960 - The Power Of One Visit To Silicon Valley w/ Audrey Chen (Nosu)

Mat Sherman (00:00.861)
All right, we are recording. We are on today with Audrey Chen, who is a co-founder of NoSu. Welcome to the show. How's it going?

Audrey Chen (00:09.228)
going good. Thank you for having me on the show.

Mat Sherman (00:11.913)
Yeah, excited to have you on. I spotted you, just like I think a lot of people on Twitter are just like absolutely blowing up a week or two ago. the energy was cool and what you were working on was interesting. So wanted to have you on and kind of explore what you're building. So I think the first question I have is how does it feel to be like going viral on Twitter every day? And like, you still going viral? Has it ended? Like, what's that like for people that don't know?

Audrey Chen (00:39.918)
Yeah, so I started last week with 300 followers, or like a week and a half, with 300 followers on Twitter. And then now I'm at almost 2,000. And I'm still going viral every day. I post about investment. I post videos about the journey. I posted our reaction video to getting our first feces, and that blew up too. Yeah, that's what we're doing.

Mat Sherman (01:08.072)
Yeah, it's, I don't, I feel like it was like 2018, 2019 for me, but I was around, I don't know, like 500 or whatever followers, and I kinda had my like, honestly, it was like last year or two, honestly, but I just got viral, you know, a frequently for some of my takes, and it's kinda crazy, because these random people in dozens at a minute just start following you, and you're just like, what is going on? But that's just the power of the internet. So, yeah.

Audrey Chen (01:33.324)
I know it right?

Yeah, previously I had experience on social media platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn and going viral there and building followings. So I didn't really understand the Twitter algorithm, but it looks like people just come to you.

Mat Sherman (01:38.311)
No, go for it.

Mat Sherman (01:53.787)
I people look for signal and it kind of signal begets signal, right? Where it's like if people are flocking to an account and that account's interesting, more people are gonna flock and it just kind of keeps going until it stops and maybe sometimes it never stops, you never know. So you, when I guess, just going to kind of what you're working on like was.

when did you first kind of start posting about nosu you know is a close first what is this is what you working what you building on and maybe how do you kinda get to the point where you want to build that

Audrey Chen (02:26.062)
So I started working on Nosu with my co-founder Aiden when, so my background is I won 21 hackathons and developed a following of 60,000 on Instagram and from both like my own experiences hosting and competing in hackathons and also like 2,000 comments and questions about people hosting hackathons and like figuring out how to participate like even getting started.

we realized that there were patterns on Gen Zs and entry-level developers trying to join in on these hackathons and being kind of confused and organizers feeling like the process for organizing was tedious. So that's what sort of birthed DOSU is. Yeah, both feedback and experience.

Mat Sherman (03:18.293)
How do you get into doing even one or two hackathons, let alone dozens of them? Walk me through how you found yourself in this world of building and shipping code and eventually doing all these hackathons.

Audrey Chen (03:32.942)
So I got into hackadons through my university hackadon at Michigan State and

Yeah, sort of, I think the ideation process and like collaboration was really what drew me in. I think once you like meet some teammates and sort of understand the general stacks or projects that come out of hackathons, you kind of get hooked and continue to build more. So I would be going to one like every weekend.

Mat Sherman (04:04.905)
Totally. I, there's a group that was popular when I was in college, which I'm curious, I'll ask you if they're still popular. They're called Major League Hacking. And are they still kind of like the, would you say they're kind of the primary hackathon provider for universities or how would you kind of like, how do you outline them in the market of hackathons?

Audrey Chen (04:15.33)
Yeah, they're so popular.

Audrey Chen (04:25.708)
Yeah, I'd say the top two are Major League Hacking and Deaf Posts. Both of them bring people together in communities and provide a bit of a structure for organizers.

Mat Sherman (04:35.433)
Nice, I actually had the founder or the CEO, founder and CEO of Major League Hacking on the podcast. I wonder how long ago it was. actually going to check. It feels like, I'm going to guess like 2022. was no, it was April 5th, 2020. It was like right actually after COVID hit. That's wild. Well, very cool. you you've done something interesting where you, you know, this is mainly based off of reading your kind of your Twitter posts, but.

Excuse me, but you it appears to me that you like went to Silicon Valley recently or you maybe you're still in Silicon Valley and like you had in Quite an interesting experience And then based on your tweets, it sounds like you're like going back to Silicon Valley if so walk me through

Like all of that. I think like why did you go to Silicon Valley in the first place? Let's start there. What drew you to Silicon Valley in the first place to go there for like the first time?

