Ideation

It was a typical Sunday afternoon in Arizona, in the thick of the pandemic, and I found myself in the midst of an extended spring break. I was torn between continuing my video game marathon—it was double XP happy hour, after all—or joining Soelle for a visit to our old friend Kirke’s house. Several things occupied my mind that evening, but none of them were Gifted. After some internal debate over whether the journey “up north” was worth it, I felt a cool wave of nostalgia wash over me. I hadn't seen Kirke in a while, and anyone who's met him knows he exudes an infectious energy. That settled it; I was going with Soelle.

The initial part of our visit was pretty standard: catching up, touring the new place, engaging in locker room talk, and bashfully discussing Kirke's Fortnite dreams and nightmares. As the night progressed, we partook in what some might call a "t-ball bat." Once the bat had made its rounds, Kirke asked a question that sparked something in motion. “Soelle, what do you think about the name, image, and likeness changes going into effect next year?” I remember the excitement that surged through me, the kind that emerges when a brilliant idea starts bubbling up, elbowing its way through a sea of less impressive thoughts.

On the drive home later that evening, I asked Soelle to elaborate on these changes. I was clueless, but I understood that whatever was happening was about to change the landscape of NCAA sports, and I liked the sound of that. I remember thinking, this is it, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. These student-athletes will be bombarded, I thought. Nobody's going to guide them! They'll be exploited; there's so much potential here! My mind raced at the prospect of working in sports, entertainment, software, startups, new markets—this uncharted territory was intoxicating.

I got home and immediately whipped up a Google doc titled "Gifted Business Plan V1." Anyone who knows me knows how much I love a fresh Google doc, though this penchant would later come back to haunt our team.

After emptying my thoughts into the document, I realized I needed to clear my mind further. I knew I couldn’t embark on this journey alone. So, I got some much-needed rest, gearing up for what I believed would be the crucial next step: finding a co-founder.

Tom's Thumb, a mountain in northern Scottsdale, AZ, became particularly significant around this time. Featured in the classic film “Holes,” this trail, introduced to me by Soelle in 2018/2019, is quite the ass-kicker. It's a four-mile loop, with 1.8 miles of steep switchbacks, unforgiving terrain, and not a hint of shade. But the beauty of Tom’s Thumb is that the hardship is front-loaded; the second half is a leisurely walk amidst giant saguaros and prickly teddybear cacti, concluding with one final challenging stretch before you reach the summit, greeted by a massive, thumb-like structure.

Around May 2020, Soelle, Matus, and I began frequenting this trail. What started as a fun Sunday morning activity turned into a sort of spiritual practice for me. I decided to set a daunting goal—one that would make all other objectives seem trivial in comparison: climb Tom’s Thumb every day for 30 days. This represented about a four-hour commitment daily, a real thorn in one's side.

I believed this challenge would benefit everyone in the house, so I tried to recruit my roommates. I figured it would be a great way to use our time, stay healthy, and connect with nature. Having set many goals that slipped through the cracks before, I wanted my roommates to serve as accountability partners. But they weren't sold on the idea. Frustrated and a bit hurt that they weren’t even willing to try, I eventually realized I’d been a bit of a pain. I wished I hadn't pressured them, as they were all following their spiritual journeys. After some persistent coaxing and a few heated discussions, I resolved to go it alone.

However, a couple of days later, while Matus and I were likely discussing house music or planning our next Tuesday movie night (IYKYK), I casually invited him along. To my surprise, he shrugged and agreed. A week passed, and Matus consistently joined me, despite his other commitments. During my solo hikes, my thoughts often circled back to three things: 1. Where is the top? 2. My calves are on fire! 3. Who am I going to build this company with?

I wrestled with the startup conundrum of not wanting to share my idea for fear it would be stolen, a myth debunked by many successful founders. Of course, discretion is necessary, but you still need to let a few people in on the plan. It was during an afternoon hike in early May, a magical time in Arizona as the sun was setting, that everything felt right. Matus and I had just completed probably our fifth consecutive hike, both of us sweaty and covered in dust but euphoric that our calves had ceased their throbbing. I blurted out to Matus that I had been working on something he might find interesting. At that moment, I think I described it as a LinkedIn for student athletes.

Matus is the kind of person who's tough to persuade unless he's completely on board with an idea. But after some initial questions and thoughtful pauses, a simple "fifty-fifty" sealed the deal: we were starting a software company.

