The Yoga teacher that raises millions of Dollars
I just met KJ Ericsson, a yoga teacher that just raised millions of dollars. She’s a Y-Combinator company. I told her I would invest in her round as I was very impressed by the growth of her service, Simbi. Our Facebook live session got 57,000 views as I write this, watch it if you haven’t.
How did she get there?
She was teaching yoga with her husband and many people wanted to take yoga classes but could not afford them. Instead they offered to exchange their services for a yoga lesson. KJ accepted and was offered massages, cleaning, deliveries and home improvements, etc. The problem was that she ended-up with so many services she could not use them all.
That’s how the idea for her new website Simbi was born. It is platform for the barter of services without the use of any currency. Today investors are lining up to invest in her startup and she has raised millions of dollars. It doesn’t mean she has succeeded yet, but it’s a great start and she has impressive growth numbers.
Uber was also born that way. Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick thought the black car and taxi experiences sucked and decided to fix them.
That’s also how I decided to build my own company Leade.rs. I just needed a service to find great speakers on specific topics and there wasn’t one. I always found amazing speakers for my events by asking on social networks. Then I manually built a list of who recommended whom. I turned it into our first product, a call for speakers. We launched it 2 weeks ago for our small event on chatbots in San Francisco on Sept 13th (almost sold out). 1,500 early users recommended 160 speakers, most of whom I had not heard about. Thank you if you contributed, means a lot to me. We have a great line up thanks to your recommendations.My point is this: if you want to start your own business do not wait for that revolutionary idea, just take a simple need you have and build it.
In case you missed it, my previous newsletter was about the technologies that changed the world in the last 10 years.
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