Uber shuts down Car Next Door, Sitemate acquires Nomad Fleet

0:00 Will Richards: You're listening to a Day One FM show.

0:04 Gemma Clancy: The Startup Retro is recorded on the lands of the Kabi Kabi and Wurundjeri people.

0:10 Will Richards: G'day and welcome to The Startup Retro, a weekly show brought to you by the team behind the Overnight Success newsletter, where we help you level up on the Australian startup ecosystem by giving you an insider's view on Aussie startups and venture capital.

0:22 Gemma Clancy: The Startup Retro is brought to you by Day One, the podcast network for founders, operators, and investors. I'm Gemma Clancy.

0:28 Will Richards: And I'm Will Richards. In today's episode, we'll dive into Uber shutting down Car Next Door and what it means for the local car share market.

0:35 Gemma Clancy: As well as a few feel-good stories from the ecosystem, including a Sightmate acquisition, Bindymaps securing a massive partner, and the latest developments at Suncable.

0:44 Will Richards: We then get stuck into our startup raise picks of the week, including an out-of-this-world raise in space tech and a childcare-focused AI startup tackling some massive industry problems.

0:59 Gemma Clancy: Okay, Will, let's jump into the headlines. What caught your eye this week?

1:04 Will Richards: Yeah, one big headline was definitely Uber shutting down their car sharing business, which is an interesting one because they acquired Car Next Door, which was this Australian startup back in 2022 when they paid a pretty handsome sum of $105 million. And in a few short years, they've decided that it's not quite worth the work for it. So, they've Yeah. Just shut down the whole platform entirely and told staff that they're basically no longer with the business within sort of like a couple of weeks. So, quite an interesting change for a big company like that. Obviously, they had a heap of aspirations for what that could mean for ridesharing or car sharing in Australia. But it was also the test of like doing car sharing globally as well, and Australia was the first market they sort of dabbled in. But yeah, turned it off.

1:54 Gemma Clancy: Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting that they didn't necessarily— I don't know that they really even got to the point of expanding it internationally to try it out in different markets before deciding that it wasn't worthwhile continuing with, which is really surprising to me because I mean, Australia's a bit of a weird market when it comes to transport. Like we live all so far away from one another. We have like very dispersed and low— very dispersed and small population sizes. So you would think like for any type of marketplace business, especially one based around transport. I would have thought that there were potentially even other market opportunities where this might work differently. I mean, obviously Car Next Door was making it work to a scale that was working for them, but maybe Uber's aspirations were so much bigger that they just, they didn't feel like they could make those. But it's quite sad. I was really sad to read this one. 'Cause it's like, I can only imagine how the founders feel. Like, you know, they built this startup, I think, over more than 10 years and 3 years like less than 3 years after being acquired, it's dead. It's really sad.

2:57 Will Richards: I think it's sad in some ways, but in other ways, they sold a business for $105 million. They built the business for 10 years. It's actually got a really interesting founding story. So, in the whole journey, they raised $25 million before the acquisition, and they sort of went from a seed stage investment all the way through to sort of Series B and then got acquired. And they even actually pitched on Shark Tank back in the day, and Steve Baxter invested early in their sort of seed round, and he put $300K into the business. So, they've gone through a fair journey in that 10-year period. And I think like, you know, the founders, Will Davies and Dave Trumbull, both declined to comment on the acquisition. But I think if you're an investor or you're a founder in this business, like you've probably done fairly well out of the whole process, and it's just sad to see it turn off. Yeah.

3:45 Gemma Clancy: Financially, for sure. For sure.

3:47 Will Richards: Yeah.

3:48 Gemma Clancy: Yeah. Oh, I mean, financially you can't complain, and maybe that the kind of like helps the— helps ease the pain of, of seeing something that you've worked on for so many years, um, you know, end up being disbanded. But I saw Will Davies present at Sunrise, this year's Blackbird's annual conference, and it was a fantastic presentation. He pretty much talked about, um, the whole history of Car Next Door and how, um, you know, they grew, what the go-to-market strategy was, their funding strategy, and all of that. And it was absolutely fascinating. I was actually sitting next to one of the early investors for the presentation, so I was getting kind of like behind-the-scenes information as I was watching the presentation, which was really fun. Yeah, Will talked about the fact that, you know, one of the main motivations for starting Car Next Door was actually a climate-based, like, climate change-based motivation. That, you know, with a rise in car sharing, he hoped that that would help reduce global greenhouse gas emissions if more people embraced it. And so with the acquisition, because the presentation was done after the acquisition was announced, obviously, um, he was hoping that it could kind of be scaled out with a global brand like Uber. Yeah. So, I can only imagine that he's probably, you know, I don't know, I don't wanna speak for Will, but you know, you kind of wonder whether he's going, okay, well, that's a shame now, it's not gonna be scaled out in the way that I hoped, but—

5:00 Will Richards: Yeah.

5:01 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, he kind of continued on working at Uber and he alluded to what he was thinking of doing next, you know, very, very vaguely in that presentation and saying that he, you know, he's still really passionate about climate and working in that space. So, I would say maybe this will, like, I don't know whether he has to stay at Uber for a little bit longer for kind of an earn-out period, but I'm really interested to see what he does next and what a lot of those Uber CarShare employees go on to do now. There's probably a heap of talented people in that team who are now looking for new roles.

5:33 Will Richards: Looking for what's next. Yeah, and it's an interesting point, like what does it mean for the local market? 'Cause there are other businesses that do the same sort of thing. So, there's a business called Turo, which does a very, very similar thing, probably more on the, It's a San Francisco-based business, but they've got an Australian operations now. Very similar product. There's Carli as well.

5:55 Gemma Clancy: Slightly more luxury-based, I would have thought. Turo is kind of like, well, at least a lot of the advertising I see, it's like, get a Mustang. It's not just like a Suzuki Swift, you know. No offence to anyone with a Suzuki Swift, but—

6:05 Will Richards: I think like CarShare probably focused on the utility of, oh, I need like I'm moving house, I need a van. Like I can hire a local van for 5 hours or so. And Turo probably focuses more on like the aspirational tourism angle.

6:18 Gemma Clancy: The experience.

6:19 Will Richards: Yeah, like I'm flying to the US, I'll just hire and live locally. A lot like Airbnb. I think they both use the Airbnb model as a great way of summarising what they do. But Turo definitely focuses more on the tourism side of things.

6:31 Gemma Clancy: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think, I mean, obviously they probably were launching in Australia then at the same time as like Turo and other competitors were entering the Australian market. So, you know, a bit of a hard time to try and test something out. But yeah, it's a shame to see it die, but I guess that's the ups and downs of startup and tech life.

6:50 Will Richards: Yeah, for sure. I think it's just an opportunity for everyone else to jump in and the business model of car sharing is definitely not over, so.

6:58 Gemma Clancy: So, that's a bit of a, maybe a little bit of a sad story, at least from my perspective. But so, let's see if we can find some feel-good stories to talk about.

7:08 Will Richards: For sure. There's definitely a few feel-good stories this week, which is awesome to see. The first one that really jumps out is the acquisition of Nomad Fleet by another construction tech company called SiteM8. Did you read much about this one?

7:21 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, it's really cool. So, I like, I think I'd heard of both companies because of Startmate. So, they both went through the Startmate, I believe that both went through Startmate accelerator program. And I think it wasn't that long ago that we were writing about Nomad Fleet's raise and like amazing that they've obviously turned this acquisition around in quite a short amount of time. Great for the founder.

7:42 Will Richards: Yeah, so Nomad Fleet went through the 2023 winter cohort.

7:45 Gemma Clancy: Yeah.

7:46 Will Richards: Just over a year since they went through the accelerator, they've now been acquired for $2 million. So, a pretty good result for the founder there and the small team involved with Nomad Fleet. Do you want to summarise what both businesses do really quickly before we jump in what it means for them to come together?