I chose Matus for several reasons. The primary one was his willingness to join me on the Tom's Thumb challenge. He didn't complete it, but his willingness to try was enough for me. Other reasons included his genius, analytical mind, curiosity, and ability to accomplish things even when he initially didn't know how.

The early days of Gifted were a serotonin rush. The name, inspired by athletes being naturally gifted, seemed perfect at the time, though it would later pose challenges. As naive first-time founders, we hit the drawing board, detailing every tiny aspect our software company would require. I had some startup/business experience; Matus had virtually none. Our early days were a cycle of research, daydreaming, and more research. We conceived a simple app, and despite having no coding experience but a burning desire to create, we did what every rookie founder does—we began prototyping. The result was an app so ugly only a mother could love it.

Matus and I decided it was time to start interviewing professionals, beginning with professors to gather as much information as possible. We assumed that having these advisors on our updated pitch deck would propel us to Jobs and Wozniak levels of success. After numerous interviews, we assembled what we believed was the most elite team of advisors west of the Mississippi. They indeed were, but we were out of our depth, unsure of what to do with all these experts. We created titles for each and thought that having these credible names alongside ours would translate to money in the bank and a self-creating product.

Convinced we'd laid all the groundwork, we thought it was time to bring on a technical founder. The plan was set: I would be the CEO, Matus the COO, and our next recruit, the CTO.

One thing that hasnt been mentioned yet in this story that is quite important is the home base that made this all possible. Lambda Chi Alpha (LXA). LXA consisted of the best of the best Arizona State had to offer; whatever industry you were interested in you could find a high-performing individual. Fortunately for us, we were both liked individuals in the chapter and were able to connect with a variety of people. We started with the close connections, those we knew could use a computer a little better than everyone else. Then, we started to specialize. We needed to find an IOS developer, it turns out not every nerd (<3) studying computer science can do this. After expending our immediate resources and finding no luck, Matus remembered a bright individual he had gone to high school with. Andrew Luckenbaugh. Andrew was a student-athlete at Northwestern University who had experience creating apps. Bingo we thought. What better way to polish off the team by adding another student athlete who has direct experience in app development. We reached out to him, set up a meeting and gave a small test run. He began developing the app, no questions asked, based on our makeshift prototype. Andrew was a wizard, but something still didn’t feel right. He was balancing a cyber security job at the time and had extremely limited hours to meet. After a few back and forths Matus and I agreed we would need to sever ties with Andrew before he had pulled any more of his hair out working with first-time founders. Matus and I had to let Andrew go, and as the saying goes, it is more likely worse in thought than it is in action. Andrew was relieved, and we went our separate ways. We still kept in contact and had the intent to drop a bag of cash off at his house for his initial efforts once we IPOed.

Back to the app developer hunt we went. In retrospect, we probably should have figured out a way to build the tool ourselves at first. Something with sticks and tape, maybe. This was suggested to us by our first advisor and favorite professor, Dr. Asish Satpathy. After countless searches, we picked up a hot trail of an alumni who worked for a major app development company. We did everything Dale Carnegie tells you to do in How to Win Friends and Influence People, took him out to lunch, talked about him and kept the business talk after the food had digested, only for him to tell us the clients they work with are more established, but if we had 120k, they could do it. We maybe would have had 120k if we didn’t go to all those Devils 2-4-1s

We were baffled at how hard it was to find a technical founder who was willing to partake in a Sunbar excursion and could whip out every detail our product had to have. After more failed leads and a bit of desperation, Matus and Larson hit the prototyping board again. We wanted to polish up our first design and have an easier way of displaying our idea which led us to Figma and Avery Carter.

Avery Carter was a Lambda Alumni who was a skilled designer and prototyper. Larson met Avery via NoFreeDrip. Long story short, I reached out to Avery for a prototype facelift. Avery said he was willing to help advise us but didn’t have time to design it himself. Instead, he decided to teach us the SPRINT methodology. The SPRINT methodology, in short, is how to test business ideas in 5 days. Through a series of questions like How might we’s and heat mapping, you can understand your business idea at the macro and micro levels. We did this process virtually and with Avery’s help we refined our vision and product, another person we mentally promised 10k post IPO. We created the outline first on Mira and later created a working prototype on Figma. This made our initial prototype look like child’s play. We were stoked to have something that looked like a real app.

