Description
Today’s guest is the Co-Founder & CTO at ScribbleChat – an app that allows you to customize any chat with a handwriting or animation. He shares the ups and downs of integrating with other chat apps, why they decided to use their API company to create this app, and a key lesson of raising too much money.
Trey Stout is the Co-Founder & CTO of Handwriting.io & ScribbleChat.
Show Notes
The Ups and Downs of Integrating with Other Chat Apps
The ups would include instant name recognition from all of your friends telling you that they love your stuff and that you got this amazing partnership from huge corporations. The second would be vanity metrics. Unfortunately, most of the ups (at least in the immediate side) are just vanity. Having something available in Facebook Messenger, for example, is fantastic as you will get massive influx of traffic because it is something that will take you a long time to attain by yourself along with a huge capital. How quickly you learn about a product is mind-blowing when you do these integrations. These are the things which are really hard to do when you are a small start-up but the downside is that, these users are not your users. The contract doesn’t really read well for some of these things so you need to ensure you go through whatever it is that you are signing on to be able to play with the rules in whatever ecosystem you are playing in.
A Key Lesson in Raising Too Much Money
There was time when Trey was hired really early in the company and they were able to raise about $40M. For an idea which sounded not immediately amazing, this much money in a bank account had a force of its own. It seems like they were working for this horde of cash and the same hunger and drive to work on the project is different than a founder who only has two months of runway left. Knowing that you have this much cash can light the wrong kind of fire in the leaders as it can send a message that your job is safe for a long time and have forever to figure things out.
Show Mention
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