S2E21 - Mark Smukler, Founder @ Flow

Mark Smukler is the founder & CEO of Flow, a location-based app that makes it easy to discover the best coworking spaces, gyms, spas and experiences around you. Flow is now available in 50 locations across London with the target being to have 300 locations signed up by the end of the year.

The now exited founder of tenant & resident management platform, Bixby sat down to shed some light on the decision making process behind enrolling in a computer science course, his rather unconventional approach to raising investment during his time at Bixby and the learnings he is taking into the launch of his second business venture.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to riding unicorns. The podcast about growth startups on James Pringle. And my co-host is Hector Mason from episode one ventures. This week, we're delighted to have Mark Smukler from Flow on. Mark started out in banking before training as a software engineer. He then founded a company called Bixby, which was acquired by hello, Alfred in 2019.

[00:00:35] He stayed there as director of product and recently launched flow, which is an exciting new business. Challenging traditional membership models. We have a new flexible model. So let's get started

[00:00:48] James: Hi, Mark. Welcome to riding unicorns

[00:00:55] Mark: at James sector. Thanks so much for having me today.

[00:00:58] James: Awesome. No problem. It's a pleasure to have [00:01:00] you. so we always like to start by getting a full background on our guests. So maybe you can take us right back to the start of your career.

[00:01:06] Mark: Sure. So. I graduated from New York university in New York city in 2012 and, like many good Stearns. These are those who went to the stern school of business. I started my career in finance and I had spent two years in investment banking at a boutique investment bank called Stephens, Inc, which is a little rock Arkansas based investment bank owned by the Stevens family.

[00:01:30] I knew at that time that I wanted to operate a business one day, I had no idea what that might mean. I thought finance might be a great way to start my career. I found pretty quickly, at least doing M and a or merger acquisition advisory that I was learning a lot about how to sell a business at, maturity or how to help a business buy another company.

[00:01:55] But I wasn't quite getting that experience of actually operating a. And one of the [00:02:00] companies that we were advising, I'd spent some time with the founders and the CEO and the COO. And I told them that I wanted to start a business one day and they turned them in. They said, you know, mark, as long as you're not playing, you're watching.

[00:02:13] And they were basically implying that as long as I was gaining experience, but really from the sidelines. I could potentially be doing that forever and I'm not actually learning what it's like to start a company. So a couple of weeks later, I left my career in investment banking and began my entrepreneurial journey.

[00:02:32] And over the last 10 years, I started by teaching myself how to code and then spending some time at some tech boot camps, like general assembly. I became a freelance engineer for about two years, spent most of that time, building websites for real estate companies in New York. having gone to NYU, I knew a lot of people in the real estate industry and most of them didn't know any software engineers.

[00:02:57] So I became like the tech guy for that,[00:03:00] group of friends. And then I stumbled upon a ton of inefficiencies in the property management. I had a client who was still primarily collected in the mail. I had no good way to communicate with tenants. No good way of processing maintenance issues and was really just operating their business in a very archaic.

[00:03:20] I got very interested in that as a problem and more interested that there wasn't a good solution in the market. And so in 2015, I built a company called Bixby. That was a B2B SAS solution for property managers to deliver an exceptional resident experience. over the course of the next five years, we scaled that business to about 150,000 units or apartments on the platform across the us.

[00:03:44] And in 2019, we sold that to another venture backed resonant experience company called hello, Alfred, where I spent the next two years leading product development. and then started to look at bill bringing that business to the UK. And that's what brought me here to [00:04:00] London. And now I'm working on a new company called flow that gives users on demand access to the best nearby coworking spaces, gyms, spas, and experiences.

[00:04:09] And I'm sure we'll get more into that.

[00:04:11] James: Awesome. The membership model is not a slight class path, but you guys are doing much more than just gyms. Jim's that right?

[00:04:19] Mark: Yep. That's exactly right. And we actually don't even do memberships. what we're really going for is flexibility, a year ago when COVID hit, I started to think a lot about remote work, distributed teams hybrid work, if that was going to stay.

[00:04:34] And if it was what that meant for consumer behavior, what it meant for how people interact with physical spaces, definitely what it meant for commercial real estate as an industry. And what I hung my hat on was freedom of moving. That the flexibility of working from home or from your office or from some third space allows individuals to [00:05:00] move more freely.

