Gemma Clancy: The Startup Retro is recorded on the lands of the Gubbi Gubbi and Wurundjeri people. G'day

Will Richards: 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.

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

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

Gemma Clancy: As well as a few feel good stories from the ecosystem, including a sitemate acquisition, bindi maps, securing a massive partner and the latest developments at Sun Cable.

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 childcare focused AI startup tackling some massive industry problems.

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

Will Richards: Yeah. One, one big headline was definitely Uber shutting down their car sharing business, which, um, is

Gemma Clancy: an

Will Richards: interesting one because they acquired Car Next Door, which was this Australian startup, um, back in 2022 when they, they paid a pretty handsome sum of 105 million.

Will Richards: And in a few short years, they've decided that it's, um, it's not quite worth the, the, the work for it. So they've just shut down the whole, the whole platform, um, entirely and told staff that they're basically. Um, no longer with the business within sort of like a couple of weeks. So quite an interesting change for, um, for a big company like that.

Will Richards: Um, obviously they had a heap of aspirations for what that could mean for, um, ride sharing 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

Gemma Clancy: in,

Will Richards: but yeah, it turned it off.

Gemma Clancy: Yeah. It's interesting that they didn't necessarily.

Gemma Clancy: Um, 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 is pretty 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, um, you would think, like, for any type of marketplace business, especially one based around transport, um, Um, I would have thought that there were potentially even other mark opportunities where this might work differently.

Gemma Clancy: I mean, obviously, um, Carnextor was making it, making it work to a scale that was, um, working for them, but maybe, um, Uber's aspirations were so much bigger that they just, um, they didn't feel like they could make those, but it's, um, it's quite sad. I was really sad to read this one. Cause it's like, uh, I can only imagine how the founders feel like, you know, they built this startup, I think over more than 10 years and, um, three years, like less than three years after being acquired.

Gemma Clancy: It's, it's dead. Uh, it's really sad.

Will Richards: I think it's, it's sad in some ways, but in other ways they sold the business for 105 million, they built the business for 10 years. It's actually got a really interesting founding story. So. In, in the whole journey, um, they raised 25 million dollars before the acquisition, and, and they sort of went from a seed stage investment all the way through to sort of series B, um, and then got acquired, and they even actually pitched on Shark Tank back in the day, and Steve Baxter, um, invested, um, early in their sort of seed round, and he put 300k into, into the business, so.

Will Richards: They've gone through a fair, a fair journey in that 10 year period. And I think like, you know, the founders, um, Will Davies and, and Dave Trumbull both declined to comment on, 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.

Will Richards: Out of the whole process, and it's just sad to see it turn off.

Gemma Clancy: Financially, for sure, for sure.

Will Richards: Yeah.

Gemma Clancy: Yeah, I mean, financially, you can't complain. And maybe that kind of, um, like helps the, helps ease the pain of, of seeing something that you've worked on for so many years. Um, You know, uh, end up being disbanded, but, um, I saw Will Davies present at, at sunrise, um, this year's Blackbirds annual conference.

Gemma Clancy: 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 gold market strategy was. They're finding strategy and all of that. And it was absolutely fascinating. I was actually sitting next to one of the early investors for the presentation.

Gemma Clancy: So I was getting kind of like behind the scenes information as I was watching the presentation, which was really fun. Yeah. We'll talk 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 rising car sharing, he hoped that that would help reduce, um, Global greenhouse gas emissions, if more people embraced it.

Gemma Clancy: And so with the acquisition, um, cause 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. So I can only imagine that he's probably. You know, I don't know, I don't want to speak for Will, but, you know, you kind of wonder whether he's going, okay, well, that's a shame.

Gemma Clancy: Now it's not going to be scaled out in the way that I hoped, but, um, yeah, he, he kind of continued on working at Uber and, uh, he alluded to what he was thinking of doing next. Um, you know, you know, very, very vaguely in that presentation and saying that he, you know, he's still really passionate about. Um, climate and, and working in that space.

