Uber shuts down Car Next Door, Sitemate acquires Nomad Fleet
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In this episode
Summary
In this week's episode of The Startup Retro, Gemma and Will explore Uber's decision to shut down Car Next Door, its Australian carshare division, after acquiring the startup for $105M. The hosts share some positive news from the startup ecosystem, including Sitemate’s acquisition of Nomad Fleet, Bindimaps securing a key partnership with Australia Post, and the latest developments in the SunCable renewable energy project. In the startup raises segment, the hosts spotlight space-tech innovator Metakosmos and childcare-focused AI startup LoveHeart.ai.
Time Stamps
00:00 - Acknowledgement of Country
00:30 - Intro music
01:00 - Welcome and episode preview
01:30 - Pre-roll ad
02:00 - Headlines
02:30 - Uber shuts down Car Next Door
07:30 - Sitemate acquires Nomad Fleet
09:00 - BindiMaps secures partnership with Australia Post
10:00 - SunCable project approved by Federal Government
12:00 - Startup Raises
12:30 - Gem’s Pick: Metakosmos
17:00 - Will’s Pick: LoveHeart.ai
20:00 - Mid-roll ad
25:00 - KaaS Recommendations
28:00 - Outro
Headlines
- Uber scraps Careshare division, after acquiring Aussie startup Car Next Door for $105M
- Sitemate acquires Nomad Fleet for $2M
- BindiMaps navigates a path to partnership with Australia Post
- SubCable solar farm in NT gets Federal government tick of approval
Startup Raises
KaaS
Gem’s Pick
- Building B2B Startup Marketing Orgs from 1 to 25+, Emily Kramer (MKT1)
Will’s Pick
- Thrive, Consolidate or Die by Abhishek Maran (Superfluid/Rampersand)
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Gemma Clancy (00:00):
The Startup Retro is recorded on the lands of the Kabi Kabi and Wurundjeri people.
Will Richards (00:07):
G'day and welcome to The Startup Retro, a weekly show brought to you by the team behind the Overnight Success newsletter, where we help you level up on the Australian startup ecosystem by giving you an insider's view on Aussie startups and venture capital.
Gemma Clancy (00:18):
The Startup Retro is brought to you by Day One, the podcast network for founders, operators, and investors. I'm Gemma Clancy.
Will Richards (00:24):
And I'm Will Richards. In today's episode, we'll dive into Uber shutting down Car Next Door and what it means for the local car share market.
Gemma Clancy (00:32):
As well as a few feel-good stories from the ecosystem, including a Sitemate acquisition, BindiMaps securing a massive partner, and the latest developments at SunCable.
Will Richards (00:40):
We then get stuck into our startup raise picks of the week, including an out-of-this-world raise in space tech and childcare-focused AI startup tackling some massive industry problems.
Gemma Clancy (00:57):
Okay, Will, let's jump into the headlines. What caught your eye this week?
Will Richards (01:01):
Yeah, one big headline was definitely Uber shutting down their car-sharing business, which is an interesting one because they acquired Car Next Door, which was this Australian startup back in 2022 when they paid a pretty handsome sum of $105 million. And in a few short years, they've decided that it's not quite worth the work for it, so they've just shut down the whole platform entirely and told staff that they're basically no longer with the business within a couple weeks. So quite an interesting change for a big company like that.
(01:36):
Obviously, they had a heap of aspirations for what that could mean for ride-sharing or car-sharing in Australia, but it was also the test of doing car-sharing globally as well. And Australia was the first market they sort of doubled in. But yeah, turned it off.
Gemma Clancy (01:50):
Yeah, it's interesting that they didn't necessarily... I don't know that they really even got to the point of expanding it internationally to try it out in different markets before deciding that it wasn't worthwhile continuing with, which is really surprising to me because Australia's a bit of a weird market when it comes to transport. We live all so far away from one another. We have very dispersed and small population sizes. So you would think for any type of marketplace business, especially one based around transport, would've thought that there were potentially even other market opportunities where this might work differently.
