The MVP Show: Recent Episodes

Luca Monk

MVP is a podcast for operators and product builders. It may be particularly helpful for first-time founders, early startup employees and those looking to make the leap into entrepreneurship!

For Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Youtube links go to: https://linktr.ee/MinimumViablePod. Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE!

Dropping out of uni to launch a start-up in his parent’s garage seemed crazy until some former Apple execs came knocking on this Aussie guy’s door.

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About Allen Liao

After studying Electrical Engineering and Economics at the University of Sydney for two years, the 23-year-old dropped out and went to work in the basement of his familly home— building the world’s first unloseable sunglasses.

After going viral on Time and WSJ, Allen and his team secured $60,000 worth of pre-orders in just 3 days. From there, he attracted some of the best investors in the world — Ron Johnson who built Apple retail from the ground up, Wordpress Founder Matt Mullenweg and even comedian Stephen Fry.

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Show Notes

0:00 Introduction

2:29 Genesis Story of Tzukuri

8:34 First Business, Prank Bills and NZ Federal Police

15:56 Kickstarting Tzukuri, $60k Pre-Orders in 3 days

20:18 Protyping Tzukuri v1 and Raising Capital From Apple Executives

28:48 Flying to Silicon Valley and Broken Prototypes

32:44 Constructing a Good Investor Story and Meeting with a16z

41:10 Manufacturing Complexity of Bluetooth in Sunglasses

45:32 Reflection, What Could Have Been Done Better?

50:57 Mental Health

For Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Youtube links go to: https://linktr.ee/MinimumViablePod. Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE!

About Eric Bahn

Eric Bahn is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund, an early-stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco. Hustle Fund invests in software startups at the pre-seed and seed stages, backing founders who exhibit great execution and high velocity (aka, hustle).

Previous to Hustle Fund, Eric was an angel investor and partner at 500Startups. And prior to becoming a professional investor, he spent over a decade as an operator (Facebook, Instagram) and entrepreneur (Beat The GMAT, The Hustle). Eric draws from his product and growth experience to advise his founders in scaling their own enterprises.

Eric is a native of Detroit, Michigan and first arrived to Silicon Valley to attend Stanford University (BA, MA), which launched his career into software and startups. Eric is happily married with two kids.

Show Notes

0:00 intro

1:05 What does great execution mean?

3:29 Tactical product building advice from Instagram and Facebook

7:41 How do you run a good experiment?

11:29 How to curb Novelty Effect?

14:34 Privilege in Silicon Valley and how to fix it

21:02 How important is it that a startup be based in San Francisco?

27:56 How Beat The GMAT started

33:22 How big is the GMAT market?

35:54 Rebuilding the GMAT today in a different vertical

39:34 The story of how Daily Mail bought Beat the GMAT

44:16 How do you view failure?

48:29 How to stand out amongst the crowd in the Hustle Fund screening process?

52:53 Fun questions to wrap up

For Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube and Website Links go to: https://linktr.ee/MinimumViablePod. Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE!

About Michael Batko

Michael started as a business student following the traditional path into consulting and corporate life (Amex, PwC, KPMG) ...but then fell in love with the startup world growing two start-ups from a team of 2 to 5 (madpaws.com.au) and 10 to 50+ (expert360.com), including a $AUD 13M Series B capital raise. He then joined Startmate as their Head of Operations and is now CEO.

Shownotes

0:00 Introduction

0:52 From Intern to Startmate CEO in 4 Years

7:25 Startmate Business Model

15:20 Relationship between Blackbird and Startmate

18:39 Building a 1 million person startup city

27:28 BatkoOS and Productivity Hacks, Emoji Shortcuts and What CEO's Do

30:28 Emoji Shortcut

34:00 What does a CEO do?

36:00 Difference between CEO of 2 and 20

38:36 Clearly communicating vision and strategy to 30 people

45:25 Who do you think of when you hear the word successful?

This week's episode is sponsored by https://gems.closingbell.co. Sign up to this free newsletter for undervalued stocks w/ momentum and conversations from pro investors.

For Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube and Website Links go to: https://linktr.ee/MinimumViablePod. Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE!

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For Episode 18 of The MVP Show I talk with a very special and different guest - 10k Diver.

With over 230k followers, 10k Diver has become the go to educational resource for finance and investing.

In this episode we cover:

0:00 State of the public markets

10:32 Is inflation here to stay

14:36 Breaking down Financial Statements

19:05 Float in Businesses (i.e. Starbucks)

28:02 Normalising financials

35:26 Things novice investors overlook in the Balance Sheet

40:23 Management, Capital Allocation, and Buybacks

48:51 Match.com

52:04 Who do you think of when you hear the word successful?

