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February 7, 2023

Founder Spotlight — Lisa Jiang, Co-Founder of Velma

Founder Spotlight — Lisa Jiang, Co-Founder of Velma

In this month’s Founder Spotlight, we’re putting the spotlight on Lisa Jiang, Co-Founder of Velma!

How did you come up with the idea for Velma? Has it changed along the way?

Justin Curhan and I were both working at hyper-growth startups at the time. Because of the continuous hiring, we spent a lot of effort coordinating with others on projects and still missed key pieces of information. This frustration led us to the thesis that project coordination is an exponential problem at scale. If we could create self-driving cars, why couldn’t we create self-driving projects?

Of course, it’s morphed along the way, but what’s changed the most is how we’re solving the problem more than the problem itself. In the very beginning, we targeted quarterly planning at the engineering team level. Now, our path has led us a few levels higher to recurring insights at the project level.

How did you meet your co-founder(s)?

We’ve been close friends for almost a decade. We first met at a friend’s apartment after graduating college and hit it off discussing startups (read: side hustles) we were working on at the time. Before we started working on Velma together, we built out a few apps for fun, including Uber for rental beds and a social prop-betting game.

Where did you find your first 5 customers?

Cold email outreach! Just like everyone else, we first started with our friends in tech. Funnily enough, they were the least helpful people. They’re inherently supportive and didn’t tell us when something sucked. However, people who didn’t know us, and were more likely to ignore us than not, were wonderful first customers. It required our product to align with their top priorities at all times. On top of that, we used LinkedIn to continually refine the attributes of our ideal customer profile and measure success rates. This helped us truly understand the makeup of the people who said “yes”. We also had triggers set up, so we knew when a company grew into our sweet spot. All these little tactics together made acquiring the next customer easier than the last.

What is the one piece of advice you ignored back then but wish you’d taken now?

Be narrowly focused. There’ve been a few decisions we’ve made where the right answer was always “get narrower”, and we’ve been on both the wrong and right side of that.

For a long time, we couldn’t make the hard decision to deprecate part of our product even when it wasn’t seeing the success metrics that it should. We thought it didn’t hurt to keep it alive since it was already built, but we overlooked the impact of the setup and maintenance costs. When we finally got rid of it and put all our effort into the more valuable half, we saw a jump from 10% to 70% of first calls interested in a trial — all because 100% of our energy was spent on making the important features even better than they already were.

There have also been a few times when customers asked for a significantly lower price point. Thanks to Ash, we turned them down, and, in each of those cases, we found out later that they just didn’t care about the problem as much as they said they did or even thought they did. We would have incorrectly built a product for a completely different segment and been distracted again.

Stay narrow until you’ve proven the need to expand!

Learn more about Velma at www.HeyVelma.com.

Thanks again to Lisa Jiang for sharing her story!

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Ash Rust

Ash Rust

Managing Partner, Sterling Road
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