Customer-Driven Products: How Brett Kopf built “Slack for Schools” and launched Omella
Today on the podcast: good friend and true mensch Brett Kopf. Brett is a founder, CEO, and the best customer-driven product founder I know.
We explore companies he founded (Remind and Omella), his incredible skill in customer development, what he learned starting and scaling Remind, and how he is using those lessons to build his next company.
Remind is a messaging app for teacher, students, and families (like Slack for schools.) Remind is used by 80% of teachers in the US. After stepping away as the CEO of Remind, Brett is back at it with Omella, a payment platform for organizations (like google forms with payments.)
Here’s what I learned from the episode:
Brett’s formula for building a company is: talk to customers, solve a problem, and build something simple.
Brett’s struggle in traditional education drove him to entrepreneurship. He wanted badly to solve the problems he struggled with for himself and others.
Education is changing. Brett predicts 10-15% of kids will leave traditional education in the next 20 years for more individualized learning.
In college, Brett needed help remembering when assignments and tests were coming up. With his brother, he developed a text reminder system. This evolved to become Remind.
Remind probably should have died many times. Building the company was hard. It required sheer willpower and resourcefulness.
Investors are helpful with three main things. 1) raising capital. 2) signaling to the market that you have something. 3) strategy and insight. Otherwise, a company will live or die by the founders and team.
Brett failed at building payments into Remind. But he couldn’t let the payment problem go. The problem brewed, and he eventually started Omella to address it.
Omella simplifies the payment process for PTAs, clubs, microschools, etc. These groups struggled with having to use too many systems for payments and with losing too much money to credit card fees.
Brett has approached building Omella a little differently than he did with Remind. He is a little more methodical this time around and is working smarter, not harder.
Learn more about Brett Kopf:
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Chris Powers: Starting A Real Estate Empire at 17, Focus, Podcast Flywheels
Andrew Wilkinson: De-risking Leverage, Investing vs. Operating, and the Best Part About Business
Episode Transcript:
Brett Kopf: I don't think this framework necessarily applies to decision-making, but it's really important. Like when we started Imagine K12, Geoff Ralston, I mentioned this in the beginning, he said to me, talk to customers a lot. And I don't know if he told me this or like I kind of extrapolated this framework, but talk to customers, solve a problem, and build a simple product to solve that problem and just rinse and repeat. And it's so simple, but like that is what we run our- If you stripped away everything we've learned over the last 15 years, all the frameworks and customers and growth and employees, yada, yada, that's really at the core of what we do. Like we try to make things really simple, and we know that they're simple because we understand the problem because we talk to customers. That's it.
Eric Jorgenson: Hello again, my friends, and welcome. I’m Eric Jorgenson, and this podcast is how I excuse my procrastination. This show explores technology, investing, entrepreneurship, and personal growth in ways that will help you and the rest of humanity create a brighter, more abundant future. This podcast is one of a few projects I work on. To read my book, blog, newsletter, or invest alongside us in early-stage tech companies, please visit ejorgenson.com. Today, my guest is a true mensch named Brett Kopf. He's the founder of Remind, a platform for communication and learning that reaches students and families wherever they are. Almost all of the teachers in the United States, about 80%, use Remind. They have tens of millions of users. It's a truly remarkable company. It's basically like Slack for schools. They have investors like Naval Ravikant, Chamath Palihapitiya, and John Doerr and well over a billion-dollar valuation. I'm lucky to call Brett a very good friend. I've known him since college, and I remember the day he started Remind; he was still a sophomore at Michigan State. Now, more than 10 years later, Remind is a successful company, and Brett has stepped away as the CEO, but he's back at it again, co-founding Omella, a payment platform for organizations. They are a very mission-driven company, and they're designed to support local organizations like PTAs, schools, clubs, sports teams, and more. You're going to learn a ton about it in this episode. I'm proud to say I'm an investor personally in Omella, and that's a disclosure I want to make to you clearly as well. I have some skin in the game. Obviously, I'd love for Brett and Omella to continue to be successful, but I hope you know and trust by now that I would never promote something that I didn't believe in. So please enjoy this conversation. It focuses on his incredible skill in customer development, I think Brett is one of the best in the world at this, what he learned starting and scaling Remind, and the frameworks that he's using now as he builds his next company. Please enjoy this conversation arriving at your ears in about 120 seconds.
For the past few months, I have been absolutely bingeing the Founders Podcast. David Senra, the host, is a biography reading machine. He has read hundreds of entrepreneurs’ biographies from all across history. And this podcast is a solo cast of him talking through his notes, quotes and key insights from each book. If you listen to any of my solo casts, they're inspired exactly by David's format. My favorite aspect is the skill he has and the memory he has to connect stories between people like Andrew Carnegie, Lucille Ball, and George Lucas. He's an encyclopedia of knowledge. And if you don't have time to spend 40 hours reading every new biography that comes out, that Isaacson- the skyscraper thousand-page biography that Isaacson writes, David's high-quality recaps in one to two hours are an incredible 80/20 way to learn. It's a paid podcast. And you can get access to the whole back catalog, hundreds of episodes, for $299 or get all the new episodes for $99 a year. I've listened to dozens of episodes. I can't recommend them highly enough. This is something- learning from biographies is something Charlie Munger and Mark Andreessen both recommend. It's something I love to do. And David has given us a much easier way to do it. If you're interested in learning more, go to founderspodcast.com to learn more and sign up. You can also listen to 30 minutes sample episodes or purchase the paid feed through most podcast readers or search the Founders Podcast in your listener, and it's the white script on the black background. Founderspodcast.com, the link is in the show notes. Thank you so much for supporting the sponsors who help make this show possible.
Another way to support the show, have some fun, and be a part of the action is to invest alongside me and my partners in startups and early-stage tech companies. I started an early-stage investment fund this year called Rolling Fun with two of my most talented and trusted friends. We've all been angel investing for years and managed to find a few billion-dollar companies along the way. This year we started a fund which lets us invest your money alongside ours in the next batch of companies. We'll be investing in the most promising early-stage opportunities we can find around the world. Before we started this fund, I actually personally invested in Omella, like I mentioned. In this episode, you'll hear why Brett's an incredibly compelling founder with a great opportunity and insight on the market. If you love exposure to companies like Omella, you can learn more by listening to the podcast episodes with Bo and Al. You'll hear more about Rolling Fun there, updates on the portfolio, how we came together, what we look for in companies. We're taking on investors now. I'm honored that many readers and listeners have already joined the fund as co-investors. You can go to rolling.fun, which is linked in the show notes, and learn more. Accredited investors can join with us through Angel List today. If you have questions or would like to hear more, please reach out to me. I'd love to meet with you. Now, on with the show.
It is incredibly exciting to have a long time and true friend on the podcast who is also an incredible founder and mensch. And I'm very excited to have you here, Brett. Thanks for taking the time.
Brett Kopf: Happy to be here.
Eric Jorgenson: I'm hoping to learn a few more beautiful Yiddish words from you through this adventure.
Brett Kopf: I’m happy to do that. And funny enough, the word mensch, for my second company, I thought about trying to get that URL, but the problem with it is that it's very hard to spell. Most people don't know what it actually means, and I'm sure it's very expensive, the URL, so I didn't do it.
Eric Jorgenson: I feel like that's a common thing. Most people don't know what it means?
Brett Kopf: It kind of depends if you run in like Jewish or Yiddish circles, or if you grew up in New York. If you grew up in New York, you probably know what it means.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay. I feel like I picked it up from the comedy circuit. So maybe that is not as mainstream as I would expect it to be.
Brett Kopf: It's a really good word. Like in Yiddish, mensch basically means like a gentleman, or arguably you can use it for a woman too, but it means like a really nice person, a good quality person. That's what the meaning of it is. So I appreciate that you called it that.
Eric Jorgenson: It is good that we- like, I don't know, I'm fascinated by languages that we have specific words for things, but there's no analog for that in English that I know of that is just like a full bodied that word for a whole bunch of good intentions about the inherent quality of a person. Like that feels like an important concept to have a word for.
Brett Kopf: Yeah, we need one. I'm not going to take that on, but it would be great if we did.
Eric Jorgenson: We'll just use mensch. That's great. We can borrow, we can borrow. So, if Yiddish words are one theme of this podcast, the other I think will be what I think is the thing that you are best in the world at and the best that I have ever met or anyone that I know of at really engaging customers to build products that solve their problems. I think there's a lot of talk about that, conceptually, but I don't know anyone who walks it better than you, and I'm very excited to kind of dig in because I feel like that's the skill and the insight at the core of both of the companies that you founded, and it'll be a great kind of skill to bring us through your story and take away for people who are trying to solve any customer's problem, which should be pretty much anybody.
Brett Kopf: Yep. That sounds great. And I appreciate that.
Eric Jorgenson: I'm curious where that started. Like what is the earliest memory you have of being like, oh, this is what my job is, this is how I should be doing- this what my work is?
