Joining the 500 Startups Distro Team as Entrepreneur in Residence, London
I’m super-excited to be joining 500 Startups as Entrepreneur in Residence for the upcoming London Distro Dojo!
“What’s that?”, you ask? The Dojo is new programme to help post-seed, pre-Series A companies in Europe looking to scale and operationalise their growth marketing function, and close their next round of funding.
I’m joining as part of 500’s in-house “Distro” team — the 500 nickname for “Distribution” — aka. customer acquisition. It’s great to help expand 500 Startups’ European footprint, joining outstanding humans Matt and Vicky already here in London.
Kicking off in September, the programme will be extremely hands-on — I’ll be working directly with teams on operationalising and scaling their growth engines. The first month will be in-residence at the new WeWork building in Moorgate, covering core topics such as:
- Beefing up analytics
- Identifying and nailing key KPIs
- Testing new channels
- Optimising conversion rates
- Bringing down acquisition costs
After nailing the basics, we’ll specialise on the channels and growth engines appropriate for each company. I’m looking forward to working closely with the teams on a diverse range of areas, building on my prior experiences in:
- Social growth from building Selective Tweets from 0 to 1M users.
- Email deliverability from scaling GroupSpaces to deliver 10M emails/month.
- Prioritising demand, community, marketing and inbound sales nuances from launching Stripe in the UK.
- Perhaps most pertinently, how not to screw up in the multitude of ways I’ve managed to over the past 10 years.
The Dojo mission to build strong growth through the post-seed stage rings very close to home for me. In my journey with GroupSpaces I was particularly fortunate to land a fantastic group of investors and advisors, but with hindsight the one thing I missed was having my butt kicked to focus on nailing our core KPIs and growing them relentlessly week over week. With the startup scene here at it’s most exciting in my 6 years in London tech, I’m looking forward to help the next generation of exciting businesses achieve much more!
“Hey — the Distro Dojo sounds great!”
Fantastic, I’m glad you think so — now please send me your referrals! For the first Dojo, 500 won’t be accepting applications — rather, the team will be searching for post-seed companies with demonstrable product-market fit and measurable traction via recommendations and introductions. Ideal candidate companies will already have demonstrated growth and/or revenue, and are looking to operationalise their marketing to continue predictable growth at scale.
That’s all for now — tweet me at @andyy if you’d like to chat more, and please do hit me up with your referrals for the Dojo!
