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Simon - Relay VC

👋 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.

Going in as experts - automate with AI agents over time

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

Problem

Well-designed customer referral programs offer among the lowest CAC, unlock true virality, and often become a leading marketing channel.

But many mobile referral programs struggle to gain traction and deliver meaningful results.

After conducting 40+ customer and expert convos and drawing on our direct experiences, we believe there are three core reasons why:

1. Ownership is fragmented. Referral programs often fall into the cracks between product, engineering, and marketing. Marketing owns the growth goals but lacks control. Product and engineering own execution—but referrals compete with features, bugs, and infra work, and rarely win.

2. Referrals are treated as one-off builds. Referrals get built, then buried. Teams often make just one or two changes a year—even when referrals are driving 10%+ of new customer acquisition. Like any growth channel, referrals need continuous experimentation and optimization to drive meaningful outcomes.

3. Referral expertise is rare. We’ve seen many programs make the same execution mistakes: referral programs buried deep in settings, clunky sharing flows, no lifecycle notifications, missing fraud protection, and a lack of analytics.

Questions

What’s getting you excited about what we’re building? Where would you want to dig in more before building conviction?

Tell me more about your community-driven growth thesis. What are you investing in and why?

What other thesis areas do you have and why? Are you a thesis driven fund?

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

How’s the Vancouver tech ecosystem compared to Toronto and other markets?

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