Navigating UX Research with James Friscia: The CoNote Journey

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to our podcast, From the Ground Up, where we interview startup founders exploring their journeys, their success, challenges, and lessons learned. We hope you be inspired in discovering what it takes to build a thriving startup. I'm your host, Jake Aaron Villarreal. Excited to have with us today James Friscia, co-founder and CEO of CoNote. James, welcome to the show.

James Friscia: Thanks so much, Jake. Happy to be here.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Well, before we dive in, let me give you a little background of James. James uh is building CoNote, an AI platform for collaborative research, enabling researchers, designers and product builders to move easily from data to action. Before founding CoNote, James spent over 15 years launching, scaling, and advising for digital products. James, you got a lot going on. Uh before we uh talk about your startup, where are you joining us from today?

James Friscia: I'm in San Diego today. That's my home base, personal and professional.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. I went to San Diego State. Know San Diego very, very well. It's a beautiful town. Not too far for... from that today. Um are you originally from there?

James Friscia: I'm from Long Island, New York, so have, have made my way circuitously to San Diego. I actually, from Long Island I've lived in Boston and New Jersey, but then a while abroad as well: England, Spain, and the United Arab Emirates mostly, before making it back to the States and San Diego... Los Angeles, and then San Diego.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's, that's great. Now I'm a big traveler too. I've been around uh quite a bit, multiple countries. What uh what's the, the travel for? Was it for work, was it just personal interest, what uh, what took you on that track?

James Friscia: A lot of that time I spent abroad was either part of a contract project or my full-time employment. I was a strategy consultant for a while, both for a large firm and for myself, and some of those projects took me to those places. And I love truly immersing myself in a new culture and, and learning the language. It's, it's good lessons for everything right? Going into a new industry, a new company, a new country, it's, it's pretty similar. You got to figure out the vibe and figure out where you can fit in.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, no doubt. Well you know, when I was going to school in San Diego uh I ended up doing a semester abroad in Sevilla, Spain, which was incredible, life changing. And then ended up uh, after I left Oracle, did a world travel, went around the world and took a year off. And it was great just to you know see different countries, different cultures, experience the foods, the people, the language. Hopefully walk away with a different worldview, which uh happened to me, I'm sure happened to you, and happens to a lot of us that go outside. There's a lot going on in terms of international business too um, which I think it's easy not to, to lock into if you just work in the US or work in whatever country you're at. Um, for you, what, what was it that really, if you kind of look back at your career, kind of drove you to, or become, or help shape you into becoming an entrepreneur?

James Friscia: Looking back, for me I believe it was always in me. Why is that? I believe it's because I like building things and seeing the effect that I have pretty quickly. I'm an impatient person if I'm honest. And so starting my career in consulting was amazing for training. I didn't frankly know what I wanted to do out of undergrad. You get an education like dog years, seven years of training in one year, and so that was fantastic. And there you don't always get to see the effects of your efforts. I went outside of that, or or I went in-house to some companies and there you get to have an effect. I worked for, for example, Activision Blizzard working on some big video games that a lot of people have played. So you get to feel like you contributed to something real that got out into the world. I think for myself though, you're still part of a large organization which has many pros and, and many cons. And for me, I think it's that being able to set a vision yourself and see that vision through, from vision to an execution plan, to you actually have to walk the walk, right? You have to do it and it's all on yourself. And that, that is both fantastic in many ways and, and tough in many ways. But that's who I feel that I am.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, really cool. Um, if you look back prior to working for big companies like Activision, and I think it was Guitar Hero that you helped re-relaunch and really touches millions of people, that there is some level of gratification I'm sure knowing that what you created or helped support is being used. Um prior to technology um did you have any other type of work that you did um as a kid, as as you kind of grew into uh you know getting into more of your adult life that you look back and was really helpful of just understanding you know the commitment to work and and just doing stuff productively?

