William Leonard
The pandemic has changed how we meet for work, social life, and entertainment. Software like Zoom, Air meet, and Google meet are your traditional platforms, facilitating virtual meetings. Built on the concept of spatial video chat, Atlanta startup Gatherly is a modern platform, reshaping how virtual events are facilitated by replicating the magic of in-person interactions. On this episode of the Atlanta Startup Podcast, I sit down with Christopher Cherian and we’ll dive into what makes Gatherly a startup that spun out of Create-X differentiated for corporate and enterprise use cases. We’ll also talk about the future of hybrid events and get Christopher’s perspective on raising capital outside of the Bay Area. Chris, how are you today, man?
Christopher Cherian
I’m doing well. Thank you so much for having me on today. Looking forward to this.
William Leonard
Likewise. I’m excited about this conversation you’re building in such a fascinating space that has seen rapid growth thanks to COVID. But I’m excited to hear how you’re planning to build Gatherly for the long haul and in a sustainable fashion. We’ll talk about that a bit later but let’s kick it off here and would love for you to give our listeners a quick rundown on what you’re building at Gatherly.
Christopher Cherian
Absolutely. It’s interesting because I think there are a lot of like shared experiences that people have like birthday parties, and funerals, on the other hand, and now we’ve added weird Zoom calls and weird Teams meetings to that like shared new experience. What we’re building is essentially a solution to allow people to more naturally bump shoulders, run into people, and have a good time serendipitously at a virtual event rather than just sitting in a more boxed-out framework type of Zoom call. I think Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams all are phenomenal solutions for one type of meeting where one person talks and everyone listens but when you think about like the last birthday party you’re at, or the last cocktail hour, or the last trade show, hopefully, it wasn’t just like the birthday boy or girl or person just talking for hours on end. You were able to actually go and chat with people that you wanted to. That’s the kind of experience we want to create, which is incredibly valuable for teams that are looking to create employee retention, customer success, or similar types of experiences.
William Leonard
I love that. That’s so important right now, especially in today’s current economic environment when you have headline after headline talking about the great resignation. It’s important to focus on employee retention but as I said, we’ll get to that a bit later in the conversation. I want to understand your background a bit. What was your journey to building Gatherly and entrepreneurship?
Christopher Cherian
I frequently described myself as a recovering political science major, where I started off in politics and law school, I was really passionate about all of that. But more so than the politics, what I was really excited about was problem-solving. Not to get too political, but politics was a little bit too slow on the problem-solving aspect for me so I started looking for other roles, like consulting or banking. But all throughout this, without even realizing it, I’ve been working on startups with people like my current co-founder to just solve whatever problems that were around us whether it was like, “Oh, back in high school, all my friends were crazy about college admissions, how do we get into the best school?” So we started building a college admissions chatbot, for example, before another company beat us out to it. I didn’t even realize that these are startup experiences until I started to delve more into the conversations with professors and economics and finance teachers. They’re like, “You’ve been doing a startup for a long time and you need to realize it.” Well, I guess that’s what I like. Junior year of college, so in 2020, that’s when we were working on a 3D body scanning startup. Basically, the idea was, that people, return a lot of clothes that they buy online just because they don’t know what the fit might look like. If we can build you a better 3D body scan so you can see what the clothes look like on you before you buy them. Hopefully, we can tear down this billion-dollar return industry. Well, the pandemic hits in 2020 and we had a 3D working body scanner in a garage. This thing literally started to collect dust just because no one was coming in to test it because of all the lockdowns. That’s when we started pivoting everything down. Really happy to dive a little bit into what sparked that, but let me pause on the answer real quick.
William Leonard
I was gonna ask what was that moment for you all to say, “Hey, let’s pivot into something that can be a little bit more sustainable and have a long-term vision here.”
Christopher Cherian
Absolutely. A little bit more sustainable than a 3D in-person body scanning startup during a pandemic. So what happened was, I said the product’s literally collecting dust on a shelf. Early April rolls around, so this is like maybe two or three weeks into lockdowns, my amazing, amazing girlfriend sets up a birthday party for me on Zoom. And listen, this was the most awkward birthday party I’ve ever had in my entire life. There were 50 people on the Zoom call, people from high school, college, and previous work experiences. Great seeing them but I would talk to like one person I haven’t caught up with within a few years and 40 Other eyeballs would just be watching you have this one conversation. That was like, “Oh, there has to be a better way” moment. We put together an MVP. It looked like a crappy 2003 HTML version of Snake. We showed it to a couple of our friends. One of my college buddies saw it and said “Hey, I’ll pay you 15 bucks to use this at one of my meetings next week.” And we said great product market, let’s go ahead and start building this together.
