Most founders fall into an extremely common trap: Just because you produced outstanding results for the last round of investors doesn’t mean new investors will believe you. This new cohort hasn’t seen that performance firsthand, and they have no reason to trust you yet.

As a founder approaching your next round, it’s common to wonder, “How do I get this new group of investors to trust that I will perform?”

In our experience, founders who fundraise successfully are great at building relationships, and they usually deliver what we call “the pre-pitch.” This is the “we actually aren’t looking for money; we just want to be friends for now” pitch that gets you on an investor’s radar so that when it’s time to raise your next round, they’ll be far more likely to answer the phone because they actually know who you are.

But the concept of the pre-pitch goes deeper than just having potential investors be aware of your existence. Building relationships with potential future investors requires you to think less like a founder and more like a marketer — much of the relationship heavy lifting comes long before it’s time to ask for a capital commitment.

There’s a host of advantages to the pre-pitch approach:

Good practice: You’re not asking for money. Instead, you’re offering a sneak peek. Since your relationship-builder pre-pitch doesn’t have millions on the line, you’ll invariably be less anxious, which leads to better relationships. Remember: If it’s not a good fit, who cares?Candid feedback: When you’re not asking for money, you’re more likely to receive honest feedback that you might not get in a high-stakes environment.Set the baseline: You should go over where you’re currently at, why it’s actually not time to raise capital quite yet (the inverse of “Why Now”), and what you still have to accomplish until the time is right.Performance-based trust: Put your performance where your mouth is by showing your potential investor where you are today and what you expect to do in the short term. Later on, you can prove to them that you achieved what you said you would.

7 ways to build relationships with VCs

Now you’re probably wondering, “What the heck do I say to build a good relationship with that next-round investor?” Here are a few notes on how to approach the pre-pitch:

Seek the relationship, not the money

Acknowledge you’re early, but mention that you think it could potentially be a good fit later on. State it up front that you’re seeking a relationship and want to find out if you could eventually be a good fit for one another. Don’t sneak in an ask; let the relationship blossom organically.

Here’s an example: “We’re actually not raising yet, and we’re probably too early for you. But I think this is something you might be very interested in, and thought it made sense to reach out, open up a relationship and see if there might be a fit.”

Don’t waste time

With more than 270,000 stickers, Stipop’s library of colorful, character-driven expressions has a little something for everyone.

The company offers keyboard and social app stickers through ad-supported mobile apps on iOS and Android, but it’s recently focused more on providing stickers to developers, creators and other online businesses.

“We were able to gather so many artists because we actually began as our own app that provided stickers,” Stipop co-founder Tony Park told TechCrunch. The team took what they learned from running their own consumer-facing app — namely that collecting and licensing hundreds of thousands of stickers from artists around the world is hard work — and adapted their business to help solve that problem for others.

Stipop was the first Korean company to go through Yellow, Snapchat’s exclusive accelerator. The company is also part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 cohort.

Stipop’s sticker library is accessible through an SDK and an API, letting developers slot the searchable sticker library into their existing software. The company already has more than 200 companies that tap into its huge sticker trove, which offers a “single-day solution” for a process that would otherwise necessitate a lot more legwork. Stipop launched a website recently that helps developers integrate its SDK and API through quick installs.

“They can just add a single line of code inside their product and will have a fully customized sticker feature [so] users will be able to spice up their chats,” Park said.

Park points out that stickers encourage engagement — and for social software, engagement means growth. Stickers are a playful way to send characters back and forth in chat, but they also pop up in a number of other less obvious spots, from dating apps to e-commerce and ridesharing apps. Stipop even drives the sticker search in work collaboration software Microsoft Teams.

The company has already partnered with Google, which uses Stipop’s sticker library in Gboard, Android Messages and Tenor, a GIF keyboard platform that Google bought in 2018. That partnership drove 600 million sticker views within the first month. A new partnership between Stipop and Coca-Cola on the near horizon will add Coke-branded stickers to its sticker library and the company is opening its doors to more brands that understand the unique appeal of stickers in messaging apps.

Park says that people tend to compare stickers and gifs, two ways of wordlessly expressing emotion and social nuance, but stickers are a world unto themselves. Stickers exist in their own creative universe, with star artists, regional themes and original casts of characters that take on a life of their own among fans. “Sticker creators have their own profession,” Park said.