8:00 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think I have to caveat that construction is not an industry that I'm super familiar with, so I'm going to do my best. But essentially Nomad Fleet Their main focus was on asset management of equipment for large construction projects, so like your bulldozers and your diggers. And then SiteMate is a little bit more focused on a project delivery and operational management of construction sites. And they both kind of have software platforms to support both sides of that. Yeah, so now obviously coming together, it sounds like it's gonna be maybe a little bit more of a one-stop shop for construction management. So yeah, that's really great. I mean, construction's a huge industry in Australia, so it makes sense for both businesses to kind of come together and try and demand as much as much market share as possible.

8:42 Will Richards: Cool. And then the next good news story was Bindymaps and them acquiring a really big customer in Australia Post. Did you— have you ever seen Bindymaps do a demo?

8:52 Gemma Clancy: No, I haven't. Have you?

8:54 Will Richards: I remember Alan Jones talking about it a few months ago, but yeah, he gave a really good summary of what the tool actually does. And I've seen them in shopping centres as well, but they map out indoor spaces and then provide a really, really exceptional navigation tool for spaces that you just don't traditionally get it. So, it's like a hyper-focused Google Maps for when you're inside like these big shopping centres like a Chadstone or a Westfield, for example.

9:20 Gemma Clancy: For vision impaired people, right? So, that they can like better navigate it.

9:24 Will Richards: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, they've partnered with Australia Post to focus on using their software in Australia Post's Sydney and Melbourne post offices. So, yeah, quite a cool use of of technology.

9:37 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, that's really great to see. You know, it's one of those things that you just so take for granted when you don't have to worry about these things as somebody with kind of your full sight, that you can just rock up to an essential service like a post office and navigate it. I mean, I don't know about you, I go into a post office these days, like I don't go to post office very often. When you go, like you have something very important to do and you get there and you're like, okay, what do I, where do I go? Like it's actually hard for the average person.

10:01 Will Richards: I just join the back of the massive line normally.

10:04 Gemma Clancy: Yeah. Yeah. But I feel like because you don't go very often, like quite— it is actually, it can be a little bit overwhelming, but I can only imagine it's pretty challenging when you've got so many people. There's usually about 5 different gift stands in the way between you and the counter, plus like the table where you have to, you know, write your letters and— But yeah, it's great to see that it's going to make it a bit easier.

10:28 Will Richards: Interesting way they make money as well. They charge on a per square metre basis. So, they do a setup fee where basically they put a few cameras in the area. And the cameras, like a GoPro or an iPhone camera, and they sort of scan the space so they understand what the space looks like. And then they charge for that setup fee, but then they also charge on the square meterage of the space as well. So, I think like Australia Post offices, there's obviously lots of them, but they're not massive buildings. So, I think it could be quite cost-effective for—

10:57 Gemma Clancy: Mm-hmm.

10:57 Will Richards: An organisation like Australia Post to give this to a certain type of population that, that really need this.

11:04 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, no, it's really fantastic. The last good news story that, um, I want to chat about quickly was the Sun Cable, uh, renewable energy project, which is the big, so very, very ambitious solar project that intends to run a huge underwater sea cable to send renewable energy overseas. They've had their big, uh, solar farm project in the Northern Territory approved by the federal government, which is really exciting. Um, it's going to create like a huge a huge number of jobs during the construction phase and then also once it's there. And it's kind of just, you know, this is one of those projects where it's, it's gone through an incredible up and down, like, you know, story over the last couple of years, uh, with Mike Cannon-Brookes now at the helm, um, to kind of drive it forward. And I think probably a lot of people thought that maybe it wasn't going to work, but certainly looks like it's, it's on its way to working. So that's, um, that's pretty exciting.

11:57 Will Richards: The Startup Retro is supported by Teamified. So I'm super excited to be joined by Simon Lee, the co-founder of Teamified. Simon, I'd love to get your thoughts on the rise of fractional roles for startups in Australia. It's a trend that I'm seeing really start to kick off lately. How do you sort of see that in the market at the moment and what does Teamified do to help?

