 I see fans out there, love it, love it, hi everyone. So thank you all for joining us today. I'm Rachel Palmer, head of VC and startup partnerships for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Google. I also co-lead our Black Founders Fund with the wonderful Marta Krupinska out there as well. Raise your hand, she's on on Friday at five o'clock. And I am joined here by Christian Facy, CEO and co-founder of Audio Mob. Now we've endured a global pandemic and I think it's fair to say that things are very different post-pandemic. Today, Christian and I will discuss how startups can navigate the turbulent times like what we've seen in the past and what we're seeing now. So Christian, really, really happy to have you here. You have had an incredible two years. We at Google have watched you grow from two guys needing space on one of our Google for Startups campuses to a high-growth business with, let me make sure I get this right, 40 employees generating seven figures in ARR and calling major brands like P&G and McDonald's clients. Christian, please tell the audience about the wonder that is Audio Mob and your story. Well, thank you, Rachel. Really great to be here. Thank you all for joining. So I am Christian, co-founder and CEO of Audio Mob. And before I get into what we do, let me just ask you all a question. Who here likes video ads? The kinds of ones that block you on the mobile phone? All right, there's one person that put their hand out. I'll have to talk to you afterwards. But most people don't like video ads. And it's because it blocks the experience. And what we do, we invented non-intrusive audio ads in mobile games. So for those of you that are unfamiliar, imagine you're racing a car and you need a power-up or a life or something like that. Usually in mobile games, we block for the 30-second video ad, you put the phone down, you do something else. It's quite an annoying experience. But with Audio Mob, what we do is we send non-intrusive audio ads. So imagine that an audio ad was playing from the car's radio and you get the power up instead. So it's non-intrusive. We see 1,000% increase in engagement, which is great for advertisers. We see over 600% increase in revenues for game developers, incremental revenue. So it's great for them. And players are less annoyed. So we've got that real golden trifecta of value between those three participants. So that's what we do. Excellent, excellent. So I think it's fair to say 2020 has been an interesting decade so far, right? Yeah. Yeah. What would you say are the notable differences between the circumstances, challenges and opportunities presented to startups during the pandemic versus today? How do these time periods differ and how did your behavior differ back in 2020 versus right now? Yeah. So as a first-time entrepreneur, it's a bit of a baptism by fire. So to give you an idea, so background was managed $100 million at Google as a strategist, partner at Facebook. And we started thinking about these ideas where I was developing my own games and developing my own music outside of work, start streaming the music into the games. These experiments cost a lot of money, right? And building up Audiumob with Wolfrid co-founder and CTO cost a lot of money, a lot of saving. So you can imagine grafting and building a company broke, raising your first million dollars in January 2020 for the world to go to pot in March 2020. It was a baptism by fire. But the first thing is don't panic. We have some great investors at the time, our first investors, Supernode Global. The whole idea was not to panic and just accept that there is no rulebook. You know, March 2020, there was no rulebook, nothing to follow, no examples from the previous pandemic. So we really had to start educating ourselves. So a couple of things is, you know, accepting, you're a bit of a bit of a Bambi and you need to learn as much as possible. So survival is actually a mindset. And this is something I tell a lot of people that I mentor. For instance, you know, PR strategies, right? No going to events anymore. You know, Zoom calls at conferences, Zoom calls with VC. So I actually started reading a lot. One of the books I read is called Key Personal of Influence by Daniel Priestly, highly recommend you read that in terms of how to become an influencer or micro influencer in your space. Another book that I believe saved the company was Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday. And it really put me, Wilfred and the company in the mindset of consistent trial and error and using very, very cheap and not very costly methodologies in order to really hyperscale and grow your company. And I can give some more examples there. But it's like going back to university, just really trying to learn how to figure out what the unknown unknowns are. Yeah, I think even around PR you've done some amazing things and you learned from, was it a PR agency? And can you tell the audience about what you did there? Yeah, so we actually had an agency for H2 in 2020. The PR agency that we used, it was a short-term project just so that we could, you know, figure out the ropes, figure out how to, you know, build up our impressive profile. Now I get asked on a weekly basis, who's our PR agency? Because if you were to literally Google Audio Mob right now, you'd see a lot of press from Forbes, Business Insider, a lot of tier one press. We don't actually