Jojo Hedaya, founder @ Unroll.Me

Jojo Hedaya

Alright so happy hanukkah everybody so my name is jojo and I'm the founder and ceo of unroll dot me for you for those of you who don't know what unroll dot me is we're a consumer app that shows you a list of all your newsletters from facebook to livingsocial to groupon whatever you don't want it's a one click unsubscribe whatever you do want but you don't want clearing up your inbox you can combine into a single daily digest that we call the roll up and this is my unexpected journey and yes that is me on as bilbo I let my designers do that and hopefully I don't regret it so I was a college kid living with my parents in brooklyn I was studying philosophy at brooklyn college and I thought that html was something you need to get vaccinated for I seriously went into this industry not knowing what html was but everyone starts somewhere you don't need to have an amazing degree you don't even need to finish college you don't need to have a tech background or come from a wealthy family and this is my adventure as an entrepreneur so chapter 1 it all starts with the idea despite my lack of tech chops I was always fascinated by the web I was amazed that you can build a website and millions of people across the globe can see it and at the time I thought it was like a push of a button I didn't understand what scaling was but that really fascinated me because if I wanted to open up a coffee shop let's say I opened a coffee shop down the block from here I would need 1 coffee shop here if I wanted to be in la I would need it was so operational intensive to get it over there so tech really fascinated me I actually started my first business in high school as a spammer not actually a spammer but my friend charlie and I got together and I come from a very small jewish community in brooklyn and people wanted to advertise to the community members but had no way of doing it online so we went out and we collected thousands and thousands of emails from people in the community hustling in every way possible I went through yearbooks to get email addresses on the back of yearbooks I went to conferences and got people's emails from conferences and if someone wanted to build an ad we had an ad and we sent an email from to them so I went from sending people emails for a living to helping people get rid of emails and now back to our story the beautiful jerusalem this is my best friend josh and this is what brought us together and yes that is a blackberry how many people here had a blackberry at some.

Jojo Hedaya

In their lives that's a nice amount so when we were in israel together we were about a 100 people and only 2 people in the entire school had a blackberry me and josh so our rabbi came to us and said guys I got a little bit of advice for you and you know when your rabbi is telling you want to be a good jewish boy you're gonna listen to your rabbi he's like jojo josh you both have blackberries and you both like business be friends and we laughed alright we'll give it a shot it was love at first sight we figured out that our birthdays were both december 30 1989 and we stayed up the entire night watching the 1st season of gossip girl later on we ended up going to burgers bar for breakfast lunch and dinner and we really became very good friends 2 years later we decided to that's life broken but we'll go with it anyways we decided to start a company together but instead of building 1 company our idea was we're going to build 12 companies in 1 year because 99% of startups fail so chances are better if we build 1 company a month we had no idea how hard it was to build a company but we gave it a shot so we hired a couple of engineers off of craigslist and we thought we're entrepreneurs we're gonna make it happen our first startup was called wearing social we connected to your social media accounts and helped you wear your identity so we took for example all your profile pictures and created a big facebook like sign it failed pretty quickly but the concept's still cool and maybe one day we'll bring it back in action so josh and I were emailing a lot back and forth to try and figure out startup ideas but this guy would not answer any of my emails seriously he would get pissed at me if I'd answered one of his emails but we were sending ideas back and forth together and it just never got answered so I remember I called the guy up and I'm like josh you want to start 12 startups in a year but we can't communicate because you're not answering my emails at the same time josh went to a conference and someone told him help me unsubscribe with my emails do something to help me unsubscribe with my emails and light bulb went off and that was the first logo of unroll me alright the yarn ball I still love it and we have to bring the old t shirts back because I don't have anymore it actually took us a full month to come up with a name for unroll me we thought that we would have 12 startups in a year 1 startup a month and it took us a full month to come up with a name it's impossible to find a domain name these days every dotcom is taken and we tried everything unsubscribe me unsubscriber every single possible domain name was taken if we wanted a dotcom and then we figured out okay you enroll into emails and you unroll from emails and bam we just went for it first thing was it had to be simple I wanted every single person to be able to use unroll me no matter what device you use no matter who you are and no matter where you live but I really wanted to make sure that this lady could use it and that beautiful lady is my mother and