[00:05:01] hopefully therefore explore more of their city, coordinate their day, a little bit, based around their life, rather than so much around their workplace and in doing so. I wanted to give individuals the ability to find access and pay for the places that they need when they want.

[00:05:20] Hector: Cool. Very interesting.

[00:05:22] winding back the clock a little bit. When you went off to do an engineering course or computer science, what was the reason for that? because I think, me personally and lots of our listeners have probably, business ideas and thought, okay, I can pay someone to build an MVP.

[00:05:35] I can vote it myself, but it's going to be terrible. I have to not, to code, or find an agency or something like that. So what, was the purpose of doing your, computer software course? And was it to pursue a career as an entrepreneur? Or was that just something that you felt was, a wise thing to do?

[00:05:51] Mark: Yeah, so fortunately in the last 10 years, Creating the product has gotten much easier. Thanks to no-code solutions like Webflow [00:06:00] and others that I'm sure you guys are familiar with. going back to 2014, I left Stevens and I was fortunate in that. I had a couple of friends who were a little bit older, successful in their careers, starting their own business.

[00:06:15] And you can imagine. Two guys in a room, creating a new online media company and they say, Hey, we need somebody young and hungry to do some of the grunt work, right. Somebody to do competitor analysis, market analysis, maybe build our financial models and pitch decks and help us raise money. And so that was a great opportunity for me because, I basically got a front seat to see what it's like to start a business from scratch, which isn't something that I had gotten from my experience at Stephens.

[00:06:46] I quickly realized that I had a major skill gap in technology, right. So I was helping some of these companies as a business development or finance consultant, raise [00:07:00] their seed round, for example. And as part of that pitch deck, it was what's your guys' product. and every company has some component of technology these days, right.

[00:07:09] Even if you're an e-commerce business, you don't have to be a deep tech sat or B2B SAS company to have elements of technology. And so. Part of the deck was what's our product, what's the framework? What programming languages are you using? And I would copy paste these into the deck, but really have no understanding of what it meant, no understanding of what the development process was like.

[00:07:33] And that just made me really uncovered. I had always had an interest in computers and programming and had dabbled here and there and had done code academy classes and Khan academy. And, I could print hello world, but I couldn't put all the pieces together. Right. There's a very big difference between writing a line of code and building an application.

[00:07:55] And so that's, why I went to general assembly and I did their three month web development [00:08:00] immersive, and it wasn't necessarily to become a software engineer or to pivot my career completely. But I felt like it was a skill that was important to have. I was fortunate to have the time to, learn about it at least a little bit.

[00:08:14] And it helped me put the pieces to. when I did finish that three month course, I realized, okay, I kind of know how to code, but not really. And that's really why ended up spending a lot more time as a freelancer, because I think if you speak to, most software engineers and doing projects and that's really the best way to learn.

[00:08:33] Hector: Yeah. I think it's interesting because I think, know, if you want to go off and start a company in a certain way, you need a tech product. It's like. Actually there are going to be people out there who can just code way better than, you're going to be able to code until you've done a ton of projects, ton of practice and all that.

[00:08:49] So, yeah, I guess maybe for Mbps it's useful, but did you end up using your skills in your subsequent to.

[00:08:57] Mark: I did in a big way. And at the same time, I [00:09:00] didn't, meaning that with both Bixby and flow, I've built a good portion of the MVP. But to your point, I recognize that there are software engineers much better than.

[00:09:12] So I think where it's really come in handy and how it's been helpful is being able to speak the language and understand the process, right? When you, want to build a new feature and you have at least a high level understanding of what the backend is and how that interacts with the database and what the front end is, it helps you manage the project, and communicate with engineers in a much more streamlined way.

[00:09:37] So I think that's how it's been mostly.

[00:09:39] James: Yeah. So take a sport to Bixby and journey, and then getting to an exit. How did that come about and why did you want to sell?

[00:09:50] Mark: Sure. Yeah, so Bixby was, an interesting one. So I was building a website for a company in New York called empire meant. This is [00:10:00] your traditional third generation family office real estate company that went from acquiring one building to growing to a portfolio of 50, to a hundred multi-family properties across the city.

