"When I’m in a slump, I comfort myself by saying if I believe in dinosaurs, then somewhere, they must be believing in me. And if they believe in me, then I can believe in me. Then I bust out." - Mookie Wilson
I’ve written and rewritten and scrapped and written again this blog post about 10 times (50 if you include the rewrites in my head).
Building a startup is hard. Like really freaking hard.
Building a startup that gets caught up in the crazy fundraising environment from 2 years ago and then deciding to scrap your original business and reinvent the entire business from the ground up?
At times over the last year that’s felt impossible.
Any founder who sits and tells you a story about how they knew everything, had a perfect plan, and everything is rosy is either insane or a liar.
4 years ago I entered a nocode hackathon and built a little tiny product I dubbed Commsponsor. I certainly had no idea at that time what that weekend project would evolve into. It didn’t even do well in the hackathon!
9 months ago we made a difficult decision - to wind down the business we’d been building for 3 years in search of something bigger and better.
And today, we’re finally ready to share what we’ve been working on and our vision for where we’re headed.
But first - we need to acknowledge that the way we do business is broken.
Software is easier than ever to copy. It feels like every product category is becoming a suite of the same features.
Go-to-market teams have fallen into a rut of using aggressive cold outbound and unchecked automation to increase the number of new relationships, regardless of value.
Our relationship with social media and peers has gotten vast, but at the cost of depth.
All around us, we’re rushing along, automating as much as we can, replacing people with AI and process, removing ourselves from the very thing that creates value—our ability to connect with other people and create trust.
The people in our network—the authentic relationships we’ve built—make all the difference. It’s these connections that refer us to our next job, open the door to our next sale, become our mentors, or even our lifelong friends.
But we’re not always good at this. We forget to stay in touch with important people. We forget things. We struggle to make new valuable connections. We expect to close deals by just hammering on the buyers door a littler harder or a little faster.
And that’s why we’re building tools to help you unlock the value in building a strong and engaged network.
And so we come to Commsor’s next chapter - the House of Authentic Connections.
Right now the house has two rooms - Bronto and Matcha.
🦕 Bronto is a modern professional rolodex for individuals, helping them manage and stay on top of their networks.
But it’s also a go-to-network platform for companies that enables them to manage their networks of investors, advisors, creators, champions and more, all while unlocking warmer paths to revenue.
🍵 Matcha is where modern professionals create intentional serendipity through 1:1 connections and communities. It’s a place for depth and quality of connection, not breadth of social media.
But we’re creating more than just products. We’re setting out to build a movement to bring authenticity and connection back to how we do business, grow as professionals, and carve our way through the crazy thing we call life.
As a great mentor once told me - if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together.
This is just the beginning of this new chapter. We’re at basecamp and it’s time to climb the mountain in front of us.
Thank you to every team member, both past and present who’ve worked tirelessly to make Commsor the company it is today.
And thank you to everyone who has been apart of the journey. Whether you join as a customer, a teammate, or just as a fan of dinos on LinkedIn, come on in. There’s room for everyone..
Welcome to the House of Authentic Connections.