she is the best and she is now a power user my mom has trouble turning on her computer but she is a power user so on one of our biggest outages everyone's emails are hitting their inbox my mom sent in a support ticket and if you can read it it says a lot of emails that I put in my roll up are coming into my inbox you know when my mom's complaining we're in trouble but at least she gave me a it's jojo's mom lol you know thank you mom and now it's about looking at the competition who's out there what are they doing what are they all about so first we saw unsubscribe.com they were the biggest in the space they raised a few $1,000,000 we had a downloadable plug in what it only worked on your desktop I was using email on my phone and it wasn't the right solution fun fact james simonov who started unsubscribe.com and ended up failing started ring years later and sold to amazon for over $1,000,000,000 this year so it all starts with email guys then there was other inbox other inbox is a lot better but it was all about moving messages from your inbox into an other inbox folder and we still thought that wasn't enough so this was the first prototype of unroll me and this logo never went live the prototype never went live but it gives you the basic idea Microsoft dell apple you just click what you don't want right you click what you don't want and one click unsubscribe and then we get you to inbox 0 and that was it that's where it all started now onto chapter 2 but let me grab a drink of water quickly but everything was great until it wasn't we decided to launch our alpha site and make it invite only because that was a cool ship back in the day I remember like 5 10 years ago everything was an invite only but we also used this to our advantage and this is what we did the entire throughout the entire life cycle of unroll me so we wanted to create buzz and we wanted to get a lot of press for our launch so instead of just emailing techcrunch and mashable and lifehacker like hey we're launching a startup with no funding but it helps people with email we said this is a closed beta and it's invite only but the first 1,000 people that come via the techcrunch article the mashable article the lifehacker article get in free and cut the line and this really helped us have a huge launch and it really was enormous we were covered all over the place right our servers crashed I didn't know what html was but I had to like come in and try to be an engineer to solve these problems and I would say it's like when everyone here is going to try and get press when you're trying to get think about a techcrunch writer how many emails are getting us every day figure out what you can give them to get their audience excited that's more than just your product there's always something that you can give to make your launch really successful and I remember you get on techcrunch I thought I was that was it I'm gonna retire now I'm on techcrunch you know it was invincible and then we went and decided to present at new york tech day and new york tech day is an amazing conference that had a couple 100 startups in science in a science fair like atmosphere presenting and we were probably the least impressive startup at the event but we came to win there were vcs there were judges there were reporters you know people looking for jobs and we're like what are we gonna do to stand out how are we gonna make it that every single person that is at that event is gonna be talking about unroll me and how can we be unconventional because everyone goes and they give out you know the the credit card holders and the stickers but what were we gonna do that was gonna be different so I had my friends come in and dress up in costume we had my friend jimmy dressing up as a trash can we had someone dressing up as you know the mister spam I had a friend dressed up in like you know a captain underpants costume to help kill spam and then we went one step further and we replaced all the toilet paper at the conference with unromi branded toilet paper and seriously this was what everyone was talking about no one was talking about our startup no one's talking about any other startup they're talking about unromi is crazy they replaced all the toilet paper in the conference with our toilet paper and we ended up winning we did it right again well I was that excited that I lifted up the trophy dropped it and it has a big crack right down the middle but it's all it's all about the memories but seriously the next time anyone here is presenting at a conference we probably spent the least amount of money on that on that event right we bought 20 rolls of toilet paper and went to party city to get some costumes think about doing something different that's gonna let you stand out right how do you be the the company that people are talking about at the conference so after the conference we were so hot we had 40,000 people on the waiting list I was ready to buy my ferrari pop the champagne I thought steve jobs was gonna call me up and ask me to take you know charge and we decided obviously we weren't that cool but we decided to go all in and I was in college I was I had in my senior year I was actually studying for the lsat I didn't actually want to be a lawyer and thank god I'm not because now I just get sued all the time and not what I want to do but like I'm a jew in new york I faint every time I see blood so if I'm not gonna be a doctor I guess I'm gonna be a lawyer and it was time to do it I dropped out of college and I still have 3 classes left that I promised my wife I'll finish so I'll make it happen at some.