use a PR agency. So the way that we started our press, for instance, is we started doing some very, very small paid press publications, thought leadership pieces. We started building up our SEO. And then as soon as we were able to fundraise, we used that to get our first, what we call, tier one press in terms of readership. And that was Business Insider. Business Insider led to Billboard. Billboard led to pretty much all the other publications like Forbes, for instance. So we really just built that momentum with that PR. And myself and Warford were at the forefront building relationships with journalists, et cetera. So we found, for Audio Mob, definitely leading as founders on the PR front has been tremendously effective. And again, it's not just about getting the brand out there. It's actually promoting us and the value that we're bringing to all of these different clients, returns for investors, et cetera. And yeah, it's been great so far. Great. So I'm hearing during pandemic, no rule books, learn, educate. What about now? What about post-pandemic? What's different today? So post-pandemic, we are certainly going into turbulent times, hence the talk. And that's something that we've had to accept. But the good news is that there are so many other examples of previously turbulent times. Let's take, actually, the pandemic, for instance, in terms of the world shutting down. There are certain similarities there, more similarities with the 2008 recession where people could still go out, be more conscious of their spending and not stop spending completely like in 2020. So one of the things that we did, and I encourage every single early stage founder to adopt, is to really look at what past companies have done in similar recessions. Not so much the pandemic, but let's take 2008. How did companies, costs, for instance, how did companies navigate the PR field? How did they raise? How did they concentrate on where the recession, so I have to say, recession-resistant verticals, how did, how did, how was spend adjusted in those periods? So this is what we did at Audium of during the pandemic and we're certainly doing now, and we're still seeing triple-digit year-on-year growth. Great. Now, if I recall, correct me if I'm wrong, in the beginning of 2020, it was you and your co-founder, Wilford, working out of one of our Google for Startups campuses. At the time, you had zero revenue, nothing. Now, question for you, what did you do during the pandemic to set you up to achieve the current seven-figure ARR that you achieved in 2021 and it's been growing more and more now, and what lessons did you learn? Yeah, really, really good question. So the pandemic, and I'll explain this in a bit more detail, at the beginning it wiped out our revenue completely. Yes, more people were playing games. However, people were playing games that had already launched. There were actually less games that launched in 2020 than in 2012. So if you're a new company looking to integrate into all these new games, big developers back then wouldn't have integrated us. All of them want to integrate with us now, but back then we had to look at smaller game developers, all of which were not releasing games. So it was a definite baptism by fire, so to speak. And this leads me onto my next piece of advice where it's scary doing a pivot, but if you are going to pivot, put a hundred percent effort into that pivot. We knew that we had no revenue, but yet we raised, actually, with a couple of dollars revenue a month because we kept pitching the vision, the IP, how we're unique, how we're first movers, what the size of the market is. So we already knew that without revenue for a certain amount of time, we could definitely raise and continue speaking to angels. However, the key pivot that we made is we had to bring forward a product by two years while raising money to build a product. So between March 2020 and the end of the year, we raised our second million dollars in little pockets throughout the whole year, and it was mostly from angels. So angels tend to be very, very active, or more active than VCs in times of turbulence. The product that we brought forward was actually our advertising platform. So our business is in two halves. We've got the piece of technology that the game developer integrates to expose the audio ad to the user. Then we've got the advertising platform where we sell the concepts to agencies and big brands like McDonald's, Procter & Gamble, et cetera, in order to target the users in the games. So we raised an extra million dollars and we put that whole bet, that my experience at Facebook, Google, and selling to these big brands, that if we launched these products earlier, I would then lead the sales team, Wolford would lead the product team, and our revenue would go through the roof. So that was the pitch that we made throughout 2020. It's very, very hard raising, but yeah, we went from literally, okay, not zero, $5,000 of revenue in December of 2020 to seven figure ARR within nine months of 2021, which led to the Series A $100 million valuation. So it was, 2020 was a roller coaster and 2021 was like the rocket ship. And now we're in growth mode with 41 people. Well, you're nervous about that pivot. How did you know what you were doing was right? It was either going to, well, it's going to bankrupt the company or it was going to take off like a rocket ship, but based