Coming back to Twitter for a moment to clear up a few things about @withfwd that seems to be skewing the view of what we're doing. Investors assume we aren't scalable, which means i've done a poor job communicating what we are. Let me clear that up.

1. We are not a community.

I set off to solve a problem over two years ago. After my 6th YC rejection with a $15,000+ MRR company, I decided to explore why this was the case. I did so with a podcast. I interviewed founders. I learned from them. I took mental notes. I pattern matched.

Since I started the podcast, 58 companies have raised more venture capital. At the same time, many companies that should have raised capital couldn't. Even with more traction. A better team. More focus. But the investors were not interested in them. This is a strange phenomenon.

So about a year ago, I decided to build a product to heIp these companies that had great traction communicate to investors that they were a great investment. I called it Growthmeter; crunchbase for pre-seed startups. And it worked. Founders came, they put in their data, etc.

Investors even signed up! This was beautiful. i thought I had it figured out. I solved it! Until i realized that I needed this to make money. When I started asking for money on both sides, there was major apprehension. I was told "this is an equity game, kid".

I couldn't get any meaningful revenue, and I had a full time job at the time. I couldn't focus on Growthmeter if it wasn't brining in revenue. It was taking away from work. So i let it go. And this hope of building a filtering tool in the short term.

Fast forward a few months, COVID is wrecking the world and is causing total chaos. This was a very prime time to start a company. There was a lot of transition happening in my work, and I thought this was a great time to jump and work on this filtering problem again.

Because I left Prenda without any other plans, I needed to get to revenue immediately. You all know the story. I hustled and created Forward Thinking City just so i could eat. It was the first thing that I could think of that would make money. So yes, I STARTED with community.

Through the time of working on it, I was calculating how to make a business model work where someone pays for a product that helps people cut through noise. I actually never wanted to build a community. I wanted to solve a problem. The same problem i've been working on for 2 yrs.

The problem is that investors don't know how to filter founders by merit. They only know how to filter by credential. And this is leaving everyone billions of dollars on the table. LP, investors, and founders. So I have set out to solve THAT problem.

Community is ONE way I could solve that problem. But it's not the way that i've identified is the most effective way to solve it. But I realize since i've been talking about FTC and virtual cities for like 4 months, most people probably don't realize this is what i'm doing.

Seedscout was my next effort to solve this problem and charge investors directly. I thought I had good data, and thought I could sell this data to VCs. Turns out, VCs think their data is the best data out there. Every VC thinks this, which is kinda funny.

I learned that VCs won't pay for data. 0% chance that this was going to happen. So I looked for another model that supports meaningful revenue while solving this problem. When @LumaHQ announced their membership model, the light shined. I had the answer. @withfwd was born.

FWD has the business model that support a solution to solve the problem. Community is not that business model. Neither is network. I understand why you may have thought that before reading this, but now you know.