This week, our guest is Hana Mohan. Hana is the co-founder and CEO of MagicBell, a startup tackling the monumental task of solving notifications for other software products. We spoke to Hana about her path to entrepreneurship, being labelled 'a high-maintenance employee,' taking part in Y Combinator, and what it's like transitioning in the startup world, and being a proud transgender woman founder.
This week, our guest is Hana Mohan. Hana is the co-founder and CEO of MagicBell, a startup tackling the monumental task of solving notifications for other software products. We spoke to Hana about her path to entrepreneurship, being labelled 'a high-maintenance employee,' taking part in Y Combinator, and what it's like transitioning in the startup world, and being a proud transgender woman founder.
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Darrell Etherington 0:00
Hi, and welcome to found I'm Darrell Etherington, and I'm here with my closest confidant and co host, Jordan crook.
Jordan Crook 0:06
And I'm here to sell secrets. So just hit me up on Apple Pay or square Venmo, whatever.
Darrell Etherington 0:13
Oh, any, any of those platforms. I'm glad you support so many different payment options for selling me out.
Jordan Crook 0:19
Yeah, I mean, it's good to be agnostic platform agnostic, because
Darrell Etherington 0:22
what I hear that's true and Jordans expressing entrepreneurial spirit, which is what found is all about, we're thrilled to be able to talk to different founders every week about their experience of building a company, everyone so far has been very different. I mean, obviously, there's some things they share in common when it comes to the experience, but everybody goes about it in a very different way. And everybody comes into it in a very different way. Journal, what do you think about our conversation so
Jordan Crook 0:45
far, I've actually felt like there's been a bit of a mismatch almost like some of the founders with the less sexy, let's say, products that are more like, you know, buttoned up tie are some of the like, looser personalities and have a lot of fun with us. And then there are people with these really kind of creative products that they're working on, who've been a little bit more buttoned up on the podcast. So it's interesting to see, you know, how people are reflected back in their products and, and how they approach us. I've had a lot of fun.
Darrell Etherington 1:23
On this week's show, we speak to Hannah Mohan, who is the founder and CEO, co founder and CEO of magic Bell, which is a yc company from this latest batch this the winter 2021 batch. And it's a startup focusing on, I don't know, if you were alluding to this one, specifically, Jared. But like one of these things that, you know, it's pretty behind the scenes, like it's a developer focus tool. It's a notification platform, aimed at developers for use within corporations, so very b2b product, but has a super interesting founder. And we had a really, really engaging, fun discussion.
Jordan Crook 1:57
Yeah, totally. And yes, I was alluding to this because you got on the face of it doesn't sound very sexy. But point one is that money is sexy. And I've feel like this is a product that will make lots of money. And to Yeah, handle is like so chill and fun. Like didn't feel very b2b. And she had a lot of interesting things to say she really opened up with us got kind of vulnerable. She talked to us a lot about yc, which I thought was cool. You don't hear a lot about like the inner workings of yc all the time. So that was really fun.
Darrell Etherington 2:29
Yeah, for sure. And she has a super interesting path to entrepreneurship in terms of like all the various twists and turns that she's taken. She's opened up to us about her experience as a trans founder too, which is, you know, super eye opening. And that's something you come across a lot in this industry specifically. So we were really lucky that she was willing to talk to us in detail about that.
Jordan Crook 2:51
Yeah, I thought that, you know, her openness about it was, I mean, obviously, that's a very specific journey. But I do think that there are pieces of it that are applicable to two other founders as well. And so, you know, I felt like I learned a lot. And I hope that our listeners learn a lot, too. It's really fascinating.
Darrell Etherington 3:16
Hi, Hannah. Thanks for joining us today.
Hana Mohan 3:19
It's my pleasure. Thank you.
Darrell Etherington 3:21
So you are the founder of a company called Magic Bell, which is a very young company, but you're in Y Combinator. Is
Hana Mohan 3:30
that right? That's correct. Yeah. And we have our demo day coming up. Pretty exciting time.
Darrell Etherington 3:35
Yeah, very exciting. Very exciting. So can you tell us a bit about magic Bell and kind of like how that got started and what the team is like right now?
Hana Mohan 3:44
Yeah, sure. So magic Bell is a notification system for web and mobile products. We focus a lot on the inap experience. And using magic Bell, you can get something like a Facebook Notification Center in your app in within an hour. We started about six or seven months back in September. Been in yc. Since January, it's my co founder and I, we've had a few people help us out on the web, but it's just the two of us now. And we are going to start recruiting a team. So it's still pretty small.
Darrell Etherington 4:19
Very small, but what have you you've already built a you know, I've seen the demo video that you released for the for the yc pitches there. So like, you build something that's functional, like it provides the functionality I think you have customers already has all right.
Hana Mohan 4:34
Yeah, we have a few customers. In fact, we just signed up a couple of weeks back pitch, which is really cool startup. And it's really exciting. Yeah, we both both of us, co founders are engineers, so we can build things together. And we have a lot of experience. So yeah, I mean, we have a long way to go but it's already a product providing a lot of value, sort of like truly an MVP, but a very polished MVP, I would say
Jordan Crook 4:58
do you feel like being like Double engineering team when you go, how does that affect like going into sales? Because like right now, it's just the two of you, right? What? What's that, like pitching to clients? And like kind of splitting your time between those two things?
Hana Mohan 5:12
Yeah, that's a great question. Um, so I've been an entrepreneur for 15 years now. And in my last company, I built a b2b SaaS, but an enterprise SAS, but a b2b SaaS company. And so I have a lot of experience doing demos, and you know, just helping customers onboard. So I think I'm not super like, target driven or quota driven. But if we have inbound leads, which we do already magic, well, I'm pretty good at nurturing them and converting them. So I actually enjoy that part. I'm just, it's actually sometimes a little bit challenging, because I enjoy both these aspects of the business quite a lot, writing the code, and
Jordan Crook 5:50
it feels like it would give you like an edge almost in sales, like depending on who you're talking to necessarily to be able to say like, Oh, no, like, I, you know, I have the technical chops. And I can actually explain to you like, how easy this is, as opposed to something like a non technical founder who's like, it's good notifications, right, like you want those, you know,
Hana Mohan 6:10
Yeah, I agree. I think, also this, you know, in general, I think sales is moving more to solution selling to sort of understanding how your customers are going to use your software, it's not just about selling it to them, but you know, helping them actually be successful with it. And so I think I can bring that perspective. And because we know, you know, what are the challenges in implementing getting fines from everybody in your team. So I think it helps, sometimes probably being a little bit more sort of from the sales background gives you an idea of these processes, or how to qualify leads, and something that probably I don't do as well. But that's what I'm hoping to improve as a founder
Darrell Etherington 6:47
here, but I've had experience with, you know, SAS platform sellers. And often I've found, like, interacting with the founder is very convincing, at least for me, when I was on the buying side, I was like, This is what I want, like this, this convinces me that I want this product more than anything else. And like that, but I On the flip side, I also wasn't the I wasn't like a typical buyer, but maybe this is what you're talking about, right? Like I was the person that would actually be using the product. And then when it came to like, okay, there's, there's a contract negotiation, I would be like, Alright, there's some, here's somebody else he does that. I'm over here, but but like, you know, is that what you mean? when you're when you're talking about like, most of the time, the people that you're selling to are not really the the, the typical kind of like enterprise buyer anymore?