You can follow 10K Diver on:

https://twitter.com/10kdiver, and
https://10kdiver.com/twitter-threads/

For Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube and Website Links go to: https://linktr.ee/MinimumViablePod. Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE!

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Currently focussed on supporting and developing the New Zealand startup ecosystem via Phase One Ventures.

Mahesh has held multiple executive roles in some of Australia's most iconic startups. He has experienced how to build a global Unicorn from ground up as an early employee and the first Head of People at Canva (SAAS) helping to scale to 200+ people. He had the opportunity to drive operational excellence, helping Airtasker (marketplace) become profitable, go global and go public. He was the COO at Simply Wall St (Fintech), as it hit an inflection point setting up the right foundations for it to accelerate and grow.

You can follow along with Mahesh here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/maheshmuralidhar
https://www.phaseone.ventures/

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In this episode, we talk about:

Mahesh's relentless hustle, getting Uber as a client through Tim Tams
Getting hired by Mel and Cliff at Canva to run their People Operations
Canva's hiring process, how to hire an A+ team
Setting expectations w/ the Board, getting alignment
Working at Airtasker as VP People Operations and Simply Wall Street as COO
Supporting the NZ Startup Ecosystem and more...

For Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube and Website Links go to: https://linktr.ee/MinimumViablePod. Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE!

Jeremy Moser is a co-founder at uSERP, a digital-brand-building agency. He's also the chief marketing officer at Wordable, which he acquired in 2020. On the side, he runs www.copycourse.io to teach copywriting.

You can follow along with Jeremy here:

https://mobile.twitter.com/jmoserr
Learn to write high-converting landing pages in one week: https://www.copycourse.io/

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In this episode we talk about:

Formula's for writing better landing page copy
Most common mistakes people make when writing copy
Building effective funnels from SEO
Hacks for finding SEO keywords
Substack vs custom blog to optimise SEO
Long-form vs short-form landing pages

For Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube and Website Links go to: https://linktr.ee/MinimumViablePod. Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE!

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Tractor Ventures Co-Founder and Startmate Mentor Matt Allen is on a mission to help founders hold onto as much of their equity as they want to, for as long as they like.

He is achieving this mission by bringing revenue-based financing into the mainstream Down Under.

In this episode we talk about:

Mike Cannon-Brookes and his AGL endeavors
Matt's start as a web developer and other career highlights
Revenue-based financing and the Tractor Ventures business model
How investment syndicates operate and Side Stage Ventures

Since '96 Matt has:

been a software developer, mostly on the web.
ran a hosting company.
co-founded and exited (with varying degrees of success) 5 tech startups. (River Dynamics, YourWeb, ProcessGo, Wattcost, DoneSafe).
become a partner at Lookahead Search, opened and ran the Melbourne office.
directed Founder Institute for two semesters in Melbourne.
was the President then Treasurer of Ruby Australia.
made 11 early stage investments (Pin Payments, Practice Ignition, Buildkite, Gyde, Hava, Teamsquare, Mentor Loop, Spaceship financial, CodeLingo, Making Things, Taggd).
helped Blackbird Ventures with deal flow
Invested in and mentored with StartMate since 2017 Sydney batch, Partner since MEL17
joined the Amazon AWS Startup team in Melbourne, VC BD.
formed Tractor Ventures, Australia’s first Revenue Based investment fund.

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For Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube and Website Links go to: https://linktr.ee/MinimumViablePod

For Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube, and Website Links go to: https://linktr.ee/MinimumViablePod. Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE!

Tibo Maker is one-half of the creative force behind Pony Express Studio. The studio builds tools and services to help creators and makers launch and grow their audience or user base.

The studio launched multiple products in 2021, experimenting with different ideas and concepts until one resonated with the audience. That one was Tweet Hunter, a Twitter growth tool that includes an AI writing assistant and advanced tweet scheduler.

Both Tweet Hunter, and Pony Express, experienced a lot of success in 2021. In July, Pony Express received an acquisition offer for $100k. By October, Tibo shared that they had grown Tweet Hunter to $150k ARR.

Feel free to check out and support his most recent projects TweetHunter (https://tweethunter.io) and Taplio (https://taplio.com)!

In this episode, we talk about:

Tibo's No-Code Process for Launching a Startup
Using Twitter for Distribution
Offering Equity to Early Influencers To Trigger Growth
Bootstrap vs Raising Capital

For Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube and Website Links go to: https://linktr.ee/MinimumViablePod

For Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube and Website Links go to: https://linktr.ee/MinimumViablePod. Don't forgot to SUBSCRIBE!

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Elizabeth Yin is a co-founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund, a pre-seed fund for software entrepreneurs. Previously, Elizabeth was a partner at 500 Startups where she invested in seed stage companies and ran the Mountain View accelerator. In a prior life, Elizabeth co-founded and ran an adtech company called LaunchBit (acq 2014). Elizabeth has a BSEE from Stanford and an MBA from MIT Sloan.

