Podium

I grew up working at my dad’s tire shop, which taught me the ins and outs of operating a small business. Fast forward to college, and I was generating $80K in revenue from running an iPad accessory business on Shopify, a software platform for e-commerce. I started to ask myself why my dorm-room side hustle had access to 10x better technology than my dad’s tire shop, a much more complex operation that did $3.5M in gross revenue. This realization—that no one was building software for brick-and-mortar local businesses—ultimately led Dennis and me to start Podium. Along the way, many investors told us to focus on Enterprise, given the price sensitivity and volatility of the SMB customer segment. While we were tempted to pivot when we got to Y-Combinator, our unwavering belief in small businesses and dedication to helping them grow became the core of Podium’s success. We believe the greatest opportunities for impact are often found in underserved, unglamorous markets that most people overlook.

When starting Podium, we read every single essay from Paul Graham and used them as the blueprint for building Podium in the early days. It was a dream of ours to get into YC one day. Even though we started the business in 2014, we didn’t apply until the winter 2016 batch because we initially thought that our SMB reviews product wasn’t a big enough idea for YC. We were amazed and excited when we were accepted into the W16 batch. During the batch, we grew from $1M to $3.5M ARR. At one point, we considered pivoting the product in a more trendy direction, but Dalton and Aaron (our group partners) told us that we were insane since we had a product people wanted and were buying like crazy. Staying the course turned out to be excellent advice. Due to our explosive revenue growth, we had a lot of investor interest on demo day. However, we had enough capital so we decided to wait until the end of the year to raise. We ended up raising our Series A in early 2017 at a $100M valuation from investors we had met on demo day. Being a company based outside of the Bay Area, Y Combinator was invaluable to us since it gave us the support and exposure to top-tier investors we needed to continue building Podium into a world-changing company.