Announcing Rally — The People Tool for Startup Founders
Founded by repeat YC alums who raised over $180M in funding
Summary / TLDR
Rally by Socap.ai is a new community/network tool for startup founders
It consists of a forum and a chat + LLMs-based search over forum archives and member profiles
You can use it to get intros to potential customers/investors/hires, get advice, solve problems, sell & buy stuff, etc. — all through other founders
We think it’ll work because of highly-vetted members, self-selection by our thesis, and thorough moderation
The overall aim is to build a “people tool” that would help founders solve their problems through other founders who happen to have what they need, be it information, knowledge, or resources
Rally costs $49/month with a refund if you don’t find it useful
To join, apply here and we’ll be in touch within 24h. Join the Rally!
Contents
Summary / TLDR
The Insight: Many Problems Are “People Problems”
People Problems Need People Tools; A Brief Review of Such Tools I’ve Used Over The Years
YC’s Bookface as The Best People Tool I’ve Seen
Enter Rally: What It Is, How It Works, and What Makes It Special
The Dream: Build The People Tool For Startup Founders
CTA: Join The Rally!
The Insight: Many Problems Are “People Problems”
Some time ago, we realized that many problems we deal with as founders daily are “people problems.”
Not in a sense that they concern other people (e.g., hiring, firing, leading), but in a sense that we can solve them 10-100x faster & better through some other person who has what we don’t, be it information, knowledge, or resources.
For example:
Apart from humility, solving such problems via other people requires, well.. people. And that’s exactly what we did not have in mid 2010s as first-time, early-stage founders, operating from the land of nowhere called Minsk, Belarus. (We love Minsk and Belarus but gosh ~95/100 people we speak to in London / in the US have no idea that Belarus exists.)
I mean, we did have some network when we were just starting out, yes. But there’s network and there’s network, and we clearly did not have the latter. Hence our “bash-my-head-against-the-wall” approach and slow progress as founders in those early years.
People Problems Need People Tools; A Brief Review of Such Tools I’ve Used Over The Years
Since ~2013, we’ve tried every tool under the sun to solve this problem.
From our brains to Contacts app to personal CRMs in Excel/Google Sheets/Notion/Coda/whatever is the thing of the day — all the way to LinkedIn and private founder groups on WhatsApp and Telegram and to startups like Clay.
What we’ve learned is that you can solve your people problems in two ways:
via people you already know, and
via people you don’t yet know but who, for some reason, would be willing to help.
#1 Our brains, Contacts app, and personal CRMs of all kinds attempt to do the former.
They all have their pros and cons.
The brain is the easiest one to use, but also the most fragile. Anybody who ever misplaced something or came to a room and forgot why knows this. Our brains aren’t built to memorize long lists of facts re who can help with what, just like they aren’t built to multiply 8-digit numbers.
Personal CRMs of all kinds solve that problem but create two more: writing things down and updating them. Anybody who tried keeping a personal CRM knows that updating it is a pain in the ass almost impossible once you know >20 people. (This, we think, is why the personal CRM industry failed. See this Twitter thread for more details.) And, of course, just like with your brain, you’re limited to who you already know.
#2 Social networks, forums, and groups attempt to do the latter.
Their trouble is the inverse correlation between engagement and scale and that most important info is always left private for various reasons. We’d never write on our LinkedIn profile that “I know such and such billionaire and can introduce you but only if I like you and you’re good enough.” That’s just not how it works in our society.
Back then, we mostly gave up and just went with the brain.
But fate is a funny thing. Shortly after we found our (separate!) ways into YC and stumbled upon the best way to solve people problems we’ve ever seen.
YC’s Bookface as The Best People Tool I’ve Seen
Few people outside YC know this, but YC has a private forum for founders called Bookface.
On the outset, it’s no different from Indie Hackers or Pioneer or YC Startup School founders forums that you may have seen. There are profiles, channels, and posts.
What makes the forum work, we think, is the YC network. Specifically —
Posts are generally thoughtful, helpful, and insightful; because YC founders generally are. Ditto for comments.
Posts are quite rare because founders value each other’s time and attention. You don’t post on Bookface a random idea or a shower thought that you had. You just don’t.
Because of the batches, there’s new people showing up every few months. This keeps the forum “alive,” so to speak. Like the branches and leaves on a tree, some people fall off, some dry up, and some new ones emerge.
Because YC is almost 15 years old now, the forum has voluminous, searchable archives that you can dig through for every imaginable startup-related topic or question.
Simply put, YC founders trust and respect each other, and that is the reason why they’re willing to spend time & energy helping other YC founders, be it by writing thoughtful and helpful posts & comments, making intros, helping solve a problem, or even funding each other’s ventures.
