How NASA Saved SpaceX and Tesla

Morning Innovators 👋 This week (in less than 5 minutes!) we’ll explore…

👻 How a 12 year old in a playground helped build a $90bn social media app
🚀 How NASA Saved SpaceX and Tesla
📱 How going into your local phone shop can grow your podcast

Each week we’ll be writing about crazy pivots, secret stories of how huge companies almost failed in the beginning, the untold journeys that the most successful founders took to get to where they are today, breakdown mind-blowingly successful acquisitions and investments whilst spotlighting some of the most exciting start ups that you haven’t heard of yet, plus throwing in a few tips and tricks along the way.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for next week’s edition let us know.

Happy hustling,
Rich & Gary

P.S. Connect with us on LinkedIn…

👥 How they got their first users?

Ever wondered how Snapchat, now a social media giant, first kicked off? Picture this: a Stanford dorm room, a brilliant idea, and a handful of initial users. Let's travel back in time to witness Snapchat's humble beginnings.

In the early days, Snapchat faced a common hurdle: attracting those initial users. They had a cool idea - disappearing photos and messages - but breaking into the already competitive social media scene was no easy feat.

Evan Spiegel, co-founder of Snapchat, understood the importance of an exclusive launch. He started by introducing Snapchat to his immediate network - Stanford University students. The initial version was far from perfect, leading to the idea of Snapchat being mocked by his fellow Stanford Students.

Snapchat's early adopters, after the July 2011 launch, were Spiegel's classmates and friends. However, those early adopters were surprised to see the app change from its original name, ‘Picaboo’, to its new name, ‘Snapchat’. This was due to the fact that Evan and his team were dealt with a cease-and-desist letter from another company named ‘Picaboo’ just a few months after launching.

Spiegel & Co turned to shopping malls to give out Snapchat themed business cards to potential users, they set up one on ones with their desired millennial prospective users, they even tried to reposition themselves as a sexting app. Nothing really seemed to work for them, leaving them with just 127 users after months of trading.

But the turning point? Evan Spiegel’s mum told his cousin about the app, who then went on to tell his classmates in the playground. Within a few months, Snapchat’s active user base increased to over 30,000. This lead them to move away from targeting Millennials altogether, and focus every single decision around Generation Z. By October 2012, Snapchat had crossed 1,000,000 users and was processing 231 photos per second.

Could changing your target market, change the fortunes of your Start-Up?

💡 Start-up spotlight

Each week we’ll be reviewing the start-ups currently crowdfunding and highlighting our favourite. This by no means can be considered investment advice, just the businesses we admire.

This week we’re looking at Toraphene who are currently overfunding on a £1m raise on Crowdcube. Their campaign ends shortly and they’ve already been backed by around 700 investors on the platform (at the time of writing). Toraphene are aiming to disrupt the packaging market and reduce plastic consumption with their proprietary graphene-based material.

By combining graphene with plastic or natural polymers, Toraphene creates a material that improves strength, flexibility, barrier and recyclability.

The successful launch of their first product, a biobased home-compostable waste bin liner with barrier performance, showcases Toraphene's commitment to sustainability. With an estimated trillion plastic waste bags used annually, this product debut opens doors for a range of other innovative products.

🚀 How NASA Saved SpaceX and Tesla

Ever heard the phrase 'between a rock and a hard place'? Elon Musk felt it first-hand when SpaceX and Tesla were on the verge of financial disaster during the 2008 economic downturn.

Imagine this: SpaceX reaching for the stars, Tesla racing to transform the automobile industry. Now, imagine their dreams almost going up in smoke. So what happened?

In 2008, when the economy hit rock bottom, Tesla and SpaceX were also scraping the financial barrel. Tesla was burning through about $4 million a month (f**k me 😭😅), and SpaceX was facing a crucial, do-or-die moment. Elon Musk found himself standing at a crossroads - essentially faced with a choice of which business to save.

SpaceX pinned its hopes on a NASA contract. A $1.6 billion contract win was their lifeline, keeping Musk's space dream afloat.

Tesla, on the other hand, faced a cash crunch. Instead of choosing one venture over the other, Musk made a gutsy move. He placed a bet on SpaceX winning that NASA contract, a bet that would save both his space and car dreams.

Musk gathered every penny he could find, scrounging $20 million, which included a loan from SpaceX, showing how desperate the situation was. He even bluffed his investors, pushing them to match the $20 million he had scraped together. Miraculously, the deal closed on Christmas Eve in 2008, just hours before bankruptcy would have knocked on their doors.

This saga of sheer determination and audacity is a testament to Musk's relentless spirit. It reminds us that sometimes, against all odds, passion and grit can defy the darkest of hours and pave the way for unparalleled success (although a little luck definitely helps).

🧑‍💻 Marketing hack of the week

This week we came across Yoann Pavy’s podcast growth hack on LinkedIn. Wish just a little effort (and access to a phone shop) you could be supercharging the growth on your podcast. See his post below:

👉 Go to an Apple store
👉 Grab an iPhone on display
👉 Open Apple podcast
👉 Find your podcast
👉 Press play
👉 Follow it
👉 Leave a review
👉 Rinse and repeat

You'll get:

🚀 An instant boost in organic rankings - we ranked Top 3 marketing podcasts in the UK a few times.
🚀 More social proof on your podcast - Which is very hard to get when you're just starting.

Who said growth hacking was over? 😜

Could you make this work for your company or podcast?

🙌 Opportunities

As start-up founders ourselves, one of the areas we’re really passionate about is raising awareness of opportunities. If you’re not mixing in the right circles, it can be really easy to miss a pitch event, or job opportunity that could be game-changing for you. We’ve included a few upcoming events and opportunities below, but this is where we really want to leverage our community of innovators. Please reply to this email with any tips and opportunities you think we should be featuring.

💼 Job opportunities

🎺 Sales Development Representative, Trumpet
🪙 Partner Management Associate, Coinbase
🧓 Product Designer, KareHero

💷 Funding opportunities

For those in the South West, check out the South Wales Investment Fund recently launched by the British Business Bank. This £200m fund offers a range of debt and equity investment options.

🛠️ Tool of the week

Each week we’ll be highlighting our favourite tools - either something we’ve been using in our businesses, or tools that our innovator community have recommended.

This week, we wanted to share a super cool AI video generation tool. Hey Gen is one of the coolest video creation tools we’ve come across. It offers a wide range of features such as creating an avatar (this can be you) and then utilising it to create explainer videos, or you can take existing video content and translate it into different languages and the AI tool will automatically alter your mouth movements to seamlessly make it look like you’re speaking a foreign language 🤯

👉 Coming next week…

Next week we’ll be looking at how one of the biggest ecommerce brands grew via a huge acquisition that you’ve probably never heard of, what the founder of Cazoo and Zoopla was doing first, and highlighting more great tools and marketing hacks.