Gemma Clancy: So I would say maybe this will like, hope, I don't know whether he has to stay at Uber for a little bit longer for kind of an own out period. But, um, I'm really interested to see what he does next and what a lot of the, those, um, Uber car share, um, employees go on to do now. There's probably a heap of talented people in that team who are now looking, um, for new roles.

Will Richards: Looking for what's next. Yeah. And it's, it's an interesting point. Like what, what does it mean for the local market? Cause there are other, other businesses that do the same sort of thing. So there's. Uh, there's a business called Truro, which does a very, very similar thing. Um, probably more on the, It's a, it's a San Francisco based business, but they've got an Australian operations now.

Will Richards: Um, very similar product. Um, there's Carly as well.

Gemma Clancy: Slightly more luxury based, I would have thought. Turo's kind of like, or 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 offense to anyone with a Suzuki Swift, but.

Will Richards: I think Car, like Car Share probably focused on the utility of, um, oh, I need, like I'm moving house, I need a van.

Will Richards: Like I can, I can hire a local van for five hours or so. Car Share. And Churro probably focuses more on like the aspirational tourism angle. The

Gemma Clancy: experience. Yeah, like I'm flying

Will Richards: to the U. S. I'll just hire and live locally. A lot like Airbnb. I think they both use the Airbnb model as a great way of summarizing what they do.

Will Richards: But Churro definitely focuses more on the tourism side of things.

Gemma Clancy: Um,

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

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

Gemma Clancy: So, that's a bit of a, um, maybe a little bit of a sad story, at least from my perspective. Um, but, so let's, uh, let's see if we can find some feel good stories to talk

Will Richards: about.

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, um, the acquisition of Nomad Fleet by, um, another construction tech company called Sitemate. Did you read much about this one?

Gemma Clancy: Yeah, it's really cool. So I think I'd heard of, um, both companies, um, because of, uh, start, uh, start mate.

Gemma Clancy: So they both went through the start mate, I believe that both went through start mate accelerator program. And, uh, I think it wasn't that long ago that we were writing about Nomad Fleet's, um, race and like amazing that they've obviously turned this acquisition around in quite a short amount of time. Um, great for the founder.

Will Richards: Yeah, so Nomad Fleet went through the 2023 winter cohort. Yeah. Just over a year since they, they went through the accelerator. They've now been acquired, um, for 2 million. So a pretty good result for the founder there and the small team involved with, with Nomad Fleet. Do you want to summarize what both businesses do really quickly before we jump in?

Will Richards: What it means for them to come together?

Gemma Clancy: Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think, uh, 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, no matter fleet, um, they, their main focus was on, um, asset management of equipment for large construction projects.

Gemma Clancy: So like your bulldozers and your diggers, and then site make is a 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 going to be Maybe a little bit more of a one stop shop for construction management.

Gemma Clancy: So yeah, that's really great. I mean, construction is a huge industry in Australia, so it makes sense, um, for both businesses to kind of come together and try and, um, you know, demand as much market share as possible.

Will Richards: Cool. And then the next good, good news story was Bindi Maps and them acquiring a really big customer in Australian Post.

Will Richards: Did you, have you ever seen Bindi Maps do a demo?

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

Will Richards: I remember Alan Jones talking about it a few months ago, but yeah, he gave it, it gave a really good summary of, of what the tool actually does. And I've seen them in shopping centers as well, but they, they map out indoor spaces and then, you know, Provide a really, really exceptional navigation tool for, for spaces that you just don't traditionally get it.

Will Richards: So it's like a hyper focused Google Maps for when you're inside, like these big shopping centers, like a Chadston or a Westfield, for example.

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

Will Richards: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So they've, yeah, they've partnered with Australia Post to focus on using their software in Australia Post's Sydney and Melbourne post offices.

Will Richards: So yeah, quite a cool use of.

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, when you don't have to worry about these things as somebody with kind of your full, full site that you can just rock up to an essential service like a post office and navigate it.