What do founders generally use it for?
getting warm intros for fundraising, hiring, sales, partnerships, PR, acquisitions, legal advice, urgent problem-solving, etc.; to virtually anybody in the world from Mark Cuban to criminal defense attorney to Apple Vision Pro Team to professional poker players
sharing valuable things and information, be they great candidates before they’re officially looking for a job, office space for lease/sale or simply to work from when visiting city X, or free grant money
getting individualized, comprehensive advice on every imaginable topic and problem, from when to hire first marketer/PM/etc., to how to engage Stanford students when you’re building a product for them, to whether to build a self-hosted version of the product or not, to how to get featured on TechCrunch
Here are a few concrete examples —
But, unfortunately, Bookface has changed, and imho not for the better.
As one YC founder put it (we’ll paraphrase), “It’s become more of a social media instead of a social network.” The posts and comments are a lot more promotional these days than they were five years ago. Worse than that, many posts and comments are framed as helpful but in truth are designed to shill the founder’s product. There are no followers yet, but the overall vibe isn’t what it once was.
The tech side of things generally stagnated. There have been some minor design improvements, yes, but little else. It blows our mind that in 2024 there’s still no really good, Dexa-like vector search implemented over Bookface. There’s a pretty good one by Trieve for YC Startup Directory, but it doesn’t work for the forum or the founder profiles. Most founder profiles on Bookface are incomplete, so you can’t really search for somebody who worked at a particular company or has particular skills.
All and all, it feels like Bookface has gotten stuck. That, plus the obvious fact that it’s not and never will be available to non-YC founders, have prompted us to get back to the drawing board and ask, what would a great people tool look like?
Enter Rally: What It Is, How It Works, and What Makes It Special
Rally is essentially Bookface for non-YC founders but with better software and moderation.
Physically, it’s five things:
A network of highly-vetted founders (many are YC alums)
Bookface-like forum for structured discussion (copying what works!)
WhatsApp chat for quick/urgent questions
Searchable forum archives
Searchable and detailed founder profiles
Here are some screenshots —
What can you do with it?
Get warm intros for fundraising, sales, hiring, etc.
Get individualized, comprehensive advice on all things startups, from cloud providers to burnout to PMF
Solve problems of all kinds, from your app being banned at the app store to getting a $XXk cloud provider bill
(Optional) Talk to other early-stage founders once a week during our office hours
What makes Rally special is self-selection by thesis. Like YC, we’re also looking for ambitious founders working on interesting things that grow very fast. But, in addition to that, we only recruit founders who believe what we believe: that many problems they face daily can in fact be solved through other founders, that there are no great tools that help with this, and that it’d be cool to have one.
We also do advanced moderation by admins and members, engage in certain member activation rituals (not far from those in the social network movie!), stick to use-it-or-lose principle (where we kick members that have been inactive for some time), and do so much more. But we won’t go into those details here. When you’re buying a car, you don’t have to learn the nitty-gritty details re how it’s made and how it works. You can just drive it. Similarly, when you’re buying Rally, you can just use it, and it just works.
Speaking of which: Rally is a paid tool. In part because we want to make money from it, but also because people value what they pay for a lot more than what they get for free. And we need founders to value Rally for it to work. It costs $49 a month, without a trial, but with a refund if you don’t find it useful. You should give it a go!
The Dream: Build The People Tool For Startup Founders
There’s a whole lot of challenges in front of us.
The first one is the famous chicken-n-egg problem with networks. Will our thesis and a handful of quality founder friends be enough to attract early adopters and to make the network useful to them? How soon can we reach the critical mass? Will that be soon enough?
The second is figuring out how to smoothly transition from team (1-10s) to community (100s-1000s) to a society-sized network (10,000s+). They seem to require different governance structures and different tools to run them, as this HN comment aptly describes.
Then there’s the question of distribution. And many more!
But we’re optimistic. We’ve seen the value of great people tools, and we know they must exist. Kinda like people in the early 2010s knew that somebody was going to build an Uber-like service, but didn’t know who or how. This is what keeps us going; the dream that one day we’ll have a tool that’ll make our founder lives a lot easier. And we won’t stop until we get there.
CTA: Join The Rally!
If after reading (or scrolling) this post you’re interested (or even merely curious) about Rally, we invite you to give it a shot!
Apply here, and we’ll be in touch within 24h. Our process consists of an application and a 10-minute Zoom interview. We’re planning to accept the first 30 founders in Oct-Nov to get things going, and then start onboarding more folks in batches.
Join The Rally!
P.s. Why Rally and not some other name?
Seemed fitting :)