Time flies. This update is long overdue.

Quick recap:

Slick helps trucking and logistics companies save thousands of dollars monthly by cutting unnecessary execution costs.

We provide real-time visibility into how transport orders are performing against the plan, allowing us to identify and resolve issues for our clients the moment they occur.

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Where are we now?

• Our first customer started paying in Q1 of last year. By Q4 we crossed $100K ARR.

• More than 1K people are using Slick weekly.

• In my last post I wrote that 200K messages were sent via Slick to date - now almost twice as much is sent monthly.

• Slick is already handling fleets much larger than 100 trucks for many of our customers.

• We tried 6 different channels to acquire customers. We found the one that works - 90% of the customers were acquired in a repeated manner.

• The team is still small. Founders, 2 amazing engineers and a 2 person sales team.

• Around a year ago we raised a seed round of financing from SMOK Ventures and a group of angel investors.

Our next big goal is hitting 1 million ARR. We’ve done that before at Base so I really don’t see a reason why this time should be different :)

Honestly, it feels like our biggest challenge right now is to execute at scale on what already works.

Speaking of execution - we’re looking for great people to help us in two key areas:

• Product - If you’re (or know) an ambitious, customer-oriented developer who loves shipping stuff to production, please contact me at bart@slickshift.ai or apply here

• Sales - If you’re (or know) someone with a proven track record selling B2B software, ideally in the transportation/logistics space - please also contact me at bart@slickshift.ai or apply here

There are a few topics I’d like to cover in more depth this time:

• Funding

• Product

• Sales & customer acquisition

Funding

As I shared in my previous post, we bootstrapped the business at the start. MVP came out in early 2024. First customers started using the product pretty quickly. Back then I wrote about Slick for the first time, that was Q1 ‘24.

Honestly, the main reason for those early posts was recruitment. But something unexpected happened: a few VCs reached out.

At that point we weren’t even thinking about raising. Cash was fine, costs low, we were still experimenting a lot.

What caught their eye? Strong team (most of us ex-Base with an exit), huge unsexy market, and the fact that we had actually shipped an MVP.

We chatted with a couple of VCs, but since we weren’t raising money, things cooled off fast. Still, the seed was planted. External capital started feeling like a real option.

After a while we realized: to build a truly compelling product, we needed to grow the product team. Our revenue was zero back then, so the choices were simple: provide more of our own money, or take external investment. We did both.

To get on VCs’ radar properly, I decided to write the second post about Slick. It focused on three things: real customer progress (validation), why our team rocks, and how we planned to grow.

Right after the post went live, Borys from SMOK Ventures messaged me: “You inspired me to record a TikTok ;) https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGetJgwvX/”.

I’d met Borys before and shared our story. That TikTok showed he really listened – and he thinks about building businesses in a similar way we do. With that, it became pretty clear that there is a real opportunity to start working together.

We set up a full day with the SMOK team in Kraków. Borys and Diana came over, we locked ourselves in a room. A few days later we had a high-level handshake agreement!

With SMOK leading it was much easier to close angel investors: Bartek Majewski, Richard Lucas, Krzysiek Langer and the Base crew – Uzi, Agata, Sebastian. We knew almost everyone already, so closing was smooth.

How’s it been working with SMOK so far?

• Super natural, direct, and friendly process

• Borys really means it when he says he doesn’t want to waste founders’ time. It’s true both during and after the round

• They’re quick to help with intros, job postings to their portfolio, etc.

• Very transparent about everything – evaluation, terms, legal. Most of it is even on their website

The money lets us grow the team and go after customers seriously. And that is exactly what we’re doing.

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Product

Where should I even start with this one? As a reminder, here’s how I described what we built last time:

“Slickshift is where technology meets logistics, creating a smoother, more productive world. We’re making logistics communication effortless and putting visibility into freight and driver locations at everyone’s fingertips. Our goal is to revolutionise communication in logistics just as Slack transformed communication within companies.”

People don’t buy “smoother experience” or “effortless communication.”

What they actually buy is real value for their business.

That’s why, with Slick, trucking companies save money by catching and eliminating expensive mistakes during transport orders.

A typical truck drives 10-12K kilometers per month. If the fleet consists of 50 trucks, that is 500K-600K km monthly. Assuming that 1-2% of that can be eliminated (sometimes it’s more), we’re talking about north of ~10K unnecessary km saved, which may mean tens of thousands of dollars saved monthly.

How do we do it? We focus mainly on 3 things:

• We enable the choice of the best route considering drivers’ working time, route length, and road costs.

• We eliminate extra kilometers driven by the fleet due to driver mistakes (e.g. deviating from the route, taking the wrong border crossing, driving on the highway instead of a cheaper road).

• After every transport we immediately provide a comparison of the delivery plan vs actual execution. All differences are visible right away. This way we can eliminate similar mistakes in the future.

That value proposition is what starts conversations with trucking company owners.

And yes - we still make communication effortless, we use AI a lot (actually most of the things above happens automatically), we connect to GPSes, we replace chunks of forwarders’ duties.

But the goal of all of it is simple: saving money for trucking companies.

My single biggest shift in how I think about building product now (which might be obvious to some, but definitely wasn’t the norm for me):

The person who builds the product should also be the one selling it.

Doesn’t matter if they love it or hate it, if they’re good at it or not - all product work must be validated first with potential leads. In the early stage, you only have so many existing customers. The main goal is growth, so making sure what you build actually makes sense for future customers is by far the most important thing. It’s also the reality check on how delusional product people can be.

Moving forward our main ambition in product is this:

Let Slick take over more and more of the manual work that dispatchers and forwarders still do today.

There are many repetitive tasks with every transport order and we believe we can automate them completely thanks to the progress in technology that has happened recently . It’s similar to what happened in support: many cases get resolved by agents or AI with zero human touch. The same thing is starting in sales. We think that similar stuff will happen in managing drivers and transport. That’s our core focus at the moment.

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Sales & customer acquisition

That’s the area where we’ve made the biggest progress and I’ve learned the most over the course of last year. I will dedicate a separate post to share more on that.

To wrap it up - at the beginning of last year we had very little idea how to speak about Slick’s value, via what channels to reach customers and how to make this process repeatable.

We closed last year having acquired all revenue in a repeatable manner via only one sales channel. Onwards!

As I wrote before, our next big goal is hitting 1 million ARR. We’re looking for engineers and sales people who would like to help us with that. Please drop me a line if you know someone (bart@slickshift.ai).

“What do you do at night when everyone else is sleeping?”
“What does Bart Kiszala remind you of?”
“What is the worst reply to ‘I love you’?”

These are just a few of the questions you can expect when you play Buddies, a game created by Dominik and Jarek, which I happened to invest in around a year ago. It’s a game where friends answer questions they would typically hesitate to ask. By doing so, they learn new things about each other while having a lot of fun.

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Now, with the company nearing the break-even point—a major milestone for the team—they’re preparing to raise capital to bring Buddies to more countries. With over 100,000 monthly users and holding the #1 spot in Poland’s App Store, the team is already seeing interest in markets like Italy and Germany. If you know someone who might be interested in connecting with them, feel free to ping me or reach out directly to dominik@buddies.fun

What Is Buddies?

Buddies is all about having fun by simply asking and answering questions — questions about each other. Some questions are quirky, and some are a bit deeper. The idea is simple: you play on your phones, and every round, players take turns answering questions about someone else. The fun part is that the questions require knowledge about the people you are playing with —so it’s not about random facts, but about what you know about each other, your memories, and inside jokes.

Now, imagine you’re playing Buddies with your closest friend. Here are some questions you might get asked about them:

• “What should they spend a million dollars on?”

• “What do they do best?”

• “What’s definitely in their browser history?”

• “How would they try to get the party started?”

• “If there were no tomorrow, what should they do?”

The questions give each person a chance to share stories they might not have otherwise told. It's great for house parties, team events, or even virtual hangouts with friends.

Where Do People Play Buddies?

The beauty of Buddies is you can literally play anywhere, anytime.

A few weeks ago, Jarek—one of the co-founders of Buddies—turned 30. He was the first designer to join Base in Poland. Along with a bunch of other folks from Base, we recently met for a surprise party to celebrate Jarek’s 30th birthday. After a few pizzas, a quick catch-up, and a couple of beers, we started playing Buddies. Ten people in their 20s, 30s, and one guy in his 40s (guess who) played for a couple of hours. Watch for yourself:

We had so much fun during the game. Some questions brought back cool memories from work, which I guess we sometimes miss.

The Growing Popularity of Buddies

The first 10,000 users playing buddies were reached in nine months after launch (from March to November 2022). After that, it took only five more months to hit 100,000 users. The journey from 100,000 to 1 million users took another 1.5 years. This was the story of the original Buddies app.

Then, last summer, the team released Buddies Spicy. It took just four months to reach 100,000 users.

Buddies include over 2,000 questions crafted by the team, and users have added nearly 1,000,000 which is pretty wild.

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Unlike other games, Buddies is mostly played by women—60% of players are female, which is pretty unique. It can probably be explained by the fact that when friends get together, men often end up talking about things like “football and cars”. To keep the group engaged, women are more likely to suggest playing Buddies as a group activity.

The games are most popular in Poland, where Buddies currently holds the #1 and #2 spots in the Trivia and Family categories on App Stores. The team’s goal is to achieve similar success in app stores in other countries. There are early signs of adoption in other EU countries like Italy and Germany, and the next big step for the team is to expand into those markets.

The Team Behind Buddies: Dominik, Jarek, and Mirek

A little bit more than a year ago, Buddies was clearly growing into a serious business. The funding team faced a decision: commit fully and make it their full-time job, or continue treating it as a side project. As a big fan of the idea and knowing the team well, my friend Krzysiek and I were happy to provide initial funding to help them focus entirely on the game. Krzysiek is also an investor and serves as the CEO of Admind, the largest branding agency in Poland.

As I mentioned before, Buddies was created by Dominik and Jarek.
Before Buddies, they co-created a game called "Wiem to", a trivia game played on a single phone with a group of people. It was fun but didn’t quite have the multiplayer angle that Buddies brings to the table.

Jarek is not only a designer, but also an author who isn’t afraid to challenge the status quo. A few years ago, during the COVID pandemic, he managed to write and publish a book that created a real buzz. Jarek’s book, “Dobre intencje, demokracja, kobiety – pełna historia Jarosława Kaczyńskiego”, is a satirical take on Poland’s political landscape, particularly focusing on the country's leadership. The book is entirely empty, with blank pages symbolizing Jarek’s thoughts on Kaczyński’s views on democracy and women, making a strong statement through its lack of content. A significant portion of the book’s profits was donated to the Centre for Women’s Rights, reflecting the main character’s anti-women policies.

As for Dominik—he’s a true geek. He loves both computer games and socializing, and he has a particular soft spot for cats. He’s always been passionate about games, which is why it makes sense that he co-founded Buddies. His technical skills have been crucial in developing the game. Dominik is also incredibly hard-working. In 2021, he ended up in the hospital for a couple of weeks, and during his stay he started working on Buddies. The idea for the game had been on his mind for a while, but it was during this time that he really started making it happen.

Mirek is the 3rd pillar of the team. Dominik and Mirek have known each other for over 30 years—some marriages have lasted less time than their friendship. They grew up in the same village and even in the same building, went to the same university, and ended up working in similar fields.

My Personal Take on Buddies

What I enjoy most about Buddies is observing how B2C products are built and scaled. I’ve always been on the B2B side, where finding the right acquisition channel was critical, typically a paid one.

With Buddies, the game is naturally social. You can’t play alone—you have to invite friends, and most games are played with 4 people. By inviting others, users help promote the game, which brings in more players. As more people join, the app moves up in the app store rankings, making it easier for new users to find it when it’s at the top. It’s a great system that helps the game grow.

On the revenue side, the team transitioned from selling sets of questions to a recurring revenue model.

It’s fascinating how differently recurring revenue works in games compared to SaaS businesses. Everything is different—paying periods (weekly vs. monthly), price elasticity, and the decision-making process to purchase. At the same time, there are similarities—some users have been paying for the app for more than 20 weeks and counting (equivalent to almost two years in SaaS), which is remarkable.

After the success of Buddies Spicy, the team is creating a new AI-powered game that builds challenges around what a group of friends actually enjoys—whether it’s gaming, music, memes, or something totally niche. I’m excited to see how this new game will be received by the players.

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As mentioned before, with the company nearing the break-even point—a major milestone for the team—they’re preparing to raise capital to bring Buddies to more countries. If you know someone who might be interested in connecting with the founders or exploring this opportunity, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me or contact dominik@buddies.fun.

The All-In Summit is organized by four investor friends—David Friedberg, Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Sacks—who run the All-In Podcast. Their weekly discussions on current events, market trends, politics, and tech insights have attracted over 600K YouTube subscribers. As a loyal listener and poker enthusiast myself, I’ve followed the podcast for almost three years.

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The event lasted three days in Los Angeles, with around 2,000 attendees by my estimate. The first day was all about networking, followed by two days of discussions with amazing speakers. The lineup, which wasn’t revealed until one day before the event, was incredible. Just to name a few: Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), Peter Thiel (PayPal, Palantir), Travis Kalanick (Uber), Marc Benioff (Salesforce), Sergey Brin (Google), JD Vance (politician), and many more.

So, how was it? First of all, it was hot. Insanely hot, actually. The first two days were over 40 degrees. I’m not a big fan of a sauna—especially in the summer in LA.

Jokes aside, this felt like an event where people came because they truly wanted to, not because their employers sent them. Everyone I talked to was a fan of the podcast. So, most attendees already knew the besties, their style, opinions, and political/economic viewpoints. The interviews—most of which featured the four besties with a guest—felt natural, fun, and direct because of this shared context.

The interviews felt natural and direct, as if you were listening to a private conversation between friends rather than a formal event. The openness, jokes, and honest disagreements made the sessions fly by, even though they lasted for hours.

For example, Jason and Musk during the interview, had a hilarious conversation about checking if the show Saturday Night Live is truly live. Musk, once on the air, was supposed to reach into his pants and tell the audience he was going to show them his "cock"—AND then reveal a tiny rooster. The whole point was to see if viewers at home would actually see the rooster. If they did, it would prove the show -  Saturday Night Live -  was live; if not, it meant there was a delay in the broadcast. Not a typical conversation you hold in front of a large crowd.

Additionally, many speakers answered questions in a super direct way. For example, Thiel showed strong support for Trump in the upcoming election, highlighting that even if Trump wins, it may still lead to disappointment. Musk shared that his outspoken views could potentially lead to his arrest for political reasons.

Another aspect people enjoy about the podcast is the disagreements between the besties, which often lead to discussions and push others to think more deeply. The primary line of disagreement happens between Sacks, a strong Republican, and JCal, who claims to be independent but leans more toward the Democrats. Since it's an election year, many discussions, both in recent podcasts and during the conference, were related to politics.

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A common sentiment among attendees was that there was too much political content, with many missing the older discussions that focused more on the economy, markets, and tech. With the election around the corner, it's likely that politics will continue to dominate the conversation. To keep things more engaging, it would be great to include more discussions with leaders or supporters from the Democratic side to keep the conversation more intellectually honest.

My top 3 interviews were the ones with Peter Thiel, Travis Kalanick, and Bari Weiss—with no particular order.

Thiel made a point about elections, explaining that voters often pick the lesser of two evils. He said that elections are a relative choice, where people vote more to oppose someone than to support another. But once someone becomes president, they are judged in absolute terms, which often leads to disappointment or regret. In most cases, no one is truly pro any candidate; it’s mostly about voting against the other. This highlights a broader frustration with modern elections.

On a funny note, he stated that investing in Europe “is always sort of junk” but “it’s a great place to go for holidays as an investor.”

Thiel also compared AI today to the internet in the late 1990s. It’s huge and will be incredibly important, but the real transformation will take time—20 years, not 6 months. Right now, predicting which AI companies will dominate is tough. Nvidia is the only one really making money, while others are still losing. It’s similar to how people didn’t know which internet companies would win in the early days, but we can be sure AI will reshape the world.

The part which stuck in my mind the most was his reply to JCal's question: “Are you optimistic for the future?"

Thiel: “I always push back on that question. I think extreme optimism and extreme pessimism are both really bad attitudes, and they're somehow the same thing. You know, extreme pessimism—nothing you can do; extreme optimism—the future will take care of itself. So, if you have to have one, it's probably best to be somewhere in between—maybe mildly optimistic, mildly pessimistic. But, uh, you know, I believe in human agency, and that it's up to us. It’s not, you know, winning a lottery ticket or some astrological chart that's going to decide things. I believe in human agency, and that’s an axis that's very different from optimism or pessimism. Extreme optimism, extreme pessimism—they’re both excuses for laziness.”

Kalanick shared a story of JD’s acquisition of Uber in China During the negotiations with JD, Uber made sure to apply a lot of pressure. They knew that in order to close the deal on food terms, JD had to be scared. As Kalanick explained, "We had to make them nervous." To achieve this, Uber ramped up its spending to a whopping $75 million a week. It was a move to create urgency and leverage it in negotiations. In the end, it worked. By driving up Uber’s market share in China and showing they were willing to burn cash, JD felt the heat, and Uber secured a deal where they retained 20% of the merged entity.

Reflecting on his time with Uber, Kalanick said, "I loved every minute." But now, his focus has shifted. "When you fall in love again, you don’t think about your ex that much," 

I also love his motivation for building things:

"A lot of folks go, ‘Look, you did the Uber thing, why are you doing it again? I mean, you cashed in a lot of chips, you could be just chilling.’ I'm like, ‘Look, Serena keeps getting on the court, she's totally badass, why is she doing it, right? You know, or take your favorite star of anything (...)  It’s because they have a love of the game, and it's not just showtime that day. It's everything behind the scenes, it's working with people(...) You gotta—I like the magic of working with magical people. Doing it as a crew is where all the good stuff happens."

The interview I enjoyed the most was with Bari Weiss, who used to be an editor at The New York Times before she resigned. She then started a blog called Common Sense, which eventually became The Free Press media company.

Weiss talked about the transformation of journalism -  how the role of journalists has shifted from reporting facts to pushing a specific political agenda. She emphasizes that journalism has become less about telling the plain truth and more about guiding people towards a "correct" political position, which she sees as a fundamental change in the job.

Weiss also talked about the confusion in society. She said, "people all of a sudden turned around and thought, when did everything get so insane?" Many people feel frustrated with today’s public conversations, where extreme opinions seem to dominate and common sense is hard to find.

Her goal with The Free Press is to combine the fact-checking standards that outlets like The Washington Post or The New York Times used to follow with the political freedom of independent media. She believes that truth, transparency, and making corrections when necessary are key to building trust with the audience.

The interview was fantastic, and after hearing her, I immediately became a subscriber to The Free Press.

The conference also hosted a poker tournament with a few hundred participants, which was a great way to meet others. The main prize was an invitation to a poker event in Las Vegas with the besties, and I'm thrilled to have been one of the 10 winners!

To sum up, there’s a good question to ask: Is it worth traveling to LA, paying a lot for the ticket to attend the conference in person, or is it better to just watch all the content on YouTube a few days later?

