How do you get VCs to chase your seed round?

Jason Kirby (00:01.802) Welcome to episode nine of Fundraising Demystified. This is Jason Kirby, founder and managing director of Thunder.VC and your host of Fundraising Demystified. Today we have Jens Neuse, the co-founder at Wondergraph, a next-generation framework to optimize front-end, back-end, and full-stack developer workflows. They've recently raised a $3 million seed round, and we talk about how founders need to understand the VC game, why cold emails may not work, why founders should focus on building a brand instead of cold outreach, and why he thinks the pitch deck isn't as important as most founders think it is, to which I partially agree in a lot of cases. But let's go ahead and dive in and hear Jens’s story. Jens Neuse (00:28.388) Hi Jason, thanks for having me. Jason Kirby (00:30.69) Yeah, great. Yeah, glad to have you. Let's jump right in. Let's tell the audience a little bit about your background and what led you to starting Wundergraph. Jens Neuse (00:40.192) Yeah, so I was a software engineer for about 10 years on various different roles, like just regular, like I started with app development. I started actually very, the very first steps of my career was a startup, which completely failed like we were like super early, but that startup was my entry point for actually learning how to program because I never knew how to program and there was no reason or I didn't go to university or anything. interested in building a startup and someone had to build the Android and iOS app and the website and so nobody wanted to do it. And so the obstacle between us and creating a startup was I had to learn to program and then I went on YouTube, learned the stuff and that's how I failed my first startup but learned a lot about software engineering. Then I became like engineer in other companies. and eventually moved up the ranks into management roles and as an architect, and there in some upper roles, I just learned so much that eventually I wanted to build my own company and that was Wundergraph. Jason Kirby (02:00.762) Awesome. So basically you self-taught yourself, you know, software engineering 10 years ago and then moved up the ranks, not necessarily having like a computer science degree pedigree to kind of move up those ranks, just hustling and making it happen. And so kind of what led to the idea for, for Wundergraph. Jens Neuse (02:19.188) Yeah. So in my last job in, I would say in the corporate world, I was an engineering manager responsible for three teams. And one of our biggest obstacles there was that we had like, I don't know, a heterogeneous system of internal and external services that we were using, like a content management system, databases. APIs that spoke XML, JSON, GraphQL, gRPC, anything. And then you had external partners like AWS. They also had REST APIs and we had external partners who sent us data like football data and financial data and all different data points. And one of our biggest problems was how can you actually build an API on top of... 30 other services and every system is different. Every system speaks a different language. And yeah, the solution was to build a homegrown kind of API integration system. And I realized this is not just a problem for us. Everybody has to somehow glue together things. And the go-to solution is we write custom code. And I think that's a huge waste of time. And back then, like this is kind of five years ago, I started Wonder Graph as a side project. Back then I thought, wouldn't it be super useful and a big time saver if you could just talk GraphQL, which is just a, it's a query language similar to SQL. Wouldn't it be cool if I could just talk GraphQL to all my systems? Because then I don't have to build this manual. gluing together layer, I can just plug in all the systems and then talk to them. And this problem is gone. And that's, that's how I started. You know, I was just a nerd, I would say, who was interested in, interested in, in, in solving a technical problem. At that point, I didn't really think much about starting a company. I really just started an open source project, solving a problem. And over time. Jens Neuse (04:37.216) Some people came to me saying like, hey Jens, you have this open source tool. There's something missing, like can you help me? And then I helped them a bit. And then sometime later, actually one and a half years ago, someone came to me and said, hey Jens, can I pay you 3K per month? And you helped me and my team figure out how to get the most out of Wundergraph and you improve Wundergraph a bit. And with that 3K MRR in the back. I was able to start the funding process for a seed run and then build a team and eventually turn a side project from a tech nerd into a company. Jason Kirby (05:21.07) That's a fun story. And so I guess, what's the timeline here from, you know, when you initially conceptualize the idea to getting that first, you know, MRR in the bank to going out and raising? Jens Neuse (05:35.672) So I think from, because I rewrote this a couple of times in the beginning, but I would say from first idea to that first customer almost a year, which