[00:10:15] and during that time hadn't really adopted technology. So the same way there were managing that first property, largely still managing their growing portfolio in that same way. And, a good friend of mine, Alex. Ohebshalom had recently stepped into lead property management at the. company And interestingly, we were spending time not talking about real estate.

[00:10:41] Alex was a very passionate traveler and he was committed to building a company in the travel space. And so every Saturday we would get together at general assembly and talk about his different ideas for creating a startup in travel and how to potentially build a product [00:11:00] and bring it to market. And eventually I turned to Alex and I said, You know what?

[00:11:04] I know that you love to travel, but you don't actually know anything about the business of travel. And I certainly don't either, but you know, a ton about real estate. And I bet there are a bunch of inefficiencies in that business and industry that you're intimately familiar with. So let's do this this week, go back to your company.

[00:11:25] And when we meet next Saturday, let me know if there's anything that you identify that could be fixed with technology And he came back that Saturday and he was like, mark, everything is broken. We still take rent, buy checks in the mail. I have no idea what my maintenance team is doing. I can't communicate with our residents and we have buildings that are pre-war older assets, but they're in nice expensive areas like Chelsea and the west village.

[00:11:54] We need to modernize a better experience to residents and that's really how the business started. [00:12:00] So, I built an MVP or minimum viable product. For one of his buildings, two 10 west 10th street in the west village. And we released it to that property. I remember we set up like a little table with crackers and wine and cheese sandwiches and every resident that came into the building.

[00:12:22] For the next two weeks. Hey, what do you think of the app? What's your favorite feature and mind you at the time, the app had an announcement board for messages, a maintenance request portal to submit work orders and a way to pay your rent and nothing. And we grew from that one building two 50 or so of our Alex's buildings.

[00:12:43] He introduced me to some people that he knows in the industry, and we started to sign new property management companies. As we did that, we learned more about what property managers need in a product like this. We learned more about what residents could use or could benefit from in a product like this.[00:13:00]

[00:13:00] And then over the course of the. Three and a half years or so, we just continued to, build the business and to acquire new buildings and, property managers. And then in terms of why we sold the business, we always knew that we could build a big business. If we could build a solution that helped property managers operate more efficiently.

[00:13:23] but however, The real opportunity was not providing them that software. It was then being able to monetize the residents by providing them services that the building team or the property couldn't deliver. For example, a resident needs dry cleaning, not a washer dryer in their apartment or in the.

[00:13:48] If you think about it every time a resident would do dry cleaning, there's an average order value of 20 to a hundred dollars, right? Depending how much laundry they have. same time property [00:14:00] managers are paying us $1 per apartment per month. Right? And the name of the game was unit economics.

[00:14:06] How do you grow that business from a dollar per unit per month to $10 per unit? And the property managers are pretty price sensitive more than you might think. And so we realized that that $9 that we needed to grow the business by needed to come from the resident. Somehow over the course of those three years, we got really good at building software for property managers, supporting them in the use of the platform, selling to property managers.

[00:14:34] We did not get very good at convincing residents to order housekeeping through us, to get dry cleaning through us, to buy renter's insurance. it's different, right? It's a different business. At the same time, we had a competitor down the road who had the exact opposite problem, and that was hello, Alfred.

[00:14:54] they came to market as a concierge service for reason. So they would sell their service to an apartment [00:15:00] owner. And then every resident in the building would get an Alfred who was basically your personal assistant, who would do your housekeeping, your dry cleaning, stock your fridge, but they had an opposite problem because in a lot of buildings in which they operated, there was a big SPE a solution to pay your rent.

[00:15:19] Reserve amenities in the building submit maintenance issues and then the Alford app for booking a housekeeper. And as you might imagine, the residents have to use our app to pay their rent every month. They don't necessarily have to use the offered app to get a housekeeper because you can do that all sorts of ways.

[00:15:38] And so we had an issue and bringing to market. a consumer services business, and Alfred had an issue in providing a software to the buildings that was a little bit stickier, both to the property managers and the residents. And so we both solved core problems for each other. And after lots of discussions, as these things [00:16:00] go, we found a way to, combine forces and be a single company.