Audrey Chen (05:33.742)
So, my co-fawner and I were going for a ski trip.

We had a ski trip scheduled and so we went up to Silicon Valley, then went skiing in Lake Tahoe. There were some very interesting Luma events that we noticed online while we were in Lake Tahoe and we were like, we should just stay in Silicon Valley and see how these events go. Then we ended up raising $75,000 in the span of a week and a half and we decided that maybe it's a great time to start a startup. And...

So we flew back to the Midwest to pack up and we're going to move to Silicon Valley.

Mat Sherman (06:13.459)
So there's a little bit of a gap there that I'm sure people are going to be interested in. You're going skiing, and then you get $75,000. First of all, congratulations. Super exciting. mean, congrats on. Is that $75,000 the first check that you've gotten from an investor before?

Audrey Chen (06:31.15)
yeah, we got our first angel investor checks and our first VC.

Mat Sherman (06:35.453)
That's incredible. So if you're open to just going, you know, a little more in detail, because people, know, folk listening to this, a lot of them want to build companies, a lot of them want to raise venture capital, but it's hard for them to know exactly how to do that. Kind of like outline how that happened. Like, did you go to some of these events? You you met investors and kind of just like outline kind of what, how you went from going on a ski trip to going back with a fat check of 75 grand, now wanting to go back to Silicon Valley even after that.

Audrey Chen (07:05.07)
So basically, the way we started raising was, I think a pivotal event was going to the Hotpot event. There was a Hotpot at one of the hacker, like the founder manners, Mission Dolores manner in mission. And I was very hungry.

My co-founder and I didn't have our finances as figured out before the investments. So we were crashing a bunch of motels, eating very interesting food, and there was a hot pot with a $10 ticket. And so I beelined for that hot pot. Basically, the whole time at that event, I was just on my feet trying to get every single sauce, every single piece of meat. And somehow, some people noticed. And we had some conversation.

They said they're startup founders. They said they're like investors and I sort of mentioned NoSu about how we were trying to make hosting hackathons more streamlined with AI And they liked it There's also like a pitch opportunity where we were able to pitch in front of like the whole 200 people at the hotpot So I signed up like very then I I made a pitch deck in 30 minutes

and just pitched it to everybody and landed my first angel checks of $5,000 and $2,000. One of the reasons the investors said they invested was because I guess they saw how hungry I was, how much I was trying to go after that hot pot. And...

Yeah, getting the angel investment, we immediately put it to work and started distributing the product, double our users. And once other investors saw our traction, they all started reaching out. And then I started posting on Twitter. And the more I posted about investment, the more investors just went to my emails, went to my DMs. The hot pot reel was recorded. I recorded the whole...

Audrey Chen (09:18.538)
experience of pitching in front of the investors, talking to them, talking about valuation and learning about saves in a reel on Instagram. That also blew up to 350k views. And yeah, since then we've had 29 investors and VCs reach out to us. And that's how we got our current 75,000.

Mat Sherman (09:46.403)
So I have one or two more questions on this, then I want to go back to Nosu and talk about the product and the experience and how it works and stuff.

you have this incredible trip. You go to Silicon Valley not expecting any of this. You leave with some money. And then I think one of the tweets that I saw, as I mentioned, decided you're going back to Silicon Valley to spend more time there. I am curious. It makes sense when you're going back. I spent a lot of time there. It's a great place to be if you're building a startup. But how long did it take you to decide that you were going back there? How long were you back home? And where is home? What city or what state?

How long did it take you to decide that you wanted to go back before you did decide to go back?

Audrey Chen (10:30.924)
Yeah, once, I think it's even before we landed our angel investor checks, I was considering staying in Silicon Valley because of the energy of the founders there. But after the angel investment checks kept rolling in and we landed our VC, that's when I knew. My home is Michigan, so I grew up in Michigan, went to school there.

And yeah, I think getting that VC and those investors and the platform making a ton of revenue is really what got me to go out and take a gap semester and go back to Silicon.

Mat Sherman (11:19.783)
love that story it really shows you the power of that city and you know it it doesn't always work out like that of course like some of its going to the right event meeting the right person etc

There are things that happen in Silicon Valley will never happen anywhere else, which makes it a great place to build and raise. So let's go back to Nosu. So walk me through, who's it for? Is it for organizers? If I want to plan a hackathon, would I use Nosu? And an organizer, can you walk me through how someone would use the platform for their own hackathon?