After more research and more daydreaming, we decided to talk to users (finally), we interviewed dozens of student-athletes and shared with them our idea. Nearly everyone loved our product User testing Nov 2020.. a 9.53 rating across the board! Everyone loved our app! We thought we had created the next Google. We should have read (ad) the mom test.

With our biases confirmed, we got back to the CTO hunt. Matus and I pulled out their virtual Rolodex and, this time started sifting through names of people they knew were involved in tech somehow. Starting with Knutson, Anundson, Dave, Theisen, Andersen, Gilchrist, Shapiro, Sisco, Neville, Dayanc. Dead end, dead end, dead end, dead end, dead end, dead end, dead end, dead end, dead end, bingo.

We didn’t know much about Mertay. A few things we did know at the time, he was our age, he was turkish, he really liked the movie Ted, and he was really, really smart. We invited Mertay to meet with us, at a Tempe staple, Chop Shop on University, a real granola eatery with overpriced juices and mediocre protein bowls with things like “forbidden rice”. We grabbed a table outside and got into the nitty gritty. For starters Mertay shot it to us straight, He knew nothing about IOS development, something that originally was offputting but would later be valued highly. He was an electrical engineer in his previous life of studies but it just wasnt his thing. He transferred to ASU, met a couple of cute blonde girls in APHI and began studying computer science. This was his second semester and the only real experience he had thus far in terms of software engineering was building something that involved a butterfly and native americans. After the protein bowls, green glories, and acai bowls had been polished, Mertay scooted a little closer to the ipad that had the prototype on it and said something along the lines of “I don’t know how to do this at all, but I am willing to learn.” To this day I am not sure why he took the chance. The only thing that brought together Mertay, Michael and Alex, was a sidequest that was started long ago. I remember going home that night and talking to Matus, we we weren’t sure if Mertay was our guy. He wasn’t the software engineer with all the accolades, nor did he have an internship at Google. He didn’t act robotic when we asked him technical questions, he also did not pretend to know the answers to things he did not know. After some back and forth we it dawned on us what he was, it was right in front of our face the entire time, behind the few sips of green glory he had left behind it was clear that he was one of us. Amongst Mertay’s known genius, is a kid’s curiosity, what he didn’t know he wanted to learn. When discussing the project with him there was no convincing, no sales pitch, he saw it all the way we saw it. The icing on the cake was he loved house music so much he almost protruded it. Mertay was and is the most ideal technical co-founder. At the time, he didn’t know what the software would be, and neither did we, but we did know it would be something.

Steve’s Espresso

The months to follow were some of the most exciting and challenging months we had faced in our professional careers. It finally felt like we were hitting strides. We were able to book meetings with nearly everyone, we were all operating on a different level. Each of us hungry to move the needle forward. Matus and I had the pleasure of living with one another at a house they called the Glacier. The blend of cool A/C mixed with the echoes of Gunna & Guatemala made the place a sort of solitude. Down the street was a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop I had discovered after navigating traffic. It was a dingy sign that read “steves ESPRESSO.”, Larson thought the only way this place could still be in business with signage like that is if the espresso ripped. And oh, did it. There are a lot of fond memories in steves, from the easy-to-look-at baristas to familiar faces asking us what we were working on; we felt like real founders. A real Zuck energy was in the air. We got a lot done at Steve’s and made great progress both professionally and personally. I was accepted into Propel, a community of founders; Matus was entering into an impact year on the gridiron, and Gifted was moving along at a good pace. We onboarded who we thought was our golden ticket advisor, Aaron Hernandez, no not that one, but a real good character and mentor who worked for the NCAA in compliance for years. He was recently brought to ASU as the director of the sports law and business program, and while he didn’t end up being our golden ticket, he is a lifelong friend and someone who played a pivotal role in Matus and I’s lives.

The year was coming to an end but more good news was to be had, we had been accepted into a legal accelerator program that afforded us the opportunity to work alongside law students, this was a highly competitive program and we were fortunate to be accepted. Then it happened, the moment we had been waiting for. We got a meeting with Arizona States Athletic Department.

