Product Hunt Radio

On this episode Abadesi sits down with Reshma Sohoni, co-founder and managing partner of Seedcamp. She co-founded the firm in 2007 and works with the Seedcamp team and their portfolio companies to help push early stage companies from difficult times to household names. In this episode they discuss... How Seedcamp discovers, attracts (and retains!) hidden talent “We do recruit from odd places. Forty percent of our team are working mothers. On the accounting and legal side, it’s a job you can do remotely and can do with kids. We’ve recruited folks who are senior and could be doing other things, but we’ve given them flexibility and they’ve chosen to work with us.” Reshma talks about some of the unique ways they have been able to compete for talent that others in the industry miss. She also talks about why diversity is important to the team and how being authentic about their values has helped them find people who mesh well with the culture. How they’ve built a strong culture at Seedcamp Reshma explains why they have clearly articulated not just want they want their employees to do, but also what they want their employees not to do. They discuss the rule at Seedcamp that a meeting should never produce another meeting, and some of the other ways that they have differentiated their culture from other VC firms. “One of the things we say is that you’re CEO of Function X and you should run it like that. Obviously the negative is, how do you get them to work together and talk to each other? We’re conscious of that. We’ve built in online and offline systems to make sure all those pieces connect together. But that autonomy is a huge part of retention.” Her advice for people who want to work in VC “It helps to do jobs you don’t like early in your career. It’s huge. You really figure out what your weaknesses are and also therefore identify what your strengths are.” Reshma talks a bit about how she got into venture capital, how it has changed and how she would advise young people looking to get into the VC game today. “We don’t do interviews in a traditional style. It’s very much a multi-party dialog around how you’ll fit, what are your ambitions, and how do we help those?” Why founder mental health has been getting more attention and how VCs can help the cause Reshma talks about how they’ve taken a different approach to helping founders when it comes to some of the personal difficulties they face in building a company. She points out that some of these issues are not thing that they can discuss at for example, a board meeting. She says that they are investing in companies that can help alleviate some of these pressures generally, both for founders and others. Which spaces she’s most excited about investing in “We’ve made a number of investments in personalized health. We think that’s the biggest opportunity humanity has had. We believe a lot in that and we’re investing in it.” Reshma talks about some of the products she uses from their portfolio companies and why in addition to the healthcare space, why she’s also excited about FinTech. And of course, they talk about some of her favorite products and what the Seedcamp team uses to stay productive. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Big thanks to Vettery and Copper for their support. 😸 Companies and Products Mentioned In This Episode Airtable — Realtime spreadsheet-database hybrid. Curve — One place to spend, send, see and save your money. Pleo — A company card that does your expense reports. Revolut — Spend, exchange and send money globally with no fees. Streak — CRM in your inbox, for Gmail. Telegram — The best messenger for every platform. Thriva — Smart finger-prick blood tests you take at home. TransferWise — Send money abroad without hidden and excessive bank fees.

Abadesi talks to Veni Kunche, who is founder and CEO of Code with Veni, a newsletter for women in tech, and Diversify Tech, an awesome online resource for underrepresented groups trying to break into the industry. In this episode they discuss... How she got into tech and her advice for people trying to break into the industry “The first programming class that I ever took was Intro To Java Programming and I got a C in it. That disqualified me from entering the computer science program. I was completely lost and had no idea what to do. I think one of the reasons that I struggled was that a lot of times university intro classes are not actually intro classes. I had no idea what code was but my classmates all seemed to know.” Veni was the first woman in her family to go to college and she describes what that was like as someone who was unfamiliar with all the “unwritten rules” about college and the job market. She also speaks about her father, who is also a software engineer and was the first person in his family to go to college, as her inspiration to get into the industry. She lists her advice for those trying to break into tech, including building a network before you need it, and remembering that everyone is on their own journey and their own path — so don’t sweat it if other people seem to be making more progress than you! How companies can make their recruiting process more suitable for women and underrepresented candidates “Research has shown that women apply only if they meet most of the requirements whereas men apply to a job even if they meet half the requirements. Sometimes people list nice-to-haves in the requirements list in a job description but they need to understand that that may be deterring people from applying.” Veni talks about the difference between the interview process when she was applying for jobs in 1999 and now, and how it has changed (not necessarily for the better). She points out that some candidates need more accommodations and can’t necessarily take an entire day off for an interview. She also shares some of the feedback she’s given CTOs via her job board at Diversify Tech. How she invests in her career capital and keeps up with new developments “I usually need a project to work on. I’m not someone who can learn something just by reading. So usually I make up a project and work on it. That’s how I keep up with the new developments in tech.” Veni describes feeling like she was behind her colleagues when coming back from maternity leave and how she got herself up to speed on new developments in the language they were working in. She talks about the challenges of landing a job when she was first starting out and how she volunteered in order to obtain work experience. Her advice on starting companies and fostering community “Starting a company is like a marathon. It’s not something that you do and just works. The launch is not going to determine if you’ve failed or not. You have to be continuously reflecting on what’s working, what’s not working, what changes you can make, and constantly talking to your customers.” She shares what she’s learned after trying and failing to build a number of different companies and why she found success with Code with Veni and Diversify Tech. She explains the most important factors in building a strong community and why she still runs office hours, the program which was the initial catalyst for her two companies. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Big thanks to Vettery and Copper for their support. 😸 Companies and Products Mentioned In This Episode Airtable — Real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid. Baby Connect — Track, log and share information daily about your baby. Self Control — Avoid distracting websites.