Audrey Chen (11:51.404)
Yeah, so it's a platform for both organizers and participants. We have software for people to host hackathons end to end, AKA AI helps you assign judging. It helps assign, like does AI matching for teammates for your participants in a hackathon you're hosting.

And it also suggests categories and tracks for prizes that you want to dwell on the hackathon. And all the logistical things end to end. Rather than traditional hackathon hosting software where you do everything manually and it takes a while. And you also have to have a whole operations team to brainstorm tracks. But yeah, since I had experience organizing and lot of experience talking to other organizers.

we were able to sort of put that info in and have the platform be able to intuitively decide on what prizes it should be. So instead of hackathons taking months to host, it takes a snap to host a hackathon. And the goal of this is to...

make hackathons easier to host so developers can get more opportunities and companies can get more engagement. There's a lot of very well-built software companies, just companies in general, that don't have users deeply using their app or as much exposure. So hackathons are a great way to...

Yeah, get that engagement community and exposure. On the other side, we have software for developers to get into hackathons. We have a bunch of roadmaps for them to understand what tools you need to learn for a hackathon, how to come up with ideas, how to find teammates if you don't use our AI team matching. And...

Audrey Chen (13:58.59)
and also getting feedback on your ideas and storing all your ideas in like a library and accessing a database of other hackathon ideas that you could get inspiration from.

Mat Sherman (14:11.581)
That's awesome. Lowering the friction to host these. Even like, I know you're focused on hackathons, just event organizing in general. I just feel like making it easier to get people together is such a high alpha thing to do because when people get together, that's when things happen, right? When relationships are built.

One question I had is when you mentioned that you raised this $75,000 and then you said double your user base or double your revenue or something like that and initially had a big impact. How did you know where to spend the money to invest it? If you never raised before, do you just know the gaps in the company and you knew that, if we have 10 grand to allocate, we're going to put it there? Or did you run a bunch of experiments? Or how did you know where to put the money to get to the growth?

Audrey Chen (15:00.812)
Yeah, so because of my experience as a content creator, I had a lot of experience with distribution. So I understood, like as a Gen Z, that like a huge percentage of a company is the way you distribute. So, and I also know that building systems, you have to immediately put money to work for you so you can get more money. So that's why I immediately decided to use a

Yeah, 30 % of the money to aggressively go out to market. And the way we did this is by partnering with 15 content creators between followings of like 10K to 150K.

And basically what they would do is they would post reels about Nosu and our events that we were hosting. And that funneled in so many users and got us more reach so we could have leverage for companies to sponsor us. We ended up landing three YC sponsors, two Series A, a Series B and an IPO, and a ton of other startups that wanted to sponsor the hackathons that we hosted.

Yeah, that was before we pivoted to now being a self-serve platform where companies can host their own hackathons. And that's scalable now.

Mat Sherman (16:25.705)
That's awesome. It's great when you have experience prior to something and then when you have an opportunity, you know what to do with it because of your past experience. What is one thing or more than one thing that you've learned about Silicon Valley since you spent time there and now are going back that wasn't obvious to you before you were out there?

Audrey Chen (16:32.674)
Yeah.

Audrey Chen (16:45.896)
yeah, one thing about Silicon Valley that I've learned is that environment does play a factor in the trajectory of your company. If we had stayed in the Midwest, I mean, we could have raised, I guess we could have done everything virtually, but being on your feet, being scrappy, seeing everyone else who's like just as passionate about you as you are really heightens like our energy. At least networking events, it wasn't just like

like scurrying after the hot pot. It was scurrying after talking to people, making sure you just put yourself out there, knowing that like every moment counts when you're trying to grow fast. So that's something that wasn't as apparent to me before when I was just in the Midwest kind of chilling.

Mat Sherman (17:35.027)
Totally. That's, I was just having a podcast with someone a couple of days ago and we were talking about this on like, you technically can do whatever you want to do from wherever you're at, but your level of difficulty that you're playing on changes depending on where you're based. And if you're based in SF, it's not necessarily easier to build a company, but like the...

It's easier to get to the people, it's easier to learn faster, it's easier to find the signal, which maybe that leads to an easier time building a big company. I'm out here in Phoenix, I've been in Phoenix my whole life, but I started the... No way, you were born in Phoenix? Nice.