by the way was one of the worst ideas you could ever have. But I wouldn't say I'm a good first time tech founder, but I learned a lot of stuff. Jason Kirby (06:08.152) And are you the only founder or do you have a team of co-founders? Jens Neuse (06:12.224) Yeah, so I actually have three co-founders. So being the technical founder, I have one guy, Bjorn, who I worked with together before. He was my CEO back then, and he's now our COO. So he runs and operates the company. He actually has experience in that. Then we have Dustin, who's our master hacker, now that I'm not able to... code that much anymore. And we have Stefan, who's more like our, so he's from Miami, he's more like our, I would say, the extravert in the team. He builds the connections, he's responsible for growth and for, he's the kind of guy who makes friends and I'm the kind of guy who solves hard problems. Jason Kirby (07:03.99) good complementary skill set across the team. And so walk us through the fundraise. So you guys just announced it not too long ago, but in fact, you were telling me earlier that you actually raised and closed the money a while back. So kind of tell us about the fundraising journey and the decision to kind of delay announcing it. Jens Neuse (07:26.528) Yeah, so actually getting to the seed funding, it was extremely hard at the very beginning and I had no clue or we had no clue what we were doing and it was just a huge disconnect between us and how VCs work and we had to learn so much. We got the money in the bank, I think it was mid or a bit later last year. And we actually made the decision to defer the announcement because back then we only really had an open source tool and we wanted to build a SaaS on top of that and we thought why should we use or why should we announce this, which will potentially give us some attention when we have nothing to sell. So we wanted to first. have something to sell and then tell the world, hey, we're, you know, some people think you're only a real company if you have raised money. I wouldn't agree to that, but the perception is there and, and, uh, yeah, I don't know why, why don't use the seat announcement as a marketing activity. Jason Kirby (08:39.814) It's something that I think a lot of founders don't think about. They're so excited to announce that they raised the money, but they're not using that as a client acquisition tool. If you're going to put the effort in, Miles would try to leverage it. I think commend that strategy. I think it's something that a lot of founders need to think about of when is the right time to announce. Now that you've got the money, you don't have to stress so much. You can focus on building and doing other things. You kind of loosely went over that your fundraising experience is difficult. Let's unpack that a little bit more. You mentioned that it was kind of first time, going to market, there's a lot to learn in the VC ecosystem and your LinkedIn post, not too long ago, kind of really shed some light on that. It'd be great to kind of have you share your fundraising journey and kind of like, what were some of those lows of lows and kind of how did you figure it out? Jens Neuse (09:31.292) Yeah, so I think the biggest issue we had was we thought, hey, we're smart, we have a great solution. We go to the VCs, we tell our story. It, we're so good. We get funding. And the reality is we are in the, in the DevTools space. It is not extremely easy to understand what we do or what the impact is. Like when you go to... a really large company and you ask a senior architect who works on topics like APIs, he reads through our landing page and docs, he will immediately see the value. For venture capitalists, they are not that technical architect at a large enterprise. They don't have that level of expertise. The point is, and you said this earlier before we started the conversation, Some founders try to talk to as many VCs as they can. I think the most important bit is to build relationships, to build a network, and to not see VCs so much as someone on the other side of the table, but more like finding the right kind of partners. Because VCs specialize even within a VC company. You have different departments or different responsibilities in terms of what they cover. And I think the most important bit is that you find someone who actually believes in your long-term game. Because like, why do you want to or it's not that you, it's very hard to convince a VC who doesn't immediately buy into your story. So ideally, you find someone who has a background or their own experience that actually helps them immediately see like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. Let's figure out the checkboxes because you want to get to that checkbox stage where it's really about finding the negatives in terms of, okay, is there any problem in the seller or you know, like... Jens Neuse (11:52.712) Do they have a weird cap table or like, is there any big blocker? Do you want to get to that stage? You don't want to get to the stage where you have to bag or anything or like chase them or yeah, in the beginning, you, you, you know, it's, it's kind of like dating, you