Let Go and Haul: What it’s like prepping for “demo day”
Week 13, 2018 – Brooklyn
Journey: where we’re at
We’re deep in deadline valley right now. My brain feels simultaneously like mush and also very alert because of my monster to-do list and all the adrenaline that will rush through me when I get up on stage on Tuesday and pitch TRASH to a few hundred investors as the finale to the Betacamp accelerator.
In the run up to this we do two pitches a day to a rota of investors who come into the office to give feedback. You pitch in the morning, take critique, revise, pitch again in the afternoon, take more feedback, revise... It’s grueling but excellent practice. Here’s a peek into this life:
On Monday I got slaughtered in crit. By Tuesday morning I had completely re-written the script and it was much better but a first draft. Around Thursday it was starting to sound decent. Thursday night, exhausted and rushing for the train I accidentally let a water bottle leak into my bag totally drowning my MacBook Pro (yep, and oh fuck).
Thank god for Apple Care and the 24-hour 5th Avenue store, because that’s where I spent most of Thursday night (who knew it’s such a party in there at 2am!?) Even with insurance, it was still a very expensive mistake but the most immediately stressful part was losing 48h of work stored locally putting me totally behind schedule, and the fact that my laptop needs to go in for repair for a week. So, what do you do when you need a machine and it's the middle of the night? Buy an Air to return in 14 days I guess, and not spill water on it.
Friday morning was mad dash to set up a new work environment and redo the pitch deck from memory. Also, did I mention we’ve been working in a basement with no windows and construction and drilling every day? Betaworks is renovating, so we’re all in it together. This week the construction workers had to turn off the AC just as it started to warm up outside. Nothing like a little sweat to go along with the stress. Somehow I’m also still sick. Aaaahahaha. One for the book ;-)
In between all this we’ve been coordinating the logistics of a new office (which we found out on Thursday we got!), and have been in serious talks with investors.
On top of all this, we gave ourselves a product deadline for demo day as well, so whenever I’m not working on the pitch, I’m working on the app prototype. Anton has been coding like crazy and we’re very close now. Despite all the competing priorities and logistics (and I’m only recording a fraction of it in this logbook), we’ve managed to stay as focused as humanly possible on how the product will demo on Tuesday.
Journal: what I learned
Yesterday our friend (and old studio owner) Chase was kind enough to let us escape the construction zone so we could put in a day of work on the app, so I found myself back at our old studio in Gowanus where I hadn't been since we moved out in January. Even though it’s only been a quarter, it’s felt like a year. Putting my key in the door of that nondescript Brooklyn warehouse by the canal and climbing the four flights to what I jokingly, lovingly, call the “dude box”, it was a visceral realization of how much I’ve changed, grown and learned since the beginning of the year and gone from baby CEO to maybe like, toddler CEO.
Designing late into the night on a Saturday, it surfaced a feeling I’ve known would happen at some point, which is: I obviously can’t keep doing two jobs like this forever. Even though I’ve hired dozens of designers in my career, at my last job the design team reported to me, and we even worked with my friend and extremely talented designer Simon on the TRASH branding – the feeling right now in the midst of demo day prep is very rite-of-passage-y and identity shift-y that has clearly been a long time coming. I know I’ll need to eventually get out of some details if I’m going to stay focused on the big picture, and I deeply suspect this is what the challenges of Q2 are going to be about.
Shout outs! Thank you to Sophie for helping me untangle how to explain “Millennials that take videos” to investors, to Kofi for totally saving our asses with some beautiful looking footage, to Chase for the Saturday studio time, and to all my friends and family for putting up with me for periodically disappearing on deadline.
Jams: what I’m into
If you’re new to this (I see some of you are!) here’s my monthly playlist from March that I shared last week.
If you’re into the sexy sounds of The Weeknd’s new EP, check out Collection One by SAINt JHN which dropped yesterday. Some of the lyrics are similarly solipsistic and raunchy but yunno, pop culture.
On the theme of recent RnB albums that really feel like a whole (and this one with wholesome lyrics cuz Sango), Sango!
Not an album yet, but if you like this genre I’m talking about, I recently discovered FRVR FRIDAY (who happens to be from my hometown), and I hope this dude gets big.
I’ve been fascinated by watching the culture around Rihanna's Fenty Beauty line unfold, and there’s not enough time to talk about it this week, but this article on being a male make-up virgin until Riri was a pretty fun read.