Brett Kopf: Well, if you go in the way, way back machine and you ask my mom who's a therapist, she would say that it started when I was in fifth grade and I was diagnosed with all these learning disabilities. And I know that sounds kind of- how would you correlate fifth grade learning disability to now I'm 35 and I have two companies, yada, yada. But the reason is because I really struggled in school. Why are you laughing?
Eric Jorgenson: Because we are already on the scoreboard – yada, yada.
Brett Kopf: Oh, I don’t think that is actually a Yiddish word. But I really struggled in school, and emotionally, I didn't feel very smart because of that. And when you don't feel smart, you have low self-esteem. I don't have low self-esteem now; I'm very happy with who I am and who I'm not. But for a long time, I did, even when I met you in college. I think we met freshman year, which was like in 2003 or something. And that's because I didn't feel like I had a place and I didn't feel like I was good at anything because I was stuck in this system of education that served the 99%, not to say that I'm special in the 1%, but I just learned in a very different way. And so, I think the natural curiosity to try to solve a problem came from wanting to so badly solve my problem. And then, so that was like the emotional undercurrent. Then I, in 2011, moved to Silicon Valley, got into a startup incubator, which I'm happy to talk about. And they taught me sort of like the “business fundamentals” fundamentals of how to build a product from scratch and how to identify a problem. And then I just went crazy with it in a good way. Like I just talked to hundreds of customers because I love it. I am like extremely obsessed and passionate about it. And I should bookmark and say that this is my way of doing it, customer development and identifying a problem. It's very bottoms up. It's very grassroots. It's very hand to hand combat. And there's multiple ways to do it. That's just the way I do it. So back to your initial question, I think it came from a deep pain that I had, which I have turned now into a positive.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a- school does a lot of us a disservice in that way because it is so obvious in adult working life how many different kinds of smart there are and all the different skills and nuances and abilities that everybody on a team has, and that you need people with all different kinds of skills. But when you're all sitting in a classroom, absorbing the same thing and expected to produce the same output, it produces this very like one dimensional, like force ranked view of the world that we spend our first like 20 years in. And then, sometimes even 5, 10 years into your working life, you're like, oh my God, there's visual talents and vocal- like auditory talents, and people who can only learn through conversation and engagement and people who are great with people and people who are analytical and people who aren't, people who are organized and people who aren't. And that that's not- there's so many more dimensions to it. And just finding ways to kind of put people in their natural element and let them discover their own strengths and apply them is so important.
Brett Kopf: Yeah, I agree. A lot of times when I interview candidates, whether at my last company or this one, they have this stacked resume, Harvard, Stanford, MBA, Penn, yada, yada, worked at this big company, this big company. And then when you ask basic questions that you wouldn't expect a logical answer from, it requires some thought and like emotional I guess you could say pragmatism, they just don't know how to respond to it. It's not just one plus one equals two. And that really surprised me because all these people went to the smartest and best schools in the country. Of course, there's wonderful people who went to those schools. But I agree with you that the structured system that we grew up in, and it's changing by the way. And so that's actually a big belief of what we're building with Omella, which we could talk about at another point. But I believe that in the next 20 years, 10 to 15% of all kids in the United States will be educated in a different way, specifically more individualized, one-on-one self-directed learning. Not all of it. I think it's not that a hundred percent of the kids in the United States will leave the US education system. I believe that's a load of shit. Excuse the French.
Eric Jorgenson: This is a French podcast. We speak French. We speak Yiddish. We speak whatever we want here.
Brett Kopf: Yeah. I don't know how to say it in Yiddish. But for a good percentage of them, I think that that's going to happen, and we're really excited by it.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I absolutely love it. What form does that take? Like, is that homeschooled? Is that charter schools? Is it small neighborhood communities?
Brett Kopf: I think it's just the start. I think the pandemic kicked it off and it's somewhat of the wild, wild west right now. And it's starting to form. And you're seeing pods, micro schools, homeschools, teachers selling classes all over the internet. And it's great because it's operating like a true market. People are frustrated with the existing and they're building their own, like they're finding a way to do it. One specifically that I think is really neat is called Acton Academy, which most people don't know about. There's 200 of these micro schools. Do you know about it?
Eric Jorgenson: I've heard of it before. It came out of Texas, right?
Brett Kopf: Yeah. And an entrepreneur, a husband and wife couple, they actually built it, and it kind of follows all these main methodologies of self-directed individualized learning that believes that kids are incredible, and they don't necessarily need a teacher to tell them to do this or that. Now, my entire adult career was built around helping teachers. And so, I very much believe in them, and I don't think that they're the problem at all. Like I think that they are really important part of the US education system. But back to the micro schools and pods, it's growing really quickly. It’s just in sort of wild, wild west phase and organizing itself. But Acton is like one good example that is doing it at scale.
Eric Jorgenson: That's awesome. You gave the incubator some credit for teaching you the customer development practice, but I remember seeing you in college like basically doing that by intuition. Like you were just stopping students coming out of classes, you were getting consulting gigs from like local companies. Like you have been in like full contact with the market certainly as long as I've known you and probably before that.
Brett Kopf: Yeah, I forgot about that. And again, I actually think that came out of a place of not feeling like I had a place. And so, when I met you in college, I was so frustrated because the business school at Michigan State denied me. And again, I'm not mad at them about it because like probably the majority of the students who go through that school end up working at a big fortune 500 company, nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to just start something from scratch. And I was so curious, like what does a consultant do? What does it mean to operate a business? And at the time, all this whole lean startup Silicon Valley stuff, like I didn't know anything about it, and it was just sort of starting. This was the time of Blackberries. And so, I would go to the Barnes and Noble on Grand River, which I know you remember, and I would look up books on business. And I remember it said How-To Accounting for Dummies, which is probably the last thing you want to read when you're starting a startup. I just didn't know what to do. So, what I ended up doing was any entrepreneur that would talk to me, I would basically go knock on their door and say, “Hi, I'm Brett, I'm a student. I just want to know what you do every day because I'm interested in being an entrepreneur.” And they were like, “Sure, I'm happy to explain it.” And then I would get coffee with them. And I've literally like went to a local coffee shop, a small business owner, and I sat down with them, what do you do? And they would kind of tell me. I'm like, no, no, I don't get it. Like what do you do every day? You wake up, you put your pants on, and you go to your coffee shop in the morning at 7:00 AM, and between 7:00 and 9:00 PM, what do you do? And I just really wanted to understand it because I was so curious, and I really wanted to solve my problem. But at the time, it was kind of like figuring out the maze of, it's like I am a mouse and there's cheese and there's a really big maze and the maze was huge. I can kind of sniff it. Like there's a nice piece of Swiss cheese, and I wanted to shrink that to figure out what my place was in the world.
Eric Jorgenson: And you did that through this process of conversations?
Brett Kopf: Yeah. I just talked to a ton of people, and I tried things. So, my first job and the only major company I've ever worked for is Kraft Foods. So, I don't know if you knew this, but in college I worked from, I don't know, Fridays and Saturdays, usually from like 8:00 or 9:00 PM until 3 in the morning at the DeWitt, Michigan, Walmart, and I stocked Kraft cheese and cookies. I was a merchandiser, and I learned a ton from that. And so, I tried things like that. And then I also just talked to a bunch of people. And then it was around 2005 or ’06 – when did we graduate? No, maybe it was 2009. And like Facebook and Twitter were just becoming a thing, and I'm like, oh, I should become a social media consultant because there's all these companies that wanted to use social media. I'm like, well, I don't know, I'm young, I'll help them figure it out. And that sort of started on my entrepreneurial path. Do you remember [inaudible 16:35]? You were around for that.
Eric Jorgenson: I do, social bonfire.
Brett Kopf: That's right. I don't own- And Jake Leston, I think his name is Jake, he was going to design the logo for free for me, which is very kind of him.
Eric Jorgenson: I mean, it was a very supportive ecosystem there. And a bunch of- I remember you were like a rockstar for having built a successful company, like a consulting company when we were at school. I mean, there's a lot of sort of- we had that little entrepreneurial circle.
Brett Kopf: Well, it was a great little community, and we all go, the kind of like 5 or 10 of us all go really back. I wouldn't call it successful. But I remember when this local company basically said, all right, we'll pay you like $125 an hour for 20 hours a week. Is that reasonable? And I nearly like, I almost fell over. I was like, yeah, that sounds good. And I walked out and I called my mom and I was like, wow, [inaudible 17:23] I just made X dollars working for Kraft. Like they want to pay me all this money, but now I have to figure out how to do the work. And so, I don't know, go figure it out. And that's actually, oftentimes, when I'm having a hard day, I'll go to my wife, and I'll wake up in the morning, and she's like, “Hey, how you doing?” I'm like, “I'm okay. I need to figure out how to make something from nothing today.” And that is literally what we as entrepreneurs do every day is like you have to make something that's in your brain and somehow will it on the world from nothing. And it's hard, but it's really gratifying when it actually works, when people use the things that you built.
Eric Jorgenson: And Remind is certainly like a thing that exists in the very tangible world and reaches a ton of people that you and your brother had to will into existence a number of times. When would you say- I feel like I was there the moment you decided to start Remind, but I don't know- Like where do you think that company actually started? Like what was the moment of conception?
