We recently connected with Tom Bachant and have shared our conversation below.

Tom, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s something crazy on unexpected that’s happened to you or your business

In the middle of 2022, we had been building an HR tech product for about 2 years. We had completely run out of money, our idea wasn’t resonating with customers, and we weren’t able to raise any more funding. We didn’t even have enough money for the wind-down of the business and I was ready to pay out of pocket to shut down.

I was applying for regular jobs, and just for fun, I also submitted an application for the Y Combinator startup accelerator program. I got a few job interviews along with, to my surprise, a YC interview offer.

YC has a notoriously low acceptance rate, with only 1% of applicants getting into the program. I read everything I could on how to prepare for the interview, and when the time came, it was… a complete disaster. We spent time focusing on how our first and largest customer had churned, and how poorly the business was doing at the time. I reached out to the hiring manager of a job I was applying for and said I was ready to talk about accepting.

To my surprise, we got accepted by YC, giving us the $500k we needed to stay afloat, With that, we also gained their community of world-class founders who helped us to pivot, launch what is now Unthread, and raise the funding to build out the team and product that we have today.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I started my first company in college and haven’t looked back. I first launched a software platform for taxi companies to launch their own on-demand ridesharing, called Dashride. I had been building this while in school and as soon as I graduated, I moved to NYC to build this out full-time. That company was later acquired by Cruise, the self-driving car startup, and I left there in 2021 to start Unthread. I’ve always learned whatever was necessary to get the job done, first learning how to code to build the MVP, then learning how to build out a sales team, then learning how to raise money from VCs, and now learning how to scale up a world-class team and product, and there’s much more I’ve yet to learn!

Conversations about M&A are often focused on multibillion dollar transactions – but M&A can be an important part of a small or medium business owner’s journey. We’d love to hear about your experience with selling businesses.

I started my first startup, Dashride, while in college, and I sold it after 5 grueling years. Beyond making all the classic startup mistakes, I found myself burnt out and prioritizing short-term business goals over my own personal health. There were tactical lessons learned about how to negotiate with ruthless M&A teams, how to entice new buyers into the process, and how to keep investors and board members in the loop throughout the process. But the primary lesson was to first deal with my own burnout before starting the process, because the best time to sell your business is when you don’t want to sell. The decision to sell should be motivated by what’s best for the company and being burnt out in an M&A process will not yield the best results for you or the company.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

The story of where we are today with Unthread started in an unrecognizable way. While we now provide an AI-automated helpdesk for IT and HR teams, we started out as a consumer event app.

While I was at Cruise, I started building a fun app for my friends and I to plan parties and events, as a replacement for Facebook events. I had no commercial goals in mind, but it picked up some traction on the App Store – that was, until Covid hit in 2020. In-person events and parties went to zero, but I found that people were struggling to manage the virtual events that they were hosting, so I pivoted the app to be a virtual event planning app.

The next realization was that internal teams at large companies needed help planning their events, so we launched a product for that. I finally saw a path to commercialization, and quit my job to pursue it full-time. While we didn’t hit Product Market Fit, we had some initial customers and learned more about the market.

Finally, we realized that internal teams were primarily struggling with how they managed the chaos of managing internal operations in Slack, and this was a massive problem where we could achieve PMF. So we shut down the old product, pivoted to Unthread, and we’ve been growing quickly ever since. There’s still some code in our codebase from the event-planning app that confuses our engineers to this day!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: bachonk
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/tombachant
• Twitter: bachonk
• Other: I run a small side project helping to advocate for public transit and reducing dependency on personal cars at https://abolishcars.org