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Here’s how I see it: Imagine you're a fan of Thai food. You could order Pad Thai from your favorite local restaurant on Uber Eats and enjoy it at home. Or you could fly to Thailand and buy Pad Thai on the streets of Bangkok, late at night when the streets are full of people. The smell of street food is everywhere, and you can see the fire as they fry the noodles. You feel the heat, you hear the sounds of the busy street—it’s an experience that touches all your senses. The taste of the food might be similar to what you get at home, but the overall experience is completely different and much more real.

Going to the conference is the same. You have to decide for yourself: Do you want to enjoy Pad Thai on your couch at home, or do you want the full experience of flying to Thailand? It’s a personal choice.

PS

Our crew getting ready to Top Gun party:

It’s been a while since my last post , mostly because there’s been so much happening at Slickshift, and it’s been taking up most of my focus.

There are some cool developments and insights that I thought would be interesting to share.

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Just to recap, my last post about Slickshift began like this: "Slickshift is where technology meets logistics, creating a smoother, more productive world. We're making logistics communication effortless and putting visibility into freight and driver locations at everyone's fingertips. Our goal is to revolutionise communication in logistics just as Slack transformed communication within companies."

The good news is that this is still a pretty accurate definition of what we’re building. We’ve run into many challenges over the last few months, but our core promise remains the same. Fast, transparent communication between drivers, forwarders, and dispatchers, as well as accurate understanding of cargo delivery, is critical for the success of the logistics business. That’s exactly what we’re working on.

Here’s what the last 4 months looked like in numbers:

• Team: 3 amazing engineers joined our team, so we are 7 ppl now

• Users: More than a hundred forwarders and dispatchers are actively using Slickshift.

• Engagement: Hundreds of drivers are being communicated with daily by forwarders and dispatchers through our platform.

• Outreach: We've talked with well over a hundred companies about Slickshift, roughly 30-40% of whom agreed to see a demo, and almost half of them decided to give Slickshift a try.

• Communication: There have been approximately 200,000 messages exchanged on the platform so far.

So, what are the key learnings and observations from this period?

Real customer usage is the ultimate test of any product.

After the MVP of Slick was released, we recognized that we had cut corners in some areas. It’s a natural part of the process. There are two opposing forces at play: one urges you to polish the product and add more features, while the other questions whether you are building something people truly need. There’s also a psychological aspect—it’s always easier to postpone the release and work on yet another thing. However, releasing the product is the only true validation of the work. Is it any good? Do people need it? Are they going to like it?

So, we decided to launch early with just one company on board. We wanted to see if our ideas were even on the right track. Luckily, we quickly saw that our vision of providing a centralized and transparent communication hub, as well as clear fleet status, was on point. However, we also learned that users have high expectations, and the difference between them loving the system or getting frustrated by it is really slim.

Changing established habits is another huge challenge. Generally, people don’t like to switch up things they’re comfortable with. There’s a natural tendency to focus on any evidence that supports sticking to the old ways.

At the beginning, Slick didn’t support message replies. Sometimes notifications about new messages were delayed. The mobile app wasn’t snappy on some devices.

This led to losing a few accounts. While we felt those cancellations were a bit premature, I completely get that people might just be tired of using something that doesn’t work smoothly—and delivering a top-notch product experience is our responsibility.

That’s why we've spent a lot of time over the last few months improving the user experience. 

Our clients have pointed us towards what truly matters—doing a few things well instead of many things halfway. It’s a simple but crucial lesson. As a result of that work, we just received our first five referrals from existing customers—the best sign that people are starting to love the product.

Building a real-time messaging system is no walk in the park.

The technical side of creating our product turned out to be more challenging than we first thought, which, looking back, really makes sense.

The technical brain of our group and the CTO, Mike, has been instrumental. We’ve been teammates since our days at Base, where Mike was one of the first two engineers we hired back in 2010. He stayed on through the acquisition by Zendesk, experiencing firsthand the full evolution of the Base application—from a handful of freelancers to nearly 10,000 companies worldwide, some with over a thousand salespeople. His deep knowledge and experience allow us to experiment and build rapidly.

However, what surprised us most was the sheer amount of effort and the sophisticated quality needed for a real-time messaging system.

Picture this: a driver is nearing their destination and sends a message to the dispatcher, "Which cargo box should I leave the package at?" The message needs to be delivered instantly. The dispatcher quickly replies, but for some reason, there's a slight delay. Perhaps the driver's GPS signal is weak, the office's WiFi lags, or the system itself slows down momentarily. The reason doesn't really matter because the perception for both the dispatcher and the driver is that the app simply doesn’t work. It’s irrelevant that this particular message was sent within 15-20 seconds, because  the dispatcher decided to call the driver and resolved the issue over the phone. It also doesn’t matter that the previous 10 messages were delivered without a hitch. What does matter is that in this specific instance, the system didn’t perform flawlessly, and that's enough to break customer trust.

To prevent such situations, we doubled down on the quality of the core chat experience, ensuring it always works reliably and quickly.

Challenges like this are less apparent when working on products that don’t require 100% real-time functionality. For example, when posting a picture on Instagram or saving a ride on Strava, a delay of a few seconds in appearing on a timeline is hardly noticeable. But for Slick, timing is crucial, and it makes a significant difference.

I think more importantly, we could not face these challenges unless we had early customers using the real system. Decision to release early ensured we could focus on the right things.

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The Team is Key

In my last post, I mentioned we were looking for two engineers to join our team.

We definitely believe Ballmer was right on this one.

A key building block of a successful startup is the pace of product development. We're faced with many unknowns, but our vision is clear: we want to create a product loved by thousands of customers. The best way to achieve this, we believe, is to quickly experiment and iterate with our users. And for that, we inherently need engineers.

Thankfully, we've managed to expand our team with three amazing people. It’s pretty remarkable that out of all the options available in the market, these individuals chose to join a very early-stage startup like ours!

Pawel

An AI/ML engineer with extensive experience. Pawel and I worked together along with Alex and Mike (other two co-founders of Slick) for many years at Base and Zendesk. He is an absolute expert in AI and knows how such technology can be leveraged in real-world applications. I’ll share more about our thinking on AI in Business Software, and specifically Slick, in just a bit. However, working with someone who has such a deep understanding of AI has been a fantastic experience.

Piotrek

A Base alumni, Piotrek is deeply product-oriented and loves engineering. For quite some time, we considered working on another idea together but after various attempts, we concluded that building Slick makes the most sense. Piotrek (along with Mike and Alex) was responsible for the whole core experience of the Base product, managed a team of over 30 people, and was my best buddy in product discussions and decisions. It’s been amazing to work with him again, especially now as he finds his passion in being on the edge of technology and building things hands-on. 

Szymon

Szymon is our first hire. I recall from Base that most of the people who ended up being core members of our team were hired in their mid-twenties, with a few years of experience but immense desire and ambition to build things. Szymon fits that description perfectly. After working together for three months, I have no doubts that he is the right person with the right mindset to succeed and build big things.

In terms of work setup we  decided to work remote, with one optional day of working from the coworking space. What’s interesting is that everyone is religiously trying to meet the team in person once a week.

AI

AI is an incredibly hot topic recently. It’s difficult to distinguish the real advancements from the hype. Right now, it seems like every startup is an AI startup. Just a few days ago, Nvidia became the most valuable company in the world—its market cap is around five times the GDP of Poland! Crazy times indeed.

Having observed so many customers at work, we believe that AI will revolutionize the logistics space. When rolling out AI solutions at Slick, gaining the trust of users is paramount. You wouldn’t want to give control over your email to AI, right? As Pawel, our AI lead, says, "It's hard to let go of the steering wheel when you drive your Tesla for the very first time."

So, we take an approach of small steps in the right direction. This strategy has allowed us to deliver a few impressive experiences. For example:

When a driver sends pictures of transport documents to a dispatcher, these are automatically recognized, sorted, and structured in Slick.

When a driver sends a voice message, Slick transcribes it so dispatchers can read the message instead of listening to it, which is sometimes inconvenient.

We also automatically translate messages from other languages.

Even though these functionalities might seem straightforward if you’re familiar with various API endpoints, many people are still pleasantly surprised by them.

However, we believe that in the long term, we need to create an experience—a co-pilot, if you will—that automates and simplifies the many manual tasks currently performed by forwarders and dispatchers. By doing this, people will be able to focus mainly on more interesting, complex tasks, and ensure that routine things are being handled properly. That’s the goal, at least, and we truly believe that’s what the future will look like. We’re pushing hard to launch the first version of our co-pilot-like solution as soon as possible.

Reaching customers

I recently read "Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth" by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. It’s a fantastic book where the authors assert that "Most startups don’t fail because they can’t build a product. Most startups fail because they can’t get traction." To gain traction, a startup needs to find one effective channel to acquire customers—many businesses find none. This realization is sobering.

Gabriel offers a guide to all possible channels (19 of them) that companies can use to acquire customers. He also provides examples of successful companies that have used each of these channels. The task for founders is to test each of these channels and discover which one works best.

One comment that really stuck with me is that founders often assume some things won’t work, either because they haven’t worked in their past experiences, or they are biased because they are not personally excited about them.

Additionally, the most obvious channels that should work for your business are those that worked for similar companies in your space in the past.

In our case, that’s a long-winded way of saying that we should try outbound sales. No one was excited about the idea, as when we’re approached by people via phone, it typically doesn’t end well. On top of that, our previous experiences with outbound sales weren't great.

Having said that, we decided to give it a shot. It’s still not clear if that’s the best channel for us, however, our findings are both positive and surprising.