try to, you try to please people or you try to impress them or something when in reality, what works better is you present what you do and you ask if they are a great fit, if they understand what you're doing, and you see if this is actually a relationship. Because you will be working with them together for many years, so you better find someone where you think we're kind of working in the same direction, because this is not like a one-time event. You don't get the money and they go away. They will actually meet on a very regular basis with you. And ideally, you find someone who is not just giving you money, maybe also some other benefits, like connections or whatever they have. And you should figure out that it's kind of like a two-sided process. You should also evaluate what can they bring to the table. And then ideally, you find someone where values align, where strategies align. So talk about strategy, talk about what they think, or ask them what they think your direction should be to figure out, are you actually close enough to each other to that you want to be working with them? Because they will have a board seat and they will be super annoying if you don't like them. So yeah, but as I said at the beginning, you're more like, you think they are so powerful. But in reality, money, at least a year ago, and I think it's still not untrue, money is cheap. What is very, very hard to find is good quality founders with a good team with an OK idea. The more I work as a founder, the more I think the idea is not so important. It's more like, what do you do of it? Is the team able to iterate? And then. Jens Neuse (14:20.904) Sorry if I go on a tangent, but yeah. Jason Kirby (14:24.407) Ha ha ha. Jens Neuse (14:28.952) That wasn't love. Jason Kirby (14:29.81) No, I think you bring up a lot of good points. And I think it's something that you kind of coined a term in your LinkedIn post of venture market fit. Uh, you know, we all are familiar with product market fit in terms of getting customers, but kind of preparing your business and your idea to kind of be more of a venture market fit and, you know, kind of establishing relationships as opposed to just pitching and. you know, trying to project and present as opposed to making it a two way conversation, I think is an incredible lesson for founders to learn as early as possible. And sometimes even before they really start to build, to just make sure they have what you kind of call venture market fit, make sure you're venture backable, make sure you're building something that VCs find exciting or actively investing in. Because if you're not, and you expect to go raise venture capital, it could be a big You could end up wasting a lot of time and be very unfortunate outcome. Can you kind of expand on your definition of venture market fit and kind of how you came to that conclusion? Jens Neuse (15:30.176) Yeah, so you know, there's this whole thing about product market fit and the usual way how people, YC and others describe product market fit is if you have to ask if you have product market fit, you don't have product market fit. So if you have to ask for a seed round, you don't have venture market fit because the seed round will or. WeCees will come to you and they will just offer or ask you, hey, can I join your round or something like that? And at some point this actually happened to us. And so I came up with the idea of, OK, when WeCees, like it's weird, but suddenly like 20 or more WeCees overnight contact you and they are suddenly interested in joining the round or something, even though it's too late. And that's the weird thing. That's like, you know, it's again, it's like dating. If you, if you are successful at dating, if you have a great relationship, you, you show that to the outside, people can see, okay, this person is successful. They are confident the way they act and everything. And we see Smell That because they, they have seen so many founders and, uh, yeah, they, they know immediately in what kind of situation you are. And so I think. in terms of venture market fit, what you need to understand as a founder is, is this a venture play or not? Like, is this a hyper growth startup you want to build or is it not? And if you are intending to build a venture backed company, then you have to play the venture rules. And that is, there's like very specific criteria. Like you know, people need to... Jason Kirby (17:28.558) Thanks for watching! Jens Neuse (17:28.972) VCs, they are looking for signals in the market. They are trying to figure out what is the next opportunity. They are looking at various data sources like Hacker News. They are talking to each other. They are looking on Reddit. And they have all sorts of systems and data sources where they try to figure out, OK, what is an interesting opportunity? And if you want to. be venture ready, you should, you know, ideally you don't have to cold email them because for us that really never actually worked. A lot of VCs, we cold emailed them, later on they came back to us, they contacted us, how did it work? We had very good blog posts, we had some coverage here and there, we were on Hacker