Gemma Clancy: I mean, I don't know about you. I get into a post office these days. I 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, like, it's actually hard for the average person. I just

Will Richards: join the back of the massive line normally.

Will Richards: Yeah.

Gemma Clancy: Yeah. But I feel like because you don't go very often, it's like quite, it is actually can be a little bit overwhelming, but, um, I can only imagine it's, um, pretty challenging when you've got so many people. There's, there's usually about five different gift stands in the way between you and the counter.

Gemma Clancy: Plus like the, the table where you have to. You know, write your, write your letters and it's, but, um, yeah, it's great to see that it's going to make it a bit easier.

Will Richards: Interesting way they make money as well. They, they charge on a per square meter basis. So they, they do a setup fee where basically they, they put a few cameras, um, in the, in the area.

Will Richards: And their camera is like a GoPro or an iPhone camera, and they sort of scan the space so they understand what the space looks like, um, and then they, they charge for that setup fee, but then they also charge on the square meterage of the, 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 an organization like Australia Post to, to give this to, you.

Will Richards: a certain type of population that really need this.

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, um, which is the big solar, very, very ambitious solar project that, um, intends to run a huge underwater sea cable to send, uh, renewable energy overseas.

Gemma Clancy: Um, 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, 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, it's gone through an incredible up and down, like, you know, story over the last couple of years, uh, with my kind of Brooks now at the helm.

Gemma Clancy: 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 it certainly looks like it's, it's on its way to working. So that's, um, that's pretty exciting.

Will Richards: Let's jump into the startup raises of the week, Gemma, and we had some pretty cool startups that raised this week. What was your pick of the week?

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 space flight though.

Gemma Clancy: So, um, this, 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, uh, of technology. So what they're doing is that they're creating spacesuits that will be, um, You know, more cost effective and available accessible to people wanting to do private space flight.

Gemma Clancy: So, obviously at the moment you've got kind of NASA, spacex and etc wanting to kind of send people into space in 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, uh, wanting to send people on private, you know, 90 minute flights into space just for a joyride to see the earth from afar.

Gemma Clancy: And um, yeah, these, this company is hoping to be the one that will provide them with the spacesuits to make it much more feasible.

Will Richards: Yeah. It's really out of this world. I think it's, they're taking definitely like the space X approach to, 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.

Will Richards: Price inflation has, has increased since, you know, the fifties and sixties to, to where we are today.

Gemma Clancy: Yeah.

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

Gemma Clancy: the money back then.

Gemma Clancy: Yeah. Like not even account for inflation money. Yeah. .

Will Richards: So a product like this taking like a modular, scalable sort of. SpaceX y like, um, approach to manufacturing these, these really, they're quite beautiful as well on the, on the renders I've seen on the website, um, which is really cool. It 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.

Will Richards: So definitely, definitely check out the, um, the website and the renders for, for what it looks like. But I remember them pitching it at South by Southwest at the end of, 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.

Will Richards: Yeah. But then as the pitch progressed and he sort of spoke about like the evolution of space flight 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, this is a really, like you can see that there is a growing market for a tool exactly like this.

Gemma Clancy: Yeah, by the end of it, I remember we were sitting next to each other and I actually at the start of the pitch, I remember he got up and he kind of, whatever he said at the start, it, 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 going to get that kind of response.

Gemma Clancy: 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, I see it on a Virgin Galactic.

Gemma Clancy: 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 going to be like, got to 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.

Gemma Clancy: Yeah. So you can't really have a multi million dollar suit. Um, every time somebody wants to jump on those flights, otherwise they're not going to be, um, a very sustainable business. So, but essentially the, the suits that they're, um, developing, they've actually got a range of different suits, not just one suit, it's a range of different suits for different, um, different, uh, use cases underwater on land, yeah, yeah, no different colors really, but yeah, but, um, but each of them, they consist of, um, like a base layer and then an exosuit and also then they have like software built.

