From Pre-Seed to Seed

Written when closing the official Seed round led by Aleph. True as of October 2021.

It’s been two years since I joined Bar and Lior, and I am not sure one of us even knew how early-stage were we at that moment. With $200k in the bank, just coming out of a nasty pivot, we were amazingly and naively sure in our capabilities to get our product to market. Looking back, I realize the number of milestones we have accomplished so far, and I had to stop for a sec and put it into writing.

Here are a few lessons I learned from this crazy journey … and it’s only the start of it! :)

We needed a team

• Even if we thought we were big shots that know everything, it wasn’t enough. We needed ourselves as a team.
• Building a product is hard, and we needed friends in arms beside us. There is a limited amount of time we can fill in a day, and having the great and diverse talent to complete us, gave us the ability to move fast and iterate faster.
• “Hustler, Hacker and Hipster” is not just a saying. I wouldn’t necessarily stick to this formula, but diversity is needed. For us, the “Hustler” who knows how to sell, the “Hacker” who knows how to build, and the “Hipster” who knows how to make a great product, worked and is still working fantastically.

We never stopped selling even if we didn’t really have a product.

• Sell Sell Sell. This one I learned first hand from Bar. Selling is a relationship, especially in our industry. But selling also gives you no room for mistakes. It’s almost binary, we succeed, or we are done. But this binary process is like a search problem in computer science. We made iterations for every potential customer, refined our pitch, and made conclusions on our product according to the feedback.

My conclusion from this is if we don’t manage to sell, it’s because of two potential reasons:

- Either, we are shitty at sales.

- Or, we are selling something no one wants to pay for.

• Luckily, Bar is a hell of a salesperson, so we kept listening, iterated over the feedback we got, and prioritized based on relevancy. The holy build, measure, learn cycle started to kick in, and the feedback was amazing.
• Selling doesn’t mean you sell bullshit. When we sell, we commit our lives to making sure the product we ship will be the best product out there for our customers. If not today, then tomorrow. Guaranteed.

We never stopped selling even when we had a product.

• Stupidly obvious at first, but unbelievably important.
• Except seeing selling as a source of revenue increase, I see it as a source of direct measurement for the value and impression the product creates. What is necessary to unlock new users, and what is currently done convincingly.
• Sales and Customer Success are the units in the frontline of the war. They see and feel the immediate pain of our users and their interaction with our software. Listening to what our team had to say in the frontline, was crucial to our progress.

Feedback → Learn → Prioritization → Build → Deploy → Feedback

• We can’t stop building, but we need to stop once in a while.
• After repeating the mistake of building before feedback numerous times, Agora is the first proper place where I treated “feedback and learn” as “first citizen” objects and not useless pieces of code as ones.
• We made sure to finish what we started! There is no room for endless repetition of builds without getting any kind of feedback. It might be less relevant as we grow (not sure yet, more in the Seed to round A article :)), but it’s crucial at the beginning. As engineers, we tend to refine and mostly not finish PoCs. So … we made sure to finish it, and made sure to do it as fast as possible.
• Never build out from the top of your head. Do it based on the direct feedback of customers/design partners. Even when we thought something was a killer feature, we always tried to ask first-principle questions. This one is tricky and is relevant in almost every bit of our work.

We are building a team as much as we’re building a product

• Our journey from pre-seed to seed was not only one of building a product but a journey of building a team. To scale from 4 people company to 20 people company is not neglect-able (30+ as of February 2022). These 20 fellows who besides us had (and still have) a major effect on the culture of the company and the execution level as we scale.
• We were lucky enough to have the most talented 20 people I’ve ever met within our own company (and I met a few, trust me). Honestly, I have no idea how it happens, but never compromise on people and make sure they share your fire and enthusiasm.
• Being one of the first employees of a startup is a responsibility, and it should communicate to match expectations. There is a difference between “I am one of the first employees at a startup” to “I am one of the first employees of a multi-billion company a few years from now”. It is the second approach we were looking to instill. We want to succeed as a startup, it’s not just a job, it’s a journey.

We set the technology tone

• We asked and talked to experienced engineers/tech leads before we ran and built whatever we needed. This approach saved us a lot of time and effort down the road. As engineers, we think we have it all sorted out, well we don’t. We could have and should have done more on that aspect.
• I learned that copying from every tech-savvy person is not the success formula. We know our product the best, and it’s our work to identify the good principles, do the research, and come up with a plan.
• Iterating over the code as you scale is expensive, hard to do, and sometimes goes against the philosophy of doing what your users need and not what you want. I learned that it’s crucial to make sure to build a stable architecture that can scale. We always think about it.
• The scale of users is not the only question we needed to ask at the beginning. There are plenty of dilemmas we were, and still are, facing. (Scale of the codebase, Scale of complexity, etc.)
• Inevitably, whatever we have set as a foundation wasn’t enough. The tech behind a 1-yr product != 2-yrs product != 3yrs product. It evolves!
• We always remember that at one point the product must be ready for blitzscaling. It’s our job to understand how to do it and get there fast.
• We are building a paper plane that should evolve into a rocket ship, so we have to treat it that way.
• A great tech foundation of a company will determine its success in the short and mostly in the long term. We understand it takes time, it’s not a 1yr and bye-bye.

Methodologies

• I learned it’s crucial to listen to our team and measure (as possible) our progress. We’re always trying to build methodologies based on these iterations.
• A great team must have great work methodologies. We created our framework to communicate and manage epics. We Iterate over it again and again. It can (and should) evolve as we grow.
• Methodologies are one of the best tools for a team to achieve its goals.

It’s All-In or nothing.

• Even if we thought the market is too small or the product is too niched, there is no way back. We must ship our product as fast as possible to get to know our customers better and touch the real pain points at their core businesses. It is either we are all-in, building the product we need to get feedback and iterate over the market fit, or we lose.
• Market size change. Two years ago we weren’t sure — “is this market big enough?”. when a market “basically” doesn’t exist we’ve had a real problem convincing ourselves (and others) if our startup is “unicorn material”. I learned that it’s almost an impossible question to answer at the beginning. Markets are moving. Products are growing. We Iterate over the product, listen to the market, and validate every innovative idea we have. Happily, it’s a success (at least chapter 1). Looking ahead, I truly believe it’s an execution challenge. Expanding the market is easy, making it happen is the hard part.
• We never stop thinking about important questions on our business, but we’re also not too afraid of them. Up until today, and especially in the beginning, we spent almost every day thinking about:

Market size?

Product-market fit.

How can we get the networking effect?

Lean product to launch fast?

Customers’ feedback on UI sketches

Technology complex vs. product simplicity

• In the end, these are all important, but it’s not a one-stop shop. We always listen to our customers, they represent the market we’re in. We work with the data we have and with our inner gut.

Sadly (or not) It’s all about the money.

• Building a startup is building a business on steroids. Business sell when it gives value. Figure out how to get revenue from day 1.
• Do not rush to build anything until you know (for sure, 100% commitment) you’ll get money out of it. If money is a medium of exchange where values are expressed, it is the best proof you can get to know your idea/product provides one.

“true as of January 2022”

We closed a $9M Seed round led by Aleph, we’ve grown our ARR to $+1m in a year, and we are looking to disrupt the second biggest industry in the world — commercial real estate. Today, more than 70+ real estate funds and investment firms, and 10k+ investors are using Agora’s real estate investment management software to manage $25B+ worth of real estate in the US.