News or somewhere and we had something interesting to read for them. And that's how they contacted us. And then we were able to build that network. So what you actually need is you need to build a brand or you need to be somewhat accessible to them and make them interested in you. And so you need to be working on that. And I think that's kind of, yeah, that's my definition of, of venture market fit. Figure out how, how can you make that BCs? EMAIL YOU! Jason Kirby (18:59.215) And I think that's something that's like mind blowing to a lot of founders of like, wait, you're saying that VC should be contacting me. And I think the ones that raise the quickest with the best terms and under the best circumstances with the least amount of effort are the ones that focused on building a great product that has venture market fit. And the ones that struggle and have to put more of an effort into their fundraisers, the ones that might not be at the venture market fit or haven't focused on being noticeable or getting noticed and getting the word out in the appropriate channels. And as you say, kind of playing the VC game and playing by their rules, I think that's an incredible takeaway for founders to take into consideration. And I also realized that maybe some founders shouldn't be trying to chase venture capital and they should go bootstrap it and get it off the ground. organically with a limited amount of angel capital or self-funded. So in your process, you kind of talked about what you learned and you had struggled before. You did the cold outreach. Like how much effort did you put into the fundraise process before things started to click for you? And kind of what was that timeline from beginning your process, not having success to getting getting the money in the bank. Jens Neuse (20:24.076) Yes, I think the whole process took longer than six months. And at the very beginning, it was really a lot of cold outreach until the point where like we had some conversations, especially with some European or German VCs, but that didn't lead anywhere. And yeah, we put a lot of effort into. getting those emails, contacting them and trying to polish our deck the seventh time, which in retrospect, I think, I don't know, the more I think about the deck, the more I'm like at seed stage, you almost need no deck at all. You need something else and we can talk about that in a minute. But in our case, I... I believe in luck and I mean you can set yourself up for luck. You can adjust the odds in your favor. But in our case, we were working with a technology called GraphQL and we found or an angel investor working at Meta found us. And for those who don't know, Meta or Facebook invented GraphQL. So an angel who understood GraphQL was looking for investment opportunities that were using this technology because he understood it. And he looked at some other tools. Most of them were like way too big for them to invest. They found another project, but that didn't really look like scalable in terms of venture. And then they found us and they found us very interesting. And I think. So this angel then brought a couple other angels, and they also introduced us to one VC, Espenwood Ventures. And at the end of the day, that was, I would say, our ticket. Because we didn't have to convince them that what we do makes sense. They understood it, because the angel was engineer, and they had a very good. Jens Neuse (22:49.428) a relationship so there was a level of trust and this is what I meant earlier. You need to find someone who understands what you're doing and then ideally someone with the background who really gets it and then it's not about convincing a VC that Wundergraph is a good idea but rather convincing them that we are the right team to pull this off. Jason Kirby (23:20.326) And so you kind of mentioned something there of an alternative to a DAC or, you know, spending too much time on the DAC and optimizing and tweaking it when you could have done something else. What were you thinking there? Jens Neuse (23:31.904) Yeah, so I honestly believe that if you have great KPIs, great numbers, if you have good traction, if you can show that your business works, everything else is really just... You can fuck everything else up, but it's not so important. So I don't think you need the best deck in the world. What you actually need is a good company. Or show that you're the right kind. Depending on the stage where you are, I mean, if you're a seed, if you're early stage, you don't have a good company, but you might have a great team. So show that you have the right kind of team. If you have some traction, show that traction. Everything else, if I look back now one year, like everything changed, like we matured so much, we learned so much. Looking back one year at seed stage, we weren't nobody's. Like I don't want to say we had no clue, but compared to today, it's, it's ridiculous at what stage you were. So don't stress so much over the deck or something, build a great company and present it in a way that it makes VCs interested investing. It's not that hard actually. Jens Neuse (24:54.635) I think you're on mute. Jason Kirby (25:00.586) What's