Growing Tango with Dan Giovacchini

Prateek Mathur
July 30, 2024

In this episode of How I'm Building This, Prateek interviews Dan, the Co-founder of Tango, a startup that helps people create documentation more efficiently. Dan shares his journey as a founder and provides insights into building a successful startup. He discusses the importance of finding the right co-founders, the pain points Tango solves, and their growth strategies. Dan also emphasizes the need for clear hypotheses and understanding of product-market fit when scaling a business. He highlights the significance of mental health and the support system for founders.

Takeaways:

  • Finding the right co-founders is crucial for building a successful startup.
  • Understanding the pain points your product solves and having a clear hypothesis is essential for scaling a business.
  • Mental health is important for founders, and having a support system of other founders or advisors can be beneficial.
  • Experimenting with different growth strategies, such as user-generated content and short-form videos, can help drive user acquisition.
  • Balancing focus and experimentation is key when scaling a startup.

Sound Bites: 

  • "You can't bottle stuff up. You have totalk to people about it."
  • "Any successful program needs to start with a clear success criteria for your customer, for your product, and for the use case."
  • "Finding the right co-founders and building a strong support system is crucial for success as a founder."

In this episode, we cover:

00:00 Introduction and Background

03:10 Deciding on Co Founders and assigning roles

06:10 Finding investors

10:00 Understanding Pain Points and Building Tango

15:03 Post Product Hunt

18:33 How users find Tango

20:22 How UGC on TikTok got their word out further

28:10 Lessons Learned and Advice for Founders

32:03 Founder Mental Health

37:57 Growth advice for founders

Where to find Dan:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-giovacchini

Tango: https://www.tango.us

Where to find Prateek:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateekmathur

Activated Scale: https://www.activatedscale.com

For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@activatedscale.com

Prateek Mathur

Before founding Activated Scale, Prateek spent the last 20 years selling for and building sales teams at startups and public companies. He has won numerous awards and recognitions over his sales career. Over the last 5 years, he has advised a number of startups on their GTM, sales hiring etc. Prateek has intricately seen the pitfalls that startups face when scaling their business and hiring sales talent. With Activated Scale, he aims to make sales hiring easier by connecting companies with experienced US-based sales talent fractionally. Prateek is fascinated by the drive of a startup founder and loves their passion, vision and mission to reimagine our world.