Garden
Montreal, SF 2023
Our goal was to create social media analytics as a service. Our initial hypothesis was we would help content creators grow by providing them with insights into "content their audience was craving"
We got the idea riffing in Sacha's apartment. Our initial MVP took around 3 weeks of frantic building. We worked on it for around 2 months. It was a lot of fun.
We spent a lot of time creating in-house models. This took a long time, required lots of training on (questionably legal) GPUs,
and was generally very complicated. Our MVP was a Topic Recommendation system that used data and relationships we had mined out
of our Twitter Dataset.
Garden v1 Demo
I had a hard time selling this to content creators, and my hypothesis was that this was because they wanted to make content that they enjoyed making, not that other people wanted. We decided to invert the focus, to creating sales / lead generation
Video Demo
In the process we created a Network Visualization graph, that showed users all the interactions in their network. We already had all this information, so displaying it and releasing it as a free tool seemed like the obvious choice. I delayed launching this until we had something good to sell. I thought that was how funnels work. I consider that a total mistake, we should have just shipped this, since it was awesome, instead of delaying a cool product.
The product that we wanted to promote with this was SwiftDM, a tool for Twitter Lead Generation and Cold DMs.
The idea was to use personalized data from a User's Twitter Profile to craft personalized sales outreach. This seemed like a really
good idea, I think we honestly did not do a good enough job of selling this (ironic), and could have pushed some more on it.
SwiftDM Demo
At this point we had a solid array of products, and had gained some understanding of the market we were entering.
We aligned our focus to small businesses, and enabling them to make sales via Social Media. We summarized this into a
pitch deck, and packed up to go to San Francisco.
Ultimately the project failed because Sacha and I needed the company to be in two different stages. I had quit my job to build startups, and was starting to run out of runway- I needed to raise. Sacha is going for a PhD at Yale in the fall, and was worried about the citizenship implications of starting a company. After a long week, we decided to stop working on the project.
Driving to San Francisco with a pitch deck and a plan and a dream was amazing. I had such a blast working on this project and so much love for Sacha and his abilities. This company brought me to San Francisco, where I have found countless amazing people to work with. All the amazing things I have built in California would not have been possible without Garden