kind of been your inflection point of taking the, you know, that first customer that you got the three grand a month from and kind of growing from there? Like were you consecutively growing or did you kind of just get that one 3K and you went and raise money? Like what was kind of the growth trajectory for you guys during your capital raise and since? Jens Neuse (25:21.396) Yeah, so I would say for a very long time, it was very flat until the point where it's getting scary. The problem is our company is focused, so our approach is open source and enterprise first. So like... I'm under NDA and cannot talk about so many things, but we're really talking to the largest of the largest companies and those deals take a while. And it is very hard to get in there. It is very hard to build the company up until the point where they respect you enough and see you as a potential vendor. So in our case, I would say we really chose one of the hardest things to bootstrap. in terms of getting from zero to something. But now we're kind of getting to the point where it's absolutely crazy. And yeah, I don't know. Jason Kirby (26:35.746) Crazy in terms of growth or like scary? You mentioned the word scary and crazy. Is that growth or like, what do you mean? What are... Jens Neuse (26:43.78) crazy in terms of what we have achieved with so little investment and what accounts we're now able to get into. This is also something at the very beginning you have an idea of what is your ICP and everything and it turns out that suddenly some other people knock on your door and we didn't anticipate that. such big companies would talk to us or respect us. But yeah, we are what we are. And for me, the inflection point is when you don't have to, you know, there's kind of like two ways you can drive a company. You can drive it by vision. You can drive it through customer or through real user stories. Like in not. scrum user stories, but actually build something that someone really, really needs. And they are, they are ready to pay money for that. And, uh, for me, really the disinflection point is that I, I don't have to drive the company so much by vision anymore. Like, yes, we still have a vision and we still have plans and ideas. What we want to do in the future. We have a, like a big picture of where we want to go. Like, you know, we, we keep saying get up for API's. But in the short and midterm timeline, we don't have to guess what is the next best thing. We're actually using our customers to steer. Like, we have long-term goal vision, but short and midterm driven by customer demand. And I think that's just. So much fun and it's so enjoyable that you build something and people immediately try it out and they see the value and that's really where the fun in startups comes. Jason Kirby (28:52.97) That's amazing to hear. And like, yeah, it kind of sounds like, you know, product market fit is kind of where you guys are at now and really focusing on feeling growth, which is an exciting part to experience. Um, so congratulations on the success there. So I think I want to bring up that, you know, I think a lot of founders, especially abroad in the EU and other parts of the world that are not in the U S would be interested in learning of. you know, kind of when, why, and how you guys set up a C Corp in the US, a Delaware C Corp, kind of like the standard, you know, for most, you know, startups raising capital, but you're actually based, you know, the majority of the team is based in Germany. So kind of what was, what was that decision process? What was that, you know, flow and timeline of kind of setting all that up? Jens Neuse (29:35.624) Yeah. So it's, it's, there's multiple reasons. One is it's actually faster to get a tax number in the US than in Germany. Like Germany is one of the most staffed up, unfriendly countries. Like they, they try to build every barrier they can to not get your taxes. They, they, they just don't want to. It's weird. They, they really want to have businesses abroad. I, I don't understand why, but Okay. The other thing is through our age at Metta, we very early on got introduced to the US investors. We were building the relationship. We were talking to them and we realized we actually want to build GitHub for API. So it's going to be huge, huge, huge. This is going to be a unicorn or nothing. And so we thought It's so hard to get German VCs to buy into what we're doing because they have like a different mindset. We want US investors. And so we thought, okay, what's the easiest way to get a US investor? How can we remove friction? And we were talking to them, we were talking to the angels, like there are some special things that the angels can do with their retirement funds and blah, blah, blah. And yeah, we just made the decision. You know what? And instead of flipping the company later, we just create the Delaware C Corp. We also have a GMBH. But the GMBH, so that's a German C Corp, it's only a subsidiary for the American company. That makes it easier for because we have three founders in Germany. So with the GMBH, we can now. just pay regular salaries in Germany makes it easier. And yeah, we used Stripe