Violet Alumni Spotlight: Sarah Ahmad, Co-Founder & CEO at Mistro (YC W20)

Sarah is Co-Founder of Mistro, perks & benefits for distributed teams. She was previously a UX Engineer at LifeLink & Co-Founded a startup called HotPlate while she was a student at Northwestern. Sarah is an alum of The Violet Society’s Founder Fellowship Cohort 2, in Spring 2019.

What was your background before starting your startup?

I graduated from Northwestern University in 2018 with a degree in Integrated Engineering & Economics.

The summer before my junior year, I was interning in the Chicago area. I was constantly finding new restaurants to try — and always spent hours researching what dish to order when I got there. I was surprised that there wasn’t a platform that aggregated restaurant data at the dish level so I ended up starting HotPlate, an app to help diners find the best dishes at restaurants.

We incubated HotPlate at The Garage (Northwestern’s entrepreneurship hub) and even spent a summer working on it full-time. Through The Garage, we got to connect with a variety of experienced founders and investors, including a current investor of mine, Chris Erickson, co-founder of ApartmentList and NU ’04 alum.

Those experiences helped me realize how much I loved being an entrepreneur and motivated me to move to the Bay Area after graduating. After HotPlate, I joined a startup called LifeLink as a UX Engineer on a distributed team.

How did you start this startup & what problem did you initially hope to solve?

Moving out to the Bay Area, I kept ideating on different startup ideas with my friend from The Garage, Collin.

Collin (now my co-founder) and I both worked with distributed teams at our previous jobs. We saw first-hand how collaboration tools like Slack & Zoom set a solid foundation that enabled any two people in the world to work together — however, operations for distributed teams were largely unsolved.

We ended up talking to 200+ HR specialists, remote workers, and founders of distributed startups and saw that a lot of companies had challenges setting up and administering benefits internationally. We want to help companies more easily hire remote, and we see benefits as a key infrastructure layer for that.

How did The Violet Society Founder Fellowship help you launch or grow this company?

At the beginning of the Fellowship, I was in the idea phase & just getting started. During the program, I was actually working on an earlier iteration of Mistro focused on making meetings more efficient.

Because of the weekly Violet meetings, I had constant feedback from other members and accountability to keep making progress on our idea. By the end, we built and tested a prototype, after which we realized it made more sense to pivot to our current idea.

Since the Fellowship, many people from the Violet alumni & mentor communities have been open to making introductions to other founders, investors, and potential customers.

What have the past few months looked like for Mistro?

We started the Y Combinator batch in January 2020 and launched our product a month later with live customers. YC was a great opportunity to meet fellow founders at a similar stage and get feedback from alums, some of which later became customers. Our Y Combinator experience was interesting because the last few weeks were completely virtual, including Demo Day.

We’ve definitely seen more companies interested in what we are doing due to the spotlight on remote work. Right now, we’re very focused on listening to customers and building a better product for their needs.

What did you learn from your first startup that you’ve changed this time around?

I learned the importance of validating an idea with real people before building anything.

With my previous startup, HotPlate, we definitely did not get user feedback often enough. Our biggest feedback cycle came after we launched the product (with usability issues) when we could have easily started talking to users in the early design phases.

My co-founder and I have been hypothesis-driven in every iteration of our idea — even closing pilot customers before writing a line of code. We believe this helps us test a lot of different concepts quickly without getting too attached to a single solution.

I would recommend that any early-stage founder read the book Sprint by Jake Knapp to learn how to solve and test ideas rapidly.

Where do you think your industry is going & how does your company fit into this?

More and more companies have been adopting remote work, which is what interested us in this space. This trend has been accelerated due to COVID-19, with many knowledge workers being forced to work from home.

For many, COVID-19 is the first time they are experiencing remote work. Though working from home during a pandemic is very different than working from home in everyday life, we still see people realizing that work can be just as productive (if not more) and they save time by not commuting. Over time, we expect more companies to permanently change their attitude and policies towards remote work, which is catalyzing the growth of this market even faster.

Mistro makes it easy for companies with remote teams to provide benefits and perks. If your team is WFH, check out Mistro to get access to meals, equipment, and more!

Applications are now open for The Violet Society’s Summer 2020 Founder Fellowship program (Applications Close Friday, May 15, 11:59 pm PST). Join our first remote-only program for a community of female & non-binary founders, mentorship from experienced leaders, accountability to your growth goals, and more. Email us with questions at info@thevioletsociety.com