Disco
Candace Factor spent years at Wattpad scaling the platform to 100+ million users, learning firsthand how community transforms solitary experiences into engaging ones. When she left in 2017, she became obsessed with learning—specifically, how the pandemic revealed that people learn better together live, not alone watching pre-recorded courses. She built her own live learning community and hit a wall: existing tools (Slack, Circles, Zoom) weren't designed for the specific problem of creators running recurring, monetized learning experiences. The gap was clear, and in August 2020, she launched Disco with co-founder Chris Sikornik, a serial entrepreneur from six prior startups.
Candace didn't rely on traditional outreach. Instead, she leaned on her Wattpad playbook: design *with* your community. She invited thought leaders like Seth Godin and Jerry Kelowna—pioneers in live learning—to co-create the product vision alongside angels and investors. The result was organic: a 1,000-person waitlist formed before the platform even launched, all from community evangelists spreading the word. This word-of-mouth approach was intentional and community-driven, not accidental.
Disco's dual pricing model proved flexible: a freemium tier taking 10% of creator ticket sales (for lean creators), plus an $85/month SaaS plan (for those who don't want to share revenue). By interview time, 30–50% of hundreds of customers had switched to the SaaS tier, while the rest remained on the free plan—exactly the natural funnel Candace anticipated. She reported some creators were already on track to hit seven figures annually, and the company was "absolutely on track" to break $1M in revenue that year. The engineering team scaled 10X (to 20+ people), focused on building a comprehensive platform—not just live video, but chat, content, marketing tools, and a new "Disco Studios" agency arm for enterprise customers.
By the time of this interview (early 2021), Disco had raised $5.75M total ($750k pre-seed in 2020, $5M seed in 2021, 3X oversubscribed with $15M in interest). They'd just launched publicly off their waitlist with hundreds of customers, roughly 30–50% on paid SaaS plans. Candace and Chris owned 50–50, maintained strong valuations, and were thoughtful about dilution—raising enough to scale in a competitive market (against players like Hoppin) but not so much they'd be forced into unfavorable future rounds. The company was remote-first, distributed across North America.
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