Hana Mohan 7:38
Yeah, that's what I mean, exactly like so there is in this sort of enterprise sales where you are working with like a, you know, what do they call it procurement team. And then that's the and then you go through another team, that sort of like actually like deploys, and another team that uses it, we're sort of selling to these high growing high growth startups. And it's like, 50 to 100 people, people can make decisions fast. And that's a very different environment, you get like high quality feedback pretty often. They're very focused on speed of purchasing something and getting it out the door. So yeah, that kind of sales I enjoy. I think I probably enjoy the more enterprise sales as well. But I think it's good to have like a mentor that can keep guiding and keep telling you, it's okay, it's okay for these things to take time. Yeah,
Darrell Etherington 8:25
yeah. So So actually, who's that been for you like, who has helped you kind of like get to this point, through mentorship and that kind of stuff.
Hana Mohan 8:34
So I think like yc, has excellent resources, you can ask the community, I also got some coaching from Paul. Paul garci. He is a coach sales coach in the Bay Area. I plan to do more of that with him. And I really, like one thing he told me, like always stays with me said, salespeople are always internally aggressive, but externally very calm, and you never want to. And I think like that was sort of what I was missing, in sort of like making the switch to being more of a salesperson. So I benefited from that a lot. I'm still not very good at it. And I've certainly not scaled it well. But I mean, that's I think like I remember he asked me like what would be your sort of like this level you want to achieve? And I told him it would be like when someone comes in and they sort of don't even want it, but I convinced them like somehow I have this image of salespeople as sort of convincing you of that, or like making you realize you need this. Yeah.
Darrell Etherington 9:36
But I think you're in a much better position, which is that you know, people actually have a genuine need for the product and even if you are ineptly selling there, they're realizing like no, I want this thing.
Jordan Crook 9:49
works out really well when you have a good product. Wait, can we I want to ask about yc Hannah. I think that like it's an interesting thing because obviously it's the top accelerator and has the most funding in the most successful companies. And there's a really interesting network effect, right? Where you can sell to your peers and sell to alumna. Can you peel back the curtain a little bit? I'm curious, like, what is it like prepping for a demo day? At yc? Like, what is there like a big process and curriculum involved? Or is yc? Just like, good luck, everyone, demo day soon? You know, like,
Hana Mohan 10:24
Yeah, sure. So I've also written about my yc experience on our blog. So if you also want to someday go read that just search for Y Combinator remote edition experience or something like that,
Darrell Etherington 10:35
we'll put a link in for lists. Okay, we're
Hana Mohan 10:38
gonna have to search. And yeah, like, see if we rank on Google or not? Yeah. And so for me, the surprising thing was that yc is actually the first two months of yc, they almost don't talk about funding at all, or raising money at all. In fact, they discourage you from thinking about it or spending your time with it. And, and then the last month is a lot about the demo day and the prep for the demo day and getting your sort of you know, your slides, right. But so they do guide you a lot through the program, of course, they help you sort of refine how you pitch it to your customers and to your investors, they sort of help you understand the difference between the two, like our customer pitch is different from an investor pitch. So you sort of work on that through the program. But it's only in the last month that you kind of put together your fundraising plan your, your slide, and it's only really one slide now in the demo day. So they've kind of like distilled it down to these essentials. And, and if you just kind of get those, right, you're in a pretty good spot. Of course, there's a lot of pressure, depending on you know, the stage in the company and your experience before, and they tried to kind of help you through that as well. I would say like, one thing that was interesting for me in yc, was to understand very early on, and they try to say that many times is yc is not a school, so you don't really have a they have guidance for you. But you're supposed to be proactive and ask for what you need. So they'll suggest at different stages, this is probably what should do. But you're supposed to book office hours, you're supposed to reach out if you get stuck, or get blocked, but they don't really, you know, like, reach out and say why aren't you doing this you should be achieving? It's really, they want you to work independently pretty much.
Darrell Etherington 12:29
That makes sense. Like it's it's not, it's not a school, it's a self serve resource, right? And then that will set you up well for the future. Because the future, that's how you get everything done
Hana Mohan 12:40
anyway. Right. Exactly. And I think for me, at least, it was true, I had kind of taken a break from startups for a few years, for some personal stuff we could talk about later. But so for me, I actually kind of picked back up the sort of discipline of working each day and you know, taking the pressure of delivering something during yc. So for me, it was very much like a finishing sort of school of before you go out into the world and go, you know, like kinda like from the seats. So I always looked at, and I still look at demo day as sort of the starting of not as an end, but more as like kind of getting to the starting line of actually building a, like a real business, a real company, not just a product. Yeah.
Darrell Etherington 13:25
Okay, cool. So you mentioned kind of like your, your, your previous founder experience and your previous company, which I know you've scaled to successful, recurring revenue numbers, but like, Can we talk a bit kind of like how you even got into the startup world to begin with? Like, when did you realize oh, what I want to do is found companies and what did that kind of look like for you?
Hana Mohan 13:48
I'm sure. So I grew up in India, and I went to these, like the Indian School of Technology, I think they're kind of well known in the US. Basically, a lot of engineers graduate from there, it's I remember. So we have like a whole bunch of them. And you know, in different cities, we used to have like seven now there's more. And I used to be in one call it Gauhati and which is sort of in the northeast of India. So it's a little bit remote. Pretty cool. Like it was the newest one at that point. And I remember going for sort of like a summer internship to the one in IIT Bombay, which is Mumbai now. And I remember where I was like in this lab where a lot of people were just doing the graduate or post grad experiments over. But then they were like these few people who are building like a telephony company, just to just to guys just graduated building a telephony company. And I found that pretty fascinating. I had no idea that you could do that essentially. Like, it's Yeah, it's hard
Darrell Etherington 14:49
if you don't have like, constant and present examples, right? Like I'm, I'm not from the Bay Area. I feel like if you grew up in the valley, it's kind of like, Well, why wouldn't you write like everybody around doing stuff all the time and like building new companies, right? Like, I'm in Toronto, which now has a very thriving startup ecosystem, but previously did not. And you just kind of like, Well, I think people go to work for Bal or like big Telecom, whatever, like, there was a much more conservative approach to kind of like what you do with your education. And yeah, you don't, it's really hard to kind of realize like, this is something people do. And people can do very well, if they have the skills to do it unless you are presented with an example. Right? Which, which Luckily, then you you stumbled into or found, right?