Elizabeth has reviewed over 20k startup pitches from around the world in the last few years and has helped numerous portfolio founders raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Her work and writing on startup fundraising has been featured in numerous publications including TechCrunch, Forbes, Huffington Post, BetaKit, and more.

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In this episode, we talk about:

Elizabeth's early career and working in Switzerland, India and Japan
Building and Selling Launchbit to BuySellAds
Capital Knowledge and Networks
Current State of Valuations in Startups
Raising $10m for a Fund, Pitch Iteration

For Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube and Website Links go to: https://linktr.ee/MinimumViablePod

For #12 of MVP I talk to Victoria Harris, Co-Founder at The Curve and Portfolio Manager at Devon Funds Management.

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The Curve was an idea conceived by Victoria Harris after she started taking note of the number of friends approaching her for advice around finance and investing — an industry in which she has worked for over 10 years (she is currently a portfolio manager at Devon Funds Management).

Launched last year with the help of her business partner Sophie Hallwright, this platform — now comprising an Instagram and a website — has cultivated a fast following for the way it offers clear, concise information and advice around investing, skewed specifically to a female audience.

“The Curve came about to provide a platform for women to learn more about investing in a non-scary environment,” Harris explains. “I wanted to create a forum where people could ask questions without feeling judged and where there wasn’t any confusing industry speak or intimidating jargon.”

So far, The Curve’s growth has been organic, driven by a groundswell of interest from women of all backgrounds and experience levels who want to up their financial literacy.

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For Spotify and Apple Podcasts go here: https://linktr.ee/MinimumViablePod

P.S. Excuse my raspy voice, Covid just hit me the week this was recorded!

If you want more episodes like this:

Hit the big red subscribe button above
Go here for Spotify and Apple Podcasts: https://linktr.ee/MinimumViablePod
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For MVP #11 we spoke with Brian Lovin. He built and sold Spectrum Chat to Github.

Over the years, he's worked as a Product Designer at Facebook, Buffer, and Github.

He's also the host of the very popular design podcast, Design Details.

We spoke about:

➡ Microacquiring co's

➡ Expectations vs reality of selling your company

➡ Extracting insights from customers. Navigating a sea of product requests

➡ Spiraling towards the truth

You can learn more about Brian here: https://brianlovin.com/

For #10 of MVP I talk to Ben Lindsay, Co-Founder at Solushin and now, Climate Tech Investor at Investible.

In this episode we talk about:

Ben's start as a high-performance swimmer
Starting University at 16
Sales frameworks - how to use SPIN Selling
How to start a medical device company
What areas of deep tech he's most interested in

P.S. Excuse my raspy voice, Covid just hit me the week this was recorded!

If you want more episodes like this:

Hit the big red subscribe button above
Go here for Spotify and Apple Podcasts: https://linktr.ee/MinimumViablePod
Subscribe by email for an episode every week: www.minimumviable.tv

This week I talk to Daniel Brockwell, Co-Founder and CEO at Earlywork.co, the home for 2500 + young people in ANZ creating the careers of tomorrow.

Earlywork recently raised $700k from Squarepeg Capital, Archangel Ventures, and PhaseOne Ventures.

Daniel was previously a Product Manager at Atlassian and still a scout at one of Australia's largest venture funds, AirTree Ventures.

In this episode, we talk about:

The Earlywork founding story and it's mission
Their $700k pre-seed round
Taking investment from Squarepegs Balance Sheet and what that means
The current state of technology in Australia, onboarding more talent
Earlywork's remote community living experiment, Earlyhome.
Meditation and why it's important

You can read Squarepegs Investment Notes about the investment here: https://www.squarepegcap.com/blog/investment-notes-earlywork-usd700k-pre-seed.

We send episodes weekly to your inbox here: www.minimumviable.tv. You should subscribe!

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Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/minimum-viable-podcast/id1607798067
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5clN8ddU4Yxm5hZtHvveGk

Go subscribe for new episodes every week: https://www.minimumviable.tv/

Aleksandr is the Founder and CEO of Lemon.io - a marketplace of vetted Engineers.

He openly reports all his financials as a record of his journey to $10m GMV. That includes:

The P&L numbers every month.
Trials and errors in the business.
Marketing experiments he tries

You can follow along with him here: https://volodarik.com/

We talk about:

Leaving Ukraine due to War
His pivot from Coding Ninja’s to Lemon.io
Building the Lemon.io brand
The journey to $10m GMV
Building a marketplace and best growth channels
Biggest mistakes people make when outsourcing development

You can follow him on Twitter @volodarik

In this episode of Minimum Viable Podcast, I talk to Hiten Shah (twitter.com/hnshah). Hiten has started four SaaS companies: Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, Quick Sprout, and most recently, Nira. One is venture capital-backed & the others are self-funded.