Gemma Clancy: Into them for, um, telemetry. So, um, that's like essentially, uh, tracking all the different things happening inside the body and making sure that, um, I guess everything's okay from, from a life science perspective, when you're taking somebody from land into zero gravity. Um, but yeah, super interesting. So essentially we haven't even talked about the raise.

Gemma Clancy: We just talked about how amazing the startup is, but they raise a 2 million pre seed round from a Saudi technology group, actually, I tried to do a bit of research on the invest. 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.

Gemma Clancy: Um, but yeah, obviously like there were some quotes in um, The press releases and, uh, one of them kind of mentioned that Saudi Arabia has got a kind of burgeoning, um, space flight industry. So perhaps that's where the kind of interest has come from. But, um, otherwise a bit of an unknown for me at the moment.

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, these sovereign nations have more of a focus on, on space, like Australia is sort of focused now as well. Obviously the U. S. and there's certain European countries too.

Will Richards: 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.

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

Will Richards: 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 Himal is doing, um, at LoveHeart because it's solving a really big problem in, in Australia.

Will Richards: The um, in the early childcare space, which is basically a labor shortage issue and what they're doing is using AI to really help educators to 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, these educators are really quite, um, can be quite stressed and there's always lots of different things going on in a childcare center.

Will Richards: 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. On what's going on. So it's, it's sort of bridging that gap between, you know, automation, but automation when, when it's really appropriate.

Gemma Clancy: Hmm. I didn't know much about that kind of those, the administrative compliance side of child care. Um, is, is that something that you think has increased a fair bit over the recent years? The requirements there?

Will Richards: Yeah. So it's always been a very heavily compliance based industry for, for all the right reasons.

Will Richards: Hmm. 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, they sort of change depending on the state, but the sort of rough guidance is you need one educator between sort of four and five children. And it does fluctuate on the age of kids as well.

Will Richards: So, oftentimes, you'll, if you go to a childcare center now and you try and enroll your kid, you might sort of say, oh, but the center might say, we're actually full, we can't take the enrollment. It's, it's quite, there are centers 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.

Will Richards: So, it's a really frustrating thing for sort of everyone involved because the, the educators. Uh, overwhelmed. The childcare centers want to get more enrollments because it's better for business. And then parents get really frustrated as well because they can't get their child in. In a childcare center.

Gemma Clancy: Yeah. It's actually interesting timing and funny that you say that because I think it was just this week actually that I think Victoria University came out with some research talking about how many childcare deserts there are, um, in Australia. And they found that one in four Australians actually have severely limited access to childcare and about 700, 000 people virtually have no access to it at all.

Gemma Clancy: And there's some places where there's up to 50. Kids vying for one spot in a child care 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, to, um, child care, um, like that's, that's a huge impact on your life. Like, uh, particularly, uh, like Um, usually the mom's ability to return to work, um, which is again, like huge flow and effects, productivity, economic impact.

Gemma Clancy: So yeah, yeah. So anyway, coming back to the startup, we can keep going bigger and bigger on this. And whenever you talk about childcare, I find it fascinating to whenever we talk about childcare, I think, cause it has such like huge impacts on our society, but tell me a bit more about, uh, about the raise.

Will Richards: Yeah, so it was a 2. 3 million dollar seed round, um, and it was led by OIF Ventures and Scalada were also involved in the business and Scalada 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. Um, so it was founded in 2022 and the founder Himal owns his own child care centers and he's actually an Exeter founder as well, so.

Will Richards: Um, he, 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 um, he had some family connections to, to the childcare industry and decided basically to, to start, Oh, I think he acquired, um, a childcare center and he's now expanded that portfolio to about six childcare centers in New South Wales.

Will Richards: And I think when you're, you know, managing centers, you see all the frustrations of both the educators and the parents, um, 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 your, for the children you have under your care as well.

Will Richards: Um, and that's sort of where he, he came up with this, this solution and it's gone through a few iterations, but I think they've, they've landed on a product that's really resonating with, with educators across Australia.

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

Will Richards: Yeah, so they, 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.