Hana Mohan 15:34
Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you do not see it, it's hard to sort of imagine it. And, and then it's hard to design it, and then obviously very hard to get it. Right. So I remember seeing that I didn't still understand like the financial side of it, or how the whole thing works. But I kind of I think that gave me the desire. And then I graduated, moved to Bangalore, which is sort of this considered the Silicon Valley of India, a lot of software companies. I worked for a couple of years, I was probably what were what is considered, I was still I'm like a high maintenance employee. So I want to hear
Jordan Crook 16:12
about that. Let's tell that story who said that to you, Sarah? Well,
Hana Mohan 16:17
I think like, the like good people like they were running the startup. And I think like it was more of a services business where you're sort of doing projects for other people. And they sort of recruited me wanting to build because I did a lot of sort of, in undergrad I've done a lot of wireless communication work. That's why I've gone to IIT Mumbai as well to work with a professor on actually, when I graduated, I had four IEEE papers, which is pretty rare, for I had terrible grades, but like terms of obligation for an undergrad, but that didn't impress the universities in the US or apperently that much. But so they hired me for that work. But that's a you know, it's a pretty massive undertaking. You really can't do it on a shoestring budget. So they very quickly realized that and then they just wanted me to do their regular projects. And I was pretty disillusioned.
Darrell Etherington 17:07
Yeah. Was it like consulting type work, then?
Hana Mohan 17:09
Yeah, this consulting kind of work? Yeah. So you know, I think like, back then the rage was doing the best hardware was probably like writing mp3 decoders for that will like go on to become car stereo systems or something.
Darrell Etherington 17:23
Oh, yeah. Like
Hana Mohan 17:24
how it hadn't had the resurgence it had with Arduino yet. It was like, a few years away from it, sadly. So it's like, yeah, they were just and I remember at one point, telling them I'm considering leaving, and they were like, Oh, I mean, they would suspend a relieved. Like, you've like, those conversations you're dreading having. Because you think, Oh, my God, you're gonna be like, kind of upset. And then you almost see them relieved. And you're like, oh, my
Darrell Etherington 17:51
goodness, you said something? Yeah.
Hana Mohan 17:54
So um, so I think like, I quit that. And then I, I joined another company, kind of something very similar happened during a very exciting project. I actually learned a lot from them. But they sort of ran out of funding. So they had to make a lot of changes. And so I was almost like this kind of entrepreneur born out of boredom, I would say, like, I was just like, bored at my work. So I would start like hacking on my own in the evenings. And I tried building web apps before like, kind of like clones. I know, clone skater terrible reputation. But I remember like, I used to shop from India on that website called deals to buy to buy laptops and have like, my friends bring them back to me because you couldn't buy those laptops in India. So I was like, wow, let's do this here. And this was pre ecommerce boom, never went anywhere, of course. But I learned a lot. And so I used to play a little bit of music at that time, I also had a camera, I used to love uploading my pictures on flicker, and just how much it inspired me. So I kind of felt it would be great to have something like that for music. So with my business partner, we started building something called musu, which is a music community for musicians. And, and it was pretty cool, because there was nothing like that in India, India, people love music, creating music, and, and then just the third or fourth day, we already started seeing people upload things that we didn't know them, and they were uploading already. And that was like a massive boost. So that's kind of how I got started, I would say, you know, just more sort of accidentally never to build this, like, you know, this is the market and this is the opportunity and just Yeah, the first one was very, very accidental that way.
Darrell Etherington 19:39
Yeah. That's super interesting, though, because it's like, I think I think that's probably more common than you think. Right? People are just finding themselves dissatisfied at their courage, finding that their limits are being tested, right like that. There's, that's a great reason to do a startup because you basically have to build everything from scratch and if you're like, well, I'm really Tired of doing this one thing? Guess what, there's a whole list of other things that you have to do too, right? So you can kind of like, make sure that you're constantly engaged and interested in challenge, right. But it's also when you when you say, you know, the first users on your music platform, like, I'll bet there's like a dopamine hit there. And then you're like, Oh, I want to chase this forever, right? Like when you get user engagement and get user satisfaction, I was be very rewarding. I don't know if you've found that. But I would imagine it would be
Hana Mohan 20:28
absolutely i mean, so I was a terrible web programmer. At that point. I never, like build anything. Well, I remember the whole, even this, you know, the term probably is obsolete now. But the whole Ajax thing where you know, pages didn't reload was so new. I remember building a commenting system, but it was an Ajax. So it would just reload the page when people commented, and the music would stop. And it, it upset everybody. I sort of, I sort of copied some code from the internet, which had the wrong DB column. So it would truncate the text to 255 characters, and people would break it into 255. And comment. And so I was assuming is that it was so terrible, but people still wanted to use it. Right? And that's great.
Darrell Etherington 21:09
Yeah, that's another side like you were talking about with the sales, right? It's like, there was friction. And yet people were still so engaged in the product for you like, you can be guaranteed that there's demand there, right?
Hana Mohan 21:18
I think like, that's what they call the sort of that more like, instead of pushing, if you see this pull, that's where you should go with your product.
Jordan Crook 21:24
It's interesting, though, we were talking about like passion, right? Like you started out of boredom. And like music, I can understand right like that, you know, I want to chase this and like, deliver this experience for users. But like, notifications, annoy people, like how does that become a passion? You know what I mean?
Darrell Etherington 21:42
I would even go step back further. Your other one was SAS to write like SAS in general. But then also the specific problem notifications. Like, I guess we're only halfway through your journey. So I would love to hear like how you got to that, right.
Hana Mohan 21:55
So I think I just take your minute to wrap up the music once a music is great. As a consumer, it's a terrible business to be in unless you are at a certain scale. So I think like more power to Spotify, I love using Spotify for 10 bucks a month, but I don't want to be in the music business anymore. Very litigation prone very. So we sort of like knew we have to move on from that. But we had a lot of skill. And we couldn't raise any money. We didn't know how the whole thing was. I actually remember at one point, when this whole Lean Startup happened, and Eric crease, you know, like his book came out. And for I have no idea why he agreed to do a phone call with me just this random entrepreneur from India that I just said, Hey, would you talk to me? And he said, Yeah, sure. And yeah, and I got on the phone with him. And, and this is literally the question I asked him. It's amazing, like how much these people will tolerate? Like, how many stupid questions I actually asked him, I said, I do not understand this, like, What will I do if somebody gives me a million dollars? Like seriously, right, like to read look like if somebody actually funded invested a million dollar into you, then why do you even have to work anymore? Right, right. Yeah. And so I was gonna do so I didn't understand I just wanted to make a business that could support our lifestyles, because we were having fun. So we just wanted to keep doing it. So that's when we moved to SAS, because we knew that, like, one of the big problems in the music business was, it just wasn't predictable. One month would be nice. But then you start again from scratch the next month. So that's kind of why we made the move to SAS and did the customer support. Sort of, because again, like a natural thing we wanted for our business, something very easy to use. So we said let's, let's, let's build it. Let's take a harder problem this time.
Darrell Etherington 23:40
Yeah. And you wanted those smooth, dependable SAS revenue curves?
Hana Mohan 23:44
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. We haven't. I think that was also the time if you remember in 2010, that sort of this 37 signal space scam, Shopify, because you know, I was using Ruby on Rails, so they were they were my heroes. Oh, right.
Darrell Etherington 23:58
Yeah. DHH until you're all Ruby all the time.
Hana Mohan 24:02
Yeah. All Ruby. Totally.