Atlas to set up the C Corp. The process was super straightforward. And I can only recommend everybody who's aiming big, just go with the Deliver C Corp. Don't even try in Germany or don't even try in Europe. It's just... Jens Neuse (31:58.36) just go for US investors and then I think that's just a better market, a better ecosystem in general. Jason Kirby (32:09.398) No, I would definitely agree with you. And I think one thing that I want to highlight to other founders is that you set up the entity in the US and you made the foreign and well, technically your domestic entity a subsidiary. And that, in my opinion, is the correct way to do it. A lot of companies I've met or worked with that are based out of the EU will set up like a Dutch C-Corp equivalent or like whatever country they're in and then get a US entity as a subsidiary. But that couldn't create... conflict of control because then technically the Feces don't want to invest in the subsidiary. They want to invest in the the parent carp who has all the control. So I think you guys approached it correctly. Did you guys get legal counsel? Did you guys just set it up yourselves or? just kind of Jens Neuse (32:51.292) No, no, we got legal counsel and we thought about this a lot. And you know, we were thinking like... Maybe not at seed stage, but at series a stage, definitely an investor, they will want to invest into the IP of the company and who owns the IP. It's our Delaware C Corp and like investors want to invest in everything there is. And so, yeah, I don't know for, I think it's really obvious. You want to make. Jason Kirby (33:12.726) Mm-hmm. Jens Neuse (33:30.648) things frictionless and you want to set up your company in the most straightforward and simple way. If they like what you do and if your metrics are good and everything else, then don't create friction with a bad company structure. Jason Kirby (33:50.802) Yeah, and if you don't mind me asking, what did it cost in terms of setting it up that way? Was it a few thousand dollars, tens of thousands of dollars? Jens Neuse (33:59.06) I think it was a couple of tens of thousands. Jason Kirby (34:03.358) So that's something to be conscious of for a lot of startups to acknowledge. It's a right move, but there's a couple costs of money to do it that way. But again, first thing to make sure, make sure you have that venture market fit before you invest 30K to go raise capital from the... Jens Neuse (34:20.28) I can say one thing to this. So the people we work together with, they were very friendly in terms of very early on they actually gave us a safe note so we could use their money to set up everything correctly and that's just a really good move from a VC because you can give a little amount of money as a safe note. And that's... then gets contributed to the to the to the seat. And so we didn't have to take our own money to set up the company in the in the correct way and everything. And yeah, that's that's how you start a good relationship. Jason Kirby (35:05.198) So, okay, that's good to know. So you didn't actually have it set up before you went to market. You had waited until you got the VCs to the table and then had that discussion with them. Okay, so that's good to know because I think a lot of founders are trying to decide, do they do it first or do they do it once they have the capital at hand. So that's a great solution. Do the safe just to get... the initial capital so they can properly invest into the entity and everything. Jens Neuse (35:34.76) You know, in our case, it was kind of easy because we only really had an open source thing, so nobody could really own that. You cannot buy it. All they invested into is us as a team and this idea. And one customer. Okay. But that's, I think, yeah, that's... That's okay, 4C. Jason Kirby (36:00.65) Yeah, like the pre-seed seed stage, I think, you know, those typical things. But what it comes down to is just like, does the VC believe in you? And do you have, and do you wanna build, you know, build that relationship with them? And if that's the case, these are table stakes. These are simple things that get worked out by lawyers, and you know, it shouldn't be what holds you back from success as a founder. So you guys raised, you technically closed, maybe what? Like... nine months ago or something like that. How does your next several months look? Are you guys going back to market to raise anytime soon and kind of what's the future look like for Wundergraph? Jens Neuse (36:40.204) So we are currently in the late game of closing some very, very interesting accounts. Hopefully, they will allow us, and then in the future you will hear about that in the next couple of months. With that, we will have optimized our KPIs and everything, and I think we will then be at the point where we start raising the next round Jason Kirby (37:12.31) And what do you anticipate doing differently this time, going into the next round as opposed to the previous round? Jens Neuse (37:19.064) So what completely changed in the, I would say, like the situation today is different because we built a network of VCs and we tried to figure out who are the VCs where we would