Visual artists can also find a lot of traction releasing stickers, even without sophisticated illustrations. And since they’re all about meaning rather than refinement, non-designers and less skilled artists can craft hit stickers too.

“Stickers are great for them because it [is] so easy to go viral,” Park said. The company has partnered with 8,000 sticker creators across 25 languages, helping those artists monetize their creations and generate income based on how many times a sticker is shared.

Stickers command their own visual language around the world, and Park has observed interesting cultural differences in how people use them to communicate. In the West, stickers are often used in place of text, but in Asia, where they’re used much more frequently, people usually send stickers to enhance rather than replace the meaning of text.

In East Asia, users tend to prefer simple black and white stickers, but in India and Saudi Arabia, bright, golden stickers top the trends. In South America, popular stickers take on a more pixelated, unique quality that resonates culturally there.

“With stickers, you fall in love with [the] characters you send… that becomes you,” Park said.

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The design space has undergone major changes in the last decade. What once was dominated by a single player in Adobe has now become a burgeoning software landscape, with a handful of major players answering the needs of designers across every industry.

One such player is Canva, the startup valued at over $15 billion. The company started out with a consumer-facing product, making design accessible to non-designers. But on the back of launching an enterprise-centric suite of tools, the growth of Sydney-based Canva has been staggering.

So it should come as no surprise that we’re absolutely thrilled to have Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins join us at Disrupt (Sept 21-23) for a fireside chat.

Since launching the company in 2013, Perkins has led its growth to now see more than 55 million users each month, ranging from individual creators to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies.

We’ll talk to Perkins about how she shifted the company from individual creators to a B2B platform, what it’s like to run an industry-specific startup in the midst of a fundamental evolution — see: Design may be the next entrepreneurial gold rush — and how she’s handled this period of monumental growth for the company.

Perkins joins a stellar lineup of speakers at Disrupt, including Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Calendly’s Tope Awotona, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, Houseplant’s Seth Rogen and investor Chamath Palihapitiya, among many others. Check out a full list of speakers here. Disrupt is less than a month away and you can still get your pass to access it all for less than $100! Register today.

 

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With so much startup activity in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space it can be a challenge for businesses to figure out which of these SaaS (SaaSes?) are actually useful and worth continuing to shell out for. Well, Cologne-based startup Sastrify is here to help — offering what it describes as a “highly automated” platform (covering some 20,000+ SaaS solutions) to help other businesses with procurement and management of third-party services.

It may not sound the sexist startup business to be in, but despite only launching earlier this year, Sastrify is already cash-flow positive — and can tout “a high six-digit recurring revenue” just a few months post-launch. Not bad for a startup that was only founded last summer.

Today it’s announcing closing a $7 million seed round from HV Capital and the founders of FlixMobility, Personio and SumUp. That follows a $1.3 million pre-seed raised back in late 2020, ahead of its launch.

Sastrify tells us it has around 50 customers at this stage — including “unicorn startups like Gorillas”. It says its approach works best for growing companies with 100+ employees, and is perhaps especially suited to European tech scale-ups.

On the competitive front the startup points to U.S.-based Vendr and Tropic, which may further explain the regional focus (although it’s not only selling in Europe).

Sastrify’s sales pitch to SMEs includes that current customers have seen an average 6.5x return on their investment — in addition to what it bills as “thousands of working hours” saved from “wasted” activities related to SaaS procurement.

Cost savings are another carrot — which the startup is claiming its customers are “typically” saving around 20-30% of their SaaS cost.

So how does it actually make it easier for businesses to navigate the pros & cons of the smorgasbord of SaaS(es) now out there?

“Our main mantra is: ‘Effective procurement asks the right questions at the right time’,” says co-founder Sven Lackinger, who previously co-founded a SaaS startup himself of course (evopark), exiting that company back in 2018.

“To ensure that we’ve defined and implemented a five-step process into our platform, covering the whole life-cycle of SaaS applications within enterprises. Our clients can search for the suitable SaaS solutions while we guide them through the right evaluation process per use case and tool (e.g. what are similar companies using?).