William Leonard
Are you technical? How did you all throw together an MVP in what sounds like a pretty quick timeline?
Christopher Cherian
Let me clarify here. I’m not the technical co-founder. I’m tech illiterate but don’t let my co-founder hear you say that. But I’m very fortunate to have good friends from Georgia Tech who are phenomenal at the software engineering components and they’ve been phenomenal engineers. My background is I went over to Wharton to study and handle the business side. That’s what I was really focused on at the time and still today.
William Leonard
That’s fascinating. It sounds like you all have a pretty wide array of customers that could potentially use Gatherly and not just like a business fashion, or a social entertainment fashion as well. Talk to us more about who you would define as your core customers here.
Christopher Cherian
This is a great, great question, William, because first off, the big recommendation here. If you haven’t read it, The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. Phenomenal book. Love the author, Georgia Tech alum, and native Atlanta guy. What he talks about is startups frequently drown, they don’t start, and you nailed it, we can serve multiple different types of customers, ranging from like corporate institutions to the American Medical Association, and similar types of like 501c6 organizations to education like Georgia Tech has been a phenomenal customer of ours. This is great for proving out a big TAM–total addressable market–which is wonderful for our pitch deck slides and wonderful for when we go to talk to investors. But what ends up inevitably happening is if you’re trying to service everybody at once, you start to build a product that everybody likes, but no one loves. We’ve focused on over the last couple of months as a pandemic has been thankfully ending is really building a solution that resonates with one or maybe two types of customers. Our ideal customers come down to people who are in one of two different profiles, let’s actually break it down into three. I’ll break my own rule real quick. The first type of customer that really resonates with our product is people who are running webinars or sales team meetings. These are people who have people coming to their webinars, but during the time when they’re pitching their product or talking about their solution, they’re on another screen answering emails or shopping for Father’s Day gifts on Amazon, don’t forget to do that, like that kind of stuff. Great. How do we build a more engaging environment for these types of customers where sales reps can literally walk up to employees or walk up to potential customers and prospects and engage them in a meaningful way? Number two would be people ops managers or HR managers who are looking to build retention. I think remote work has been a phenomenal, phenomenal change in the world. This is wonderful for mental health, saving on energy costs, and different things but one challenge that a lot of people have been telling me is that remote work can create a commoditized work environment where one software engineering job is pretty much the same as another just because all you’re doing is putting up commits in GitHub and you’re not really interacting with other employees. Creating a culture, which has always been only important for startups and large businesses alike, is getting really, really hard in a remote environment. Gatherly really helps do that by helping create these social mixers and different things like that. Finally, I would refer to communities very similar to the HR profile. I’d almost call it one but it’s just a slightly different type of customer. A great example of this is stacks.org, a phenomenally successful customer of ours, they’re running like 600 people user communities across the entire globe. These people can’t meet in person because you fly out 600 people to one location weekly, right? But being able to build a community around that is important. Similar to the HR use case, but more external than internal.
William Leonard
That is pretty wide-ranging, you said webinars, sales teams who are potentially doing product demonstrations, HR managers looking to focus on company retention, and then communities as well. As you think about product market fit here, such an interesting but necessary aspect of the business to really nail down because this is how you’re going to grow. And I feel like COVID was probably a great sense of momentum for customers who were wanting to just find that quick solution but now as you said, as we navigate out of this pandemic a bit you’re trying to find product market fit in a way that is sustainable for the next decade or so as we kind of maybe shift back to this in-person work environment and navigate this hybrid work environment as well. Talk to us about how you think about finding product market fit and after you kind of initially built on the back of the pandemic.
Christopher Cherian
This is I think one of the most important things for startups, and if not the most important thing, I think this is frequently mentioned on Twitter Hacker News, your TechCrunch, pick your favorite media source. But I don’t think it’s really frequently well defined and I’ll take a stab at it, but again, first-time founder, just recently diving into this. I think product market fit really just comes down to two key components. Who does your product help make more successful? Who’s coming back to your product again and again because it solves one of their core problems and they love what you do and even more so, they need what you do? If you were to rip away your solution from them and shut down, is their business going to be tangibly less successful because of that? If the answer is yes, then you’ve found a really core market. Number two is repeatable sales, a repeatable customer acquisition component. Can you essentially Xerox this customer over and over again, which to boil it down is really just a distribution strategy? I think that’s what’s really key. There are elements of product-market fit where you can find a phenomenal fit within a market, but the market is too small or distribution is really challenging because there are already existing players, or there’s like mounds and mounds of paperwork that need to be navigated. Product-market fit comes down to more than just building something people love, I think the other component that people frequently forget is, can you build something people love and need, and get it into their hands quickly and efficiently to scale such that you’re able to beat out competitors and do it before you run out of runway?