12:20 Will Richards: Yeah, I don't know about you, but everywhere I'm seeing fractional everywhere now. If you actually look at the biggest cost on people's balance sheet is their labor costs, right? And 90% of businesses, it's their labor costs is the biggest cost. And so building remote teams is a great way to reduce the cost, but fractional services is also, you know, if you're a small business, do I need to hire a full-time CFO? Do I need a full-time CMO? We'll hit $18 mil revenue this year and I've still got a fractional CFO and a fractional CMO and they do an amazing job. When you're trying to start a business, trying to find who should I partner with and having someone that at least a vetted CMO or a vetted CTO is just gonna make it that much simpler.

12:58 Will Richards: To learn more about how Teamified can help scale up your business, head to teamified.com.au. Let's jump into the startup raises of the week, Jemma, and we had some pretty cool startups that raised this week. What was your pick of the week?

13:12 Gemma Clancy: So my pick this week was a startup called Metacosmos, and it's super sci-fi. Like, I kind of love it because I'm a bit of a sci-fi nerd. I love my Star Trek, and ironically, I do not like the idea of spaceflight though. So, this— Mm-hmm. So, what this startup is developing, I will probably never interact with because it doesn't interest me at all. But I think it's an incredible feat of technology. So, what they're doing is that they're creating spacesuits that will be, you know, more cost-effective and available, accessible to people wanting to do private spaceflight. So, obviously at the moment you've got kind of NASA, SpaceX, and et cetera wanting to kind of send people into space and the moon, but that's largely just been reserved for astronauts, whereas more and more now we're hearing the likes of Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic ambitions wanting to send people on private, you know, 90-minute flights into space just for a joyride to see the Earth from afar. And yeah, this company is hoping to be the one that will provide them with the spacesuits to make it much more feasible.

14:19 Will Richards: Yeah, it's really out of this world. I think it's, they're taking definitely like the SpaceX approach to manufacturing this product because we like, we try to do some research on, how much a spacesuit cost back in the days and how much a spacesuit price inflation has increased since the '50s and '60s to where we are today.

14:35 Gemma Clancy: Yeah.

14:36 Will Richards: And like back in the Apollo days, each suit was custom made for each astronaut. And from the loose research we can find, it was $15 million to $20 million US for each astronaut. And then with inflation—

14:48 Gemma Clancy: In the money back then.

14:49 Will Richards: Yeah, in old money.

14:51 Gemma Clancy: Inflation. Yeah.

14:52 Will Richards: So, a product like this taking like a modular, scalable sort of SpaceX-y like approach to manufacturing these. These really, they're quite beautiful as well on the renders I've seen on the website, which is really cool. Definitely sort of when you think of like space travel and you speak of like, think of the future of space travel, you definitely think of suits that look like this. So, definitely check out the website and the renders for what it looks like. But I remember them pitching it at South by Southwest.

15:18 Gemma Clancy: Yeah.

15:19 Will Richards: At the end of last year. And it was quite a like, It was a really interesting pitch. When he started pitching, I felt like this seems like a very far-fetched idea.

15:28 Gemma Clancy: Yeah.

15:28 Will Richards: But then as the pitch progressed and he sort of spoke about like the evolution of spaceflight and how much more, how common rocket launches are these days and the evolution of space tourism and all the interest in that, it was quite interesting to see like, oh, though this is a really, like you can see that there is a growing market for a tool exactly like this.