(02:25):
I mean, obviously Car Next Door was making it work to a scale that was working for them, but maybe Uber's aspirations were so much bigger that they didn't feel like they could make those. But it's quite sad. I was really sad to read this one because I can only imagine how the founders feel. They built this startup, I think over more than 10 years and three years, less than three years after being acquired, it's dead.
Will Richards (02:52):
Yeah.
Gemma Clancy (02:52):
It's really sad.
Will Richards (02:53):
I think it's sad in some ways, but in other ways, they sold the business for 105 million.
Gemma Clancy (02:59):
Oh, yeah.
Will Richards (03:00):
The built the business for 10 years. It's actually got a really interesting founding story. So in the whole journey, they raised $25 million before the acquisition, and they sort of went from a seed stage investment all the way through to sort of Series B and then got acquired. And they even actually pitched on Shark Tank back in the day, and Steve Baxter invested early in their seed round and he put 300k into the business.
(03:22):
So they've gone through a fair journey in that 10-year period, and I think the founders, Will Davies and Dave Trumbull both declined to comment on the acquisition. But I think if you're an investor or you're a founder in this business, you've probably done fairly well out of the whole process, and it's just sad to see it turn off.
Gemma Clancy (03:41):
Yeah, financially for sure, for sure.
Will Richards (03:43):
Yeah.
Gemma Clancy (03:44):
Yeah. Oh, I mean, financially you can't complain and maybe that helps ease the pain of seeing something that you've worked on for so many years end up being disbanded. But I saw Will Davies present at Sunrise this year's Blackbirds annual conference, and it was a fantastic presentation. He pretty much talked about the whole history of Car Next Door and how they grew, what the go-to-market strategy was, their funding strategy and all of that. And it was absolutely fascinating. I was actually sitting next to one of the early investors for the presentation, so I was getting behind-the-scenes information as I was watching the presentation, which was really fun.
(04:20):
Yeah, Will talked about the fact that one of the main motivations for starting Car Next Door was actually a climate-based, climate change-based motivation that with a rising car-sharing, he hoped that that would help reduce global greenhouse gas emissions if more people embraced it. And so with the acquisition, because the presentation was done after the acquisition was announced obviously, he was hoping that it could kind of be scaled out with a global brand like Uber.
(04:47):
So I can only imagine that he's probably, I don't know, I don't want to speak for Will, but you kind of wonder whether he's going, "Okay, well, that's a shame now it's not going to be scaled out in the way that I hoped, but." He continued on working at Uber and he alluded to what he was thinking of doing next, very, very vaguely in that presentation and saying that he's still really passionate about climate and working in that space.
(05:12):
So I would say maybe this will... I don't know whether he has to stay at Uber for a little bit longer for kind of own-out period, but I'm really interested to see what he does next and what a lot of those Uber car share employees go on to do now. There's probably a heap of talented people in that team who are now looking for new roles.
Will Richards (05:29):
Looking for what's next. Yeah. And it's an interesting point, what does it mean for the local market because there are other businesses that do the same sort of thing. So there's a business called Turo, which does a very, very similar thing, probably more on the, it's a San Francisco-based business, but they've got an Australian operations now, very similar product. There's Carly as well.
Gemma Clancy (05:51):
Slightly more luxury-based I would've thought. Turo is kind of like, oh, at least a lot of the advertising I see, it's like, "Get a Mustang." It's not just like a Suzuki Swift. No offense to anyone with a Suzuki Swift.
Will Richards (06:02):
I think car-share probably focused on the utility of, "Oh, I'm moving house, I need a van. I can hire a local van for five hours or so." And Turo probably focuses more on the aspirational tourism angle.
Gemma Clancy (06:15):
The experience.
Will Richards (06:15):
Yeah, I'm flying to the to the US. I'll just hire and live locally. A lot like Airbnb. I think they both use the Airbnb model as a great way of summarizing what they do. But Turo definitely focuses more on the tourism side of things.
