Creating new ways to experience startup events has led Oana Manolache to found Introvoke, a streaming service tailored to this growing space. Relying on her work at HP, Oana is getting strong traction from organic growth. A great interview with a compelling immigrant founder.
Highlights Include:
Introvoke
“…we take engagement a step further. So, we have an open chat where people from all over the world start conversations”.
Founding Story of Introvoke
Introvoke’s Traction
5000 Users through Viral Marketing – No Marketing Spend
Sal Talks about Savran Technologies and Its Remarkable Ability to Capture Extremely Rare Cells
How Introvoke Plans to Compete
“…87% of consumers prefer to watch a live stream of a brand rather than to read a blog…”
Introvoke Aims to Make Virtual Memberships Appealing
“Our viewers stay engaged for at least 80% of the video…”
Introvoke Just Stated Monetizing its Business with a Tiered Subscription Model
Oana Manolache Wants to Make Introvoke the Norm for Startup Events
How Oana’s Family Life in Romania Contributed to Her Entrepreneurship
Raising Money Should Note Be an Automatic Reaction If You Are Planning to Start a Company
“I strongly believe that you don't have to be a social impact company to actually have social impact.”
Sal on the Social Value of Entrepreneurship
Social Impact of Angel Invest Boston: Three Founders Inspired to Start Their Companies by Listening
Finding Your Calling
“I realized that I am supposed to be in technology, and I've always been supposed to be in technology.”
“…we do want to, of course, follow certain norms in live streaming because people are used to certain things. But we also want to disrupt some others, so to build something new.”
“And that makes you wake up in the morning, and those hard days when you're not sure if you're doing the right thing. So, passion strives.”
Transcript of “Introvoke: Live-streaming Reinvented”
GUEST: FOUNDER & CEO OANA MANOLACHE
SAL DAHER: Welcome to Angel Invest Boston. I am your host, Sal Daher, an angel investor who delights in the fascinating tech companies being built in Boston's singular startup ecosystem. Because of the unique concentration of great universities here, Boston is a massive exporter of great startup ideas. This gives me the opportunity to invest early in the companies that will be changing our world, companies such as Savran Technologies. I'll tell you a bit more about Savran, later on. Now I'd like to introduce my guest today, Oana Manolache, founder of Introvoke. Oana, welcome to our studios.
OANA MANOLACHE: Thank you, Sal. Thank you for inviting me here.
SAL DAHER: Tremendous. I'm really grateful to Ashland Stansbury of Because Intelligence for connecting us. I look forward to having Ashland on the podcast in the future.
OANA MANOLACHE: Thank you, Ashland, as well. She's definitely a great founder.
SAL DAHER: Very impressive. The listeners will have a chance to learn about her company Because Intelligence, which is harnessing people's interest in causes and combining that with sort of like an influencer platform. It's an interesting area. Anyway, Oana Manolache was born in Romania. Romania, and studied business and marketing in the United Kingdom. She then worked in marketing at Hewlett Packard for about seven years. At the start of 2019, Oana founded Introvoke, a platform for live streaming events designed to be used by startup companies. So, Oana, please tell us what Introvoke does and why it's important.
OANA MANOLACHE: Of course. Introvoke is building the world's digital venue for entrepreneurship. It allows entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, investors from all over the world, to tune into local startup events that are already happening, just not open to the virtual public. It pretty much levels the playing field. So not everybody can afford to live in San Francisco, Boston, New York, but they could access information that would help them build their business in a much better way.
At the same time, we are building live streaming as a very unique and important tool, important marketing tool for organizations like Founder Institute, Venture Lane, Founders Live, and so many others so that they can understand their virtual audience much better and reach a much higher level of awareness.
SAL DAHER: Interesting. So live streaming as opposed to webinars, which are really recorded events, and that have pretty low engagement. So in a live streaming event, you really have an opportunity to interact. In a live webinar, you have an opportunity to interact with the presenters and to ask questions, and also to see people in an unguarded way.
Because most content that one sees is highly edited. This podcast is highly edited. There may be things that we say that are ... For example, sometimes people use language that we don't like on the podcast and it gets taken out. So it's that sort of immediacy, the idea of being present from far away at an event that's taking place at the moment. So that's the value of this sort of focus on the live events.
OANA MANOLACHE: Exactly. Through our platform, we take engagement a step further. So we have an open chat where people from all over the world start conversations. We had a conversation, a few months ago, between people from Hawaii, Germany, South America, Barcelona. It was amazing how they came together on the platform to talk about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency event.
And we even, because it's so tailored to entrepreneurship and having so many pitch competitions on our platform, we even allow people from the comfort of their own home to vote for startups during pitch competitions, ask questions. And if you do pitch at an event that is live streamed on Introvoke, you also get your personalized link that you can afterwards use to send that to investors, mentors, and everybody else. Not only sending a deck, but anyone would be able to see you present the information that you want to message.
SAL DAHER: So instead of you holding a selfie stick and doing your pitch deck, you can just do a pitch in front of real people asking real questions, and then you can use that as a calling card for your company.
OANA MANOLACHE: Exactly.
SAL DAHER: Interesting. Very interesting. So tell us how Introvoke came about.
