Hi Friends!😀

I am starting a weekend edition of The Day 1 Lab where I will be interviewing startup founders each week to showcase their startup journey and the lessons we can learnt.

In today’s edition, we are featuring:

Glasp (💵 Pre-revenue)

The social web highlighter for the desktop.

👨‍🚀Founders: Kazuki, Kei

🌎️Location: USA

💰️Funding: Bootstrapped

💳️Monetization: TBD

🏠️Category: Web app

1. Hi Kei, what's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

Kazuki studied chemical engineering in Japan and business in the United States. Kei studied law in Japan and business and marketing in the United States. We both worked for Google and met there. Since then, we have organized many projects together. When we were organizing a book reading club, we came up with one question, “Why can’t we learn from others’ learnings and experiences efficiently?” If we can take a look into other people’s brains, we can learn faster and spend time on more important things. That’s how Glasp’s idea of sharing what you learn came up.

2. How did you build Glasp and get your first 1K users?

As Kazuki didn’t know how to code, he started by learning to code. He wrote in vanilla JS and used the Google Cloud Platform. It took a few months, but finally, he made Glasp’s Chrome extension and shared it with his founder friends.

Firstly, we invited our friends based in the United States. But it was around 200 or so. So, as Glasp is a knowledge management and social media, we thought of using our profiles which have many great articles about product management, growth, startups, and marketing. And we shared it on the Slack channel for product managers and Linkedin groups for product managers. Then, we got many feedbacks, and sign-ups, and reached 1,000 users.

3. Since launch, what strategies have worked to attract and retain partnerships and customers?

I think that keeping improving the product to provide value worked for sure. We continuously conduct user interviews and listen to their feedback. If we find improvements, we implement it quickly.

Also, we learned that following the trend is important in terms of the growth of the product. When we launched the beta version, web3 was hot, but we didn't find value in it, so we didn't do anything around it. But in late 2022, when AI was hot, we researched it and found value, so we built some features around it. Then, we got featured in big media and by many influencers on Twitter and YouTube. It brought us many sign-ups and installs of the Chrome extension.

4. What were the biggest challenges you faced and lessons learnt?

I think the biggest challenge is fundraising. In order to fundraise, we need traffic, retention, revenue, and a good team. Also, we should follow a certain trend and use some technologies related to it. But when we fundraised the second time, it took time to complete as we needed more traffic and retention, and we lacked revenue. Thanks to the AI trend, we could fundraise.

For sure, we would do it more aggressively. When we launched the beta version, we were careful about the origins of users and we didn't know how much competitors work on growth and marketing. Also, we thought that people would come when we make a good product. But in reality, we needed to do marketing and growth activities more aggressively.

5. What is your advice to entrepreneurs who are just starting?

Making a good product is the priority. To do so, you should talk to users quite often and focus on basics and fundamentals. Making a good product is repeating the basics. Many founders and startups created hype, but users didn't retain it due to the lack of value in the product. So, focus on the basics.

That’s all for today!

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