Ryan Born

Just shipped this week's Diaspora.nz podcast with Paul Copplestone, founder & CEO at Supabase. We talk about: ⚡️why open source is an unfair advantage — as a product development strategy, supercharging recruiting, and helping build customer community. ⚡️how they are building the end-to-end tech stack for AI startups — seeing many customers grow into the millions of users in just weeks, growing to be one of the most tagged products by makers on Product Hunt most redeemed Y Combinator “perks.” ⚡️raising $116M, and scaling to ~80 people in 30 countries over the past 4.5 years, operating as a distributed asynchronous team. ⚡️building three startups over nearly a decade living in South East Asia. Subscribe listen links in comments below👇 Subscribe at diaspora.nz for weekly episodes 🎧👈

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Today is the one year anniversary of announcing DevClarity! When they say startup life is "peak life", they aren't kidding. From launching our first MVP, landing our initial paying customers, and winning Alabama Launchpad to tackling a massive problem space with no funding (or salary) and getting rejected dozens of times, the past 12 months have been the biggest roller coaster I've ever been on. And yet I have zero regrets about my decision because starting a company has been BY FAR the greatest learning experience I've ever had. So much so that I've lately started telling people that I believe EVERYONE should start a company at some point. In the coming days, I will share some reflections from the past year. But there are two main takeaways that stand out to me: 1. Perseverance is the most important trait for an entrepreneur. More than intelligence, specific knowledge, boldness, or anything else. The entire game is to stay in the game. Everything can change with one conversation, one customer, one investor. But you have to stay in the game long enough for that to happen. Great things take time. Perseverance gives you the mental fortitude to allow yourself that time. 2. People are the most important aspect of a business. When we announced the launch of DevClarity, I said that in the course of a career, or a lifetime, when you meet special people, you bet on them. I continue to feel validated that Will Blackburn is one of those people and am glad that we continue to bet on each other and ourselves. It's hard to know what the next 12 months will hold, but I am open to the journey and excited for what's to come! - Peter

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TWO OR THREE-STEPPING TO SERIES A A lot of software founders are still trying to raise a $4-5M seed round from a pre-revenue standpoint to get to Series A. I get that we all want more buffer nowadays but it's also a harder calculus to go from pre-monetization, to early customers, to giving yourself enough sales cycle time in order to hit $1-2M ARR proxy for a strong A. Which is why inevitably, more founders end up having to raise messy extensions/bridges/Seed II or whatever you want to call them. So my advice is that IF you have the luxury of starting a company today, PLAN AHEAD. Even prior to even raising your first angel round. Break up your path to Series A into 2 or 3 tranches of mission-driven capital. Each tranche has a clear goal that you can rally your team and investors around. For example: First tranche to build the product and get early design partners. Second tranche to get to $300K of ARR. Third tranche to get to Series A. This will help support higher operating discipline and awareness. Incremental purchasing and hiring decisions will instantaneously shorten your runway in a way that a larger $5 million seed round obfuscates. And you'll be motivated to find GTM efficiency faster in the journey. Great habits for long term success. For context, Peter Walker of Carta recently sent an update on the arduous path from Seed to Series A. The survival rate is about 1/2 of what it used to be: "Something like 20-24% of startups that raised a seed round would graduate to their Series A in 24 months or less. For companies that raised their seeds in H1 2022, only 13% have made it to Series A across the 6 industries in the chart."

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Alexey's growth eng class is an awesome and refreshingly different approach to accelerating growth teams. I spoke last year and cohort had incredible talent, and Alexey really brought out what problems growth teams concretely face when getting wins. Take Alexey's class!

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tl;dr - We're pausing NoCode Pros as a paid community for a few months. Why is this happening? John Krueger and I started NCP last summer to help our journey growing our own low code agency, DreamLabs. Our hypothesis was that the best way to level up and achieve flourishing would not be to read some books or guru videos. Instead, we wanted to learn directly with and from other practitioners, fellow nocode / lowcode agency owners in the trenches building their own businesses. Our hypothesis was correct. Over the past 8 months we've applied the insights, lessons and connections made through NCP to achieve our goals as an agency, expanding from a team of 2 to over a dozen. We're now so busy with the agency we can't in good faith maintain the NCP vision at the same time. So we're temporarily pausing NCP to focus on stabilizing our agency. The idea is that after we're built in more foundational stability, we can open up time to return to NCP and bring it to the next level. We appreciate all the NCP members' participation, engagement and support as we learn and grow together. Upwards 🚀

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When a senior dev from Big Tech wants a “Head of Engineering” title at your startup… what’s your move? One of our Recruiting Partners, Brandon Whitman, breaks it down: "Get your team on the same page about titles and growth paths. At my last company, we ditched titles early on to boost collaboration, but consistency and transparency were key when we started adding ‘Head of’ roles." Be upfront with candidates: “Startups move fast. Show your impact, and you’ll grow with us.” Clear expectations = fewer headaches later. Curious how to handle these conversations? Work with Brandon—link in the comments! #hiring #startups #recruiting

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