Brett Kopf: Yeah, I remember exactly when it was. It was in 2009. I was a year and a half away from graduating. I had just worked my ass off. Am I allowed to have those light swear words or is that bad on here?
Eric Jorgenson: Absolutely. We love chutzpah.
Brett Kopf: Okay, good. I worked so hard on the paper, of which my very nice brother helped me on for hours, and he's super smart. So, he has a very high, well, he has a high IQ and EQ, but where my EQ might be really high, his IQ is super high and he's also a very good writer. And so, he was very nice and would spend hours helping me. And then I would get like a C minus or a D, and it was so deflating. And I sort of had this point where I was like, okay, I have a path. I'm either going to drop out of school, do who knows what, or I'm just going to start something to solve my problem. And after I got that grade, I called him and I said, “Hey, I'm starting a company. I want you and need you to do it with me,” because he has so many gifts that I don't, “You have 24 hours.” And then he called me in five minutes, like, “Okay, let's do it.” And the first version of that, I don't know how granular you want me to get, was I thought, well, if all of my friends receive text messages on their Blackberry every day – if we were to go to lunch, I would text you – why do we have to use these very antiquated software systems that we use in our education? And I'm not going to name names, but you've all used them in college or even high school. They're just old and clunky and slow. And so, my brother helped build an Excel- using Excel Macros, a system that would send me a text message running on my computer through a mobile gateway. And so let me take a step back. The concept was, I have a hard time remembering when I have assignments, quizzes, tests. I have ADD and I'm dyslexic – clinically diagnosed by the way, not just saying that to be fun. Not to be fun meaning like every entrepreneur says they have that; I literally do.
Eric Jorgenson: It’s become fashionable to be neuro atypical and that- yeah.
Brett Kopf: I don't actually know if one can lose it though. Like, I don't know if I still have it or- because I'm very glad that I have now “disabilities.” But I don't know if you could actually lose it. But anyway, that's beside the point. So, I wanted a way to remember about things coming up. I wanted a second brain because I had to remember everything, and I just wasn't good at that. And so, he built a system that would use Excel and using a macros would send a text message through a mobile gateway. And for any nerds that are watching, it is a highly unreliable way to send a text. I don't even know if the carriers will let you do that anymore. But it was like your phone number at AT&T or verizon.net delivered 50% of the time. And you had to keep my computer on. So, if my computer fell asleep, then the system wouldn't work. But it worked for me. So, like it would send me a text – hey, Brett, you have a quiz coming up, or you have a test coming up. And then I'm like, huh, it works for me. I wonder if it would work for Christine, who was one of my best friend's roommate and Remind’s longest term employee. She's there right now, funny enough. Her name is Christine, you know Christine. And it sent her a text and it saved her and a few other of our friends from missing assignments. And that was our first sort of taste of like, whoa, we built this really shitty, scrappy system, but it worked and that kind of got us hooked. And that was in 2009.
Eric Jorgenson: It evolved a long way from there.
Brett Kopf: Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt you. Publicly, Remind was started in 2011 because we basically hit our head against a wall for the next two and a half years. Not knowing what my late father would say, shit from Shinola, which I don't think is Yiddish, but it's a good- Have you heard that? You have? We had no idea. We were just like a rocket ship with no guidance system. We had so much energy. Like I have a lot of energy now, and I'm 35. Imagine, you know me, like when I was 22, we just wanted to like do a lot of things and have impact on the world.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. It's so funny, looking back at like the amount of effort I channeled extremely poorly into things in college, early twenties. I worked so hard on things that were so dumb because that's just like the mix of skills that we had.
Brett Kopf: I don't know if they were that dumb. I remember the bamboo shirt, like you were starting something.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And like those are all like reps that you learn and come through and it's true, like you do get successive tastes. Like your social bonfire kind of led to like Remind V1 that was like, oh, we can solve problems with technology. We can talk to people. We can understand things. We can deliver solutions. And the same thing, like a buddy Jack Butcher, his mantra is just like go make $1 on the internet, like get that first taste, which I think is a really helpful framework for people who are kind of getting into it.
Brett Kopf: Yeah, that's great. I like that.
Eric Jorgenson: How did you know to like keep that ball going forward? Like this is something that that small taste led to such a huge outcome over a long period of time through what I know are a long series of like hints from the universe that maybe this thing doesn't need to exist, maybe this is too hard, maybe the market doesn't want it. Like how did you decide at each gate to keep going, to keep improving, like which problems to solve and to keep persisting and building this company?
Brett Kopf: You asked that question in such an eloquent way, hints from the universe. And so, what Eric means by that, because Eric's known me since 2000- and you have known me since 2005, there were multiple times where our company should have died. And I think what kept us from dying – I don't mean dying in the literal sense, but our company dying, which at the time I felt like would be me dying because I tied my identity so close to the company. Of course, I'm a human and it's a company, but it's a very hard thing to decouple. I know that sounds like a joke, but especially when it's very big, Remind has 30 million users, it's a hard thing as a founder to decouple yourself.
Eric Jorgenson: And when it's your first company and when you don't have a family yet and stuff like that.
Brett Kopf: So, we just- I think it came from two things. One was what I talked about in the beginning, me wanting to prove to the world that I had a place, because I felt so insecure over such a long time. That sort of propelled me to refuse to die. Like I just refused to stop no matter what. And it was really hard. And I don't want people or founders watching this or potential founders to look at this saying like, oh, how glorious, like oh, it's such a great concept that he was like working so hard and killing himself to do this thing that's now really big. It was really hard. Like, there was times all my friends came out of school making really good money and having full-time jobs and going out on the weekends and yada, yada, and don't get me wrong. Like I have a great life. I'm super happy. I don't regret anything. But on a Friday night where all my friends were going out to the bar, I was grinding, looking up all of our competitors or trying to figure out where a customer is or trying to figure out what Twilio is, because Twilio was just starting, and I wasn't an engineer. I'm not an engineer. And so, it was just like this sheer will to stop. I think a lot of that actually comes from our upbringing. So, I'm from Chicago. We grew up in a middle upper-class neighborhood. We played football. I'm not a meat head anymore, but at one point I was. I used to be the 260-pound lineman, and my coach, we referenced this a lot in our first company when we would talk to our employees. My coach, his name's Mark Gogowski, one of the best life teachers I've ever had, I remember there was one point where there was this like 280-pound defensive lineman, and I would try to block that lineman and I just couldn't, physically couldn't. And I walk up to my coach, and I said, “Coach, I can't block him. He's too big.” And Coach just looks at me and he goes, “Brett, find a way to do it.” I was like, “What do you mean? I just can't. He's too big.” And he says, “Just figure it out.” And I never understood what that meant until Remind, which is when you start a company, you just have to be unbelievably resourceful and just find a way because mommy and daddy aren't going to come and help you. You just have to figure it out. It just forces you to do it. And I think that is what sort of kept us going through the dark times.
Eric Jorgenson: What were some of those hints from the universe? How does that manifest when you're like this is a pivotal moment of oh shit-?
Brett Kopf: So, let me give you an- I'm sorry to interrupt you. The only reason I'm interrupting is because I didn't want to forget it. In 2011, David and I moved out to Silicon Valley. We had an existing application. It had 300 users. It was bad. They were really active. And Geoff Ralston who now runs Y Combinator, but he started Imagine K12, basically said to us, go talk to your customers and solve a problem and build something simple. Just go talk to customers. And we're like okay. And so, we go talk to 200 teachers one-on-one in six weeks. We put together this crappy prototype on a piece of paper, a sketch, and then we built a very simple V1 very quickly, and it worked. And like people were growing, like all of a sudden, we had like a thousand users and it was like 5,000 users. And before we know it, we were like, David and I and one engineering consultant, we were probably adding 3 to 5,000 users a week that were very engaged. It's like a really good accomplishment. And every text message- So Remind, to take a step back, Remind makes it easy for teachers to communicate with students and parents. For anyone who's a technical, it's like Slack for schools. Every text message we sent using Twilio at the time was a cent. For anyone who uses Twilio now, you'll think that's crazy because our prices have obviously dropped, but mind you, this was in 2011. And we had raised $25,000, I think, of which 90% was out the door because David and I have big appetites. It had been three months, we ate a lot, and it had been three months and we had no money, and it was running out very quickly. And David, and this is the part to listen to, he woke up from a nightmare that he was being drowned in pennies because we were growing so quick and sending so many text messages, but making no money yet, which I don't recommend people do. But at the time, it was right for us. And so that was one very pivotal point. Now we agreed, and it was a handshake because I think I had $500 to my name. My brother had a little more because he had been working. And we agreed that even though I don't have the money now, if we go really in debt, I will pay you back. I will pay you back just on a handshake. He's my brother. Fortunately, we never got to that position. But I'll never forget the drowned in pennies story because by logic, the company should have either shut down or said all users stop, we need to charge you today. That would have been the wrong for our company.
Eric Jorgenson: And how did you- you made it through by bankrolling that personally until you had the investor money come through?
