Extreme clarity, conviction, and charisma.

Those are three C’s I believe to be super fundamental to getting a startup off the ground, stabilised, and slipstreaming the air currents towards the moon.

That’s what I’ve found at least in the last 18 weeks.

Welcome back, this is Week 18 of The Unicorn Founder, and it’s been a wild week.

We’re looking for funding, US customers, and as much working-feedback* as possible every single day.
*feedback from actual target market users/customers using the product.

This Week’s Update Overview:

• 🖊️ The Recap: Pitch-Decks, VC/Accelerator applications, Harvard CS50 (lol), and a whole bunch of Reddit + deeper clarity and conviction.

• 😤 The Current Obstacle: Funding.

• 🕺 The Next Week Ahead: A (confidential) but very exciting proof-of-concept we’re building, US customer acquisition, funding request submissions.

🖊️ The Recap:

Funding

Y-Combinator

What’s your vision?
Can this turn into the next billion dollar company?
We have had several people come in with the same idea, we don’t like it, how is your’s different?

Those are a few questions often asked in YC application interviews — and they’re super gnarly.

Honestly, going through this application to YC; the prep-work for a potential interview, the research, and just the gravitas of realising that I need to have 100000% conviction of why and how this is a valuable company has been invaluable.

It’s forced me to:
1. Get serious about knowing where I want to take this all.
2. Poke extremely deep holes into what we have so far and the “big idea”.
3. Investigate and know intimately why you could fail.
4. Question every single bias you have subconsciously believed.

Pressure affects people differently, but for me, that’s where I thrive — it’s been the perfect pressure on me, as the CEO of this so-called potential billion dollar company, to get the evidence in order and be clear on where we’re going.

Because if I don’t, we die.

→ I love that kind of responsibility.

Other VCs/Accelerators

We’re not just applying to YC, but to a ton other in order to hedge our bets.
And they all require pitch-decks, so I realised it was time to get one together.

This was something I initially thought to be a waste of time — a distraction.
→ That turned into one of the most valuable uses of my time this week.

Suddenly, I needed to have a clear, concise, and (ideally) an eloquent answer for:
1. The problem we’re solving
2. The solution we’re offering
3. Competition & how we’re different
4. Market size
5. Why now
6. Why us
7. Fund apportioning
and so forth…

That’s why it took so much time from me this week: It was a lot more difficult than initially expected, but so damn worth it.

I gained so much more conviction about:
— The impact we want to have.
— The greater goal we want to achieve.
— And the roadmap going forward, including potential speedbumps.

Plus, I gained clarity on the vision & mission at large:

Vision: To completely automate realtors’ sales pipeline, from lead gen, to lead qualification, nurturing, and confirmation all with AI.
Mission: To let realtors do what realtors do best; make meaningful relationships with their clients.

All of the above is of course a work-in-progress always, but a lot of progress was made this week in that regard.

If you’d like to view our pitch-deck, here is the link.
Any, and all feedback is invited.

Harvard CS50

It has been amazing to say the least.
But, I have not completed it yet, around 45% through — as set out as a goal last Sunday.

I’ve managed to find a good hour every morning to give to it, which has been powerfully productive.

However, that’s obviously not my main priority — especially when there are time-bound deadlines due like the pitch-deck needed for funding applications.

So, I decided to pivot mid-way through the week and make the pitch-deck no. 1 priority
And spent pretty much all my time, when not dealing with customers, building, researching, and refining the pitch deck.

Reddit Rabbithole

Oh my goodness. Every single conversation I have on there has been a profitable use of time.

The question I ask myself is why I didn’t dig into this internet goldmine sooner in my life!

The key thing I’ve found: You need to filter the available channels of communication down to the good ones and then go all-in on those.

Because, as you can probably guess, there’s a bunch of junk there as well.

Just try not to waste too much time filtering through the noise by getting distracted.

But, what I’ve managed to find:
1. US Customers
2. A bunch of people also building tech in the real estate industry — which has been a great opportunity for shared learnings/ideas/tips.
3. A ton of market feedback from actual realtors, lawyers, agency owners, etc.

Those are pretty much the big three you need to aide your progress:
1. Customers
2. Collaboration
2. Market Feedback

I have been really pleased and pleasantly surprised by the amount of value I have gotten.

One last thing: Self-promotion is seriously frowned upon (thankfully didn’t need to make that mistake myself to find that out).
But giving genuine help to others is encouraged and gets you greatttt “red-cred” (I’d like to term that) which propagates even more feedback, customers, and collaboration coming your way as you sleep.

And yes, my Reddit DMs are now overflowing, it’s hectic. But good.

So get onto Reddit if you need any of the above three: Customers, Collaboration, or Market Feedback, or all!

😤 The Current Obstacle:

So, my co-founder Aditya, and two other guys in the founding team; Parthiv and Sowrabh are all finishing up their final year of university.

Which is not great — because a lot of their time is taken away to go to class, study for exams, and write those exams.

Whilst I build full-time.

So, in order to solve this problem, we need some funding.

Why?

If we get funding, the guys can leave Uni (finish their exams online so they still graduate), which leads into the following cycle:

Funding → No more uni → more product building → more customers can be onboarded → more progress & traction → more validation that we’re building something people want → more chance at getting into YC/investment from top VCs like Sequoia or a16z.

You see our dilemma?

But it doesn’t stop us — for now we just make do with what we can → doing things that don’t scale, which allow us to get some small, consistent traction at least.

🕺 The Next Week Ahead:

1. US Customers: We have ±30 estate agencies in the pipeline and they’re slow (very slow) — so gonna try my luck with supposedly faster adopters and action-takers in the US.

2. Funding: Sending in applications to ±25 VCs, accelerators, angels.

3. Reddit: Continuing to slog this beast and extract the maximum value I can out of it every single day.

4. Social Media: Continuing to be as consistent as possible with posting at best, every single day on IG and LinkedIn.

5. Education: Continuing to crack on with some work each morning, as well as work on the Data Science module from MIT.

See you next week, trust it will be with some awesome results 🤠

😌 Want to give honest feedback?

All you need to do is reply to this email to tell me your experience versus expectations.

I’ll see what I can do to improve either a) the experience or b) the expectations I am promoting.

Or just thank you for the really helpful feedback :))))

Did I miss anything? Hit that Reply button and let me know what you’d like to see.

Did someone forward this to you? You can follow the billion dollar company journey here.

Want to connect? Here is my LinkedIn, IG, X (aka. Twitter), TikTok, and YouTube.

Ciao, see you next week!

Ethan