20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 27 September 2019
⏱️ 34 minutes
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Summary
Julia Enthoven is the Founder & CEO @ Kapwing, the startup that provides a new, collaborative platform for creating images, videos, and GIFs. To date they have raised $13m from some dear friends of the show including Saar Guur @ CRV, Mamoon Hamid @ Kleiner Perkins, Niv Dror @ Shrug and Nikhil Basu Trivedi @ Shasta. Prior to founding Kapwing, Julia was an Associate Product Manager @ Google where she worked on everything from image search to sign up workflows.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Julia made her way into the world of startups and came to found the future of content editing with Kapwing?
2.) What does Julia believe are the 4 benefits to building a website over an app today? How does this change your development cadence and speed of product iteration? How does this change your economics and margin structure? Where does Julia see many founders making mistakes here?
3.) Why does Julia believe that marketing innovation is as important as product innovation? Kapwing is now at 1m users per month, what has been Julia's biggest lessons in scaling a customer base to this size with very little spend? How does Julia think about marketing channel mortality rate? How should founders approach this?
4.) Why did Julia decide it was better to bootstrap than straight away trying to raise VC dollars? What were the benefits of this? Was it the right decision? What was the turning point when Julia realised was the moment to raise external funding? How did her mindset change as a result of the funding? How does bootstrap life compare to VC funded startup?
5.) How is Julia finding the personal scaling journey from PM to CEO? What have been some of the biggest challenges? What has she done to overcome them? What advice would Julia have for other newly minted CEOs? What have been some of Julia's biggest lessons in what it takes to hire the very best talent early?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Julia’s Fave Book: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Julia on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You are listening to The 20 Minute VC and Founders Friday with me, Harry Stebbings, at H. Stebbings |
| 0:04.4 | 1996 with 2Bs on Instagram. And what a special episode we have in store for you today. So this |
| 0:09.3 | interview was very, very unique. After the episode, I was so impressed and excited by the vision |
| 0:13.8 | and all that could be built here that there was no way I couldn't not ask if I could invest. |
| 0:17.9 | I'm thrilled to say that this exceptional founder let me, and I personally |
| 0:20.8 | joined their series A led by Sara at CRV, announced earlier this week. The question is, have you |
| 0:25.5 | guessed the company yet? Well, I'm super excited to welcome Julia Enthoven, founder and CEO at Kippewing, |
| 0:30.8 | the startup that provides a new collaborative platform for creating images, videos and GIFs. To date, |
| 0:36.0 | they've raised $13 million from some dear friends |
| 0:38.4 | of the show, including the lights of Sagar at CRV, Mamun Hamid at Kleiner Perkins, Nivdra at Shrug, |
| 0:43.9 | and Nikhil Basutravetti at Shasta. And prior to founding Kepwing, Julia was an associate product |
| 0:48.6 | manager at Google, where she worked on everything from image search to sign up workflows. And I do also want to say a huge thank |
| 0:54.3 | you to the wonderful Dylan at Figma for the intro to Julia, without which this episode wouldn't |
| 0:58.2 | have happened, the angel investment wouldn't have happened. Dylan, I owe you one, my friend, |
| 1:01.5 | and many mehito's on me to thank you for that. I want to start to stay with a big shout out to |
| 1:05.6 | my friends over at Active Campaign. With their platform, you can create unique customer experiences that attract, nurture, and convert leads into customers into repeat customers. Over 80,000 companies use ActiveCampaign to hit their sales targets with intelligent automations that send the right message to the right person using the right method at the right time. If you already have sales and marketing tools you love, keep them. Active Campaign will work with them and give you automations to make them even better. Active |
| 1:31.0 | Campaign is the first customer experience automation platform, helping you provide |
| 1:34.8 | personalise and optimize customer experiences. You can get your second month free and two free |
| 1:39.7 | one-on-ones when you go to ActiveCampaign.com forward slash 20VC. That's activecampaign.com forward slash 20 VC. That's activecampaign.com |
| 1:45.8 | forward slash 20 VC. And speaking of crafting unique customer experiences, you know when you go to a |
| 1:51.0 | website and there's just one thing you want, it should be simple, quick, friendly even. That's |
| 1:55.6 | Intercom's motto. So Intercom makes that little chat bubble in the corner of a website, opening your |
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