Gemma Clancy (06:28):
Yeah, I mean, obviously they probably were launching in Australia than the same time as Turo and other competitors were entering the Australian market. So a bit of a hard time to try and test something out. But yeah, it's a shame to see it die, but I guess that's the ups and downs of a startup and tech life.
Will Richards (06:47):
Yeah, for sure. I think it's just an opportunity for everyone else to jump in. And the business model of car-sharing is definitely not over.
Gemma Clancy (06:55):
So that's maybe a little bit of a sad story, at least from my perspective. So let's see if we can find some feel-good stories to talk about.
Will Richards (07:04):
For sure. There's definitely a few feel-good stories this week, which is awesome to see. The first one that really jumps out is the acquisition of Nomad Fleet by another construction tech company called Sitemate. Did you read much about this one?
Gemma Clancy (07:17):
Yeah, it's really cool. So I think I'd heard of both companies because of Startmate, so they both went through the Startmate, I believe that both went through Startmate accelerator program. And I think it wasn't that long ago that we were writing about Nomad Fleet's race and amazing that they've obviously turned this acquisition around in quite a short amount of time. Great for the founder.
Will Richards (07:38):
Yeah, so Nomad Fleet went through the 2023 winter cohort, just over a year since they went through the accelerator. They've now been acquired for $2 million. So a pretty good result for the founder there and the small team involved with Nomad Fleet. Do you want to summarize what both businesses do really quickly before we jump in what it means for them to come together?
Gemma Clancy (07:56):
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I think I have to caveat that construction is not an industry that I'm super familiar with, so I'm going to do my best. But essentially Nomad Fleet, their main focus was on asset management of equipment for large construction projects, so your bulldozers and your diggers. And then Sitemate is a little bit more focused on a project delivery and operational management of construction sites, and they both kind of have software platforms to support both sides of that.
(08:22):
Yeah. So now obviously coming together, it sounds like it's going to be maybe a little bit more of a one-stop shop for construction management. So yeah, that's really great. I mean, construction's a huge industry in Australia, so it makes sense for both businesses to come together and try and demand as much market share as possible.
Will Richards (08:39):
Cool. And then the next good news story was BindiMaps and them acquiring a really big customer in Australia Post. Have you ever seen Bindimaps do a demo?
Gemma Clancy (08:49):
I haven't, have you?
Will Richards (08:50):
I remember Alan Jones talking about it a few months ago. But yeah, he gave a really good summary of what the tool actually does, and I've seen them in shopping centers as well, but they map out indoor spaces and then provide a really, really exceptional navigation tool for spaces that you just don't traditionally get it. So it's like a hyper-focused Google Maps for when you're inside these big shopping centers like a Chadstone or a Westfield, for example.
Gemma Clancy (09:17):
For vision-impaired people so that they can better navigate it.
Will Richards (09:20):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So they've partnered with Australia Post to focus on using their software in Australia Post's Sydney and Melbourne post offices. So yeah, quite a cool use of technology.
Gemma Clancy (09:33):
Yeah, that's really great to see. It's one of those things that you so take for granted when you don't have to worry about these things as somebody with your full sight that you can just walk up to an essential service like a post office and navigate it. I mean, I don't know about you, I go into a post office these days... I don't go to post office very often. When you go, you have something very important to do, and you get there and you're like, "Okay, where do I go?" It's actually hard for the average person.
Will Richards (09:58):
I just join the back of the massive line normally.
Gemma Clancy (10:01):
Yeah. But I feel like because you don't go very often, it is actually can be a little bit overwhelming. But I can only imagine it's pretty challenging when you've got so many people. There's usually about five different gift stands in the way between you and the counter plus the table where you have to write your letters. But yeah, it's great to see that it's going to make it a bit easier.
