- Duration: 33 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JH8NVC1W4N37F0E2KGECYCB5 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JH8NVC1W4N37F0E2KGECYCB5)
Transcript
[vijay]: Hi Michael, how are you? [Michael Houck]: Hey Vijay, how you doing man? [vijay]: Good to meet you. Good to meet you. Actually, I want to say you look totally different in your thing, but I remember exactly you in the podcast that I had seen recently, which made me actually register into the newsletter. Oh cool. Yeah, so the podcast made me register a newsletter and when I’m reading the I thought I’m talking to a completely different person, which is normal, because the picture is different. And then when I’m reading this, I felt that there is something I can learn more from you and your experience. And you have this consulting thing going on, and that’s why I registered. So that’s interesting how all this works. Yeah, that is interesting. [Michael Houck]: Where did you find the podcast? Was it YouTube, Spotify? Where did you find it? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: YouTube. [Michael Houck]: Oh, very cool. To know. We’re planning to invest a lot in YouTube in 2025. So it’s good to know that it’s working. [vijay]: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I’ve been listening to a couple of from many days actually, but the one that popped my interest is the guy that you recently interviewed, like VerticalSass. Yeah. And he talked about his experience being in a college student and getting into Thiel’s fellowship and all of that. And then, yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense to me. And that’s when I thought, okay, let’s register for newspaper. Well, hey, I’m glad you did. [Michael Houck]: Excited to chat. I took a look at the note that you added to the original Calendly link. So I guess just, yeah, happy to dive into it. Would love to hear more about you, but I also know we’re limited on time. So if you want to just get right into it, to questions, that’s fine too. However you wanna take it is fine with me. [vijay]: Yeah, I do have specific questions, but let me give you a little bit brief of me and brief of me, my struggles, and then where I want to, where I can get help from you, right? These three things. So the first one is, I have entrepreneurship from long, long time ago, but I never did anything. I mean, need to blame me a lot, but initially when I came to this country with a lot of hopes and everything, there is this H1B restriction. I cannot work, I cannot start my company. I had to work for somebody. I experimented and helped a lot of people build a lot of things, but without my name, that kind of thing. So I have a lot of experience in backend engineering, building that kind of thing, apps building thing, that kind of thing. I can hack together something quickly, but I also have my limitations. What I can build, which I think I can overcome. So that’s the thing. Second thing is I have a very big background of engineering. I’m a principal engineer in Blue Origin. Recently I quit. Oh, nice. Yeah. I’m a senior engineer in Amazon. I have a lot of those experiences. And last year I did start a company. It’s not in my LinkedIn, but I did start a company with a guy. The website is up. We have a few interactions going on. To the cars buying and selling niche. It’s buying cars and selling cars in a niche market. And we also found out a very niche, a very high velocity idea within that to see what can build, which we think is a pretty big. However, there is a lot of chances that, I mean, the other guy, he has a lot of his family problems and he’s the guy who knows the community. I’m the software guy for this and he’s the community guy. So it is possible we pause it and not do anything for a while or things like that. So that’s also there. So this is my stuff. So I can, I have, I’m a big picture guy, what goes everywhere and things like that. And I can actually execute a majority of that, of that, not, not entirely. So that’s, that’s what my background is now. I actually have a AI idea that I can, a niche down like I have I have a AI bigger picture idea that needs a lot of investment. I have niche down to two levels for like a small idea that I can build for this idea that I can build for this idea. So I would rather build this idea if I have some if someone gives me money because this has a bigger potential. So so those are the different things I have. So now my struggle is like I said a person not a person with an agency company in India because that’s cheaper and the product came out really really bad. It’s not I cannot put it in the in front of customers. Then I took a lot of I actually quit my job with a couple of these things. I took that and finished majority of the back-end but I still need to do a lot of front-end. I’m not a front-end guy. I’m a back-end guy. So either I have to sit down next two months not doing anything and risk building, I mean, building this and without any income or anything like that. Or I would rather find some income, meaning one thing I’m looking at is my idea aligns very well with A16z in a basic form. But I don’t have a product. I don’t have a co-founder or anything, buddy. I’m just the only guy. So I was thinking, how should I position myself to get into there or other single founder? I can find co-founder, I’m not against it. At this point, I don’t have. So how can I position myself to get into, like apply for this and then get in? Yeah, basically apply for this and get in. Basically, that’s the whole thesis of it. I also thought about, before this call, literally yesterday, I was thinking to ask you, How about if I build this in a way, just a landing page or something, and advertise in newsletters to see if people are interested with it, and then use that as a benchmark, say, hey, I’m building this idea, this is me building, this is the people interest, will that get me into something? So these are all the different ideas I have. So I think I gave you enough information. Yeah, no, that’s a ton of context. [Michael Houck]: I