Jordan Crook 24:04
I also know what you guys. Let me tell you a little bit about Ajax.
Hana Mohan 24:10
Exactly.
Jordan Crook 24:13
technical person
Darrell Etherington 24:14
in this in this area, or I'm the technical partner, which is not saying very much given my own technical experience, but
Jordan Crook 24:21
I'm really here for personality.
Darrell Etherington 24:25
I know that time. So that was a heady time. And it was it seemed like yeah, this is the way to go. So then so then you built your first business and how did that go for you?
Hana Mohan 24:35
Um, so that went pretty well, I would say like it took a little bit longer and but Europe SAS has the sort of like flywheel kind of thing where you start building revenue and especially customer support, you know, you have lower churn, it's a pretty like solid business to be and we were the first waves to do this kind of shared inbox. It's not really as much of a help desk as much. It's this kind of shared in inbox. And, you know, people loved it. I was pretty focused on the experience of it. So very much like I was very inspired by Gmail. And as I said, If I could just have Gmail, but sort of multi user, then that would be perfect. So that's kind of what we built. I think at that time, what I did not understand was just how expensive it is to scale companies up sort of how and, and people do it. I think bootstrapping, I think like, some people have very good business sense. So they know where to invest, how to prioritize features. I took a lot longer bit longer to sort of get to this profitability. But Ted pretty well, I've written about it. I've done an indie hackers ama, about how it like I left the business last year when it was doing a little over half a million a year in revenue. And it was just like a very small team of three or four people. So I will do pretty well. But yeah,
Darrell Etherington 25:55
that was entirely bootstrap.
Hana Mohan 25:57
Yeah, entirely bootstrapped. We, we did like StartUp Chile, which gave us a grant. And then Microsoft accelerator incubated us for a little bit. But we never really mentioned never any equity funding.
Darrell Etherington 26:13
If you're listening to found you're probably already super interested in startups, and the overall startup ecosystem, so we've got a great deal for you, we're going to offer you 50% off either a one year or a two year subscription to extra crunch. extra crunch is techcrunch's premium product offering. And when you go there, you'll get deep dive interviews with some of the top founders in the industry, who get market maps on specific verticals, then some of the most exciting areas of growth and startup land. You'll also get surveys of some of the top VCs in different areas, including different geographies, so you can subscribe to extra crunch at extra crunch comm that's probably the easiest way. Or if you're already on TechCrunch, follow the links for extra crunch. And you'll get a prompt to subscribe and then just enter that code that's found the name of this podcast during checkout and you'll get 50% off on either a one year or a two year subscription. You mentioned the Startup Chile and also the Microsoft accelerator and you've been in yc. So I'm just curious like is, can you provide a kind of rough comparison of all these experiences? Like is there something common to them all? Or they're very different in their approaches? Or how do you find that overall?
Hana Mohan 27:28
Yeah, sure. So I think I just want to say that I did start up Chile in 2011. That was actually the very like, that was in the pilot patch. But that was the very first official patch. Like it was not the zero, but it was the number one patch. Yeah, so it's been some time, I'm sure it's evolved a lot. And I did start, sorry, Microsoft x rayed in 2013. So pretty, pretty early as well. So I don't even know if the program exists anymore. in that form. I would say at least the current Y Combinator experience is pretty software driven. So in terms of like, how you booked time with people, how you, you know, and the alumni network is pretty strong. And I think like they just happen to also be in the Bay Area. So they have access to a lot more sort of attention. And obviously, it's harder to get in. So you also have like startups that are sort of doing better. I know from my StartUp Chile, but they were actually some pretty successful businesses in that time and elsewhere. So I think overall, probably percentage wise, it was pretty similar. The yc experience is very much the sort of, when I got into yc, I was surprised by just how reading through the user manual, which is like kind of the internal knowledge base, even before the program started, I already knew that these three months are probably the highest leverage three months in my life, and I should not waste my time on like, I should get to know my batchmates and I should at least people in my section, but I should understand very well that this time will sort of this high leverage time will never come back in my startup. And I think that sense I never could derive from any other program like this the way yc is able to express that to you.
Darrell Etherington 29:10
Yeah, that's, that's good. Yeah. Cuz, I mean, you would want to make the most of it, it would be ashamed to look back on it and be like, Oh, wait, I didn't realize what I had. Right. But I, yeah, I get the sense, you know, just from from talking to people about it, that it can be like, especially if you're not originally from the Bay Area, it can be like, a decade of networking shrunk into a quarter of of time, right? Like it's, it's, it's insane how hard or how packed it is. And then it's insane what those network effects do later on for just like, Oh, I know this person because they were an advisor at one time or whatever. And now I can tap them and like that stuff that you know, for me and for Jordan, probably, it's taken us a decade of writing about technology in the startup scene to build those same kinds of relationships and able to tap people for things like that. And and you're doing it in a short amount of time if you're doing it effectively, and if you're not wasting the opportunity, right?
Hana Mohan 30:07
Yeah, I think probably it's also different when you are in person in the Bay Area. It's like our batches, obviously, entirely remote. But at the same time, I think the sort of like, willingness for somebody to reply to your email, because you're a yc company is much higher than if you were to cold email them or otherwise. Or for you to find somebody in the network who could introduce you. I'm, I'm constantly amazed that you can pretty much reach anybody through that network. And that's like mind blowing.
Darrell Etherington 30:35
Yeah, it is. I know. I mean, we got we got introduced because of yc. Right. That's why you're here today, too. So it's, it's definitely makes a huge difference. But then, so let's get to how you came to magic Bell and how you moved, you know, away from your previous startup and into this and what the process was there for you? Yeah,
Hana Mohan 30:57
sure. So I like I said, I added support before about 10 years. And around 2015. Actually, around 2016, I sort of realized that I'm transgender, and I decided to transition to start transitioning. And so I took like, the next three years, I still kept working on my business. But then I was basically giving 70% of my attention to my transition, I think I am inherently pretty ambitious, to be honest. And then like, I think, like startups are these things they have sort of their moment. So like, something can be a good business, but have kind of missed that moment of it's like, wave, right. And so I think I felt like that with support bfl. It's a great business. And it's a great business, especially in the hands of somebody who appreciates the work life balance it brings and sort of, you know, the customer loyalty it brings. But I kind of like how I like to joke with some people, it's like, I have a gaping void in my life. And the work life balance isn't really for me. So I've already I've already to do something like a little bit more ambitious. Also, I think I got a very first hand sense of how expensive it is to build companies like let's say, if you make even if you bootstrap, and you make like $3 million in seven years, or something, which is actually a fairly good outcome for a bootstrap company, you'll find you probably spend about 2.5 of that getting there. So I figured it's much better to invest that early on, than to sort of spread it out over time. So I was pretty clear. I wanted to do another business, something for developers, because that's a crowd I really enjoy being with, and definitely raise money this time, stay cash, sort of like focus on being efficient with cash. Yeah, thanks. And, but definitely raise some money. So magical was sort of this obvious problem that I've always felt like support these probably 40% of the code was just notifications, email notifications, in having people reply to email notifications, debugging them, because like, you know, we were sending millions of emails, and then one or two emails would not read someone. And we'd have to like go finding it. So you sort of realize it's the way people look at notifications as fire and forget is not actually true. They end up having a shelf life. Like even in your email inbox, half of your emails are actually notifications. And,
Darrell Etherington 33:19
yeah, you've already
Hana Mohan 33:21
snooze them or whatever. So like, I could see that it's a pretty serious like it. You know, like Jordan also said, like verifications have come to be sort of this annoyance, more, because I think the tools are missing. So I felt it would be great to sort of build a tool for the tool makers, that also has this kind of end user effect. And that's where that's why I decided to work on magic ml in 2020. Like, last year, once I was finally done with my transition, especially the legal part kind of took a while. Gotta keep dragging on. When I was done, I was like, Okay, I'm ready. I took the summer off, enjoyed running around in Europe, and then I kind of like was a good moment.