Will Richards (10:24):
Interesting way they make money as well. They charge on a per square meter basis, so they do a setup fee where basically they put a few cameras in the area and the cameras like a GoPro or an iPhone camera, and they sort of scan the space so they understand what the space looks like, and then they charge for that setup fee, but then they also charge on the square meterage of the space as well. So I think Australia post offices, there's obviously lots of them, but they're not massive buildings. So I think it could be quite cost-effective for an organization like Australia Post to give this to a certain type of population that really need this.
Gemma Clancy (11:01):
Yeah, no, it's really fantastic. The last good news story that I wanted to shout about quickly was the SunCable Renewable Energy Project, which is the very, very ambitious solar project that intends to run a huge underwater sea cable to send renewable energy overseas. They've had their big solar farm project in the Northern Territory approved by the federal government, which is really exciting. It's going to create a huge number of jobs during the construction phase and then also once it's there. And it's kind of just... This is one of those projects where it's gone through an incredible up and down story over the last couple of years with Mike Cannon-Brookes now at the helm to kind of drive it forward. And I think probably a lot of people thought that maybe it wasn't going to work, but certainly looks like it's on its way to working. So that's pretty exciting.
Will Richards (11:58):
Let's jump into the startup raises of the week Gemma, and we had some pretty cool startups that raised this week. What was your pick of the week?
Gemma Clancy (12:05):
So my pick this week was a startup called Metakosmos, and it's super sci-fi. I kind of love it because I'm a bit of a sci-fi nerd. I love my Star Trek. And ironically, I do not like the idea of space flight though. So what this startup is developing I will probably never interact with because it doesn't interest me at all, but I think it's an incredible feat of technology.
(12:29):
So what they're doing is that they're creating space suits that will be more cost-effective and available, accessible to people wanting to do private space flight. So obviously at the moment you've got kind of NASA, SpaceX, and et cetera wanting to send people into space and the Moon, but that's largely just been reserved for astronauts. Whereas more and more now we're hearing the likes of Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic ambitions wanting to send people on private 90-minute flights into space just for a joyride to see the Earth from afar. And yeah, this company is hoping to be the one that will provide them with the space suits to make it much more feasible.
Will Richards (13:11):
Yeah, it's really out of this world. I think they're taking definitely the SpaceX approach to manufacturing this product because we try to do some research on how much a space suit costs back in the days and how much a space suit price inflation has increased since the 50s and 60s to where we are today. And back in the Apollo days, each suit was custom-made for each astronaut and from the loose research we can find, it was 15 million to 20 million dollars US for each astronaut and then with inflation...
Gemma Clancy (13:42):
In the money back then. Not even accounting for inflation.
Will Richards (13:42):
Yeah, in old money.
Gemma Clancy (13:43):
Yeah.
Will Richards (13:45):
So a product like this, taking a modular, scalable sort of SpaceXy-like approach to manufacturing these really, they're quite beautiful as well on the renders I've seen on the website, which is really cool. Definitely when you think of space travel and you think of the future of space travel, you definitely think of suits that look like this. So definitely, definitely check out the website and the renders for what that looks like.
(14:08):
But I remember them pitching it at South by Southwest at the end of last year and it was a really interesting pitch. When he started pitching, I felt like this seems like a very far-fetched idea. But then as the pitch progressed and he sort of spoke about the evolution of space flight and how common rocket launches are these days and the evolution of space tourism and all the interest in that, it was quite interesting to see, oh, this is a really... You can see that there is a growing market for a tool exactly like this.
Gemma Clancy (14:40):
Yeah, by the end of it, I remember we were sitting next to each other and actually at the start of the pitch, I remember he got up and whatever he said at the start, it actually caused a bit of an audible, "Ooh," from the audience. Like, "Wow, this is crazy." I mean, anyone pitching a space tech company is probably going to get that kind of response. But yeah, I remember thinking at the start, "Wow, this is crazy." And then by the end being like, "Oh, I guess somebody has to do it and this guy's planning to be the guy, so that's pretty cool."
