Editor’s note: In the following exchange, River’s co-founder and CEO, Rae Lambert, shares (much in her own words) the amazing journey of building River, scrappy growth experiments that got them some big logos (and influencers) onboard, the way Rae and team think about adding (and not adding) features to River and more. We had a ton of fun hosting Rae, hope you enjoy reading this chat.
- Why MVPs don’t work anymore
- An unintended origin story with a 100K check
- Getting big logos consistently as a very young (and scrappy) company
- Thinking about monetization as a service-heavy SaaS
- “Learnings per action” and other ways of qualifying purposeful building
- If, when, and where AI will find its way into the River story
- Why I believe the next era of growth will be community-first
Why MVPs don’t work anymore
When I look back at the early pitch decks of startups like Dropbox (2007), Airbnb (2008), Uber (2009), Instagram (formerly Burbn, 2010), Intercom (2011), and Doordash (2012) — I find myself in awe of the incredible businesses that were built in that era. We were in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis and mobile apps were picking up steam.
Those founders are legends who built businesses of the century, but there’s an overlooked truth to these successes: a lot of them were built in what feels like a utopia now. Millions of consumers with low expectations were getting smart phones. Building software was way harder back then, but it was an open field of business problems waiting to be solved by apps. The fruit was just laying on the ground, waiting to be picked.
Today is an entirely different story. Go try to find an unsolved problem that a lot of people have. Good luck with that. SaaS has been picked over at this point.
The markets are super saturated with competitors and consumer expectations are at an all time high. Every time I see a post of some dev saying “I could build that in a weekend” I chuckle because building software is not the hard part any more. MVPs don’t work anymore but there are ten competitors for every problem — from chatbots to space rockets.
Now the challenge is to cut through the noise and get people to care about what you’re building. You can no longer just solve their problem with a first-generation app. The law of switching costs states you must solve their problem 9x better to get them to leave an existing solution.
With River, our MVP was quite large. The platform needed to orchestrate hundreds of community events for a brand by crowd-sourcing hosts from their online audience, and guide those hosts to put on great events.
At first look, you might think River is yet another event app because the majority of people are simply registering to an in-person meetup under a community they love such as Tim Ferriss, Don’t Die, or Reading Rhythms. While technically River is just a CRUD app (create, read, update, delete) — the community owners and hosts see the impact of what we’ve built.
The brands we work with previously took incredible pains to host just 20 events per year are now hosting hundreds of them in a single day. On River, communities create event campaigns with save-the-date events in every city around the world. Then they invite their audience to join or host.
The River platform guides hosts to put on great meetups, all while keeping brand and data control with the brand. Most of what we’ve built — event campaigns, host applicant tracking dashboard, and automated host guidance are not ever seen by the majority of our users. Orchestrating hundreds of hosts and thousands of attendees to plan and attend meetups in a matter of weeks takes a hell of a lot more product than a simple weekend MVP.
An unintended origin story with a 100K check
I started River because of my own accidental pain point. I’m a big fan of The All-In Podcast — I had been to their first summit and really liked the people I met there.
After the summit I was new to Miami, and really wanted to meet people beyond the typical tech parties, so I thought selfishly, “let me host an All-In listening party and maybe I’ll meet some interesting people that way.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but that’s how River started: hoping to meet 12 like-minded, interesting people in my city…
It was a little sign-up form with three cities. Miami for me, San Francisco for my friend Melissa, and Austin — because I was thinking BIG. Just in case I put in a write-in field for an additional city and a checkbox to let me know you wanted to host. I was shocked when it went viral and found myself scrambling to help coordinate 24 meetups around the world.
The tech side of it was hacked together with just Airtable, Google Calendar, a bcc email per city, and a Slack group to organize the hosts. Soon the Slack grew to two thousand people.
I was exhausted from my unexpected community building, but truly didn’t think much of it until six months later, when episode 125 was coming around and everyone DMd me, “We’re doing it again, right, Rae?”
Initially, I said no, because it was so. much. work. But enough people asked, so I figured the Luma pro plan could get the job done. It was certainly a better attendee experience, but from the community manager perspective it was just as much work as doing it manually.
But the effort was not in vain. The 50 simultaneous meetups with 2,000 attendees caught Jason Calacanis’ eye. He couldn’t believe we managed to pull so many cities with so many people.
He wanted to hire me for his other podcast, This Week in Startups. I had no intention of leaving Olivine, the product marketing agency I co-founded, but I quoted him $60K to launch the program and maintain it for the year. He said that was way too much money and I wasn’t interested in doing it for less because it really was a ton of work. I thought that was the end of the conversation.
But 3 weeks later Jason had an entirely different idea: “How about I invest $100k and you build a startup in my accelerator”. And that is how I both discovered a problem that was not being solved in the market and landed my first two big customers: The All-In Podcast and This Week in Startups.
Getting big logos consistently as a very young (and scrappy) company
Once our beta was released, I psyoped Sam Parr into bringing My First Million onto River. I’ve been told one of my superpowers is getting big influencers to respond to my outbound.
For example, I saw Bryan Johnson announce that he wanted to get everyone together around the world and planned to organize it in Discord. I knew this was never going to work so I got in touch with him and said I could help.