James Friscia: That's a great question. As I think about it as a kid, my first job paid under the table and, and things like this, is teaching tennis. You know, with little kids, assisting with peewee tennis, and then came to teach tennis. And then as a kid as well, let's say high school, I was a tutor a lot. And even I've [been] doing tutoring in my life past then. And then I've always looked for ways to be a mentor or you know help students who are going to university or things like that. I love teaching. I think it helps in my journey as well, because you need to figure out how to connect with someone and not explain something the way that makes sense to you, that's easy right. It's explaining something in the way that it makes sense to somebody else. So I'd like to think that perhaps some of those learnings or, or some of those personality traits help as I try and connect with [a] customer or vendors or partners or employees or folks like this.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Uh you know, when you look at just in general communication, uh teaching is... if you look at sales for example, it's really not about selling something to somebody. It's about educating them on what it is that it can benefit them, for doing, for using. And so I always believe that you know teaching at the heart of it is so instrumental in building a company because you're educating everyone along the process. Whether it's a product you're building or employees you're influencing to go out and sell your product or service. It's so incredibly important and I think it's overlooked. The best, you know, I, I come from a sales background, the best salespeople that I always worked with... and this is at big companies like Oracle... were, you know, backgrounds oftentimes were in education, which was surprising to me at the time. But looking back it's, you know, if you can simplify what it is you're building or creating or delivering at the, at the simplest level, and they can understand it, you know, you can not sell them but get them to buy into what you're doing. So really cool to hear that.

Um as a company, we're going to dive into your, your company today, CoNote. Um you know, walk us through what inspired you to actually create CoNote. What's the, what's the problem it's solving?

James Friscia: For us, for me in my career, especially building and scaling products, there's a whole host of functions and people that contribute to success that I've seen right. Great developers, great designers, all of those absolutely critical. Where I believe, where I know it starts is in the research phase, the strategy setting phase, the validation right. Before you actually go and code and test and deploy something and get it out in the world to try and grow it, you need to have a vision and a way of validating that vision. And that's where the, the research side comes in.

In a very discrete sense, I'll say I was working on a big project as the Lead Product Strategist for a big company. Part of a big thing, we were bringing in six folks usually every two weeks to talk to them. Discovery interviews. Discovery and validation interviews as we're taking on this, this pretty ambitious project, right? And part of the key was hearing the voice of folks so that we knew what we were designing. The reason it took two weeks [for] each of these cycles was not because it took that long to recruit them or to talk to them. That was actually pretty easy because they were just regular consumers. It's not like we were talking to specific engineers or something like that. So the rest of those 12 days was pulling out the insights. What do these people say? What is the common thread? What does this mean for what we should be doing? And then agreeing on that, and then moving forward and doing our next round as we fed into the, the agile development cycle of design and development.

So for us, this, the kernel of CoNote is exactly that, right? Is how do we speed up and, and pull out the bias from and make it easier to collaborate when we're doing this first research part of a cycle? How do we truly understand users better and faster without sacrificing [the] quality of those insights?

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well, research is part of many companies. Uh you think of like pharmaceutical, and it's easy to say "okay, well you got to first research the products you're developing, the drugs you're going to bring to market." But walk us through the research aspect for the listeners if you haven't built a product or you haven't yet built a company like, how, how important is the research? And what specifically does your product do to shorten the cycle of that research?

James Friscia: So research can mean many things, absolutely. I think you're, you're touching on that, Jake. The specific type of research that we work on today, that CoNote focuses on today is qualitative research. Usually in the form of let's say a user interview, a customer interview, a focus group, something like this. So you're... imagine you're a company, whether you're someone who's in automotive or you're building an app or anything like this. Before you know what you're building, or while you're building frankly, because so many products these days are live services right, or continual updates, you need to have a pulse on your users and your customers all the time. But especially before you're launching something new, whether from scratch or an update. And so that part of the process is where we're most focused right. "I want to build a new app. I think it should do the following things A, B, C. How do I figure out whether that's right? How do I design to that? What do people actually want?"

I worked on a financial wellness app, for example. What does "financial wellness" mean to people? We thought we knew what it meant. Does it mean budgeting? Does it mean that I check in with how I'm feeling about my money? What, what does that mean? And the way to get to things like that is the research. In video games right, does a certain feature or mode... should it be like this or should it be like that? When can the paywall come in, when can't it? When would it turn people off? How do we get people onboarded into a game? What do they need to see? What's most engaging? What are they looking for? These are all the types of research questions that... I'm not going to say you can't succeed if you don't figure out a way to answer them, come up with good theories, but you're going to have a really hard time if you don't get the pulse of the person who's intending to be using the product or even strategy that you're forming. And so that's, that's where we come in.