OANA MANOLACHE: It's a very interesting story. As you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, I spent about seven years at HP, and it's been an amazing experience. And I had the opportunity to work with the brightest minds there, but I always felt the calling of entrepreneurship. Even within my role, I was going outside of my job description, which was nerve-wracking sometimes, and I wanted to start this journey.
During the start of this journey, I started going to a lot of startup events and meeting a lot of founders, a lot of organizations. And there's so many events happening not only in Boston, but I was getting invitations to events in Silicon Valley, in New York, but I couldn't just jump on a plane and go seven hours for a two-hour event and come back. So I started talking to the other founders, and I realized I was not the only one that was getting frustrated because we couldn't get the information we wanted due to time constraints or location.
So the idea was pretty much validated with entrepreneurs through the common frustration. It was time to understand if organizations would be willing to adopt this. Before we even had a name, I went to one of our biggest customers right now and asked if they're willing to try something like this, if they want to live stream their events. And they were actually looking for something like this, a platform. And I started asking some other organizations, and this is how we started Introvoke.
We built everything and soft launched in two months. So I would like to thank my team for that because it was a lot of midnight work and a lot of struggle. But we soft launched it in May, and now the rest is history.
SAL DAHER: That is really interesting. I went on your website, and I signed up, and I see that there's some Venture Lane events. Coincidentally, the episode prior to this episode is an interview of the founder of Venture Lane, Christian Magel. I recorded it as a live event at Venture Lane. And so I saw a bunch of Venture Lane things on there. So I guess you're getting some traction. So please tell us about the traction that you're experiencing.
OANA MANOLACHE: Sure. Venture Lane is indeed a dear customer of ours. They're doing some amazing workshops and live streaming them, so I would advise anyone to tune in or attend if they can. We've been lucky to see some tremendous traction since our launch in May, 2019 that we didn't really expect so quickly, so we had to continue the development of the platform to keep up with our customers.
So since then, we've got about 20-something content creators, as we call them. They're our customers, live streaming their events from all over the world. We have four different continents right now. North America, South America, Europe, and Africa, that they're streaming live events from. So it's great to see the differences between startup events, depending on their location.
We've got about 5,000 users worldwide, and we are putting a lot of effort right now into bringing more to the platform. And it was great to get emails from them saying that this is something that is binge-worthy, and to thank us that we enabled them to access so much great content from other startup hubs.
SAL DAHER: This is really interesting that you've gotten 5,000 users in eight months since you launched. Pretty fast, pretty good, particularly given the type of thing, because these are highly specialized users. These are not 5,000 high school teenagers gawking at the latest pop idol. These are people who have a professional interest in this particular thing, so it's kind of narrow-casting to a selected audience, I imagine.
OANA MANOLACHE: Yes, and we actually did this without any marketing spend, so we only spent-
SAL DAHER: Just viral?
OANA MANOLACHE: It was just viral, because our content creators, of course, are bringing a lot of awareness to their events, so it's like cross-pollination, which is the benefit of the platform versus a social media. Every single content creator is bringing their share of viewers and entrepreneurs on the platform that they can afterwards share. We are kicking off a social campaign, as well now, in January where we are committed to bring other entrepreneurs on our platform, other viewers that would benefit all our content creators equally.
SAL DAHER: Very good. Coming up next, I'm going to ask Oana Manolache to outline the competitive landscape and explain how Introvoke competes in that competitive landscape. However, before we do that, I would like to tell you a bit more about an interesting company in which I'm invested, Savran Technologies. We mentioned it earlier. Savran is in the business of capturing extremely rare cells with a patented technology that has promise in a variety of applications. It's very rare cells, and the process is a hundred times faster than anything else that's available, so it's really groundbreaking.
But like these typical platform technologies, Oana, it takes time to figure out what's the best use for it. It has probably dozens and dozens of uses. I've interviewed the founder, [Cagri Savran 00:09:16], on the podcast in an episode titled One In a Billion, because they can pick one cell out of a billion cells. I've also interviewed one of the board members, [Jeff Behrens 00:09:26], more recently.
And the company's focus right now is on capturing fetal cells in maternal blood. There are few cells that the baby gives off in the mother's blood, and it can capture that. You can learn a lot more about the baby than you can with existing noninvasive methods. People can use an amniocentesis, or CVS, or all these other things, which are invasive, to learn some ... In the case of amniocentesis, they can learn a lot. But with this, you can learn as much as with amniocentesis, except that you are just taking a blood draw instead of puncturing the womb and so on, which is pretty horrible.
They also have another use, which is interesting, with circulating tumor cells and so forth. So I'm so excited about the company. I could talk about it for very long, but the point of this is just to mention that Boston is a place that's teeming with really interesting companies. And I as an early stage investor have the opportunity to invest in companies such as Savran or interesting companies like ... younger companies, like Introvoke.
And so this is to urge listeners to consider my investment syndicates and companies like these that I'm able to interact with, and find, and analyze through my angel network, and I can make that available to people who are ... to our accredited investors. So anyway, getting back to our topic here, tell me about the competitive landscape in the live streaming industry, and how you perceive your competitive advantage in that landscape.
OANA MANOLACHE: Of course. I mean, before I get into that, I just want to agree with you. Indeed, the Boston startup ecosystem is incredible. I meet so many founders and startups here in Boston that are revolutionizing everything from medicine, to biotech, finance. So there's no specific industry in Boston, which is amazing because it gives you such a big diversity in the space. And I'm happy to be one of the Boston startups. I am proud to say that even on our website, it says built in Boston. And I do want to thank our mentors, our advisors who were with us all this time.