Abadesi talks to Sahil Lavingia, founder and CEO of Gumroad, an online platform that enables creators to sell directly to their customers. Sahil is a very authentic founder who is not afraid to speak uncomfortable truths, as you’ll see in the interview. They talk about... His journey starting Gumroad and what happened when they realized the company wasn’t going to be as successful as they had hoped Sahil was very young when he started Gumroad (he’s only 26 now!) and had worked a couple big tech companies where he saw that “there’s a lot more duct tape in the industry than people realize.” He recounts the ups and downs of the company and what precipitated the events described in his now-famous article. “We raised over ten million dollars from a great list of investors and realized when we were trying to raise a series B that that was unlikely to happen and went from 20 to 5 employees to get to profitability. Then we went from 5 to 1 when I could run the company by myself but luckily we’ve been able to grow the team again. Even though we’ve processed over $200 million for creators, eight years later it still feels like we’re in the first inning, as people say.” He says that a lot of people think they can be the exception to the rule that most companies don’t succeed as much or as fast as they hope they will, and that you should remember that “you’re probably closer to the mean than you think.” Why relationships in Silicon Valley are so transactional Sahil talks about the difficulty of building deep relationships on a personal level in the Valley and how that changed when he moved to Provo, Utah, where he was able to find a support network. He says that people were eager to meet with him when he was perceived as successful but not so much when the company wasn’t doing well. “There’s this transitive property of trust, where if someone that someone trusts gives you an intro to them you’re sort of guaranteed to meet them. I think network-building is better in Silicon Valley than anywhere else but it’s difficult to meet with someone multiple times and build a deep relationship without a clear agenda that’s going to help [one or the other].” Dealing with the psychological ups-and-downs of having your identity as a founder so wrapped up in the fate of your company “On a personal level, you do suffer, because you realize how much you’ve invested in your company and how little in yourself.” He talks about the difficulty of admitting that your company isn’t doing as well as people think and how to find help as a founder: “The only way you can get support is to be open about the thing that you need help with, and when your identity is so wrapped up in something that isn’t working, it’s difficult to be open about that.” He comments on the trend of watching successful founders try to find themselves in public and in real-time on Twitter after their exits: “They have all this time and all this money and they feel anxious and don’t know how to spend their time and don’t know what’s next for them. You realize, that’s my future if I don’t figure this stuff out.” His philosophy of technology, both personally and at Gumroad “Pick a couple things that you really believe in strongly and do the boring, standard things for everything else. The things that you do differently, you really want to invest in doing them differently in the right way. It’s easy to fall into the trap of doing things differently the wrong way.” Why he believes so strongly in in-person connection Even with the advent of technologies and tools that make it possible to connect over long distances, he points out that the physical world is much higher fidelity than the digital one: “Technology is great and getting better but nothing replaces being in the same place as another person and breathing the same air.” “Gumroad is great, but if it’s not making people’s lives physically better, it’s not worth it.” We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Big thanks to Embroker and Vettery for their support. 😸 Companies and Products Mentioned In This Episode GitHub — The world’s leading software development platform. Notion — Increase your team intelligence. Slack — Be less busy. Real-time messaging, archiving and search. Wikipedia — The free encyclopedia. YouTube — The video-sharing site. Zoom — Cloud videoconferencing and simple online meetings.