And then specifically what CoNote does today is we take any user interview, focus group, things like that, we ingest it, we transcribe it for you. We suggest what you should do with it. We suggest action items right. "You might want to think about doing A, B and C based on what the 10 people you talked to said." We theme it and code it for you so you can see "these are the general themes across." And then really critically, I believe our AI does a great job getting you a far way there, but we wanted space for that magic to happen of the human interpretation as well. Because sometimes it doesn't mean if all 10 people didn't say something, it's not important. Maybe there's a kernel that one person said that's really critical to what you're trying to do. So we try and make it easy for the person using CoNote to go and highlight and pull those things into their report. And then I'll say lastly, on the collaborative angle, it's not just the individual, one person, me using CoNote saying, "Oh, let me figure out what these, what my interviewees said to me." It's "I might have to convince you, Jake, my teammate, what this means before we decide together what we do." So we have some collaboration and report functions as well, bringing everyone along in this process, getting to action faster.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Cool. I want to go back to something you mentioned. You brought up AI, which we know is pervasive in really every aspect of technology today and seems to be growing in every industry. From your perspective, how can AI augment research and product building?

James Friscia: Great question. I believe that AI does best today as a co-pilot to a researcher. So what do I mean by that? I mean if a researcher and AI can walk hand in hand throughout a process, I believe you're going to get the best results. You read about how really strict academics or really super professional user researchers do things uh for certain instances, and you have multiple people interpreting right. Because you want different perspectives of, of what actually got said, what is the meaning in this source material. I believe AI should be one of those right. Walk along with AI. Because you have your human biases that you're bringing. Sometimes that helps with the insights, sometimes it hurts, leads you askew. AI can be a check. AI can give you a head start. It may suggest something that you didn't see. It may suggest something that you would have seen if you had spent five more hours, but maybe now you don't have to. So it's about I believe increasing cycles, efficiency first of all, and then you know, decreasing bias and increasing the insight that can be pulled out, second. This kind of speed and quality.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. You talked about I believe it was qualitative research. Is that correct?

James Friscia: Right. Qualitative or quantitative? Qualitative, yeah.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Okay, got it. So qualitative research, so that's one area focus. Do you see your platform um, you know, being used in multiple areas of research, is it specific to that? Um, for, for the audience that's listening that might be running you know, a company that's in one area of technology and one that's maybe a product focused hard good company. Like where, how, how, how much does your product, you know, overlay on top of uh different industries?

James Friscia: I think there's perhaps two parts to that question, if I understood correctly. The way I see it is there's the industry and the specialty of what you're researching: who you are, what your problem is. And then there's the method of let's say "research," broadly defined, that you might apply. And there's a whole host of methods. And certain methods work better for certain questions and certain industries at certain times. Um so I'll take a far end of the spectrum which is not CoNote at all: you're a, you're a pharmaceutical company and you're doing drug trials. There are very specific ways, numbers of people who you need to [test] with certain placebos and so forth. I, I'm not an expert in the space right, but that's, that's more of a quantitative study that you do, quantitative research right. This many people in this group, this many people in that group, we compare them. It's relatively easy to do certain types of quantitative research. I don't want to take away from Quant people. That's, that's not... if you design a study well, to interpret the results... it might just be the results of a survey, you can get that very algorithmically.

But for anybody in really any industry that needs to do qualitative research... a lot of times it's referred to as discovery or validation, where you're trying to extract from a human "how do you feel about something? What do you think about something? What you might want something to look like?" That's what I would say is this realm of qualitative research. And today there's no unbiased, fast way to pull that out. It's, we're humans talking to each other, there's so much right, to extract meaning. That's what we're trying to focus on. How can AI extract meaning from a human-to-human interaction? So when you think about who that could be useful to, it's anybody who has to conduct that type of work. So I would say if you're someone who's going to do a focus group, absolutely. You're humans talking to humans. Maybe humans in a room. It's tough to get all the voices. Let AI, let CoNote help you with that. You're doing lots of user interviews, you want to know what's across it? That's what we've made it most for.

