#343: Samiur Rahman of Heyday, on Navigating Pivots, Maximizing Your Product Hunt Launch, and Ensuring High-Value Relationships with Investors

Just Go Grind

Samiur Rahman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Heyday, an AI-powered research assistant that makes knowledge workers smarter. Heyday empowers your best thinking by working in the background as an assistant for your memory, automatically saving all your content for you and resurfacing it when you need it, enabling you to stop wasting energy remembering and focus on creating.

Samiur is a software engineer capable of working across the stack (web, mobile, backend and embedded), focusing primarily on data science, algorithms and machine learning. He wants to create the next-generation of intelligent products using modern machine learning and neural networks. He’s particularly passionate about employing deep neural networks to tasks that were previously thought to be restricted to just humans.

Prior to Heyday, Samiur and his co-founder Sam DeBrule founded another company, Journal, which they eventually pivoted into their current venture.

Topics Covered by Samiur Rahman in this Episode

• Heyday: an AI-powered research assistant
• How Heyday was born from a pivot of Journal
• The challenging decision to shut down Journal and applying their learnings to building Heyday
• The process of defining their ideal customer
• Deciding to work with Sam DeBrule through multiple companies and the importance of complimentary co-founder skillsets
• Navigating go-to-market strategy and early customer acquisition
• Their experience getting Heyday featured as product of the day, week, and month on Product Hunt
• Getting ready to raise VC funding and working with Order Design
• How they approached VC fundraising
• How to get the most value out of relationships with your investors and why they love working with Kevin Thau at Spark Capital
• How they’re approaching sustainable customer acquisition at their current stage
• Finding and working with an ad agency
• Planning for their financial runway in the current market
• Samiur and Justin’s thoughts on Adam Neumann’s raise from a16z
• The big vision for Heyday

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Follow Justin Gordon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/justingordon212