Pitch big investors on great retention before you have a way to get users

An Nayal… reasons we had to monetize the product as well end of '23, because even though the retention numbers were really good, we got into meetings with tier-1 investors, talked with General Catalyst, a16z, Sequoia, you can name all the big shots, we had a talk with all of them, but the numbers were not big enough, the baseline numbers were not big enough to convince them, because we did not unlock distribution, we did not invest enough time into it.

An NayalSo to any consumer founder who's going to go out there to raise, I would recommend you to invest a good amount of time into distribution before you try and go and talk with investors. The way the pitch deck worked is they would look at the retention numbers, they would get on the call with us, and then they would ask us, "How are you distributing the product?" And we wouldn't have an answer.

An NayalYou know, I would try to I would try to work up some answers saying that, "Yeah, we'll we'll look at talking to influencers, or we'll do this, that," but they knew, they knew I was bluffing. So a tip to any consumer founder who wants to go out there, make sure your product is solid, but also make sure you have unlocked distribution. They will ask you about it, they will grill into it, and if you can't answer, then usually you don't have a second …