(15:03):
But yeah, I guess on the cost front it was... If you think about it, a seat on a Virgin Galactic flight is looking at it will cost about $250,000. And I don't imagine you can just chuck any old space suit on any old person and just recycle them from person to person. They're actually going to be, got to relatively custom fitted and configured from person to person, especially when it comes to the biotracking kind of software that's in them. Yeah, so you can't really have a multi-million dollar suit every time somebody wants to jump on those flights, otherwise they're not going to be a very sustainable business.
(15:34):
But essentially, the suits that they're developing, they've actually got a range of different suits. Its not just one suit. It's a range of different suits for different use cases...
Will Richards (15:44):
Summer suit. Winter suit.
Gemma Clancy (15:44):
Underwater, on land. Yeah. Yeah. No different colors.
Will Richards (15:48):
Autumn. Spring.
Gemma Clancy (15:48):
Really. But each of them, they consist of a base layer and then an exosuit, and also then they have software built into them for telemetry. So that's essentially tracking all the different things happening inside the body, making sure that, I guess everything's okay from a life science perspective when you're taking somebody from land into zero gravity.
(16:14):
But yeah, super interesting. So essentially, we haven't even talked about the raise. We just talked about how amazing the startup is, but they raised a $2 million pre-seed round from a Saudi technology group, actually. I tried to do a bit of research on the investor to try and understand who are these people? Never heard about them before. The internet gave me nothing. So apologies, guys. But if you know anything about these investors, feel free to let me know, but I could not find anything out about them. But yeah, obviously there was some quotes in the press releases and one of them mentioned that Saudi Arabia has got a kind of burgeoning space flight industry, so perhaps that's where the interest has come from, but otherwise, a bit of an unknown for me at the moment.
Will Richards (16:55):
Yeah, I've done some research on the VC as well. I couldn't really uncover much either. But yeah, I think it's interesting seeing these sovereign nations have more of a focus on space. Australia's sort of focused now as well. Obviously, the US and there's certain European countries too. Yeah, I think we're starting to see more and more investment go into these sorts of technologies for sovereign reasons.
Gemma Clancy (17:16):
Yeah, very interesting. What was your pick this week, Will?
Will Richards (17:20):
My pick this week was LoveHeart AI. So for many of you may know that I used to work in the childcare sector, so I love seeing a childcare technology startup raise some money. And I really like what Himal is doing at LoveHeart because it's solving a really big problem in the early childcare space, which is basically a labor shortage issue. And what they're doing is using AI to really help educators get off the iPad where they have to write these updates and do these compliance-based things, which is really important, but can take a long time. So these educators can be quite stressed and there's always lots of different things going on in a childcare center. So a tool like this just allows them to spend more time doing the things that really matter, which is obviously working with the children and educating them and teaching them things instead of doing the compliance side of things and updating parents on what's going on. So it's sort of bridging that gap between automation, but automation when it's really appropriate.
Gemma Clancy (18:21):
I didn't know much about that kind of the administrative compliance side of childcare. Is that something that you think has increased a fair bit over the recent years, the requirements there?
Will Richards (18:31):
Yeah, so it's always been a very heavily compliance-based industry for all the right reasons. But if you are a childcare owner, you have to have a certain number of staff per children. So there's a lot of ratios. And they sort of change depending on the state, but the sort of rough guidance is you need one educator between four and five children. And it does fluctuate on the age of kids as well.
(18:55):
So oftentimes if you go to a childcare center now and you try and enroll your kid, you might sort of say, "Oh... The center might say, "We're actually full, we can't take the enrollment." There are centers that are completely full and they can't take another child, but quite often what the limiting factor is they don't actually have the staff to accept more children because the ratios go out of whack. So it's a really frustrating thing for everyone involved because the educators are overwhelmed. The childcare centers want to get more enrollments because it's better for business, and then parents get really frustrated as well because they can't get their child in a childcare center.
