51: Recast - The Origin of Level from Startups for the Rest of Us

Level’s landing page and current query of number of members; scarcity play is effective

Level is a Slack competitor, but much less interruptive and more asynchronous

Derrick discovered Slack does not scale well as a team grows, interrupts people’s flow; Level is Derrick’s take on the solution to those issues

Derrick hit the ground running with his manifesto and getting people signed up for Level

His efforts on Twitter were effective because it’s a product marketed toward developers

Dealing with feedback, ill-informed comments and conversations

Derrick wanted to talk to too many, rather than too few people about value of creating a new product to address pain points

Differentiation from Slack: Level niched down to developers and open sourced

Derrick plans to offer free and on-prem versions of Level

Whiteboarding to go over ideas and transform them into something tangible

Derrick is working on mock-ups; challenging to lay out UI elements, such as the Inbox

Risks are involved; when building something new, the challenge is to validate your most risky hypotheses - the ones that are most likely to fail

Level is the third Saas startup that Derrick has worked on; first time he will not earn income or revenue while building Level, so had to make adjustments