think I’m going to try to attack it kind of piece by piece. So the first thing I would say is that when you’re building a new product, you say it’s a high velocity idea. I would question, what evidence do you have that people are going to love this, share it with their friends, pay a lot of money for it? What validation have you gotten? Because I want to say, before you go and spend two months building something heads down, you want to make sure that it’s something that people are going to pay for, ideally during those two months, if you can get them. [vijay]: Yeah, I don’t have that kind of skill set to get money while I’m building, which I would love to discuss with you and see what are the options and how to do it. But let me explain you my bigger idea and then niche down idea. So the bigger idea is this. I’m actually creating a purely memory and reasoning agents for verticals. So this is why I actually kind of looked at who are building the vertical AIs in the YouTube, right? I searched for it and that’s why your thing called. So your friend talked about, he was so bullish in vertical AIs, which I am very bullish in vertical AIs. I am too, yeah. So building, so one vertical AI, originally I started is backend as a service. So for example, when you’re creating a $10 million company or $20 million company, like any startup, anything, you need to have robust backend. Backend means all the backend services. One example. I was an engineer before I became a founder. [Michael Houck]: So I’m talking about microservices led the services that also packed with the database. [vijay]: So that is the initial idea I picked. I know there is a replete and these are replete and other companies right They’re kind of good in the front end, but very terribly bad in back end. And specifically, it cannot comprehend the microservice-style architecture, which is the key for any kind of services. It cannot do it. So initially, the guys that I hired in India and doing this is actually this, which is I’m trying to create a SaaS kind of idea company where you can actually prompt to create your microservices architecture entirely backend completely. One example is, I asked many people this question, which is, you’re creating an e-commerce company and there’s a founder I know who’s building an e-commerce company in multiple ways. He owns 40 developers in Pakistan, and he’s telling me they have a goal of to create like 20 APIs by end of this year, and their budget and everything allows only 10 APIs, not 20. So 50% down. So which is, I have my app, if you prompt it or it also has this drag and drop and also overall big picture algorithm, that kind of thing, where it will actually create a complete API, REST API or GraphQL API with Python or Node.js, build it, test it, deploy it, and manage it, all of it. So that is the vertical API I’m talking about. And this is for all the APIs for a company. And it’s not 100% accurate, but it is 80% accurate. But it will get to 80% within 30 minutes. [Michael Houck]: It reduces the time to build it substantially, because even that last 20%, if human engineers need to go in and do it, it’s relatively small compared to the full 100% they’d have to do otherwise. I get it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [vijay]: Makes sense. And then he’s the guy also told me that he has a lot of problem in project management. Jira doesn’t cut it sometimes. There are a lot of churn here and there. He’s telling me, can your app also can be become as a project management while you’re building a software projects, software project management app. So some people are telling me, yeah, I don’t need project management. I’m good with it. Can your app, since I’m telling you it’s a backend app, it will create all the backend. Can it create the bad jobs also for me? Because every night I had to go and do this Twitter poll and then massage the data, do all this and put it in the database. It’s actually a lot of work. It’s one time work. But a lot of situations, things we need to do. So the thought process is, I’m trying to, I initially started building a vertical AI platform for all the backend services, code, database, and everything. That’s what, and this lead me, when I’m building this, 90% of my work is not writing code. 90% of my work is, how can I create a memory to make this code work? How can I create my memory algorithm to create my testing better? Because I had to test the code and I cannot test the code randomly. I had to create like 20 different data points that I need to test. I need to run this in a chain. Sometimes the code breaks at ninth level, which actually the fix should be applied in the first level. So I’m actually creating algorithms that actually make all this. So that actually leads me to bigger idea where actually I thought, this is where I experimented with many people, which is I’m trying to create an infrastructure, which I call it as brain as a service for different verticals. So if the vertical is code, if the vertical is medical AI or something like that, I’m trying to create a memory management system, which you may or may not need racks for it, because I can actually pull from perplexity and things like that and prepare a rack for it most accurately. Data or research papers, which actually goes into the memory. I’m actually creating multiple reasoning algorithms or reasoning agentic workflows that the developer do not need to write himself. Basically, that is the bigger picture algorithm. It needs a lot of time. I have another small layer in there, but one of the small vertical a lot of people interested is, vertical SaaS for backend services. These are the main top two ideas I have. So to answer your question, when I tell people, people are telling me, yeah, if your backend works, I’ll pay for it because I have these many requirements. I’m paying my dollar plus $80,000 per year, whatever, right? So things like that. So there is an interest. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, it makes sense that, you know, I think one of the most common things that I hear about is, you know, they get that enthusiasm, they get that sort of initial validation that, hey, they know that there’s some sort of problem and issue here, right? That’s exciting. And that’s going to make you want to want to go build, I would just say, has anyone, like, I mean, no, no, is there any way that you can get people to pay for things quicker than you heads down for two months, because I think, you know, two months doesn’t sound like that long, but especially everything always takes longer than I think it’s gonna do to build from scratch. So I want to make sure you’re not setting yourself up for just going heads down before, because, you know, I go back to your original question, which is about, you know, getting in front of the best investors like Andreessen and things like that. You know, Andreessen is probably not going to really be willing to invest until you’re at least at the seed, probably at the series A So they’re like, you know, that’s probably a ways down the road. It’s always fine to build a relationship with them and then, you know, get a meeting with the partner and meet somebody, but they don’t invest this early. They just don’t. There’s a lot of other good funds that do, of course, But I would just say, before you go heads down and build something for a few months, what’s the absolute smallest thing that you can build to prove that there’s a paying market here, not just people telling you that they’re interested? [vijay]: I mean, initially my thought is put in the landing page and ask people to subscribe to it, request a demo. That’s what I was initially thinking. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, the more you can do there just go kind of step by step, like first landing page test, then some very, very small part of it that they can pay for and actually get value from and renew. And you can see, oh, they’re renewing on this. That’s going to tell you a lot more faster than going heads down for two months. And then maybe you get the build right. Maybe you’re listening to them along the way and they’re kind of telling you what they want and it works and they end up paying for it. But maybe they don’t. Up paying for it. And then all of a sudden you’re, you’re two months in the hole. So I think just founder to founder, like protecting yourself and protecting your time. I would just make sure that you’re able to sort of, you know, get more validation kind of along the way there. [vijay]: So how, what do you suggest? Like, how should I do that? [Michael Houck]: Well, I mean, I don’t know the intricacies of your product and your vision for it, but what I would say is that talk to your potential customers and see like, what is the one thing that they would pay for that’s the absolute smallest. Like just ask them, just talk to them. I’m not going to know what that is because I’m not your customer, but you can find out and then just deliver that. It’s not going to be the big vision necessarily, but it’s going to prove that there’s interest in part of what’s going to take you to that vision. [vijay]: So that would be part of my recommendation for sure. Okay. So is there any way, I mean, do you have any service that actually like from your newsletter, things like that. I don’t know how it works, like some kind of advertising in your newsletter and to see what people are interested in, let’s say, like I said, like a crowdfunding or even subscribe to it or give their email to gauge their interest. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we have placement options available in the newsletter. I can have my chief of staff send over some options to you after the call. And yeah, you get in front of some founders. I mean, if you’re going after startup founders, we have the audience for sure. So yeah, you could see if they’re gonna drop an email, see if they’re gonna go through and subscribe to something and then refund them because the product isn’t done yet or whatever the case may be. If that’s something you wanna do, we can explore that for sure. [vijay]: Yeah, so stop. I mean, my work is definitely enterprise, but also startup founders, why not? They can actually get a lot, get it done um also like uh there is also this common common notions software uh the early founders uh they may just want all their code base in one place and they will do it in in replit or something they don’t need to do so there is so there is this notion as well so I’m more often enterprise yes but uh but uh I’m not sure how to get that that interest I can I I can ping so many people in my But I’m not sure is that is that enough? Not many people respond. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, I mean, you don’t need a ton of people, you don’t need to go out and talk to, you know, 500, you can go out and talk to 500 people if you want. But really, what you need is you need to just find a small group of people who fit your ICP, and who are going to be proactive and giving you feedback kind of along the way. That’s that’s the number one thing you can get. Because What you don’t want to do is you don’t want to build the thing you think sounds great. You want to build the thing that they’re going to pay for. Right. So, yeah, I would say just whether it’s your LinkedIn, whether it’s using cold email, whether it’s, you know, starting a newsletter and having people share that, whether it’s just posting on social media and having people find your content organically through their newsfeed algorithms, you just need a small group of folks who are going to sort of be in that that initial period with you. And as initial beta customers, you offer them the ability to shape the product roadmap, long-term discounts when you are ready to charge them, just get them excited about it. But if they’re not coming to you and they’re not excited about it, then that should tell you that maybe you haven’t found the right ICP or the right way to position the product or something like that. [vijay]: How about a newsletter that is niche to my area so many people who writes newsletter for let’s say backend