I’m Micheal Scott from GV, Ask Me Anything

@Nole the best part is undoubtedly getting multiple messages every week where someone appreciates GV and says nice things about it. Also I'm privileged to be building a consumer social app along with our awesome team. I'll never be able to work on B2B SAAS after this, lol!

The worst part is the existential threat of GV someday shutting down if we run out of money or aren't able to ever make money. We never want to put GV in that position. We believe it does plenty of good for plenty of people and our mistakes should never be the reason for it to go away :// Just a sad thought that crosses my mind some times

@JinSakaii its actually the best team I've ever worked with - I'm biased because I was so involved in assembling this squad. Super humble and curious folks.

There's 14 of us now including the 4 people who originally started GV. 7 of us are in engineering/data. 2 design/UX. The rest 5 work on product/growth things.

Just 14 people running a 24/7 social media app is wild 😯

@Bittergourd that is so kind of you!

@shpinq I used to make $220K+/year when I was in the US at Google a couple years back. But now I make a small amount just enough to live in Bangalore and eat out a few times a week via Swiggy :)

@Aragorn_urf_Maverick tbh I loved that job and living in the US. But starting something up and returning to India just made way more sense. From the time I decided I want to quit - it took me 9-10 months to actually do it. So yes I took my sweet time. But it only became clearer as every day passed.

Besides, we already had a good idea something like GV can succeed because we had launched our first community (Corporate Chat India) on Discord and it was working quite well. So I had an idea Grapevine wouldn't completely tank when we launched it. Made it easier to take the plunge :)

@BaatMaan you should ask the Distilled/Search feature this question. It'll give you a solid summary of how hundreds of users have answered 'How Grapevine should make money haha'.

TBH we don't exactly know today. But as the AI says it will have to be some combo of Jobs and Ads. Let's see. We're still long away from that x

@CuriousSaucy this was actually one of the ideas we had, but dropped cuz it'll be quite expensive

You get grapes when people like or react to something you've done on GV.

It's a count of "Hi-Fives" from real people on GV to you. Which is atleast half as valuable as money or wine :)

@Elon_Musk team's doing quite well man.

Well I'd say you are already our chief meme officer. Been seeing you here since a long time, and always look forward to read a post/meme from you :)

@CuriousSaucy we def want to stay professional. There's a lot more value in organising professional info compared to the long tail of info about the world. Which Reddit is already doing quite well. But with that said, we have LOTS MORE product that we still need to build.

On AI: We are currently working on making Distilled as good as possible. Better updates coming soon. Have you noticed Discover More? We use AI there as well to serve you other relevant posts from GV. Lastly we're also thinking on using AI to give solid salary insights. This will be coming in a few weeks.

@Django

We had already craeted an MVP in the form of a community called Corporate Chat India that we ran for 1 year before starting GV. That experience taught us two things: 1) The operational side of running a community 2) That bringing similar groups of people together to talk has value (I know it sounds obvious but it has to be experienced to believe)

Perhaps, the above helped us make tens of good design choices when designing the first version of GV. Because our community had PMF, in theory GV would also have PMF (we just didn't know at what scale).

All we needed now was to solve the cold start problem.

Twitter really helped us here. We were able to get 5-8K really good people from Twitter within 3 days that kickstarted the GV product and the wheels have been rolling since.

happy to answer any more specific questions as well.