Happy New Year friends!
Almost every year, for the past several years, my wife and I take a few hours to complete an end-of-year reflection exercise called YearCompass. One part of the YearCompass that I particularly enjoy is looking through my calendar, photos, and now this newsletter to take note of significant memories.
For this post, I thought I would share some of the significant memories of my startup journey in 2021. And also provide an update since the last post.
Highlights
Through this newsletter, I’ve already documented several highlights including meeting so many new people, launching four new products (Rubric, diverse.fyi, CalmHire, and CalmCode), finding a community of founders, and getting my first paying customer. In fact, this newsletter itself is a highlight of my year.
But one highlight that I hadn’t chronicled or appreciated, until I did an end-of-year review, has been the positive feedback I’ve gotten from people online who have used what I had built. Here are a few examples:
😍 Shout outs for diverse.fyi from hiring teams on Twitter:
😲 Surprise and excitement for CalmHire from job seekers on Reddit:
😭 And even a message from a developer who just got their first full-time job:
These messages are an inspiring and motivating reminder to keep going.
Lowlight
🤔 Pace of experimentation
There were several times where I felt stuck. This feeling prevented me from continuing to experiment quickly and thus remain stuck.
In retrospect, one reason causing this stuck feeling was the lack of a fast and consistent feedback loop for experimentation. Personally, I have found it especially challenging to create this feedback loop when building a B2B product (vs B2C). Getting time on the calendar of potential customers takes a lot of time and extracting insights from a handful of varied conversations is an art more than a science.
I’m proud that I built & launched 4 products in the past year (and there were many more that I brainstormed and de-prioritized), but the word for this next year is velocity.
So, what’s the latest?
An update on accelerators
Devoted readers will know that I applied to 3 accelerator programs as of the last newsletter issue; OnDeck, Forum, and YC. Unfortunately, I didn’t get into OnDeck and Forum this time around.
Forum was nice enough to take time to provide feedback:
We unfortunately struggled to gain conviction around the competitive landscape as we would've liked to see some proof points around technical differentiation that'll enable them to win in such a crowded market with HackerRank and Codility.
In general, VC perspectives mean a lot less than customers’ perspectives but they were pointing out what I was hearing already from prospective customers. I still think there’s potential to differentiate in other ways and over time.
YC, which was a late application, responded slightly more positively:
We found your application promising, but we're about to start accepting applications for the Summer 2022 program. We're rolling your application over to be considered for the Summer 2022 session, which runs from June–August 2022.
It may mean nothing but I’ll take that positivity for now :)
An update on finding a co-founder
Meeting and testing the waters with potential co-founders has been my main focus for the past month. After signing up for YC’s free co-founder matching program in early December, I received a lot of interest from founders looking for a technical counterpart. I was also introduced to a few folks through my network. So far, I have had a handful of interesting conversations including one that is currently in the “trial stage”, where we work on an existing or new project for a couple of weeks.
What does this mean for CalmCode or CalmHire? At the moment, I’ve paused making progress in development or sales in order to prioritize finding a co-founder. But, depending on the partner, we do explore the same space. And I plan to come back to these ideas if I don’t find a fit.
I’m still looking to meet more people interested in being founders, whether they have an existing idea or not. If you know someone, please reach out!
One more thought…
Navigating the “messy middle”
Recently I watched this talk by Scott Belsky, co-founder of Behance and author of the book “The Messy Middle”. In the talk, he shares his reflection on the middle years of building his startup before he sold it to Adobe for $150M, 7 years after founding it. And he shares insightful lessons about navigating those years from his own experience and conversations with several other founders.
There were several choice takeaways, but this one really resonated with me right now:
So much of a successful journey is sticking together long enough to figure it out.
It’s about endurance. It’s about enduring the lows, somehow having the resiliency to learn from them, and making every subsequent low a little less low.
And it’s about optimization. Optimizing the hell out of everything that works. Asking, at every high point, “why did this work?” and then doing more of it.
🎯 I love this mindset and approach. It’s a necessary reminder of the persistence and discipline required when building something out of nothing.
Thanks for reading!