Brett Kopf: No, we got a little lucky. We were at Imagine K12’s demo day. And I kind of told myself, if there's ever 30 seconds in which I'm not talking to an investor, I don't care if there's a group of 10 people all talking to each other, I will walk in interrupt and pitch because we are going to die, and I have to raise money. And that happened. And I'm being explicit in explaining this because I want you to know how uncomfortable it was. But there was 200 investors in the room. There was a group of 10 of them talking to each other. And I'm like, shit, 29, 30, I'm alone. I need to talk to someone. And I walk up to this guy, and I had researched him before, and I tapped him on the shoulder like, “Hey, I'm Brett, nice to meet you.” And I shake his hand, and I told him, I was like, “I'm going to tell you how I'm going to disrupt the $4 billion emergency alert market.” I don't even remember how big it was at that point. And he's like okay. And in my head I’m thinking, oh my God, he said okay, okay, go! He ended up investing in our company after a few meetings and sort of saving us, giving us a bridge. I don’t know, it was probably $50,000 at that point. His name was Clint Korver from Ulu Ventures, of which we’re actually tiny LPs in their fund now. And there was a string of those, by the way. It wasn't easy. Remind’s raised over $60 million to this point from some of the world's best VCs. But it was a grind in the beginning, mostly because we didn't know how to tell a story, of which I'm happy to talk about it if you'd like. But yeah, that was quite an experience.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. There's a lot- I feel like I have a lot of branches I want to take from that. I think one is really interesting- I feel like there's a few companies that were enabled, big companies, that became possible when Twilio came around. How much did you feel like you're like, oh, this company can exist now when you had the ability to use Twilio?
Brett Kopf: I didn't know it at the time, but I knew that there were no other alternatives. Just like Stripe today. Stripe is an enabling system for millions of companies, including Omella. And it's going to birth billion dollar, multiple billion dollar companies because of the infrastructure. And what I mean by that is Remind doesn't want to be in the business of carrier communication infrastructure. Remind should be in the business of making it easy, if carriers are down here, right up here, super easy interfaces, great customer support with branding, solving a problem for the customer. Same thing with Stripe. Like I don't think Stripe, well, at least at the moment, they're in the business of providing infrastructure to enable a growth in the entire GDP in the economy, which you know. So, at the time, I didn't know. Now I know. Now I know. And like for Omella, we're all in on Stripe. And there's other companies who do this too. But it's just super cool. It's like once in probably a century type companies that allow all these other things to be birthed.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, those are really interesting. Those enabling platforms are really interesting things to look out for when you're looking for opportunities or new problems that can be solved. The other thing, so I am curious about Remind’s story. I'm also curious, I mean, it sounds all of the money that you raised from a bunch of top tier investors. What role did investor selection, I want to say, play in Remind’s success?
Brett Kopf: When you say investor selection, do you mean how important were the investors to us winning?
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah.
Brett Kopf: Hindsight's always 20/20. So, I have a pretty strong belief. So first of all, they are wonderful. John Doerr’s on our board, Chamath Palihapitiya invested, Naval Ravikant, like this list of tier one investors. For the most part, my belief with investors is they're very helpful for raising capital. They're very helpful for signaling to the market that you at least have something. And they are sometimes helpful on providing strategy and insight based on a wealth of experience. And let me give an example of that. I think what's happening in the market today, of which, by the way, I'm young enough, I'm 35, where when you and I were graduating school, it was the first downturn, and I was totally oblivious to it because I was starting my first company. I didn't even know what the mortgage crash was back then. I didn’t have a mortgage. Like I didn't know about it. It wasn't a thing. And so, I do think that there's value. Like right now there's probably a credible amount of value to having a bunch of experienced operators or investors in the room who can help say like, you need to cut down [inaudible 32:37] immediately or get cashflow positive, et cetera. So, they were really helpful with that, those three things I should say. But beyond that, the company will live or die by the founders and the team. Like period. End of story. And so, I don't over tilt on it. What I tilt on now when I raise money is there are extremely high-quality people from a values perspective, I want to work with them for 10 years, and they will leave me alone until I call them and I need them. And that's just because like we're not perfect, but we have a pretty- we have a playbook, we know what we're doing. We don't want someone to be knocking on our door every three or four days. We have a long-term view on what we're building, and we just want to go execute on that. And as long as they give us that trust, it's a really solid relationship.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I feel like that's- When I'm talking to entrepreneurs sometimes as an investor, I'm like I'm not going to promise that we're going to be super helpful, but I will promise that we will leave you alone. And there are entrepreneurs who massively identify with that.
Brett Kopf: And there's a place and a time for it. Like I ping you, I ping our other investors a lot when we have specific questions that I need help on something. And it's just a delight and joy. Now, let's just acknowledge bias. I've been doing this since 2009. When I first started Remind, I'll never forget this, Chamath, who was one of our first investors, says you guys need to hire a product manager. And I remember looking at my brother, we're like, great, that sounds good. And then we walk out of the meeting and we’re like what is a product manager? I know that might sound ridiculous to the typical like Silicon Valley people watching this or who have built companies or are building companies. Well, we didn't know anything. All we cared about was talking to customers and figuring out how to deliver value to them. We didn't understand all the structure that goes behind building a company yet.
Eric Jorgenson: That’s why I love your story actually. And I tell it to a lot of people in brief. Like it is proof that you do not have to learn all of the crazy Silicon Valley jargon and all this shit. You don't have to read 50 books to go start a company. If you appropriately find and solve a customer's problem, you can learn the rest of the maze as you go. You can find out what a product manager is when you need a product manager. But if you go talk to your 200 teachers and you build a prototype and you take that to market, the growth will come. And if the growth comes, the investors will come, and the knowledge will come, and the team will come and everything else will kind of unfold from that kernel. And I mean, what's maybe most- I feel like a lot of people also grow out of that simple discipline, and I don't think you have. And Omella, maybe we can kind of start that transition toward that piece of the story, is another example of that. Like you are taking everything that you learned from Remind and the experience of Remind and like going back to zero, but with all of the skills and insights that you took and building something out again, following a lot of the same concepts.
Brett Kopf: Yeah, Yiddish word drop, I'm going to drop it right here. You've heard the one, meshuggah, which means crazy. Like you would think that I'm meshuggah or crazy to do this again, because it is so hard to start it. But I love it. It's like it's what I do. And actually, I give talks to a lot of students in classes because I've been in building and education in technology for 10 plus years. And I do clarify with them, like just because they don't want to start a- maybe they don't want to start a business or a small business or a startup, that's okay. Like I used to think that everyone should do it, but it's really difficult, and only certain people really want to do it. There shouldn't be some type of beautiful veil or curtain that makes it seem like it's really wonderful. It's really hard. For me, it's very fulfilling and worth it. But not everyone should be doing it. I'm a little crazy.
Eric Jorgenson: He's a little meshuggah. So, was the problem clear to you when you were at Remind? Did you know you were going to go start another company? Has been brewing for a long time?
Brett Kopf: So just a backstory. So Remind really started scaling in 2011. Remind currently has 30 million active users. 80% of US teachers actively use it, send probably 1 to 5 billion messages a week, very healthy revenue, growing quickly. I'm on the board of that company, a few hundred employees, yada, yada. In 2013 or ’14, I basically tried to build payments into Remind. And the reason is because there were two trends happening at the time. One, in 2011, we were watching everything going on with WeChat and Aline and Kakao, which everyone knows now, but at the time they didn’t it, which is messaging apps in Asia. And what ended up happening was they would build a highly engaging user base via messaging, this is by hand messaging, and then they would build a transaction layer over that to allow people to pay for things. And now it's just common. So, Facebook messenger, Aline, WhatsApp's going to do it very soon. It's taking them a little bit, maybe they already do it. And we're like, wow, there's a similar playbook here, but no one's doing it in education. And also, I saw these teachers collecting, trying to collect a huge amount of money. And at the core, I really liked helping people that I feel like don't have good software and are doing important work in their local communities. I'm a very mission-driven founder. And in our case, that was teachers. And so, I tried to actually build payments into Remind and I failed, which was really hard, but it didn't work.
Eric Jorgenson: How come? Why did it fail?
Brett Kopf: I think that there's many reasons. We were probably 80 people at that point. We had raised $30 million. We had 25 million, 20 million active users. And the expectations were that we should just turn on revenue and it should just rip and start growing really quickly. And it's hard to build a business on top of a business, which is what we were doing, which is why I don't prescribe that people wait to charge for their company. And with Omella, the second we launched it, we made revenue from day one. I don't regret not charging with Remind from day one. I just regret not doing it a bit sooner because it just takes time. Like you hear these stories about these companies ripping from day one, and 99% of the time, or maybe 98, there was a grind for years, and then they finally hit on something, and it grows. And so, I think it was a mixture of expectations, not having enough time, and then I think the third thing was I was too abstracted away from the customer and the product. By that point, I was working on being a CEO and leading the company versus talking to customers as much and being in the product as much. And I am a very product focused founder, same for my brother. He's my co-founder. He was very focused on growth and distribution. So, I think that those are the reasons why. And the other one is it's just really hard. Like along with government, healthcare, and education, those are the three very old, antiquated, super political verticals. And it just moves very slow. It's like there's a 10-year lagging indicator. So, I think that those are the reasons why, and I just couldn't let it go. I couldn't. I just couldn't because I think it's a really big problem.