Arizona State Athletics

(Fire Ray Anderson)

It was one of those mornings in AZ where you weren’t sure if it was going to be 98 degrees or 99 degrees; regardless, the sun was shining, and it was the start to a good day. We had a meeting to show off what we had been working on. The meeting was with the assistant athletic director, we were stoked. I still remember walking across the field, feeling like the guys that play here on saturday. Matus and Larson nervously waltzed around the building waiting for our meeting to begin. Thats when a fellow swung around the corner and nonchalantly dapped up Matus, and shook my hand. “Come on back, gentleman!” and so we did. The meeting went well, we delivered the message, showed the Asst. AD all the bells and whistles and pitched to him why ASU should adopt us as their NIL tool. We left the meeting feeling pretty good, I remember thinking this is where the snowball begins to roll. Once ASU picks us up then the pac-12! It didnt quite work that way. The rather unfortunate part that we would soon learn about the athletics industry, it is filled with false promises and painfully slow political hoops to jump through. Regardless, we pushed on to our next endeavor. Launching Gifted V1.

Development Phase

(From Mertay)

We had an idea about how the app should look and feel. Our sole design source was the Figma prototype which was put together by Matus and Larson at the time - which was also the same version they used to pitch to me.

We started developing our MVP and hired our first engineer, Shiv Patel. We were paying him $500 out of pocket, split by three of us. Shiv and I had a cold winter and spent winter break to making progress on the product.

Meanwhile, Matus and Larson were spending time strategizing and interviewing potential users that consisted mostly of ASU Student-Athletes that we got by leveraging Matus’ personal connections. So, before we started developing the app we had done some user research and feedback we got was positive. At least we thought so, but user research could be misleading due to various reasons. Not asking the right questions, not reading the real problem etc… But that was fine as we were also learning at the time.

We also onboarded Asli Bulut, a talented designer to help us out with graphic design, but she was solely focused on creating graphics to be used on UI elements. Like myself, this wasn’t her domain, but she was willing to learn.

Gifted V1. was submitted on Jan 26th 2021

Gifted V1. Included:

Businesses were able to explore influencers

Businesses could send a deal to influencers through chat

Influencers could accept deals on chat

Influencers could manage/track their deal on their in-app manager

Notification system

In-message deal management system

Meanwhile, Larson gathered our board of advisors. They helped us navigate on this journey significantly.

The YCombinator application deadline was around the corner. We incorporated in Delaware and in March of Spring 2021, we applied to YC as “Marketplace for student-athlete brand deals”.

The application took us the entire Sunday, we always felt something was off. But there probably wasn’t, in retrospect. Unfortunately, we didn’t get into the batch. We were looking like this at the time:

Lars with the Average Joe t-shirt, my flow and Matus’s timer control with his big toe.

This version was obviously lacking a bunch of UI standards and definitely was a sore to the eye. At the time we were not pleased with this version and didn’t feel comfortable launching because we thought we can’t get our target user, “athletes/influencers”, with this UI. We thought the reason why we didn’t get into YC was due to not having users and we thought we had to improve the UI before we launched though our waitlist was growing.

Takeaway

Don’t spend the entire Sunday on an application

Be yourself; no one knows your product better than you.

UI is rarely the case for not getting users.

Have some users on the app benefiting from the features and wait until they complain about the UI before you make big decisions.

Honeymoon Phase

We earned a grant from ASU and had ambitious plans about how this app should look and feel. We created a couple of job postings and reached out to our network. We onboarded Ashley Bates who would act as our UI&UX lead; she redesigned everything. From creating color schemes and researching fonts for the app to adding Mertay’s favorite design feature: drop shadows. Without Ashley and Asli, our app would’ve looked like something three fraternity brothers would turn in for their WPC 101 assignment.

We also interviewed five individuals for the developer position and ended up hiring three of them in addition to Shiv. Ayaz, Joe, Chris. These students had two things in common with us; passion to learn more and curate their resume to set themselves apart from the NPC bunch post-grad. Shiv and Joe were mainly working on creating the company website. Chris was helping Mertay implement Ashley’s designs, Chris was, as Mertay put it “wicked with the front end”, even Apple thought so. Ayaz was working on the Onboarding experience, which is still one of the app's cleanest pieces of UI.

Without these three, and many others unnamed taking a chance on Gifted, things would have never been the same.

Founders were discussing ways to improve the experience which would more often than not lead to an overwhelming amount of tangents. We would eventually call this “pyramid talk”, which translates to: hold that thought until we have resources to execute on. Things were rolling. Asli was creating the new logo and cleaner UI elements. We had a team of 4 engineers, 2 designers and 3 Founders. We were all in college and thought this was our Facebook moment. We had a company culture for sharing music, exciting news and we were all communicating over memes. We were just having fun.