15:47 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, by the end of it, I remember we were sitting next to each other and actually at the start of the pitch, I remember he got up and he kind of, whatever he said at the start, it actually caused a bit of an audible like, ooh, from the audience. Like, wow, like this is crazy. I mean, anyone pitching a space tech company is probably gonna get that kind of response. But yeah, I remember thinking at the start, wow, this is crazy. And then by the end being like, oh, I guess somebody has to do it. And this guy is planning to be the guy. So that's pretty cool. But yeah, I guess on the cost front, it was, you know, if you think about it, like Virgin Galactic a seat on a Virgin Galactic flight is looking at like, it will cost about $250,000. And I don't imagine you can just chuck any old spacesuit on any old person and just like recycle them from person to person. Like they're actually gonna be like, gotta be relatively custom fitted and configured from person to person, especially when it comes to the bio-tracking kind of software that's in them. Yeah. So you can't really have a multimillion dollar suit every time somebody wants to jump on those flights, otherwise they're not gonna be a very sustainable business. So, but essentially the suits that they're developing, they've actually they've got a range of different suits, not just one suit, it's a range of different suits for different use cases. Summer suit, winter suit. Underwater, on land. Yeah, yeah. No different colors really. Water, spring. But yeah, but each of them, they consist of like a base layer and then an exosuit, and also then they have like software built into them for telemetry. So that's like essentially tracking all the different things happening inside the body and making sure that I guess everything's okay from a life science perspective when you're taking somebody from land into zero gravity. But yeah, super interesting. So essentially, we haven't even talked about the raise, we just talked about how amazing the startup is, but they raised a $2 million pre-seed round from a Saudi technology group, actually. I tried to do a bit of research on the investor to try and understand like, who are these people? Never heard about them before. The internet gave me nothing. So apologies, guys, but if you know anything about these investors, feel free to let me know, but I could not find anything, anything out about them. But yeah, obviously, like, there was some quotes in the press releases, and one of them kind of mentioned that Saudi Arabia's got a kind of burgeoning spaceflight industry. So perhaps that's where the kind of interest has come from. But otherwise, a bit of an unknown for me at the moment.

18:03 Will Richards: Yeah, I've done some research on the VC as well. I couldn't really uncover much either. But yeah, I think, yeah, it's interesting seeing these sovereign nations have more of a focus on space, like Australia's sort of focused now as well. Obviously, the US, and there's certain European countries too. And, um, yeah, I think we're starting to see more and more investment go into, into these sorts of technologies for, for sovereign reasons.

18:23 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, very interesting. What was your pick this week, Will?

18:27 Will Richards: Uh, my pick this week was LoveHeart AI. So, um, for many of you may know that I used to work in the childcare sector, so I love seeing a childcare technology startup, um, raise some money. And, and I really like what, um, what Hemal is doing, um, at LoveHeart because it's solving a really big problem in the early childcare space, which is basically a labour shortage issue. And what they're doing is using AI to really help educators get off the iPad where they have to write these updates and do these compliance-based things, which is really important but can take a long time. So, these educators are really quite— can be quite stressed and there's always lots of different things going on in a childcare centre. So, a tool like this just allows them to spend more time doing the things that really matter, which is obviously working with the children and educating them and teaching them things instead of doing the sort of the compliance side of things and updating parents on what's going on. So, it's sort of bridging that gap between, you know, automation, but automation when it's really appropriate.

19:28 Gemma Clancy: I didn't know much about that kind of those, the administrative compliance side of childcare.

19:33 Will Richards: Yeah.

19:34 Gemma Clancy: Is that something that you think has increased a fair bit over the recent years, the requirements there?

19:39 Will Richards: Yeah. So, it's always been a very heavily compliance-based industry for all the right reasons. But if you're a childcare owner, you have to have a certain number of staff per children. So, there's a lot of ratios and they all— They sort of change depending on the state, but the sort of rough guidance is you need one educator between sort of 4 and 5 children. And it does fluctuate on the age of kids as well. So, oftentimes you'll— If you go to a childcare centre now and you try and enrol your kid, you might sort of say, oh, let's the centre might say, we're actually full, we can't take the enrolment. It's quite— There are centres that are completely full and they can't take another child. But quite often what the limiting factor is, they don't actually have the staff to accept more children because the ratios go out of whack.

20:23 Gemma Clancy: Yeah.

20:23 Will Richards: So, it's a really frustrating thing for sort of everyone involved because the educators are overwhelmed, the childcare centres want to get more enrolments because it's, you know, better for business. And then parents get really frustrated as well because they can't get their child in. In a childcare centre.