The live streaming industry, to get back into live streaming, the live streaming industry is booming. So the live streaming industry is estimated to reach 125 billion dollars by 2025. To put it into perspective, only in 2016, it was valued at 30 billion dollars. So it's not even growing, it's exploding to the point where, only by the end of this year, it is expected to account for 82% of the whole internet traffic, which is a huge amount.
I mean, of course, the movie and the music industry are driving the streaming industry as a whole with Netflix, HBO Go, and Disney, and all of these that are starting a streaming service. But it's starting to be more prominent in the professional segment, as well. And we see brands adopting live streaming at a much higher pace because, according to statistics, 87% of consumers prefer to watch a live stream of a brand rather than to read a blog, and even rather than to watch a polished video like you mentioned at the beginning.
They're also more likely to purchase a product after they've seen a live stream from a brand, or tickets to a future event if they've seen a live streamed event. So the statistics and the market are supporting massively our business, which we're lucky. And at the same time, since our businesses is subscription-based, we all know that subscription-based companies, SaaS and so many others are very sustainable from a financial model perspective.
SAL DAHER: From day one.
OANA MANOLACHE: Exactly, exactly. So I feel like we are in a good space, and we are riding with the trends. And what we're doing, we are taking it a step further. So first, we decided to play in the professional segment, and more specifically, in entrepreneurship. With 100 million startups that are being formed every year globally and companies, big companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon moving a huge part of their funds to build programs for startups, we believe that the entrepreneurship has a huge potential.
And we take it a step further. We created this as a powerful marketing tool. Because I feel like live streaming is being used more as an awareness, more to show off different events, or for smaller parts of events and advertising, but not necessarily to track exactly the potential of your virtual members. And even some of the companies are building virtual membership programs because they're aware that physical locations are becoming very expensive with the increase of real estate, as well.
SAL DAHER: Right, right.
OANA MANOLACHE: So in terms of competitors, of course there are some competitors in the market. We are the only ones that are occupying this niche, but there's competitors in the social live streaming like Facebook Live, LinkedIn Live, Google Live, and so many others. And as you mentioned at the beginning, as well, there's the webinar space as well, which I feel like is very well developed already. Polished webinars and workshops, but of course they lack the interaction and the ability to have that live emotion and hype for the consumer.
We're happy to see some of our customers happy and surprised at the same time. I never expected this. They're moving away from Facebook Live. We have one customer that completely directed all their teams to live stream on Introvoke only, moving away from Facebook Live. And we even got a request from someone to move-
SAL DAHER: What drove them to do that?
OANA MANOLACHE: Facebook Live, having the social aspect of it, you can live stream to, of course, a huge number of people, but they're not necessarily the audience that you want, and they don't stay engaged for too long. And on Introvoke, you have the ability to schedule the live streams in advance. So you don't have to be in the right place at the right time. People can schedule this years, months, days in advance so viewers can add it to their calendars, can plan around it as they would plan for a physical event.
And the engagement rate is much higher. Our viewers stay engaged for at least 80% of the video, of the live video of our users, which is much higher than any other social media platform because we do have the right audience.
SAL DAHER: Right. Because you're zeroing in on the right audience. So, basically, if you find the right audience, and you build the right product, you have a chance to sort of narrow-cast to an audience that's highly interested, that's valuable and very connected with the content that you're creating. So then you create a network, which is ... it's not going to be the size of Facebook ever, but it can build a lot of value because it provides value to people who do really valuable work. That's how you aim to create your value.
OANA MANOLACHE: Exactly, yes. We are focusing on quality rather than quantity.
SAL DAHER: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Right now, you're relying on, basically, word of mouth from the content creators, viral marketing. Going forward, once you zero in on your product market fit and so forth, do you have plans to amp that up with a different go-to-market strategy, or do you just want to continue with organic growth through existing users?
OANA MANOLACHE: Yes. So, from day one, we've built this platform with our customers. And that's why we soft launched in May, and we are kicking off the revenue model now, in January. We allowed ourselves six months to constantly get feedback from our customers, and they've been amazing, being patient with us in understanding exactly what they need and tailoring it to their needs, as well as the entrepreneurs and our viewers.
So now that we got to the point where we understand exactly where we can bring a big value, we are crafting a much narrowed and specific messaging. And we have a very detailed go-to-market plan to ... like social media, strategic partnerships that we are putting in place, right now. I mean, my background is in marketing at HP. I've been doing that for about seven years. So, at heart, I'm a marketeer, and this gives me the greatest pleasure in the whole building the business.
SAL DAHER: Excellent, excellent. So you were mentioning you're figuring out a way to monetize it. Basically, you have a tiered subscription model, right now. You're launching as we speak, right? This month?
OANA MANOLACHE: Indeed, yes.
SAL DAHER: In the month of January, yeah.
OANA MANOLACHE: We launched a subscription model now in January. We already have customers signed. We've been having them signed for a while, but we wanted to allow them to use the platform and give us feedback without charging them. But January is kicking off, and in April, we'll be launching ... April, May, we'll be launching also the digital ticket where organizations would not only be able to stream live, but also would be able to sell live tickets for some of their events that they're already charging for. So we'll be getting a percentage of those tickets, but for our customers would be pure profit because they don't need a bigger venue, or more food, or anything. And millions of people can tune in if they want to.