say those are a great fit, they understand what we're doing. Unfortunately, they couldn't join the last round. But we still... nurtured those relationships. We updated them from time to time on our progress, where we are and everything. So it's not that we have to cold email anybody anymore. It's more like, hey guys, here's our update. Here are our new customers. This is how we're progressing and we're now taking next steps because we're getting to this and this point and the team is Jens Neuse (38:15.86) We cannot match the demand or whatnot. And so I think it's much easier because we have figured out a lot more about ourselves. And yeah. Jason Kirby (38:30.21) I think that's kind of especially for series A really comes down to like hitting that certain metrics and being, you know, having that venture market fit at that stage. But one thing that you're doing that I advise all founders to do is maintain the relationship. Even for the people that passed or, you know, said this too early or whatever excuses they had, if you like them or thought you might be able to have a relationship with them, maintaining that rapport while you grow and providing those updates could make it a much easier raise the next time. you come around. So some great advice. So as we wrap here, what would be some advice that maybe you haven't talked on to this point that you would give to founders looking to raise their seed rap? Jens Neuse (39:16.58) So I actually think the best advice I can give is to technical founders because I'm a technical founder as well. And my number one advice is to take a step back. Don't focus so much on the tech. Focus much more on the customer, the go-to-market and building a business that is interesting for venture capitalists. And you know... I really love to support other founders and I love to talk to them about their stories and everything. And now with like, I'm still early myself, but with my level of experience, I can now sense in about one minute if I have a good technical founder in front of me or someone who's fell in love too much with their solution and they are. You know, you ask them like, hey, what are you doing? And they keep talking about their product and features and blah, blah, blah. And it's really boring. And you can immediately see like, okay, is this a person, are they focused on the customer and what problems they solve? And like, you know, like, Hey, yes, I built this amazing go. Have you ever heard a technical founder who was, who was sharing how he has built an amazing go-to market? Like, you know, everybody's talking about their product or what they do, but how do you actually sell? You know, you can't just build a wonderguffin and people will not come. Like nobody cares about you. But so what is your strategy to marketing? How are you unique? What's your approach to go to market? That's so much more important. Like think about distribution. And I think this is what most technical founders get completely wrong. They keep building and keep writing code and they think they can hire someone to do the distribution and it's just, no, it doesn't work. It's you. You need to figure that out. So ultimately, this is also what will make it super easy for you to raise money because if you really solve people's problem and they pay you money for that. Jens Neuse (41:35.136) It doesn't really matter if you have one PHP file or, I don't know, some weird serverless architecture or something. If you get people paying for your stuff, it's so much easier to raise money. So, I don't know, follow simple advice from Steve Jobs, be obsessed about the customer, find a great solution, find a way to market that because Apple had a really, really great brand and I love listening to Steve Jobs. And, yeah. That's my advice. Jason Kirby (42:07.61) I think that's, you got me triggered thinking about. two particular founders I've recently spoken to that are running into this exact problem. I look forward to getting your podcast into their hands. I think that's going to be pretty impactful as they're technical founders and love their product and albeit it's awesome, but they're not focused on a GDM or kind of like how they're going to get those initial customers. So yeah, it's been a phenomenal time hosting you on the show. Where can our listeners learn more about Wundergraf or follow your journey? Jens Neuse (42:40.556) Yeah, so you can follow me on Twitter. It's JensNoise underscore DE. I tweet from time to time. You can also go to wondergaff.com. Just check out the product. Our whole product is open source. So you can also check out github.com slash wondergaff, see what we have there. And if you're a startup or if you're an enterprise company and you're working with a lot of APIs, I think WunderGraph can be very interesting to you and you, yeah, just check it out. Maybe join our Discord, we can have a discussion or hop on a call. And yeah, it was a pleasure being here on the show. Thank you, Jason. Jason Kirby (43:24.474) Thanks so much for joining us. We'll make sure to include all those links in the show notes and You'll look forward to following your journey. Thank you so much for joining us