When serial tech entrepreneur Candice Faktor left Wattpad in 2017, she applied some of her key learnings to the creation of Disco in 2020, a live learning platform for creators to build and scale their business all in one place. The Get Lakta team sat down with Faktor to uncover her role in Wattpad, what makes Disco different from all other learning platforms, what size of business Disco is attracting, and what they did to create a waitlist of 1,000 users before launch.
Originally from South Africa, now living in Toronto, Disco co-founder Candice Factor sees SaaS through multiple lenses. She’s a VC partner for Lobby Capital, creator of Gamechanger.co, a live learning community of over 3,000 innovators, and Board Member at unicorn Coveo, an AI SaaS platform. She was the first non-tech employee at Wattpad, as the Head of Business and Global General Manager. She helped scale the platform to 80m users. After Wattpad sold in 2021 for $660m, Faktor realized she’s passionate about learning and community, both of which are at the heart of Disco.co.
- Launched in August 2020
- Seed Round of $5m in 2021
- Waitlist of 1000
- Team of 20, primarily engineers
Faktor Finds Ideal Co-Founder, Defends 50/50 Equity Split
Faktor teamed up with Chris Sukornyk, a fellow serial entrepreneur who counts Disco as his sixth startup. Faktor gushes about the partnership with Sukornyk, noting their complementary capabilities are the key to success. When Latka presses Faktor about leveraging her expertise for majority control, she vehemently defended her 50/50 equity split with Sukornyk, describing him as an ideal co-founder with complementary expertise and, like her, is mission-driven.
How 80m Wattpad Users Inspired Faktor
Wattpad is the largest platform for creators to sell their stories. It brings something social and engaging to something we thought of as isolated—reading. Faktor learned that there was value in reading with a community on a serialized basis. Faktor explained, “What I’m bringing to Disco is what I learned at Wattpad. Learning online used to be alone. We learned (from the pandemic) that we can learn in a live environment together, and we need to bring a social element to learning.” She added that science confirms that learning is better with other people because it makes learners more accountable, offers support, and creates an environment for reflection. “Wattpad was an incredible place to learn about scaling in the creator community,” concludes Faktor.
Learning Beyond Institutional Education
Faktor sees a future in which the skills needed to compete are different from what institutional education offers. Learners will continue to look for ways to consume knowledge, while brands and knowledge creators will want to create communities around their learning. Today there aren’t any platforms that offer a single, seamless experience. Instead, it’s a stack of clunky disparate tools from content to community and chat. Disco is a single platform offering learning creators the ability to create an entire seamless brand experience in one place, from chat and live training, video, content, merchandise, and more.
$5m Seed Round in 2021, 3X Subscribed
In March 2021, Disco raised $5m in Seed round funding from a total of 19 investors, including Quiet Capital, EdTech investor GSV Ventures, and Golden Ventures. Faktor explained that as an investor herself, and after scaling Wattpad, she’s mindful of securing strategic investors to fuel growth while managing dilution. She noted that its funding had a similar dilution to typical Seed rounds of 10-20%.
Seed Round Delivered $5m from the Vision
Even when Latka pressed Faktor for numbers, she remained tight-lipped about details. Ultimately, Latka learned that, unlike most Seed Round funding, Faktor got support based on her product vision in lieu of specific metrics. Latka confirmed that the founders of Wattpad (as well as Shopify) have invested in Disco, which he noted is a testament to their belief in the business and Faktor herself.
Building a Waitlist of 1000
Faktor and her team built a waitlist of 1000 subscribers wanting access to Disco before launch. How? Inspired by Kai Elmer Sotto, author of Get Together, she leveraged her understanding of community to build a community of creators passionate about learning to help design Disco with her. She invited thought leaders like Seth Godin and Jerry Colonna to weigh in on how communities can learn together and how a future knowledge creator and learning experience would look. That network expanded, and soon Disco built a waitlist of 1000 eager prospects.
New Breed of School
Co-Founder Faktor explained that today’s learning environment features a new breed of school: micro-schools, virtual academies, boot camps, learning communities are all cropping up to meet the evolving needs of lifetime learners. With these different tools, Faktor contends that creators need different tools to build their learning empire businesses to eliminate the complexities of using a stack of tools for events, chat, marketing, and more. For instance, compared to Hopin, an event experience, Faktor explains that Disco is a complete learning community environment where creators can build recurring revenue streams vs. Hopin, which is event-focused.
Post-Interview Series A Funding of $15m
Shortly after the interview, in March 2022, Co-Founder Faktor raised another $15m in Series A funding, led by GSV Ventures. That brings the total from Seed and Series A funding to $20m. Deborah Quazzo, Managing Partner at GSV, will join the company’s board of directors.
Revenue-share Model Eliminates Barriers to Entry; SaaS subscription fees start at $85/mo
Disco is already successfully engaging the entire gamut of businesses, from solopreneurs to enterprise organizations. Solopreneurs can start with the free model that allows them to build on the platform for no cost and instead, revenue-share 10% of all platform sales with Disco. The revenue share model acts as a trial to upsell users to the paid subscription, once they build and begin to monetize their learning experience community. Pro, Team, and Enterprise plans, starting at $85/mo, offer a more traditional SaaS subscription fee that will drive MRR over time.
7-figure creators in 2022
Faktor indicated that several of their creators are on track to do 7-figures this year on the platform. She indicated that 100s of creators are on the platform but declined to give the exact breakdown by subscription type. She did, however, indicate that 30-50% of the users are on a SaaS subscription fee and that the majority had at least driven some revenue to date.
Disco Studios Upsell
Faktor shared that they quickly realized that organizations could use professional services support to help brands, organizations, and thought leaders build their learning communities when building the platform. Disco Studios acts as a professional services agency to fill this need.
Expecting to hit $1m in 2022
With 1000 waitlisted creators starting to fill the platform, plus enterprise-level organizations like Makerpad (Zapier’s no-code learning school) and Dribble University using Disco as their learning community OS, Co-Founder Faktor expects to hit $1m in revenue this year comfortably.
Lakta’s Fast Five with Disco Co-Founder Candice Faktor
Co-founder Candice Faktor indicated that her favorite book is Get Together by Kai Elmer Sotto. Her CEO to watch is Amy Errett, CEO at Madison Reed and partner at True Ventures. Candice indicates she has a lot of respect for Amy and how she’s building iconic brands. Candice’s favorite tool is Slack, noting that as an all-remote team (her Co-Founder is in Costa Rica, while she’s in Toronto), it’s their essential tool. She quipped that her team felt the immediate pain when Slack went down recently. Candice does proudly get at least 8 hours of sleep per night. She added, “I believe deeply in the importance of sleep.” She is married with two children, 9 and 12. The family also includes a puppy, she added. Candice is 44 and wishes at 20 she could have told herself, “Do not be afraid to fail. I used to be a perfectionist, and perfectionism doesn’t get you where you need to go.”