SAL DAHER: Right, right. Yeah. I'm planning to do one live event in May of this year, record a podcast live with video and so forth. So I think that would be a great occasion to use Introvoke.
OANA MANOLACHE: Very exciting.
SAL DAHER: Yeah. Yeah. How would it work, for example, if what we're doing right now, if we made this into an event for Introvoke, if we just added a camera here. I mean, we have sound, tremendous sound equipment in the room that's very good for sound. How would that work? It would be streaming. You're recording the content in your servers as it's streaming, which you make available, later on. And presumably, we would also record it here.
So we have the content ourselves, and we can do things with it. So it's one thing if you have a blooper in a live event. It's another thing if you have a blooper in a recorded event that gets published everywhere and so forth. So I'm just wondering. For example, I would have the possibility if I'm doing a video here, if I had a video camera in here and I stopped to sneeze or something, if I can just cut that out and then have the video that goes out be the edited video and not the live stream video.
OANA MANOLACHE: Good question. So before we get into that, I do want to mention something that actually sets us apart from everything. Our customers can live stream in two ways. One would be with the Introvoke Streamer app, which makes it easier for everyone to live stream just by using a phone and a tripod. Nowadays, phones have three cameras and God knows what else they're going to come up with next.
SAL DAHER: They'll make them wider. Next, they're going to have nine cameras in them.
OANA MANOLACHE: Exactly. So phones are becoming really, really good in video recording and capturing sound, but of course we allow people to live stream as they're used to with a video crew or a camera using the usual software, OBS, and some others that they're used to. Yes, you can set a camera. I mean, first of all, you schedule it on the platform for security reasons. You have to schedule it at least 24 hours in advance, to make sure that you're a real company and a real event.
And once it's time to go live, if you are with the app, you just go onto your account in the app and you click on the button "Stream", and it's streaming into your account on your company's profile, on Introvoke. And with a camera, the same. Going through the normal live streaming is not the same way. It's like going through the normal live streaming with a camera connected to a laptop and so on.
From an editing perspective, everything of course that is live, people can see live, can interact, can ask questions. And through the app, you can see how many viewers you have live, and you can manage the chat, as well. For editing, you can afterwards download. So we give our customers unlimited storage into their company profile, so they can have their whole video library live, what's happened. Past live events, the ones that are live at that time.
SAL DAHER: But I wouldn't necessarily want to download because I already have ... I'd be capturing. Whatever the feed that I'm sending you, I would record it, as well.
OANA MANOLACHE: Okay.
SAL DAHER: So it would be sent out. I wouldn't need to download it because I have a master.
OANA MANOLACHE: The feature that we're adding right now is, so for every video, you'll have two options, either to download if you wish so, or to replace. So you can replace the video with the video that you've just edited.
SAL DAHER: That's the question I was asking. If there's a blooper somewhere. Otherwise, half the time you wouldn't do it. It's nothing serious. Somebody sneezing is not serious. But somebody mouthing off, or saying something stupid, or whatever that you want to take out, it's good to know that there's that option. Where do you expect Introvoke to be at the end of 2020?
OANA MANOLACHE: Right now, we're very much focused on building this platform in a very strong way, to add the most value to our customers, both viewers and organizations. So we're very much focused on the product development. We're building a great product development team. I have a CTO on board who's currently building that, and my CTO is very versed in live streaming and in software development. He spent some years with Intel, Amazon, Microsoft, so he's got a great experience, and he's putting this team together.
As an adoption, we want to make Introvoke the second nature, a norm for every startup event, to be the way you put it on Eventbrite, you afterwards put it on Introvoke, at least until we get the integration and build that instinct of live streaming all their events with the Introvoke app or with a video crew.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, I was surprised. I didn't actually get to the point of starting a session, that it's just that simple. It's just you click a button, you put your mobile phone on a stand, and you click a button, and you are broadcasting this thing. You're streaming, and it's being recorded, and there's a whole suite of functionalities that allow you to interact with the people who are seeing it, to know who they are, to know what they're seeing and so on. It's very interesting. Are you familiar with a company named Wistia?
OANA MANOLACHE: I heard of it, yes.
SAL DAHER: Yeah. They have built a business ... They were interviewed on this podcast. They have built a business on helping people create videos, and then show the videos in a way that allows the people, if you're showing on their player, they provide tremendous amounts of analytics. They know exactly when people drop off and so forth, and they've built a very, very substantial company based on this principle.
The other thing is that they help people create the videos. They have a lot of how-to videos that are really well done, and they are just very good at experimentation, and very good at stumbling around and coming up with new ... They actually believe in being embarrassed with their first product when it comes out.
OANA MANOLACHE: I totally can relate to that. When we first launched, we were definitely embarrassed on how it looked like, but we obviously wanted to make sure that it's useful. But now we've done a huge revamp of our platform. And you mentioned analytics, something that we are launching in, actually, a week, it's building as we speak, a very comprehensive set of analytics, including every single live event. You'll see exactly the engagement that you get from people coming on the platform, dropping, exactly when they're chatting so you understand when hot topics were mentioned in the event, how many minutes were watched, averages, where they're located in the world.
