Bootstrapping, AppSumo deals and productivity tools - Macgill Davis / Will Goto, Rize.io

Macgill Davis and Will Goto are the founders of Rize, a time-tracking platform that helps you increase your productivity, started in August 2020. Will and Macgill met at a company called Peer, which then got acquired by Twitter, they then left Twitter and founded a company called Humble Dot, which they raised for but unfortunately had to shut down.

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What we covered in this episode:

• Working on a side project while at Twitter
• Raising funding then leaving their jobs
• Co-founders with the same technical background
• A different approach to finding a co-founder
• Shutting down a business when it’s not doing well
• Searching for a new idea and solving your own problem
• Creating a landing page and running some ads
• Picking a market to focus on
• Time tracking for productivity
• Getting traction through AppSumo
• Cash up front with lifetime deals
• Raising vs bootstrapping
• How to be more productive

Recommendations

• Book: Deep Work by Cal Newport, Atomic Habits by James Clear
• Podcast: The Rest is History/Revolutions, Masters of Scale
• Indie Hacker: Tony Dinh, Arvid Kahl

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• Macgill on Twitter
• Will on Twitter

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