Darrell Etherington 33:59
Yeah. So that was like, was it difficult for you then to change modes after you done this? Or were you kind of looking forward to it because you spent so much time on your transition? And obviously, that's got to be a very emotionally taxing process, right? Probably very rewarding as well. But I imagine it also stressful, but then you were just immediately like, no, I gotta get back to it. I got to build another business. Because you mentioned you have that ambition, or was there a period of like, I need to? Well, you had your decompress moment, I guess, right. But did your brain have to switch modes? And then you're like, back into business building? or How was that for you?
Hana Mohan 34:33
Um, so I think like, one thing that happens and at least happened with me was, you know, you when you're transitioning, like apart from the physical transition, or something like we all invest in this personality, and then you sort of have to build a new one again, so you take bits of it, the core of it, but then a lot of the way you present yourself and the things that bother you or affect you or whatever. So it took me a little bit of time to sort of understand was the ambition real or was it simply an artifact of not having. And for a while I thought that okay, maybe the ambition was just more because I didn't know what, like I just kind of had this anks from my transition and hence, but then it I think slowly I came to the realization, it's not really true. And so there was that. Also, I think I kind of lost my confidence a bit on the way in terms of like being able to work hard focus on a problem, because I would get easily distracted, I got in sort of like, you know, through that transition gotten more anxious. And so I actually before I got into yc, but I did the startup School, which is sort of the online program where, and they did this first build sprint in September last year or something where it was, like 30 days, you build something, and I basically, that's the time I separated from support me and I figured, okay, let me just do this. And it was really hard. To be honest, I like I wasn't sure if I could even do that. So I had to slowly pick back up that also, I realized that I was trying to get back to being this person that had been sort of like saying, that's where I need to be. And then I realized No, I can actually be a new person. I don't have to work that way. I don't have to be that person. I want to, there are some things about it. I liked like the intensity I brought to work, but I don't have to work those hours. I don't have to be, I can take care of my health better this time. So there was definitely a finding back of sort of groove that I think is still going on. But definitely the first few months was a lot of that searching.
Darrell Etherington 36:32
Yeah, that's super interesting that you you say you had the, like the personality thing that I you don't think of that, that you're like, Oh, wait, how much of this is tied up with my gender identity? Or how I feel about myself and who I thought I was before? And how much of it is just actually genuinely core to my person or something that's actually valuable and important to me?
Hana Mohan 36:54
Yeah, sorry. No, it's true, actually. I mean, we don't I think that's probably one of the silver linings of transitioning it, it makes you think about that.
Jordan Crook 37:02
I mean, I think I was gonna ask like you, you built this like network, right within like the startup community for for so long. Can you tell us a little bit about like the the reception from that network, as you went through that transition and go, you know, you start a new company. I'm curious to hear what that was like.
Hana Mohan 37:19
So I think I lost a few friends. I mean, not too many. Some of them just didn't know how to deal with this. They like, and I totally get it like, you know, it's not that they are openly hostile, they just don't know, like how to kind of interact with me anymore. However, like, I think one thing that I did notice was a lot of my friendships were from the startup world, and they were good friendships. But most of the time, what we talked about was startups. So when I was in doing startups and doing I wasn't I was transitioning, a lot of especially my men, friends could only think of it as the closest they could think of it in their head was like a sabbatical. And I was kind of far from that. Right? Like, I was going in and out of hospitals, and, you know, clinics and paperwork. And so I feel like I couldn't communicate with them a lot for a while. So it felt a little, you feel a bit isolated. But at the same time, it also strengthens a lot of your relationships. So I would say, definitely, the network took a hit. I also moved countries, right, like most of my network was in India, then I, I sort of, you know, I started my transition actually in Colombia and South America. And, and then I moved to Barcelona. And then there were bits of like my transition in Thailand. So like, I had this kind of like jetting around the world to become the person I am. So I think like, I definitely disconnected from my network. But then I sort of started picking up a new one. And I think like, That's why, like you said, yc was great, because I feel like I could just like, like, on this kind of, like, super powered mode, bootstrap a new network again.
Darrell Etherington 38:56
Hmm. And what about the there you mentioned, you know, hopping around to lots of different places? So is that why I noticed you, you talk about magic Bell is like, it's a remote first company, right? And, obviously, it's only the two of you now. But as you grow, I think you're going to continue that that strategy. So has that been part of it too? Like, has it been, since you've been like, a citizen of the world essentially, as you go through this? And then also, you did yc remotely, but so your connections are mainly remote there? like is that what proved to you the value of remote? Or do you always kind of think that that had a lot of value?
Hana Mohan 39:36
Well, so we did everything like at least in support we like so we sort of had this hybrid, you could work remotely if you wanted to. But then we had an office for a while in Bangalore, and then we went fully remote in 2015, long before anybody else did, or at least in the early wave. And we follow that remote work really well. I think one distinction I like to make is there's a difference between people who work remotely, and people who are nomadic, and I think like both have great lifestyles, I personally prefer to, you know, work with and work remotely instead of working with people who are sort of nomadic, who, you know, I think the distinction is people like you and me who are in like, whichever city for some reason, but then we have a very stable setup, we take our holidays, we travel, sometimes you work from there, but our primary ambition isn't to see the world. So I think like that remote work, I've been a big champion of for a while. And that's why with magical as well, we plan to be a remote company, like as we grow our team.
Jordan Crook 40:39
What is like, can you good, like, go deeper on that, like, nomadic that nomadic workers? Like what is it? You know, you said, you mentioned the stable setup, is that something that, you know, being on different time zone? What is it necessarily about that, that you don't, that leads you to not prefer it as much as someone who's kind of like, in the same place with the same setup?
Hana Mohan 40:59
I feel like I'm gonna get a lot of hate for this.
Darrell Etherington 41:04
I feel like I'm gonna be able to back you up, though. But I'm gonna wait to see what your
Jordan Crook 41:09
opinions Yeah, sure.
