After his startup got acquired, this Atlanta entrepreneur is building something new to help other founders grow their ideas
Talks started back in January of this year to find a suitable buyer for Atlanta-based Backspace, a community-building and monetization platform for digital creators. Over the last two years the young startup had gained significant traction through ProductHunt, a popular online community platform for early-stage ideas, and proved some big naysayers wrong as it scaled and brought on outside investors.
Last week the team announced a major milestone in the life of the company, saying it had been acquired by Florida-based venture capital firm Meyer Visions.
CEO and founder Faiz Imran has wasted no time getting his next startup venture off the ground. Following the acquisition announcement, Imran has gone public with the news of his latest venture, Vibely.
Vibely is something deeply personal to Imran, a serial entrepreneur. He told Hypepotamus he was burnt out from the process of scaling and fundraising for Backspace. Burnout is a common – though often ignored – part of the startup world. Entrepreneurship can be isolating and exhausting, as people work to find product-market fit, pitch, fundraise, and hire.
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As an entrepreneurial mental health company, Vibely wants to change that narrative for other founders. Vibely connects entrepreneurs through weekly calls to help them stay motivated, network, hit their goals, and stay accountable each week.
Imran wanted to bring Vibely to life because he realized there was something missing in the mental health space. Specifically, nothing was curated to the realities of those deep in the entrepreneurial scene.
“Founders don’t have a place to share, vent, or talk. Traditional mental health [platforms] don't work for founders…a lot of [them] will help you process and understand things…but [a therapist's] goal is to make you feel comfortable and feel heard and understood,” Imran told Hypepotamus.
What founders need is not just accountability, but also a place to “open up and be vulnerable” and get actionable steps forward, something Imran said is built into the Vibely experience.
Users are paired with other entrepreneurs and a professional coach for weekly video sessions. Then throughout the week, Vibely sends out text updates to help entrepreneurs stay on track with their set goals.
Unlike previous ventures where he hired designers and developer teams to bring a startup vision to life, Imran said he started piecing Vibely together with a suite of no-code tools and talking directly to founders who would benefit from such a platform. After working with its first group of founders, the team is currently in the midst of raising its seed round.
Imran said he is also looking at partnership models to help scale Vibely so that entrepreneurial centers or service providers can use the platform as a member perk down the road.
On top of adding new users, Imran said the Vibely team is focused on building out new content, webinars, events, and onboarding new coaches to make the platform more valuable to more customers.
Joining Imran is Vin Infante, a licensed psychotherapist and now Vibely’s Chief Product Officer. Infante was an angel investor and advisor to Backspace as it scaled.