We were still mainly focused on Athletes as the Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) legislation was about to pass. It was set to pass on July 1st but we didn’t deliver the app on time. Mertay was on caffeine 24/7 holding office hours starting at midnight and would work until 4 am on weekdays, waking up at 9am to work on the Full-Time internship he had at the time at GoDaddy. But in retrospect that kind of made things slightly worse because he was always on edge and had cloudy sight of how I should implement things. This was also putting pressure on our interns who were barely getting paid at the time (we distributed all the grants we got and added some equity on top ). However at the time we would call ourselves “B+ students,” so we were aiming for velocity and not so much about the design principles and code quality. We didn’t need A+ students that was for later when we had more resources.

Anyways, after a couple back and forth between App Store reviews we got the app approved and published on the App Store on Aug 1st. We popped champagne, grabbed dinner and celebrated our success. This was a huge milestone.

Reality Check

After the app got approved on the App Store we improved on a couple more bugs and the product was ready to go. We were constantly talking to our advisors, everyone was stoked to finally have the app out.

However, I was too naive to think that this was it. I thought from now on we would have no hiccups and a steady road ahead. Mertay went back to Turkey for a two week break and came back to start his last semester at ASU and to finish working part-time at GoDaddy. Meanwhile, Matus’ summer camp and his MBA program had started, and I was working at Whatnot.

Matus and I, were trying to set the company and brand culture, we created brand handbooks for our athlete-marketing interns. They were helping us spread the word on campus. We had about 150 signups on our waitlist. We got a decent amount of athletes onboard to the app, and our instagram was slowly growing. But we got hit by the product market fit problem.

Users were on the app but had nothing to do, they were not getting any deals. We were lacking businesses on the platform.

We were talking to many people to get us leads. We then made a deal with this college bar and got athletes get paid $100 each to go there after a game to eat.

Then we had another company making healthy meal prep for college students. We had them work with some athletes but surprisingly, it was hard to find athletes to participate in these deals. I guess college students can’t all be bought with free food. We had another deal with an NFT company that signed five athletes to promote their art. Scheduling with the Athletes was a painful. We built the app so we didn’t have to deal with the unbelievable amount of calls/text back and forth. One of the athletes didn’t post on time. We were calling him, but there was no answer. Luckily Matus knew his address, so he and Mertay went there knocked on the door, and were greeted by his barking pitbull. A few more bangs on the door and just as they were about to head back he opened the door. He had just woken up and said he had a good night out. They showed him how it works and he posted the deal. Talk about hand holding.

What we had realized that day was we were victims of the problem that we were trying to solve. Meanwhile we applied to YC again. This time it was a lot more casual, one candid shot, we didn’t waste a day like last time. As the days went on we were trying to get businesses on the app. We were trying to work with restaurants and coffee shops near the campus or in Scottsdale. Matus was soliciting businesses by email and phone, I was hustling on LinkedIn and pushing his network and Mertay was trying door-by-door sales hoping to talk to their managers. In total we each got one lead and that was it. We couldn’t believe how challenging it was to find businesses who wanted a better way to work with influencers.

This was the moment where startup was not fun, because we were not sure what was going on, we were too focused on things that were going wrong and not creative with the way we were approaching these businesses and the way we do business. We were also getting advising from ASU at the time to create a Go To Market strategy but we didn’t execute much on the take-aways from those sessions. Our biggest problem was to get a point of contact from either businesses and/or agencies. We never figured out how to approach them and never had an official meeting with a brand. Sales is a unique skill that shouldn’t be overlooked. Not everyone has that. However the more obvious of a problem you are solving then it is an easier sell. However in our case we were trying to sell something to small businesses that was impossible to measure. Calculating an ROI on influencer marketing is still yet to be solved and small business doesn’t care about instagram impressions as much as people you bring to their door.

Takeaway

Know how to sell your product, build the product around the sell

YC Interview

When we got the interview I was in one of my house shower sessions and my watch read “You got the interview YC” pure euphoria rushed through my body, paired with Bob Moses, I felt like Charlie finding the golden ticket. I let the fellas know the news and we used this email as fuel to grind for until the interview. We started pushing the gas pedal, trying more to partner with businesses and onboard more athletes/influencers.