The biggest surprise is that people in the logistics space are willing to speak with strangers. 85-90% of people don’t hang up the phone while being cold-called. It actually makes perfect sense when you think about it. People just spend a lot of time on the phone with clients, suppliers, drivers. They typically call you back if they can’t pick up the phone. That’s been a positive surprise, as at least we are able to connect with many new potential customers in a reasonable and cheap way. One of our best customers is a company that we just cold-called.

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I’m pretty sure that the outbound channel is probably a difficult one in many other industries, however, I’m really glad that it works in logistics and we were humble enough to try it out.

I hope the things I’ve shared here can be helpful or at least give you something to think about.

For me personally getting back to the early startup days and building from the ground up has been really rewarding. There’s something special about working through challenges with great people —definitely something I've missed.

Exciting times ahead 😀

TLDR

SlickShift is where technology meets logistics, creating a smoother, more productive world. We're making logistics communication effortless and putting visibility into freight and driver locations at everyone's fingertips. Our  goal is to revolutionize communication in logistics just as Slack transformed communication within companies.

Our MVP was released just a few weeks ago—but we're already experiencing traction. To keep this momentum going, we're looking for two engineers and a person who is passionate about growth to join our team.

For more information on the engineering and growth positions, please see -> HERE <- and -> HERE <-.

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Please pass this information along to anyone you think is outstanding and might be interested, or consider applying yourself. I genuinely believe we're on the right path, and joining us now promises to be an incredible journey.

Continue reading to learn all the details, but the take-home message is this: joining our team offers an incredible opportunity to develop a customer-facing product for a massive industry, where typical software solutions are cumbersome, especially at a moment in time when AI, one of the most significant technological revolutions, is happening.

The story - why?

A good friend of mine, Janek, runs a logistics company. We've had countless conversations over the years, and he's often been vocal about the software they use in business. He would say, “It’s unbelievable how bad the software we use is. In my personal life, I use so many great apps on my phone, but at work, it's like the last 20 years never happened.” My typical response was, “Yeah, cool story, man. But let's talk about something else.” (Un)fortunately, Janek is persistent. He convinced me to visit his office and see for myself. After my first visit, I found myself returning again and again, leading to the following realization:

To understand why - lets see how a typical logistics company works and what they do. 

Companies which need to move the cargo hire a logistic company - to move it between manufacturers, warehouses, and different businesses. Logistics companies typically have its fleet (cars/trucks and drivers) as well as office workers: forwarders and dispatchers. Forwarders organize and oversee the shipment of goods across international borders, handling logistics and customs formalities, while dispatchers coordinate the scheduling and routing of vehicles for the efficient delivery of goods.

Work of forwarders and dispatchers is communication heavy. It also requires a good understanding of where drivers are, what challenges they experience (you would be surprised how many calls a dispatcher receives because drivers can not find a loading place or warehouse), are they tired etc. They are in constant communication with clients, drivers and other members of the team to make sure that operation runs as a well oiled machine. On top of that, as in any operation that involves different people, things go wrong, and in the logistic industry they go wrong on a regular basis. Imagine you are responsible for a cargo movement and you just realize that your cargo went to Sicilia instead of Finland. What do you do now? Real story btw. 

After observing the day-to-day operations the following became clear: 

There are some industry-specific backend systems, known as TMS (Transportation Management Systems), where all transport-related activities need to be manually documented. People typically don't enjoy using them because of the necessity to meticulously log every piece of data.

Besides that, forwarders and dispatchers utilize whatever tools they can to get through their day. This includes Google Maps, Google Spreadsheets, Skype, WhatsApp, Viber, SMS, and Notepad. They spend a significant amount of time on the phone, contacting drivers and clients. They may receive up to 40-50 phone calls daily. There are numerous repetitive tasks, such as texting a driver, "Where are you?" multiple times a day. I was amazed at how outdated some TMS systems can be. But what was most astonishing was the lack of industry-specific software designed to help forwarders and dispatchers navigate their day in the most productive manner possible.

Yet, the need for a solution like that seemed obvious, as people were employing the apps they knew in the most sophisticated and impressive ways I had ever seen.

It seemed there was an opportunity, and Janek and I decided to dig deeper.

In order to move forward, we had to do the following:

• Find partners in crime who would like to help us.

• Decide which problem needs to be tackled first and how.

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The team 

I reached out to Mike and Alex, people whom I knew very well from Base. I gave them a brief introduction to the space and the high-level idea of the opportunity. The ask was as follows:

Would you like to dig deeper into this space, become familiar with how it works mainly by visiting different logistics companies, following their daily work, and based on research like that, decide if we should build something?

More about everyone:

Janek 

As mentioned before, we've known each other for over 20 years. Janek is an industry expert; he founded Black Orange, a logistics company, almost 10 years ago on his own. Today, the business employs over 40 people, has a fleet of more than 30 cars, and is growing. He has firsthand experience in every possible role within the logistics industry. Since the industry requires extensive cooperation between different vendors, he "knows people" and can quickly open doors to many other logistics companies. We started working on the first version of the product in September and launched it three months later. The team at Black Orange were and continue to be critical early adopters, providing us with harsh yet invaluable feedback. Building a tool like SlickShift without full access to the live workings of a logistics company from day one wouldn't have been possible. At the same time, Janek is an extremely ambitious and competitive person—a tough cookie.

Mike

One of the best engineers I've ever worked with, Mike joined Base as one of the first two people we hired back in 2011. We worked together for 10 years. He was one of the most crucial contributors to the engineering success of Base. The challenge with Mike is that he is an extremely fast typist (he uses the COLEMAK keyboard layout - QWERTY is for rookies) and an even faster thinker when it comes to coding. Because of this, he still can't build stuff as quickly as he would like. At the same time, even if he doesn't lock his laptop, making any jokes is impossible, as the letters on his keyboard are unrelated to the underlying keystrokes. He could work anywhere, but at his core, he is a builder, and that's why we do stuff together.

Alex

We worked together at Base for more than 5 years. On one hand, Alex is an engineer, but predominantly, he is an amazing thinker who loves working closely with customers. He is extremely product-focused. I worked with Alex on one of the biggest and most challenging implementations at Base. Alex also led a professional services team, and we collaborated extensively on Growth at Base. Privately, Alex is a great cook, a bookworm, and, generally speaking, a highly knowledgeable and curious person.

Bart

I’m the least interesting part of the team; however, my key responsibility is to enable our group to gain traction as quickly and efficiently as possible. Thus, in general, I try to assist as much as possible in all aspects of the business.

We decided to give ourselves 2 months for research. During that time, we spent a lot of time with a handful of logistics companies, observing how they work and what problems they experience. We started in the summer of last year.

The problem 

We visited many companies, and the following observations became clear:

• Drivers often receive the same questions about their location or estimated time of arrival, leading to unnecessary duplication of efforts.

• When dispatchers and forwarders hand over shifts, they need to update each other on recent activities. Without direct communication visibility, important details can be missed if not properly relayed.

• Dispatchers are burdened with manually inputting data into TMS and other systems for back-office operations, which is not only time-intensive but also a major source of frustration.

• The lack of an effective tracking system means it’s often unclear when exactly cargo will arrive.

• Dispatchers and forwarders are relatively young, tech-forward individuals who spend a lot of time using outdated software.

• There is a spaghetti of tools which people use to navigate their day: Google Maps, Google Spreadsheets, Skype, WhatsApp, Viber, Gadu-Gadu, SMS, Notepad, etc.

Our key observation is that communication within logistics companies is inefficient and fragmented, with a notable lack of proper visibility and transparency in understanding what’s happening with a fleet in real time.

After that time, we decided to build an MVP, and by doing so, we started SlickShift with four partners: Mike, Alex, Janek, and myself.

The solution 

Our goal is to simplify communication between drivers, dispatchers, and freight forwarders, eliminating misunderstandings and the need for constant phone clarifications. SlickShift consolidates all essential information into a single platform, avoiding the necessity for multiple apps. We aim to improve tracking and transparency by providing complete visibility of routes, including each driver's current position and the distance remaining to their destination.

That’s just the beginning. The moment we become the heartbeat of a logistics company, where forwarders and dispatchers spend their days, all the unstructured data—conversations with drivers, routes, documents, etc.—will become available to be “digested” by AI. From there, a plethora of other options will emerge, including insights for decision-makers, process automation, and out-of-the-box documentation of tasks (which currently is a tedious job done daily).

We’ve built and released the MVP, which is already being used by a handful of companies. The adoption is amazing, with more than 60% daily active users per account.

What we’re also super excited about is the size of the market. According to different sources, there are between 1.2 and 3 million logistics companies just in the EU, with almost 400,000 in Poland alone.

This highlights a huge, essential industry that, by its nature, requires technology—trucks, drivers, forwarders, dispatchers, clients—it all needs to function as one organism.

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What’s next and why now?

I really hope that if you've managed to get this far, you're at least somewhat convinced that we might be onto something.

There are another 10+ companies waiting to be enabled to start using SlickShift. We also have more conversations with other folks lined up.

The traction and early feedback we're experiencing have made us believe that we need to "full send" it.

Because of that, as mentioned in the beginning, we're looking for two engineers and a person who is passionate about growth who would like to join us. Why join us versus anyone else?

• Working in a startup is awesome. Things happen quickly, and the impact of your work is immediate.

• We are highly product-focused. If you enjoy building stuff, pushing it to production, and seeing people use it immediately, it’s the right place to work.

• The nature of the product is that it's highly real-time and engaging. Logistic companies either use it or not - it’s impossible to use it "just a little bit." All communication happens here, so if it clicks, the user engagement is phenomenal, which is highly rewarding.