Jojo Hedaya

But I was just too passionate about unroll me for it to be a side project alright it's very important to be passionate about what you're doing like you see that heart over there that's how passionate I still am about unroll me and what we were doing and I was building the company with my best friend having a great co founder is super important in being a successful startup alright there are so many ups and downs there are so many things that you're doing and this is a person that when there are ups you're celebrating with but when the inevitable happened there are downs that you're bringing you're you're bringing each other up that is very very important josh trusted me with a product and I trusted him with the business and it really worked out well for us so make sure that you have a great co founder when starting a company so again we were riding high until we talked to the guys with the money and it really hurt guys it really did they told us your startup sucks you can't make money this will never grow you guys have enough yet because we didn't we kept going for more they said you're not going to scale past a 100000 users you need a technical cofounder and I'm sure a lot of people here hear that and you don't need a technical cofounder because we didn't have one no one will invest this is a tool it's not a product and we kept hearing the same things over and over and over again and it was very very hard we always thought if you build it they will come you'll worry about everything else later but again we kept hearing the same things and imagine I had to go into the team and they knew we had these vc meetings but I had to tell them sorry guys we're over 15 didn't raise a single dollar we thought we were on top of the world and now how do we overcome this we really believed in what we were doing and I know this sounds obvious but but if you are you not fully bought into what you're doing as a founder as an early employee for a startup things will get hard there's no no one has instant success in the startup world you're gonna get turned down from some vcs you're gonna have points where like your servers just crash and you have you have nowhere to go you're gonna have times where it's like it just feels so hard what the hell am I gonna do to get over it if you believe in what you're doing it'll make this process so much easier so now into chapter 3 the breakthrough so we were scrappy and we were determined we were gonna prove them wrong we were gonna do whatever it took to make sure that we can go back to these vcs and show them everything that they said were a problem we solved at the same time we had to listen to their feedback you know vcs are smart they know what they're talking about they see thousands of startups a year but they told us so much you gotta build a product you gotta grow fast you gotta make money engage your users like we're 4 people on the team how are we gonna do that and that's when we learned how important it was to prioritize correctly everyone has limited resources no matter if you're a 2 person team a 50 person team a 200 person team you can't do everything you need to focus and you need to prioritize well so we decided to focus on 2 areas on making the best product possible and to grow super fast and we said if we have a great product and we're growing super fast we can go back to the vcs and finally raise a round and that's what we did 1st we looked at our data and we were surprised to find that people only unsubscribe from 30% of their subscriptions we're like everyone's telling us that they have thousands of emails that they don't want and they want to unsubscribe from all of them so why are they only unsubscribing from 30% and we spoke to them and found out that people didn't want to miss the deals for all their subscription they were scared to hit that unsubscribe button but they still didn't want it in their inbox and that's when we came up with the the cause of the roll up so the roll up combines all of your emails into 1 daily digest so instead of getting 50 emails you got 1 and you never miss out on a deal again that made us from a tool into a product the next thing was how are we gonna grow I was never a believer that people just share a product because they love it there are certain people that that are active on social and are gonna share things that they love but people like my mother people like my wife even like myself we don't just share things that we love on on social media how are we gonna get there so we looked for inspiration looked at dropbox looked at the ubers of the world the lyfts of the world and they were offering you know if you share for every user you get to sign up for dropbox it's free space for you know uber and lyft you get ride credits but we were a free product what were we gonna do and I also didn't like the fact that it was a it wasn't instant that I had to wait until someone actually signed up for me to get my credit so we thought very hard and we came up with a foreshare we thought what if instead of having a paywall we had a sharewall will users hate it can we get users to share and we said we were we were gonna try but we were nervous every advisor we had said this was gonna be the death to unroll me they said people are gonna hate it you're focusing on growth more than focusing on the product it's gonna be the end of unroll me but we're all like let's let the data give us the answers and that's what we did we found that once a user sees their subscriptions and unsubscribe from 5 newsletters that they felt the magic and they were willing to to share at the time of launching the foreshare 90% of users who hit the share wall shared and that was like what are they sharing on facebook or twitter all right it was 5050 at the time but for every 100 users that would share on