20:38 Gemma Clancy: Mm. Yeah, it's actually interesting timing and funny that you say that because I think it was just— It was this week, actually, that I think Victoria University came out with some research talking about how many childcare deserts there are in Australia. And they found that 1 in 4 Australians actually have severely limited access to childcare and about 700,000 people virtually have no access to it at all. And there's some places where there's up to 50 kids vying for one spot in a childcare home. So, if you're in a, you know, particularly in like regional locations, if you're in a regional location, you don't have access to childcare, like that's a huge impact on your life. Like particularly, like usually the mum's ability to return to work, which is again, like huge flow-on effects, productivity, economic impact. For sure, yeah. So, yeah, yeah. So, anyway, coming back to the startup, we could keep going bigger and bigger on this. And whenever you talk about childcare, I find it fascinating too. Whenever we talk about childcare, I think, because it has such like huge impacts on our society. But tell me a bit more about, about the raise.

21:42 Will Richards: Yeah, so it was a $2.3 million seed round, um, and it was led by OIF Ventures, and Scalata were also involved in the business. And Scalata love to play in that verticalized B2B SaaS world, so really focusing on quite niche, well, niche businesses that, um, niche software products in niche businesses. So, it was founded in 2022 and the founder, Hemal, owns his own childcare centres and he's actually an exited founder as well. So, he built a technology previously, sold that and was sort of looking around at like, oh, what do I kind of do with this money? And he had some family connections to the childcare industry and decided basically to start— Oh, I think he acquired a childcare centre and he's now expanded that. Portfolio to about 6 childcare centres in New South Wales. And I think when you're, you know, managing centres, you see all the frustrations of both the educators and the parents and the frustrations as well of just trying to get like, you know, you want the best for your staff and you want the best for the children you have under your care as well. And that's sort of where he came up with this solution. And it's gone through a few iterations, but I think they've landed on a product that's really resonating with educators across Australia.

22:53 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, that's really great. What kind of traction has he got so far?

22:57 Will Richards: Yeah. So, they've grown organically through word of mouth, and I think that really shows when there's a product solving a problem like this, people love to talk about it. So, they've grown organically to 40,000 educators across Australia using the platform. And it's a bit of a product-led growth approach where one childcare worker maybe discovers a product and then they bring it to work and then they tell their co-workers about the product because it's really saving them time. And then they try and convince the centre manager to allow them to use it across the board.

23:25 Gemma Clancy: Oh, that's really interesting. Yeah, I would have thought that that would have been quite a challenging go-to-market strategy for an industry like this. So, like, B2B product, like, is hard, full stop. But in an industry like this, it's highly regulated, etc. I would have thought that was quite challenging. So, cool that they've managed to crack that.

23:40 Will Richards: Yeah, I think it just goes back to how deep the frustrations run for these educators and how high the burnout is. So, any tool that can help them, they really look for. I think as the business matures and now they've raised this money, they're probably going to go for a more top-down approach and more of a sales-led approach, which will be quite interesting to see. And I think there's, you know, the education outcomes are a real focus for the founders and the team. If they can get this product out there and the staff have more time to spend with the children and these outcomes can be reported faster and better, I think we'll see better outcomes for the children. Involved in childcare as well, which is, which is fantastic.

24:19 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, really fantastic.

24:24 Will Richards: So each week we're going to leave you in the same way that we wrap up our weekly newsletter, which is with a section that we call KaaS, which is of course Knowledge as a Service, where we share our favorite startup-relevant read, listen, or watch of the week. And this week, Gem, what was your KaaS?