• It’s very early on. To be more specific, there is no signup process, people can’t log out from the app by clicking the “logout” button (we didn’t have time to add one), there is no search, etc. Despite all these limitations, people still use the product and love it.

• The industry is huge, and the software, for the most part, is ancient, so there is a lot of room to grow.

• Being a platform that gathers a company's communication in one place offers enormous AI opportunities. 

• The work is remote - we try to meet in person every now and then, but generally speaking, we are remote.

• If you value becoming an owner of the company you work at, we've got you covered. Equity is an important part of your compensation.

For more information on the engineering and growth positions, please see -> HERE <- and -> HERE <-.

Please pass this information along to anyone you think is outstanding and might be interested, or consider applying yourself. I genuinely believe we're on the right path, and joining us now promises to be an incredible journey.

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In one of my previous posts I briefly mentioned the importance of focus in building a startup. I believe that being focused is one of the most important skills one develops to achieve things both professionally and personally.

In today’s post I will dig deeper into it. 

At Base, “focus” was one of our company values. In the very early days, it was easy to know what was most important and what we needed to work on. Building an MVP, getting first customers, onboarding them. After a short while, however, the situation dramatically changed. The main reason was that we got resources constrained, meaning everyone bit off more than they could chew - in simple words, there was just too much work and not enough people to do things. For some reason I thought it’s a temporary situation, we just need to push hard and everything will get to being  “normal” again. Actually my thinking was completely naive; having too many things to work on was apparently a normal situation, and truth be told, the bigger we grew, and the more people joined the team, the more it felt like there was even more work. 

The amount of things we could work on was proportional to our growth. The more customers we won, the more feedback and requests we received, the more people we hired to address that feedback, the better and more robust the product has become, which led to even more customers (typically larger and more demanding) starting to use the product and the cycle repeats.

So, professionally, I think it’s just hard to focus on things, especially when one works in a company which grows fast. 

However for me, the right focus is also difficult personally. Maybe it’s related to the fact that I find it difficult to be patient, but I’m not sure that’s the main cause really. Too many times, I wanted to accomplish something, I was motivated and certain that it’s the right thing to do, but for different reasons I just kept procrastinating. 

At the same time there is so much joy and satisfaction in achieving things which are important. So why is maintaining the right  focus often so difficult? 

There are a couple of observations worth mentioning.

Urgent vs Important

Some time ago I bumped into the following Urgent-Important matrix which I found simple and effective. Every task or work can be assigned to one of the four quadrants:

It’s surprisingly easy to prioritize work or tasks which belong to Urgent & Important and Not Urgent & Not Important categories. Everyone is able to maintain perfect focus if all we could focus on are the tasks belonging only to those two categories. When a house is on fire and there is a child in the kitchen - the most important thing is to grab the kid and escape no matter what. It’s urgent and important and it has to be performed now. At the same time refactoring code in a part of a product that no one uses is probably something very few people would go after.

The most challenging categories, which typically deteriorate people’s focus are the two remaining ones: Not Important & Urgent and Important and Not Urgent. These two are confusing, as typically people tend to prioritize things which are urgent over those which are important. As a result, important things are not done or get delayed. Often I would pick up a call from a friend, reply to a whatsapp message, respond to a non-critical email, or ask a colleague an “urgent” question, rather than keep working on a project which needs to be delivered two weeks from now, make sure that I exercise regularly or get enough sleep. 

In my time at Base, I faced a recurring challenge as the CPO. One of my key responsibilities was to provide a roadmap. This document was more than just a paper—it guided our team and set expectations for our customers. However, the rapid growth of the company brought many unplanned day-to-day tasks. While these tasks seemed urgent, they often overshadowed the long-term importance of the roadmap. My turning point came when I chose to block out significant time on my calendar exclusively for the roadmap. Declining other tasks during these periods was tough, but it was essential, given the importance of the roadmap.

Consciously categorizing tasks between the troublesome categories helped me maintain better focus.  

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Being conscious of the direction 

The prerequisite of being focused is to know what to focus on. Sounds obvious, but in my opinion understanding what is important and worth pursuing is not easy at all. At least for me it requires a continuous and dedicated effort. 

People tend to think about their goals and plans on specific occasions. New Year’s resolutions or reaching a significant birthday are typically good times to think about what's important. It’s similar at work: drafting yearly roadmaps, pitching investors on plans for the following two years. In moments like that it’s natural to stop and think about what should be done. 

Unfortunately I don’t think that it works. In order to at least have a chance to be focused I believe that one should constantly evaluate what the focus should be. 

I try to evaluate my focus every year, month, and week. It’s a routine for me at this point. There are long term objectives I want to achieve - those are typically yearly. These are high level things like: live a healthy life or be active physically and intellectually. From that every month I try to narrow down the focus and determine what ideally should be addressed in a given month. It could be reading a certain book or eliminating/adding something to a diet. Weekly I try to narrow my focus to things which bring me closer to monthly goals. In a similar manner work related focus can be addressed. 

System like this is great, and definitely helpful, however it often exposes my lack of focus rather than ensures constant progress in important areas. Maybe I’m exaggerating as I feel that there is a big room for improvement, however continuous evaluation of what is important has become one of the biggest improvements in maintaining desired focus over time for me. 

Multitasking

Multitasking, or working on several things simultaneously, can make it hard to stay focused for a few reasons. First, when you focus on one task at a time, there might be a special moment where everything just "clicks" and you suddenly make a lot of progress. Multitasking can make it really hard to reach these special moments because you're always switching between different things. Second, when you switch between different tasks, you use a lot of energy trying to remember where you left off each time, which doesn't leave much energy to actually move forward with your work. And lastly, sometimes when you really focus on one thing for a while, you enter a "zone" where you can get a lot done quickly. But when you multitask, it's nearly impossible to get into this productive "zone." So, to do your best work, it's better to stick to one task at a time instead of multitasking.

My best performance and progress have always been an outcome of a prolonged focus on one and only one thing. One of the best examples I can think of was a Base implementation for a customer with a team of more than 1K sales people. The main challenge we faced was the granularity of permissions for different people in the organization. The customer was moving over from Salesforce (our biggest competitor) and Salesforce’s permissions model was extremely complex and robust. We had little time to do the transition. For strategic reasons, we never told the customer about potential hitches with our permission implementation. We didn't want to risk losing the deal by highlighting a potential weakness in our system, yet we genuinely believed that permissions wouldn't be a significant issue. Over the course of a few days, getting familiar with Salesforce’s permissions models and coming up with a solution which could work at Base was the goal. We made it. It almost felt like becoming world experts in all possible permissions models in enterprise software over the course of just a few days. 

Recently I watched an interview with Walter Isaacson who describes Elon Musk as a “great serial tasker, rather than a multitasker”. It’s an interesting take on the importance of focusing on one thing at a time. 

Distractions

This one is the hardest for me because I just haven’t found a really effective way to avoid distractions. The closest I got was by either becoming nocturnal or traveling to a different time zone where it’s much harder to be distracted by others as most people from my social circles sleep during the “focus” time. Unfortunately neither of those methods is sustainable.  There is actually a great conversation about productive work and how to avoid distractions  in Huberman Lab Podcast with Tim Ferriss.  

As previously stated, my most effective strategy to minimize distractions has been to schedule focused work hours early in the morning (when the US team is asleep). I communicate this to the entire team and make a determined effort to decline any unexpected tasks during that period.

To sum it up - focus is hard and requires constant evaluation. At the same time it’s a great area of productivity improvements. It’s always been my Achilles' heel, but over the years, by focusing on focus, I feel I have become much better at it.

The tips I shared in this post can be your starting point; using them has helped me significantly over the years. By learning to concentrate more effectively on the right things at the right times, one can achieve more and ultimately find greater satisfaction.

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I’m open to invest and/or help your startup grow. If you have any questions or thoughts don’t hesitate to reach out at bart@founderspond.com or DM me at @kiszal on Twitter.

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In my previous post, I focused a little on how the very first days of a startup might look. One of the key steps which every founder needs to take is to release an MVP - Minimum Viable Product. I want to double click on that subject today. 

Before launching an MVP, founders need to understand well what are the problems potential customers experience. The best way to notice those is by either experiencing them yourself or witnessing among people you spend a lot of time with.  

An MVP is the best solution, I know of, which allows starting a conversation with customers about solutions to their problems. 

There are a couple of interesting questions one might ask:

Who are the first customers and why are they willing to use an MVP of a product?

In other words - who are the people willing to try a rough first version of a product created by an  unknown company that has just started? The answer is pretty simple - these people are experiencing a problem today, and the solution to that problem is so inadequate that they're willing to try anything which could improve their lives. So even if an MVP is extremely simplistic, almost to the extent that founders feel ashamed of it, if it does improve their customers' lives, those customers will be willing to use it.

How to determine the right scope of an MVP?"

Actually, I’m not sure if it’s possible to know that before launching something and getting customer feedback. Very often, some parts of an MVP solve a customer challenge, and some don’t. Based on the feedback it’s much easier to understand what needs to be done. So the right scope of an MVP is usually determined only after a few cycles of improvements. Those cycles are possible due to learning coming from customers who experience the first versions of an MVP.

The paragraph above may sound like, “you can launch anything, give it to customers, listen to them, and fix what doesn’t work”. That’s obviously not what I wanted to convey. 

An MVP needs to address a fundamental customer problem. So, it’s critical to deeply understand what customers are struggling with first. Often, they struggle with many different things, and it's the founders' job to learn that. The next thing is to understand what is the most important challenge which needs to be addressed first. An MVP typically tries to address a challenge like that. 

How to know if the development of an MVP is going in the right direction?

If your first customers keep using the product there is a good chance that it does go in the right direction. If they do, it must mean that the current way their problems are solved is better than before, and they don’t want to get back to the previous solutions because of your product. 