twitter you would get 1 user in return versus every 100 users that were sharing on facebook you would get anywhere between 80 150 users in return depending on how many were sharing at the same time so we switched up the design and if you can see here we had to share on facebook and then all other options this brought us from 50% sharing on on facebook to over 80% sharing on facebook and took on roni viral so when we were able to get one big burst you know a techcrunch article a today show we had so many people sharing at the same time that it was at the top of everyone's news feed if I were to pick one thing for the success of unroamie it's the foreshare we figured out a way to get majority of our users to share the service within the first five minutes of signing up right so I made that sound easy but what would I do today if I was trying to design the next foreshare and you know across industries the first thing I would do is find the social incentive right what can you give to your user that's going to incentivize them to share right if you're a free product you know maybe you unlock features to share if you're a paid product I would challenge people here instead of doing the typical model of you know you have to invite someone and once they come then you'll get credit give them instant gratification you share you get a 5% discount you share you get $1 off alright give them something right then and there because again the people aren't just gonna share you because you have a great product you gotta you gotta give them a push the second one is make sure when you before you push them to share you're finding the earliest time in the process of once you gain their trust right for us it was they see the magic of the subscriptions they start seeing that on roaming it's working by pressing the unsubscribe button and now they trust us to go and ask them to share and they're more likely to share it so do some research look at the data and make sure that you're asking the users to share once they once they trust you and move beyond facebook facebook took us viral but facebook is very different these days it's much harder to go viral on facebook right the algorithms have changed the usage on facebook has changed look into alternatives like whatsapp facebook messenger look into you know just text messages and email so now onto chapter 4 after the foreshare we were going we were adding thousands of users a day we had our 1st 1000000 users and things were things were looking good the problem was how the hell are we keeping up our servers without being able to hire we were an unfunded team just had friends and family around and trying to compete with hiring against Google and facebook was practically impossible so we really had to think differently of who we were hiring it's all about the people right I am very passionate about my team I love my team and they're the ones that built on rollme not me right I help guide them through the process but building a great team is the really way that you you could succeed just like I said you have to love what you do to me it's even more important to love the people you work with and still to this day love the people that I work that I work with and it brings me to work every single day our main philosophy at unroamie is fuck resumes right I don't I never had a resume hopefully I'll never need a resume but we're not looking for the typical person I want to look for the diamond in the rough I don't want the person that's gonna go work at Google right we can't compete with that I want the person that maybe didn't study computer science in college right and took a coding class but really wants to do something different and really wants to hustle and work their butts off to take it to the next level and that's what we did out on enroll me and one of the perfect examples is jack who's in the audience today jack you're the best jack was an intern for us and he ran product for us for years he's one of the most important people at unroll me and he did it the unroll me way he came in he worked hard he went from answering support tickets to you know sending t shirts to to people on the you know to some of our users to seriously leading product and that's the way we did it and I would say same for everyone here look for alternatives look for different ways to hire people look for that diamond in the rough alright take chances on people it's worth it and basically hire smart people you want to spend time with because we love to spend time together you know like I we're we're a family we're a family first you know we had a thanksgiving meal together where everyone brought in a dish from their house it was a lot of fun and I can seriously talk about my team forever because they mean the most to me but I am gonna I'll move on on this one and get back to the story so we were we were doing pretty well and the tables really turned and you remember all those vcs that turned us down every single one turned us down they all came back to us and the landscape changed the odds were in our favor not only were we able to grow super fast now the value of having users you know email data start to really perk up alright there are companies like slice that raised over $30,000,000 to try and build the nielsen of online right companies like procter and gamble were able to see what huggies is doing versus pampers at the walmart stores but they weren't able to see what it was doing online so slice built a company to extract information from email receipts and help brands with market research data to understand how they're doing in the market and we were the ones with the users so we ended up being the swing state so now we had to decide do we partner with one of these companies do we raise a vc ground and try to you know monetize ourselves or do we get acquired