The Story of TOMODO: Part One
(for audio version click here)
TOMODO started as a side project while my co-founder Oren and I were working on another venture (see: Companies I’ve started before starting my company). The vision was to allow anyone using the web to manipulate every website and improve it for the greater good, in essence, allowing people to build products on top of existing products. Initially, in order to make these manipulations to websites using our platform, you had to be a web developer. The use case was something like this: you are a web developer and you encounter a website you wish to improve. You log into the TOMODO platform, enter the site’s URL and make the modifications you wish using Javascript and CSS. You then publish this improved version of the site with a new URL to the TOMODO gallery. Everyone could use the TOMODO gallery to find improved websites and use them. Behind the scenes, when someone used this newly generated URL, they were actually directed to our servers that in turn made the call to the original website and manipulated the communication on the way. Our servers manipulated URLs, Cookies, HTTP Headers and JS code just to make this work and then added the improved website creator’s changes on top of it. There was no copying of any data and our tech worked as a proxy. This is why we could make this happen for any website no matter how it was built.
From the research we’ve conducted, we’ve found no one did anything like this before, so we filed a provisional patent on the technology. The flip side of this was that it was a bit hard to explain to people most of what I just described above. There were a lot of hypotheses to validate: Would people create these improvements? Would people use these improved websites? How would the site owners react? We validated as much as we could but there was a leap of faith to take. This is what it’s like when something is truly innovative.
We actually started with the name “Better Internet” for the prototype because we thought we were making the Internet a better place, but it was too generic and got a lot of bad feedback so we changed it to TOMODO. TOMODO as in to-modify… that, and the fact that the domain was available.
At that time there was a browser plugin for Mozilla called Greasemonkey that allowed web developers to tweak websites for their needs. Developers used it to add some features and visual changes to websites. We used these creations and added them to TOMODO in order not to start with an empty gallery.
Techono.me
The prototype was good enough and we already validated as much as we could. It was time to launch the product. With TechCrunch Disrupt being too long of a wait, we picked the local Tel Aviv version, Techono.me, for our public launch.
We met with the organizer, Orly Yakulel and we were all set. Techono.me was a startup competition with 6 startups presenting on stage: a 7 minute presentation and 5 minutes of Q&A by a panel of judges. At the end of the competition, the crowd voted for the winner. The competition was pretty numb but then it was our turn to present and we really lit the crowd. It was not because we we’re that good, it was because of the fact that empowering people to change existing websites steered a lot of emotion. I could hear the crowd debate and whisper while I was on stage. By the end of the Q&A, things got really emotional and the judges just could not let us go and kept asking questions. After 3 times the host and co-organizer, Donna Griffit asked the judges to move on with the competition and we got off the stage. It was time for a the crowd to cast their vote and we got most of them. However, since every startup got more votes than the actual amount of people in the crowd, the organizers decided it was unfair and the judges should instead choose the winner. The panel consisted of VCs and other influencers from the startup ecosystem: Michael Eisenberg, Amir Shevat, Dror Berman, Ronel Mor and Jay Adelson. By the time the judges voted, the ones who liked us had already left, and so we got second place. However, it was no big loss. We got some press but more importantly, after the event, our startup was somewhat known on the local ecosystem and it made future meetings much easier.
Raising capital
Unlike with my previous ventures, it was very clear to me we needed to raise capital for this one. It was a consumer product, monetization was far away and it was a huge feat to built. We had some traction following Techono.me press. It wasn’t huge but it was something to show and for us to experiment with. We met with local VCs - both my co-founder Oren, and I been in the startup scene for long so we got the meetings we wanted. We also presented on the Junction accelerator demo day and got some interest from angel investors. One story I remember in particular is this: there is an event in Tel Aviv called “Open Startup” where, for a whole day, anyone can walk into any startup they want, get a nice presentation and ask questions. We used this event to visit Crossrider, a startup making a cross browser extensions creation platform. There were a lot of thing they had done and were relevant for us. So when we had the chance, we went over and asked every question we could think of, such as : how they got their users and how they incentivized them to create. A month later, Michael Eisenberg from Benchmark Capital, that knew us from Techono.me sent us to meet Crossrider’s founders, Koby Menachemi and Shmueli Ahdut for due diligence. The minute we walked through the door, Shmueli knew our first time there was to gather competitive intelligence :). Crossrider was acquired shortly after and Koby invested as an angel in our round, so it turned out OK.
We were about to close the round with lool Ventures and we had another meeting with Avichay Nissenbaum, one of the two managing partners. There was some misunderstanding. Avichay just landed from a flight and we needed to wait for him for 2 hours. We were very close to walking away. Glad we didn’t. lool Ventures were on board and they introduced us to Kima Ventures. We correspondent with Kima Ventures over emails, they logged-in to the platform and then said ‘they’re in’, that was fast.
