Rownd

To try to nutshell this: the full time team went fully full time.
-They joined Y Combinator (YC) Winter 22 batch (W22).
-They executed a pivot to sign-up sign-in software.
-This came because when interviewing customers as a part of YC they got the feedback "data privacy is important and interesting but i cant pay you for it for at least 6 months" to which @rgthelen asked "what can you pay us for tomorrow?"
-"If you could get me more logins"
-"We can do that!"
-So they did.
With customers like the next big idea club, USAF, Stardust, tribecca film festival and more the team is demonstrating solid growth. https://rownd.io/case-studies/native-mobile-apps
-Rob is carefully managing the company's business with goals about runway sustainability and revenue targets before even considering a series A raise.

OK so summary of progress:

We have 6 paying customers, two ProductHunt launches driving traffic (both top 10). We joined the latest cohort of the RIOT Accelerator Program and the FoundersTrec “Elite 8 program” (8 best veteran based companies in the US that are pre-seed). Key points in funnel order:

1.) Launched our live platform and have onboarded paying customers.

2.) 21 Feb We launched on Product Hunt and got Hashtag inventor Chis Messina (#1 Product Hunter in the world) to hunt us!

3.) Since high at PH launch of 34 Monthly Active Accounts (MAA) we have retained 13 Weekly Active Accounts (WAA)

4.) 6 Paid, accounts: Piacet, a Covid-19 vaccination tracking app (still in beta- we are onboarding its 10K+ users right now). A Alzheimer's tracking app, Piece, a social giving app, Off Duty Blue an overtime and extra duty management app for first responders, and Rootly, a YC Cohort Summer 2021 SRE SaaS tool, all as paying early adopters.

5.) USAF Contract: A powerful logo to build trust in us, and deliver $40k in revenue at once.

6.) Ongoing Customer discovery: we have talked to even more potential customers, more businesses, more developers. During one of these conversations with a North Carolina based App Development firm, they were so convinced of the opportunity that they not only signed up to be a customer but invested $45K into Rownd.

7.) In addition, we partnered with a professional polling company to get deeper insights about the overall direction Data Privacy is going in the US to create focused advertising and to help us create a better product.

8.) Active fundraising to fuel our mission : 1/6 Seed funding committed.

NC IDEA is one of our local innovation acceleration orgs. https://ncidea.org/ We applied once before and made it to the final round before not winning the cash. We're back for another shot on goal.

Lessons you may appreciate:
1 - try again. A shot at Non-dilutive funding is worth a couple hours refreshing an application and redoing interviews.
2 - entrepreneur whiplash. We got diametrically opposing feedback on the EXACT SAME application. "Great explanation, great improvement really appreciate the detail" and "compared to others not a well written application." Try to pull out useful nuggets, and if there's actual diametrically opposed feedback, zero it out I guess.
3 - Doing applications like this can force you to reflect on progress which can be very valuable. One of the more critical pieces of feedback asked us to be more quantitative and specific with our measures of traction, so we did, and it's pretty encouraging!

We were notified we will be getting a funded US Air Force Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract. It's around ~$40K and needs to be split out a few ways but we're extremely excited about the revenue and the powerful logo we can point to. We'll be building out one of our features for their usecase, an email proxy that would allow Airmen to give a disposable email address to websites that demand one, still be able to receive email proxied through Rownd, but also to turn it off at any time and not worry about continued spam or compromise from it.

When our platform was in a state where we felt like it could take a good amount of trial users we signed up for our main Rownd data privacy platform ( https://www.producthunt.com/posts/rownd-data-privacy-platform#) to be "Hunted" on ProductHunt by Chris Messina, the worlds #1 Product Hunter. Our first experiment - launching Privacy Hunt showed us the value his engagement could deliver. If you want to schedule Chris M to hunt your product you can do so on his site https://chrismessina.me/hunt-me

Anyhow, this launch was a bit more challenging than the last one. Seems others were able to game the algorithm, we def. saw their numbers jump up and down with what seems likely to have been bot added content.

We encouraged input and feedback from friends and colleagues from Twitter and LinkedIn but we never paid for it, and it seems kinda unclear exactly how to win in the daily popularity contest there. Lots of folks have ideas.

Its definitely worth doing as an exercise - it just may take more work for us to get it dialed in. We plan to launch features there as we release them - when they're big enough.

We had previously applied to a USAF AFWERX SBIR (https://www.afwerx.af.mil/sbir.html, https://www.sbir.gov/) for our data privacy and protection platform. We have an interested customer, but the buyer is a bigger program. We went through this once last year and got "Selectable but unfunded" Which our CEO tells me is basically second best. The customer COULD select you, but youre not funded for them.

It's our second time getting this designation while it takes a lot of paperwork it can be useful to review the topics and get better at the info. We've already applied for a third

Our CTO instrumented the Pendo for Startups analytics snippet, and this begins ingesting all user actions immediately. Data analysis is retroactive to this date as we define pages, features, events and tags in the tooling. Pendo for startups is freemium, some features arent included, but its a powerful set of tools above and beyond many other products. Critically it includes guides which can hand hold your users and get them to their first big wins. https://go.pendo.io/pendo-for-startups-apply.html

We built a quick feature to practice launching on ProductHunt. We called it PrivacyHunt. https://www.producthunt.com/posts/privacy-hunt

The real purpose was for us to practice and learn on how to launch on ProductHunt. We placed number 6 globally just using our personal networks to engage and attracted organic attention from some top Hunters.

What did this cost us? 15 hours of non-developer's time searching copying and pasting in airtable.

Our longer debrief:

Today, we launched a crowd-sourced privacy tool: Privacy Hunt on Product Hunt. We wanted to gain some experience on Product Hunt, gain some followers, without investing developer resources. This was a dry run for the launch of the Rownd Data Privacy Platform in January 2021.

We built Privacy Hunt on an airtable database and used OOTB low-code code snippets to build the UX/UI. We intentionally put it in the Rownd landing page, so we could get other traction. We invested ~15 hours of non-developer time (Rob’s time) to “hunt” privacy policies and find data request forms, build the site, and prepare the campaign.

Overall outcome: Worth every minute of investment. We are #6 in the world and got comments and upvotes from some of the most prosperous Product Hunters around. Not too bad for a dry run!

Lessons Learned:

Overall lessons:
There is a HUGE number of up-voters for hire. When we found ourselves in the top ten, we got ~10-15 messages, linkedin requests, and emails offering to trade $$ for upvotes. Need to keep that in mind in the future as we may be competing against bots.
A well known hunter basically guarantees a top 5 product.
Need a timezone strategy. Starting the day (6am EST) in the top 5 basically guarantees that they stay there, since it is above the fold. All five had over 40 upvotes by 6am. Ours came in as our networks (and a huge number of organic upvotes) started to come in. But most of those networks are in the US. Momentum builds on momentum.
(Already knew this, but worth repeating). This is NOT about winning the top 5 (top 5 does pull away and get more organic); it is about finding good users, partners, and useful feedback.

Our CTO worked hard to build the API backend to allow encryption of per user, per item pieces of information while exposing the control of these to an end user.

At the same time or CEO recruited student interns from business schools who helped us create marketing infographics in collaboration with our designers.