to comment that founders, we feel, is a good ICP to start with because they’re naturally competitive and they have a big need for connection, particularly to other founders. But I think the model should not ultimately be founder-specific. I think that it doesn’t have to be. I think that there’s different ways to approach that. Even we could like change, it could be like a seasonal approach for like the model even changes based on like, you know, input from our top players. I think there’s different ways to think about it. But I don’t know if this, I feel like this concept of like live advice in a gamified, competitive way, doesn’t necessarily need to be just for founders. [Jason Park]: That’s another thing to consider when thinking about Honestly, what I’ve been thinking about today, at least personally, it’s like, I think this is just one of the products and sweeter products. I think there’s like a lot of different parts to capture, but one, this is like more towards instantaneous meeting people. Right. But maybe there’s a, the products that we want to focus on down the line or something that’s more like sustained contact. Cause you want people to use this app and you want something that brings them in rather than just for the game. Maybe we talked about having a network attached to this in the community. And partly just because of place to like have a directory of people who can talk to each other and But also down the line, I think this wouldn’t be the only product that we have that is engaged, that is geared towards founders being founders. I think this is going to be one of the main essential ones, but it wouldn’t be standing alone in the long run. I don’t think this could be the only product that we run as an offering that can make this thing work. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, but the core thing needs to work, right? Like we’re only able to add features on or add new arms of it on if the core thing is… [Jason Park]: I’m not completely sussing with that. I’m just saying there’s a, it’s like a foundational part of it. [Joseph Weinerman]: I think the hard part will be onboarding users. Like what’s going to pull people into this, into use this? Like what, you know, is it that they think of a problem that they have and they don’t have anyone to solve it? Or is it that they don’t have the right connections and they’re looking for like a co-founder or something and they go on this app? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think that, I mean, my personal take is that if we focus on, hey, come here to get answers to your unknown founder questions, your level up as a founder or just marketing it in that way. I think like just knowing founders, I think it’d be pretty easy to get them to try it and to check it out. Um, as long as the problem becomes, then do you deliver the quality of the answer that will make them come back again and stick around and invest the time to help others to accumulate the credit so they get more time on the hot seat, right? That’s the, that’s the core challenge to me. And I think that’s why. That’s why it’s worth thinking about the whole market, not necessarily making a top down, but at the same time, like if I’m a low level founder and I’m just trying to learn how to be a founder, you know, eventually there comes a time where I’m not getting the value I need from other people like me. And I need people who are one or two steps ahead to, to learn from in order to make it worth continuing to invest. Like, you don’t want to end up with the cohort of users who are like that. I talk about these a lot, the cohort of users who are like, playing founder, right? Because there’s this whole subset of people who you know, they go to the conferences and they go to the hack nights and the A16Z happy hours or whatever. And they’re always posting on their Instagram story or on their Twitter or whatever. But they’re not actually building something that people want. They’re not actually growing their revenue. They’re not actually crushing their business. Those are the people you don’t want. Those people who are going to, you know, you’re going to need them. They’re going to ask for help and they’re going to be users. But you can’t cater to them too much. Otherwise, the network will just eventually imploded on itself because no one’s adding any value to each other. [Jason Park]: I think part of it is also the framing, though. Like, essentially what we’re like, one of the metrics that we’re trying to really capture right now is like, I mean, the hopeful outcome from each call is that everybody walks away with one person friend or to follow up with connection. Right. I think that becomes a [Jason Park]: How do you say it? [Jason Park]: I mean, we were Sorry, I’m going to circle back on this. But I think there was a problem with the competitive aspect of the nature of the game, along with inspiring connections for this. And that we’ve been trying to bridge the gap between, A, you’re not coming here to actually, like, you know that 15 minutes is not going to give you the advice that you need to solve the actual question, right? So if you walk away with the notion that you get into here and you’re going to walk away to answer your question, you’re going to leave unsatisfied. If you’re marketing it towards, you walk away here with somebody else to follow up with, That’s a lot easier to fill, no? Maybe. [Michael Houck]: I mean, Nikita Beer charges like $2,000 for a 15 minute call and intro and he’ll help your app go viral. You know, like you can get good answers in a short period of time. I do office hours with my founders for 15 minutes on Fridays. Like it’s possible. Um, it’s hard and