🚀 $12.8M Raised. AI Founder Helps Us with Idea to MVP and More!

(3 minute read)

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Let’s talk about how to go from IDEA to MVP.

👀 In today's newsletter:

 📢 We talk with a startup founder about the early days of new ventures.

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🚀 Interview with a startup founder:
Idea stage and how to get your product out there.

Today, we have the pleasure of meeting Morgan Linton. I’ve known Morgan for more than 10 years. He is the founder and CTO of Bold Metrics, a SaaS that uses AI to capture body measurements so companies can understand who uses their products. One clear use case is the fashion industry, where online ordering sees a huge rate of returns due to improper fit.

Bold Metrics has raised $12.8M in funding from a variety of notable investors.

Aron: 
Welcome, Morgan.

🚀 Morgan: 
Thanks for having me here, everyone!

Aron:  
Jumping right in: Where did the idea for Bold Metrics come about? Did you have a background in the fashion industry (the first industry you’re disrupting with your technology)? Your company was called Fashion Metric in the early days.

🚀 Morgan:
People sometimes confuse me with someone who knows something about fashion, but I'll be the first to admit I know very little about the industry - I've really focused on AI and data.

The idea for Bold Metrics came about when looking at big juicy problems that AI could be applied to, and predicting body measurements was an area we saw a big opportunity with. So many products are made for people, and historically companies have to guess who is using their products, we knew AI could power a platform that would enable companies to move from guessing to knowing.

Right now, we're making a huge impact in the apparel world, but industries like insurance, automotive, gaming, etc. are all other sectors we see our technology making an impact in. Just like Intel powers the computers of today, we see a future where products are personalized for people and guessing is replaced with real data, in this world Bold Metrics powers the body data side of the equation.

Aron:
Let’s keep discussing the early days, since that’s what we are interested here. Idea stage.

How did you know there was a clear problem to be solved?

Did you go out and talk to your target customer or clothing retailers?

Did you start by asking what problems online shoppers are having?

🚀 Morgan:

To determine a clear problem, we started talking with shoppers and asked open-ended questions. Rather than assuming we knew what people struggled with, we simply asked shoppers, “what is the biggest problem you have when shopping for clothes online”?

The vast majority of people we asked said they could never find the right size, and that formed our starting point. Return rates were a clear problem for retailers… but not a big problem when we started since less than 10% of their shoppers bought online. It really wasn’t until 2020 that apparel retailers saw a major shift that made a technology like ours go from a nice-to-have to a must have. So, when we started the company, I think we were really living in a future that wasn’t quite there yet - we saw a world where lots of people bought clothes online, but that world wasn’t there when we started.

Rather than starting with an assumption of what the problem was, we really focused on asking open-ended questions and learning.

Aron:
Once you found a problem and were rolling, you went through the TechStars accelerator, back in 2012.

What were the benefits of that accelerator and what did your MVP look like?

🚀 Morgan:
TechStars was a great program for us and a very important part of our journey. I think most founders fall into two camps, they either come from a world where they know about Venture Capital and have existing relationships with VCs, or like us, they don't. Accelerators like TechStars and Y Combinator really help teach founders about the process of raising Venture Capital and the difference between building a venture-backed business vs. a more traditional bootstrapped or small business. Along with helping us understand the process, we built relationships with VCs that were able to see us build over time and develop our idea and product.

Our early MVP was an API that predicted body measurements, this is still our core product today and powers pretty much everything we do under-the-hood. Rather than focusing on making our solution fast or scalable out of the gate, our initial MVP was really about showing value - could brands use our body data?

Aron:
You raised your initial capital through some notable investors, one being Mark Cuban. How did that early cash help your company?

🚀 Morgan:
The early capital helped us build our initial team. Building an AI solution from scratch is something we determined very early on required outside capital to do right. By raising over $1M out of the gate we were also able to hire very talented people and not ask them to work for pennies on the dollar or sacrifice important things like healthcare. We were able to hire a truly exceptional team, pay them fairly, and give them healthcare and other benefits that are so important.

Aron:
How would your journey be different if you had not raised that venture funding?

🚀 Morgan:
I'm fairly certain we would have been out of business in a year without venture funding. Using an existing AI solution like ChatGPT, etc. is completely different from building your own AI solution. While I'm sure there are people out there that know how to do this themselves, I'm a big believer in the importance and power of leveraging people much smarter than myself.

We could never build the kind of AI solution like we have today without the incredibly talented team we have built, but if we couldn't pay these people a fair salary, or give them good healthcare, we'd never get them, and we'd never have the technology we have today. That being said, we could have built something that leverages someone else's AI system, but that just wasn't going to make a big enough impact for me, and life is short, I want to make a big impact.

Aron:
Let’s talk to those people reading this that have a great idea, but no clue where to start. What advice would you give them?

🚀 Morgan:
I would start by really thinking about if the startup journey is the right path for you - it's not for most. I don't mean this to be harsh in any way, but to be realistic.

We didn't pay ourselves for the first two years. Can you live without a salary for two years? Once we did start paying ourselves, I made about half of what I made in my first job out of college - is that realistic for you?

Running a startup requires making massive sacrifices and I find there tends to be a lot of focus initially on ideas and product-market fit, but instead I think the focus should be on you, your family, and your lifestyle, and really asking yourself the hard questions about the sacrifices you can make. 

Ideas are easy to come by, and the reality is, there's also lots of capital out there, the big question is, can you make the sacrifices and execute, and then survive through all the downs, because there's a lot more downs than ups. For most people I think it will be much easier to work for a startup, or work for an accelerator so they still have exposure to the ecosystem without the risk. There are very few people who will be able to take the risk and put themselves and their family through the rollercoaster ride that comes with running a startup.

Aron:
Finally, you write a newsletter about AI in business, and we’re all clearly interested in AI and startups.

How do you seeing AI impacting the way people create new ventures?

🚀 Morgan:
I think AI is going to help people build startups faster in a lot of ways.

At the same time, I think people leveraging existing AI solutions are going to find that there's very little defensibility in what they're building. New startups leveraging someone else's AI (i.e. building on top of something like ChatGPT) will really have to work hard to show investors that they're adding value on top of these existing systems in a unique and different way. VCs are very savvy today, and they're really looking for founders that are either building their own AI platforms, or if they're leveraging someone else's AI, doing something so crazy different that they're getting far ahead of what anyone else can do.

We're moving into a time where pretty much every startup will use AI, the big question will be, who is using it in a way that nobody else can.

Check out Morgan’s AI Newsletter above (this is not a paid sponsor).

Thanks for stopping by Morgan! Best of luck with Bold Metrics!

🔍 Follow Morgan Linton on Twitter Here: Morgan Linton’s Twitter

📝Important Notes from Today’s Interview:

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