"Your friends and family will tell you what you want to hear, but an advisor will tell you even the bad stuff. It's really important to get a couple of advisors so that you can really run anything by them — they could be a great sounding board for you."
What problem were you trying to solve when you started Nappr?
Jared Lerner, Founder, Nappr: I've always suffered from sleep issues. And often while travelling, I don't sleep on planes very much — most people don't. So when I was landing on red-eye flights at 6:00 in the morning, I was powering through with caffeine to get through the day, but I was burning out a lot. I think most people experience that on a long travel day — they just want to lie down somewhere and recover, but they can't because hotel check-in times are typically 3:00 PM and later.
That's the problem we were really trying to solve: how do we get people on-demand rest to get through a hectic day, whenever they need it? And it's really the perfect solution for hotels too — sometimes 40 to 50% of their rooms are empty, not generating any revenue. Nappr allows them to fill those rooms with people who need daytime rest but don't need an overnight stay. That's really how Nappr started, and where it's gotten to.
What were your biggest challenges when you joined Connectd?
Founder, Nappr: We joined Connectd a few months ago. I saw that Connectd was sponsoring one of the events I was at, and I was curious — we were definitely looking for advisory help. We were introduced to our now third advisor via the Connectd platform, and he's more technical than our other two and comes from the payments space. We were actually thinking about implementing payments at that stage, and have since done so. We were technically at the pre-seed stage when we started looking for advisors on Connectd, and would love to add a few more as we grow our board.
How did Connectd support your journey?
Founder, Nappr: We brought on Mark, who comes from the payments space — he's spent 25 years at companies like Mastercard. We've spoken to him extensively about our plans for strengthening our tech stack, adding new features, and implementing payments. He's been a great sounding board for all of that. Our other two advisors are great, but they're not really in that space, so it was really helpful to bring on someone with complementary knowledge who could help navigate us through it.
Our advisor Aaron is in finance, so he helps a lot with strategy and anything finance related — he's been great. And then Cliff brings more high-level strategy around go-to-market and guerrilla marketing.
What kind of impact did the advisors make for your business?
Founder, Nappr: When we were recently talking to Mark about payments — specifically how to navigate a Stripe API we were trying to use — we were running into some complications. Because Mark is such a veteran in the space, he gave us suggestions on how to approach it, as well as broader payments advice for as we grow and expand our Stripe integration. He's also always giving us great tech advice on how to strengthen our security and privacy. That's something he's very focused on — GDPR laws and making sure we're covered — because it's not something an early-stage startup always thinks about. I really appreciate that he keeps that conversation open, because you don't want to run into legal issues later when you've already got so many other things going on.
We've been able to implement payments more smoothly as a result. We've also started putting Mark's privacy suggestions into our product roadmap — we have a few technical people who can implement these things relatively quickly. He's definitely made us think about things that weren't necessarily on our radar, but absolutely should have been.
What would you say to a founder trying to manage everything alone?
Founder, Nappr: I always take feedback — even if it's critical — because I think you need that early on. Your friends and family will tell you what you want to hear, but an advisor will tell you even the bad stuff. It's really important to get a couple of advisors so that you can run anything by them. They can be a great sounding board.
So far we've had a really good experience with Connectd. The website is very easy to navigate, it's clean, and it's easy to reach out to people on there. Even after getting one advisor, it's straightforward to bring on another if you want to keep building your board.
Our advisors have helped enormously and have really helped us get to where we are today. Get them early on — the earlier the better, if you can.
Jared Lerner, Founder, Nappr