on the experience of myself and Wolford, Wolford being the CTO is an ex-engineer of Google, Jake Morgan, Goldman Sachs. We have rigorously studied every single company in the video ad space, and we absolutely know the strategies that we believe will get us to that next stage. So it was scary, but we were confident that the plan was going to work. So a little bit of risk-taking is what I'm hearing there. That's a big one though. A little bit, a little bit, yeah. You also talked about backstage, we were talking a bit about some of the other things that you did. We talked about cuts, like how do you figure out where you're going to save money? What's your recommendation for the audience around how to make cuts? Well, every time someone says the word cuts, people think cutting employees, and that is absolutely not the case, and we've never had to do that. It's just being much, much more mindful of the spending, making sure there's no frivolous spending. When it comes to the kinds of perks, you don't have to provide gourmet lunches. You can provide much smaller lunch cards or low cards at all. I was actually looking at some of the cuts that we made in 2020, and a lot of it was the SaaS subscription services, whether it was CRMs or access to certain pieces of software, like Photoshop, for instance, because a lot of businesses waste a lot of money when it comes to managing their SaaS subscription spend and tools. So yeah, we cut around 15% of our burn. We load it by 15% by making these kinds of cuts. And yeah, it's the kind of thing where every little helps, and if you're going to make a cut, don't cut a couple of percentage points here or there. Try and get to 10% to 15%, otherwise you're going to need to make deeper cuts to extend your runway later on, depending on how things go. So I'm hearing long, deep cuts. Yeah. Those are the little ones. Yeah. Okay, perfect. One of the other things that you mentioned as well was this idea of hiring, and hiring specific sorts of people. What's your recommendations there? You had one around people, person, all that. Why? Yeah, so in 2020, this is another thing I wish I could go back in time and tell myself. So because we didn't have revenue in 2020, we were purely focused on commercials, commercial, commercial, commercial. I mean, it was at the point where I was processing seven-figure ARRs worth of invoices manually. So some of the key people that I wish I hired sooner were a head of operations and a head of people. They are absolutely the key people you need to build the foundation of the company from which you can then hyperscale in terms of your headcount. So these were the first two people that we hired. They helped structure our onboarding processes, our interview processes, et cetera. And it's the reason we went from, I think it was around 12 people in January to just over 40 people in the space of nine months. So yeah, absolutely essential. Wish I hired them sooner. So hire a people person. Hire someone to help you hire. People, operations, absolutely. That's what I'm hearing. Yeah. All right, let's turn to everyone's favorite topic in startup land. So fundraising. Oh yeah. I'm sure that was fun during 2020, 2021, now, all that. That's interesting, yeah. What did you do to ensure you remain funding, funded during these turbulent times? Because, you know, no cash, no gas, so. Absolutely. So one of the little growth hacks that we did for 2020 and we extended this throughout what we do it till this day is when it comes to our investor updates, when it comes to certain PR pieces we put out, any investor calls that I have, there is actually an investor subscription page on the website. And I don't see a lot of early stage startups do this. Make it easy for the investors to sign up to some kind of subscription page. And it gets to the point now where we put out an investor update and we just constantly get inbound investors combined with the PR. So that was definitely something I found very helpful. And every single investor call, just ask, do you want to sign up to our subscription page, send the link in the Google chat or the Zoom chat or whatever it is. And over a year, over a year and a half, we built up a database of 300 investors. And yeah, it's been very easy to reach out on mass to a lot of different investors when needed. The second thing is that I treat investor conversations much like a sales pipeline. So in terms of how you build a relationship with a client, you're not going to close a million dollar deal in a day. It's going to take a number of months, a number of years sometimes. So many inbound investors that we get or just investors that we generally know all have a couple of calls a week just to maintain the relationship. So that's been super, super important combined with sending monthly investor updates. Not quarterly, it takes a bit of time to make sure the update is bulky. But we're at the forefront of a lot of investors' minds combined with the PR as well. So it's not always raising, but it's always being in touch and willing to have conversations with investors. And I believe that's why we've always been able to raise when we've needed. Perfect. One of the things you told me a while ago was this idea of the American style of pitching. I'm American, so I was like, well, what is that? Can you talk a little bit about that? What you mean how that could work for a startup as they're