However we weren’t able to make any deals before the interview, this was mostly due to us lacking the bandwidth and skills to make that connection and get a lead. We spent time mainly working on our doc that includes answers to potential questions that they may ask. This included CAC, Long term customer retention cost, becoming a billion dollar company and whatnot… We were just speculating about all these, where we should have realized if we can’t easily answer these questions then there was something wrong. We spent a lot of time with our advisors figuring out the details and we realized how much we still don’t know about the space.

Larson got us an interview with two YC companies: The founders of Whatnot, and Fountain. We were ready to be grilled getting into these meetings. But the secret sauce was simple, just know your company and users and have a clear vision moving forward. The interview day finally creeped up on us. We were nervous, I probably went to the bathroom three times in the span of a thirty minute window. Then questions were dead simple, “Walk us through a deal?”, “What are the next steps?”, “What would it take to quit our jobs?”... It was 10 minutes long and we were in and out. Probably the fastest 10 minutes we ever had. Then it was a looooong wait for that phone to ring and it never did. We received an email that had solid feedback. Something along the lines of “We aren’t sure how we were going to solve the cold start problem.” We weren’t either….

Takeaway

Know your users

Have clear next steps

Know why you need investment and what you will do with it

If you don’t know what you would do with money then it is possible that you are doing something wrong. ( Marketing is not a valid answer if you don’t already have a proof of concept with an atomic network )

The first pivot - Link-in-Bio Tool

After not making it to the YC Batch, and now clearly seeing the areas that we are lacking;

There is not much demand to make deal with athletes who don’t have big social media presence

We have build the castle before we build the bridge

We needed to focus on smaller problems before solving the marketplace problem

We then started talking about a link-in bio tool for influencers which allowed them to display their brand deals on a more professional yet still fun platform.

We then got back into building phase again, however at this stage we let go our engineers so Mertay was the only one, on the dev side. We were back to our core team, just the founders. We developed this tool and we got more and more excited about the product. We hired two interns from ASU, as we needed help on Web view of the same product and logging infrastructure. Our velocity was stable and progressive.

We brought on an influener manager, Eloise, who was a Lambda sweetheart, and well connected with the girls who were doing brand deals on campus. We saw Eloise as our ticket to the Atomic Network. We assumed we could trojan horse our way into the influencing community. We were wrong, but Eloise added awesome insight into the problems we were overlooking and we valued her time deeply.

The Second Pivot - Professional networking platform for influencers

After running into more acquistion issues we decided to pivot away from the link-in-bio tool as we found that everyone and their CTO mother were builidng link-in-bio tools. After a bit more pyramid talk we searched for help outside the immediate team to see if anything new ideas could be sparked.

Enter Zach, the valedictorian who graduated alongside Mertay. Zach meshed very well with the team and quickly became a founding engineer, we could talk ideas, run sprints and develop together. We together came up with the idea, inspired by Blind and Rate My Professor to create a networking application for influencers. The idea was to build a hub where influencers would spill the tea on what it was like working with brands. We thought the idea was a fantastic blend of everything we wanted. And it was.

Thing’s were going smoothly at this point but we would face another challenge soon.

It was the year all the founders were going to live together, which created a dream scenario. Casually brainstorming over breakfast working shoulder to shoulder under one roof. We thought this was our garage moment. Meanwhile Mertay was preparing for job applications and interviewing with Google and Whatnot. Then soon after we all moved in together he moved to the Bay Area after accepting the Google offer. Which then created the need to hire another engineer to tackle the feed implementation. We hired a beast, his name is Can, a talented soft spoken indiviual who would later be accepted into Oxford. He pulled the reins on all things software.

The Launch

After 1.5 - 2 years this was the first time we ever launched the product. Which was one of our biggest mistakes. In retrospect I would have launched with the initial version of the product, with the fugly UI, failed fast and iterated faster. Since we didn’t launch then it took us another 8-9 months to realize that we were heading for a failure.

We were all so excited about this launch, we created a marketing plan, we were posting on instagram the ball was rolling again. We first spread the product around our circle and girls we knew who were doing brand deals. Then we started doing presentations at Sorority chapters to promote our product to freshmen and others who are interested in brand deals.