My credibility was growing from All-In, This Week in Startups, and My First Million, but Bryan Johnson’s announcement was our biggest app traffic to date, and we were eager to see if what we had built would scale. It did and 110 cities gathered to explore his philosophy of Don’t Die.
Next, I landed Balaji Srinivasan as an angel investor by reaching out to him about being a customer. I saw that he was doing an AMA on Farcaster and I knew it was still early days on that platform, so it might be easy to connect.
Exchange between Rae and Tim Ferriss on Twitter:
A few months later, Tim Ferriss used River to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his podcast in 154 cities with 4,400 fans. The momentum was building and I was starting to understand two things:
If I were to do a TLDR I’d say two things:
- Big influencers responded to a tight value prop around getting their audience together, but what really spoke to them was not having to hire someone or do any work. Billionaires are lazy.
- For reaching out to new prospects, I operated like a laser beam, focusing on five folks I wanted to convert at a time. There was no automation. I made sure to be extremely timely and relevant with my message.
Thinking about monetization as a service-heavy SaaS
I wish I could share a genius way of cracking monetization, but the truth is we didn’t have a lot to go off of because no other apps work quite like we do. One proxy I had was via a popular Substack writer who was doing meetups.
They hired someone to plan meetups $1,600 a month to create the events, vet the hosts, and basically do everything we offer manually.
So I was like, ‘okay, let’s do that for a third of the price at $500/month.’
I wanted the price to discourage unserious people, and River only made sense at the time for large communities. $500 a month might feel like a big bite for a SaaS tool, but when you compare it to even one paying a contractor to plan five events, it’s very cheap.
Plus, River collects data from attendees and captures user-generated content across social, so the data and content is valuable.
We are still working towards product-market fit and developing our monetization strategy. We’re in the process of launching what we’re calling River 2.0 — with a flywheel for community hosts to grow their following on River, launch their own communities, charge monthly event subscriptions, and land sponsors from our marketplace. It’s possible that our worldwide meetups for big influencers is just part of our go-to-market strategy, rather than where the bulk of our revenue comes from.
“Learnings per action” and other ways of qualifying purposeful building
When you’re trying to find a new market and differentiate, it’s really surprising what the market likes and what the market doesn’t. We all have our own tastes and hunches — sometimes users react the way we expect, but sometimes they don’t! A feature I might love could barely get any use and vice-versa.
When we’re considering building something that we know is a “table stakes” feature that other event tools have, we’re not necessarily going to learn anything from it. So, we ask ourselves can we live without it? It’s important to know if you’re building a commodity feature (something that is easy to build) or market exploration feature — something that might wow the market or get people to behave in a totally new way.
What we really want to do is learn meaningful things that help us deepen our differentiation and do that quickly. We call this optimising for “actions per minute” and “learnings per action”.
For example we wanted to learn: do people apply to sponsor events?
Here’s how we did it: We had Solana Foundation kick-off events coming up with 50 events worldwide. This felt like a good opportunity to test the apply-to-sponsor feature. We created a very rudimentary form, people filled it out, and it got dropped into a Google sheet.
Of the 50 events, 30 got a sponsor application. That’s 60% of events! We were thinking 10% tops. This was found money that the community didn’t have to go out and ask for. This was an unlock, the kind we want to build around.
Our product strategy is not to go after commodity features that everyone has or focus too much on polished design. We build only the features we absolutely need, but after asking ourselves if the job-to-be-done can be accomplished without it and if we build it, what we hope to learn.
If, when, and where AI will find its way into the River story
AI is starting to become a part of our product but wasn’t at the start. My co-founder Ryan is an AI/ML expert (used to work for Citadel, AmericanExpress, and won 1st Place at Miami Hack Week along with Best Use of OpenAI in 2022 on an AI project).
We already use AI tools like ChatGPT, Clause, and Cursor for product development. Soon we will use AI for suggesting, creating, and promoting events. That said, we’re not eager to slap AI features everywhere. I see tons of companies claim they are “AI” companies when the product is just a series of IF functions.
That’s not us.
We’re solving real human issues, and when AI can enhance those, we will absolutely use it, but the age of AI gimmicks is coming to an end.
Why I believe the next era of growth will be community-first
We’re in a loneliness epidemic and I firmly believe the next era of growth will be community-first.
The change in average minutes spent at home has skyrocketed. And no, this isn’t just a work-from-home thing. Even high school students hanging out in-person has been on a steady decline since the 90s.
And you can’t say we’re just becoming more introverted, because at the same time, Google searches for “where to make friends”, “how to meet people”, and “social groups near me” are growing.
Cold Creators — people who just churn out content but never engage — will get lost in the noise. Audiences are seeking connection, not just content, and with content creation exploding, people will stay loyal to brands and creators who feel connected.
Currently there are 4M blog posts, 95M Instagram posts, and 500M X posts published every single day. Generative AI will double this by 2030. All of this noise has resulted in the death of the follower and will lead to the death of the cold creator.
Brands and creators will seek new ways to truly engage their audience, and people will seek out real connections where they live. River will be there to help get everyone together IRL.