Hana Mohan 41:12
And like I said, there's a company for everyone out there. So I'm sure there are companies that are very happy with like people who are nomadic, what I mean, is this, right where, like, you are on a three month, South America trip, but then you want to work with a tech company, because tech pays great. And you sort of like a hop, what you're doing is technically you're working on the weekdays, but you're working from coffee shops, or your hostels with spotty Wi Fi. And then you know, on the weekends, or in the night, you're taking a bus to go somewhere else. And I think like that kind of work, if you want to do that, it's probably best to be a freelancer and sort of take projects on and then give, you know, where you, if you are a startup where there is a lot of pressure to deliver, it can get a bit tricky, like, you know, you you come into meeting, it's also about the culture just kind of encourages this. And,
Jordan Crook 42:06
and your team needs you to Yeah, right, exactly. Like your team, like their people, there are other people whose job is dependent on what you deliver, and that you do it on time and the air available, and they have a question or need or a task. And that makes it a lot harder.
Hana Mohan 42:22
Yeah. Because also, like sometimes people think like, it's just 40 hours a week, and I have a pretty big proper rate of 40, even through the yc. And I know like this is gonna sound terrible. I probably only worked on an average 50 hours a week, but to actually work 50 or
Jordan Crook 42:38
lazy.
Hana Mohan 42:39
This was, this was my confession. By the way. This was my confession. I
Darrell Etherington 42:43
think that's totally fine. I think it's absurd to ask people to do more, but go ahead. Yeah.
Hana Mohan 42:49
But you know, right, like to work 40 hours a week, you actually have to have your life in order. You have to be very disciplined, you have like to put actual 40 to 50 hours is very hard. And that's very difficult if you are not in a predictable environment. So if you are traveling while you're working, it just doesn't work very well. So I think like that's what I meant by this nomadic versus remote.
Jordan Crook 43:10
Yeah, get your Twitter ready. No, I'm just kidding. No,
Darrell Etherington 43:14
I think that makes tons of sense. And I think you're you make a good point about the hours right? If those are true quality hours, like that's a very different thing. And I think that's lost in a lot of the hustle culture talk. Right? Like especially. It's It's funny, I was just talking to an investor yesterday. It was a couple days ago is Chris Arsenault from a novia, which is a nice fun here in Montreal, but he was saying, you know, Darrell, I can't believe how much we got done this year, I got so much done. And I was like, yeah, it's cuz it's because you weren't on planes most of the time. And it's because like, and that doesn't count as work. And especially VCs like to think that counts as work, right? Like, sitting on a plane sitting in an airport, like setting up an email here. They're like, when you're at home, one of the things that is a silver lining of this pandemic is that you realize, like, oh, wow, I can be much more efficient with my time when I'm when I really literally have nothing.
Jordan Crook 44:12
Just travel either. Like I also not to like shit on VCs or anything, but like, I feel like VCs are always talking about meetings. So like, I have this meeting, and then we need to talk about that meeting. And then we need to do the pre meeting for the next meeting. And then we'll have an all hands to discuss that meaning it's like, does anybody ever actually doing anything? Do you ever, like, write something or build a spreadsheet? Or like, Is anybody actually doing anything? Are you guys all just talking all the time? Which I know like, that's a big part of the job. I get it. Like they're taking meetings and getting pitches and stuff. But like, then there's meetings are about them. I don't know. It just feels like is anybody writing anything down? Are we just talking all the time?
Darrell Etherington 44:54
Well, somebody is always a designated minutes taker. Yeah.
Hana Mohan 44:58
I think that's why they are here. too is calling into your zoom meetings now transcribing the call.
Darrell Etherington 45:05
Yeah, exactly. I was gonna say to be fair to that of like, having been on the court in the corporate world, that's, that's is it way worse there, right? Like, that's basically there's like 60 people in every meeting that you're like, and this is and they just say the person's name at the beginning of the meeting, and then they sit there and they've done nothing. And they didn't participate in the meeting at all, and then they're gone. Right? Like, it's, it's definitely more egregious. And in I think, legacy institutions, which is why none of us work. But yeah, one of the reasons anyway, so let's actually, I would love to turn to then the fundraising process. Like I know, you're, you're quite early on, but how are you thinking about the fundraising process? You know, have you done much beyond kind of like, the the stuff that's built into yc? Or what's your strategy there?
Hana Mohan 45:52
So I think I actually didn't follow weiss's advice pretty religiously, when it comes to fundraising. I did do some conversations after I got into yc. Mostly because I think I came in as a founder that could never raise before I tried raising for support, but I couldn't. So I think I had this, you know, I just needed to get a little bit of a head start just to feel better. I'm actually excited to say that I'm pretty much done with fundraising already. So it makes it easier for me to go into the demo day now. Like you said, Before, we have customers, we have a good product. And now I have this kind of background. So this time, it is a lot easier with the sort of also the yc forcing function of the demo day. I think like what what is very interesting was to actually see like those fundraising dynamics that people talk about, or you read about actually happening, and you know, being in the middle of them. So for example, I think I also like understood that how much of the early stage fundraising is about the storytelling and what this could become and using the data points, you have to, to pack that story up, versus let's say, like a series A, which, of course, I haven't done yet, but sounds like it's a lot more data driven. So you know, there is still the story of where it could go. But if you don't have the data to back up everything, good luck raising, you know, I think the other thing too, pretty interesting for me was to also just like see how subjective, you know, if the perception of your stories, the same day that I would get offers to invest, I would get rejections from equally good investors. So if it's in terms of the process, I would say, like the standard yc process, which at least I would follow now, if I were to do yc, again, is to sort of just batch up all your meetings before the demo day. So you have a lot of traction to show, that is sort of the forcing function of the demo day, and try to get meetings where the decision maker or at least somebody who can pitch to the partnership is already there. So you do not do one meeting just to say hello, and another one. I think like yc, is actually written a lot about it. Apart from Paul Graham, I think there's this article, which I probably linked to in my blog post called leverage and process. I think like between that in the Paul Graham's fundraising article, that's pretty much like the Bible of early stage fundraising. yc is already standardized, the whole idea of safe so you don't have to worry about paperwork, anything like that. So it's mostly about just keeping your emotions in check, believing in the process, and and as much as like they tell you, right, like, when you start raising money, once the money starts coming in, and you see your batchmates raising money, you're always gonna feel you're not raising enough at high enough valuations. So I think I had to definitely tune that noise out a bit. It's not easy, say with the app to say like, same with the TechCrunch coverages, right, like everybody says, Hey, press is not that important in the long run it, but then when you do see your batchmates getting covered, and you're not getting covered, you cannot try like, oh, what's going on with this? So I think like managing emotions is the big one.
