TwosWrite things down

Business Network Symposium Speech

Business Network Symposium Speech

by Joe · 101 things on NewTwos

Thank you so much to the University of Tampa and Board of Fellows for the invitation and a special shoutout to Brad Salzer who initially tapped my co-founder, Parker to which Parker said “you probably want Joe”
Parker if I end up losing the room just throw up a Twos and I’ll know what you mean.
So, instead talking about my startup for the next 10 minutes, my hope is to share my story.
For me - entrepreneurship was not something I was exposed to until later in life, but the world doesn’t only need more dreamers. It needs more dreamers that do.
Back in 2014, which feels like a decade ago, I chose the finance route in college.
I always thought that a "real person job" was the only way to support myself, and make my mom proud.
Which is what I hope to dispel because entrepreneurship is a real option and I believe in everyone’s ability to be a successful if they do something they love.
Ultimately, the difference between those who can make a career out of entrepreneurship is perseverance.
So let's talk a little about how entrepreneurship chose me but then I chose it right back.
Our story begins in 1995
Just kidding - that’d be way too much info.
Our story starts in 2018, 3 months post grad, in Austin Texas.
I was called on for an opportunity to join a ‘business bootcamp' for a startup called “Trustwork”
While I had initially joined Trustwork to support their real-estate efforts - the premise of working with kids my age to start my career was exciting to me.
Trustwork had a really smart and passionate early team, including my now co-founder, Parker Klein.
Shoutout Parker
Fast forward many months and many rotations later, I found myself back on the real-estate side with the goal of getting into the private-equity division.
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For many months, I was put at C and D class apartment communities, all around Texas, expected to spend less and make more.
That included evicting non-paying residents, sleeping in cockroach infested model homes, and even letting go of staff, I was 22 years old.
Since this was all new and difficult, I would regularly reach out to Parker to vent and seek advice since he was a great listener and friend.
This lasted about 6 months until I found myself back in Austin, managing yet another community.
But I knew I wanted to do more and wanted to do it fast, so I called my Dad for advice.
He said 7 simple words that changed my life forever.
"You need to start writing things down"
And he meant that literally.
For a lot of our lives we are expected to write things down like our homework assignments or filling out forms, but rarely exposed to the benefits of something so simple, yet so powerful.
That evening I went on Amazon, bought a red and black notebook and a good pen, and started writing things down.
I started by capturing objectives I had for my life, things I needed to do, and even stand up jokes for my non-existent routine.
I quickly became an evangelist of writing things down, and ran through 5 notebooks in 4 months.
That year, I was promoted 3 times.
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Along the way, I would still regularly call Parker to catch up, whom was now working at Google and living in San Jose california.
On one of our calls, Parker reintroduced me to a passion project he worked on during nights and weekends called "Twos."
I remember Parker telling me about Twos while we were at Trustwork, but I had trouble understanding it at the time.
However, on this call he said something that clicked for me in a way that I still think was divine intervention.
He said: "I am building the best place to write things down"
And that sentence changed our lives forever.
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Once I understood Parker's vision for Twos, I wanted to help anyway I could, so we would hop on Google Meet, once a week, for 4 hours at a time to "Talk Twos."
Between bugs, design improvements, and ideas for the future, it was a naturally exciting conversation we both looked forward to and had often.
I quickly adopted a responsibility to Twos, always thinking about things that would help move it forward, becoming more ingrained with the brand, and sharing my thoughts with the baller in charge.
Then, I got an exciting call from a former colleague in southern Florida.
She said "Joe, I just joined a PE firm in Tampa and we want you to apply for the analyst role."
It was the job I had always wanted, and I was hired a few weeks later.
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On one of my Twos Talks with Parker, I told him about Tampa and it turns out his lease was ending at the same time as mine, Google was now fully remote, and we started looking for 2 bedroom apartments.
I got to my new office, excited for this new chapter, but quickly realized a lot of my attention was dedicated towards Twos, and less about excel spreadsheets.
I would transfer quotes I had captured in Twos onto my white board, and even Twos related tasks, always trying to blast through my work in order to get back to what I loved doing.
On March 19th, Parker quit his job with Google.
3 months later, I had a slightly different experience.
I was fired from my job as an analyst
While I felt extremely embarrassed and upset, I woke up the next day knowing what I wanted to do and it didn’t require filling out another job application.
That is how entrepreneurship chose me, and we got Twos work.
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Here's where things speed up and get pretty exciting.
While we had no salary and no experience running a startup, we did have an undying confidence in Twos, a ravenous community, and belief in the benefits writing things down would have on millions of people.
So we kept choosing Twos.
We added features like being able to capture things you need to-do, auto detect reminders, calendar integration, and improved search.
We took to YouTube with the goal of reaching a larger audience without breaking the bank.
One of my favorite videos (still to this day) is from two years ago that explains the value of using Twos. I’d love to share it with you now.
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We then expanded to Twitter and Instagram and took a light/humorous angle which was refreshing for the productivity and note-taking space.
The love we got from early adopters was so strong, we kept choosing Twos over a more predictable career, luckily with our parents blessing.
The charts were moving up and to the right, which meant something was working. So we kept doing it.
As Twos grew, so did our love for Tampa.
We partnered the Tampa Alzheimer's association, found our first advisor in Allen Clary, and landed our first earned media article in the St. Pete Catalyst.
But that's not all, we also live-streamed on YouTube for 22 straight hours, took to the streets, and were given the opportunity to share Twos more places than ever.
If this seems like a lot of work, it's because it was/is/and will continue to be.
That is the life of an early stage entrepreneur and why we are so lucky to be working on something we love.
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While we had started making money in September 2021 - $2 a-la-carte purchases weren't paying the bills - and they were never intended to. So we started to seek our first round of venture capital.
We sent out a monthly Twosletter that would highlight changes, traction, and plans for the future.
After 12 more months of sharing our momentum with the world (and a couple months of my mom helping me pay rent), in October of last year, we successfully raised our pre-seed funding from Tampa Bay Ventures.
We were now able to start paying ourselves to keep doing what we believed in - and it was exciting others shared our enthusiasm.
No matter how much planning we had done in preparation for our raise, figuring out what we needed to do each month was challenging.
But we would stay lean, attempt to understand every nook and cranny of our business, and get creative with how to tell more people about Twos.
8 months later and what felt like 40 TikToks we were lucky to have some amazing success on a website called "Product Hunt"
With the help of our ravenous community, we won the top product of the day, #2 product of the week, and #5 of the month which earned us our most active users in history and is still climbing today.
Last month, we took our momentum to San Francisco, where we met with excited VCs and newly found advisors from apps like Twitter and Snap.
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But our recent success will not last long and we will continue to choose late nights, a rollercoaster of emotions, and more TikToks.
Our goal is for everyone to experience the value of writing things down in a quick, easy, and organized way that is freely available and improving every single day.
If Twos sounds like it would be valuable to you and your workflow I invite you to scan the QR code on the screen, download Twos and let me know if you have any feedback on potential improvements.
Lastly, I want to speak to anyone out there who is an entrepreneur or considering entrepreneurship.
Just because something is hard or risky does not mean it is not worth attempting. Actually it's quite the contrary.
One of my favorite quotes is permanently situated on the wall of the Lowth entrepreneurship center by a lesser known fella by the name of Steve Jobs.
He said: "Half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance."
So I beg you, stay true to what you believe in, never give up, and enjoy the journey every step of the way.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a social media trend i'd like to go viral.
Parker will you take a picture of me doing an Air Twos up here?
Thank you again and happy twosday.
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