API, how do you build engineering newsletters, right? Like backend engineering. So, so many people who may already have, like I said, so much reach and their newsletters probably might be read by many engineering managers and all those things. So, instead of me started right now and take its own time, I can approach them and then ask them to test this, right? Pay them something like that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Most newsletters would do have like sponsorships and placements in each issue. So, you know, they’re going to be priced very differently, but it’s, yeah, that’s definitely a channel you can go down to for sure. And that’s going to get you the audience, like the captive audience that you, you want to get it in front of [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [vijay]: Okay. So maybe I will, is that a good idea generally, or do you think I should start a newsletter and get this or? Go it the other way. [Michael Houck]: I think if you have the budget to do the test, it’s definitely going to be faster. So it’s just a matter of whether you want to spend the money. Cause remember, this isn’t going to lead to paying customers right away. So you’re essentially burning the money. As long as you’re comfortable with that, then I think that that’s going to get you the information faster for sure. [vijay]: Okay. Yeah. Depending on the cost, if I can, if I can afford, then will that help me to land in some place like a section Z or, or, or any other things that you should, you recommend exploring with this stage, who can give me some money to build this? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, I would say advertising in newsletters isn’t necessarily it might put you on the radar of some investors who subscribe to the newsletters. It’s not it’s not crazy to think that that’s the case. We’ve had that happen through our newsletter a few times. But at least a few times we know of probably more times we don’t know. But I would say if you want to position yourself to get in front of folks like the Andreessen team and all that, they really just care about where is the market going and are you seeing the results from that market? And are you the person who’s knowledgeable about that market to keep it growing? Those are really the three things that they care about. So it’s going to be tough to get in front of the big folks like Andreessen and Sequoia and General Catalyst and all those folks. It’s going to be tough to get in front of them until you have revenue, maybe you’re talking about it on social media, or you send them a very good, concise, cold email that says, hey, we grew 40% this month or something like that. That’s going to get their attention for sure. The other way, of course, is by getting introduced to them by someone who you know, who they know. That’s probably one of the best ways to do it. But obviously, you have to build those relationships on your own too. The one thing I always like to recommend here is don’t try to just build relationships with the investors cold. What you should do is find founders who they’ve invested in before in your sector and build relationships with those founders, like genuinely ask those founders how you can help them. And then when the time comes, just ask them for the intro and you’ll have a natural organic friendship built up with this founder. And of course, they’ll be willing to introduce you in a favorable way. So that’s the strategy that I seek at the best results. If you don’t and have those connections already. And that’s what I would recommend. [vijay]: Got it. So, yeah, actually I know a founder who recently went to their cohort. He’s there right now in San Francisco. Yeah, so I’ll reach out to him and maybe help him a little bit, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, even just find other founders, like go on Andreessen, go find a couple of partners at Andreessen, go on those partners, basis, crunch based pages, and then look at the startups that they’ve invested in the last two years, find the founders of those startups on LinkedIn, and start building or Twitter and start building a relationship with them. That’s what I would say. Now, the one exception to that, of course, is if you want to go the accelerator route, something like Y Combinator, which is still a very prestigious, but obviously much earlier stage than Andreessen is going to invest. They do take cold applications. And that’s how they do the majority of their interviews. And they don’t mind, they prefer founding teams, like at least two people, but they don’t, I know somebody who is a solo founder who got in and did their program and went on to raise from Alexis Ohanian and things like that. So it’s not unheard of for them to accept solo founders too, if you want to go that route. [vijay]: But I thought Anderson also has some kind of cohort, right? They also does the cohort. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, there’s a lot of funds that now have like I think Andreessen actually has multiple accelerators that they do. They have like a games one, and then they have like, I don’t know, a couple of others too. Those are separate funds than the main fund that they invest out of, but you know, it’s still good for making connections and founders and things like that. Yeah, but it is separate internally how they kind of structure the business. [vijay]: Got it. I think that is good. What else I should do in terms, apart from them, who should I talk to to get, or any other recommendations of auxiliary programs or get traction, like what other things I should do? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I can send you over a couple of them over email this weekend. One that I like because I know the people who run it is Pair. Have you seen Pair? I’ve heard of it, yeah. They’re based out of SF. The guy who founded the firm was, the top VC on the Midas list, I think like a year or two ago. And he’s great. And their whole team is great. I know people have gone through their program. I know the investors who run the program. It’s really solid. There’s also Neo. I don’t know too much about Neo, but I keep hearing good things from people I trust. And I think Sequoia has one called Sequoia Arc. I don’t know much about that, but it’s Sequoia, so I’m sure it’s good. And there’s probably a few others too, but those are ones that come to mind off the top of my head. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [vijay]: So these are all accelerated programs, right? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: These are all accelerated programs. Okay. [vijay]: Got it. Yeah. I’d also Google it since, since I just want to take your opinion on, on which one would be good like that, like that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Those are, those are some good ones that are obviously Y Combinator, but those are some good ones I’d recommend. [vijay]: Okay. I’m also looking at the tech starters. I heard they will invest in SolarFounders sometimes, so maybe I’ll just look into it. Okay, initially, okay. I guess those are my top questions I have. Yeah, I don’t have anything. Anything else you think I should do, read or get this product out there or anything? No, I think you’re pointing in the right directions. [Michael Houck]: And I actually think the idea is pretty interesting. So what I would say is just work really hard to make sure that You have those few customers who are in your ICP who are gonna be responsive to you and make that top priority, even more so than getting money in right away. The top thing that you can do is make sure that you’re building something that people are actually gonna end up paying you for. So just for your founder time opportunity cost, right? So yeah, I mean, look, you should keep me in the loop because we do help with fundraising when the time comes. I think you’re probably a little earlier than we do. But we have a lot of connections to investors and we have a monthly kind of digest that we send out with some deals. So when you have a deck and when the product’s a little further along, we’d love to help out and include you in there. [vijay]: I’ll do that. Actually, two quick things coming in my head. So you said the idea is actually interesting. You’re talking about the database process idea, right? Like the backend, not the brain as a service kind of thing. We’ve not went much deeper into that. In that but this itself is good you’re saying. [Michael Houck]: Oh yeah I think even the one that you presented was interesting. I would love to hear more about the brain as a service one too but the space there’s going to be a lot of opportunity in this space so I would just say that’s why it’s more important to just talk to customers because there’s going to be people who are attracted to this space you need to find where those nuances that make us stand out versus them before they do. [vijay]: Like I said before, I do have started a company last year for the car selling and buying and selling cars. There’s some traction there. So right now it’s not in my LinkedIn. So I only did not add it that because I was also working in my Blue Origin at the time. So I don’t want company to know about it. But also since now I’m not working, I’m not really gauging how much it will add to justify myself as a founder of something. Let’s say if I apply to TechStarter or this or that, or even let’s say the A16Z cohort, if there is anything, I really want to get into someone that actually can back me in some way. But my question there is, having a founder experience before, will that make any difference? Even though we’re not making that much There is a registered company. We’ve not raised any money. It’s a public source company. Or how do I position that for my favor? And should I add that in my LinkedIn, right? So that’s also the question. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, you definitely should add that on your LinkedIn and you should sort of explain it as concisely as you can. Just say, hey, here’s what I did, right? Is it an active company or have you guys shut it down? [vijay]: No, it’s an active company. Okay. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So I guess what I would say is add it. And also maybe add that you’re working on something new as well. And then when you get in interviews with these folks, what you should do is make it really clear to them, hey, this is a side company that I’m running. This isn’t going to take up a lot of my time. I’m not going to have a conflict of time interest or anything like that. Because that’s what they’re going to be worried about. They’re going to be worried, oh, this guy’s trying to build two companies at once. But it is better to show them, yes, I did Blue Origin, but then I became a founder. And I have that experience, that’s more valuable. And then you just say, oh yeah, and this isn’t like a big thing that’s gonna take up a lot of my time, but it’ll get you in the door. [vijay]: So a hundred percent, definitely add it. Okay, so if I understand correctly, definitely add it, but a point in the website itself saying that, hey, this is, I can actually say this as a crowdsourced marketplace, a marketplace or crowd directory something, because at this point, what we are doing is, we’re providing a directory of where they can find the vehicles that they need in their community. All I would say is that, you know, having it on the LinkedIn is going to help you get the meeting. [Michael Houck]: But then when you’re in the meeting, be super clear and be like, Oh, yeah, this is this is not like I’m not spending 40 hours a week on this or something like that. [vijay]: Yeah. Okay. Sounds good, sir. Thanks for your time. I’ll follow with you. I would like to know the cost for advertising in your company in If I say if I can afford and if that’s the direction, but I’ll keep you in the loop for anything else to take your advices. [Michael Houck]: Well, Vijay, keep me in the loop with how things go. And I’ll have my chief of staff send over some options for the newsletter as well. Thank you, sir. [vijay]: Thank you, sir.