Rishi Palriwala’s Post

📹 Caught on tape: SF TECH HISTORY!! 📹 Last month, we hosted one of SF's LARGEST EVER independent demo nights! With 250+ community members in attendance, we had 10+ startups demo their product for a chance to take home the hardware! 🏆 After tallying up hundreds of community votes, here were the winners! 🗳️ 🏅 AWARD WINNERS • 🏆 Best Overall: Katalist • 😍 Crowd Favorite: Theneo • 🤖 Best Technology: Chalk • 🎨 Most Creative: DXM Thank you Roan Weigert for the incredible hype reel, Emergence Capital and Arcee.ai for partnering with us, and SHACK15 for hosting us! Catch you all at the next one!! 🤩

Back in 2017, Islands (my chat startup) was dying a slow death. No one cared. We were forgettable. We raised $2M but money was running out. I had a make-or-break meeting with one of our VCs in an hour, and I knew he was going to ask the million-dollar question: "How are you going to grow?" Most founders would've spouted off about AI, blockchain, or some other buzzword bingo. And to be honest, I thought about it. It was the ICO craze of 2017. Maybe adding a token would be the answer to my problems. But I had a different plan brewing, one that would either launch us to the moon or get me laughed out of the boardroom. It was the gentle 'whoosh' of my MacBook waking up that did it. That sound was pure satisfaction. Why couldn't our app deliver the same hit of dopamine? That's what our app was missing: Sound. While every other app was as silent as a librarian's fever dream, I wanted to make noise - literally. So I'd called up this indie musician in Montreal I went to elementary school with and gave him a mission: "Create a notification sound that'll make people's heads turn." The morning of my VC meeting, I woke up to a text that nearly made me spit out my coffee: "Bought, opened and emptied three coconuts for recording last night lol" This madman had turned his tiny Montreal apartment into a tropical thunderdome, all for a 2-second audio clip that cost me $280 and probably his security deposit. As I walked into the VC's office, palms sweaty, coconuts heavy, I steeled myself for the inevitable question. "So," he leaned back in his chair, "how exactly do you plan to grow in this crowded market?" I took a deep breath and said the words that would either make or break us: "Two words: Coconut sounds." His eyes rolled so hard I thought they might fall out of his head. "Focus on the big things," he growled. But I couldn't shake this feeling. Sometimes, it's the little things that make the biggest waves. We pushed the update that night and held my breath. For a whole day, nothing. I was ready to eat crow, to admit my VC was right. But then, something magical happened. Our user numbers started ticking up. Slowly at first, then faster. Word of mouth exploded. "Have you heard Islands' notification sound? It's crazy!" It was like we'd captured lightning in a bottle. Or should I say, a coconut. It didn't make our product, but it certainely helped. Turned growth from swimming upstream to downstream. Nikita Bier says it best about how to grow startups: "My biggest learning has been that when you're launching a rocketship and you're off by 1mm, you'll miss the moon & land in space." Amen. I call it the "1mm rule: Find the small, quirky thing that makes people smile, share, and come back for more. Since then, every product decision I make starts with one question: "What's the coconut?" What small, possibly insane detail can we add that'll make users fall in love? (For more posts like this, sign up to gregisenberg.com)