Founder Interview:
Avery Schrader, CEO & Founder of Modash
Avery Schrader is Founder and CEO of Modash, an Estonia-based influencer discovery, audience analysis and monitoring platform. He founded Modash in 2018 with a mission of enabling creators to get paid for the work they do. Thanks to the internet people can make a living by doing the things they love and today Modash helps brands to more easily access these small creators around the world by using in depth audience data of 200 million social media content creators; youtubers, tiktokers, instagrammer and so forth. We had a chat with Avery to discuss his journey and learnings as a founder.
What sparked the idea to found Modash?
Avery:
Once I figured out that I wanted to do something with my life, I understood that “the something” was to work with creators. I had a pretty unusual childhood; we moved a lot, lived in a barn for a while, and basically lived in East Canada with not much to do. Content creators for me were kind of the beacon of hope; they were the people I looked up to, whom I seeked advice and education from and I always knew I wanted to be connected to that. I moved to Germany and consumed way too much podcasts while working as a cook — that’s when I learned that I wanted to be an entrepreneur and create something myself. After I moved to Tallinn I also had my own podcast where I interviewed a whole bunch of awesome entrepreneurs and that just further boosted my urge to start building something myself.
So that’s how it all came together; this combination of an obsession for people who do what they love and create content for living, getting to do that myself for a while and then being like “okay I want everyone to experience what it’s like to do the things you love and create stuff you’re proud of”. That’s how it all began.
”The thing is, that you only really need one base of customers who love your thing, one acquisition channel that actually works, one solution to the problem that actually works — once you have one of each of these things you’re already light years ahead of others.”
What have been the biggest learnings during your time as a founder?
A:
The first learning that comes to mind is kind of a cliché but still a very important thing that not a lot of people listen to, myself included. It is focusing; narrowing your focus so small that it’s not just very uncomfortable but physically impossible to narrow it further. That’s where you want to be when you start. This is probably one of the biggest mistakes we’ve made and also the most important learning — you want to focus on a really specific customer base, a really specific problem, a really specific solution to that problem with really specific hypotheses of why it should work.
It’s very easy to fool yourself into thinking that you’re narrowing it enough but you should keep narrowing it down until you can no longer do that. For example, let’s say marketers are your target customers, you need to be way more specific; marketers inside consumer software companies with more than €5M in revenue but less than €10M in revenue, who recently raised their Series A might be the sweet spot.
The thing is, that you only really need one base of customers who love your thing, one acquisition channel that actually works, one solution to the problem that actually works — once you have one of each of these things you’re already light years ahead of others.
What do you do when you hit a wall and are unsure on how to continue?
A:
There are a few things I do. The most important one is to write. I write about the problem. That can be a very painful process because I have to confront how stupid I really am. Writing helps you digest the problem and articulate it in a simple enough form so you can re-read your thoughts. It is impossibly difficult to think clearly and analyze your own thought process synchronously. Writing things down will help you scrutinize the problem and create clarity.
Another thing I do is talk to a lot of people who are really good at the thing I’m stuck with. That’s about as easy as it sounds. And that’s something you want to do as a preventative medicine as well; talking to very smart people. In fact, all the great founders I know do these two things consistently; they write about their problems and they talk to very smart people.
We spoke with Wolt’s VP of Engineering, Niilo, the other day and it was a perfect example of us talking to somebody very smart to understand how they have grown as a leader through the company’s scaling process. Talking to people is super important.
The third one is to let yourself be bored. It’s so easy to be constantly at work but your brain also needs to rest and digest. Us founders fight with huge pieces of information and just expect our brain to deal with it without any digestion time. I’ve tried to implement daily walks, time away from the phone, less conferences — just basically letting myself be bored every once in a while.
“Set your expectations incredibly high; think about the first employees of Google and all of those north star companies we all have in the back of our minds. You know, those early people were the ones who invented things that didn’t exist and are now totally embedded in our lives (like autocorrect).”