and just focus on the user and we chose acquisition main reason for choosing acquisition is we want to do what we did best and that is user user user let someone else figure out the business model and seriously our acquisition story is like a friggin movie and I still can't believe what happened and how stressed I was because I was going on my honeymoon at the time also so it was really stressful the first company that we signed a letter of intent with we were in due diligence for over 3 months and it wasn't a good fit now they're great people and I respect them a lot but we just didn't see eye to eye they didn't see us they saw us as a number the number of users they didn't see the value in the team they wanted us to come in rip up the culture and do things their way but what really took it what really pushed it overboard was how they were treating our people I remember the 1st week after signing the letter of intent we asked them everyone on our team was getting underpaid because unfunded startup how much can you pay people so so we said we need to get people to market rate and they kept pushing that conversation pushing that conversation pushing that conversation until 3 months after due diligence where they sent everyone their offer letters and it was like raising people by 5% so I got on a call to try and push that and change it and it didn't work and they said jojo as long as you come we're happy so what did we decide we're a team see you later and we walked away and that was hard because I had to go into the team and tell him this thing that we were working on for 3 months it's gone we're walking away but we were in it together and we made it happen together so was that the end of the road what would happen next to unroll me we found the right partner we saw that a company slice got acquired by rakuten seriously all we did was email the founders saying congratulations guys we're so happy for you 5 minutes later get a phone call from harpy and Scott 2 of the founders jojo josh you guys still available we're like I guess so we're like give me a number this was a thursday give us until sunday night and we'll have a letter of intent for you so first things first we gave them the salary numbers that we wanted everyone on our team to have and they approved it on the spot and said this is your team your decision we trust you and they went for it and then we gave them a number that we thought they wouldn't reach they said yes on sunday night we had a we had a letter of intent and the rest is history and it's been amazing for us at at rakuten slice you know they really let us continue to be entrepreneurs even though you know Scott harpy eric and ben were founders that have done this multiple times you know they're all they're all teachers at stanford they're now partners in eric schmidt's fund innovation endeavors have sold multiple companies but they trusted these 24 year old hustlers with no experience to run the company and let us do what we wanted to do they mentored us and they really let us grow into who we are today but most importantly they cared about the people and we were very aligned on the people and it's been an amazing experience for me so what did we do post acquisition we went and finally launched our ios app it's crazy that it took us like 6 years to launch an ios app but we did it and we did it the way that we always did it the unconventional way and we wanted it we came in to win it and we ended up being bigger than gmail and snapchat for 1 week at the top of the app store alright we were 8th overall in the app store so we went from not knowing what html was to 8th overall in the app store and we had a joint project cross country with the slice team and the unroll me team coming together and building a product and it was really really awesome it's been an awesome adventure for us and unroll me is still going strong we have over 3,700,000 active users we've been mentioned in the press over 5,800 times and we process over a 125,000,000 emails per day so now what what lessons can you take from this first one and I'll keep repeating this one even though I you know I feel like it's pretty typical believe in what you do startup life is tough right major major roller coaster ride and if you don't fully believe in the company that you're working for when things get hard you're not gonna be the ones that are able to like jump past it make sure you believe in what you do be unconventional I would challenge everyone here the next time that you're at an event do something different right if it doesn't work the next event do something different what's gonna make you stand out and don't overthink it have someone freaking dress up in a costume alright do your own version of the toilet paper stunt alright stand out there's so many startups these days it's so important to be able to stand out and share figure out a way to get your users to share in ways that people aren't doing take a chance don't just look at what's out there and do it that way take a chance and be unconventional and surround yourself by the right people most importantly and make sure that you work with people you love people that you wanna fight the battles with people that you're gonna celebrate with people that you're gonna cry with these are the people that you're gonna be with every single day from your cofounder who is like a spouse right to your team who is like your family to the people that eventually will acquire all of your companies out there make sure you surround yourself with people that you love thank you everyone again my name is jojo feel free to reach out to me and guys because I'm not taking questions I'll be around for lunch so if anyone has questions you could tweet at me email me or just find me over here alright thank you everyone and thanks for letting me speak