24:38 Gemma Clancy: My KaaS this week is one that I've actually— I've used in the newsletter a couple times before because it is one of my favorite startup resources of all time, but I've never talked about on the podcast before, so I thought this is a good opportunity just to surface it again. And it's from the MKT One, or Market One, I— maybe you say it, I'm not sure, um, newsletter. That's actually— it's a US-based, uh, newsletter, and they have the most amazing, like, articles/newsletters/resources on mainly B2B startup marketing. But I think a lot of the principles that they talk about, about marketing strategy and organizing your teams and things that are really relevant to other, like, non-B2B startups as well. Like, I've never found anything that explains things as clearly as this does. So they just released a— well, they're about to release actually a series of newsletters on this topic, but they released the first one of it, um, just this week on building B2B startup marketing org charts. And the reason I bring it up, it sounds really boring because, like, org charts like, snore, right? But no, really, really important because one of the most common questions that I get as a, like, marketing expert that works with startups all the time is, who should I hire? When should I hire them? How should I, like, craft my team around marketing? And it's different for everyone, obviously, but I think this explains it in, in a really interesting way. And it's not just kind of explaining the traditional approach that a lot of people are taking, but it's actually proposing a slightly different approach to what probably a lot of startups are doing right now. And it introduces this idea of having people in the role of what the writer Emily talks about as producers. So these producers, they have the role of bridging the gap between different siloed marketing teams. A commonly held misconception by particularly early-stage founders is that you can kind of hire one marketing person and that marketing person can just do marketing. And, um, I shouldn't laugh because it is, you know, it's, it's fair. Like, if you, you know, if you think you need a— you need an accountant, you just hire one accountant and they can do that job. But it's not really the same in marketing, and it's actually the same for sales. Like, I think sales is— not to oversimplify sales because it can be quite a complicated team to build, but the role of marketing on the team of marketing is so varied in a skill set. So you can have kind of people who are very growth-based, um, focused, like paid ads. Um, you can have people who are very content-based, and you can have very brand-focused people. And so, um, she kind of proposes a structure for a team that has people who kind of sit in these different areas of skill, but then has these people in the role of producers who kind of almost form like a project management role, bridging the gap between different people in these, in these different silos. So yeah, I definitely encourage people to take a look at— especially relevant if you're going from like having one marketer in your team to building it out to 5+. Yeah, I've never read something like quite so clear on how to, how to do it before. I think it's really, really useful.

27:37 Will Richards: Yeah, I really like the way they've broken this down into as the team grows, this is what the team should kind of look like. And the way they've structured it, like I'm not a marketing person, but I can really understand what each person should be responsible for and probably delivering just from looking at these graphics, which is really, you know, it's really good content.

27:55 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, yeah, they pretty much have it from like what you should have for a team of 5 and then what you should have for a team of 10 to 15 and then 20 to 25. So yeah, it's a great roadmap for anyone thinking about this stuff. Uh, what was your cast this week, Will?

28:09 Will Richards: Yeah, so my cast this week was the latest edition of Superfluid, which is written by the VC investor Abby from Rampersand. And the title of this one was called Thrive, Consolidate, or Die. And I think it was, um, it's quite a depressing read up top, but I think it has some quite good callouts for maybe if you're a founder who's getting started. And Rampersand obviously invests quite early how you should sort of think about the markets that you're attacking and where potentially some markets are oversaturated and where other markets are quite blue ocean. So, yeah, definitely, definitely a really good read. I love the Substack in general. I think he puts out some really good content.

28:49 Gemma Clancy: So good.

28:50 Will Richards: Yeah. Yeah. And at this stage as well, like, the amount of startups that are shutting down is always increasing just with the interest rates and the funding environment and those sorts of things. So, Yeah, it's— I think it's a, it's a good one to read, digest, and just have a think about the market that you're attacking. And, um, and if there is a pivot into one that maybe is less competitive where you can have a greater advantage and really build your business.

29:14 Gemma Clancy: Yeah, great, great recommendation. Love everything that Abby puts out, so highly recommend subscribing to that one. Thanks for joining us for this episode of The Startup Retro. We would love to hear what you thought of the show, so feel free to reach out to us directly on LinkedIn, or even better, you can follow us on your favorite podcast player and leave us a review so that more people can find us. And if you enjoy the podcast, you'll probably also really enjoy our weekly newsletter Overnight Success, which goes into even more detail on the news headlines and startup raises and much, much more. You can subscribe to the newsletter at overnightsuccess.vc.

29:51 Will Richards: Catch you next Catch you next week.

30:04 Gemma Clancy: Catch you next week.

30:04 Will Richards: Listen to the Unfunded Podcast, brought to you by the Day One Network and hosted by me, tech writer Joan Westenberg. We're sharing the no-holds-barred untold stories from entrepreneurs who have decided to build a business on their terms. I'll be interviewing successful founders and operators on the grit and ingenuity it takes to build and scale independent startups without the support of traditional venture capital funding. Subscribe to the Unfunded Podcast now, wherever you get your podcasts.