“We then take over the whole buying process, aka automatically reaching out to different vendors, AI-/OCR-based comparing and benchmarking for offers. Once the tool is implemented, we make sure to track usage frequently (via regular, automated surveys to tool owners) and re-evaluate over time so there is no ongoing waste of licenses.”

“We have a more automated platform [than Vendr and Tropic] and can also resell licenses to our customers directly (e.g. for Google, Microsoft and others) to ensure best prices and fast delivery,” he also tells us. “This allows us to offer a faster and cheaper solution which is more suited to the European market (where the average SaaS expense per company is still smaller than in the US).” 

If you’re outsourcing all this other stuff to SaaS providers, why not get a specialist service to stay on top of how you do that too, is the basic idea.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 takes place September 21-23, and we’re here to call out just some of the awesome content we have scheduled over three very busy days. The Disrupt agenda so far features more than 80 interviews, panel discussions, events and breakout sessions that span the startup tech spectrum… with more to come!

You gotta pay to play: Buy your pass to Disrupt 2021 here and open a door to opportunity.

Let’s talk about the special breakout sessions, which are hosted by our partners. These smaller sessions deliver real value and, according to attendee feedback, that holds true across all TechCrunch events.

I enjoyed the big marquee speakers from companies like Uber, but it was the individual breakout presentations where you really started to get into the meat of the conversation and see how these mobile partnerships come to life. — Karin Maake, senior director of communications at FlashParking

There was always something interesting going on in one of the breakout sessions, and I was impressed by the quality of the people participating. Partners in well-known VC firms spoke, they were accessible, and they shared smart, insightful nuggets. You will not find this level of people accessible and in one place anywhere else. — Michael McCarthy, CEO of Repositax

Now’s the time to start planning your Disrupt 2021 schedule, and you don’t want to miss out on these informative presentations.

The Missing Block to Bring Crypto to the Masses

With the emergence of concepts such as NFT and GameFi, socialization prosperities are bringing new energy to the crypto world. Known as the People’s Exchange, KuCoin is committed to exploring disruptive technologies and genius ideas to bring crypto closer to the masses. In this session, you will hear from KuCoin CEO Johnny Lyu on what is the outlook of the evolving crypto market and how to achieve better trading experience for cryptocurrency investors. Brought to you by KuCoin.

Humanizing AI: How Brands Are Revolutionizing Customer Experience in an increasingly Digital World

Empathy deficit is the largest imminent threat to a businesses’ growth, but there’s hope. Humanized AI is allowing brands to create empathetic customer experiences by offering uniquely personal interactions with digital people. But what is empathy, really? And how can it help brands and storytellers better connect with their audiences in a cookie-less world? Soul Machines’ co-founder and CBO Greg Cross explains how embracing AI could be just the competitive advantage your brand needs. Brought to you by Soul Machines.

Revolutionizing the Global Metaverse Economy

Together Labs is leveraging the power of blockchain technology to create the new metaverse economy where users can buy, sell, invest and shape its future. Earlier this year, Together Labs launched VCOIN, the first global, digital currency that can be used in and out of the metaverse. VCOIN makes it possible for users to play to earn real value and then convert that value to cash. Soon, Together Labs will introduce additional blockchain offerings to accelerate the transition to a complete blockchain economy, setting the economic model for other metaverses to follow. Brought to you by VCOIN.

Securing Your journey to IPO from the start

Without the right governance tools in place at a company’s inception, a business becomes susceptible to risks as it scales. Adopting governance practices early in a business’s growth process sets them up for long-term growth and a successful IPO. Hear leadership perspectives for securing your business growth in a time of rapid change. Brought to you by Diligent Corporation.

You’ve Raised Your Seed Round — Now What? Preparing for Your Series A

The first hurdle has been cleared: initial funding is in the bank. You’re hiring more talent, seeing the beginnings of a finished product with clear evidence of traction and experiencing the coveted growth that previously felt just out of reach. Before you know it, the decision to raise for what is arguably the most competitive round is staring you in the face. In this panel, join Samsung Next’s David Lee alongside founders Kadie Okwudili (Agapé), Andy Hoang (Aviron), and Jim Bugwadia (Nirmata) as they discuss the learnings and nuances of bridging seed to Series A. Brought to you by Samsung Next.