What is the goal of an MVP?

It’s to get to a place where a handful of customers use the product and they love it. The number doesn’t need to be large. Folks at Y Combinator suggest that it's better to have 100 people who love your product than thousands who like it a lot. I love an approach like that. Passionate users are more likely to engage deeply with the product, provide valuable feedback, and become loyal advocates. Their enthusiasm can drive organic growth through word-of-mouth recommendations - which is a powerful way of acquiring customers - specifically for early-stage startups with limited marketing resources.

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Launching quickly vs polishing the first version of an MVP?

In the beginning of a startup journey resources that founders have are limited. Typically founders themselves are the only people who work on a startup. There are no customers and revenue. All investments are coming from the founders’ pockets. Since resources are scarce it’s wise to limit the amount of unnecessary spending. Launching quickly usually means shorter development by addressing only the most critical things first. Polishing typically is related to increasing the scope of the first version and extending both the time and the cost of the first release. The key challenge before the first launch founders face is that there is really no way to be sure what are the features which are mandatory for customers and which are only nice to have. Because of that uncertainty, it’s far better to launch quicker, get the product into the hands of the first customers, get their feedback, and only later decide on what needs to be done further. This approach makes it much easier to avoid the cost of unnecessary work.

How to distribute an MVP?

Since the goal of an MVP is to get to a place where a handful of customers love the product, the simplest way to do it is to manually reach out to early adopters and then onboard them.  There is really no need to worry about further distribution before the product is used and loved by a handful of people. Building something a few people love is difficult enough and tackling it before anything else is the most important challenge.

So the framework of launching an MVP goes as follows:

1. Noticing a problem people experience. 

2. Launching an MVP quickly, which addresses the problem. 

3. Getting the product into the hands of customers.

4. Learning from their feedback.

5. Improving the product. 

6. Repeating steps 3 to 5.

Following the steps above allows launching quickly and avoiding building a product which no one really wants, which by the way is a common situation startups find themselves at. 

One other question that always bothered me related to building startups - how is it possible that companies, which are already on the market, allow startups to create successful products in the first place?

Startups seem to be so vulnerable: they don’t have customers, money, brand, or credibility, and they are often run by people who have never built companies before, yet many manage to succeed.

After working at and observing larger companies, it becomes clear that they are simply unable to move fast. There is a lot of inertia, complex decision-making, and existing commitments. The demands of existing customers are a key priority. Large companies are really tied to their past successes.

Startups on the other hand are free to move quickly, to iterate, to adapt, to address problems before their larger competitors even spot them on the horizon. They can change their products quickly and focus on smaller markets that big companies might not pay attention to.

Big companies just don't have the privilege of moving fast and being flexible, and that is one of the reasons why the best way to build an MVP is to ship it fast and start iterating.

In summary, the most important goal of an MVP is to ship the first version quickly and, based on customer feedback, iterate to bring your startup to a point where '100' people are in love with your product. This requires building the right set of initial functionalities, releasing them, and ensuring that these functionalities resolve the most critical problems of your early customers in a better way than their existing solutions. It's a hard one to accomplish. It's difficult enough that focusing on anything else is a distraction at this stage. Distribution and scaling naturally come later, but it doesn't make sense to focus on them before the MVP is ready.

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I’m open to invest and/or help your startup grow. If you have any questions or thoughts don’t hesitate to reach out at bart@founderspond.com or DM me at @kiszal on Twitter.

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Over the past three months, I've met with about 50 founders who are in the early stages of building their startups. Interestingly, some patterns began to emerge.

The first group, probably more than half of the meetings, felt a lot like sales meetings. The typical agenda would go like this: brief intros, a review of the pitch deck, and a discussion about financial needs. Pitch decks generally followed a common theme: problem definition, solution, market potential (TAM), projected growth over a few years, the team, and the business's financial needs. Often, the conversation would focus on market potential and planned growth. Revenue was always projected to increase, and the absolute numbers were staggering, even just 2 or 3 years into the business. Typically, the startup being presented hadn't launched yet or was still in development.

The second group consisted of founders who had launched their product and realized that achieving traction was tougher than they had initially assumed. These meetings were less about pitch decks and more about tackling growth challenges. Typically, the conversation would shift towards issues in scaling up, what are the obstacles that users face, potential brainstorming about reasons of what should be done to change the course of the product adoption. Money matters were also discussed, but the numbers were generally smaller than those in the first group. These founders were more interested in brainstorming and questioning ideas.

The third and rarest group includes founders who built a prototype, launched it, and discovered that people want to use their product. They're now figuring out their next steps. Sometimes, these prototypes were built while the founders were working their day jobs, leading to the dilemma of whether to quit and focus on the startup full time. Other times, the founders have already devoted their time to the startup, but it's clear that they need more help. Most individuals in this group are working on a startup for the first time. They typically lack experience in running a business, and this lack of business acumen might be stressful for them. While it's clear that the product is far from perfect and that the tasks ahead outnumber what has already been accomplished, these founders feel they're onto something. However, given the overwhelming number of tasks, their mindset is mainly focused on completing critical projects "now" rather than on long-term plans. Pitch decks are rarely present in these discussions.

Of course, it's not possible to fit every startup into one of the categories above, and that's not my intention. I simply find these observations interesting.

The logical next question is, which type of startup is most likely to secure an investment?

To answer this, it's crucial to understand what drives the investment decisions of an early-stage investor, and arguably most, if not all, investors.

First and foremost, people invest money to make more money. It's as pure and simple as that. It might not be the most romantic notion, but it's the basic premise of investing. In investing, understanding risk is key to survival. Investors strive to fully comprehend the potential risk and reward of their investments, and based on this, make a go or no-go decision.

So, in the very early stages of building a startup, what aspects can make investors feel confident, lower their perceived investment risk, and increase their anticipated reward?

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One might assume that presenting a robust and detailed forecast, coupled with a promising Total Addressable Market, should do the trick. But I don't believe that's necessarily the case. Maybe it's possible to construct a flawless growth forecast for the next few years, but I haven't seen one yet, particularly if the product hasn't been launched. Even large companies, with hundreds of employees and departments focused solely on sales, often miss their forecasts. Just recently, NVIDIA increased their forecast by 50% for the upcoming quarter! That's great for NVIDIA, but it also shows how difficult it can be to provide an accurate forecast, even for the next few months. So, how likely is it that a company, which hasn't even started yet, can provide a forecast for the next three years?!

Another common misconception is that a detailed long-term plan outlining sequential steps is desirable. I believe there are actually very few steps that need to be taken - namely launching the initial version of the product and iterating with customers. I wrote more about that in the post on how to start a startup. No plan can outdo an approach like that. Typically, after launching the MVP (Minimum Viable Product), reality sets in and it becomes pretty clear what needs to be done next, or at least what should not be continued.

So, what does inspire confidence?

In an ideal world, a working MVP with initial traction is perfect. Obviously, early traction doesn't guarantee success, but it does validate a few things, as a result reducing risk:

• The founders are operators who can build and launch a product.

• There's early validation of the product's need.

• Customer feedback is driving decision-making.

The founders have a real stake in the game and are committed to running the business.

In a situation like this, I immediately start considering the potential upside. What is really possible? How can the team achieve this? Market size typically comes up here, but the conversation leans more towards the number of potential future customers - who they are and how to reach them - rather than the Total Addressable Market (TAM) figure. A meeting with the founders resembles more of a brainstorming session, with everyone engaged, potential next steps being discussed. Founders are curious; they really want to get feedback on their ideas. After meetings like these, I immediately start to study the space and think about the feedback. To some extent, I want to show founders that I can help them build a business, and that my involvement isn't limited to providing capital.

In other situations, founders need to raise capital to launch the first version of their product. In circumstances like this, the risk of an investment typically increases since more factors need to be validated; therefore, investor confidence naturally decreases. However, getting an investment is still possible. So, what's crucial?

First and foremost is the founders' profound understanding of the market and customer needs. Founders must be experts in their fields. They often share personal stories explaining why they believe the problem they're tackling is worth solving. Their reasoning extends beyond their observations. They know other people who experience the same problem and are aware of the shortcomings of the solutions these people use. Their passion for the subject is evident. They feel uncomfortable with current solutions and there is an urge to change that.

Secondly, even without a launched product, founders may have engaged in other activities that validate their idea, such as running a blog, a YouTube channel, or a Facebook page. Gathering an initial group of potential users around relevant content strongly indicates that the founders are capable of building a product. This is supported by two main reasons:

• Engagement with the content validates its relevance.

• Successfully managing a YouTube channel or a Facebook page provides initial validation of the founders' execution capabilities.

During conversations like these, I learn a lot about the field. The insights are far from obvious.

In both scenarios I've described above, I always strive to understand the rationale behind starting a company. The best reasons are tied to the founders' dissatisfaction with the current situation or existing solutions. It's clear to them that things could be approached differently, and it's a matter of time before someone does so.

Last but not least, early-stage investing is also about the thrill that comes with the opportunity. At the end of the day, for me to invest, I need to feel excited about the project, the people, and the sector.

It’s somewhat similar to accepting a new job. While factors like money, position, and industry are important, ultimately, the excitement about the opportunity also plays a significant role.

As a founder seeking early-stage investment, you might view it similarly to hiring your first employee. What are the things that would excite them? Why would they choose your startup over all other options they might have? How would you persuade them? How would you convince them to join?

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I’m open to invest and/or help your startup grow. If you have any questions or thoughts don’t hesitate to reach out at bart@founderspond.com or DM me at @kiszal on Twitter.