William Leonard
That’s such an interesting take. I think that aspect of distribution in a space that has existing players, as you mentioned, Google Meet, Airmeet, Zoom, those types of companies, even Skype and Google are still players that are a bit older, but they’re still active and still have some market share. Distribution is a key aspect. As you kind of think about your distribution, you don’t have to go too deep into the weeds here, but how do you think about that in a space that does have adjacent competitors as well?
Christopher Cherian
Absolutely and this is a great question, William. You’ve listed off like five or six players, but look you could lift up a rock in Central Park and there’ll be like a guy saying, “Hey, I’ve got a video chat startup, you wanna join?” I say this not to like downgrade myself but to emphasize there are industries where there are a lot of competitors because the industry provides a lot of value. There’s huge market size, right? I think the projection on the market size of virtual events is going to triple over the next 10 years to whatever trillion dollars. With this being said, though, I think the key is building for a niche and this goes back, I’m gonna sound like a broken record here, but being able to build a product that people love and need. I’ll be transparent with one of the things that I really dislike about gathering these core websites is the main text says, to post engaging online events. Great, that worked wonderfully during the pandemic where people were like my virtual events suck, no one’s coming to them, people are dropping off halfway through, that tagline was perfect for that kind of audience. But moving out of the pandemic, to people, like I mentioned, like the sales leaders, or employee managers, and ops people, I think that language needs to get a little bit more precise and refined down to something like engaging prospects like never before or create a unique work environment. This is still stuff that I’m sketching on my workbook. I don’t have the perfect wording that’s like 50 and an idea just yet, but what it gets down to is going from this broad topic, engaging virtual events, which is a problem that we’re solving down to something a little bit more specific, rather than we solve engaging virtual events, or we solve boring events. We get you more revenue through this traction channel, or we help you retain employees by building a culture. The way we do that is our solution which is engaging virtual events. I would say like, a little bit cliche, but I think I heard a startup talker say the riches are in the niches and that’s really how I would dive into that.
William Leonard
I love that. I think another key aspect of product market fit is differentiation, right? You’re crafting your message to fit the evolving needs of your end customers: the HR managers, and the communities of the world. You’re going from hosting engaging virtual events but now you’re talking about increasing revenue, getting and using the keywords that the stakeholders who are your end customers are, those are their key KPIs that they’re measured on week over week, month over month, year over year. I can certainly resonate with you. The need to continuously craft and tailor your message to fit how you’re going to sell to your end customer. Completely love that, man.
Christopher Cherian
This also ties directly to the product, right? I’m just talking on the sales and marketing side because that’s where my brain loves 80% of the time, but when you talk about the product side, too, right? We’re building for sales managers, then things like integrations into SalesLoft, Salesforce, and HubSpot become really, really critical whereas if you’re building for education clients, they don’t care about that. They want this to integrate with Canva or Udemy or whatever their core solution is on that side. Building your product also heavily relates to who you’re building for and the two words that are like live and die by our customer discovery, right?
William Leonard
Exactly. Talk to us a bit about your early fundraising journey. I know you raised a strong majority of your capital from local Atlanta investors here in the city. Talk to us about that and what it was like raising early capital outside of the Bay Area.
