Even great startups sometimes need to pivot (feat. Francisco Cornejo of Theo) | E2214

The lesson here is fairly obvious. Running experiments consistently can lead to a founder learning about a new opportunity. This is Ray Crockett, 55 years old, is a traveling salesman. I tell that story because it's never too late. Where did the idea to run this experiment come from? Can you remember the moment in time? Was it somebody on the team? Was it you? Who had this idea to include prayer? I guess there was always the relationship between prayer and sleep. Like, sleep is universal and prayer was present in most of our family's routines. We are, as founders, also deeply, spiritual, I would say, deeply Christian. And we thought, yes. This is something we would use. Why don't we run this experiment? Let's launch some prayer and bible stories on a storybook. We launched the bible stories, like, in 2024. But the the data, the insight really came about by the 2024 when we realized, hey. Something interesting is happening happening with people who consume these stories. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret turns feedback noise into customer intelligence so your team knows exactly what to fix and build next. Head to interpret.com/twist to book a demo and see it in action. Sentry. Your team should be focused on shipping features, not chasing down bugs. New users get three months free of the business plan, which covers a 150,000 errors. Go to century.io/twist and use the code twist and Squarespace. Turn your idea into a beautiful website. Go to squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Welcome back to twist. This is Alex. And today on the show, we have an absolute banger run of interviews. We are talking to Familify. This is the startup behind an app called Storybook. It did very well on the app store. It helps kids get to sleep, but Familify has a second act, an app called Theo that is growing even faster and took this company from doing well to hypergrowth. Then we're gonna talk to OnVerite. They are a start up building a service that helps founders get their due diligence in order, and VCs ensure that what they're buying is actually what they think it is. Then as part of our gamma pitch competition, we're talking to Pitch Perfect. They are building an SMS based marketing tool that at once stays on the right side of the law and hopefully won't annoy all of us by sending us too many messages. Let's go. One of my favorite things, Alex, having one of our portfolio companies from the accelerator and the launch fund on the program. And one of the things that happens that is lovely when you're an investor is that founders figure things out, and sometimes they'll email you and say, hey. We figured something out. And then the best of those emails …