Ian MacKinnon
Co-founder, Stingray Security. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineer@imackinn ↗LinkedIn ↗stingray.security ↗
Ian MacKinnon co-founded the visual social media marketing platform Later, scaling it to over $40 million in ARR prior to its 2022 acquisition by Mavrck. He subsequently co-founded Stingray Security, a cybersecurity startup building real-time protection tools to prevent payment fraud and phishing attacks.
1shows
1appearances
26statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Ian MacKinnon said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Raising only one round prevents late-stage investors from blocking an acquisition
“It was really good to have only raised one round because if we had raised at a higher valuation later on, there might be investors who say, Hey, we can't take that. You haven't returned enough.”
Word-of-mouth growth models do not work for workflow software
“Word of mouth just Doesn't work. Like, people just don't sit around talking about what apps they use, what cool tools. Like, and maybe they do, but it's not at a rate that you can really model and derive some success from. You need to have better channels than…”
MacKinnon: Meta revoked Later's API access for 3 days in June 2018
“Like, I remember very clearly in June of 2018, we lost our API access, because this was right after that whole Cambridge Analytica fallout, where all, they got really particular about Users of their API being properly credentialed and verified, which is unders…”
MacKinnon: Make a few users fanatics instead of many mildly happy
“The best piece of advice I always give to young entrepreneurs is don't try and make a lot of people happy a little bit. Try and make a small number of people utter fanatics about your product. It's a lot easier to increase the number of people who like your pr…”
Launching an iOS app Canada-only is the perfect App Store beta test
“You can go through all of Apple's various, you know, beta schemes, or you just launch Canada only, and no one's going to take notice of it anyway unless you tell them. So we have this great beta testable country here.”
MacKinnon: Real Customer Feedback Only Begins Once You Charge Money
“You get the real feedback after you ask for five bucks, like whatever you're making, whatever you're building, once you ask for money, then people start talking about it seriously.”
MacKinnon: Developers Don't Respect Marketing Enough
“A lot of people say like, I've done no marketing. It's like a lot of times they just be, you've done no paid marketing. And, you know, there's a certain respect you, especially I think devs don't have enough respect for marketing”
MacKinnon: Incumbent Social Tools Stagnated by Staying Twitter- and Text-Centric
“If you looked at Buffer and Hootsuite, especially back then, they were very much designed for a Twitter-centric world. You know, everything is very tech space. Media is not the first class citizen where our product was very much media is the first class citize…”
Later intentionally avoided enterprise offerings to focus entirely on SMBs
“So we intentionally never had any enterprise offerings precisely to focus on the small and medium business”
Selling a startup combines the worst parts of dating and home buying
“If you imagine all the worst parts of dating and all the worst parts of home buying and put them together, that's what selling a company is like.”
Buffer users unwittingly posted pro-Russian propaganda after a 2022 hack
“Buffer had something similar but we kind of caught it before any later users were spewing out pro-Russian propaganda through their accounts. Like, Buffer had that problem at the beginning of the Ukraine war.”
MacKinnon: Technical founders working for sweat equity do not need to raise
“Where if you just have a developer who's on your founding team, kind of working for sweat equity, you can really do pretty well and you don't need to raise. Like you can get really far just with your own time, which isn't true in a lot of other industries.”
Earning US dollars while paying Canadian expenses creates a resilient startup
“Like one of the things about having a company in Canada, you can run a lot, if your revenues in US dollars and your expenses are posted in Canadian, you can, you know, kind of be that cockroach that's hard to kill.”
MacKinnon: The natural instinct of an M&A deal is to die
“Deals fall apart all the time. Like we had other deals that did. I think people don't realize it's like the natural instinct of a deal is to die.”
MacKinnon: Later Grew 10% Weekly to 1,000 DAUs in Summer 2014
“By the end of the summer, I feel like we were at about a thousand daily active users, so in about a three-month span, we grew like that. I mean, we were growing like 10% a week”
Later Hit $20K MRR in First Month of Monetization
“And we got, I mean, we had in that first month, 20 K of MRR.”
Rocketship VC Invested $200K in Later Before Incorporation
“I think it was only like 200,000 dollars, but what was interesting, it was from a firm called Rocket Should BC, and they found us. So they kind of modeled themselves as like a quantitative venture capitalist. So they just found us probably from product hunt or…”
MacKinnon: Blog Content Was Later's Best Channel to Attract Users
“What we found, like I said, was the blog was one of our best ways of bringing the right audience in, because you'd, you're searching for something”
Later raised a $1.3M seed round but never touched the capital
“Our seed round was in the summer of 2015. We did 1.3 million. So the term I've heard that I like is a seed strapper. You're not bootstrapping. You're getting one Round. I heard that, oh, that describes it pretty well. And we were always profitable. We never re…”
MacKinnon: Later reached $5M ARR with 30 employees by 2018
“By 20 18 energies at that point, we're probably like 30 people, probably five million in ARR.”
Later added $1M in ARR per month during peak growth periods
“There were months where we were adding a million in ARR, which is crazy to think about.”
MacKinnon: Founders must document every contract and employee dispute for M&A
“So I think the big thing you have to anyone listening to know about the due diligence process is every contract you ever sign. Make sure you have that, like, some folder somewhere where everything gets stored, every little piece of information, every disgruntl…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ian's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Co-founder, Stingray Security | 1 | 26 | 100% 1/1 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |