Feb 19, 2020, 3:13 PM ETWebinar, Fireside Chat

YC SUS: Eric Migicovsky hosts founder office hours

Core Offering: Provides outsourced business development and sales services for software developers, functioning as a hybrid software tool and contract service.
Current Stage: Operates a pilot program with active paying customers; recently transitioned from a "service-only" model to a hybrid service/software mix.
Revenue Model: Currently charges a one-time fee for pilots; strategic goal is to convert these into monthly recurring revenue (MRR) contracts.
Key Challenge: Balancing customer fulfillment, expectation management, and ongoing sales activities as a solo founder.
Actionable Advice:
- Define explicit success metrics for pilots in the contract to ensure alignment before concluding the engagement.
- Prioritize converting successful pilot results into long-term monthly subscriptions rather than maintaining a backlog of one-off projects.
- Set a specific goal to close two additional deals within the next two weeks to validate the sales-to-fulfillment pipeline.

Core Offering: A digital platform facilitating "distortion of thought records" to connect patients with therapists for cognitive psychology treatment.
Metrics: Boasts 30,000 monthly active users (MAUs) on the free patient app and 45 active paying subscriptions ($13/month) for therapists (down from a peak of 200).
Current Strategy: Attempting to convert organic free users into paid therapist subscriptions, with a recent pivot from monthly to annual billing cycles.
Key Challenge: Low conversion rates on email marketing campaigns (approx. 3% open rate on 17,000 emails sent).
Actionable Advice:
- Abandon broad email blasts in favor of manual, one-on-one outreach (phone calls) to therapists who already have patients on the free platform.
- Leverage the "do things that don't scale" heuristic to gather real-time feedback on pitch wording, then refine email campaigns based on that data.
- Set a specific goal to sell 10 annual subscriptions in the next two weeks by personally calling prospects.

Core Offering: An influencer marketplace connecting vetted travel influencers with hotels for barter (complimentary stays) and paid collaborations.
Traction: Platform includes 2,500 influencers and 200 hotels, with 25 paying hotel customers (subscription-based, 14-day free trial model).
Key Challenge: Uncertainty regarding Product-Market Fit (PMF) while facing potential expansion into airlines and tourism boards.
Strategic Pivot: Focus on a specific geographic and demographic segment (e.g., small, owner-operated hotels in Southeast Asia/South Africa) rather than general expansion.
Actionable Advice:
- Treat the next two weeks as a hypothesis test: identify a specific niche segment and attempt to contact 100 properties in that segment via phone/WhatsApp.
- Manually curate influencer-hotel matches for trials to engineer success, rather than relying on passive platform discovery.
- Goal: Report back in two weeks with the number of calls made and the conversion rate for the targeted segment.

Core Offering: A collaborative wish list and registry platform used for personal events (weddings, showers) and charitable causes (foundation gift drives).
Revenue Model: Generates affiliate fees from major retailers (e.g., Amazon, Target); currently earning approx. $10,000 annually.
Key Challenges:
- Website lacks clear segmentation; the "foundation" use case is buried despite driving significant revenue.
- Cross-domain affiliate tracking is failing due to ad blockers and privacy changes, obscuring revenue attribution outside Amazon.
Actionable Advice:
- Create a dedicated landing page for foundations with a clear, visual three-step process to drive sign-ups for gift drives.
- Implement internal data tracking to attribute affiliate revenue to specific user segments (e.g., foundations vs. individuals) since external tracking is unreliable.
- Set a goal to generate 10 new baby registry sign-ups in the next two weeks, moving away from the current "zero" baseline.

Core Offering: A goal-setting framework that currently pairs users with a coach for weekly accountability calls.
Economics: Currently operates at 15 users generating $220 MRR; the manual call model (2 hours/month per user at $20/user) is not scalable or profitable.
Strategic Shift: Moving from a manual coaching model to a "social accountability" software model where users and their friends/family set and track goals together.
Key Challenge: High barrier to entry for the new model (users must recruit friends and pay to join) compared to the low-friction manual service.
Actionable Advice:
- Avoid running both the manual and software models simultaneously to prevent dilution of effort; fully commit to the social software pivot.
- "Do things that don't scale" during onboarding: manually sit with new users to set them up on the app rather than relying on automated emails.
- Goal: Launch the new app by March 1st and acquire 15 new paying user pairs (30 total users) in the first two weeks.