Let's say a company in the U.S. wants to expand somewhere in Europe. What's the country that has the most entrepreneurs interested in their company? And we even track ... Because they can build their company profile, and put their website and social media, we even track how many from our platform went onto their website and social media platforms so that they understand that conversion. I think, as a marketeer, I love the creative, but I believe in data. I find comfort in numbers, and I feel that marketing without data is not ... is just beautiful creative.
SAL DAHER: True. That is very true. I was also an investor in another company called Videolicious, and the founder was interviewed on this podcast, one of the founders, [Matt Singer 00:00:25:37]. And that company was ultimately sold to Squarespace, just at the end of last year. And what they did was they made it really easy for people to take videos with their smart phones, and then to add a soundtrack, add stills, add graphics and so forth on the smartphone itself. And it ended up being taught in 90 schools of journalism, and it helped transform the videos that journalists produce. They have these tolerably produced videos with a little bit of background music and all this stuff, and effects and so on, on their mobile phones.
OANA MANOLACHE: That's amazing.
SAL DAHER: You can do it in 20 minutes. And they also found it really important to have training videos and videos to show people how to create the content, like the very basic stuff. And I think the success of both Wistia and Videolicious, I think, owes, to a great extent, to this how-to, telling people how to actually do this thing. Because you're never going to be like a professional like [Raul 00:26:38] or some of the camera people that I know, and so forth. But a little bit goes a long way.
OANA MANOLACHE: Indeed. It's a learning curve for the customers.
SAL DAHER: Now, let's turn to ... This is the section of the podcast where we like to talk about finding your calling. Tell me your story. You were born in Romania, and tell me about your family, what they did, and how that affected your becoming an entrepreneur.
OANA MANOLACHE: Yes. I was born and raised in Romania by, actually, a couple of entrepreneurs. So since I was very little, I could hear business talk at dinner table and seeing my parents burning the midnight oil before I even realized why it's important, what they're doing.
SAL DAHER: What do they work on? What do they do?
OANA MANOLACHE: So my father had a company in automotive. He was very passionate about cars, and my mother still has a business in health and safety, and environment. Being both in Europe, part of the European Union, environmental laws are very strict. So she's helping companies make sure that they're compliant.
SAL DAHER: Oh, excellent. So coming out of that environment, you were a little impatient being in a large organization, albeit a very nicely run, a very decent organization. After a few scrapes and bumps, the well-run company. So this is why you felt the urge to go out and venture on your own?
OANA MANOLACHE: Yes. I mean, I owe it to HP, everything they taught me. And I started my career with them. So I moved from Romania to the UK when I was about 18 for university, and started my career with HP. And there were amazing people there who believed in me, and I became, actually, their youngest manager ... I was on the management board of the UK ... that they had. I was only 23. A lot has happened since. And they moved me here to the US to lead the marketing initiatives for North America. And after a few years, they expected me to start my own thing because I was always a bit trying to work on different projects.
SAL DAHER: Right.
OANA MANOLACHE: And that's what I did. And I worked in Atlanta and Palo Alto, but then I moved to Boston eventually to start my business. One, because of the entrepreneurship ecosystem here, but also being so used to London and European cities, I feel like Boston has a bit of the both worlds, US and Europe at the same time.
SAL DAHER: Oh, it does. It certainly does. I mean it's the most old-world major city in the United States. And the connections here, the old Yankees, they felt a very close connection to the United Kingdom, to England, even after the revolution and all that. A remarkable place. Now, given this experience you've had, you worked in the United Kingdom, you worked in the US, and now you're starting a company in the US. You've seen your parents doing business in Romania. What thoughts come to mind that you can talk to other founders that might be valuable for them?
OANA MANOLACHE: I think living and working in so many countries, and experiencing so many cultures. I spent a lot of time in Barcelona, where our European center was. I lived in Germany for a while, as well. It really opens your eyes, and I think it made it very important for my career growth at HP, and vital for building Introvoke because we do not work in silos anymore. Even if you build a company in the US, your customers are all over the place, right now. And even if they're not, maybe their background is. So it gives you a certain level of understanding of how the world works at a much bigger scale.
And also, because my company is built ... a company in Romania where the unicorns and tetracorns are not really that usual. They taught me to dream big, but also to keep a little foot on the ground, as well. So that's actually the reason why we decided to not raise funds, straight away, but to build a sustainable business, to launch our revenue model, and then to raise when we're ready to skyrocket with something that we took off the ground, which is good for us and our investors, as well. So we do want to be ... Of course, we're building a very scalable business, live streaming and technology, but we keep our heads in the right place, knowing that profit, customers, and margins are very important, as well.
SAL DAHER: Interesting. Interesting. So yes, there's a certain parallel to Wistia. Wistia was a very thrifty company. The guys at Wistia were very ... They lived in this house, this dilapidated house in Somerville when there were still dilapidated houses in Somerville. They've all been primped up now. And the rent was cheap, and they have confessed to me that, at times ... Because they had an office there. Their office was in the house, and they lived in their house. It's the guys, the two founders and the girlfriends and so on. And the workers worked in the house, and they had a refrigerator. And sometimes things were so tight that they ate the food that was brought by their employees into the refrigerator because there was nothing else to eat, and they're coding, late into the night.
OANA MANOLACHE: Oh, wow.