Abadesi is back to host this episode with Saron Yitbarek, founder and CEO of CodeNewbie and the Codeland conference. Saron is a former journalist who started working in the tech industry and then pivoted to a technical role after learning to code from scratch. Aba and Saron talk about... What inspired her to get into tech, and the story of going from journalist to software engineer “Cold emailing will get you far in life.” Saron describes how reading the Walter Isaacson book about Steve Jobs showed her that tech can be about design and storytelling and that tech had a human side that fit with her liberal arts background. She explains how she got her first job at a tech company without any tech experience by cold emailing several founders in NYC. “Transitioning into a new career is hard. It’s a lot harder than we’ve been telling people that it is.” Her journey learning to code, including what she learned from the failed attempts “I said to myself I’m going to do this full-time, I’m going to give myself a month to see if I like it and I’m not allowed to quit until the month is over. This time I said to myself, it’s going to be hard, it’s going to suck but let’s give it a month and we’ll see if it sucks less at the end of the month. And it did — it sucked less, so I continued and went about my coding journey.” Saron talks about some of the resources she used and why having the right resources made a big difference in her eventual success. She also talks about starting the CodeNewbie community and why having a supportive community around you when learning to code is important. How to get the most out of coding bootcamps and how to find a great job “Your network is absolutely everything. When you’re hearing the success stories, what I’d like to know is how did that person actually get that job? Did they know a friend at the company? Do they live in San Francisco? Are they already working at a tech company in a non-technical role?” Saron points out that it's important to manage your expectations coming out of a coding bootcamp. “I think there is this expectation oftentimes that if I go through the bootcamp and graduate, I’m going to automatically get a job without having to go through the job search. If you go into it with that mindset, you’re going to be frustrated if it’s been a couple months and you still don’t have a job.” How the landscape for learning to code has changed She explains how bootcamps have evolved over time: “I think that there is a deeper understanding of what it really takes to learn how to code and what it takes to be job-ready. Some of the programs are a little bit longer and more in-depth. They’re not trying to cover all things but instead the fundamental things. There’s a maturity in the space where we have a better understanding of what companies are actually looking for.” She also talks about some of the communities and resources that have popped up since she was learning how to code. Her unique formula for staying organized and productive “Any time someone gives me a task I pull up my calendar and I will give myself a block of time to do a task. I end up with a timesheet for myself with everything I’ve been doing in a day. At the end of the month, I can tally it up in a spreadsheet and see exactly how I’m using my time.” She also talks about some of the apps her and her team uses to stay on top of their time and their work. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Big thanks to Monday.com and Embroker for their support. 😸 Companies and Products Mentioned In This Episode Codecademy — Learn to code for free. Dev.to — Where programmers share ideas and help each other grow. Equitable — Split the bill fairly. Flatiron School — Learn coding, data science and UX/UI design. Google Calendar — Spend less time managing your day. Google Drive — Free cloud storage for personal use. Grasshopper — The coding app for beginners by Google. Lambda School — A full computer science education — free until you get a job. New York Times Crossword — A smart way to fill the breaks in your day. Slack — Be less busy. Real-time messaging, archiving and search. Treehouse — Learn to code, gain a new skill, get a new job. Trello — Organize anything, together.

