Startup Spotlight #131: Glimpse

Glimpse is THE app to spice up your virtual events. Effortlessly set up new rooms, and share them on Slack, Zoom, and more!

Jun 07, 2021

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I got the chance to speak with Helena Merk, co-founder and CEO of Glimpse, about what she’s working on at her startup, and any advice she has for emerging entrepreneurs.

Merk grew up in the Bay Area, started building apps in middle school, and worked on startups throughout all of High School. She was always interested in technology being a means to solving problems and got hooked on the thrill of building. For undergrad, she decided to leave the Valley and attend Duke in NC. That lasted 3 semesters before dropping out and joining Smartcar, a Series A API company in Mountain View. Several months in, during a visit to Duke, Merk met up with my now co-founder, Brian Li. She asked him, “why are you still a student”, and he threw the question back at her -- “why are you still working at Smartcar?”. The next thing you know, the two started working together on a shared passion: building the next-gen of social media for authentic relationships.

Merk and Li graduated from Y Combinator’s W20 batch with an entirely new product. While entering with an in-person meetup platform, the two left with a speed-matching video-chat app. Their timing could not have been better: they built our MVP in a week, and immediately following our beta launch, the world went on COVID lockdown.

2020 was crazy for us. The startup grew to hundreds of countries, where everyone from university students to Fortune 500 company employees used Glimpse to feel more connected. Glimpse Events is a 1-on-1 speed matching platform, where people match with others in their community back-to-back, for short bursts of time.

The co-founders spoke with hundreds of community leaders and learned there was a massive gap in social community platforms as a whole. College clubs on average used seven different platforms, members felt disconnected, and there was general social anxiety in participating in groups online. Rather than focusing on work (slack) or gaming (discord), the two wanted to build a platform where the goal was to authentically connect with others in your community.

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Startup Spotlight: Glimpse

Problem: Engaging members to build thriving online communities takes a lot of work for community managers. There are several root causes, but one underlying one is that community communication is broken: platforms that may be effective for organizers (e.g. Slack) are uncomfortable and non-personable for members, resulting in unofficial adoption of separate messengers, cliques, and ghostlands.

Market: On average, messenger platforms like GroupMe generate $15 ARPU of group messaging apps, and 1.4B Facebook Group users = $21B. This number is validated by other players in the space, Discord (revenue $120M), Reddit ($120M), Groupme ($85M acquisition), Slack ($400 M revenue).

Solution: Glimpse Groups is a people-first community platform, helping members meet each other, stay connected and organize events. Groups are uniquely cohorted into squads, resembling the organizational structure of communities with waves of new members (college clubs, accelerators, etc.) through squads, empowering leaders to create announcements or schedule events for specific groups.

Team: My co-founder is Brian Li, and we both dropped out of Duke University to build platforms that authentically connect people. We live together, moving around the west coast in month-long Airbnb stays along with other YC founders.

Recent Success:

Merk: We’ve ranked #1 for key search phrases in Google, long before we had any traction. We learned what people are not searching for what you are building, and definitely not the name of our company. Rather they are googling a question and hoping for a quora/Reddit answer.

For example, we noticed people wanting “virtual speed dating”, however, when googling, they’d search “speed dating on zoom.” While (at the time) Glimpse was not related to zoom, our platform solved their needs: automatically pair people for 1-on-1 speed matches.

A lot of startup advice goes against focusing on keeping up a blog, but we’ve experienced the opposite: to date, our content marketing articles have hundreds of thousands of views and drive the majority of our traffic. We don’t spend money on ads, and future Glimpsers feel empowered as they find us through organic means.

Recent Struggle:

Merk: Saying no is the hardest piece of building out a huge vision. We dream to tackle massive social problems, but to get there, we have to start insanely tiny. Mentally, it can be frustrating as the steps from where you are today, to where you want to go, are years down the road. And the road is bumpy, curvy, covered in fog, and probably has chunks fallen into the ocean. So you have to be a bit crazy to even try.

We determined early on that we wanted to impact the fundamental way people connect and build meaningful relationships. When we started building and got accepted into Y Combinator, we found ourselves getting distracted by profitability or having our Glimpsers drive product direction. Several times now, we’ve stopped something that was working after reflecting on the impact we’d be having on the world.

The best example of this is Glimpse Events. We had customers ranging from Fortune 500 companies to college clubs, paying us thousands a month to use our speed matching software. While confident in the post-covid viability of the platform, it would have brought us into the b2b networking space. We took a step back and decided to shift our focus towards Groups, essentially starting over.

We learned there are many reasons to build a company, and if you are not 1000% on board, there’s no way you’ll succeed even with product-market fit. You won’t be able to pull yourself up on hard days, motivate your team, lead successful fundraisers, or even build a good product.

Founder Advice:

Merk: MVPs come in all shapes, sizes, and complexities, while the goal remains the same: validate a theory. This might be validating that you are indeed solving an acute problem, that there’s a willingness to pay, that it piques people’s interest, that it improves conversion… etc.

Often, the same theory can be validated with 10% of the engineering effort -- i.e. fractions of your original MVP. Challenge yourself to scope your MVP to a 1 day MVP, a 1 week MVP, and a 1 month MVP. This will force you to think about the core value prop and build just that.

So much of building a startup has slow feedback cycles and can leave you disheartened and tractionless, or blinded by optimism with underlying assumptions you’ve never thought to challenge. Build yourself quicker feedback loops with clever MVPs, adding analytics tracking from day 1, and never working in “stealth” mode.

(Note: there are exceptions to all startup advice. This is coming from a consumer-social startup founder -- I have no experience in biotech, health tech, fintech, etc., and I would not recommend this approach).

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Merk: Here are three founders you should check out next!

Ali Ahmed, Founder of Trove: Trove allows you to create highlights across the internet and send them to Notion.
Erica Hairston, Founder of Edlyft: Edlyft is designed to get students through tough computer science courses and into high-paying jobs.
Ying Wu, Founder of Pulley: Pulley's mission is to make it easier for anyone to start a company.

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