SAL DAHER: So they're very thrifty. They ended up raising something like 1.4 million in angel money. And they've built a business. There's nothing public published about them. But if you count the number of paying subscribers they have, I figure they must be doing at least 40 million dollars a year in revenue, in SaaS revenue. So it's a multi-hundred-million-dollar business that they built, and with just 1.4 million. And some time ago, they borrowed some money and bought out all the investors who wanted an exit, because investors get itchy, even though it's a great company. And so they bought them out, and they got a very handsome return.
And so people think ... The first thing they think about is, "Oh, I'm going to start a company. I need to raise money." If you can put that off as much as possible, you have, number one, raising money can take all your time. It's very time consuming. It kills you. It can kill your company if you're not at the right stage for the investors that you're ... I mean, if the development of the company doesn't fit the kind of investor that you have.
If you develop your company to the point where you've really figured out product market fit and so forth, you're going to have investors chasing after you because they like the idea of, "You have a fire, here's some gasoline to throw on it." They like that, that kind of setup. It's much harder to convince people, "Well, I have this idea, and I want to do this, and I have a couple of pilots, they're not paid pilots," and so forth. It's really hard. Bootstrap it, which is what you're doing now, and which I find really a very wise course.
OANA MANOLACHE: Yeah, indeed. I mean, we are definitely looking to raise at a point where exactly as you mentioned, put gasoline on it to literally skyrocket. We're taking this strategically. We want to find strategic investors, and also at a very strategic time because we're not going to be the Mailchimp. They bootstrapped all the way. But we are bootstrapping to get it off the ground, and then I do believe that this is going to bring better value to investors, as well.
SAL DAHER: And to you.
OANA MANOLACHE: And to us, of course.
SAL DAHER: Because there's a balance to be struck between how much of the company you own and how much of the company you give up so you can make it grow really fast. People say it's the tension between being rich and being king. But are you going to be richer if you own 40% of a 500-million-dollar company, or if you own, let's say, just 5% of a billion-dollar company, which can happen.
OANA MANOLACHE: Yeah.
SAL DAHER: There have been situations where people, they'd go through repeated funding rounds, get diluted, and investors are stupid enough to allow founders to have such little stake in a company. It takes away the incentive for them to put in the crazy time they need. Is there a social impact aspect to Introvoke?
OANA MANOLACHE: There is. And I strongly believe that you don't have to be a social impact company to actually have social impact. And I do want to urge every single founder out there, while building their startups, to see what is their social impact angle. It could be part of their ... It could be financial, it could be something that they're already doing, but kind of amplify what they're doing.
From our perspective, we have two sides that we are greatly supporting. And funnily enough, we didn't even realize we had a social impact until, actually, someone emailed us from South Africa thanking us how much we helped him through live streaming, because he was able to tune into some of the live events in San Francisco and in New York where he could learn things that he didn't find in the events in that region.
And he even said that he lives in such a remote location where he can't get to the startup events, but he does have internet, so he can tune in. He could still learn without having to spend a lot of time on the road or feeling disadvantaged, the fact that he has to be with his family or he doesn't have the financial possibility of investing that much time and money into going to events. And that's when our eyes just got opened. We didn't realize that there's more people like that, that we're helping in some remote locations, just by opening up these events.
The second part of the social impact came out of the ... which is now a very hot topic, environmental and the pollution that business travel is bringing. There's companies, big companies, corporations, that right now are not looking at the business travel in terms of money, but in terms of the pollution, the impact that it brings on the environment, indeed. And they have programs in place and auditing in place where they look at how much their employees have polluted the environment by taking planes and so on. And they are looking actively at ways to, if you don't have to go to an event or if you don't have to go to a meeting, to use technology and tools that would allow you to be there.
Of course, we never want to replace relationships-building. Face-to-face relationships are irreplaceable. It's the interaction that we don't want to replace. But the next best thing is to attend virtually an event, to have a conference call, to watch a webinar rather than to fly all the way for a two-hour meeting and come back. So these are the two points that we realize that we are impacting from a social perspective. As a company, once we stabilize ourselves with the customers and our revenue model, we will look into being more serious about supporting these two areas.
SAL DAHER: Yes, of course. Right now, there is no substitute for face-to-face contact in many situations. But I think there's a great deal that can be done to enhance the ability of virtual contact between people to be more effective. So I think you're working a really fertile ground. You're tilling really fertile soil on what you're trying to do. And if you do it successfully, it could build tremendous value for you and for all the constituents that you have; your investors, your users, and other people.
It's interesting, people talk about social value companies. Economists debate, because some say it's 2%, some say it's 20%. But the percentage of the value captured by the people who build a business is somewhere between 2 and 20%, meaning that the rest of the value is thrown off to society, in general. It's social capital that's built that way. So an enterprise like Facebook, yes, Mark Zuckerberg is a very, very rich person, and yet, maybe he's only capturing 2 or 5% of the value created by that enterprise.
And so this is something we forget about. So this is the social impact of businesses. Actually, monetary. This is in a monetary sense. It's not just social, but it's the monetary value created by the business. Most of it cannot be captured by the business itself. There's a tremendous externality of value that's thrown off by a creation of businesses. And this is what's made us so incredibly wealthy.
