Nobody Studios 2024 Update

Hey Nobodies,

We hope this update finds you in good spirits. We had an action-packed Q4 and are already forging an exciting path in Q1 2024.

As we kick off the first quarter, we're thrilled to present our Nobody Studios update for 2024. ??

This report will delve into the past three months, highlighting our achievements and challenges in the realms of NewCo development, Studio scaling, and startup creation.?

We’ll share a sneak peek into our upcoming plans, what's keeping us on our toes, and ways you can contribute.

We continue to connect Nobody all over the world, from Miami to Helsinki and Boulder to Paris. Our global community continues to grow, learn, and support one another.?

Whether you're a valued member of the Nobody Studios team or an enthusiastic investor, crowdfunder, or builder, our Studio provides a special window into the ongoing journey of innovation, disruption, and growth within the world of venture building.?

Dive into the updates below, and as always, feel free to hit reply if you have questions.

Highlights for Q4 Into Q1

Super Angels ??

• At the end of last year, we called on our Angels for another push before we closed our Seed funding round.
• The response has been excellent! We did 50% of our target in 6 weeks.
• If you ever thought of investing in Nobody Studios, this is your moment. Email [email protected] before we close.

Series A Ready ???

• We’re in the final stages of signing terms with two bankers to drive our fundraising with institutional investors for our Series A.
• We’ll be in the market in mid-February with the goal of closing our Series A round by the summer.?
• It’s a trajectory-changing moment for the Studio and Nobodies!?

NewCos Raising Themselves ?

• Evalify, Ovationz, ThoughtForma, and Webdelics are commencing their fundraising.?
• Each NewCo is raising using a SAFE with a $10 million cap.?
• If you want to invest directly in these companies or know investors who would, please contact us directly.?

We’re focusing on three critical product thinking and leadership areas in 2024.

1. A Customer-centric philosophy.
2. AI-enabled Customer Discovery and Validation.
3. Best in class User Experience across our NewCos.?

Being customer-centric means embedding customer needs, preferences, and feedback into every stage of our product life cycle. You’ll see every NewCo implement userback, chatbots, and tools to gather real-time feedback.?

AI will become deeply integrated into our discovery and testing approach—we’re already having fun with zeda.io and SurveySparrow .?

?You’ll also see best-in-class User Experience, so people say, “Yeah, that’s a Nobody Studios product” due to the ease of use, slick design, and quality.?

We’ll need you to help make these themes come to life. At the beginning of every project, quickly identifying and engaging deeply with ten qualified leads is essential for guiding our product direction. That’s you, the crowd, and your power.?

Our technology strategy and planning for each Studio company are also accelerating.?

We’ve been building out AWS blueprints and component libraries to increase company building speed by enabling the reuse of code, services, and tools across all our NewCo engineering teams.?

With Evalify, we’ve refined our Intellectual Property strategy and filed patents for NewCos (such as SleepGlide) to protect and own the innovations we’re creating in the Studio.?

One other key theme for 2024 will be building AI as a discipline (data, tools, services, capabilities) across the studio and in each company. You’ve seen tasters with Santa-GPT, SleepGlide, and Parentipity, but these are only the tip of how deep we’ll develop this competency within the Studio.

What happens when you combine speed with the venture studio model? We have taken the entire Idea Lab process and found the places where we can 10x the speed, allowing us to move from idea to validated business with unreal velocity.?

We’ve updated our idea management system to incorporate cutting-edge tech, allowing us to accelerate idea ingestion, processing, and validation with AI. From the time an idea gets submitted, we’re using tools to apply our evaluation criteria, track our conviction, and bring ideas to life so they can fully demonstrate how great they can be in days and, eventually, in a matter of moments!?

We built a trained AI to assist in scoring ideas, a tool we use to give us a rough first read of where we should be most excited about an idea based on our 20-point scorecard and where we could establish experiments to validate and invalidate our core hypotheses quickly.?

Rapid prototyping is another area where we're seeing tremendous progress. In just the past month, we've transformed five ideas into clickable prototypes within hours, not days.??