Darrell Etherington 49:02
Yeah. We'd like give you some insight on what that looks like, basically, it's a volume problem, honestly, a lot of the times now, because there's so many yc companies,
Jordan Crook 49:15
it's like 300 companies like that's, I don't know how many stories we publish in a day or week. But
Darrell Etherington 49:21
like you said, with VCs too, it's often quite subjective, right? Like, it's it's essentially, who are the writers we have? What are their specific expertise, skills, like areas of interest, right? And then also, what is their schedule, like during that particular time when they received a patch? Right, like, those are the things that go into it. And it's, it's, it's difficult. It On the other side, for sure, but it's, it's something where I think the best strategy to counter that is to not let it dissuade you from continuing to come back every time right and like, because it's because all those factors change every time and then one of the times it's gonna be a hit,
Hana Mohan 50:01
it will happen, don't worry about it. And, uh, you know, I really one of the things that I keep thinking about is how it's kind of like climbing the Everest, right? So you think getting to the base camp is so hard and you know, in some ways you can say like getting into a good accident is like getting to the base camp, but then you realize there's a bunch of people already there and almost to the very peak of the Everest in the peak season, right? Like there's a line of people who are wanting to just go there, take a selfie, and come back out. So I think any like ideas that you are special at any stage and the hence you will just get that coverage, get that money. You you you figure that out that that's not happening. That's not the case.
Darrell Etherington 50:39
Right. But then once you do, and once you accept that I think it unblocks you kind of right, then you're able to be much more successful, because you're focused on yourself. And you're you've got blinders on, and you're not looking around at everybody else. Right. So I know, you know, I was trying to tee you up for it, but I think it will have been published on TechCrunch at some when this podcast comes up, but you've raised your your series your seed, right, you've closed your seed funding. So what did that feel like for you? And and, you know, how did you pick those investors? What were your kind of main criteria for who came in on that? And anything around the seat would be?
Hana Mohan 51:15
Yeah, sure. Actually, as I basically go close the majority of it this morning, so it's amazing timing to come here. And I raise it from Sofia Benz, she is partner at Sherry and they wrote the biggest check this out some agents like clear who introduced us, and Max Toma, who is the creator of react boilerplate. Some of my friends who are entrepreneurs and who run successful companies, I've invested Christianne Reber, the CEO of pitch and Wunderlist. He's an investor. So it's, it's been interesting, because a few of our customers offered to invest. So pitch, of course, like first became a customer. And then you know, I got introduced to the CEO, and he agreed to invest. So they were like that there were a few like that, as Sophia was the very first one who came in with a smaller check first, tried around the time yc started, and then you know, the full on seed round when we were ready to raise. So I'm especially thankful to her for trusting in me. I think like one of the exciting things that has happened, and I know like, statistically speaking, it's only like 2.7% of the funding that goes to women. But on the flip side of it, I think like the female angel investors are like actually a pretty strong force right now. And once you get on one person's radar, they'll introduce you to each other, and they'll try to introduce you to the other female operators. So Mary out here who's sold a startup to Twitter and works there. She's an investor because Sophia introduced me to her. So that's actually been really great to watch and experience. So I would say like from Sophia, there was this kind of like, NYC, there was a sort of snowball effect. yc is definitely a force multiplier, undoubtedly. But I think I am glad that Bri early on, I understood the difference between like, good investors and sort of the ones who I think like for each person, there's probably a right set of investors who wipe with you. And so I would say, I've got a glad I ran into some of them early on. And then they introduced me to more people like themselves.
Darrell Etherington 53:25
Great. Yeah, that's that's an interesting point about the kind of network effects, especially among women investors, I think, you know, I just, we just had in Canada here, a big announcement of a group of angels that were all early Shopify employees. Yeah. So you know, I know them all pretty well. But RT Chairman was the main lead, I think, on that. And then Ashley Clark, as well, and a bunch of other really fantastic women and senior leaders that have obviously invested a lot from their early Shopify equity. But it's super exciting to see that thing happen. And I think it's it's borne out in practice, you really do see, I don't know what it is, but it's like much stronger network effects or like just more of a willingness to make introductions and to make things happen, even if it's not this specific right fit for you. Right, which is another thing that's super valuable, especially at the early stage. So now you've got that in hand, what's the plan next, for magic pill.
Hana Mohan 54:26
So like I said, it's just been our co founder alive, we would love to bring some people on board. Now, apart from obviously a few developers that I think we are a little bit better at hiring. We want to work with, you know, product people, because especially people who have sort of built dev tools, we sort of had this interesting intersection of being a dev tool, but with a pretty end user facing world work. So we are actually like one of those products that people use directly. So if you weren't in that, we would love to you know, hire people like that. A designer can If the team's small up until product market fit, stay lean, but probably higher, bring on maybe four to five people more so that I can actually do like we stopped at the beginning the sales work and learned to make people realize they need this.
Darrell Etherington 55:15
Yeah. So is that what you want your focus to be like? What do you want? What do you envision yourself being, you know, as the leader of the company? And what's kind of like your day to day, or what do you think is your ideal use of your day to day time,
Hana Mohan 55:25
I think I got this stage, it's definitely to sort of get the product market fit, which is both of course, like a product people love that solves the problems, but then also like figuring out how to reach those people and how to scale that up selling like, that's the biggest difference between a bootstrapped I mean, a lot of bootstrap entrepreneurs, of course, are pretty aggressive with the sales target I was in. So I think for me, yeah, that's the transition is to be growth focused. I can only do that job if I have a good product team backing me up. So the very first job, obviously, is to set up that product. org and work with them. But then definitely start moving towards more of the sales onboarding. That function. I think, like Bill different, I'm pretty excited about I'm sure every cu says I'm pretty excited about breeding smart, bringing smart people. And I think one of the good things about raising a lot of money from angels is you also get to see how they operate, how they make decisions, how they sort of support you through your own, like journey of decisions and all that. So I would love to, you know, become that leader. And yeah, they are not like that. Yeah.
Darrell Etherington 56:33
That reminds me of I talked to Aaron Valley, CEO of carbon health recently. And he was saying, He's like, you know, what I really love now at this point in the company is, I can come into our all hands meetings on Friday, and people will announce something, and I'll be like, Wow, that's cool. I didn't know that was. But it's like, it's a really good thing. It's like, I hired the smart person and they went into the job. And I'm pleasantly surprised at the things that they're doing. Is that Is that too much of a, like letting go of control for you? Or do you think that's kind of like the ideal state?
Hana Mohan 57:09
That's the ideal, right? Because otherwise, you're always limited by what you can imagine. And I think one of the reasons you want to get smart people is not just to do your bidding, but to also to imagine to show you sort of like what you are missing and to build a culture like that. So if you want to build a pretty big cup, like my goal definitely is to build a pretty like long term, great business. Now. Let's see what happens of course, but you know, if you if you want to do that, you need to have these kinds of people who, who you want to have the caliber of people who basically would be doing their own startups, but the only reason they're teaming up is because the thing somehow working together, they can do more. And you cannot I mean, that's like having a bunch of like really cool cats. You can't tell them what to do you have to you don't want to also write like, why would you have cool cats if you don't want them to be cool cats? So I don't know. For this to
Darrell Etherington 58:09
know, it's the greatest analogy I've ever heard.
Jordan Crook 58:12
Do you think that we're cool cats there?
Darrell Etherington 58:15
What's that?
Jordan Crook 58:16
Do you think we're cool? Cats are? Cool. I
Darrell Etherington 58:18
don't know about that. I mean, I think I think I think TechCrunch is that's a pretty apt description of TechCrunch as well. Hannah in here, this is an audio podcast. The listeners haven't seen this. But Hannah's cat just walked by.
Jordan Crook 58:33
Right at the right time.
