Hey folks,
I’m grateful to many of you who read this newsletter and have reached out to support me on this journey. The last few weeks have been tough; I think largely because I’ve been doing this as a solo founder and bootstrapped so far. But, I know I’m privileged to be able to pursue this dream full-time. I’m lucky to have the support of my family and friends like all of you. And, finally, I’m incredibly lucky to have the support of my wife.
I appreciate you.
Past 4 weeks
🔴 Pitch 30 prospects
I pitched CalmCode to 5 more companies. This isn’t nearly enough, but more of my time was spent on the next two goals.
Nevertheless, in pitching these companies I learned that time and consistency of interviews are not yet problems for most early-stage companies (pre-seed and seed). Instead, they struggle more with finding candidates to interview. And when they do find candidates, it’s often through referrals which already adds a layer of vetting.
This means that I need to target slightly later-stage companies (series A or B) that are still willing to be early adopters.
In response to my last post, I was grateful to get Ryan Doyle’s help in re-writing my cold email so that it is succinct and spread out into a sequence of follow-up emails. Ryan is the founder of MagicSalesBot — a product that helps sales teams write cold emails that convert at 2X their typical rates. If you’re sending cold emails, check it out and/or let me know if you’re interested in learning more. I also received tactical sales tips from Clark and insightful positioning/business model feedback from Meghan. 🙏🙏🙏
🟡 Ship v1 of the core product experience
I’ve made good progress on the core product experience!
Now:
✅ Interviewers can access a growing library of assessments for various roles (i.e. backend, frontend, full-stack)
✅ Interviewers can create/delete custom assessments
✅ Assessments have structured rubrics that can be customized
✅ Interviewers can invite candidates to complete a CalmCode assessment
✅ Candidates can choose their preferred interview format (live or take-home) ⭐️ — our key differentiator
✅ If live, candidates can schedule their interview through the platform
✅ If take-home, candidates can view and mark assessments as completed
✅ Interviewers can evaluate candidates using structured rubrics
✅ Interviewers can compensate candidates for take-home
While the product is deployed to a production environment, it’s still in the prototype stage. There are a few details (such as in-product copy) that need to be filled in. But it is in a state where I was able to put together a demo for applications to VC programs. More on that below.
If you’re interested in checking out a demo video, reach out and I’d be happy to share.
🟢 Apply to 1 VC incubator/accelerator program
In the past couple of weeks, I completed applications for 3 incubator programs. Turns out that once you complete one, it’s easier to submit applications to others since they are similar. I applied to Y Combinator, ForumVC, and OnDeckX.
As many founders have shared before, I also felt that filling out YC’s application was a helpful exercise. If you’ve got a startup idea that you want to flesh out and get feedback on, I recommend filling out YC’s application (at least in a google doc) and following their advice on being ruthlessly clear and concise. Thanks to my time as a PM, I had done a lot of the thinking already by doing market/customer research and creating a lean startup canvas.
But, now that I am considering venture capital, the question became — is my idea “venture-scale”? Is the market big enough? Is my solution or competitive advantage significant enough to have a chance to capture a piece of the market large enough to provide an outsized return for investors?
A big thank you to Aravindh and Neely for their feedback on my YC application 🙏.
If you’re interested in checking out a copy of my YC application, let me know.
Other things I did:
I partnered with two organizations, NYC Tech Talent Pipeline and YearOne, to provide free mock interviewing services for candidates. It’s been energizing to work with and help early-career software developers! It’s also been a little disheartening to see how they feel the need to study data structures and algorithm interview questions on LeetCode for weeks/months in order to prepare for their job search.
I’ve had four working sessions with potential co-founders. And I signed up for YC’s co-founder matching platform. Finding the right partner will take time but it’s going to be important for me to be able to persist and succeed in this journey.
1 thing I could do better
Focus
There are a few things on my mind right now and it’s really hard to pick one focus area between strategy, sales/marketing, and product. Still, I know picking one for at least a week at a time will be more productive and less cognitive load than trying to make a little progress on everything.
Next 2 weeks
[Product] Ship a usable v1 experience for my 2nd customer
[Talk to users] Complete 30 customer conversations (includes pitches and user research)