[00:16:05] Hector: it's a great story. And lots of what you're talking about is. Stuff that so many people are familiar with, the struggles of renting or not even the struggles, but just the, pain points of it. and how fragmented all the systems are. And you get that when you start exchanging, like twenty-five different threads with your, letting agent.

[00:16:22] So why do you think solutions. Big speeds and not, widely used yet. And is it because it's a behavioral change that people need to take, that people are resistant to?

[00:16:33] Mark: I guess, first of all, in the U S the multifamily market is pretty mature.

[00:16:38] And when I say multi-family, I mean, rental properties, right. which I think here in the UK, you guys call bill. Which is a, I think, fast growing asset class, but a newer one. Right? So the, concept of I'm a developer, I'm going to build an apartment building, but I'm not going to sell them as condos. I'm going to rent them out [00:17:00] and I'm going to collect, stable cashflow for the foreseeable future is pretty prevalent in the U S and I think to an extent, just taking hold here in the UK, Resident engagement, resident portal products are definitely not new.

[00:17:16] Right? in the U S there are kind of three very large property management companies or property management software companies. One of which was public and recently taken private, which was real estate. And then there's another company called Yardi and another called MRI Yardi acquired a tenant portal product called rent cafe.

[00:17:37] I think in 2009, and RealPage had acquired a resident portal product in 2005 called active building. And these products did exactly what the Bixby solution did. It was a tool for residents to communicate with the landlord, more efficiently submit maintenance issue. And pay their rent. So this wasn't new.[00:18:00]

[00:18:00] but to your point, there have been a lot of companies that have tried to address this category in the prop tech and real estate market, both before Bixby and after Bixby instilled today. And if I think about it, paying your rent and submitting a maintenance issue. Isn't really like a pleasant experience, right?

[00:18:23] Like it's, not the kind of app that you use on a day-to-day basis because it adds value, no one loves paying their rent. You have to pay rent, but nobody loves it. And when you have an issue at your apartment, you're not necessarily in the best mood. So It's an interesting problem where using these platforms is very beneficial to the management team because it centralizes their communication and their. But as a resident, you kind of want to do what's most convenient for you. And that might just be picking up the phone and calling your superintendent of the building may just be going downstairs and talking to [00:19:00] the, person at the front desk.

[00:19:01] And I think that's why now you've seen these resident portal products evolve from really a utility, an app to pay your rent to more of a hospitality solution. And in Alfred's case, the housekeeping, the dry cleaning, the discounts to local businesses, the reserving of the amenities And I think latch is probably a good example of a company that recently went public through a spec and their approach was the stickiest thing you could possibly do or provide to a resident in an app is unlocking the front.

[00:19:36] You pay the rent once a month, you submit maintenance issues when things go wrong and hopefully never, but you got to unlock your door several times a week, several times a day. Right? So they really led with that solution and it's actually allowed them to back into the other functionality, but probably have much higher adoption of the product than some of the other resident [00:20:00] portals on the.

[00:20:01] James: Interesting really interesting. And did you raise money because it feels like you just lays it in and just focused on like building and getting out there and giving people wine and crackers to get them on board and stuff.

[00:20:14] Mark: Yeah. we did raise money, but Alfred, when they acquired us had raised over $60 million, we had raised barely.

[00:20:22] so we're definitely not an example of a company that raised a ton of funding, our capital raising history when something like we raised $50,000 when we first started the business, when we had that first building, really, and we raised that on a concept, a deck and a product and a little.

[00:20:45] Proof of concept. then after we rolled out the product to the rest of Alex's portfolio and we showed that there was adoption here, that people were paying rent through the platform. We raised another 250,000 and I'm talking in [00:21:00] us dollars. and that was really an angel round.

[00:21:02] So I guess the 50,000 was friends and family. The 250 was angel. And I mentioned that because things have changed so much in the last five years. and then we raised 750,000 in what we call the seed round, which like today that I don't even know what they were. They wouldn't even consider that a funding round.

[00:21:20] Hector: some mistakes, some change the found out.

[00:21:24] Mark: Right, exactly. Find it on the side of the road these days,

[00:21:28] James: I mean, you still raised a million dollars. It's good. Not everyone has done that, but did actually not raising too much actually help you when it came to the sales process because you didn't have lots of bossy VCs telling you, no, I need this to be a unit.