One standout is PrehabLife, which leverages wearable data to support addiction recovery, signaling a designated supporter when a user has relapsed—a testament to our lab's ability to turn innovative ideas into real-world solutions quickly. We’ll be implementing more fast prototyping AI tools to 10x this speed in 2024.

We have new talent, including skilled hackers and analysts, who are not only expanding our hacker network but also refining our idea evaluation processes. We’ll continue to grow this group via HiveHax as our volume of experiments explodes.

10x more ideas > 100x more experiments > 1000x faster validation ??

Key Metrics From Q1/Q4 for the Studio and NewCos

Executive Hires?

We continue to hire the best and brightest to lead our NewCos. As our NewCos get ready to leave the nest and raise their own external funding, having top-class leadership is key.?

Welcome our two latest executive hires, Jennifer Pereira , the CEO of Webdelics , and Jarrod Jordan , the President of Ovationz .

NewCo Progress?

??? Evalify , (the startup formerly known as The Adjacent Possible)

• Landed their first client, and Evalify ran 30 pitch decks for them.
• Check out their new explainer video .
• New website to be launched imminently.
• Starting fundraising pitches.

?? ThoughtForma

• Stand-out showcase at the NoCode event in Paris.?
• Generative AI functionality blew away conference attendees and challenged our thinking on what target audience to double down on.
• Focusing now on go-to-market, product positioning, and roadmap.

??? Ovationz

• 400% increase in booked revenue in Q4 from Q3 2023.
• 35 new speakers onboarded in the last three months.
• Five deals are in progress, and 15 active leads are in the pipeline for the Speaker Series .
• Scaling up the team (full update in Ovationz upcoming newsletter.)Aaron Ellis , VP of Talent, Vision and Strategy?Amanda Peterson , Product LeadMark Glover , Director of Sales?

?? Webdelics

• 100 pieces of new content were created in January.
• 25 pieces of user-generated content.
• The pitch deck is complete and starting to be showcased to local investor communities in Miami.
• Exploring sponsorship opportunities (full update in Webdelics upcoming newsletter.)

??? Parentipity

• Looking to double down on the original idea of paying content creators for their content, allowing them to share their parenting knowledge but to build their ideas contextually into the AI responses.

?? SleepGlide?

• Completing steps to participate in Apple’s hardware trial program.
• Dr. Poe guested on the global Top 10 podcast, the Huberman Lab, raising awareness about our work. Check out the episode “Use Sleep to Enhance Learning, Memory & Emotional State .”
• Landing page setup to capture future leads and build on our conversion funnel.

?? Cat-GPT

• Over 250,000 contacts in our email list.
• Sponsorship opportunities in place.
• Seeking growth marketer to content marketing and newsletter for our audience.?

?? Santa-GPT ?

• Santa gave out 200 recommendations over the holidays.
• We learned a lot and are already putting plans in place for next year.
• So, for goodness sake, get your list for 2024 ready.

?????? PrehabLife

• Prototype complete.?
• Launching in the Apple App Store in late Q1.
• Seeking a growth hacker to drive audience engagement.

?? Library Labs

• We called time on this web3 initiative. We did not find the product-market fit we hoped for. Now, Jeremy is working on building out our experimentation platform for the Idea Lab.

Fresh Sprouts and New Developments

Want to know some of the things we’re experimenting with in the IdeaLab? Some hints… Client-side machine learning models to help influencers capture the sentiment of their viewers so they can optimize their videos… Sourcing data from seemingly unrelated places around the web to help you get a look at competitors and their business activities... Hijacking the dopamine centers of young students to point them toward more productive learning and education activities…

Still want more?

• Health and wellness communities that support people with chronic diseases
• Compete directly with AI (are you smarter than AI?)
• Financial planning for a very specific and meme-worthy niche ??
• AI for seniors to combat loneliness

Stay tuned for the learnings of these experiments!

Here are a couple of early-stage businesses in Frugressive Concept preparing to launch:

• ?XYZGPT.ai : A platform dedicated to creating your brand's very own AI chat.
• ?Developments in progress to create a suite of TextAI: Products to support everyone from patients preparing for medical appointments to business owners seeking to connect with clients and more. ??