Korea Pavilion Pitch Session – Hosted by KOTRA

We present the 13 pioneering Korean companies that will enrich our lives with their innovative edge. The companies specialize in various technologies, including Green Tech, AR/VR, 3D Display, AI & Big Data and Cybersecurity. Don’t miss your chance to catch a glimpse of ingenuity from the technology powerhouse. Brought to you by KOTRA.

Eliminating Styrofoam Protective Packaging

Over 380 million tons of plastic are produced every year and 50% of that is for single-use purposes such as product packaging. Until now, companies have been hard-pressed to find a replacement for Styrofoam for protecting fragile items like electronics and appliances. John Felts of Cruz Foam will discuss the development of bio-benign, compostable alternative materials. Tom Chi of At One Ventures will talk about the importance of investing in environmental and climate entrepreneurs. Moderator Scott Cassel of PSI will lead the discussion on how the packaging value chain can create a truly circular economy. Brought to you by Cruz Foam.

Powering What’s Next: Insights from the Enterprise Software Market

Spurred by digital transformation and the recent shift to remote work, the enterprise software industry has gone from strength-to-strength and competition for deals and valuations are at all-time highs. While investor appetite for enterprise software may be strong, it doesn’t mean that all tech businesses make worthy investments. In this panel, hear from Michael Fosnaugh and Monti Saroya, co-heads of Vista’s Flagship investment strategy, and a selection of Vista CEOs on the hallmarks of best-in-class software companies and trends driving the industry. Brought to you by Vista Equity Partners.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 takes place September 21-23. Don’t have your pass yet? Buy one here and check out the breakout sessions for trends, advice and opportunities to help grow your business.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Natasha and Alex and Grace and Chris were joined by none other than TechCrunch’s own Mary Ann Azevedo, in her first-ever appearance on the show. She’s pretty much the best person and we’re stoked to have her on the pod.

And it was good that Mary Ann was on the show this week as she wrote about half the dang site. Which meant that we got to include all sorts of her work in the rundown. Here’s the agenda:

Funding rounds from: Ramp, which raised $300 million at a $3.9 billion valuation; NoRedInk, which put together an impressive $50 million Series B; and Playbook, which is building a sort of Dropbox for designers. Each company gave us something different to noodle on, be it the diverging strategies at Ramp and Brex, how NoRedInk is different from Grammarly, and why Dropbox is not the Dropbox for designers.Then we spun the globe to narrow our focus to Latin America, a booming startup scene that Mary Ann recently profiled for Extra Crunch. In a nutshell, venture capital is helping drive an enormous wave of startup activity in the region — or perhaps a wave of startup activity is driving a boom in venture investment? — leading to huge companies, and perhaps some tech-powered inclusion of more folks into the modern banking and digital economy. (For more, here are notes on the Brazilian market’s rising exit tally! And Flink raised, which was worth chewing on as well.)We quickly pivoted to the hot-button issue of the moment for every startup (and business): hiring. Natasha noted how startups used to focus on runway, and now they are looking to fill empty seats amid the great resignation. Finally, we nattered about huge venture results from Boston, big numbers from Austin and what increasingly feels like an everything bubble. Chicago is doing well, too. Pick a city, it’s putting up big numbers.

The buildout of 5G networks continues apace, with wide-scale deployments across much of the developed world. Yet, one of the largest challenges with closing the gaps in coverage maps are constraints on 5G transmissions. Because of the spectrum that 5G technology uses compared to 4G, telecom operators need to install many times more towers to deliver the advertised bandwidth with the same quality signal that users expect.

Installing cell towers is a daunting proposition though. An operator has to find exactly the right location in terms of line of sight to users, then make sure the location has power and internet access, and then negotiate a contract with the property owner to keep the tower there for a decade or more. Now repeat tens of thousands of times (and maybe even more).

Sitenna, which will debut next week as part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 Demo Day, wants to radically speed up the process of selecting tower sites and securing contracts, creating a marketplace for landlords, tower operators and telcos alike.

Tower siting and access to poles have in some cases emerged as national infrastructure priorities. In the United States, the challenges around installing new towers — and new towers quickly — became a top priority of the FCC during the Trump administration, which launched a 5G FAST Plan to try to ease regulations around tower installation.

