Ethan

👋 Opening (30–60 sec)

Hey, I’m Shivam — I’m the co-founder and CEO of Flock. I spent over five years working in product growth, and one of the most effective acquisition tactics I saw was referral programs. They drove low-CAC, high-quality growth — but every time we built them, they were painful to launch and even harder to iterate on.

We looked for existing solutions, especially for mobile, and realized nothing in the market truly solved the problem — so we decided to build it.

Flock is a mobile-first referral platform that gives companies everything they need to launch a referral program in days — UI, messaging, SDKs, the whole stack — and more importantly, gives marketers the tools to continuously test and optimize without needing engineers.

We’re solving a problem we felt firsthand, and one that’s becoming more important as paid channels get more expensive and many folks we talk to are looking to grow more efficiently

Questions

What’s outside VC’s investment thesis?

How do you decide how much to raise for a pre-seed?

How do you conduct research to determine if a pre-seed fund is a good fit for our business?

What involvement do you have after an initial investment is done? How do you help? Examples.

What does your investment process typically look like? What do you look for?

Walk me through an example of a successfully run process at this stage?

Why now?

Customer acquisition costs for mobile apps have reached all-time highs. The average cost per install has surged—Facebook CPI is up 87.5% and Google CPI is up 140% between 2019 and 2024 (

Source⁠

). Growth teams are now operating in a saturated, mature market where channel optimization matters more than ever. Referrals, often the most cost-effective and highest-converting channel, remain underused due to internal fragmentation and lack of tooling.

Further, the ability to remotely configure pixel-perfect mobile UIs without code changes or app updates is a new software paradigm—pioneered a few years ago by

Superwall⁠

—and not yet adopted by the broader SaaS ecosystem outside of the paywall use case. Flock applies this same principle to referrals, enabling fast, continuous iteration without waiting on engineering cycles or app store approval.

Competitive advantage?

In-house referrals will continue to suffer from fragmented ownership. Flock empowers marketers: Even with better AI tools, we’re skeptical marketers will have direct access to mobile codebases. Launching a referrals MVP is just the start; like any marketing channel, success depends on consistent iteration. Flock’s core value is enabling non-technical marketers to own and optimize referral programs without relying on the product & engineering team.

We're productizing specialized expertise: Orchestrating complex referral offers (e.g. tiered, milestone-based, time-bound), managing fraud and misuse, and handling region-specific privacy, legal, compliance, and tax implications is complex and nuanced. That’s why prompt-engineering Lovable or ChatGPT won’t cut it for at-scale players.

We’re laying the groundwork for AI agents that autonomously optimize referrals: We subscribe to the "

sell work, not software⁠

" philosophy. Today, we're manually optimizing our client's referral programs by suggesting experiments, analyzing data, directly iterating on programs, and sharing insights. Over time, we can build AI agents that do more of this work. In this world, our defensibility comes from turning client performance data and our own playbook into evals and guardrails that drive referral growth.

This isn't a novel idea, we've been following companies like

Coframe⁠

and

GrowthLoop⁠

that are thinking along the same lines but for different use cases.

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