Audrey Chen (18:03.864)
Yes.

Audrey Chen (18:08.183)
yes, Plane Phoenix.

Yeah, and then we went back for a bit to hike Camelback.

Mat Sherman (18:15.497)
That's awesome. Do Campbellback is a that's a great hike. It's short, but it's very very steep. It can be difficult But did you when did you move from Phoenix to Michigan?

Audrey Chen (18:27.544)
When I was five, so not really that long.

Mat Sherman (18:30.321)
Yeah, totally. It's actually similar to my wife. was born in San Francisco, but moved to Phoenix when she was five. Her family moved. Very cool. Is there any...

Anything that you've learned that you think would be useful to share to like your former self of like a month ago or like before you or anything you've learned even like or even a couple years ago. Like what is something you want to shed light on that maybe would help other people a few steps before you?

Audrey Chen (18:53.054)
You can go.

Audrey Chen (19:01.314)
hmm, I'm trying to come, okay. I think something that I would share with my past self would be to put yourself out there. No matter how good, like, you build their project technically or how good your school name is or how much prestige you have, if you don't put yourself out there, if you don't, like,

Audrey Chen (19:32.802)
Like put yourself in front of people's faces. It's gonna be much harder, I think, to get to the places you want to be. I think, or I guess, yeah, it's much easier to get to the places you want to be by just putting yourself out there. No matter where your product is, no matter where your product's going, or how good it is, just make sure that you try and work on the confidence to...

Just be in places that you're supposed to be and talk to the people you need to talk to.

Mat Sherman (20:07.101)
I love that. And then just a couple more questions. When it comes to Nosu, who's your kind of ideal, like if someone's listening to this and they're wondering, is this for me? Like, could I host a hackathon? Do have an ideal user of who would use Nosu? Is it a company? Is it a hackathon organizer? Like, who's your ICP for this?

Audrey Chen (20:24.502)
Yeah, so the ideal company is a DevTool company. There's a lot of DevTools that developers haven't really explored. So if you're a DevTool company, it's really good for you because you get marketing. You are a consumer company, but since you have the developer niche, it's a little bit different, I think. So it's good for exposure.

Like you get access to our social media streams of like 100,000. And I guess even more of a reach too because we partner with content creators. And then, then yeah, more engagement to just grow exponentially. Yeah, if you have a really good technical product and it's not out there, there's so much you can explore for growing your product exponentially.

Mat Sherman (21:22.665)
100%. And then if someone was listening to this and let's say they're in that ideal customer profile, their DevTools company, where can they find, what's your website, is there a social media account, how can someone kind of get started?

Audrey Chen (21:38.71)
Yeah, so you could email OJviolin07 at gmail.com or you can search me up on like LinkedIn or X at Audrey Chen and just type in the word hackathon and it's likely going to be me. And then yeah, the website's called nosu.io. And for the rest of the month, we're going to be building better infrastructure for hosting the software hackathons.

Mat Sherman (22:07.963)
Amazing. And I think my last question is what's next? I mean, you've had a wild couple of weeks. You went to SF, got some money, you're going back to SF. Like, what's the plan? are you just kind of taking a day at a time?

Audrey Chen (22:21.582)
Oh yeah, the plan is to go to market even further, distribute. I'd say if you are trying to host a hackathon on Nosu, definitely contact us now because seven other people already reached out. We don't know how much our clients are going to fill up and our prices are low for hosting right now. It's like $500 to host a hackathon on our platform instead of a dev post like $3,000. And then...

Yeah, our other plan is to freaking get housing. yeah, finish up our fundraising round. We're raising a 300k pre-seed. And since we're already one third of the way through, I suppose it's gonna close in like the next few weeks. So yeah, we're gonna try and finish that up so it can keep on scaling. And yeah, that should be a bit of work, but I'm so excited to drink more turmeric shots in San Francisco.

Mat Sherman (23:21.321)
That's awesome. Well, I appreciate you coming onto the podcast and sharing a little bit of your story with me and what you're working on. And I wish you the best of luck closing the round and building a really great enduring company in the Bay Area.

Audrey Chen (23:32.214)
Yeah, thank you so much. Nice to meet you, Matt, too.

Mat Sherman (23:35.305)
Dennis and Mewtwo, have good rest of your day.

Audrey Chen (23:37.452)
Yeah, peace out.