Eric Jorgenson: So, this problem of teachers collecting money, Remind couldn't quite add it in as a feature, has been sitting on your mind for, what, that's 7 or 8 years now, right?
Brett Kopf: Yeah. I've thought about it. I started thinking about it in 2012 or ’13. I don't know the math on that. It's 2022, so it's been 8 or 9-
Eric Jorgenson: 10 years, yeah.
Brett Kopf: Yeah. And I've tried. It's not like I was just sitting on it. Like I tried and I failed. And it was just low grade brewing of like this thing. And by the way, Stripe, when did Stripe start? Do you know?
Eric Jorgenson: Around 2011, ’10.
Brett Kopf: So, they existed. I don't think that they were nearly as prolific. So they did exist, but there are good. And then we probably even built a prototype on them, but they're an example where they do so much now, like we sit on Stripe Connect and we don't have to worry about this large- They abstract so much away around the MTL license, which means money transmitter license, and like connected accounts and all of these things where we could just focus on what we're gifted at, and they'd focus on core payments infrastructure. It's very enabling.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. So, and I know that was part of- when you first started looking at building Omella- so you left Remind, you took a break, then Omella started brewing a little more. And I remember the deep dive you took into, all right, what are the enabling tech? What are the payments? What does Stripe look like? How do we actually move the money around? What can we build on? as part of the early research. But I want to do a really high def look at that time when you were kind of like you were thinking about starting a company, you were planning on starting a company, but you did really intensive both customer and sort of market and technology research before really even committing to it. And I think that is a very underrated period of time and under studied thing in companies.
Brett Kopf: Yeah. So, we took a break, and then after that break, my brother and I knew we wanted to start a company together. The question was what and why. And we didn't let ourselves immediately do payments and education. We thought to ourselves, like what are the biggest problems that we have, and we care about? And so most people publicly don't know this, but in 2015, my dad died, and it was kind of like a slow process of him dying because he had Parkinsons. And so not only was I running the company and I was getting married soon, my dad was dying, and there's all these immense emotional pressures going on. And he passed from Parkinson's. And so, we really cared about healthcare. And a lot of the specific part of healthcare we started caring about was the financial logistical operations around that, dealing with his will and like nurses because he was in Chicago, and it's just like, it's just horrible. Both to emotionally have to handle it but also the financial burden of it. It's like why isn't there a playbook and like web app to walk you through this? And so we thought about healthcare. And then I basically went and talked to 20 or 30 doctors, nurses, patients, anyone that would touch it, anyone. I talked to your mom. I talked to your mom.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, you talked to my mom. My mom's a nursing administrator. Yeah, I remember you doing that.
Brett Kopf: I was trying to understand what the problem is. We decided not to do anything in healthcare because in my opinion, it doesn't seem to function like a true market. Meaning I have a buyer and I have someone who wants to sell something to that buyer, and there is value exchanged. And in healthcare, I'm super not- I'm the farthest thing from an expert in healthcare, so don't quote me on this, but there's a health insurance company, there's a doctor, and there's a patient, and there's not a clear line. And so, we didn't feel like we were uniquely suited to solve that problem. And there were two other ideas that we had that we said nope, that was one. Another one, I wanted to start an off road rollerblading company. If anyone wants to take this, please do. I know that sounds crazy, but I like rollerblading. I haven't done it for a while, but just like there's mountain biking, why doesn’t it exist where there's inflatable tires with shock absorbers that you can go rollerblading with? And my wife would joke with me because I think I would draw circles on a piece of paper, and I'm not a hardware engineer. I wouldn't know the first thing about building it. Anyway, just to fast forward, we cycled through a bunch of ideas, and I just could not stop thinking about payments. And so, we had a simple framework to decide. One was founder market fit, which I'm sure you've heard before. I don't know who coined it. I think Packy might've been the one to mention it a lot in his articles, Packy McCormick. But it's when the founder has unique gifts or experiences in the specific market they're going after. And we had spent a decade. We understand teachers better than anyone. And I can say that with confidence because we've talked to thousands. We know all the data to support it with financial transactions, and we really care about it, like deeply care about it. It's like, wow, we're not going to build a rocket ship, we'd be really bad at that, but we'd be good at this. And that was one. The other one was like do we want to spend 10 years of our lives plus building this? And the answer is yes because we cared about it so much, and we think it's a huge market. And so that set us off on the path. And that was in August of 2019. And we've been very quiet about it since, just talking to customers and building product. That is all we've done for pretty much two and a half years straight.
Eric Jorgenson: How many customers did you talk to before you started building product?
Brett Kopf: I talked to a lot. So, I've spoken to over 2000- Well, excuse me. Now, I’ve spoken to over 2000. Before we wrote a line of code, I probably spoke to over 500. One-on-one in Zoom because it was, well, a little bit before pre pandemic in-person but mostly Zoom or phone calls. And people always think I'm a little bit crazy for that, but I have a very specific reason and methodology. One, because I believe it is our job, my brother and I, to understand the problem better than anyone, not for the sake of understanding it though, because it informs what we build. And then the second one is for distribution, which most founders don't think about. I shouldn't say that – most first-time founders often don't think about which is how you get users at scale. And I just really like doing it, sometimes too much because I probably over tilt on it because I like doing it so much. So, we've spoken to over 500 before writing a line of code.
Eric Jorgenson: Can you tell us more excruciating detail about this process? Like how do you organize it? What are the conversations like? What are the notes that you take? And what do you do with them once you kind of have those learnings? When do you have like high conviction in an idea that you learned from this process?
Brett Kopf: So, I think that there's two parts of it. First is the infrastructure. I know it sounds basic, but we were pretty early users of Notion, and we didn't realize how powerful and flexible it was. And so, we have a Notion CRM that has a bunch of data in it from my conversations that we have figured out how to structure and quantify. And that leads me to my second point, which is quantitative and qualitative data. Nothing in the beginning is statistically significant because you have like two users or five or ten or fifty or a hundred, it's not stat sig. Stat sig meaning that like you have enough of a sample size so you know that, with confidence, you could say test A is right over test B. And so, what we would do is I would go talk to a bunch of users, and what that looks like is how I actually did it, I would look on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter for anyone who I knew that could potentially be a customer, just like in healthcare when I thought that we might want to go down that route, I said, Eric, your mom is a nurse, can I talk to her? I would find any teacher I knew, any club, any parent teacher association, any micro school. And I wasn't selling. I was doing customer development. Like, “Hey, I'm Brett. I started this thing called Remind. I am thinking about solving a problem in this space because it seems hard. Can you talk to me for 15 minutes?” Usually, they say yes. I'm very flexible to their schedule. And then I talk a little and I listen a lot and I look for trends. And then when I hear those, I immediately summarize my notes. I tag my brother in it. We have a very fast discussion. And then after 20, 30, 50, 100 conversations, you have trends. Because you don't want to make a decision just on one customer because then it's like maybe there's just one voice in the room. But after like, if there's 20, 30, 40 people all saying, God, it's frustrating to do this, I'm using these 10 different systems, by the way, can I pay you money right now for this? It is like, huh, I wonder if something's there. And then we go even deeper to really understand what it is. Because there's a weighting of a problem of course. Everyone knows the whole vitamin versus painkiller, and you really want it to be a pain killer. So, I know that's- I summarized it, but that is the process we use. And it does not stop once we get users. Even at scale at Remind, even though I wasn't doing it as much because I was leading the company, I still did support every day and I talked to customers. I still do that today every day.
Eric Jorgenson: So, how did those- what are some of those trends that you picked up on? Like what were the breadcrumbs that led from, hey, we want to solve a problem in this space to Omella the product as it exists today?
Brett Kopf: It was a few things. The first was the sheer amount of systems that our customers had to use to do what they wanted to do. I can give an example, like if we talked to a parent-teacher association, they would use a mixture between Venmo, spreadsheets, check, cash, Google forms, WuFoo, name your fundraising service because there's a thousand of them, to like operate their back office. It was so much work, and it took them so much time, super inefficient. The second one was they spent a bunch of money on credit card fees if they used something like Square. And then the third one was really important, but I often think that people say more with the way they look than the words they say. And so, when you talk to them, when I would ask them a question, and be like, oh yeah, that was a really big problem for me, in my mind, I'd be like, bullshit, I don't believe you. Because no one wants to hurt your feelings. I’m a nice person. As an entrepreneur and wants to say like, oh, we don't like your idea, but you want to get to truth really fast. And so then I would say like, really? Is that true? How did you actually do that? They're like, well. So, what I look for is when the eyes bulge out of their heads and they are like, gosh, is that frustrating, I use these five different services for it. It takes me 20 hours a week. I'm super frustrated because I have to physically walk to the bank to deposit these things. And by the way, our small organization that collects a hundred thousand a year spends $4,000 in credit card fees. It's crazy. I wish there was something else. I mean, of course, the best thing is if they hand you money right now, which oftentimes doesn't happen that fast. But those are the things tactically that I look for, and then I look for trends in that.