Sitenna’s founders Daniel Campion and Brian Sexton saw an opportunity with such programs to help with the movement. Over the past year, they have built out what is essentially a marketplace that on one hand helps property owners figure out if they have an asset that’s worth investigating for telecom usage, and on the other, helps tower operators select and digitally sign deals for installation.

The company launched in the United Kingdom in June, and “it kind of resonated,” Campion said, noting that 65,000 real estate assets and roughly 15% of the towers in the U.K. are now on the platform. The company has kicked off two pilots with Vodafone and its tower provider Cornerstone. He said the company intends to enter the U.S. market in the first quarter of next year.

While the company is starting with a marketplace, like many startups today, it is also augmenting that marketplace with B2B SaaS tools. In its case, that means tools for telcos to manage the process of onboarding a new tower location and then managing the asset. “Once they find the site, they ping pong emails back and forth,” Campion said. “So we have built some tools to help them on their workflows.”

While there is definitely a large wave of tower installations underway now with the transition to 5G wireless, that wave doesn’t mean that tower installation will suddenly dry up in a few years. Campion notes that there is a “continual refresh of 15-20% on the carrier side” due to everything from changing usage patterns and building redevelopment to just standard hardware replacement.

And of course, there is always 6G, which while completely amorphous today, is a real thing that I get invites to conferences for. There’s always going to be a next generation of wireless, and Sitenna wants to become the center for managing that infrastructure.

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What a busy week in the world of media liquidity.

That’s a sentence you don’t get to write often. Regardless, news broke this week that Axel Springer is buying U.S. political journalism outfit POLITICO. The transaction was expected, but the eye-popping roughly $1 billion price tag still has tongues wagging. We even got on the podcast to chat about it.

And Forbes announced that it is going public via a SPAC. The business publication’s news follows BuzzFeed’s journey to the public markets through a blank-check company. Hot media liquidity summer? Something like that.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

That TechCrunch is in the process of being sold to private equity, of course, is not something that we should forget. Shoutout to the Verizon bankers who found a way to get rid of us while also deleveraging Verizon’s debt profile. Ten points.

I want to take a quick tour of the Forbes SPAC deck this morning. Our notes on BuzzFeed’s are here, in case you want to run comparisons. This will be easy and fun. Perfect Friday morning fare. Into the data!

What’s it worth?

In corporate-speak, Forbes Global Media Holdings is merging with blank-check company Magnum Opus Acquisition Limited. The transaction will close either Q4 2021 or Q1 2022, Forbes estimates.

The deal itself is somewhat modest in scale compared with other SPAC deals we’ve recently looked into. Forbes reports that it will sport “an implied pro forma enterprise value of $630 million, net of tax benefits,” after its completion. Some $600 million in gross proceeds will be derived from Magnum Opus funds “and $400 million of additional capital through a private placement of ordinary shares of the combined company,” Forbes writes.

The company will sport an equity valuation of $830 million after the deal closes, per its own calculations. That number will change some depending on redemptions ahead of the combination. The gap between the large dollars going into the deal and the modest final valuation of the public Forbes entity is due to some $440 million in secondary transactions for existing Forbes shareholders.

In case you’d prefer all of that in table form, here’s the Forbes investor deck:

Is $830 million a fair price? Let’s dig into Forbes’ results.



The Equity crew felt that there was enough media news out recently that we simply had no choice but to fire up a Twitter Space and have a chat. The above episode is a discussion of a few things, in a loose and relaxed manner, so don’t take any of the Verizon jokes too seriously, Verizon, as we still work for you. For a few more days.

Regardless, here’s what Danny and Alex got into:

Politico sells for $1 billion: Its new parent company Axel Springer is also buying the rest of Politico Europe and all of Protocol at the same time. This deal exploded everyone’s Twitter feed due to its scale, and the fact that it was one heck of an exit for a media company. One billion dollars? For media? In this economy? Yes!Forbes is going public via a SPAC: Yep, the venerable Forbes magazing and its enormous digital arm are taking the blank-check route to the public markets, which means that we got its numbers and time to stroll through them. Our take is that Forbes has done massive work to take its IRL brand and extend it into the digital world. The company has big plans to boot, and will be worth more than $800 million when it combines.Layoffs hit Vice: As Vice turns its focus to video content — you’ve heard this story before — it is shedding some of its editorial staff. The layoffs were a stinkbomb on Media Twitter after the other news of the week, but were sadly not a huge surprise. The company’s union decried them as something of a yearly recurrence. Not good, not good at all.