[00:21:44] Mark: I have an opinion on the bossy VCs, but this was not an example. I think of the boss' CBCs what I think this was an example of was I heard this quote at some point, or somebody had told me, when you have a lot of money, you get good at spending it. And [00:22:00] when you don't have a lot of money, you get good at maybe.

[00:22:03] and we raised a million, but we never had more when we raised that seven 50 K that, was the most money we ever had in the bank account. And that's a good amount of money, but maybe not in relation to, some other companies funding. we always had to be really scrappy, and I think that was actually really beneficial for us.

[00:22:22] It taught us how to do a lot with.

[00:22:25] James: does great the way. And that probably leads me to my next question, which is you're now building flow. And what have you done differently this time around all that learning you must have had from Bixby about how you manage funding rounds and how you stay scrappy and focused on your customers.

[00:22:42] So that must all be playing a part now in what you're doing.

[00:22:46] Mark: Yeah, a hundred percent, you know, they say it gets easier the second time around. And what I found is it is easier of course, because you've learned so much and you've learned [00:23:00] where the hurdles are and rather than how to get over them, how to avoid them.

[00:23:06] but it's still really, really, really hard, in terms of things that I've done differently. I think when I started Bixby, I kind of knew, what its market potential was. And when I started the company, I literally remember talking to Alex and saying, Hey, I think this is like a three to five-year thing for us.

[00:23:28] we never really thought that we would build it into a billion dollar business with Flo. I don't know, nor think that I'm going to build it into a billion dollar business, although that would be wonderful, but I recognized that this time around I'm building a marketplace, I'm building a consumer facing business And I'm building it out of a pandemic where I'm making a lot of assumptions about what the future is going to look like and how [00:24:00] people want to live in that future. And I called basically all the investors that had backed Bixby. And I said, I want to try this thing and it will probably fail.

[00:24:14] And it's going to take a long time. And we're going to have to be really, really, really patient with it. so it's a little bit of a different approach. I'd say I'm fortunate now having an exit under my belt that I probably can be a little more patient, so for example, we're not raising money right now.

[00:24:33] I'm sure we will at some point. but.

[00:24:36] when you raise money, you have a fiduciary responsibility to the investors. And that creates a lot of pressure. And I think this time around, at least for now, we said we have a lot to learn. We have an idea of what we want to do. We're not going to care how we're going to do it, and we need the time to figure it out.

[00:24:53] And it's better to have that time without feeling a responsibility to investors

[00:24:59] Hector: [00:25:00] must be a really nice position. Be able to be a little bit past. I've seen as an investor and James probably too, has seen loads of companies working in this space, slightly different approaches.

[00:25:13] I've even seen some people looking to do a more micro version of we work so more distributed version of where you work, where you sign up to that. So, alongside the patients. Do you see all this going on and think, oh God, I can't be impatient here. It's all going on around me. Or what's your take on the market and the way it's going?

[00:25:31] Mark: Yeah, I came to that perspective or that realization before I even started the business. And I think I, at least in my head found a way around it before I even started. And I don't know if I would have started, had I known. Come to a different perspective. and yes, kinda cut me off whenever you want, but I'll tell you a little bit about the story, of flow.

[00:25:59] so [00:26:00] March. 20 comes around the world, shuts down. I'm living in New York still, and I get on a plane and I fly to London and I find myself in a new city and I find myself still here. And what I was thinking about most of that time, like I mentioned, was, are people going to go back to the office?

[00:26:19] And if not, what does that mean? What does that mean for. How people interact with physical spaces? What does it mean for cities then? Like I said, what does it mean for commercial real estate? And I'm walking around London and retail is suffering, obviously we're all stuck at home. And so my first thought was, well, if people do have the flexibility to work from anywhere, there's probably the need to create a more local.

[00:26:51] Coworking neighborhood clubs solution that gives people a good, productive place to work near. Right. So [00:27:00] the first concept for flow was something that spacious had done before they required by we work. there's a company called patch that you guys might be familiar with that just raised around a million pounds.

[00:27:13] there's another company here in the UK called Pluto. There's a company in Atlanta, Georgia. There's plenty of these kinds of neighborhood club concepts. And. I met with a couple individuals that had formerly worked at, we work on the design and construction side and a couple of urban planners.

