How Disco CEO Candice Faktor grew Disco to $3M revenue and 400 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is candace factor she's the co-founder of disco.co a platform for knowledge creators to build a live learning empire she's also a serial tech entrepreneur who's a passion for learning and community before launching disco she scaled wattpad to 80 million users making the world's largest platform for creators to share their stories wattpad was sold in january 2021 for 660 million bucks candice you ready to take to the top absolutely all right so give us some more clues here what was your role at wattpad and how did that role help you discover the need for disco absolutely so um i joined wattpad i was the first non-technical employee and i joined to help scale the business so i was the head of business and the global general manager and uh you know it was so great to be able to work with such talented founders to bring something that was really social and engaging to something that you know we always thought of as you know isolated which was reading right like most people think you read alone well actually what we learned at wattpad is it's really really great to read with community and also to read on a serialized basis and so when you think about disco it actually so much of what i'm bringing to disco i learned from wattpad which is learning especially virtually in an old world all used to be about learning alone right watching pre-recorded courses and consuming content alone and what i got really excited about um during the pandemic when we all had to sort of work from home we learned that we can actually learn live together and so just like we did at wattpad which was bringing a social element to reading we're bringing a social element uh to learning because the science of learning is that you actually learn better with people because people hold you accountable they give you support you're able to reflect more with them and so lots of learnings from wattpad uh in disco why did you feel like you couldn't build this inside of wattpad before the sale obviously oh so i left wattpad a few years ago um i i helped scale wattpad to as i said 80 million people and then realized um i wanted to do some other things at that point and so this was you know after a few years of uh what year was that by the way that you left yeah so i left wattpad in 2000 2017 okay and we started uh disco in 2020 and what's interesting is when i left hop out i became incredibly interested in learning because you know i was so aware that the skills that people are going to need in the future are so different with than what they're being taught in institutional ed uh and i actually built my very own live learning community after wattpad and what disco is really solving for is it's actually really hard to do that it's hard to bring a live element and a social element to learning with the existing tools that exist oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you wanna check this tool out if you wanna jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview i i love this use case because like communities have time struggling all the time slack doesn't work circle's even sometimes tricky gather round right whether it's one person meetups and it's random people videos also sort of tricky i know actually i have friends i'm looking at your interface right now i have friends that use you guys i mean did you guys sort of start in the pat flynn sort of amy porterfield sort of world and expand from there did you start somewhere else yeah no you hit the nail on the head like we we started with knowledge creators who really wanted to build community-based learning um and it's expanded you know from solarpreneurs who are you know uh individual knowledge creators putting learning communities together to like really big now organizations are using us like makerpad which is the largest no code school it's owned by zapier we are the os for their entire learning community um dribble the world's you know one of the world's biggest product design communities they're using disco to be the os for their entire dribble university and i think what you know um knowledge creators and organizations are realizing is it you really want a seamless and branded experience for your learners to go to just one place right one place for chat one place for live video one place for content and it's really helpful if you can have mission control to run your entire business from marketing and selling these live learning experiences to merchandising and monetizing different live learning products makes complete sense to me i understand the pain point let's circle back to products in a second because i want to see if i can get some hints at you in terms of where you're taking the disco product but first help us understand how you've gotten yourself funded today customer fund or you decide to raise some capital yeah we've raised some capital um we have had you know a really um we haven't was the last round and how much was it for yeah so our last round was our seed round um we raised that last time this year and uh amazing investors from funds like inovia quad capital um we also how much did you decide to raise uh so in our last round um we raised 5 million u.s and we have incredible angels as well lots of interesting folks from shopify um lambda school selena endeavor very interesting people who are participating so smart round great capital was that your only round of date or have you raised other capital precede maybe yeah we raised a pre-seed round we raised a safe um as well because there was a lot of interest and uh we'll we'll be sharing some some further funding uh in in when was that pre-seed round closed was that in 2020 uh that was in 2020. okay so first year in business really so so 2020 and how much was that for uh that was just a friends and family 750k did you get did you get alan and ivan you're you're watching i do i have i have i i've been listening esther um huge fan of of uh the wattpad team also like the head of product touring sec devo is an investor well those are good signals i don't know though if your former founders you worked with cut you checking your pre-seat round like you got my ears perked i'm interested so launched in 2020 you raised some money early on to get going you raised another 5 million in 2021. um what gave you the leverage to raise the five million like were you guys pre-revenue still or did you have a lot of you free user growth that let you get that evaluation or i mean we were you know we were three times oversubscribed for that round uh we had you know 15 million of interest um i think two things one a a really clear vision for where we want to take disco and lots of interest from knowledge creators and organizations uh that wanted a tool like this um can you quantify that candace where were you like what in what was an important metric to you last year when you raised there on is a number of active users number of courses created number of live sessions what's the metric uh for a seed round it really was uh the product vision okay got it so you weren't there wasn't a deck where you were saying i'm making...