Christopher Cherian
Pandemic, horrible events, a disaster for human history, but one benefit out of that is I think it has democratized capital access. I think everybody needed to be in Silicon Valley earlier, right? Or be in New York, or Israel, or China, or like one of these tech hubs. I think being outside of one of those cities and being able to find your balance sheet with other capital from outside sources, whether it be like Midwest, Atlanta, or Silicon Valley has been a huge, huge boon for the startup industry and I’m excited to see that continue. For Atlanta specifically, I really like Atlanta investors. I think what I’m most excited by and this might be a controversial take, is I think the investors that I have on the East Coast, specifically Atlanta, are the most down-to-earth investors that I’ve ever had. Now, the main difference that I see with Silicon Valley investors is they’re more fundamentals-focused. When I talk to Silicon Valley or West Coast funds, I find myself frequently leaning into vision statements. “Oh, here’s how we’re gonna save the world.” That kind of stuff is important. I don’t want to downplay that. But for me, I care a little bit more about like the core numbers, right? What are our customer retention numbers? How is our growth been over the last couple of months? What’s our distribution plan to achieve that product market fit like we were talking about earlier? For me, the conversations I had with Atlanta investors in New York investors were incredibly more detailed on that specifically than it was about vision. Again, don’t want to downplay the vision, it’s incredibly important, especially when you’re at that pre-seed stage to talk about what you’re going to do. But what I really liked about Atlanta specifically, is the conversation went from I liked that vision, let’s talk about how we’re gonna get there, and that was the immediate next conversation. I love that.
William Leonard
To your first point, access to capital now has certainly benefited startups that are in non-traditional venture hubs. Now you’re talking about the differences between kind of West Coast and East Coast investors, there is a variation in what they’re honing in on. It’s good to hear that you kind of have experience communicating with both and figuring out who you want to be in this marriage as you continue to build. That’s fascinating. Was that intentional on your part to raise outside of the Bay Area? Or did it just occur as a happenstance?
Christopher Cherian
I wish I could say it was intentional. I think like most startup founders will say, things just sort of happen, you look back and you say, that worked out quite nicely. I’m not going to question that. So no, as much as I wish I can say it was intentional, they really came out of like the community. I really like the Atlanta startup community and how it’s been growing. We were part of the Create-X accelerator. I mentioned that my co-founders are from Create-X. What Rahul Saxena and Chris Klaus are doing over there, I’m a huge fan they just reached I think was like 100+ startups for their latest batch. But that network really started springboarding us into other ones, like we had a conversation with Andrew Dorman of Knoll Ventures. He put us in touch with other investors as well and I think the fact that it’s such a tight-knit community has helped us a lot. It’s been able to help us springboard from one conversation to the next to be able to have those meaningful chats with investors to hear what their perspective on how we can reach our next milestone looks like.
William Leonard
Create-X is such a strong vector of startup production here in the city and in the state as well. I know you went to school at Penn and you could have gone I feel like to New York or DC, or even Philadelphia to build, what led you to come back here to Atlanta to build and have this company here in the southern United States?
Christopher Cherian
I think it comes really back down to the network and to give one quick clarification, I do split my time 50/50 between New York and Atlanta right now, primarily because a lot of our customers are in New York. I love being able to just like grab drinks with them or like stop at the rock. That’s like really important. I don’t want to underplay the importance of being where your customers are and building those relationships but with the onset of virtual platforms like Gatherly or other types that allow you to really break those barriers in person and really be able to communicate with people from wherever. I do like Atlanta a lot again, primarily for that. I think the investor network is strong, but even on top of that the resources like Atlanta Tech Village and Create-X, I think they’re building phenomenal things down there that have been able to provide value beyond just capital dollars, right? They’re also providing great mentors. I think it was Tristan Walker who just came to this city right with Walker and Co and his suite of brands there. I had 1 30-minute phone call with him and the way that I really evaluate phone calls or books that I read is how much of my business or how much of my personal practices I change after a phone call. I think right after the call with like Tristan, for example, I changed like four or five things when I was running Gatherly. I find myself having a moment over and over again in Atlanta and I’m really excited to see how those resources continue to develop and grow in the city.
William Leonard
You mentioned something interesting about how you are splitting your time 50/50 between New York and Atlanta primarily to spend time with customers, right? At this early stage, how do you develop a cadence around that, as a founder knowing when to check in with your customers, iterating on feedback that they’re giving you, and how do you build a cadence around this customer communication interaction?