I will give a quick plug of, we have people outside of that core focus who just use it to, to interpret other things or to pull things out. For example, a marketing message. They might upload Match Relevant's podcasts, 50 episodes. You might use this and extract "Hey, I'm actually looking for quotes where entrepreneurs are talking about their background, or people who like teaching," or whatever it is. You could re-listen to everything, you could rescan all transcripts. You could do that yourself. There are ways to do it today. It's pretty time consuming though. Something like CoNote could find you that needle in a haystack a little bit faster, and then allow you to share that with others faster.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Yeah, I mean look, I think there's probably an opportunity in podcasting, because I, we have, you know, oftentimes guests will come on and say "you know, I listened to your... I read, I read through your, your transcripts to get a better feel for the podcast." And you know, which one, we have 140 you know episodes now. Well I, you know, I just, I logged in, I you know went to OpenAI and you know I logged in, I added this you know little plugin, and you know I was able to kind of quick assess like your focus and kind of the messaging and the questions. And you know, they come in, they're very prepared. So I know that there is a lot of use for AI um specifically that's like, you could say one aspect to research. You're researching what that podcast and those transcripts are alike, so your understanding is a good, is a good fit for me as a guest. Um and there's also you know other areas. But that's really cool. So if you look at the market, you know, you put your thesis together, you've built and you're building this product and this platform, how big of a market is it for CoNote?

James Friscia: There's a, there is a whole host of people today, many, many people who call themselves User Researchers, UX Researchers. That is their main job to do this type of qualitative research, among other things. So certainly all of those people are our market. What I have been noticing, I noticed this a few years ago before I started CoNote and I notice it more now: other functions with people with different titles, designers, product managers, sometimes even VPs of Engineering or folks like this, they are needing to conduct or participate in research themselves as well, whether that's because of resource constraints or because they're interested and want to feel closer to it. But all of these people are now starting to touch research as well. And so our market is expanding right? It's anybody who has a question that's being answered or attempted to be answered with something qualitative, some piece of media even. So all of those folks I would say are a market.

We ourselves come primarily from digital product builds: video games, apps, streaming platforms and so forth. So we understand things like that the most versus, you know, "I'm building a new computer or a new car." That being said, we have a lot of our users and customers who are in those realms because it's a similar process of discovery when you're conducting a focus group and trying to extract what people are looking for in your product.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. I want to give more credibility to your background. Uh you worked uh at Activision, you also worked at a, believe, Beachbody. Is that correct?

James Friscia: That's right. Yeah.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: And you know it's, P90X was a product that I used and a lot of the, the, the maybe the older listeners myself included probably used, which was you know, you work out, you're you know, it's a DVD or what, whatever you're using to watch it. But you took, you joined the company when they hadn't quite got yet to streaming. Is that correct?

James Friscia: Right. That is why I went to the company. So I saw a pretty similar path that games were going as Beachbody was looking to go. That's why I was very excited about that role. And I joined Activision even right on the dawn of... believe it or not... mobile gaming, which is now all over the place, ubiquitous and, and everybody has probably played a mobile game. And what were video games doing? They were going from "I ship you a disk once, that's the only disk you ever have to... I kind of want, I want to be a li-, a live platform. I want to give you updates. I want to keep you engaged. I want to sell you new packages" and so forth. And Beachbody and fitness has gone a similar direction. "I'm going to send you one P90X DVD or set of DVDs and then maybe I'll try and get you to buy something else down the road. What if instead you were a subscriber of mine and you could have your fitness gym all year long on any device you wanted?" And so that was the type of problem that really excited me. How do we move, how do we take the same people, as in people who want to work out or improve something about their fitness, and deliver it to them in a different way and meet them where they are or, or want to be?