Brand Awareness and Reach?

• The Making of Nobody : Our weekly NoPody with Chief Nobody, Mark S. McNally , and Chief Culture Officer, Sejal Thakkar , is getting rave reviews.
• Explosion in social media followers: Our total audience has grown by 9.9%, with? LinkedIn being one of our fastest-growing platforms. Our followers stand at 9,865.
• Newsletter: 32.69% open rate for this quarter, increasing by 5.33%. Additionally, we’ve seen a 7.69% increase in our subscribers.

• We're getting recognized! If you missed the latest article that names Nobody Studios as the global top venture studio, here it is . Companies, investors, and innovators from all over the world are beginning to reach out, seeking partnerships and collaborative opportunities with the Studio. Stay tuned!?

Community Building?

Engaging and activating our crowd of Nobodies is a core strategy for the Studio.

Throughout 2024, we’ll be focusing on developing our founder, investor, growth marketing, and dev hacker communities.

Hackathons ???

Dr. Erik Reis and Min Bhogaita have been all over London, from UCL Entrepreneurs workshop to mentoring at Phase One’s 54-hour micro-incubator .

Part of Min’s role is scouting and being part of the startup ecosystem. If you’ve got events you think we should be part of, contribute to, or lead, email us at [email protected] and let us know you are responding to our newsletter request to share events with us.

All part of our strategy to find exceptional talent (and ideas that align with our sectors and niches).

What Keeps Up at Night... And How You Can Help

Get Our Early-Stage Companies Funded Faster

Another core tweak to our strategy is getting NewCos funded sooner and faster. As these businesses pop out of the Idea Lab and start to scale, we want to be able to staff them quickly and scale with the traction they are achieving. That means making sure they have the team, resources, and capital they need when they get early traction. ?

If you have Seed investor groups, syndicates, or institutions that are interested in such investments, let us know. We’re going to have a solid stream of deals with 100 companies to build over the next five years.?

Activating More of Our Nobodies

The crowdfunding brought us over a thousand new Nobodies. We’ve world-class advisors, close to a hundred angel investors, and a wealth of talent joining our round tables every two weeks. We need to harness the power of our crowd more.

We’ll be reaching out to learn more about you, how you wish to help, and what you’re passionate about in the coming weeks. Do us a favor and engage so we can sort and assign you for maximum impact.

Help Spread the Word

Leads for more amazing hires to accelerate our company creation:

• We have run bi-weekly talent round tables over the last three months with over 300 attendees, 150 job applications, and a significant step up in the skills and experience of people applying for roles. Word is getting out. We’re hot right now!

Open roles:

• Adjacent Possible, Business Development Executive
• Google Analytics Guru
• Community Manager , Nobody Studios
• Product Lead
• Design Lead
• Technology Lead

Nobodies In Real Life

Where will people be:

• London — February 23rd —?Barry will be in town if you want to grab a pint ??
• Palo Alto ?—? February afternoons —?Connie is open for meeting for easy hikes if you want some exercise

What Lies Ahead in 2024?

As we step into 2024, we are thrilled to share our excitement for the journey that lies ahead. Our Studio has been navigating uncharted territories, and the year ahead holds immense promise.?

The decision to raise a Series A funding round marks a pivotal moment in our trajectory, providing us with the financial fuel to propel our vision to new heights.

This infusion of capital not only validates the exceptional work of our team but also serves as a testament to the potential that our innovative solutions hold in the market.

Accelerating the pace of new company launches will be a key focus in the coming year. With the Series A backing, we are well-positioned to not only strengthen our existing ventures but also to diversify into new and exciting arenas.?

The entrepreneurial spirit that fuels our organization will be unleashed at an unprecedented rate, fostering a dynamic ecosystem of creativity and innovation.?

Together, we are set to redefine the rules of the game, changing not only our trajectory but also the entire landscape of industries we touch.?

Get ready for an exhilarating ride in 2024 as we go faster, dream bigger, and make waves in the world of innovation.

Grateful,

Mark S. McNally

Chief Nobody at Nobody Studios