Will Richards: So, they've grown organically to 40, 000 educators across Australia using the platform, and it's a bit of a product led platform. Growth approach where one childcare worker maybe discovers a product and then they bring, 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 center manager to, to allow them to use it across the board.

Gemma Clancy: No, 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. Um, certainly like B2B product like is hard, full stop, but in an industry like this, it's highly regulated, et cetera. I would have thought that was quite challenging.

Gemma Clancy: So cool that I've managed to crack that.

Will Richards: Yeah, I think it just goes back to how deep the frustrations run for these educators and how high the burn out is. So any tool that can help them, they really look for, um, I think as they, 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, you know, a sales led approach, which will be quite interesting to see.

Will Richards: And I think there's, you know, the education outcomes are a real focus for, for the founders and the team, if they can get this product out there and the. The staff have more time to spend with the children and these outcomes can be reported faster and better. Um, I think we'll see, you know, better outcomes for the children involved in child care as well, which is, which is fantastic.

Gemma Clancy: Yeah, really fantastic.

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 CAS. 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 cast?

Gemma Clancy: My cast is a week, is one that I've actually, I've used in the newsletter a couple times before, um, because it is one of my favorite startup resources of all time.

Gemma Clancy: But I've never talked about it on the podcast before, so I thought this was 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 newsletter and they have the most amazing like articles slash newsletters resources on mainly b2b startup marketing.

Gemma Clancy: 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 just this week on building B2B startup marketing org charts.

Gemma Clancy: And the reason I bring it up, it sounds really boring because like all charts. Like snore, right. But no, really, really important because one of the, um, most common questions that I get as a like marketing expert, we work the worst with startups all the time is who should I hire? When should I hire them? Um, how should I like craft my team around marketing?

Gemma Clancy: And, um, it's different for everyone, obviously, but, um, I think this explains it in, in a really interesting way. And it's not just to kind of explaining the traditional approach that a lot of people are taking, but it's actually proposing a slightly different approach. Um, approach to what probably a lot of startups are doing right now.

Gemma Clancy: And it introduces this idea of having, um, people in the role of what the writer Emily talks about as producers. So these producers, they have the role of, um, bridging the gap between different siloed, uh, marketing teams. A commonly held misconception by, um, particularly early stage founders is that you can kind of hire one marketing person and that marketing person can Do marketing and, um, I shouldn't laugh because it is, you know, it's, it's fair.

Gemma Clancy: Like if you, you know, maybe 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 complicated team to build, but the role of marketing on the team of marketing is so varied in a skillset.

Gemma Clancy: So you can have kind of people who are very growth based. Um, focus like paid ads, um, you can have people very content based and you can have very brand focus 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.

Gemma Clancy: Project management role, bridging the gap between different people in these, um, in these, uh, 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 a team to building it out to five plus. Yeah, I've, I've never read something like quite so clear on how to, how to do it before.

Gemma Clancy: Um, I think it's really, really useful.

Will Richards: Yeah. I really liked the way they've. 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, which is really, you know, it's really good content.

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

Will Richards: Yeah, so my cast this week was the latest edition of Superfluid, which is written by the VC investor, Abby, from Rampersand.

Will Richards: 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 call outs for maybe if you're a founder who's getting started and Rampersand obviously invests quite early, um, how you should sort of think about The, the markets that you're attacking and where potentially some markets are oversaturated and where other markets are quite blue ocean.

Will Richards: So yeah, definitely, definitely a really good read. I love the sub stack in general. I think he puts out some really good content.

Gemma Clancy: So good. Yeah. Yeah.

Will Richards: And at this stage as well, like the amount of startups that are shutting down is always increasing just with the, you know, interest rates and the funding environment and those sorts of things.

Will Richards: 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, and really build your business.

Gemma Clancy: Yeah, great, great recommendation.

Gemma Clancy: Love everything that, um, Abby puts out, so highly recommend subscribing to that one.

Gemma Clancy: 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.

Gemma Clancy: You can subscribe to the newsletter at OvernightSuccess. vc. Catch you next week.

Will Richards: Catch you next week.