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. And, and you look at that now, it seems like, oh that's such an easy discussion to have. And it's so normal to stream you know content, Netflix, it's everywhere from streaming movies to, to, to games to everything online. But really to be there in the forefront, you first have to understand, is there an opportunity and will the market buy into it. So I could imagine the research there was probably very deep and wide to understand if we're going to invest you know millions of dollars into building a streaming service for anything, is there a market that's going to purchase that, subscribe to it, continue to stay engaged. Uh, and so a lot of that seems like that makes sense to me. So if your background really seems like it's teed up perfectly for what you're creating now, which was taking an idea, bringing a new product to market, but making sure that you're going through all the research and the focus groups and getting insights that you know a customer would want to have in a product and then building the product so that you can be successful in scaling it up. So that to me makes a lot of sense.

But what you have today, the research and all that background stuff that has to take place to ensure you have the right product for the right market. Uh, if you could speed that up in a cost effective way, I mean why would you not want to at least try that? And so you know for, for the listeners there that might want to use your product, what's it cost them? How do you price out? What's, what's that look like if they're interested?

James Friscia: So today we have a free trial, no credit card, no commitment, anything, just your email and a password. And you can try it on a project and actually have those insights. We won't even take it away from it if you don't pay. We have several plans ranging from individual plans starting at $19 a month up to teams and, and larger companies. Anyone who's a student we'll give it special pricing for a particular project, even if it's very large. So the easiest way would be to go to www.conote.ai and just do the trial. See if it works for you, see if you're interested. And if it is, we have several plans. I guarantee we can find something to fit what you need.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Um as companies grow they have to go out, they got to raise capital. You got to build your team, find your founders, hire. Walk us through where you're at as a stage. And you're a little bit earlier than other companies. We work with a lot of YC companies, Y Combinator, a lot of Techstars companies, and they're all different levels, different ranges, different timeframes. Where, where are you at today? How, how long has the product been you know in the market? How big are you as a company?

James Friscia: We've been building for a little while. We had our first working version that the public could at least try come out in mid-July of this past year. So yeah, months, not years out in market. And then we try and iterate, taking our own medicine, listening to users: what new features? We try and add new features and improve things almost every month. If not every month, a new feature comes out or a new set of features for users. That's how long we've been there.

We've been able to do this with a pretty scrappy team. We have three co-founders. My background I would say is in product strategy, launching things like that, more the business side. We have a CTO, Nisha Aiyer, who is a badass data scientist and CTO. So she is the technical lead. And then Cameron Ryall is our Chief of Design, right. He is someone who has lived and breathed these problems, these challenges of, of designing something good based on what users want. That's the, that's the founding team. And we have a host of other people helping us conduct some of the research, customer outreach. But especially our currently our design... our uh development front and back end is our outsource partners who we work super closely with as, as if they were internal, but uh they are not our internal team yet. So how we're going to grow is as we have you know more and more things to do... as you know, when you're early, founders do multiple roles right? So we can bring in people to help do the critical things that we're doing every single day. But that's our team today.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Yeah, sounds like good setup. And in terms of you know funding and investing, you, we have a lot of listeners are also investors. Some angels, some more institutional. What uh, are you, are you in the, in the raising stage right now? Are you out there pitching? Where are you at from that perspective?

James Friscia: I'm getting ready to start pitching our seed round this month. So we're in the raising stage. We've had a little bit of money to date, but we've been mostly bootstrapped to date. So we're in the raising stage because we see our traction starting to take off. And I know that if I can add some fuel to that fire, only good things will happen for all parties involved.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, really cool. Um well, we'll leave you some time at the end to kind of walk through how investors might want to get in touch with you directly. But um, talk to me about your co-founders. So it sounds like you got a badass team, what uh, how did you find each other?

James Friscia: We worked together at a previous company. We were all different roles. Um I was actually a fractional employee at the time, but was doing things around strategy and business development, being a business lead for some large AI projects that we were selling. Nisha was the technical lead, Head of Engineering at the time I believe her title was, and Cameron was the designer. So on some pretty exciting projects, including one that won an SBIR award... the Small Business Innovation Research for the government. And I can't say exactly what it was, but a really, really awesome AI tool that ended up being deployed in the Air Force. We all worked together and worked together really closely. And so not only did we get to know each other and ensure our values were aligned, but we got to see in action how our complimentary skill sets worked well together right? A business person, a technical person, and a designer. And we crushed that project and several other things together.