Gemma Clancy (19:31):
Yeah, it's actually interesting timing and funny that you say that because I think it was just this week actually that I think Victoria University came out with some research talking about how many childcare deserts there are in Australia, and they found that one in four Australians actually have severely limited access to childcare, and about 700,000 people virtually have no access to it at all. And there's some places where there's up to 50 kids vying for one spot in a childcare home.
(20:00):
So if you're particularly in regional locations, if you're in a regional location and you don't have access to childcare, that's a huge impact on your life, particularly usually the mom's ability to return to work, which is again, a huge flow-on effects of productivity, economic impacts. So, yeah. Yeah. So, anyway, coming back to the startup, we could keep going bigger and bigger on this. And whenever you talk about childcare, I find it fascinating too, whenever we talk about childcare, I think because it has such huge impacts on our society. But tell me a bit more about the raise.
Will Richards (20:34):
Yeah, so it was a 2.3 million seed round, and it was led by OIF Ventures and Skalata were also involved in the business. And Skalata loved to play in that verticalized B2B SaaS world, so really focusing on quite niche, well, niche software products in niche businesses.
(20:54):
So it was founded in 2022, and the founder, Himal owns his own childcare centers and he's actually an exited founder as well. So he built a technology previously. Sold that and was sort of looking around at like, "Oh, what do I kind of do with this money?" And he had some family connections to the childcare industry and decided basically to start, oh, I think he acquired a childcare center, and he's now expanded that portfolio to about six childcare centers in New South Wales.
(21:23):
And I think when you're managing centers, you see all the frustrations of both the educators and the parents and the frustrations as well of just trying to get, you want the best for your staff and you want the best for the children you have under your care as well. And that's sort of where he came up with this solution. It's gone through a few iterations, but I think they've landed on a product that's really resonating with educators across Australia.
Gemma Clancy (21:46):
Yeah, that's really great. What kind of traction has he got so far?
Will Richards (21:49):
Yeah, so they've grown organically through word of mouth, and I think that really shows when there's a product solving a problem this people love to talk about it. So they've grown organically to 40,000 educators across Australia using the platform. And it's a bit of a product-led growth approach where one childcare worker maybe discovers a product and then they bring it to work and then they tell their coworkers about the product because really saving them time, and then they try and convince the center manager to allow them to use it across the board.
Gemma Clancy (22:17):
No, that's really interesting. Yeah, I would've thought that that would've been quite a challenging go-to-market strategy for an industry like this. B2B product-led is hard full stop, but in an industry like this, it's highly regulated, et cetera, I would've thought that was quite challenging. So cool that they've managed to crack that.
Will Richards (22:33):
Yeah, I think it just goes back to how deep the frustrations run for these educators and how high the burnout is. So any tool that can help them, they really look for. I think as the business matures and now that they've raised this money, they're probably going to go from a more top-down approach and more of a sales-led approach, which will be quite interesting to see. And I think there's... The education outcomes are a real focus for the founders and the team. If they can get this product out there and the staff have more time to spend with the children and these outcomes can be reported faster and better, I think we'll see better outcomes for the children involved in childcare as well, which is fantastic.
Gemma Clancy (23:10):
Yeah, really fantastic.
Will Richards (23:16):
So each week we're going to leave you in the same way that we wrap up our weekly newsletter, which is with a section that we call KaaS, which is of course, knowledge as a service where we share our favorite startup relevant, read, listen, or watch of the week. And this week, Gem, what was your KaaS?
Gemma Clancy (23:32):
My KaaS this week is one that I've actually, I've used in the newsletter a couple of times before because it is one of my favorite startup resources of all time, but I've never talked about it on the podcast before. So I thought this is a good opportunity just to surface it again. And it's from the MKT1 or MKT1, maybe you say it, I'm not sure, Newsletter that's actually, it's a US-based newsletter. And they have the most amazing articles/newsletters, resources on mainly B2B startup marketing. But I think a lot of the principles that they talk about about marketing strategy and organizing your teams and things that are really relevant to other non-B2B startups as well. I've never found anything that explains things as clearly as this does.