Eric Jorgenson: I mean, I imagine there's an amazing feedback loop between, hi, I'm Brett, I want to understand your problem, they feel like you really do listen and understand, and then you come back a month later or six months later with something that you built to solve their problem. That is, you mentioned distribution quickly as being like a big reason to do that, but that's also a huge bond with a customer and proof of work, proof of effort, proof of the intent that you have to really serve them.
Brett Kopf: Yeah. And in the early days, we're not a big corporate company, I want them to know who I am – I'm married, my wife's name is Courtney, I have a little boy. I want to know about them because I really want to understand them. I want to understand their persona. I want to understand why a micro school, I don't know if they're calling them like a president or a leader, like the owner of a micro school decides to start this and have 30 kids and collect a million dollars a year. Like why do they do that? Especially if they have five kids of their own. What propels them to do that? Because it helps me do- Everything is in service of understanding the problem deeply. The more I understand the problem, the more we can solve the problem. It is not their job-
Eric Jorgenson: It is not their job to articulate.
Brett Kopf: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, we need to understand it really well. That's why we ask so many questions.
Eric Jorgenson: It's interesting to see Omella’s sort of customer evolve. Like you're now in the education industry. It's not just teachers who use this product. I think you mentioned PTA heads, you mentioned micro schools, you've mentioned principals. It is now like- How much wider is the purview, I guess, maybe of Omella tean Remind was in terms of who the market is for who for the problem that this solves?
Brett Kopf: Yeah, good question. It's very different. Remind was “I am a teacher, I teach between pre-K and K, call it, 20, up to college and I have one problem.” Omella is different. There are multiple segments – PTA, micro school, club, et cetera. Thematically, they all have a similar problem, but if you really dive in deep, it's a little bit different. And so, it's a very hard problem to solve because the market we're going after is quite fragmented, but they all have similar attributes. They all collect a certain amount of money. They all have a very big problem. They all don't have a single way to like operate their back office. They all spend a ton of money in credit card fees. And so, there is a very similar theme amongst them.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. How much money does an organization need to gather before it's kind of like, oh, this is like our bread and butter?
Brett Kopf: Usually anywhere from $50,000 to 2 million, but any time that an organization collects at least a hundred thousand dollars, it's like, God, is this complex. And just for anyone who doesn't understand why, if I lead a club, like a college club even, we have a bunch of college clubs using us, like Spartan Ski Club at Michigan State, they have 2000 members. They have to collect registration info for 2000 members. They have to charge for dues. They have to charge for ticket sales. They have to sell merchandise. Where you in Spartan Ski Club?
Eric Jorgenson: No, but I went to some of the parties.
Brett Kopf: Did you? I wasn't in it. I didn't go to any of their parties. It's just a very complex use case. And zooming out, our hypothesis is as follows after talking to customers. If you were to look at a square investor presentation, like they would have the deck of their TAM and they would say SMBs are for customer, then mid-market, then enterprise. We believe that there's an entire layer below SMBs – that’s Omella – and there's millions of organizations, and I say organization because usually they're not a registered LLC or C Corp. They are some version of a 501(c)3 nonprofit, a school, a micro school, a music school, a karate school. They collect a ton of money. They have a very acute problem. There is no single system that solves it in a single place. And so that's why we're super focused on it. We really love the space.
Eric Jorgenson: That's awesome. I mean, and there's a lot of money to collect and a lot of information to manage. Like, collecting a million, 2 million, like that's bigger than a lot of small businesses and enormously complex.
Brett Kopf: Yeah. I can give you one specific example. Like there's a band in Illinois, they have 10 different physical forms that parents and students have to sign. They have 12 different times during the year where they have to collect money for different things – band dues, ticket sales, going on a field trip, all of these different things. And they use so many different systems to manage it. It’s not their fault, but they're doing a wonderful job trying to hack it together. But like anytime an entrepreneur sees that and they're like, huh, this stack can be simplified into one. I wonder if that would help them.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. It is amazing that we are now like, I don't know, 50 years into building software, like aggressively as a planet, and there's still huge, huge unsolved things like this, that like entire- it is like bigger than an industry. It's like a layer, to your point, like a layer of people who just are wildly underserved by the tools that exist. And that something so much more precise can come in and solve a huge problem for them is incredible. I believe a lot of people think that that's like all the software that exists that will exist. And it's like there's still so much opportunity there if you actually go and explore for problems and go fishing and listen and seek ways to improve people's lives.
Brett Kopf: I totally agree. I think it's very early days. And especially there’s like all this crypto and web3 stuff, which I'm far from an expert on and there's wonderful people solving it. But I think sometimes people forget that there are customers that are still doing things via physical pen and paper who are using really antiquated systems. If it's even software, all built on Cobalt, like for an engineer, or cold fusion, like really old systems. And we really want to help them. We really want to help them.
Eric Jorgenson: Let's talk a little bit about the distribution because I think that was something that Remind did really, really well. It kind of seems to have similar characteristics. It's something that a lot of people overlook, or it seems like good product is inherently distribution, which is not always true. But Remind grew really, really quickly. And I think that Omella is poised to do much the same thing, in part due to your customer development, but I think also sort of the inherent distribution in the product. I'd love for you to kind of maybe tie those two together or show us how you can do that more deliberately.
Brett Kopf: Yeah, there's similar themes between Remind and Omella, and it's as follows: One entity needs to either reach, communicate, or collect information from hundreds of entities. And an entity could be a teacher, an organization, for a different company, you can even call it a small business, and they have a bunch of end points that they have to collect money from or they have to communicate with, students, parents, coaches, or maybe they have to collect money again from parents, or a PTA collect money from parents, or a nonprofit has to collect money or donations from their constituent. And so, the whole hypothesis is if we can get this and help them, they'll help us get this – very simple. And so just to give an example for Remind, I think in the early days, every teacher that we would acquire and activate, and I'm happy to talk about what those terms mean, they would bring in anything from like 20 to 40 students and parents, and a subset of those would invite more teachers. And so there's this inherent flywheel. And look, like you hear a lot of this stuff in the Valley, there's no fancy growth hacks that we did. We built a good product, we removed friction, we measured it very frequently, and we really helped our customer. Like we solved a big problem. If your product doesn't solve a problem in the first place, then it's not going to grow. There's no magic sauce to it.
Eric Jorgenson: I kind of increasingly think like no matter what companies do, they don't actually sell their product. Like their customers sell their product for them. It's pretty- if you go through life believing that the only way things grow is through word of mouth, it will guide you much more right than wrong. Especially in industries like education, I feel like, where it's such a small world and people are so closely tied and everybody wants to know what everybody else is using, and they talk all the time. And I feel like Omella will have similar dynamics.
Brett Kopf: Yeah, for sure. It was a little bit different in the respect that like we iterated on Remind and there was a single problem to solve and it just started ripping, and we've been a bit more methodical and we've approached Omella in a different way. And our Head of Engineering calls it the theory of constraints. He didn't come up with this framework. Have you heard that before, the theory of constraints?
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's Goldratt? Eli Goldratt, right? The goal, the theory of constraints?
Brett Kopf: I actually have no idea who even said it. It's just, it was the first time I heard it and I really liked the concept of it, but his name is Philippe, he told me, he's like you basically in the nuclear, in the next, call it, thirty, sixty, ninety days, you figure out what is the biggest blocker, and then you remove that constraint. And so when we thought about building a company, of course, the first thing to do at Omella specifically was you have a hypothesis, you talk to customers. But then when you think about growth, you start backwards, which is do they retain? Then are they engaged then? Then do they activate? And can you acquire them? And I actually want to talk about this for a sec because I think it's really important. Retention means over a long period of time, do they keep coming back? The best way to have this is if you have a long-term cohort analysis. In the beginning, you don't because you're just starting. But over 5, 10 years, for Remind as an example, a large majority of the customers keep coming back. And then engagement is the frequency in which they come. There's a bunch of ways to measure this. Usually they are monthly active, weekly active, daily active. If you have a very sticky product, then you get into words like weekly active over daily; of all users every week, how active are they every day? And then you get to activation, which is when they hit your web property, do they actually sign up and collect $1, send one message, et cetera, and then acquire them. Can you get a lot of them? That's the framework. And so the way we've approached it is eliminating threats from retention to engagement to activation. And now we're eliminating the threat of acquisition. Of course, there's other things like business model and margin and employee retention and culture. We think about all those things too. But specifically, as it relates to how we're building this business, that's how we're approaching it, and it has been super fun.
Eric Jorgenson: I love the focus that you mentioned before on removing friction. How do you- when you approach one of those bottlenecks, how often do you find that the solution is removing something or simplifying versus adding something new?