[00:27:31] And we started to look at okay, if retail is district. Is there a great opportunity to take retail assets, convert them into these neighborhood work clubs. And is that a great solution for somebody who's working from home, but wants to get out of the house and can walk five minutes to high street and pop into a great environment.

[00:27:52] However, I'm not a real estate developer and. Building property managing property actually scares me. it's human [00:28:00] capital intensive it's financial capital intensive. And what I decided at some point was if I'm looking at that opportunity, a lot of other people are, particularly people that are better suited to bring that kind of business to market.

[00:28:17] And. If they do bring those solutions to market and you see tremendous growth in that kind of asset, then you're going to have a ton of fragmented supply. Right? You're going to have a bunch of, we work operators out there and you're going to have a consumer that wants to interact with that space in a more flexible and on-demand manner than is currently possible.

[00:28:42] And to me that justified the creation of a marketplace that helped individuals find access and pay for, that space. and so that was kind of the first stop in the, development of the flow concept. Next [00:29:00] was like you alluded to Hector. There's a lot of other providers that, offer a vertical marketplace or workspace, right.

[00:29:09] Meetings Booker that recently rebranded to Hubley has been around for a decade or more liquid space in the U S has been around for awhile desk pass out of Chicago. Dishona I think towards the end of 2020, I was putting together a competitor analysis. Pretty much ran out of columns on my spreadsheet.

[00:29:30] Like it was just insane. there were a ton of companies already in the market and it seemed like there was a new solution every day. And I realized that. It's a tough business to be in because there are very low barriers to entry and then low product and competitive differentiators. And what I mean by that is on the supply side, the operators, let's say a coworking operator they'll work with anybody, right?

[00:29:57] Because they see platforms like this [00:30:00] as lead generation customer acquisition. And there's no reason for them to partner with a single provider. And from a technology perspective and Hector, I think he focused on some deep tech stuff. This is definitely not deep tech, right? Anybody arguably, even an engineer who went to general assembly for three months and a year or two as a freelancer can build this booking application.

[00:30:23] So the kinds of things that you look for in entering a new market in terms of barriers to entry weren't there. And so I said, cool. Okay. I don't want to be in this business because it's probably an industry or a sector where whoever raises the most money can spend the most marketing dollars to acquire the customer wins.

[00:30:46] And that's not an industry that I wanted to be. So I became a customer of all of the different apps out there. It's better to use liquid space and croissant and desk pass. And I [00:31:00] noticed, or I felt that they had missed the mark on some things. and I'm happy to talk more about that, but one of the things is booking a desk versus access.

[00:31:12] so for example, I would use these apps one, I paid a monthly membership. Again. I felt that to be inherently inflexible in a world where I can work at home, work at a coffee shop or go to my company's office because I don't think that's completely dead. I don't want to pay a monthly membership. For access to co-working spaces.

[00:31:37] I do want the ability to go to a co-working space when I'm away from my home or my office. And it's convenient for. But unlike ClassPass, I'm not looking to trade, my gym membership for my ClassPass membership. I'm not looking to trade my company's office for another membership. And so I [00:32:00] thought the memberships were inherently inflexible.

[00:32:02] And then the bigger problem. most of these solutions, you pay a monthly fee, you get credits, you use those credits to go, to, book a desk, at a coworking space. And so, I would book a desk tomorrow at a co-working space in shortage, and then I would get there and I would hang out there for three or four hours.

[00:32:23] And then I would leave because I want to change of scenery or I've got a meeting somewhere. whatever it might be. And I realized that, well, I'm paying a monthly membership. I made a booking the day before, and I just used a credit that has a monetary value of like 20 to 30 pounds to sit in a coworking space for two or three hours when I could have just stayed at home or gone to a coffee shop or the park or really anywhere.

[00:32:50] and at the same time I was using LimeBike to get around the. and I compared those two experiences and I realized [00:33:00] what I really wanted was not to book a desk somewhere. what I really wanted was that same line bike experience. I wanted to see places around me that had available capacity.

[00:33:11] I want it to be able to access them in a really frictionless experience. I didn't want to take a tour. I didn't want to fill out an application. And I wanted to pay not for the whole day, but only for the amount of time that I was there. And I felt that that was enough of a differentiator to start to pursue that concept further and over a lot of time and iteration and discussion, it diluted to what flow is.