One of my favorite quotes from Charlie Munger is:

 “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” 

Charlie is a big believer of inversion. With inversion, rather than focusing on what you should do to achieve a goal, you think about what you should avoid doing to prevent failure. It’s a powerful technique. 

Starting a startup for the first time is difficult for most people. The key reason is probably related to the uncertainty of the outcome. While there is always a risk of failure, some startups do succeed, which is why taking the chance might actually be a great idea.

You might ask yourself “How do I  start?”. Rather than jumping to conclusions immediately, let's invert the question and ask:  “How not to start?”  or even better  “How to start a startup that fails?”. 

Finding reasons for startup failures should be much easier, since most fail anyway. Avoiding common mistakes can be a good starting point on what to watch out for. From my perspective, the most frequent reasons for startup failures include:

• Making a product which no-one wants 

• Running out of money 

• Working with a bad team

Let’s have a look on how each of these objectives could be achieved. It’s actually a pretty fun exercise to go through. 

Making  a product which no-one wants 

A good way to achieve this would be to start with a shallow understanding of customer needs. A  long development without customer iterations would help. In some cases, a product might not even get released - that would actually ensure the failure!

The mindset of this kind of founder would typically be theoretical and intuitive, based on unverified assumptions. 

Running out of money 

Generally, a startup receives funding from three main sources: the founders themselves, investors, or customers. While the founders themselves may serve as an initial source of funds, this is typically a short-term solution as it only lasts for as long as the founders are able to self-fund. Alternatively, customers can provide funding through the purchase of the product or service, but this is dependent on the need for the product. Finally, investors can provide capital if they believe that the startup has the potential to effectively solve an important problem for many people.

So, solving a problem which people don’t care about or not being able to deliver a solution often leads to running out of money. 

Significant expenditure can also increase chances of running out of money.

A bad team

Building a team that is destined to fail is quite simple. First, you need to work with people who lack the necessary skills to do the job and are not willing to learn. Additionally, these people should not be hardworking and should lack passion for what they do. They should have a 9-5 mindset, tend to procrastinate, and possess a "can't do" attitude. To ensure that failure is certain, communication within the team should be poor.

Isn’t it amazing how simple it is to provide a recipe for a startup failure? On a related note, just imagine running a startup while following the above guidelines and achieving success. That would be remarkable!

I assume that no one who  begins a startup plans to run it in the way I described above. At the same time, however, so many people keep repeating similar mistakes. Perhaps the most common one is the long development of a complex first version of the product. Challenges coming from this approach  are:

• Most importantly,  it makes everything “theoretical”. It’s not clear if what is built is necessary, as there is no customer feedback.  Often you might end up with a product which people don’t want to use. 

• It’s expensive and it takes a long time. 

• It’s hard to keep focus, excitement and momentum.

Since it’s such a common mistake, I started thinking what causes it? I realized it relates to the inherent difference between the nature of a startup and regular business. By ‘regular business’ I mean companies which are well understood. 

Let’s consider the bakery business. To run a bakery, you need to find the right location, rent a space, purchase baking equipment, recruit staff, develop a menu, source ingredients, and set prices. Fortunately, most people have a good sense of what good bread tastes like, which makes it easier to meet those needs. In order to open a bakery, setting up everything before the launch is the best approach. It might  actually be the only approach. 

With startups, it’s different. The fundamental distinction is that you try to solve a problem which hasn’t been solved before. If it was solved, and the solution was good, why start a startup in the first place? So the nature of how one approaches a problem needs to be different from how one would approach building a well-understood business. 

So how to start a startup then? 

A good starting point, as a guiding principle, is to avoid building a product no one wants, running out of money, and working with unqualified people. It does not guarantee success, the same time, it can certainly increase the likelihood of making progress. 

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What then, is a good way to start, or rather how are successful startups  typically built? A blueprint may look something like this:  

• Building a product which is loved by a small group of people

• Being frugal 

• Working with right people

Let’s dig deeper. 

Building a product which is loved by a small group of people

As a founder you observe an inefficiency in the world and come up with an idea of how to fix it. The best way to observe an inefficiency is to either experience it yourself or witness it among people you spend a lot of time with. 

So getting an idea for a startup is much more practical than people might think. 

As soon as you come up with an idea, the quickest way to validate it is by building and launching a simple version of your product, commonly referred to as an MVP or Minimal Viable Product. While it may seem counterintuitive, receiving customer feedback on your first product release is the only way to truly validate the idea. Furthermore, launching a product quickly can only happen if the scope is small. 

To get customer feedback, the founder needs to find and convince customers to give the product a shot. In the beginning, having only a few people trying a product is enough. However, bringing them together is critical. 

Here are the steps again: 

1. Noticing a problem people experience. 

2. Launching an MVP quickly, which addresses the problem. 

3. Getting the product into the hands of customers.

4. Learning from their feedback.

5. Improving the product. 

6. Repeating steps 3 to 5.

The beauty of an approach like this is that it can be done quickly and it follows all aspects of running a company. It also makes it difficult to build a product which no-one wants. 

Base was started in a similar way. I’m not sure if our approach was intentional, however, we all felt that we needed to launch something quickly and see how it goes. 

There were a total of five founders - Uzi, who was running a web agency in Israel, and Agata, Ela, Pawel, and myself, who were running a web agency in Krakow. Agency work was good, but after a while, it became repetitive. Our clients were typically startups, and our primary role was to build a minimum viable product (MVP) for them and launch it. Once the idea had proven successful, our clients would usually build an internal team to take the development further, leaving us out of the exciting phase. Over time, we all felt a growing desire to transition from agency work to creating our own product company.

Conversation about Base started at the end of 2008. Uzi’s key observation was that there was no sales management software that was simple, intuitive and affordable. Back in 2009, cloud software and SaaS were not as popular as they are today. We all thought that it would change. 

We launched the MVP in April 2009 after 3-4 months of development, while simultaneously working on agency businesses. The product was released and available for use, but initially, it didn't receive much attention. However, we only needed feedback from a few people to understand what needed to be improved. 

The initial version of Base was simplistic. The scope of the first release and even the product one or two years later were so much different. Initially we released an interface with one sales pipeline. People could add deals and move them between stages. One could only add a note or a task to a deal. We also started with 3 simple reports. That was it. The first version didn’t include search, deals were denominated only in USD, and there was no filtering. There were no contacts, leads, permissions, emails or appointments. Functionalities like that today seem to be a fundamental part of a sales tracking tool.

When I look back it amazes me that people decided to use Base so early. Obviously, we learned quickly that managing sales without search or filtering is hardly possible. 

Another non-intuitive realization was that I would have never thought that multiple currencies and filtering would become main pain points to continue using the product. Thankfully our customers told us that.

Being frugal 

The immediate reason for many startup failures is running out of money. One day, founders may no longer afford to run their business, and it's game over. So even potentially good ideas may not succeed if founders can’t work on them long enough.

When starting a startup one of the best pieces of advice you can follow is to spend as little money as possible, specifically before your product is launched and is wanted by users. 

It might sound somewhat unintuitive, as some determine the success of a startup by how much money it raises. However, I don’t think getting external funding should be treated like that. Ideally, startup founders would not need to raise external funds and could grow the business organically.

Launching an MVP is best achieved with either self-funding or a small investment from individuals who can provide valuable assistance to the founders.

Base was bootstrapped. As I mentioned earlier at the beginning, all founders worked full time on agency businesses while building an MVP. A couple of months after the launch, Uzi, Pawel, and I focused solely on Base. Our first round of financing - $1.1 million USD -  happened in the beginning of 2011, so almost 2 years after the launch. By the time we sought investment, the product was much more robust. We already had a small customer base. This made it easier to pitch to investors.

Bootstrapping may not be a viable option for every business. In our case it allowed us to focus on the most important things. We couldn't afford hiring many people, spending too much money on marketing or sales. Our main focus was perfecting the product and growing the customer base. So cash constraints turned out to be useful and liberating. 

It also created the right mindset and culture in terms of spending. After the investment, we could afford to hire people and to spend money on marketing, but the financial discipline largely stayed the same.  

If founders can launch a startup on their own, I always recommend doing so. Taking money from friends, family or people who can help early on might also work well.  

In both cases being financially disciplined and focusing on a quick MVP launch followed by product iterations makes a good foundation of a startup. 

Additionally, a  product that is used by people significantly increases the chances of raising capital. 

Working with right people

As mentioned before, the main difference between building a regular business and a startup is the uncertainty of the outcome. Because of that  it's not common for people to take on this type of venture.

From my personal experience, people who start startups tend to share certain common characteristics. They have a can-do attitude, are motivated to help their customers, are proactive doers, thoughtful learners, and value authenticity. I describe these in detail in the article "Learning the hard way part 1". If you haven't yet read it, I highly recommend you do.

Focusing on  building a product which is loved by a small group of people, being frugal and working with the right people is definitely a great starting point when building a startup. Many successful ones were built that way. 

At the same time, even following good practices can’t guarantee success. There are other things which need to play out. Maybe the problem you are trying to address is just not a good one, or maybe not many people care about it, or there are too many competitors, or market conditions go to dust. The list goes on. At the end there are more startups which don’t make it than those which end up being successful. 

At the same time good practices improve the chances of success. If you build something people don’t want at first, by being close to them you might pivot quickly and adjust the course. It's better to spend less and have more time to figure out what works. Having a good team helps in moving quickly, focusing on the important stuff, and finding the best solutions.

If you have an idea and wish to start a startup, I hope this article provides you with some helpful tips. Even if you're not sure if starting one is for you, the only way  to learn is to give it a shot.  By following these steps, you can quickly figure out if your idea is any good and if starting a business is the right thing for you.