Brett Kopf: It depends on the company. So, Remind, it was often simplifying even more. Remind solved- So Remind went niche to- we started with one thing, and then we layered on all these services. It is a very full-fledged messaging app right now. We do everything from like tutoring to we have a product where we sell to schools. We have an emergency alert system. There's a bunch, but we started with one thing. Omella is different because the problems are very wide and deep because we replaced so many different services. And so, when I talk to our team about what we're building, we kind of have an X and Y axis of Omella needs to be really powerful, so it has to do a lot. And then up here are my figures, so my face right up here, it needs to be really simple. And that's very hard to do. Salesforce, as just an example, is extremely powerful, and it also takes six months to onboard and it's super expensive. It's probably not simple. Venmo is super simple, but it lacks power. And so, I think that there's a balance, and you shouldn't just like say, oh, Omella did this, Remind did this, you should think to yourself like, well, what is right for my company given my customers and my market.
Eric Jorgenson: I think last time I saw the Omella homepage, I think that was the tagline – a powerfully simple way to collect money, for organizations to collect money.
Brett Kopf: Yeah. We might've AB tested that and iterated on it. And just a fun fact, when we do that, we both talk to like three or four customers and get their feedback like, hey, what do you think of this? And then we also put it on the site and measure it just to get both. Because again, we're not- it's not like at Remind when you have 25, 30 million users, you like put up an AB test, run a test, and within a few days, you have a statistically significant answer. Can't do that in the early days when you're just starting out.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, qualitative and quantitative, definitely both. Pursuing both at the same time and making sure they both agree at the early stage. I'd love to do some kind of first company, second company comparisons. As a founder, you talked about massive willpower and sort of naivete powering you through some of the stuff that you went through at Remind. How different does that feel now as a second time founder, where you kind of know what you're getting into, but do you feel a little more- a little less just driven by like raw, stubborn persistence, or do you feel like that is as necessary of a component sort of the second time around as it was the first?
Brett Kopf: My wife would tell you I still have raw stubborn persistence. I'm pretty stubborn. I think there's a few big changes. One, I'm young, but I'm not as young as I used to be. And I also have different responsibilities. I have a child, I'm married, I have a dog, and we'll probably have more kids. And so, I've sort of reframed what matters to me and why. And this part is kind of important. At my first company, Remind, I would work 17, 18 hours a day. I didn't eat healthy. Everything was in sacrifice of the company. And I was exhausted from it. Like overweight, emotionally just tired. And when I took a break in 2018, I sort of took a step back and said, well, what matters to having a good life for me? And it was three things. And I don't necessarily believe in goals because you kind of run and try to achieve something, and then you're constantly trying to achieve it versus enjoying the day to day. But there are themes. And the first theme is health for me, both emotional and physical. The second one is my family. And then the third one is Omella. And if I don't have the first one, then I can't support the other two. And so tactically, what that means, I work out five or six days a week, I fast, I do all that stuff. Like I try to eat healthy. I try not to eat that many carbs even though I do. And that reframing has been pretty helpful. The reason I say pretty helpful is because I'm not perfect at it. It's still hard because I'm just stretched so thin. But back to the initial point, I do not have the physical amount of time in the day to do 17 hours. So, I have to work a bit smarter. I still wake up at 4:30 in the morning every day, and I'm working by 4:45 or 5:00 because it's two hours before my baby wakes up, and I want to spend an hour. And that works for me. Like it might not work for other people. But that is probably the biggest change is figuring out how to manage time in a different phase of life, usually which comes back to what you're an expert at, which is leverage, which means like figuring out how to use your time efficiently given the gifts you have.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I mean, you approach that differently a little bit as a person. Do you think about how leverage fits into structuring your company any differently the second time around?
Brett Kopf: What do you mean by structuring the company?
Eric Jorgenson: I mean, do you have- are you thinking more in terms of building a small, really high-powered team, hiring more slowly, hiring less people, or maybe relying more on vendors like Stripe? You used Twilio for the first one, Stripe on the second one. Do you think about the pros and cons of each decision as a founder and company builder differently having been through the full cycle with Remind already?
Brett Kopf: I try, but I don't want to sound like some guru who has figured it all out that's going to spout off a bunch of things that are sort of like philosophical because I'm not perfect. I'm not perfect like that. Let me think. I don't know if I actually have a good answer for this. I don't think I have a good answer.
Eric Jorgenson: Are you hiring differently?
Brett Kopf: Yeah, we're hiring super differently. Yeah, so I guess that's one. We're a hundred percent remote, fully distributed, entire product and engineering team is in South America. Technically they're 1099 contractors, but they're full-time employees, they have equity ownership in the company, and they're wonderful. Like we feel really strong about it. And it's kind of crazy, we've been working with some of them for over a year and a half, and I feel like they're close friends that I physically never met face-to-face. And so, we definitely feel strong about the all remote thing, US time zone. That's one. The other thing, I guess I do have an answer for this, the other thing is the way I think about companies is like building a very efficient engine. And the first part of the company with David and I was building a customer development engine and inputs to that engine was our Notion CRM and figuring out how to ask questions and what the questions are and how we ask them and who we talk to. Once that started working, the second engine was figuring out how to build it efficiently, and the input to that is the right team and the right people. And then we have to scale that engine, both sort of like the technology we use, Stripe, and all the different inputs. And then, there's a different part, which is like, okay, now that we are in the customer acquisition engine, how do we build that engine? And we're figuring that out right now. And I never sort of had that framing at Remind. It was more so holy shit, we're growing really quickly, like never have control, constantly looking behind my- like, oh my God, I'm not fast enough. And this one's a bit more methodical. We take more time to make decisions that end up saving us time in the long run. And I think that's because we're just a bit more experienced.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's a really interesting- I mean, Remind, I think it had a slow burn as you found the problem, but those stories of like, it was like a light switch flip and you were just like running full sprint for years, 5 years maybe, longer. You were just like the zero to billion happened so, so, so fast.
Brett Kopf: Yeah. When you hit it, you hit it. Let me give context on that because I never understood it. Like you would just hear ABC company has 50 million users or X million users, but when you actually go through it, we hit. And then within like three months, there were points where we were adding 2 to 300,000 users a day. At our peak in August, there was one point I think in a single day where we added 425,000 unique users, of which a large majority of them retained with like 10 engineers. It was wild. And just to metaphorically conceptualize that, we went to Michigan State, I went to like three football games, and I think they can support 80,000 people in the stadium. And so, it was 10 stadiums of human beings signing up on our site. And you should Google, by the way, if you Google Remind 101 homepage, there's a picture of like a stick figure I drew of like a person sending mail to another person, this janky thing. It's just wild. And it's a very fortunate problem to have, but like the growth was just crazy. We didn't have any time to-
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I mean, I imagine now it's a little bit of a luxury to kind of be able to think in that high leverage way instead of just like everything's on fire. It's good fire. It's positive, but like, oh my God, you can't possibly work hard enough or fast enough to keep up with all these things and just keep the servers from falling over.
Brett Kopf: Yeah. And of course, it would kind of be nice if it were that, but it's just a- We’ve been working on this for two and a half or three years. And we're now at this point, we're now at the point where we're starting to get the servers on fire and it's starting to grow in a really healthy way. It's just a different business. It's just a totally different business than Remind.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. It's very interesting. I mean, for all of the parallels that there are, I don't know, it's been very interesting to hear kind of some of the nuances, because from the outside, it's kind of like similar audience, similar distribution, but the differences between kind of the nodes and the depth versus breadth and the precision of the initial sort of product is really interesting. This is one of my favorite questions. It doesn't always work, but it's an interesting one if it does. What are the most common heuristics or mental models or principles that you use to sort of make decisions, like rules of thumb? And I can give you examples if that's helpful.
Brett Kopf: Yeah, give me one example.
Eric Jorgenson: So potentially at Remind, like Jeff Bezos had a thing for each year or season of the company had like a principle that was like one was get big fast, like every decision that you make should be geared towards adding more users or getting more volume through the platform. And then another season of the company was getting our house in order. It's like, hey, we're going to enter a chapter of rapid scalability. For me personally, it is often like leverage personally. So now I'm thinking through like what is the highest value use of my time? Or what are the things that only I can do? Or those are sort of like things I keep coming back to that are principles for how I make a decision. And I wonder maybe what those are for you that are top of mind, at least at this point in your company.
Brett Kopf: Yeah. I mean, so I love the concept of having a single thing. I don't know if I actually have a principle for it though. I mean, for me with Omella, number one problem is acquiring customers. That is it. We have eliminated every other threat and so we just need to acquire them. So, my entire time and thinking is spent on acquiring customers. Because when they come, they retain, we have a positive business model with clear unit economics, all that. I don't think this framework necessarily applies to decision-making, but it's really important. Like when we started Imagine K12 with Geoff Jeff Ralston, I mentioned this in the beginning, he said to me talk to customers a lot. And I don't know if he told me this or like I kind of extrapolated this framework, but talk to customers, solve a problem and build a simple product to solve that problem and just rinse and repeat. And it's so simple, but like that is what we run our- If you stripped away everything we've learned over the last 15 years, all the frameworks and customers and growth and employees, yada, yada, that's really at the core of what we do. Like we try to make things really simple. And we know that they're simple because they understand the problem because we talk to customers. That's it. John Doerr, who is one of the great investors from Kleiner Perkins, was an early investor in Remind. And I think he invested in Remind for two reasons. One just because we were just growing extremely fast. And the second thing is because when he visited our little office on, God, Brannan. Was it Brannon? I don't even remember the street in Soma. It was so long ago. I don't even know if Brannon is a street. You know in Soma?