And there’s more media news to come. Our parent company Verizon Media is expected to close its sale to Apollo on September 1 or sometime soon after, which means we will either be hosting Equity regularly as always, or we’ll be hosting the RUDE (Recently Unemployed Due to (Private) Equity) podcast.

A new startup called Popcorn wants to make work communication more fun and personal by offering a way for users to record short video messages, or “pops,” that can be used for any number of purposes in place of longer emails, texts, Slack messages or Zoom calls. While there are plenty of other places to record short-form video these days, most of these exist in the social media space, which isn’t appropriate for a work environment. Nor does it make sense to send a video you’ve recorded on your phone as an email attachment, when you really just want to check in with a colleague or say hello.

Popcorn, on the other hand, lets you create the short video and then send a URL to that video anywhere you would want to add a personal touch to your message.

For example, you could use Popcorn in a business networking scenario, where you’re trying to connect with someone in your industry for the first time — aka “cold outreach.” Instead of just blasting them a message on LinkedIn, you could also paste in the Popcorn URL to introduce yourself in a more natural, friendly fashion. You also could use Popcorn with your team at work for things like daily check-ins, sharing progress on an ongoing project or to greet new hires, among other things.

Videos themselves can be up to 60 seconds in length — a time limit designed to keep Popcorn users from rambling. Users also can opt to record audio only if they don’t want to appear on video. And you can increase the playback speed if you’re in a hurry. Users who want to receive “pops” could also advertise their “popcode” (e.g. try mine at U8696).

The idea to bring short-form video to the workplace comes from Popcorn co-founder and CEO Justin Spraggins, whose background is in building consumer apps. One of his first apps to gain traction back in 2014 was a Tinder-meets-Instagram experience called Looksee that allowed users to connect around shared photos. A couple years later, he co-founded a social calling app called Unmute, a Clubhouse precursor of sorts. He then went on to co-found 9 Count, a consumer app development shop which launched more social apps like BFF (previously Wink) and Juju.

9 Count’s lead engineer, Ben Hochberg, is now also a co-founder on Popcorn (or rather, Snack Break, Inc. as the legal entity is called). They began their work on Popcorn in 2020, just after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the rapid shift to remote work in the days that followed could now help Popcorn gain traction among distributed teams. Today’s remote workers may never again return to in-person meetings at the office, but they’re also growing tired of long days stuck in Zoom meetings.

With Popcorn, the goal is to make work communication fun, personal and bite-sized, Spraggins says. “[We want to] bring all the stuff we’re really passionate about in consumer social into work, which I think is really important for us now,” he explains.

“You work with these people, but how do you — without scheduling a Zoom — how do you bring the ‘human’ to it?,” Spraggins says. “I’m really excited about making work products feel more social, more like Snapchat than utility tools.”

There is a lot Popcorn would still need to figure out to truly make a business-oriented social app work, including adding enhanced security, limiting spam, offering some sort of reporting flow for bad actors, and more. It will also eventually need to land on a successful revenue model.

Currently, Popcorn is a free download on iPhone, iPad and Mac, and offers a Slack integration so you can send video messages to co-workers directly in the communication software you already use to catch up and stay in touch. The app today is fairly simple, but the company plans to enhance its short videos over time using AR frames that let users showcase their personalities.

The startup raised a $400,000 pre-seed round from General Catalyst (Niko Bonatsos) and Dream Machine (Alexia Bonatsos, previously editor-in-chief at TechCrunch.) Spraggins says the company will be looking to raise a seed round in the fall to help with hires, including in the AR space.

The Y Combinator application season is upon us. I have been through YC a couple of times and have reviewed thousands of applications as a volunteer in later years.

Typically, you hear advice focused on ways to improve your YC application so it gets accepted. Here are some tips on what not to do and why so many YC applications get rejected. I’ve also put down some advice about what else to anticipate and take into consideration as you navigate the application process.

In short, don’t overthink your application, and keep it simple and straightforward.

When should I submit my YC application?