Scott Kupor joins Ryan on this episode to talk about his new book, Secrets of Sand Hill Road. Scott is Managing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and has been at the firm since it was founded. He has a long history with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, including working alongside them at Opsware in the early 2000s. Ryan and Scott talk about... How venture capital has changed over the past decade “The biggest shift has been the massive amount of seed funding growth that has happened. Something like five hundred new firms focusing on seed have been formed in the last ten years in the US alone.” Scott also points out that even though there has been an explosion in seed funding, it's still the case that less than 10% of all venture capital dollars are deployed at the seed stage. “You’ve got this interesting dichotomy, which massive new company formation happening at the seed stage but a winnowing down of the opportunities and increasingly more capital going to winners in particular ecosystems as they mature.” They also discuss the fact that companies are taking much longer to IPO now than they did in the past, and why that trend is here to stay. Advice for founders in the new investment landscape Scott talks about how founders need to adapt to the new investment landscape and walks through some of the biggest mistakes that founders make when they are trying to raise money. “It’s cheaper than ever to start a company today and we’ve got incredible amounts of seed funding but it’s also more expensive than ever to actually scale the businesses because the markets you can go after are much bigger and people realize they have to look at international markets in parallel.” The future of venture capital Ryan asks what the biggest potential disruptor to venture capital could be in the next five to ten years. “Capital is definitely no longer a scarce resource and therefore if you’re relying on capital to differentiate yourself in the market, that’s not a good place to be. Whether [the future] is ICOs or crowdfunding, I think we’ve permanently gone into a place where you have to provide something other than money to be competitive. I think we’re also going to see more blending between the private markets and the public markets.” How to think about the long-term relationship between your company and your investors “It turns out that most VC relationships will last longer than the average marriage in the US, which unfortunately only lasts about eight years. Sometimes you’ll be involved with VCs for ten to twelve years, so it really goes to this fundamental question of understanding the VC’s incentives but also being very clear as an entrepreneur what you expect from your VC.” “We think about these financing rounds as though they’re episodic because they are, but they’re a part of a continuum and anything you do that doesn’t play well for subsequent investors is probably the biggest mistake I see on both the investor side and the entrepreneur side.” How a VC thinks and how to understand their incentive structure Scott pulls back the curtain on VC to explain how an early-stage investor thinks about evaluating your company. “The question ultimately for an early stage VC is, imagine if this company worked — what could it become? And then the real question that follows from that is, why would I want to back this team versus any number of other teams that might have the same idea.” Ryan also tells the story of walking into Andreessen Horowitz in sneakers and a Product Hunt kitty t-shirt to pitch the company and finding himself speaking to nearly twenty people. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Big thanks to Monday.com and Embroker for their support. 😸

Ryan and Wade Foster have known each other through the internet for years before recently meeting in person in Mountain View. Ryan learned so much from the coffee chat that he asked if Wade would join the podcast to share some of his stories scaling Zapier. Like Product Hunt, Zapier is a fully distributed team, although they're much bigger with 200 people in over 20 countries. They're helping makers create no-code apps and helping everyone get work done more efficiently. Ryan and Wade talk about... Learnings from scaling a distributed team and Zapier's “delocation package” “We went through YC in summer 2012, and for the summer all three founders worked and lived together. That was the only time period in our company’s history where everyone was in the same location.” Zapier is a very large distributed team, with over 200 people working completely remotely. They've only worked together one time in their history, when the founders were all at YC together in 2012. Wade talks about some of the benefits to working in a distributed team, including the fact that he has “effectively a teleportation machine” that can transport him from meeting to meeting in seconds by taking calls via Zoom, instead of having to find an open meeting room and switch between physical locations. Zapier came up with a unique “delocation package.” As a distributed team, they offer people living in the Bay Area $10,000 to move out of the Bay Area, which a few employees have taken them up on so far. Wade talks about how they make sure that everyone is on the same page in a fast-growing, distributed team: “A big task that you have to do as you get bigger, is alignment. Alignment is simpler when there are fewer people. When you get bigger, you can do a lot more, which is exciting, but good smart people can pick different paths to go down, which don't necessarily solve for the customer's needs. The last 18 months we’ve worked really hard to create an OKR system that creates alignment across all these different teams.” Managing team dynamics in a fast-growing organization Wade talks about how managing a big team is different than a small team, and why CEOs need to pay attention to how the team is working together and how everyone is feeling about their work. “The larger your org gets, the law of large numbers kicks in. If, say, 1% of your company is angry about something in a given day, you get to 200 people that means every day 2 people might be pretty angry about something. If you make a mistake, maybe 5-10 people are pretty angry about something. For someone who’s a natural people-pleaser, that can wear on you.” Wade explains why it can be difficult to hire from within in a