This week we’re featuring a Q&A with Sam DeBrule, co-founder of Journal, to hear about how he and his co-founders came together to build their startup, what characteristics make their team unique, and how they were able to raise their Seed round.
Q&A with Sam DeBrule
Sam is a co-founder of Journal, where he leads Marketing & Growth. Journal makes it easy to organize all your online content in one place.
Among other accomplishments, Sam’s responsible for growing the company’s blog, Noteworthy, to 1 million+ monthly visitors.
Prior to starting Journal, the three founders of Journal were working together at Mattermark. How did working together impact the company and product you wanted to build?
As Mattermark employees, Samiur, Avi, and I each experienced firsthand the problem that we eventually started Journal to address – people feeling scattered and overwhelmed with all the apps and content they use on a daily basis.
Through our experience, we also formed a unique perspective on how to solve the problem. Samiur’s experience building a conceptual search engine, Avi’s experience designing interfaces that made complex data easy to digest, and mine leveraging content marketing to drive user growth and build community have all shaped Journal into what it is today.
What characteristics make your team unique? How have they helped shape your company culture?
Our team shares this belief that mental space and wellness are the keys to unlocking people’s creativity.
This belief forms the foundation for everything from how we communicate internally to how we connect with people using our product.
For example, we ask our team members to create “operating manuals” with their preferences for communication and collaboration, start meetings with “red/yellow/green check-ins” to understand how everyone is feeling before diving into challenging discussions, and host weekly calls in which team members listen directly to community members as they describe the happiness (and frustrations) they experience while using our product.
Since 2016, your team has raised a $1.5 million dollar Seed round led by Social Capital. What was the fundraising process like for your team and how long did it take to close your round?
Journal is currently backed by Khosla Ventures, Slack Fund, Social Capital, Abstract Ventures, and Product Co-op.
Since we’ve built meaningful relationships with investors who share our vision, our fundraising process usually begins when one investor introduces us to a later stage investor who is excited to get involved.
From start to finish, our last fundraise took about *3-4 months. It involved talking to at least 50 different firms, and digging in on our long term vision, growth strategy, and how well we’d work together. The latter might actually be the most important thing, particularly at the early stages of a company.
Do you have any advice for early-stage founders on building the right founding team or anything you’d like to add?
Look beyond the “hard” skills that your potential co-founders bring to the table.
What will it be like to work with that person every day for the next few years? How will you communicate when things are going well? What about when things get hard? Will you be willing to work with that person to repair your relationship when there are miscommunications and misunderstandings?
Building a startup has been the most difficult undertaking of my professional life. I consider myself extremely fortunate to be doing it with people that I respect deeply!
You can follow up with Sam on Twitter at @SamDeBrule