In this episode we talk about:

Staying focussed as a Founder
Talking with Customers, Finding the Pattern of Pain
Product Market Fit
NFTs and who he looks to for Alpha

...and much more!

Hiten is your favorite founders, favorite founder.

Levi studied mechanical engineering and his first job straight out of university was as Rocket Lab’s first hardware simulation engineer. He built the Electron Hardware Simulation team and then the Internal Infrastructure Team at Rocket Lab before leaving to start AllGoods.

He was drawn to the deep engineering challenges of building a rocket engine, but rockets are not Levi’s first love – cars are.

Partly recently raised $3.7m to reimagine how the world interacts with vehicle parts.

About Partly

Partly is a global SaaS-enabled marketplace for auto parts. The magic is its young, ambitious team solving a messy problem with juicy network effects in a large but unglamorous industry.

Partly was born out of two obvious yet unresolved problems – that there isn’t a purpose-built inventory management solution for auto parts businesses, and that most auto parts live offline. This means lots of lost time and money for businesses, and a convoluted shopping experience for buyers.

Partly will bring this traditionally offline industry online, giving a massive boost to sellers and making life easier for buyers.

Auto parts globally is a $1.9T market, split roughly 67% OEM and 33% after-market parts. Only $82B of that is spent online. Although 74% of auto parts buying journeys start online but only 11% are completed there. In the US alone, there are 350k auto parts businesses and the majority do not sell online. COVID-19 has accelerated e-commerce forward by 5 years and auto parts is one laggard industry that is rushing to catch up.

Dilhan is the co-founder of Urban Plant Growers, Australia's fastest-growing smart garden business.

In this episode, we ran a "v1" masterclass in starting and operating a D2C Ecommerce Business. It starts at about the 14th minute! We covered:

Sourcing Product
Funding Manufacturing and Strategies to Manage Cashflow
Storage and Product Distribution (3PL vs. In-House)
Warehouse KPIs
Marketing, First Sale, Scaling Distribution
Software and Infrastructure
Distribution Partners

Hope you enjoy!

About Urban Plant Growers

Urban Plant Growers is a Sydney-based online store that sells affordable and easy-to-use indoor smart gardens that enable people to grow herbs and fresh vegetables from the comfort of their homes. Founders, Dilhan Wickremanayake and Peter Cole, launched Urban Plant Growers on Shopify in June 2018 after these two engineering students bonded over their mutual passion for growing greens.

This future-forward duo is on a self-funded mission to educate and empower people one grow-kit at a time.

Part of their education drive is to reframe the perception around the use of the word *hydroponics, which is often associated with growing marijuana. Too many people overlook the fact that this type of horticulture can be used to grow much-needed vegetables in urban environments.

Dilhan and Peter want to start a more edible revolution of fresh green lettuce and veggies, grown without mess or fuss in every urban home.

However, their real innovation is how they’ve made hydroponics more affordable. They have managed to source cheaper components, making the price point 50% less than that of their competitors.

Daniel Vassallo (@dvassallo) quit his job at Amazon earning over $500k per year to pursue a lifestyle-first approach to living.

He became Gumroad's first "Quarter Time" Head of Product and bootstrapped himself to over $750k in revenue through a series of information products which he sold via Twitter.

I talk to Daniel about:

What it means to construct a series of small bets to offset risk
Being a VC for your own ideas and;
The playbook to launch an information product online

You can learn more about Daniel here: https://dvassallo.com/

Cavalier spent 10 years in Healthcare Tech as a product expert, operator, and organizational leader. He is now a product lead at one of Australia's most successful Web3 companies IndexCoop.

We talk about the transition from Web2 to Web3, DAO's, Governance, his Daily Rituals, and more!

Harrison Uffindell has a background in technology startups, management consulting and law. He is currently VP of Operations and Growth at Partly. Prior to this, he was of Head of Business Operations for Airbnb across Australia and New Zealand. He was also the first employee on the ground in APAC and Australian Country Manager for Tilt (a VC-backed tech startup acquired by Airbnb in early 2017), and in 2016, was named on the Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list. Harrison previously founded, raised funding and exited his own startup (“Meatmail” – a subscription-based food service). He also practiced as a lawyer at a tier-1 corporate law firm and worked as a management consultant.

James Alexander is a founder, operator and investor. He is a Co-Founder and Partner at Galileo Ventures, a new $10m seed VC fund dedicated to the next generation of emerging founders. He has supported founders launch over 120 startups from ‘0 to first customer and investor’, as well being in product and engineering roles within early-stage businesses.

He previously started one of the first student focussed multi-university accelerators, INCUBATE, in the Asia Pacific region.