company that is growing exponentially. “If the needs of the company outpace the needs of the individual, which is often common in these companies that are growing exponentially, there are very few people who can rise through the proverbial management ranks fast enough to match the growth of the company.” What it's like to be CEO and the “cheat code” that CEOs get to keep in their back pocket “CEOs get a cheat code, which I think is fair because CEOs have a crazy hard job in so many different ways. We get to hire people. If you feel like any function isn’t being successful, you get the opportunity y to go hire the best leader you can possibly find in the world. As a CEO, your job is to assemble the best team and so if you do your job right you should probably be the dumbest person in your executive team to a degree.” Wade also talks the system he adapted from Dharmesh Shah at HubSpot to denote how urgent his communications with the team are (or aren't). They have a set of hashtags that Wade uses alongside his emails and Slack messages to make clear whether urgent action is required or not. Sometimes employees feel that any email from the CEO means action needs to be taken right away but this system ensures everyone is on the same page. His thoughts on the no-code movement “If you’ve got an idea and you really aren’t an engineer, you can get something up and running that is pretty good in a couple hours. I think it’s just fantastic because it allows many more people to get their ideas out into the world.” Zapier is a big part of the no-code movement and Wade and Ryan talk about some of the coolest projects they've seen built by makers without writing code and some of the products being used alongside Zapier in the no-code movement. “I imagine we’ll find that more and more companies are built with off-the-shelf software, which feels pretty powerful for society to enable the 99% of us who are not engineers unleash our creativity on the world.” Joel also talks about some of this favorite products and the software the company uses to collaborate. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Big thanks to Pilot, Monday.com, and Embroker for their support. 😸 Companies and Products Mentioned In This Episode Airtable — Real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid. Coda — It's a new day for docs. GitHub — The world's leading software development platform. Hubspot — Sales and marketing software. Jira — Issue and project-tracking software. Slack — Be less busy. Real-time messaging, archiving and search. Typeform — Makes asking questions easy, human and beautiful. Webflow — All-in-one web design platform. Workona — Transform Chrome into a professional work tool for free. Zoom — Cloud video conferencing and simple online meetings.

On this episode Ryan is joined by Joel Gascoigne, CEO of Buffer, a simple tool manage all your social media accounts. We've been avid users, big fans, and paying customers for years. In this episode Ryan and Joel talk about... Joel's roundabout journey from the UK to the US via Hong Kong and Israel Joel started Buffer with his co-founder in the UK. They lived only thirty minutes away from one another but worked remotely most of the time, preferring Skype calls and chats. After moving to the Bay Area, they ended up having to leave the US because they weren't able to get visas. He tells the story of how they decided where to go next. “We were unable to get our visas, so we had to leave the US. I remember the three of us in an apartment in San Francisco looking at Google Maps, thinking ‘where should we go?’ We ended up going to Hong Kong for six months and then to Israel for three months.” What it's like to manage an 85-person completely distributed team “David Cancel, who’s at Drift now gave me really good advice. He said either go fully remote or have an office with everyone in the same place. He said it’s hard to make it work when you’re in between those two scenarios.” Joel talks about the advantages of a distributed team, including why distributed workers tend to have more loyalty and retention with a company than Bay Area employees. He also gives his advice for setting up and running a distributed team. “We actually went out of our way to hire the next few people outside the Bay Area just to makes sure we were really distributed and not ending up with people who felt like second-class citizens.” Buffer's extreme transparency and how that endears the company to its customers Joel is one of the most vulnerable and open CEOs you'll find. He talks about how he started writing on the company blog about all the highs and lows that Buffer was experiencing and how it benefitted the company in ways that you might not expect. Buffer also publicly shares their formula for determining salaries as well as the salaries of every individual in the company. Joel explains how this is empowering to employees. “It’s just fulfilling and liberating to open up and share. I feel like it keeps us honest and doing the right things.” He says that transparency made the company more human and that both customers and non-customers felt like they were “along for the ride” when they could learn about the interior workings of the company. [When facing scaling challenges and angry customers] “...we would try to be very responsive on social media and email. When you’re sharing things transparently, you’re building up that trust with customers and very quickly those situations turned around into overwhelming support from customers — and even non-customers, just people cheering us on as a company.” Why (in a very unorthodox move) Buffer bought out their investors last year Joel explains their unique approach to company-building. He talks about how they broached the topic with their investors that Buffer might not be seeking the typical VC exit — and how they found VCs willing to partner with them on those terms. “We shared in the negotiations that there was a good chance that we might never want to sell the company or go public.” Of course, Joel also talks about some of his favorite products as well. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Big thanks to Pilot and Monday.com for their support. 😸 Companies and Products Mentioned In This Episode Discourse — Civilized discussion for your community. Superhuman — The fastest email experience ever made. Threads — Empower your team to discuss and make decisions at scale.

