From managing a product at N26 to putting AI to work across many different apps and raising 2M€ in a pre-seed round - Jack Lancaster (Spoke.Ai) - S2 Ep8

Welcome to this new episode of Explore! 😎For those of you that have been here since the beginning, 1000 thanks, and welcome to the newcomers who have joined us in recent weeks. I receive a lot of encouragement on LinkedIn, the best way to send me some love is to follow this podcast and give it 5 stars. It will allow others to discover it. 🙏In this episode I sat down with Jack Lancaster, the co-founder and chief product officer of Spoke.Ai, a company that helps you streamline communications through AI workflows that connects Slack, Jira, Notion, and the rest of your product stack. We discussed Jack's unique journey from Product Manager at N26, to founding a Plant as a Service company and now working on Spoke.Ai. We talked about his vision on AI and its use cases, the strategic decisions of staying in beta for more than a year, the importance of bringing in technical expertise in building the MVP and the necessity to track key metrics such as customer usage. We compared briefly Microsoft Copilot and Spoke, how they differ but also complement each other, and Jack shared some insights for early-stage entrepreneurs. 🚀Have a great episode! ***** Thanks to our sponsor ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠OpenVC.app⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! 🔥Use the code "EXPLORE" to get a lifetime 20% discount on their premium membership.Learn more about Explore: ⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Website⁠⁠. Learn more about ⁠⁠⁠Jack ⁠⁠and ⁠⁠⁠Spoke.ai⁠⁠⁠.*****Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction and Background02:07 Early Career and Start of Plant Club06:37 Role as a Product Manager at N2610:37 Founding Spoke AI15:55 Original Idea and Product of Spoke AI22:24 Building the MVP of Spoke AI23:46 Raising Funds and Early Beta Users27:04 Launching the Beta Version29:23 Differentiation in Summarization Capabilities32:11 The Beta Phase and Future Launch35:28 Partnership with Slack 38:04 Vision for the Company41:37 Business Model and Key Metrics46:29 Advice for Entrepreneurs This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climateventuresvco2.substack.com