And we didn't leave right away to start this. It was one of those journeys of keeping in touch and doing due diligence on certain ideas together. And when we came upon this one, it was a problem that we all felt so deeply. We had all been needing to conduct research or having some, lots of unstructured data dumped on our lap while we're trying to do other things and needing to make meaning out of it and make, take some action on it fast. And so that's, that was the germ of CoNote. It's, "man, there's got to be a way that we can do this a little bit better." And so we started building it.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Did you go through an accelerator?

James Friscia: No.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. Okay. Uh and then I guess in terms of the company, it's been around, you know, in months. We talk about that all the time in AI, that's actually pretty normal these days. You know, how many companies in the last 6 to 12 months have only been around for months? But you know, it's AI focused, they've raised, you know, millions of dollars. So it's not uncommon to have started an AI company not that long ago solving a real problem. Um what's, as you look at fundraising for 2024, but in addition to that adding functionality, what's on the roadmap for you in 2024? You've got your base product today. You're still developing it and getting you know customer feedback and making changes to it. So maybe the roadmap's already defined, but what are you really excited about as you continue to build here in the next 12 months?

James Friscia: Jake, I, I'll, I'll answer one thing first and then I'll hit that exactly. We have the first version was in July. But in true form to how I believe products should be built, we've been at it way longer than that talking to a lot of people, designing prototypes, things like this. So we, our whole journey from before we launched until, even while we're live, is one of just continual learning and continually trying to get as close to our users as, as possible. So another plug, I would love anyone to use this, test it out for a purpose, because that is our lifeblood: finding out what is useful and what could be more useful.

And then the roadmap, transitioning to that is, is essentially that part of it is defined. We have ideas of what we believe will be most useful. But we don't actually code things and release things until we've tested it and put it in front of users and heard from them that that's what they want it to look like. So I have uh... if you boxed me in, I'd tell you exactly what I want to do in this year. But I know I'm probably wrong at least about a lot of it or, or not exactly right or it needs to be refined. So our roadmap is fluid based upon what folks are telling us.

If you look at CoNote today, we give you what I believe is our crown jewel of AI, that we suggest to you is action items and a really easy way to see where those suggestions came from in the source material, and then an easy way that when you see one that resonates with you, to be able to bookmark that, save it, share it with somebody else, compile it together, right? So you can see what the AI suggested, but you yourself can go in and search and, and do this very easily. That's what we have. There will be more features like that where we're trying to be that even better co-pilot suggesting things to you and enabling you as a user to extract insight where you don't feel like AI is... it's a very boring metaphor, but I, I want to be your wheelbarrow, right? You still have to load it up. You still have to unload it on the other side, that's up, or determine what gets loaded or unloaded. But man, it's a lot easier to walk that whole path if you have a wheelbarrow than if you do it all yourself.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I like that metaphor, the wheelbarrow. Uh very cool. Well let's switch gears here. I'm going to uh ask you um some personal questions here, just three questions, pretty simple for you. Um you know, obviously you're, you've inspired your teammates and your co-founders to build what you've created. Where, where do your ideas come from? From what, where do you go physically to think big, to get ideas, to get creative?

James Friscia: A long time ago, I got suggested uh... it's not a book, it's more of a pamphlet. It's called A Technique for Producing Ideas, I believe is the title. And I think it was written in the '50s by an advertising executive who I cannot remember his name. And I ascribe to this. Coming up with something, thinking big, is not a moment. It's a process. And so for me, it's all about immersing myself in places where I can get seeds of ideas. So I love to, when I can, go to meetups and meet new people, you know, talk with folks. I love reading certain you know blogs and other things where I just essentially get dumped information about what the way the world is. I love talking with my users and just hearing what they have to say, even if it's not specifically about a feature. To me that's the seed planting stage.

And then where I go to have the big ideas is I need to let those ideas sit and then percolate. So I like staring off into the distance at the ocean. You as a Southern California person might appreciate that as well. But I love going to the Sunset Cliffs in San Diego and just staring. Loaded myself up with all these germs, then some of the big ideas come when I'm just sitting.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, it's a great place. I love that area. That's really cool. Okay, great. Um, what advice have you gotten from other founders in your journey that you think was priceless that you can share with someone? It could be one idea, it could be a few ideas.