Web Smith has a long history working in direct-to-consumer and e-commerce. He managed marketing spend for Rogue, a leading sports goods manufacturer back in 2011 before co-founding Mizzen + Main and later joining Gear Patrol. In 2015 he founded 2PM, a B2B media company for the commerce industry and advises leading executives in the space. Through 2PM Web also invests in early-stage DTC brands and platforms that support the consumer ecosystem. If you've ever thought about starting your own DTC brand or online shop, you'll want to heed Web's advice. In this episode Ryan and Web talk about... The state of direct-to-consumer today “It’s going to become a battle to discern which companies have sticking power and what a possible exit will look like. Casper’s potential IPO will set a standard for other brands looking to exit. We’re also looking at a lot of companies developing holding companies for these types of brands.” Web points out that only 12% of transactions are e-commerce today — the remaining 88% comes via physical retail. Trends in the industry and how it has evolved over the years “The industry’s filling up pretty quickly. It’s a really dense area for people who want to become founders. They’re highly educated, from great schools, and funding is easy to come by in the DTC space for the time being. So they’re coming out of the gates from Wharton or wherever with millions of dollars in the bank and they’re probably going to get to the next milestone because they have the right founders, the right teams, and the right money. That’s the story of tens if not hundreds of consumer brands in the last two years.” Direct-to-consumer has for several years been a hot area for founders and investors. He talks about some of the trends he's seen in the space, including which growth strategies have been effective and how companies will need to evolve in the coming years as the landscape shifts. They also discuss companies like Casper and Warby Parker getting into brick-and-mortar sales, even as they are the poster children for the disruption of brick-and-mortar. What Web would do if he was creating a direct-to-consumer brand today “If I was starting a DTC brand today, I would actually start with a media company. I would launch a newsletter or blog a year or two before. It’s worth your while to develop an organic base of people that are interested in the product that they have. I know that sounds counterintuitive but you’re seeing a premium on the brands that have that type of organic acquisition” He says that paid acquisition is a commonly used strategy by DTC CMOs but that it is quickly becoming cost-prohibitive. He predicts that companies will need to adapt to different models in the future. How to think about defensibility for direct-to-consumer companies “[Ask yourself] Who are the people defending their purchases? How are they talking about their purchases to their friends and loved ones? How loyal are they? Will they come back to buy the next thing that you sell? That’s an element of defensibility that goes a bit unconsidered.” Web points out that there are plenty of informal brand ambassadors for companies with strong brands. He says that the word-of-mouth spread of brand affinities is an underrated aspect of defensibility. How direct-to-consumer companies can create a community around their brand “When Nike released the ad with Colin Kaepernick, Nike knew what it was doing. It was going to polarize the customer base and the folks that were on their side would spend a lot of time and energy defending Nike’s decision and that would amplify the brand for those defenders.” He says that companies need to think about their consumers in terms of one-to-many relationships instead of the one-to-one model that has been the primary model to date. Web talks about some of the communities that are forming around certain brands and how companies can encourage the creation of those communities. They also discuss some of their favorite e-commerce or direct-to-consumer brands and companies, and Web breaks down why those companies have been successful. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Big thanks to Pilot for their support. 😸 Companies and Products Mentioned In This Episode AdoreMe — The new face of lingerie. Away — Beautiful, direct-to-consumer luggage. Chubbies — Radical shorts for your weekend. Lacroix — Naturally essenced sparkling water. Loop Fitness Tracker — Activity band with heart rate variance and smart guidance. Philz — Ryan's favorite coffee. Recess — Sparkling water infused with hemp extract and adaptogens. ThirdLove — Better bra sizing through a self-measuring iPhone app.