We raised a total of $1.1MM from lool Ventures, Kima Ventures and 4 angel investors: Aryeh Mergi and Oren Abekasis whom we met at the Junction, Koby Menachemi from Crossrider, Chemmy Polak and the Israel’s Chief Scientist (but that’s for another post …). Yaniv Golan from lool Ventures joined our board - we have the same last name but we are not related.
The whole process went smoothly but took a lot of valuable time. My take on this matter, after raising capital a few times now with this one being the first, is that entrepreneurship is not about raising capital. If you have an insanely great growth, investors will compete to invest and if you have a bad company - nobody will invest even if you are a magician at storytelling. Most of the time you are somewhere in between, so it helps to be professional about it.
We got the resources needed to make it happen and pursue this truly disruptive vision.
Growing the team
The first office we took was on Rothschild Blvd. Nothing too fancy but with a lot of character. We even had nice neighbors: Playbuzz. They were just starting back then and today they’re a very successful company. I already knew one of the co-founders, Tom, and made good friends with the other, Shaul. We worked long hours and the light was always on in our office. Playbuzz on the other hand were really laid back. I remember thinking “they would never succeed with this kind of culture”. Well, lesson learned.
We started hiring, we needed a lot of engineering power and a community manager for our growing developer community. I wanted to hire as much as I could through my network, but as I found out, it can only get you so far. Interviewing can get quite predictable once you get the hang of it. You can usually tell how the rest of the interview will go and the outcome of the test I used to give, after the first ten minutes. But as I learned from my friend Boaz from Bizzabo, everyone that walks through the company doors is a potential ambassador of your brand. They need to know they just walked into a rocket ship. This strategy proved itself useful time and time again. Finding the right people was definitely a challenge, but soon enough,we were a company of 8. As for me, I was living my dream. I moved in with my girlfriend Neta-Lee, we got a dog which I brought to the office, and I was commuting using my bicycle. Life was great. We worked long hours just to build our MVP, which was quite a challenge. We also used our platform ourselves and created many improvements for existing websites.
Modify the web hackathon
TOMODO was a marketplace. There were developers who created modified sites and users who used them. We needed to fill our marketplace with dozens and dozens of new sites. We decided a good way to make it happen would be to throw a Hackathon. The benefits of a hackathon were double. It would give a bump to our inventory, but would also allow our team to look over the shoulder of developers while they’re using our platform. The event production was massive and the entire team was involved in one way or another. We invited every developer we could reach. We decided it would be a high class event. We ordered nice food and picked the best prizes we could think of: Pebbles, Chromecast and of course t-shirts for everyone.
If you ever produced an event, you know the anxiety on the morning of the event. You usually have some signals, but it can either turn out to be a great success or a total flop. When I was hanging the signs outside 20 minutes before the event started and saw the people pouring in, I knew we would be OK.
The event turned out to be a great success. We had more than 100 people working in different teams throughout the day. And people ended up with really great results. We had one team that developed a better version of Facebook where you can do anything on the web without leaving Facebook - kind of like how Facebook is today. We had another team allowing people to add notes on top of Google search results and another that combined all the different movie ratings into IMDB. For our team it was like a festival, better than any team building activity we could think of.
The Umm al-Fahm high school competition
As a result of our very successful hackathon, our platform became known on the Israeli developers community. One effect of that was that TOMODO was chosen for a regional Umm al-Fahm high school competition. Each school sent few teams to build improved websites using TOMODO and they competed on building the best improved site. The organizers reached out to us to see if we’ll be willing to attend the event and help the teams with the platform. Of course we said yes.
Umm al-Fahm is not the best region in Israel to say the least. The local unemployment rate is 51% and 77% of the population did not finish high-school. We knew what we were getting into. The idea wasn’t to get something valuable for TOMODO but instead to give just a little bit back to the community and have fun along the way.
And indeed that was a hell of a ride for our team. We met some very bright students, obviously just as bright as the ones where I grow up but the gaps in education were very prominent. Some teams really managed to shine and built really nice things. Some needed a constant boost of motivation which our team was happy to provide. There were students who broke under the pressure and started crying. The pressure was certainly not by us, it was their parents pushing them too hard. One of our team members, Shai, turned out to be an expert in cheering them up. It was truly a unique experience.
Building a consumer product
Building a consumer company is hard. Well, building every startup is hard, however, IMHO, the success of a great consumer startup is less deterministic. After a year, we had few hundred modified sites created on our platform and about 5K unique visits a day to the modified sites. It was nice but certainly not enough. We tried every possible trick we could find to facilitate growth. Since day one, TOMODO was built as platform with an API to allow products to be built on top of it. The first product was, well, TOMODO. It was time to launch a new product on top of the TOMODO platform.
This is the first post in the series. To read the second post - click here.