James Friscia: The one that comes to mind first is be very diligent and concerted and thoughtful when you're assembling your team, especially your co-founders. I had a small venture many, many years back and my co-founders and I were very good friends, but it turns out we had overlapping skill sets and we had differing visions of what we wanted the future to be. And so when we assembled CoNote, what we always said to ourselves is we need to be 100% aligned on values and vision, but we actually need to be very different in the way that we think and the skills that we bring to the table. So that's a, that's an amalgamation of a variety of advice I've received from people. I feel like I'm part of the way through living that and I can say wholeheartedly that they were right, because the first time around it didn't work out the way that we're building momentum this time around.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. I love that. Um last question for you is um what do you do to stay positive in the roller coaster of the, of the journey of a, of building out a startup? There's the ups and downs, the ebbs, the flows. The great day we got that new customer, to the product's not working and you know, I'm getting a ton of push, push back on features. Like what do you do to keep the perspective?

James Friscia: For me to, to keep balanced, I exercise. I love surfing, so I get my meditation and my exercise and my immersion in nature all in one. So I think finding a way to truly unplug... even some of the good ideas come during those times when you don't think you're working. You actually are, your brain is doing something else in a different way. But for me I believe... oh sorry Jake, I lost my train of thought. But I had something good there. Maybe, maybe you could ask that again. Let me think about what I was going to say. Yeah, let me, let me...

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, let me, let me ask that again. No, no problems. What do you do to stay positive uh in the up and down journey of a startup and keep the perspective when things aren't always going great and sometimes they you know ebb and flow? What's your, what's your anchor point? What do you do to, to keep yourself and others you know thinking positively during those downturns?

James Friscia: For me, even though you have to push really hard and there are inherent stresses in what we're doing, I believe if you can't take care of your own body and your own mind, if you can't keep yourself healthy, all is for naught. You're going to start to work more poorly and it's not going to work out for you anyway. So I find balance by doing exercise in the way that I like the most. For me it's surfing.

I think this reminds me of another piece of advice that I received one time, which is: when you're going to build something, make sure it's something that the core thing, the core problem, the core challenge is something you feel deeply passionate about. In my first business I, a long time ago, the same one I referred to, I was passionate about building. I was passionate about solving things for customers, but I wasn't passionate about the core thing that it was. And then with CoNote, I feel passionate about correct strategy setting, right? Like that I'm a nerd for that, that's what I've always liked doing. How do we figure out what the right thing to do is? And so on my bad days... it's easy to be a good day when a new big customer comes in or you raise money or, or, or something that extrinsically is going to give you some motivation. But at the end of the day, I take some intrinsic motivation because I believe deeply in the issue that I'm solving and working on. So I always remind myself at the end of the day when I've had a bad day, why I'm doing what I'm doing.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Very cool. Well, James, as we wrap up here, I want to thank you for coming on and sharing your story and uh keeping us appraised of where your journey is headed. And you know, it'd be great to check in with you in 6-12 months, see where things are at. Uh you've already you know, shared your company website with us, but why don't you go ahead and share it with us again, and also where uh people could find you if they want to just connect with you directly.

James Friscia: Absolutely. We're conote.ai. C-o-n-o-t-e.ai. You can land on our homepage and a very easy click and you can trial us. 30 seconds to try it out. So extremely, extremely low effort if you want to give it a whirl. I am James@conote.ai. Please feel free to reach out, whether that's just jamming about what AI can do for research, a specific need for how you might want to use CoNote. Uh investors obviously, I would love to talk to you as well.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. But James, again, huge shout out to you for joining and to all of our listeners for listening. World's to me, to me... world's, the world to me that you've, you've taken your time to spend with us today. My name is Jake Aaron Villarreal. I'm signing off for now but can't wait to catch up with you all on the next episode. Until then, take care.  

Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that have joined to make this podcast possible. And for all the listeners for listening, it means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now. We can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care.  

This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market. And they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.  

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