AJ is mysterious. He's a maker who goes by his initials only and is the creator of Carrd, an awesome tool for creating one-page websites without any code. AJ lives in Nashville and built Carrd entirely himself. He's a bootstrapped, solo entrepreneur and maker who's been able to make a great living building a product people love and pay for. Luckily, he agreed to be recorded without voice masking, as Startup L Jackson requested, when Park— er, Startup L Jackson came on in the first incarnation of Product Hunt Radio. In this episode Ryan and AJ talk about... How AJ started Carrd as a side project which morphed into a full-blown business... “It started out as trying to make my life easier but ended up making users’ lives easier as well. A one-page site builder sounds innocuous, but you’d be surprised at the directions something like this can go.” He explains how he started Carrd and why he decided not to take on the large, multi-page site builders of the world. ... and how Carrd's users transformed it into something new entirely as an outlet for their creativity. “Trends in web design means everything moves together and kind of starts to all look the same. It’s nice to see people using Card to build websites that look unlike anything you’ve ever seen.” Among many other applications of the platform that AJ says he couldn't have foreseen, there has also been an unexpected takeover of Carrd by K-Pop fans who use it to create customized fan sites that look very... unique. AJ explains how he thinks about the direction of the platform and how he handles feature requests... “I try to take most new feature requests and figure out whether this is something that really only service one niche, and if so, is it a big enough niche to justify implementing that feature? But I prefer to implement things that would work for multiple groups of people. I try to look at them and think, ‘how can I distill this down to something that’s a bit more general-purpose that others can get use out of?’” ... and how inspiring it is to see the next generation of makers creating their own projects based on the platform. “It tells you that you can do this, you don’t have to just consume, you can create, you can get out there just like everyone else and make something. It doesn’t have to just be a one-way thing. I’m glad that Card is included in this even though I didn’t intend it to be included in the sphere of no-code tools. That’s probably the coolest part of this entire thing to me.” Some of the sites that users have created are in Ryan's words, “so internet in the best way” and are a great way for people to get into creating things on the web, which is reminiscent of the way that people creating amazing apps today got their start hacking their MySpace pages. They also discuss what it's like to work at a single-person startup... “The day-to-day is fundamentally just me in front of a computer, just hacking away at this thing. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t get lonely. Remote work has only been a thing people have done recently. I don’t think we’ve fully realized the implications of what it means to spend your day working alone away from human interaction.” AJ recently brought in someone to help with content moderation, but otherwise he's created, built, and scaled Carrd himself. He opens up about some of the “mistakes” he's made along the way and what he would do differently next time. He also talks about the tools he uses to build the platform. ... and why the discussion around whether a company should take venture capital or not is flawed. He talks about whether he would want to take on venture capital and points out that people get caught up in a false dichotomy. He says that we need a more nuanced discussion of what the right type of funding is for a company that takes into account the company's age and stage. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Big thanks to Pilot for their support. 😸

In 2013, Danielle Morrill was just starting up her blog, and writing about startups from a unique, data-driven lens. The blog turned out to be an MVP for what would later become Mattermark, a company she co-founded with her husband, Kevin Morrill, and Andy Sparks. Danielle's blog was also unique in that she opened up publicly about some of the challenges she was facing at the time, such as feeling lonely as a founder. She also admits to being a “secret introvert” and how over time, even with the level of transparency she brought to her writing, blogging “came to feel a bit like performance art.” “There’s so much content online but a lot of it is very impersonal... Pain is a little easier too bear when you share it. Sometimes it’s easy to believe when we’re struggling we’re going through something no one else has been through. But it’s not true.” In 2017, Mattermark was acquired by FullContact and Danielle moved to Denver Colorado, where she now resides. Danielle recently joined devops platform GitLab as GM of Meltano, a developer workflow tool. In this episode Ryan and Danielle talk about... Her love of reading, the mind-expanding power of fiction, and her book recommendations. Danielle admits that until recently, when she was on sabbatical, she hadn't read many of the classic “startup books.” She's checked many of those off her list now, but she still loves fiction for its mind-expanding power. She says that she thought of herself as a fairly worldly person before she started reading fiction. “I understand a lot more about emotions like empathy and compassion after reading fiction. Each time you read a new book, you try on these new characters’ lives and you get new perspective.” You can follow Danielle on Goodreads, “one of the most underrated social networks.” She loves to give book recommendations. They also discuss... The tools and strategies Danielle uses to track her time and stay productive, and how she ensures she makes time for solitude and self-reflection. Danielle runs through the tools she uses to manage her time and how her routine of Sunday planning and reflection lets her make sure ahead of time she won't have regrets about how she spent her time that week. She talks about the importance of solitude and says that she blocks out time for it in her calendar. “The blog was a good outlet but in a way it became another form of performance art. There’s always more truth you don’t share. There’s the internal work of constantly working towards some kind of coherent story about your life. Journaling, working out, or other things that cause you to have to be in solitude are good for that.” She also talks about what it was like to move from Silicon Valley to Colorado and what it was like to have a co-founder who's also a spouse. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Big thanks to Spoka and Pilot for their support. 😸 Companies, Authors, Books and Products Mentioned in This Episode Goodreads — The social network for book lovers. Gyroscope — See the complete story of your life. Haruki Murakami Fresh Complaint by Jeffrey Eugenides