We quickly gained a decent amount of users 20 -30 in our first couple weeks. We were doing weekly giveaways to keep influencers coming back to our app and upload a brand deal. It was working… This was one of the greatest feelings we had as a team. Finally we had an app that people were using. We started doing more exciting giveaways, new years rave tickets, etc… It was going great.

The Bottleneck

We approached another bottleneck as growth slowed down. We weren’t sure what was wrong. Our thesis was girls didn’t see value in coming back to the app. We then started thinking that we should reach out to brands to sponsor the weekly giveaways so that girls get not only free clothes but also a brand deal. Businesses would get brand visibility and start interacting with their clients in a more natural setting. It was a win win for everyone.

Matus and I were trying to get a hold of businesses just to do an interview with them. We had two interviews one with an LA based alcohol marketing agency and another one over dinner thanks to my mojo. We had some feedback but then again it was too small of a user research to conclude from. We obviously needed more but businesses were nowhere to be found.

Losing a Founder

We have been trying for almost 2.5 years now and our patience and motivation was going down to its lowest. Everyone had important life decisions to make, I was laid off, Matus was bullish on chasing his NFL dreams and Mertay was trying to get accustomed to new city, work and people. It was a tough time for everyone.

Matus wanted to take a break indefinitely to chase his dream. It was just Mertay and I at this point. We were also not sure about our path forward. There were too many unknowns and little to no patience and motivation. Finally 2.5 years of hard work creeping up on our minds.

We wanted to move forward but then it naturally turned into hanging up the cleats for good. It wasn’t an end, it was the beginning of New Chapter for everyone.

Was it a Failure?

In short, no.

During this time we all had invaluable benefits by working on this product.

We deepend our relationships and used the time covid afforded us to grow personally and professionally.

We have met people that we would otherwise not have:

Mentors

Industry professionals

ASU entrepreneurs and faculty members

Pitch competitions

YCombinator Partners

Ray Anderson (Fire)

Founders of Whatnot, Fountain

Kelvin Beachum (so random)

This was something uncomfortable for all of us and we all learned what is it like to develop and launch a product.

We got THE KNOW HOW

We got challenged by YCombinator, not many people can say that

Matus got in to MBA program

I got a job at the fastet growing startup ever

Mertay graduated valedictorian and got a job at Google

We got invited to give talks at ASU tech and innovation events

We have learned, experienced and grew by 10x throughout this project. So, it was only wins, no losses.

Takeaways

Launch fast

Fail faster

Pivot when needed

Always talk to your customer

If you can’t even schedule a call with them, check what might be going wrong

Interview users, understand their pain

FOUNDER MARKET FIT

Have someone on the founding team who know the problem you are solving and who is connected to other people who might be having similar problems

Think about fundraising from DAY 1

It is never too early to fundraise

Without funding you can’t execute and try different strategies

Keep an investor newsletter

To investors it could be quarterly depending on the velocity of the team

Send monthly newsletter to potential stakeholders and advisors, share it on LinkedIn

Find ways to bootstrap the idea without spending any time on development and without breaking the bank

PROVE THE IDEA FIRST, having a cool idea doesn’t isn’t enough to make a successful business

Celebrate small wins

They are probably a bigger deal than you think it is

This is hard to realize when you are in the motions

Stay healthy

Meet regularly

Keep a balanced calendar

Take notes

Leave with Action Items assigned to someone

Keep each other accountable

Be Gifted

I think we could write a 500 page book about Gifted and it still wouldn’t include all the stories, the good ones, like that time we went viral for supporting womans sports, the bad ones, having to hunt down athletes to post on time, the ugly ones, Mertays coding breaks at devils comes to mind here, or the beautiful ones, like meeting Mertays family or breaking bread with the hundreds of people we brough along the way these stories, memories, and friendships are infinite. At the end of the day this is what Gifted was bound to be, an exploration into who we were, who we are, and who we could be. A question often comes to mind, could we have tried harder and made more sacrifices? Maybe. But that’s not how this story goes. Gifted was more than a software company, Gifted was the first step into our twenties, the step that pushed us so far beyond our comfort zone that the only certainty was uncertainty itself. As this chapter closes, a new one begins. The knowledge we cultivated through this process is rare. You sort of get x-ray vision for bullshit. You have a deep understanding on how to go from x-y-z faster. Will we fail again? Certainly. But failing means we havent stopped trying.

If it’s this its this, great.

If it's not its not, fine.

But it will be something.

-Lars