Darrell Etherington 58:34
Perfect. Yeah, no, I do think that is an accurate description of tickers. Because everyone's quite independent, but also quite capable and intelligent, right. And we just kind of let them do what they want. And then the match. I
Jordan Crook 58:47
mean, I just found out that this podcast is launching alongside.
Darrell Etherington 58:52
I so I do want to talk a bit about the product too, because, you know, when I saw it, I was like, he reminded me of we had, obviously, customer facing notification systems. When I worked at Shopify, and it was a topic of much debate and discussion and effort and engineering effort. You know, it's, it's, it's a very important surface area, if, especially if you're a SaaS business, and it's something that you can spend a lot of time on to make even minor changes, you know, or especially to build yourself from scratch. So, you know, based on just that experience, it seems like there was an obvious need for this, but you saw that too, coming up and seeing kind of like, what your fellow startups were dealing with.
Hana Mohan 59:40
Yeah, and I think like, that's a pretty good way to describe the problem. I would just add that there are a lot of notification tools in the market, but most of them focus on this kind of marketing engagement. So if you are a marketing team or customer success team, you can use something like intercom and then send target Good messages. And what Maribel is focusing on is if you're a product team, and you send notifications to keep the product workflow moving, so let's say, you know, for example, pitch if a slide is assigned to you, or, you know, one of our other customers as an insurance marketplace, like a lead comes in, and you want to grab that quickly, those kinds of things that traditionally people have sent an email just because email was easy. That's the sort of piece we are bringing in app and we're saying, like people are already in your app, or like, say, they come back to your app, they want to see what's new, what needs your attention, what should they work on, that piece hasn't gotten any love until like magic ball came on the scene. And that's the one I'm really passionate about. The other way to look at this problem is this. Let's say you look at your phone, and then you see these notifications. And you pretty much have to manage them mentally, right. And the subjects actually make you more anxious. So you say you make a mental note on a Saturday night that Monday morning, I need to get back to this. I would like to build eventually, like it would be great if we can get to a place where you can truly rely on your notifications. In a way you can say, I will not miss anything important. And I will not see anything that I don't need to see. Oh, yeah, that'd be great. Yeah. All right. Let's start. Yeah,
Darrell Etherington 1:01:14
yeah. Because you see that on consumer devices, right. And you see companies like Apple trying to accomplish that with their notification systems, whether they're doing a good job or not, is another question. But like, it's, it's a big Miss for those not to just be an inbuilt task management system as well. Right. And I think, you know, with with the ability to dial it to be as heavy or as light as you would like it to be, depending on your preferred engagement model, right. But that makes a ton of sense. Because, you know, I'm just thinking about the internal tools we use. And we use Slack, I use this thing called combo. And one of the ways that I use Convo, which is essentially like our asynchronous sort of like, bulletin board, is I look at the notifications that happened overnight, and then like, sort of triage them that way, so that I don't have to go through the whole thing. But it's, it's very basic. Now. It's essentially like, here are the things and then like, once I navigate away, they're sort of marked as red and gone forever. And you know, there's nothing really I can do it. Like you said, it's something that I mainly have to manage mentally as opposed to like through the tool.
Hana Mohan 1:02:21
Yeah, I think it's just because the API is available today. And you can of course, build a notification system, you also by to low level, what we need is like slightly higher level API's, where you can say this notification should probably expire when this thing is done. So some of the notifications go away, you should be able to as an end user, pick preferences, move some of your notifications to a tie, just like you said, you should be able to dial up or down the volume or choose as an end user, for example. You know, slack has Do Not Disturb but which other app Have you seen even having Do Not Disturb and slack has been doing that for five years, and it's still not mainstream. And so I think, like, it's pretty exciting to build that and to sort of have this eventual, like, impact in people's lives and sort of also notice state of the art. I mean, I'm happy to see more competition in this industry, I mean, more players, and it's a pretty, pretty big problem to solve. Doesn't it? seem?
Darrell Etherington 1:03:19
I'm sure people have suggested like, Well, you know, the thing, the classic, like, Is it a feature? Or is it a standalone business thing? Right? Like? Do you foresee that being a problem where you think like, no, like, the things that we're going to do is not something you could tackle sort of in house? or it doesn't make sense to restrict it to one enterprise? Or would you conversely, be happy to go that way, if somebody, an enterprise tool came to you and was like, you know, we just like to make this a key differentiator for our platform. And so here's a big check. Do you want that? Like, how do you think about it in terms of the future,
Hana Mohan 1:03:50
I think you actually summed it up pretty well. So it will be great to get to a place where notifications are a differentiator. And I think we will get to that, like for example, slack is like that, right? Like they probably do a very good job of their notifications. And that's why people are able to live with slack. The whole feature was says, you know, this, is this a feature of How can this be a billion dollar company or something like that, you know, especially when you get asked that a lot in fundraising. I thought a lot about it. And what I realized is that, when people are thinking about it, they're thinking about the state of the art that exists today. So if you look at the notification systems today, and they have the symbol drop down, and just you know, like you said, everything is marked as red and it goes away. If you try thinking of replacing that, that looks like a feature. But if you think about a well functioning notification inbox within an app, that's actually like each app having an email client, that's not so much of a feature as much as like a mini product within a product. So I think people always end up confusing, not just for us, but for search. Let's say they compare the state of the art with anything of replacing the state of the art and so it just looks like okay, yeah, sure. It makes But, but when, when good companies like take on that problem, they just like take it to another level because most people have never had time to solve those problems.
Darrell Etherington 1:05:11
Great. That makes a ton of sense. All right, and I think we're close to time here or maybe even a bit over, but it was fantastic talking to you. I really, really appreciate you taking the time and glad we could get this done.
Jordan Crook 1:05:23
Yeah, it's awesome.
Hana Mohan 1:05:25
Yeah, thank you. We'll be a cool cat.
Darrell Etherington 1:05:29
We're okay.
All right. Don't know about you journal. But I now know a lot more about notifications and how developers use them for triage systems. It was honestly something I was not really that cognizant of before. But I think like he teased at the beginning, you know, this is a huge money making opportunity for a company and Hannah seem set up to really take advantage of it.
Jordan Crook 1:05:57
Yeah, and I also think that Hannah is the kind of person just from our conversation with her that will really make solid business decisions because you can you can see in a situation like this where the the scale opportunity is so big, how it would be easy to kind of like get ahead of yourself or make missteps, but I feel like she's really thinking through everything very clearly. And it was just also a really fun person to talk to like I just I actually had so much fun so great conversation with Hannah. I'm excited to see where magic ball goes.
Darrell Etherington 1:06:32
Found is hosted by myself, TechCrunch news editor Darrell Etherington and TechCrunch managing editor Jordan crook. Both of us are very cool cats. We are produced and mixed by a shad Kulkarni and techcrunch's audio products are managed by Henry pic of it again, cool cats. Our guest this week was Hannah Mohan, co founder and CEO of magic bell. She is a cool cat for sure. And you can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and on twitter@twitter.com slash found. You can also email us at found at Techcrunch. com. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week. Meow