The best applications are often those made at the last minute, because applicants do not overthink their responses and toil over details they think need to be shoved into a question. While I do not recommend submitting applications at the deadline because the system has had issues receiving submissions, you can capture the essence of last-minute submissions by being clear and concise.

Remember that your application should be good enough to get an interview, not win a prize. Go back to work instead of spending more time perfecting an application.

YC experiments frequently. For this batch and the last, there was an early deadline that would give accepted teams access to YC before the batch officially began. Applying early gives you an opportunity to land an interview in the early round and to update your application to be considered in the standard round.

Is it OK to submit my YC application late?

There’s a lot of advice out there on how to grab people’s attention, but there’s one aspect of marketing that Robert Katai thinks isn’t talked about as often: maintaining their attention. The solution, he says, is a combination of content strategy and positioning.

Based in Romania, Katai is known for his podcasts and speeches covering the gamut of content marketing. A product manager at online graphic design platform Creatopy, he also works with clients as a freelance content strategist, and it is in this capacity that he was recommended to TechCrunch via our growth marketer survey. (If you have growth marketers to recommend, please fill out the survey!)

Katai was recommended by multiple Romanian clients and contacts who vouched for his content strategy prowess, so we were curious to know more. Who is he? And is his advice applicable beyond borders?

The short answer is yes. In a freewheeling interview, Katai spoke about how content marketing should integrate with users’ daily lives, and how content can be repurposed across multiple formats. He also shared some insights on the booming Romanian startup ecosystem.

Editor’s note: The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

TC: How do you help your clients as a freelancer?

Robert Katai: One of the two things I’m doing is that I’m helping clients with creating their content strategy based on their objective. You can get web traffic, but you can also create a message and build the brand. You don’t have to start at the beginning; You can rebuild the brand later.

For instance, I’m working with a Romanian outsourcing company that pioneered this industry in our city of Cluj-Napoca. But lately, they started to realize that they should be more attractive from a sales as well as from an employee perspective. So I worked with them to perform an internal audit to see why employees love the company, why they leave, why they stay and what they want from the company.

From there, I got to the idea that they needed to reshape their brand to not just have people notice them but to also maintain their attention. And here comes the content: I started an ambassador program, because there are people outside of the company who love it.

I also recommended they create an internal print magazine. It’s a very well-designed magazine that their 200 to 300 employees can take home and read. It’s not just about the job; it’s also about their hobbies, things to do in the city and some thought leadership articles that can inspire them to have a better life.

What’s the second way you are helping clients?

Apart from content strategy, I’m working with clients on their positioning for their audience, community and market, but also sometimes in terms of employer branding. Content can be a bridge between the two ways I am helping clients, because I’m using a lot of content marketing here and not focusing only on performance or growth marketing hacks. I’m helping them understand that if they want to establish a memorable, long-lasting brand in the market, they have to make content marketing part of their life.

If they want to reposition themselves in the industry, they need to say: Okay, these are the kinds of content we have to create for our goals; who will amplify the content, who will connect with us, and who will consume the content. Today, content creation is free — everybody can do it. The hard part is how you distribute and amplify that. And here’s how I can help the startups: Make a big piece of content and repurpose it in several small pieces; get it in front of people so that the brand is on their minds.

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How can brands achieve that top-of-mind status?

We all know that there are four kinds of content: Text, video, pictures and audio. These four formats never die. The platform can change, but the format will stay the same. A video can be an Instagram Reel, a documentary or something else, but it’s a video. The same goes for a photo. So the content strategy I’m working with is how brands can use that content ecosystem.

When I work with my clients — and also with Creatopy where I’m a product marketer — I recommend them to use content to build their brand and be visible to their users every day in their feeds. Every morning, when their customers are waking up and checking their phones, they don’t open a newspaper. They will open Twitter, Instagram or Facebook, and maybe then when they get out of the bathroom and make coffee, they will open YouTube and connect with Alexa.

I really believe that brands should create content that can just be in the mind of the user. Snackable content, Reels, TikTok … It doesn’t matter what we call it.

You also talked about repurposing content. Can you explain that?

