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  • 🌊 Meet the CoFounders of Surf: a startup with 0% enterprise churn over the last 2.5 years

🌊 Meet the CoFounders of Surf: a startup with 0% enterprise churn over the last 2.5 years

This deep dive will make you wanna meet them

Author

Joel Hansen
June 04, 2024

Hey, this is Young Genius: the newsletter that interviews young, high-signal founders before they’re $100M+ CEOs rolling their eyes at your LinkedIn invite.

Here’s our menu for today

  • Learn about a startup named Surf

  • If you wanna team up with them, request to meet them at the end.

Now, let’s get to the goods.

Meet Aanikh & Swish, Cofounders of Surf:

Swish and Aanikh left high-paying job offers to go build Surf: a software platform empowering brands to access compliant consumer data.

The big juicy problem they’re solving? Fundamentally consumers have been shut out of the value creation their data has provided to larger companies since the dawn of the internet.

Aanikh and Swish are both extremely passionate about creating a symbiotic relationship between consumer data and enterprises in a way where both feel valued.

🎉 Q: 3 Fun Facts you can’t learn from their LinkedIn?

  • 🤿 Both of them are advanced open-water divers

  • 🏀 Swish/Aanikh won Toronto's BWT league in 2020

  • 💪 They’re the best founder Call of Duty duo in North America

That open-water diving fun fact is too on-brand for us not to love it.

Let’s get to some more questions…

Q: 🥁 Your 2-3 sentence aha moment/light bulb for why you're building Surf?

Aanikh told us:

“The world is rapidly shifting when it comes to consumer privacy. Laws like GDPR, CCPA, and Castle are just the tip of the iceberg. Enterprises need support when it comes to accessing data, and consumers need a trusted partner which provides transparency into the process.”

Q: 🥁 Any unique story of how you landed your first 1,000 users?

“Our first 1,000 users we got from being Product Hunt's product of the day during our beta launch. Early on we were battling "BMW Bikes" (an app from india that showed what typical engineering salaries could afford in BMW bikes). We passed them a few hours in but it was crazy to see how popular it was to start.” - Swish

📈 What #1 metric do their investors love?

This one shocked us:

Aanikh told us: “we’ve had 0% enterprise churn over the last two and a half years.”

Q: ☕️ Dream Coffee Meeting?

"Any executives or cofounders from the OpenAI team”

Sam Altman, if you’re reading this, give us a holler and we’ll intro you.

💼 Q: What top levers have you used to grow your business?

“Setting up a customer advisory council was an amazing way to get direct access with our biggest enterprise customers and have them advocate for us with their peer.” - Aanikh

🔑 Q: 1-2 traits that keep your team ahead of the competition?

“Constant feedback loops (products, sales, marketing) we are relentless when it comes to analyzing our data and using it to improve” - Swish

💰 Q: 1-2 strategies will take your business from your current revenue to 1 million or 10 million in revenue?

- Better inbound lead generation to help create better top of funnel quantity.

- Solving deeper pain points for enterprises in the privacy realm.

🤝 Q: What’s been the most painful service area you’ve had to work through during the last 1-2 years of scaling?

“Legal for sure - our partners at Osler are amazing but it has been a lot of learning in many different areas for us as first-time founders.” - Aanikh

Wanna learn more about what Swish and Aanikh are building? Hit the button below to request an intro via email and we’ll connect you for a chat.

Until next time,

✌️ The Young Genius Fam