Week 4: Moved to SF, Won a Hackathon (Almost), and Discovered My Biggest Churn Problem

Just landed in San Francisco for Founders, Inc. The density of talent here is unreal. Every coffee shop has someone building something interesting.

Saturday I entered a hackathon. We made it to the finals and we'll find out this week if we win. Built an agent orchestration project and learned a ton about how these systems actually work under the hood.

The big learning this week

I've been doing tons of user interviews (trying to follow The Mom Test and not sell, just ask). And I finally found my real churn problem.

Remember how I mentioned 47% conversion after killing the mandatory onboarding calls? Well, I went deeper into the data and realized something worse: 50% of users were dropping off at the Gmail connection step.

Why? Because I'm not Google-verified yet (CASA Tier-2 certification takes months). So users see a scary warning when they try to connect their email. Half of them bounce right there.

The fix

I'm migrating from my custom Gmail integration to Composio. It's a tool that handles OAuth so I don't need to go through the certification myself. They're already SOC 2 compliant, which is actually better security than what I had before.

The irony: I thought my onboarding problem was about explaining the product. Turns out it was about trust signals on a Google popup I don't control.

Also fixed this week:

• Mobile UX was broken (lots of users coming from mobile after the viral post)
• Various UI bugs my new colleagues found during interviews
• Started treating everyone here as potential users

What I'm learning about SF

The events here are different. Not networking-for-networking. People are actually building and want to talk shop. Had conversations I wouldn't have had in Barcelona.

Still figuring out the rhythm. It's intense but in a good way.
See you next week from the Bay.

I'm Matias, building Nori: an AI exec assistant that handles your email chaos. Follow the journey: getnori.ai