What advice would you give to founders looking for their first hires?
A:
Set your bar way higher than it currently is. If you think you can recruit mid-level engineers pretty easily then push really hard to recruit super senior level engineers. Set your expectations incredibly high; think about the first employees of Google and all of those north star companies we all have in the back of our minds. You know, those early people were the ones who invented things that didn’t exist and are now totally embedded in our lives (like autocorrect). They built amazing stuff that didn’t exist before. Those people are really hard to find but it’s important to have that idea in the back of your head when you start recruiting. Moreover, people are really easy to reach these days; just write them on LinkedIn or Twitter and ask them for lunch.
“The same way as raising expectations for talent, you should raise your expectations for funding; if your idea is as good as you think it is, why would you raise funding from anybody who’s not the best in the world. Set your bar really high. Investors make a huge impact on your company and emotional wellbeing.”
What advice would you give to founders looking for their first funding?
A:
Postpone it as long as possible and raise as much as humanly possible when ready to raise. Investors who don’t want to spend money on you probably don’t know how startups work and don’t actually believe in what you do. The same way as raising expectations for talent, you should raise your expectations for funding; if your idea is as good as you think it is, why would you raise funding from anybody who’s not the best in the world. Set your bar really high. Investors make a huge impact on your company and emotional wellbeing.
We’ve spoken with amateurs, worked with great angels and had fabulous investors like Icebreaker and the difference is tenfold. The baseline or bare minimum is that people give you money and never ask or need anything from you again, anything worse than that is really hard on the head but anything better than that is exponentially better.
In short, raise really good capital, don’t raise for as long as you possibly can because if you get traction then you’re immediately worth more.
What has been your proudest moment as a founder so far?
A:
I think those moments always come at a team dinner or something like that. You just sit at the table and listen to the awesome conversations that the people in your team are having and you’re like “wow, I had something to do with bringing these people together”. Those moments are very motivating.
Or after you hire somebody and in three weeks you ask how they’re doing and the list of stuff they’ve already crushed is so crazy long and they have exceeded all your expectations and they’re also just super awesome people who are passionate and excited. That’s when I feel really proud.
Or when you hire someone really awesome from a company you admire –we recently hired a couple of engineers from Amazon and I was honestly surprised that we could even get their interest but actually seeing them joining the company, getting excited and motivated by our culture and hearing them comment things like “this is the most feedback I’ve gotten in four years” — that is just amazing.
These are the things that make me a bit teary-eyed and most proud — the people.
What is the best piece of advice you have ever gotten?
A:
It’s hard to pick one because every piece of advice is always better than others in a different context but one that comes to my mind is from Niilo from last week actually. It is small but mighty, something I feel has a lot of punch: good startups know what to do but the best startups actually do those things.
This might be a curse that many founders have; maybe we listen to every SaaStr podcast and Y Combinator startup school piece of information ever but then we hesitate to double down on the same target customer or we’re scared to reach out to that very senior engineer, VP or CTO of a company we admire– it’s kind of like an imposter syndrome. We know all these things; we know it’s important to hire the best people in the world, we know it’s important to give that hard feedback that people really crave etc., but we fail to execute on those things. So this is definitely one of the best pieces of advice I’ve received recently.
What are you most excited about in the upcoming months?
A:
We have figured out what we need to do and now we’re doing those things so I’m excited about being at the point where we can say “let’s scale, it’s time to grow fast” and I think that’s about six months away now. It’s a super scary one but one that I’m really looking forward to; setting this line in the sand — whether we’re ready or not on this day let’s just see what happens when we pour leads in the top of the funnel.
About Modash:
https://www.modash.io
Modash is an influencer discovery, audience analysis and monitoring platform that allows marketers to build, launch, manage, and measure audience targeted influencer marketing campaigns.
Founder: Avery Schrader
Founded: 2018
