Founder and CEO at Poppin
Tejes is building Poppin, a social media app designed to get people off their phones by facilitating a seamless event discovery experience.
I'm building a startup called Poppin, and we are trying to revolutionize the way people organize and invite their friends to events, starting with college campuses.
I think I would pick Naval, I like a lot of his writings, his tweets and his books, and I think there'd be a lot to talk about. I'd pick Cristiano Ronaldo, just because I'm a big Ronaldo fan.
I'I started Poppin literally exactly three years ago, like by five days. I was in summer. I had just graduated high school and I was going to college and I just really wanted to work on something and I was coming out of the pandemic and I felt like hanging out with people and finding events was a pain point me and a lot of my friends are experiencing.
And I wanted an excuse to throw a party, so I thought if I throw a party and build an app for people to register and RSVP, it could be a good, productive way to do something unproductive. Then I organized a party before I started building the app. And once we got on that journey and invited people to the event, a thousand people RSVP'd for a house party. And that's when I knew we were onto something and we've just kept going since then.
.In my opinion, a lot of the social media platforms I've, I've used Instagram for like, I think 12, 10, 12 years now. I was really young when I got on and I've used it consistently and same thing with with like TikTok and Snapchat. And I feel like a lot of these social media platforms are changing their social graph to an interest graph. And they're more media platforms than social media platforms. In terms of Poppin, we want to build something that's not content driven. Of course, that potentially could be worse for our bottom line because we have less engageable content or things to do on the app. But we do believe that there needs to be a platform that's truly social, that reflects the time you spend with your friends and a way to connect with people, see what they're up to and make plans with them rather than looking at funny videos and sharing that with your friends. I think we want to build something that is a better mirror of the real world.
I would say Partiful is a really great way to invite someone to something. I think it's really, really fun to use in that use case. I think in my experience with Partiful, there has been limited ability to discover events. It's a great platform to send invites and receive invites. But thus far, it's not really solved the problem of helping people find things to do, and specifically, we're focused on a younger demographic of college students and people just graduating high school, where people are very active and have a high social battery and an inclination to look for things to do and not always the means to host their own event, because they don't necessarily have their own space or the money to support that kind of endeavor. We want to build a platform that allows anybody to open their phone and find everything going on around them. I think Luma solves that use case to some extent, but it's been mainly professional events. Things that are more geared to advancing my career rather than my social life and again, not very catered to the younger, Gen Z, college age population.
I'm a Poppin power user, because I like to find events on there and meet people through there. I've actually met my roommate for the next year on Poppin originally. We met on a poker game through Poppin. Two of my best friends have found their girlfriends on Poppin. And I think the funniest one was somebody actually found out that their boyfriend was cheating on them through Poppin, because they saw them on a guest list and apparently that person said they were staying home and they were friends with that person on Poppin. So they saw that they were going to a party. So I think Poppin promoted a lot of love. Maybe it's taken some away, but I think seeing people use it organically and find new friends and things to do is, is really, really comforting. And a lot of people have told us that it's helped them find a sense of community in college and in the regions that we've already launched, which is probably the best thing that we can possibly hear.
We've taken a lot of risks. We tried to build features very, very quickly. And we tried to ship at a crazy rate almost. And some of those things panned out in the sense that it got adoption quickly and we were able to go to market faster than competitors and sell to hosts that were excited to use us because of how quickly we could build a feature for them. But other times we've had bad cases of bugs and messy outcomes, one of which being an address not going to the right location. So 100 people go to the wrong location for a party. We've definitely made a lot of clumsy mistakes like that, but I'd say a risk we take is to ship quickly. We were very aggressive with marketing by throwing our events ourselves. In the early days, you have to build your own supply before you could get hosts on there. And then a couple of times that resulted in unfavorable outcomes where, obviously, throwing parties anything can happen. We've definitely taken risks. Some have panned out, some haven't. But I'd like to believe most are for the better of the company.
I'm very excited by it. I think everyone is just because it's a huge advancement in what's currently possible. I think it could be very useful in our platform and automating the boring parts. Maybe you need ideas to generate a party description or to generate a party flyer that really fits exactly what you're looking for rather than, shopping through preselected ones that we have in our library. But I would like to stay away from it to some extent because I don't want it to erode the authenticity that exists on our platform currently. I feel like it could be a slippery slope for people using it to not send messages that they write themselves or to make their profile look better in a sense, but not necessarily reflect themselves. So I'm excited about using it in the capacity of streamlining logistics and making it a more fun experience for the user, but we will definitely stay away from using it in making it something that's too core to the platform because that would defeat the purpose of what we're trying to build.
It was very opaque of a process. There's not many resources specifically at like 19, 20 that you have out there to learn how to apply for funding or to reach out for funding. It's a very, very different ballgame. Everyone around me was recruiting to work at tech companies or banking or consulting. And there's a bunch of material and people you can talk to for advice about that, but obviously fundraising is more opaque. I think I really benefited from making founder friends who were experienced in the process and courteous enough to give me their time and give me feedback on my deck.
Secondly, I spent a lot of time on YouTube and Reddit and looking at articles on how things work, reading books. I read a bunch of books, one notably with Venture Deals, which was like a textbook on how venture capital is structured and how it works. So when it comes to negotiating, financing, you really understand the intricacies.
I just consumed a lot of online resources or anything I could get a hang of. And then I just took a lot of meetings, I would really cold email at least five to 10 people a day and maybe get a meeting for one. If you're a 19 year old or 20 year old working on a party app, even though our vision and mission is grander than that, that's definitely how we're marketed on the surface to hook users in. But if you're marketing that, and investors get that vibe, I think it's definitely not the most exciting to them, specifically if you're young and you're a first time founder.
So I think getting meetings initially was very hard. And then once we close our first check, you get your foot in the door and it's a lot easier to get access. I think that's the hardest thing. I've been pretty privileged to grow up in the Bay area where I naturally was exposed to these things, probably younger than most people.
And my parents would know at least one or two investors that they could connect me with and get me started. I definitely got lucky. But once I was able to capitalize on that opportunity for the first check, you get good investors on board and they help you fundraise some more and meet more investors.
Fundraising is one of those things where every meeting ends well. It's very rare that you end a meeting and you're like, wow, they're definitely not going to invest. You might have an inclination, Oh, this person wasn't the most interested, or this doesn't make sense for them, but I had a lot of meetings where I walked out, especially when I was earlier on in the process and a lot more naive where I was like, They're definitely going to invest. And I was so wrong so many times and it would sound like the investor would want to invest in it a hundred percent. And then I'll get an email that's pretty generic saying like, Hey, we'd love to stay in touch or this is too early for us . So I think not over extrapolating what happens in meetings because I think fundraising is kind of like flirting. Everyone is talking and making these conversations and making these perspective statements as to what could happen. And then just staying true to what you have. And then again, that first yes is everything, but there were so many situations where I thought it was going to happen and then I wanted to give up at some point. Cause I was doing like eight meetings a day. I feel like every single one goes well. I would record my meetings. I would like study them back and take notes on what I did and try to improve, but I'd still like feel like I'm running into a wall. The variance is the biggest thing and not letting anything get to your head, whether you think it's positive or negative. And just moving forward is probably the best advice I could give, or that I would have liked to hear at the time.
I think a lot of first time founders would just take any check, right? Because it's pretty hard to get an offer in the first place. And once you do, you just want to take it. I think that was definitely the case for me. I'm going to take any offer, but I definitely got good advice from people that who you take the money from is like basically getting someone you can't fire. I like to think of people who would bring value to the company beyond just the capital.
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