Recruit a Hollywood accent coach and run a manual email pilot with 12 users

Anada Lakra… from Harvard Business School. I decided to say no to my McKinsey return offer, so I could focus full-time on this and I gave myself a deadline. I was graduating in six months. I told myself within those six months I need a term sheet and if I don't have a term sheet, then I can start applying to jobs. But if I do, of course, I'll continue this full-time. And in the meantime, I'm doing this 110%. I'm not entertaining any other projects.

Anada LakraThat deadline was a great forcing mechanism to have that 100%, again, focus that I think is needed. Otherwise, a startup won't happen if your attention is split in a lot of different ways. So got to work very quickly. The first thing that I realized is, "I'm the user, but I'm not the expert here. I'm not the speech coach." So first thing I did was to reach out to a bunch of different speech coaches who are experts in the field. I had this idea that if we got Hollywood speech coaches to work with us, that it would be especially differentiated and very cool because these are people who work with celebrities and actors and they often also have an acting background themselves. So they would be really great people to have involved in this project. So that was my first thing that I did.

Anada LakraReached out, explored conversations with them. Once we had our first coach, Ron, who's incredible and still works with us now five years later, put together a pilot with him where he recorded a bunch of videos. I found a few people, about a dozen people who were willing to do a beta run of this. And we were sending them manually these videos and they were giving us their speech recordings back and emails and the coach was giving them feedback asynchronously. So we're just doing the dry run super manually without any lines of code being written, just to see how this would actually go and work when we actually had a real product out there.

Anada LakraSo with all that being said, then I started to pitch investors and through that process we landed our first term sheet of around 500K. And then once we had that term sheet, we also applied around the same time to YC because we had the term sheet. We had them accelerate our interview process. So we had the term sheet in hand. We also got into YC. So at that point, Ilya quit his job and we're both in it full-time.