you better make sure you have the right people in the audience who can actually help. I think that’s why having multiple groups is, is a good thing that you guys are doing. Um, but I think a lot of people will come in with that expectation, or at least they’ll need that to be true in order to make it worth continuing to invest in. Because if it’s just a network building tool, you guys can deliver that value without making me play a game, right? And it’s like, if we want the game to have value, if we want the time spent on the game to be meaningful, I need to be getting strong value in return, not just like, well, I think what might happen [Joseph Weinerman]: is like, let’s say you used it and you get two credits to go on the hots. So you go on the hot seat first. You find out that you’re at a level where you’re not getting very much, very good feedback. So you’re going to have to then be in the audience the next couple of times to build up your score to get to the right level or like where you can get your question answered. So it’s all about, I think that first, because eventually you’re gonna get to a level where you should be able to get your question answered. From what we’ve seen is that peers are able to help peers fairly well. It doesn’t need to be, I see what you’re saying with like people above their level, but it seems like having, if you have peers at the right level, like actual peers, not, then they’re able to help out. [Michael Houck]: Are you guys, I think, are you guys collecting data after people run through a game? Like, even just like a thumbs up, thumbs down? Like, if I’m on the hot seat? Did your question get answered? Right? Or do you want to follow up with anyone from this group? Like, are we trying to? We’ve done this survey. [Jason Park]: I can show you the survey right now, actually. It’s really, really simple. There’s not really much to it. I mean, then these questions we have, if you can connect with one person in your hot seat session, who would it be? What did you enjoy or dislike about the question? What is one thing you could wish you could change about the hot seat format? And do you have any additional comments or features and suggestions? We’ve been lucky that we’ve gotten, let’s see, out of the 36 unique users, maybe 20 of them have replied to this. So it’s not, we’ve been getting somewhat decent feedback. [Michael Houck]: Sorry, just a couple of things there. 36 unique users, 20 responses. Does that mean, like, how many times on average are those 36 people played? Because someone, ideally you want someone answering this every single time they play. [Jason Park]: There should be a disclaimer that this type form didn’t roll out until, let’s see, August 7th. And by that point, we had already done testing for… [Orri Bogdan]: The first two games were about figuring out the format and testing the product first. We don’t run it every time they play. So one, we have now. We didn’t at the beginning. But also, every time we run a test, there’s two tests. So it’s the same people running the test twice. So it’s cut in half. [Joseph Weinerman]: We go two back to back. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: The question that seemed like it was missing from the survey, I think the questions were good in the survey, but the one that I think is the most important is just, did you get the answer you were looking for? Like, did you get helpful, helpful feedback? [Orri Bogdan]: So I actually, that is interesting. I don’t know if it is the most interesting, because I feel like for me, the two metrics that I think are interesting are one, do you want to do it again, obviously, but then two, Did you find someone here that you connected with post call? Because I don’t think yes, you can get answers in 15 minutes. But the intention of the product and why it’s like a multiplayer game is that one person or maybe two people are going to be giving the best generalized advice about short sprints. And ideally, you go connect with them. And then after the call, you guys connect to become friends. And that’s where the advice happens. And And my theory around that is with every founder community I’ve joined, the ones where people, people stay in them when they make friends early on that stick. So if we can make that happen, then I think they’ll stay. And that, that’s sort of, those are the points tracking those metrics first, rather than did you get your question answered adequately? [Jason Park]: I mean, the best thing so far right now we’ve witnessed is that out of the 12 13 folks that we’ve been re-invited for testing, they’ve all committed to retest again or come back to another session, which is like, I think that’s, I’m not sorry, that might be almost all. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Orri Bogdan]: Well, I didn’t, I know one who didn’t for sure, but yeah, but he had a reason, but yeah, most, mostly almost everyone has either come back or asked to come back. [Jason Park]: The ones we specifically requested to come back, have come back. Anyone who’s like, we reached out to saying, Hey, we’d love to invite you for another hot seat has come back. Yeah. We put them in for a session. That’s been a good metric for us so far is that anybody we’ve asked to come back has come back. And once is a favorite, twice is more of a, you want to do this. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think that’s, I mean, it depends how strong of a relationship you have with the person. But I think it is a good indicator that they’re coming back a second time, or especially if they’re asking to come back, like that’s really good. It’s better if they’re sharing it with their friends and telling their friends about it, and then asking you to loop their friends in on the tests. [Jason Park]: We got one founder giving their co-founder, telling their co-founder to come for a test, which has been helpful. [Orri Bogdan]: There’s another one that suggested a friend from the university student We’ve been getting some referrals, but not a high referral rate that we can speak confidently at the moment. We also haven’t been trying to fish for them at all. [Jason Park]: This has been very like, we’ve been saying this kind of locked and key kind of trial testing, but yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I just think like knowing like myself and like the founders that I will, you know, I hang out with, like if I was going to use this as a user, personally, I probably wouldn’t use it unless I was able to get value from my time spent in it. And I think that as you get into higher ELO levels, which are the people that you’re going to need in order to continually add value to the people who are lower, it becomes more value-based rather than just like getting another connection to somebody. I think if the idea is, let’s have this be a lead gen for our community, and the community is where everything happens, and you’ll continue to follow up with people in there and do events through the community and things like that, if that’s the flow that we want, then this makes sense, and those are the right questions to optimize for in the post-survey. If the thing we’re trying to optimize for is how can we make this one thing as valuable as possible, in and of itself, regardless of a community afterwards, then I think we really need to know if people are getting answers to the questions that they asked in the hot seat or not. And I would couple that by saying that when people first sign up, I don’t know if you guys are already doing this, but I’d couple that by saying when people first sign up, we probably need to run them through some like very simplified actual examples of hot seat conversations that happened, which is like, here’s a question someone asked in the hot seat, here are the two responses, which one’s better. And if they respond with the one that the person said was more valuable, then that shows that they have a, I don’t know, maybe a higher yellow score when they join some way to get. [Orri Bogdan]: I think the only way to… I don’t know if that… I mean, it’s interesting. I think it might be too hard to contextualize the full like into like this or that. But I think there’s other markers just like, have you raised a seed? Have you raised an A [Jason Park]: I’m kind of curious what your thoughts on this proposal. I’ve already shared it to Orri. I haven’t really shared it to the rest of the group that much. But like, I think one of the things that we want to And part of the registration process is that users will select up to like five industries that they have familiarity with and up to like five different skills that they probably have some familiarity with, be it marketing or questions, or like something like that. The skills would be actually a code for question types, because question types often fall under the skill set categories. So they can fall under industry as well, but they also fall under like, if it’s like B2B, the B2B sales is a type of question that it is related to. If someone marks a B2B sales trait on their signup list, we kind of want to pair the questions together. My thinking was, so far we’ve kind of avoided a lot of the industry matching. We’ve done it a little bit subconsciously through our matching, but we’ve kind of avoided doing a lot of question type and industry skills and stuff like that in the collection so far. But I’m wondering if you find Do you think that would be too detrimental to the user center process to be asking like up to the five industries that they’re good at or up to five skills? Like, I mean, I don’t know how much of a lengthy you just signed a process we can have for this, especially for promising a short time app. [Michael Houck]: Like if it’s supposed to be really quick, what do you mean by a short time app? Like it’s supposed to be a weekend and you can do a 15 minutes, right? [Jason Park]: Like the whole premise is this is quick and fast. If the long, if the onboarding process is long, is that going to turn off people from the get go? [Michael Houck]: Well, I would say that if you guys presented this to me fresh, I’d never heard of it before. [Michael Houck]: And you were like, you can come spend 15 minutes somewhere to get a question answered. To me, that feels like a big commitment. To me, that feels like not something quick. To me, it seems like there’s, you know, an investment of my time. If I download an app normally, I can look at the UI and be like, OK, I want to use this or not in like five seconds. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Right. [Michael Houck]: This is a much bigger commitment that your users are making, especially because it’s active time. They’re going to be thinking they’re going to be engaging with other people. [Michael Houck]: So in my mind, that gives you more leeway to add friction to the onboarding process. But there’s the counterweight of you always want the onboarding process to be as quick as possible. And some of this stuff you might be able to get dynamically by like scraping their social media profiles or LinkedIn while they’re going through the onboarding flow in the first place. [Jason Park]: I just feel like the thing that’s going to be necessary for us to pairing is like this industry, the skill sets, the stages, of course, but like those things are probably more useful down the line. I mean, Joseph, Hunter, you guys have been pretty quiet. Thoughts? Joseph, you’re muted. [Joseph Weinerman]: Sorry. For the onboarding, I would rather place a new user higher than they normally would be, rather than lower. [Orri Bogdan]: So I would… A better initial experience. [Joseph Weinerman]: A better initial experience. And it’s not like they’re going to completely ruin a group of five. So I would just have them self-assign sort of their first, their level at the start. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, like if they’re like, if they’re like, I’m a senior director of whatever, and then they go in and they get matched with other senior director people and they get trashed, then it’s like, well, you’re gonna, you’re gonna go [Michael Houck]: do your best. [Hunter Randolph]: The other interesting thing to think is, what is most likely to get someone to come back a second time? Them joining with people of similar level, losing and dropping, or someone who’s really smart getting put with a bunch of idiots, absolutely crushing it, going, I don’t belong with these people, going, congratulations, you win, and them going, All right, like, do we want people to leave after their first game feeling really smart, or potentially losing and going, fuck these people, I’m never coming back? Well, neither. [Michael Houck]: We want people to feel like it’s a community of people who are their peers who they can relate to, and who can help them, right. And so it’s a hard problem. And we’re going to get cases on both sides, for sure. But the ideal outcome is that I feel like this is a place for me, right? I as a user feel like this is a place for me. You guys have people like me who can help me who are pushing me who I can help as well. So I don’t know if one is better than the other. I think both are bad. [Hunter Randolph]: Right. I mean, yeah, all I was trying to point out is that putting someone higher than they initially belong isn’t necessarily the answer. That maybe putting someone with people who are, I don’t want to say below them because that’s like, but you know what I mean, maybe something worth testing. And how important is it that you immediately are with people you feel like are exactly at your level? Versus going, wow, I was really valued because of how helpful I was. That’s so cool. Like, I don’t have anyone, like I’ve founded a company, but I don’t have anyone that views me as a mentor. That’s really, that was really cool. [Orri Bogdan]: If you’re always in the hot seat first, then you’d want to, I assume, be with better people. But then on the next part, when you’re not in the hot seat, being lower could be good because you could stand out as like, oh, I’m like when you’re swerving in a video game, you know? [Jason Park]: I’m going to put a counterpoint to that. If you come into a higher level group and we overestimate you and you’re in this higher level group and then you drop down because you don’t fit in, it gives you a little taste of something that you could be in if you level up. There’s also this feeling of missing something. It’s a lot more powerful than desiring out of nothing. People long for things that they have nostalgia or had a taste of before. [Hunter Randolph]: It’s just such an interesting psychology question of what will motivate people to stay around. Being with people smarter than them and then dropping and trying to climb or being with people that they feel smart around. It’s like, it’s so interesting. It’s like, I don’t know what the answer is. And I think the answer is test them all. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we should definitely test them all. [Michael Houck]: I can only speak for myself. I can’t generalize to the whole market. I think we’ll see people on all sides of it for sure. People will be like, Oh, you know, I want to be the mentor or people who are like, this isn’t worth my time, unless I’m getting value from it. I would bet that most people who are high powered professional, like founders will skew towards the latter. They’ll be extractive in that way. And they’ll only be additive if there’s also some sort of incentive or credit system like, like what Orri was saying at the beginning. That would be my hypothesis, but we’d have to test it. [Jason Park]: Yeah, definitely some incentive. There has to be some other incentives attached. I think we were talking about a prize competition at least the first month to get us going. But like the credit system is something that we’ve been thinking about a lot. And I think it’s been like one of those chief like, yeah, the credit system solves the problem if it’s implemented correctly, for sure. [Michael Houck]: Any other last stuff? Because I do have to, I do have to hop. [Jason Park]: Not on my end. [Orri Bogdan]: I think it was really good. I think like, obviously, like, they just met you. So I think maybe we’ll just talk about we’ll have another follow up call in like a week or two or whatever. I don’t know what you’re around. But yeah, I’d love to chat with the team. I think that are you like, what are you basically thinking about here? Maybe just to help clarify for them? Like, are you interested in like advising us? Or like, what are you thinking? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, you and I should catch up or maybe let’s do a one on one. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: But I’m excited about the idea. You guys seem great. So yeah, let’s keep talking. [Orri Bogdan]: Cool. Yeah, we’ll catch up one-on-one first night. And then, yeah, we’ll probably do another team call in a couple weeks. Cool. Sounds good. Cool. Appreciate the time. Cool. Good to meet you. Good to meet you. Bye. Bye.