Speaking as an immigrant, I mean, my family came to America in 1966. I looked this up, the other day, in the census and so forth. So, in that time, if you went to buy a kid's shirt, I looked at the Sears catalog. It was fall of 1967. Boys, button-down long sleeve shirt. Well, my mother had two of those for me. I said, "Why did I only have two shirts?" I mean, she was washing that thing all the time. It was $3.47. It was only $3.47. Couldn't she buy five shirts at least, and wash them, and not have to be washing them every other night and all that?
Well, but then I looked at the median income for Americans in those days. And we were immigrants here from Brazil where median incomes were much lower. Adjusted for inflation, median income, I think it's something around 60-something thousand dollars, $69,000. Then it was something like $7,000, so it's like one tenth. And if I look at that shirt, that $3.47 shirt, at Target, you can get a similar shirt for $15. So, well, okay, so if you do the calculation, the shirt is 50% cheaper when you adjust for inflation. But people earned so much less then that my mom was actually buying a $200 shirt. So that's the reason. Imagine if you had to have $200 shirts for your kids. How many would you have, right?
OANA MANOLACHE: Probably none.
SAL DAHER: It's the only shirt. It's like a uniform shirt, like you would have one or two. So then you say, "Jeez, Americans have gotten so unbelievably richer since 1966 when I first arrived here." And that is because all these companies building businesses. And every time they build ... You look at their profit, you look at what their shareholders are making. That's the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the iceberg is this massive thing that the companies themselves cannot capture, is a massive value that they create. And you can say it's social capital and so forth, but it really is really massive and we don't see it.
In this podcast, and this podcast has a social impact that I had not expected, I thought that it would be a good way to learn for me and for the listeners. But I did not expect to have at least two founders tell me ... The founder of JobGet and the founder of Realplay tell me that they were inspired by this podcast in building their businesses and actually starting a company.
In the case of Realplay, Justin Real, that I interviewed recently, he said, "Well, jeez, I can build this business. I can go to Christopher Mirabile and ask him for money, and I can do this," from listening to the podcast. That, to me is a tremendous social impact, and we don't see it. This is kind of like an injunction to people to get out there and start something because you're going to be making such an impact that you don't even know. It's invisible to you, but it really helps others.
OANA MANOLACHE: Indeed. Yes. And that's what I said, is don't think that your company doesn't bring social impact, just because you're doing something that doesn't have anything to do with it. And continue to listen to your customers, and understand, kind of build with them, because automatically you will bring a social impact to others like them to the levels that probably you haven't even discovered yet. For example, like you, when you started this podcast, you didn't expect something like this.
SAL DAHER: Nope. I expected I would learn. And I expected people would learn ... They might avoid a few scrapes and bumps with protips. I thought there would be just protips. And it turns out that it's actually much more than that. It's kind of like people, "Hey, I can actually do this. I can go on and start a company because I saw so-and-so." Well, I don't know how public Raul wants to go with this. Raul is starting his company, as well.
OANA MANOLACHE: Good luck. Way to go.
SAL DAHER: Can we send a name across the waves?
Raul: PodSpot.
SAL DAHER: PodSpot. Coming up, PodSpot. It's going to be a great place to record your podcasts. I'm going to be recording at a PodSpot, and we'll do that as well. And that was inspired by this podcast, because Raul has been listening to-
OANA MANOLACHE: Amazing.
SAL DAHER: -all the interviews, and he decided to do this. So you never guess what conversations heard over the shoulder, what could happen. Telling my older daughter what kind of a boy she should look for, and they should be kind, they should be considerate, and so forth, and so forth. And I used to have a beard. Beware, guys with beards. They're hiding something. Somebody told me people with beards are hiding something. So I told her, "Beware of guys with beards."
She was nine. My four-year-old daughter was listening to that, and years later she told me what she interpreted from that conversation. She thought that it was like the day that she was going to get married, it would be five guys lined up at the altar, and somehow my eyesight would fail me and she would have to inspect them, make sure they didn't have beards. She's getting married to a guy with a beard, a wonderful guy with a beard!
OANA MANOLACHE: Congratulations.
SAL DAHER: But anyway, so I just thought it was very funny. But it's like overheard conversations can have unbelievable impact. And so I'm really intrigued by the potential of doing a live event that can be streamed easily, because streaming has been around for a long time. People ... Simulcasts and all that stuff, but can be streamed easily to a large audience that's not present physically. And that streaming can be analyzed, can be understood so that you can provide better services in the future. You can tell, "Oh, Sal told one of his jokes. Hey, our listenership dropped. Skip the jokes, Sal." That kind of thing. That is really, really promising.
Do you remember a moment ... I like to ask this with all these very accomplished people who I interview, was there a moment in your life when something, a light went off and it said, "This is what I'm meant to be doing?" Something, some experience you had that caused you to have this little revelation, "This is what I'm cut out for?"
OANA MANOLACHE: Yes. I feel like there's a lot of moments in someone's life where they're little triggers, where you feel like you're on the right path and you're doing what you're supposed to be doing. I do have one of those moments. Actually, after I left HP and worked in technology, and love technology so much, I wanted to start a food business, which was completely different from what I knew, what I was passionate about.
And after a few months working on the bits, and the business idea, and all those things, I went to GTC, which is a huge conference, a tech conference in San Francisco. And talking to innovative technology entrepreneurs there, and understanding what other companies are doing, and it felt like home. When you're around an industry that you love so much, and that you are good at, it felt like we were talking the same language. And I had Introvoke at the back of my mind, at that point, and starting talking about it, and it just clicked.