trying to raise during these times? Yeah, so there's a reason why Silicon Valley is considered the fundraising capital of the world, why American startups have bigger valuations, bigger companies, bigger visions in general, people IPO in the US. And the concept that I coined as pitch-like and American, what I mean by that is always pitching the big vision, always pitching what your IP is capable of in six to eight years' time. Not what you're going to do in the next two to three years in terms of what your potential revenues are going to be from being six-figure MRR to eight-figure MRR in three years, pitch that billion-dollar vision. I mean, the amount of times I mention a billion-dollar vision because we believe AudiumMob is tackling a multi-billion-dollar opportunity, $20 billion to be rough in terms of what we believe we're capable of. And it's really pitching this vision, pitching the IP, why we are unique. And the way that we did the Series A is that we sought advice from founders, from VCs that have actually invested in Silicon Valley founders that raised a significant amount of money, a significant valuation with zero revenue and just an idea. So it's pitching this vision and getting people bought into the vision and what your IP is capable of, not what your current revenue is, that's what we did. And I encourage every founder to raise like that. Great. Sounds wonderful. So, now here's a tricky question for you, but I know you can handle it. Were there any mishaps you endured during these turbulent times over these past couple of years and things that you can share, vice, things that you wish people would have told you? So mistakes, basically. Yeah, so I would, I think I alluded to this earlier, one mistake was not hiring the head of people and head of operations before the Series A started. Now, the reason that we did that is that we wanted to be conservative in terms of burn and we wanted to make sure that if the round extended that we could raise in time not either a bridge loan or bridge funding or whatnot. But in hindsight, what we should have done is trusted that the round was going to close on time, which it did, and that we onboarded the head of people and the head of operations so they were absolutely ready to help myself and Wolford deploy the capital into head count and various investments from day one. So there was definitely a teething process, I mean, going from 12 people to over 40 people, I mean, talking about hundreds of percentage increase in head count. And there was definitely a teething process for about four to five months. I mean, we got there in the end and the company's doing very well, but I think we would have scaled much quicker if we hired those key people sooner. So you wish someone would have told you to hire? Yeah, yeah, absolutely, just hire higher sooner, yeah. Okay, awesome. All right, well, we're coming up on time. So I'd love to hear some closing thoughts from you. So what are two to three things that startups out there can do today? Well, let's say tomorrow, because let's be honest, everybody's busy today. We have a big party to go to all that tonight. So tomorrow to increase their chances of survival over the turbulent times that we're experiencing right now. So I'd say definitely keep talking to angels. The money hasn't dried up, it's just where you focus. Keep talking to angels. And I had a really good conversation with John Thompson. He's a former chairman of Microsoft. This was earlier this morning. And something he said really resonated with me. It's not just about making sure that your product works, but making sure it works uniquely. So pitching that unique value to angel investors and constantly keep doing it, it's gonna take a lot of time. Just keep doing that and you'll increase your chances of survival through smaller tickets, but investment tickets nonetheless. The second thing is that survival is, for myself and Wilfred, an educational mindset. Educate yourself, read books, lean on advisors. Just basically it's like going back to university. Try and figure out where your blind spots are, figure out what your weaknesses are, lean into it and conquer it. Don't outsource it. Really try and improve yourself and the mindset that you adopt as you try and figure out all these problems that you may not know you even have. And then I'd say the last thing is look at history. Now again, the pandemic is a bit of an anomaly for talking about in the last 50 to 100 years or so, but look at previous recessions. Look at similar companies in your space, maybe competitors, for instance, that are a bit bigger, a bit further along. What did they do in 2008 recession? What did they do in 2000? And start adopting some of those techniques to help you make a more informed decision in the future. So yeah, these are all the things that we've done at Audium of and it's definitely, definitely worked out in our favor. Excellent. Well with that, I will close the session, but I heard one of the key things I keep hearing consistently throughout is educate yourself. Know what you don't know. Go study, go learn. If you don't know it, hire someone to teach you like you did with the PR agency. That was a good move. Absolutely, yeah. So great, well thank you everyone for joining us. We'll be around after the session for any questions that people might have and enjoy the rest of your slush. Thanks everyone. Thank you.