(24:15):
So they just released a, well, they're about to release actually a series of newsletters on this topic, but they released the first one of it just this week on building B2B startup marketing org charts. And the reason I bring it up, it sounds really boring because org charts, snore, right? But no, really, really important because one of the most common questions that I get as a marketing expert that works with startups all the time is who should I hire? When should I hire them? How should I craft my team around marketing? And it's different for everyone, obviously, but I think this explains it in a really interesting way, and it's not just explaining the traditional approach that a lot of people are taking, but it's actually proposing a slightly different approach to what probably a lot of startups are doing right now. And it introduces this idea of having people in the role of what the writer Emily talks about as producers.
(25:10):
So these producers, they have the role of bridging the gap between different siloed marketing teams. A commonly held misconception by particularly early-stage founders is that you can kind of hire one marketing person and that marketing person can just do marketing. And I shouldn't laugh because it's fair, maybe if you think you need an accountant and you just hire one accountant and they can do that job, but it's not really the same in marketing. And it actually the same for sales. I think sales is, not to oversimplify sales because it can be quite complicated team to build, but the role of marketing on the team of marketing is so varied in its skillset.
(25:48):
So you can have people who are very growth-based focused, paid ads, you can have people who are very content-based, and you can have very brand-focused people. And so she proposes a structure for a team that has people who sit in these different areas of skill, but then has these people in the role of producers who almost form a project management role bridging the gap between different people in these different silos.
(26:15):
So yeah, I definitely encourage people to take a look. It's especially relevant if you're going from having one marketer on your team to building it out to five plus. Yeah, I've never read something quite so clear on how to do it before. I think it's really, really useful.
Will Richards (26:30):
Yeah. I really like the way they've broken this down into, as the team grows, this is what the team should kind of look like. And the way they've structured it. I'm not a marketing person, but I can really understand what each person should be responsible for and probably delivering just from looking at these graphics, which is really, it's really good content.
Gemma Clancy (26:48):
Yeah, yeah, they pretty much have it from what you should have for a team of five, and then what you should have for a team of 10 to 15 and then 20 to 25. So yeah, it's a great roadmap for anyone thinking about this stuff. What was your KaaS this week, Will?
Will Richards (27:02):
Yeah, so my KaaS this week was the latest edition of Superfluid, which is written by the VC investor, Abhi from Rampersand. And the title of this film was called Thrive, Consolidate or Die. And I think it's quite a depressing read up top, but I think it has some quite good call-outs for maybe if you're a founder who's getting started, and Rampersand obviously invest quite early, how you should sort of think about the markets that you're attacking and where potentially some markets are oversaturated and where other markets are quite blue ocean. So yeah, definitely, definitely really good read. I love the Substack in general. I think he puts out some really good content.
Gemma Clancy (27:42):
So good. Yeah.
Will Richards (27:42):
Yeah. And at this stage as well, the amount of startups that are shutting down is always increasing just with the interest rates and the funding environment and those sorts of things. So yeah, I think it's a good one to read, digest, and just have a think about the market that you're attacking and if there is a pivot into one that maybe is less competitive where you can have a greater advantage and really build your business.
Gemma Clancy (28:06):
Yeah, great, great recommendation. Love everything that Abhi puts out. So highly recommend subscribing to that one.
(28:19):
Thanks for joining us for this episode of The Startup Retro. We would love to hear what you thought of the show, so feel free to reach out to us directly on LinkedIn, or even better, you can follow us on your favorite podcast player and leave us a review so that more people can find us. And if you enjoy the podcast, you'll probably also really enjoy our weekly newsletter, Overnight Success, which goes into even more detail on the news headlines and startup raises, and much, much more. You can subscribe to the newsletter at overnightsuccess.vc. Catch you next week.
Will Richards (28:45):
Catch you next week.