I realized that I am supposed to be in technology, and I've always been supposed to be in technology. Even my parents, they were in automotive but it was all about the technology and behind the machinery, as well. So that's when I decided to switch from the food business idea that I had and actually make a reality Introvoke, which I had at the back of my mind, back then. And it felt good ever since.
Because I'm also ... I lived everywhere, but I also travel so much. And I love the ability to build a business, no matter where you are. And also the marketing component that comes to it, and my passion for it. And I spent a lot of time in B2B building relationships. It feels like a second nature to talk to people, to understand and to build something that brings value to them. It's not necessarily an "A-ha" moment, but it's a feeling that you get that you're doing what you're supposed to be doing.
SAL DAHER: Oh, very interesting. I think you were wise to consider that. The food business, real estate, these things have gravity. In the food business, you have concern with not poisoning your people. I mean, there's a lot of constraints. There's a lot of regulations around things. You can't be so daring, you can't have minimum viable products that are terrible. You have to do pretty well, and it's a highly developed market and so forth.
The same thing with real estate. I mean, real estate is extremely competitive. And to find a new direction, real estate is really hard. But in a social media, live streaming space, you can experiment and do crazy things, and have completely incompetent products that flop in the beginning and still survive. And as a way of figuring out really innovative things, so that ... There's only so many things that the human gastric system can ingest. They're very limited.
OANA MANOLACHE: Yeah.
SAL DAHER: But in terms of mixing and matching ways of connecting people and so forth, there's a whole universe that you can experiment with. So the palette is much, much broader.
OANA MANOLACHE: And I love that. I love to see different people from different parts of the world coming together by something that we built. And, as you said, it's also we are more daring in trying things and seeing if they work. We have a set of hypotheses that we keep on testing because we do want to, of course, follow certain norms in live streaming because people are used to certain things. But we also want to disrupt some others, so to build something new.
And we keep on testing them and validating them, and it allows ... It gives us that room of trying crazy new things and see where this takes us. Whereas, with food, you could do that, too. The business that I was trying to build was more subscription-based. So I was very passionate about the model and building the business, but not as much about the industry, although I have-
SAL DAHER: But there's so much gravity there. I mean, there's a lot of friction.
OANA MANOLACHE: It is.
Sal Daher: -when you're doing it. Whereas, in the digital world, it's like you can design things, you can innovate really fast. And if it hits, you can go to scale very fast.
OANA MANOLACHE: That's something that I was very interested in, being able to scale this at a very high level. And I have friends that are doing amazing in food, here in Boston. There's something, a place called Branchfood, and an incubator for food businesses, and it's absolutely amazing. But I also believe that it's important, and I've said that before, just because a business idea is good, that doesn't mean you should be the one to do it.
SAL DAHER: No. No, it's the calling.
OANA MANOLACHE: It's important to fit with you.
SAL DAHER: It's a calling you have.
OANA MANOLACHE: Exactly.
SAL DAHER: I mean, the people who are in that business, the food business, this is what ... I mean, they understand food, they smell food, they're cut out for this. This is what they do. And they could not do anything else. I mean, they're doing it because ... It's like a vice. They cannot control themselves. They have to be in in that business.
OANA MANOLACHE: And I'm the same with technology. I feel like every single thing I see, like a technology, a device, I just can't help myself, like reading all the Wired magazine. And it's your calling, and I think that people should listen to it.
SAL DAHER: And it's not ... So people don't do it for the money. They do it for the passion, the thing that really draws them to it.
OANA MANOLACHE: And that makes you wake up in the morning, and those hard days when you're not sure if you're doing the right thing. So passion strives.
SAL DAHER: This is wonderful. So, Oana Manolache, great interview. I love the fact that you have the sort of very high ambitions for creating a business, but I think you're kind of gimlet-eyed, and a very serious person who looks at the bottom line at the same time, which is a very unusual combination. Because people who are big dreamers tend to forget the little nitty-gritty.
And I think, maybe for me, but your background of both your parents being entrepreneurs, you understand that at the end of the day, you got to make ... the business has to make money in order for it to stay in business. So I find you to be a very interesting mix of both the dreamer and the doer. And so I think you're going to have great success in what you're doing.
OANA MANOLACHE: Thank you, Sal. I really appreciate your kind words, and I really appreciate you putting all of this together. It's amazing to hear about all the companies that you've invested in and how successful they become. And it shows that if the right people are in place, there's no limit to how big you can dream, made the internal, external teams, partners and I really appreciate your time doing the interview, as well.
SAL DAHER: This is great. Lest listeners get Facebook envy about the companies that I've invested in, let me tell you, every single one of them had really difficult moments. The most successful company like SQZ Biotech, for example. They have a multi-billion dollar deal with Roche and their clinical trials and all that stuff. Those guys were ... Their first round, they were really struggling. I interviewed the founder here, and they had to pivot and so forth.
So, don't get Facebook envy. Everybody has a hard time in a startup. If you are going through a difficult period with your startup, understand that that's the norm. So thanks again, Oana Manolache. I'd like to invite our listeners who enjoyed this podcast to review it on iTunes. This is Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. I'm Sal Daher.
I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.