Eric Jorgenson: Brannon's definitely a street. I think I've been to that office. I think you're right on Brannon.
Brett Kopf: It was this little- we had like a little bed in the upstairs where like one of our employees would sleep when they came in from out of town. Anyway, we had a sheet of paper above the bathroom by the mirror. So, whenever you used the bathroom, no matter which way you were looking, it said, “What is our goal for week WAT,” which was weekly active teachers. That was our goal. And that was it, and there's a single number on it. And every week we updated it and it was everywhere. And he loved it. And we loved it too because we were so focused. So just relate to the idea of like a single goal, it was super helpful. Anytime, and I made this mistake, that we set multiple goals for the company, no matter the size, we almost always failed.
Eric Jorgenson: That is very interesting. I remember having similar challenges. We were kind of like, for a while when we're a small team, it's kind of like we can afford to only have one goal at a time. And as we added to the team and added to the complexity of the business model, we kind of had this feeling like, okay, now we have to be able to do multiple things at once. And I don't ever feel like we actually reached that stage. It's interesting to hear. I mean, you built a much, much, much bigger company, an organization, and still, even at some scale, you still didn't really handle multiple objectives at the same time well.
Brett Kopf: Yeah, but just so we're like brutally honest here, I don't actually think I succeeded at doing multiple things well. When we brought in very senior experienced management into Remind, they did. Like they not only grew the user base, but they also grew the business model. And I learned a lot from it. It was very helpful for me. But they did. And so, it's definitely possible. I think though, again, like the takeaway framing is, especially when you're small, you have such a small team and you can't do a lot at once, it's just like really, really focus on one specific thing. And for us right now, that's customer acquisition.
Eric Jorgenson: In your experience at the incubator or mentoring other companies, I know you invest in companies as well now, do you find it like sad or funny or whatever, like there's this very simple framework that has worked for you throughout your career that is talk to the customers, understand the problem, build something simple. I probably have those three points wrong actually now that I say them out loud. Did I get them right?
Brett Kopf: It is talk to customers, solve a problem, and build a simple product, but it's fine.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay. Do you find people just not doing that and totally trying to over like add complexity or skip to level five, and do you watch people fail by overthinking it rather than just like following the simple playbook?
Brett Kopf: No, I don't. Most of the companies, so I've probably invested in like 30 plus or minus companies, mostly through funds. But most of them, I just really like the entrepreneurs and the problem they're solving and I just get out of their way and anything they need, I help them. They usually happen to be very customer focused and like they have somewhat of aligned mentality, but even if they don't, I'm not going to put my way, I'm not going to say like, oh, you have to do it my way. Because there's just two ways to skin a cat. Like one of my other friends who started a company, he has hardly talked to any customers, and he has like a very healthy, engaged, growing user base. And he's more of a technologist and he just built this thing and solved it, and he's good at marketing and it's working. So, there's just multiple ways to do it. It's this is just my way.
Eric Jorgenson: Where would you like to see Omella grow over the next 5, 10 years?
Brett Kopf: 5 to 10 years is a long time horizon. Let me do a reverse order. The first order of business is to get to break even or profitability because we want to control our own destiny and grow really quickly to serve our market. Longer term, if we zoom out, remember we said that square investor presentation, these millions of small organizations, we really want to become, and I don't want to overuse this term, but like the operating system for them. We think it's really valuable to help them focus on what they're gifted at, which is leading, teaching, coaching, preaching. Like we want to help them do that and use very simple software to abstract away all this crap. That's where I see it. Hopefully we won't have hundreds of employees. We have a small team of 10 right now. I mean, it's going to be more than that by then. But I don't think that more people equates to higher productivity or revenue or engagement.
Eric Jorgenson: How do you ensure that you can keep a small sort of high performance team versus solving problems with headcount? Like as a company builder, how do you set yourself up for that future?
Brett Kopf: Almost all of it comes down to the leader you hire. And I'm sorry if you hear that in the background, I have an upset baby crying. If you can hear that, I apologize.
Eric Jorgenson: Poor Ellis.
Brett Kopf: Yeah. We have a sick baby. He has a fever, but he'll be fine. So, I think the answer is leverage through the best people. It's like if you hire the people who are really, really good and get out of their way, then they will somehow solve the problem. And you have to be able to get out of their way. And I think we're actually pretty, my brother and I are pretty good at that. Like we find people who are domain experts who have aligned values and move. And for at least Omella, very aligned that more people don't equate to higher productivity, revenue engagement. It's like we want to build this in a long-term profitable way. We obviously need people; they’re like the engine that powers this bigger engine and this company. But we don't have to hire hundreds of people, at least yet, unless this machine is just ripping, which we're not there yet.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Okay. As we kind of wind down a little bit, I want to return from the end to the fundamental skill that you have of talking to customers, bringing that back, like you said you've talked to 2000 people, organizations throughout Omella. How does that- as you took the product back to them in succession, how many of those sort of become customers, become evangelists, become marketers for you? What does that process feel like?
Brett Kopf: Yeah. A few of them have become customers, a lot of them have become evangelists, and some of them, I haven't even contacted again because we're not ready. That part's hard. Like I want to pull the trigger and go, but there's still a few more things that we have to put in place. Now that doesn't mean we're waiting. Like who is it? Rita Hoffman who says like if you're not embarrassed by your first product then you're not shipping it. We've shipped it. We have customers. GMV is growing, revenue is growing. I would say that we have product user fit. But there are still a few important puzzle pieces that we aren't ready to scale yet until the core engine is working. And there's a few more things that we have to put in place, and that's going to be happening very soon over the next, I don't know, six months plus or minus, but we want to put those pieces in place before we really start to unleash.
Eric Jorgenson: It's interesting to know and sort of see which customers have their problem fully solved at which set of features or set of completion. Like I've been using Omella for a long time and have seen sort of the platform evolve. And I know you've gone through really interesting kind of like, okay, now we have to trash the MVP platform and rebuild. How are those decisions where you're like, all right, it is now the right time to go from V1 to V, and what are the inputs to that decision?
Brett Kopf: We ripped on our first product and had to start from scratch, which was brutal, but sometimes you have to move slow to move fast. And we did that for a bunch of reasons, which are irrelevant to this podcast. But it was very hard to do that. How did it- was the question when we decided to do that or how we decided to do that?
Eric Jorgenson: How did you decide?
Brett Kopf: Oh, based on talking to a bunch of customers, having a bunch of data, looking at usage metrics, and then looking at the customers that we've talked to who have not signed up. And then we have these terms internally, which is are they a blocker, a need, or a want? And we looked at trends for features that blocked customers. And we focused on just those. And customers that mattered, by the way. We did the whole Sean Ellis survey. And there's some customers that don't matter. And what we've found, just for our company, is that the more money an organization collects, the bigger the problem they have and the more that they need and the more features they need. And we're kind of getting to the point now where we're pretty feature- pretty robust with the features that we have.
Eric Jorgenson: I mean, that's a great alignment to have – the bigger the customer, the bigger the problem, and the more they need you. That's exactly the way you'd want it to go.
Brett Kopf: Yeah, makes total sense.
Eric Jorgenson: Awesome. Well, I'm very excited to see this thing evolve. I think Omella is a beautiful product and brand, and I love the problem that you're solving, and I don't know, how mission-driven you are and the specific mission that you've chosen. I believe everybody's got the right to pick their own mission and should, and founder market fit is incredibly important. But it's just very, it's energizing to watch you sort of apply yourself fully to this problem because it means so much to you, and you have the skills and conviction to go solve this problem and run through it. And I feel like you're in your element building this company. And it's really exciting to watch and be a part of.
Brett Kopf: Thank you. I would agree. And I appreciate you having me on here.
Eric Jorgenson: Thank you so much. I admire you and your skill and your work and your work ethic and always have. And it is a pleasure to have you here and share some of what I've learned from you over 10 plus, 15 years of friendship now and bring it to the world and get to shine a light on you. It's a pleasure to be able to do it.
Brett Kopf: Thanks, Eric. I appreciate that. That's very nice of you.
Eric Jorgenson: I appreciate you hanging out with us today. Thank you so much for listening. If you liked this episode, you will probably also like my episode with Shane Mac, another friend and founder who talks in frameworks and from the trenches of being a CEO and creating companies out of nothing. Another is Kevin Espiritu. Both great founders, great insights, interesting businesses. I think you'll learn a lot from both of those. You can support the show by checking out the Founders Podcast at founderspodcast.com or investing with me and my partners through Rolling Fun. Links to both are in the show notes. For a free way to support the show, please, please leave a quick review or text this episode to a friend you think would enjoy it. Those are the best two ways to help this show grow, help us reach more people, grow the community, and get bigger guests, which I would love to share with you. Thank you for listening. Have a great one.
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