[00:33:41] Hector: Super interesting. Really, really great story. so how can people sign up? Uh, you live,

[00:33:47] Mark: we are live. started to work on this in March of this year. And in may two months later, I released an MV. Very basic MVP. It allowed users to find locations on a map on their, [00:34:00] smartphone. both iOS and Android.

[00:34:02] It allowed them to scan a QR code when they came to that location. And when they left that location and allowed them to scan that QR code again, at which point they were charged for the amount of time that they were there. And we partnered with 30 locations, 20 co-working spaces and 10 gyms and all in east London.

[00:34:22] And we acquired 50 beta users. And the way we did that was I reached out to 10 friends, which is basically all the friends that I have in London. And then I asked them to invite four friends each, right. And that's how we got to 50. And then in June we did the same thing. we asked them to invite one or two friends each and we got to a hundred users.

[00:34:44] And then in July we did the same thing. So now we have about 150 beta users. Last week, we officially launched. We migrated our app and our entire infrastructure from our development environment to [00:35:00] our production environment. So it's a real app, real money, real places. And we tried to open to the public.

[00:35:07] And low and behold, the app crashed immediately. And this is what happens when you build an MVP and try to onboard a bunch of users onto it. so the app is live it's available for download currently only in the app store. we'll release the Android apps. but it's invite only. And that's for two reasons, one, because we've needed some time to fix what broke last week.

[00:35:34] but also we're a marketplace, right? Users use our app to find places around them that have capacity and to check in to them. It's important to us that if a user opens the app and wants somewhere to go, they have a place to go within a five or 10 minute walk. In order to do that, we kind of have to grow our demand, our users, and our [00:36:00] supply in lock step.

[00:36:01] and so because of that, we employ kind of an invite only waitlist model. And at the moment, hopefully starting next week, we'll be letting in 20 to 50 users.

[00:36:12] James: Awesome. Well, when it comes to Tunbridge Wells and Ken, that's great. So it's been great to hear your voiding, you the core story, the journey you've been on through banking and then software development, and then founding a business now with the second is really great to hear.

[00:36:29] And there's lots of useful tips in that for founders. We always like to wrap things up by doing a dinner party, guests games. If you it's out, anyone who would she have? Dinner was three people.

[00:36:40] Mark: I have maybe what's like a bit of an untraditional answer. obviously I'd love to get Bezos, Musk and Branson in a room and, talk about who had the better time in space.

[00:36:53] But, having spent a lot of time in this, future of work, future of real estate [00:37:00] dialogue. And one that's quite polarizing, right? You have, on one hand, everyone's going to go back to the office and things will snap back to how they were. And then you have this contingency of, things have changed forever and nobody wants an office.

[00:37:16] And what I'd like to see is Chris heard, from a company called first base, which is based up in Scotland. Who is a, very vocal proponent of remote work as the future and the impact that it can have on quality of life. And to an extent, his antagonist, Jonathan Wasserstrom from square-foot, which is a tech enabled brokerage in the us.

[00:37:45] I think they've been boxing on social media for quite a bit. And it'd be interesting to get those guys in a room. And let them go at it. well, I think would be interesting is to have Ryan from convene, sit in on that, dinner party [00:38:00] and referee, so to speak because he's the founder and CEO of convene and has spent quite a lot of time in this flexible work context.

[00:38:08] And, I'd love to be a fly on the wall for that dinner.

[00:38:12] Hector: That's good. It sounds like it should perhaps be, held in the books.

[00:38:16] Mark: Probably a more suitable environment. Yeah.

[00:38:21] James: Awesome. You picked three that are super relevant. What you're walking on and that's really great. You've got three points for originality because, naturally we haven't had those three names before, but they, sound really amazing. So, yeah, no, that would be really interesting. Well, thank you so much again, mark, for coming on riding unicorns.

[00:38:40] We've really loved having you on, so yeah. Thanks for telling us a story.

[00:38:44] Mark: Thanks so much, guys. It was a blast.

[00:38:46] Thanks for listening to if you haven't already please like, and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. If you want to receive episodes direct to your inbox, go to riding unicorns dot sub stack.com and subscribe on [00:39:00] there as well.

[00:39:00] See you next time