Christopher Cherian
I’m going to be honest, I don’t know if I do this well yet. But I don’t know if I’m ever going to change that answer that I just gave because I think there’s always more you can do, right? I don’t think there will ever be a complete peak on, yes, I have the best grasp of customer discovery, and the best grasp on the customer possible, but you can get pretty close. Let’s talk about how to get to that 90/10 split before you get to the 99th percentile. I think that can seem to be as high as possible, right? Talk with your customers on a weekly, if not bi-weekly basis, as possible and as you build up more customers, you can stop annoying the same one over and over again. But if you are building a solution that helps them solve their problems, there are two things that happened. One, I mean, who really asks you about your problems, right? People ask you how your day is and you just go, “Great.” People who are actually hunting down what sucks about your life. People love that. I’ve never had a challenge when I asked people like, “Hey, tell me about your biggest problem.” People talk for like hours on end and they love me for it. They love other startup founders for it because we will never ask them. Number one, you’re not necessarily bothering your customers by asking them about their problems. But two, if you’re building a solution for them that helps them solve that problem, then they’re gonna get even more excited. That’s what’s meaningful and valuable for them. I think that’s the twist on it. It makes it okay but to get back to your question about how you build that cadence, I think there’s like a number of ways. Let’s put them into three different categories. First is just general customer discovery one on one, can I set up a phone call with you, here’s our latest product, I want to like get your feedback before we launch it. Dropbox and Buffer are phenomenal examples of companies that have built fake products like Dropbox’s video, I think they made an hour-long video of a pipe that didn’t exist, showed it to like a million people and they loved it. They built from there. Similar case with Buffer, check out those case studies if you have some time, I think they’re great. That’s one example, right? Number two is like more of these like roundtables or events. We hold events with our core customers frequently where they go and talk to each other. We just sit in the background and listen to these conversations happen. When our customers start talking to each other, that’s when you can really see that they resonate with different types of problems that are going on. The final set would be not customers that you have today but customers that you think you might eventually have. A great example here is when we were starting off, we started off in education because we were students. We had a hunch that corporate would be a really strong use case for us. I mean, kind of a no-brainer, corporates are almost always a great use case but what we did was we started contacting recruiting managers and HR managers before they were our customers to ask them questions. Again, more so from a customer discovery angle than a sales angle but I can’t emphasize highly enough how into this you need to be and how much I think it’s almost impossible always to be 100% in tune but do it as much as you can.
William Leonard
I think that’s all fascinating insight and advice. You’re getting your customers into a room together, sitting back and listening to how they’re using the product. I’m sure they’re probably gathering inspiration from the other users of the Gatherly software. Really interesting feedback there, Chris. As we wrap up this conversation here, what’s going to be most exciting this year for Gatherly? We’re halfway through the year right now, it’s June 2. What is top of mind for you all as you think about the second half of the year and look forward to 2023? That’s so crazy to say, but we’re almost there.
Christopher Cherian
I still feel like it’s the end of 2021. Like I say, last quarter and now I guess I only mean quarter one, but I think what I’m looking forward to most is a couple of different things. Gatherly-specific, we’re closing out our fundraising round, mostly insiders, but we’re working with a couple of different funds that might be a really great value add. That’s number one. Looking forward to that. Number two, though, Gatherly specifically as a company is we’re locking down that product-market fit from the repeatability side and what we’re really being intentional about is a distribution strategy. We have a strong understanding of who loves our product, and who uses it frequently, now what we’re doing is we’re trying to get this into the hands of as many people as possible. A lot of people talking about Series A like 1 million is that rubber stamp benchmark. Where my disagreement with that comes in, it’s not just the 1 million, it’s repeatable sales. Can you Xerox those customers? I think what I’m looking to do for the remainder of the year is just Xerox as many of these customers as I can and just build up that money machine, right? As much as you can tell investors or I guess, customers, and even prospective employees for your team, for every dollar that we get into our business, we can put that into ADs. We can put that into events or whatever traction channel that we’re excited about and out will pop $5. That’s what a scalable startup is. That’s the golden nugget of what we’re trying to do. Look, we have the elements in place, how do we build for that? How do we prove it out on paper so that we can just go out and do it again and again? And then the fun challenge from there is organ building, right?
William Leonard
Having that repeatability is going to be so important to focus on as customers and startups now navigate this interesting market that we’re in, doubling down on your sales funnel and the sales process is top of mind for a lot of the companies that we’re working with and seeing as well in the market. Really can appreciate and have that feedback resonate with our listeners here. Chris, I appreciate your time. Let’s say there’s an enterprise listening right now, what’s the best way for them to get in touch with you about potentially using Gatherly?
Christopher Cherian
I’m always living in my email inbox. You can always reach me at chris@gatherly.io.
William Leonard
Love it, man. Chris, thank you so much for joining me. You have a lot of interesting perspectives, especially as a first-time founder. Really enjoyed this conversation, man.
Christopher Cherian
Thank you so much for having me. I had a lot of fun.
William Leonard
Cheers. Take care.
Lisa
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