The night before Nextt
(A personal promise to work tirelessly for your ideas)
The most exciting night of my life took place at a random Airbnb in LA. Not a night club or exotic city. Just a tiny guesthouse in Culver City.
It involved a Facebook ad, a Whatsapp chat and a sh*t ton of Google spreadsheets & coffee. There was no audience or fanfare to speak of. I was alone in that guesthouse, but ended up connecting with inspiring people entire oceans away. I couldn’t wait to get to sleep at the start. By the end of the night, I felt as alive as I can remember.
It was the night my team at Tala, a little known startup at the time, launched a wildly under-engineered & total moonshot of an experiment called Mkopo Rahisi.
And I’ll never forget it.
For the sake of brevity, I’ll just say that, at the time we launched it, very few people at our company (including me — the lead on the project) thought Mkopo Rahisi would do much of anything. It was literally the most ambitious incarnation of Shivani Siroya’s already massive vision that we could imagine, and we boiled it down to an MVP we could design & build in 4 weeks. We wrote the bare minimum of code required to launch, automated little & spent zero on fancy design/branding. This was intentional. What we sacrificed in complexity we invested in identifying & testing our assumptions, listening to customers and understanding their problems.
And nothing could have prepared us for that first night.
Within thirty minutes of publishing the incredibly simple app and spending our first $50 in Facebook ads, we were inundated with usage, demand…and excitement. I had all but retired for the night, when I checked my phone in bed and realized Monday was going to be a lot more interesting than I expected. I pinged my partner-in-crime, Ami Gosalia, and Slacked the entire company to put everyone on call. What followed was priceless. Because so little had been automated, all of us (including me, Shivani & the rest of our management team) stayed up the entire night speaking to & servicing customers manually. We learned their names & backgrounds, how they discovered our app and why they wanted it so bad. We adjusted processes in real-time as new customers flocked and awoke the next day with a feeling that so many startups never feel.
We had found it.
It was super early in the game, and there was still tons & tons of work to do (there still/always is), but we finally had something that the people we set out to serve really wanted. It solved an important problem they faced frequently. And this feeling was addictive…in a good way. We spent the next few months with the happiest of tunnel vision. We worked nights & weekends, put off our board decks & postponed meetings with famous VCs to spend time with customers & obsess over usage data. Some of us even recruited our wives to help with night duty when we could no longer keep our eyes open. Thanks bae :)
Fast-forward just a year, and that tiny experiment turned into the start of a great business. FastCompany named us one of the most innovative companies in the world next to staples like Slack & Facebook, and Shivani raised a hearty Series A from awesome investors like Lowercase Capital, Data Collective & Vikram Pandit. I eventually left my role as CMO but with a heavy heart. It was hard to move on from something I had bled for, sweat for and loved so much.
But I’m glad I did. Because it got me here.
This month, we launched Nextt, which is something I’ve been working hard on for awhile and stems directly from that epic night in March a few years ago.
We call Nextt the first ‘accelerator for ideas’ and truly believe it is. Put simply, we help people refine their big ideas into six week experiments and team them with leading designers, developers & the like from amazing companies like Snapchat, FourSquare & VICE in the process. These ‘advisors’ do a lot more than mentor — they’ve committed a set number of hours each quarter to design mocks, write code, analyze data & generally do whatever it takes to get our projects off the ground. And, unlike most other accelerators, you don’t need to leave your job or go full-time to participate.
Just like the Mkopo Rahisi experiment at Tala, there’s a lot of method to what we’re doing with Nextt. You can learn a ton about that on our site. There’s a lot of pedigree & trackrecord as well. My co-founder, Tom, and I have invested in and helped start/grow multiple venture-backed companies, our agency-in-residence OAB has built award-winning apps for huge clients, and the companies represented in our advisor community could compete with the S&P 500. You can learn about all that on our site as well.
But, the most exciting night of my life wasn’t just about method and trackrecord. And neither is Nextt.
It’s about people. And passion. Lots of it.
Sure, experiments help us validate assumptions, drive consensus & create clarity. But, in the MVP stage, they’re hardly statistically significant. When they work best, they simply give us a rational nudge to suspend reason & disbelief. And help us convince others to do so.
I’m here — a new dad with a completely unreasonable proportion of my family’s assets invested in risky startups — writing this post, launching this accelerator, asking to help you bring your projects to life, because I’m already there.
I believe, in my core, that simple & thoughtful experiments can empower individual people to change the world. I’ve seen it happen. And from Mark Zuckerberg to Malala Yousafzai to the shopkeepers & students I met through Tala, I’m convinced it is individual people — more than entrenched companies, increasingly unstable governments or red-taped organizations — that will in fact change the world. In my mind, this is the key lesson of our time.
“The model of the future is to empower the edges. That is the way you build a multi-gajillion-dollar company. Give people individual power.”
— Chamath Palihapitiya
The fundamental goal of Nextt is not necessarily to build a gajillion dollar company. We’d like to evolve into something that scales, but only to the extent that it enables people to take action. To try stuff. To approach ideas with the humility to know that we don’t truly know if they will work and the curiosity to want to find out.
If nothing else, consider this post a personal promise. That, I will bleed, sweat, and suspend reason & (at times) sanity for our Nextt projects & your ideas just like we all did when we launched Mkopo Rahisi at Tala.
In fact, I can’t wait to do so.
Here’s to many exciting nights ahead :)