Let’s take the interview you’ve done with Peep Laja. You could have recorded it as a video. And he covered several topics, so you could have several short videos — 30 seconds, three minutes, whatever. You can publish them daily on your site or social media channels with a comment that says, “Here’s the link to the full article.” But remember that on LinkedIn, that link will need to go into the comments section, not the post itself.

You can also have a longer video that you can publish on social media or on Wistia, asking people to give their email — so now you also have subscribers.

Then the second type of content you can create is audio. You already have it from the recording. You don’t have to publish the full 45-minute conversation, but you can have a five-minute audio clip, and again link to the articles.

Now we have video and audio, but what if you also designed quotes with his headshot and messaging? If it’s part of a series, you should also give it a name.

And it’s not just motivational; it’s educational, too, so you should take these quotes and create carousels for Instagram and LinkedIn. The first slide should grab attention — it can be a question. The second slide can be a link to the interview so that even if people don’t click it, it will be on their minds. Then you can have slides with insights.

The last slide will always be a call to action: Asking people to share, comment or save it for later — it’s the new currency on Instagram! And once you have your Instagram carousel, you create a PDF and publish it on LinkedIn.

So now you have five formats of content from one piece of content.

Wow, how much do we owe you?! Just kidding, we actually do some of that for the Equity podcast, for instance. Now, what other advice do you have for startups?

I’m a big advocate of documenting the process. Just imagine if Mark Zuckerberg had done that and you could read how he launched Facebook and so on. Noah Kagan is doing that right now. I think startup founders should do it, not just from the PR and marketing perspective, but for their audience. Even if your audience is not paying for your product right now, they are staying with you and giving your brand an essence in the industry.

Just think about what Salesforce is doing right now: They launched Salesforce+, which is like Netflix for B2B. It’s to get the attention of professionals and also maintain it, and I believe this is the currency of the big companies today: People’s attention.

Do you work with any startups in Romania? And do you have any impressions to share on the Romanian startup ecosystem?

Yes, I help a few Romanian startups with their content marketing and positioning. Sometimes other startups email me with questions, so I help them, too, but I don’t charge for email advice. I work with the ones that are looking for a long-term or project-based collaboration.

Startup founders here in Romania are curious, and very courageous to experiment even if it won’t necessarily work. And Romanian startups are very smart. For instance, Planable is doing a great job with content, social media and positioning. We also have social media analytics company Socialinsider, which this year launched virtual events, and TypingDNA, which wants to get rid of needing to log in with passwords and was founded by a former colleague.

I also found that the founders here work harder than their teams and don’t just leave others do the work — at least the ones I have met. We have several startup events in Romania: How to Web, and Techsylvania here in Transylvania.

I don’t like this name, but people say that Cluj-Napoca is the “Silicon Valley of Romania.” Lots of startups have been launched here, but the city that is getting more and more traction is Oradea, where the bet on education is paying off.

(If you are a tech startup founder or investor in Cluj or Oradea, fill in TechCrunch’s European Cities Survey 2021.)

AI-powered voice transcription service Otter.ai is expanding its Otter Assistant feature for Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Cisco Webex. Otter.ai first released this feature for Zoom users earlier this year (in May). With this new integration, Otter Assistant can now join and transcribe meetings on more platforms, even if the Otter user is not attending the meeting.

The Otter Assistant automatically joins calendared meetings and records, takes notes and shares transcriptions with meeting participants. If a user decides to skip a meeting altogether, they catch up on the discussion through the recorded notes afterwards. The tool can also help in instances where you have overlapping meetings or larger meetings where only a portion of them are relevant to you.

To use the new tool, users need to synchronize their calendars with the service. The assistant will then automatically join all future meetings, where it appears in the meeting as a separate participant, for transparency’s sake.

“With more companies adapting to a hybrid work model where professionals work and take meetings in-office, at home, and on mobile, many are looking to Otter as a tool to improve team communication and collaboration,” said Otter.ai co-founder and CEO Sam Liang in a statement. “We’re excited to make using Otter even easier and more accessible no matter where or how people conduct and participate in meetings.”

The new integration will be handy for those who attend meetings across several platforms, as the tool can keep all of your meeting notes in one place. The Otter Assistant is available to Otter.ai Business users. The business tier starts at $20 per month and includes features like two-factor authentication, advanced search, audio imports, custom vocabulary, shared speaker identification and more.