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Additionally, ​​I’m open to invest and/or help your startup grow. If you have any questions or thoughts don’t hesitate to reach out at bart@founderspond.com or DM me at @kiszal on Twitter.

This is the 2nd post in a series “Learning the hard way”. Please read part 1 to get the right context for further reading. 

According to Paul Graham “A startup is a company designed to grow fast”. He provided the reasoning for that in the essay “Startup = Growth”

In my last post, I talked about why startups need to grow quickly and shared my own experience of what that growth looked like and what made it possible. I emphasized that the team responsible for building the company is a critical factor, if not the most important one. 

In this post, I would like to dig deeper into how to focus on the right things and solve them efficiently, while building a startup. 

What does focusing on the right things consist of?

Putting your customers first 

It’s a cliche, but it’s really what matters most. Your startup solves a problem for a group of people. If these people are happy, they will choose your solution. They will spread the word and pay for your services. It’s that simple. 

To put customers first means, first and foremost, to deeply understand both what they want to achieve, why they want to achieve it, and what they struggle with. Struggles  are a gap between how they currently solve their problem and what’s the best way to solve the problem. That delta is what your startup tries to sort out, typically using technology. 

How to understand what customers are struggling with? 

Getting to know them, observing how they work and asking questions. There  really is no silver bullet. Just spend as much time as possible with them and you will know their struggles best. 

At Base, our sales team was dogfooding the product; we used to go onsite and spend time with customers. We were greedily gathering as much understanding of  the way our customers work as possible. 

Being close and learning from customers is a continuous process. It doesn’t end. 

I remember an implementation of Base in Chicago. The plan was to introduce Base to two teams - around 20 people, make them our champions and only later roll out to everyone. The company we worked with was big with a few hundred sales people. I was a part of the implementation team. We arrived at the customer office and I spent 2 days just observing how the team goes through their day. It was awkward to sit in the middle of 10 strangers and observe what they do, what system they use, ask “stupid” questions, in general being a pain in the butt. These observations however become a fundamental input to what we needed to work on in the product.  One thing which stuck in my mind was that few people used Notepad in Windows as their daily task management solution. After each call with a prospect, they would extend the same note, write down next steps, only to re-enter the same data at the end of the day to the system. Had I not observed it myself, we wouldn't have known that people experience a challenge like that. 

Measuring stuff

Naturally people tend to trust their intuition. Intuition is important but it introduces bias. In a startup it’s better to be analytical and measure stuff. Ideally every project should be measured and have a certain goal assigned to it. A hidden advantage of assigning goals is that it forces you to think about what the success of each project means, which then  typically triggers another question  whether it makes sense to work on a project in the first place. It also forces you to measure stuff. 

We tried to measure things from the very beginning. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as it sounds. We started with an admin dashboard in the first version of Base. We outgrew it quickly. The next iteration was creating a dedicated solution. We called it Overmind, and yes, we used to play Starcraft. Every evening we would update the Overmind database with the fresh data so that we understood how people used Base. After a few months, updating the database would take almost a day, so one could use Overmind only a few hours after one database update finished and the next one started. We kept improving the flow but we had to switch again. We realized that in order to get proper analytics, we needed to build an even more advanced system consisting of proper data collection, storage, processing etc. After a few iterations, we ended up with dedicated teams responsible for different parts of the analytics process. Measuring things is an iterative process and it requires ongoing work. That is definitely something I didn’t appreciate from the beginning. 

Another challenging part was determining what to measure. Over time we kept expanding the number of metrics. On one hand it felt that we knew “everything”, on the other it was hard to know which metrics were most telling. There were numbers like: churn, retention, MRR, which showed the general performance of the business. Various factors impact metrics like those: product, customer support/success, competition, changes in pricing, etc.

At the same time these were not great for measuring the immediate impact of the roadmap. We started looking for a metric which would better portray the value a product delivers to customers. We were looking for a North Star metric for Base.  We believed that a good one should meet the following criteria: 

• be actionable 

• be relevant on an ongoing basis

• be simple 

• provide fast feedback

After a decent amount of exploration we found that there is a strong inverse correlation between the usage of Base and churn. In other words the more active and engaged salespeople are in the system, the less likely it is that the company they work for would churn from Base. 

If a salesperson used Base on a given day, we qualified them as an active user on that day. Based on that, we measured DAPU, which aggregated all daily active paying users. From that we could measure %DAPU - which was a percentage of active paying users on a given day divided by all paying users who could use the system in a given day. 

Once we had those numbers, we came up with wDAPU (weekly DAPU), which became the North Star metric. wDAPU was an average of %DAPU for a given week. 

Measuring wDAPU definitely upped our game. We could fairly quickly understand the impact of our work. It was a significant improvement. 

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How can one think of working on things efficiently?

Give up on scope 

There are three forces driving every project you might work on: scope, quality and time. Since resources are always constrained, you can’t have it all. To move efficiently, we always chose to do less work faster but with great quality. Short and quick iterations allow getting feedback earlier and avoid unnecessary work. 

That approach tends to be intuitive in the beginning of startup life. Typically, thinking is focused on days and weeks rather than months or quarters. Since there is a lot of uncertainty, the natural reaction is to iterate quickly and learn whether the direction is right. However, that attitude tends to change over time. There are more people in the company, projects get bigger, timelines extend. Suddenly everyone starts planning in months and quarters. 

To keep the momentum and operate quickly, the easiest way is to limit the scope of projects. Large projects can always be divided into a series of smaller ones. It’s a matter of the approach. I really can’t remember any big chunk of work at Base which couldn't be divided into smaller pieces. 

Focus

To move quickly, ideally, everyone in the team focuses on the most important tasks.  People lose focus mainly for two reasons: either prioritization is not clear or they get distracted. 

Try to avoid distractions as much as possible. This is often about being considerate of other people's time and minimizing unnecessary interruptions. It’s helpful to always ask yourself, ‘Do I really need to bother someone now?’ Very rarely do you actually need to. 

Prioritization is more difficult. At the minimum shorter projects help as it’s much easier to decide what’s more important if an outcome is not too far in the future. 

The trick that often worked for me was setting up goals for each week. Goals were easy to understand and verify. These were also bringing me closer to longer term objectives. At the beginning of each week, I would write down three things I had to achieve. I was rigorous about achieving them. By doing so, focusing on important stuff was simpler as I had a short term goal which I committed myself to. The beauty of an approach like this is that I would never need to worry about my long term focus. I only needed to make sure that the short term focus was right. 

Remember about costs 

At the beginning of a startup journey, when founders build the initial version of a product and the first users are coming, being frugal is natural. It’s actually the only reasonable approach. The company doesn’t have revenue. Costs start to pile up. Since all expenses are covered from the founders’ pockets - money is spent wisely. 

The challenge appears when a startup is injected with external financing. Nothing really changes, but suddenly there is money in the bank and it needs to be spent. It’s easy to spend money, but it’s extremely difficult to do it wisely. 

Working on initiatives with explicit goals and measurement helps in the allocation of the capital. So again it’s critical to work on the right things. 

Having the same mindset in spending habits like at the beginning of a startup’s life, helps  to make the right investments. 

The thing which I haven’t mentioned yet is that to ensure long-term fast growth for a startup, it’s best to operate within a large and preferably expanding market. I guess I just took it for granted. 

We started in 2009 when business software was in its infancy of moving to the cloud. The SaaS model was significantly less popular than today. Before, companies used to pay up front for on premises solutions. Monthly subscriptions changed that. Additionally, the iPhone was only introduced a few years before, and smartphones were only then becoming popular. In 2010 - 40 mln iPhones were sold, 5 years later, it was 230 mln. Since we released native iPhone and Android Base apps in the end of 2011, we managed to ride a wave of mobile revolution.

To sum up, market dynamics were definitely a tailwind for us. Businesses moving to cloud, SaaS becoming a first citizen software model, hyper growth in mobile adoption. Because of that CRM, software revenue worldwide grew from $14 B in 2010 to $69B in 2020. We definitely had good timing. 

When I reflect on the observations I shared above, they don't seem very revealing to me. There are really no silver bullets. At the same time, these resonate much deeper with me today. I guess it’s just difficult to embrace them on a daily basis and stay behind them every single time. 

Startups are companies designed to grow fast. There is no one way to achieve it. Working with the best people, focusing on the right things and solving them efficiently increases your odds. The learning shared above helps with that.

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Additionally, ​​I’m open to invest and/or help your startup grow. If you have any questions or thoughts, don’t hesitate to reach out at bart@founderspond.com or DM me at @kiszal on Twitter.

“A startup is a company designed to grow fast” -  so said Paul Graham in his essay “Startup = Growth”. It’s a phenomenal read. It’s such a simple observation which refers to the essence of what every startup aspires to achieve - to grow fast. 

To understand why growth is so important,  let’s go through the typical journey of a startup. 

A small group of people observe an inefficiency in the world. They create an initial solution, an MVP. By doing so they gain a deeper understanding of the underlying problem they are trying to solve. Until now a startup might not take any external capital as founders do the majority of the work themselves. In some cases seed money might be raised from friends, family or angel investors to gain runway. Based on users’ feedback, product iterations take place. Ideally more customers show up (growth). Since there is very little or no revenue, founders usually start to seek external funding to continue running the business. Money is mainly needed to hire people.

At this point, typically funding is provided by Venture Capital firms aka VCs. It’s important to understand the incentive of a VC firm. 

• They manage a fund (a big bag of money), which for the most part is raised from other wealthy people and organizations. These folks are called Limited Partners or LPs.

• So VCs invest other people's money - that’s important. 

• A VC firm promises their LPs that they will get a healthy return.

• VC firms make the majority of gains from taking a cut from profits of their most successful investments. 

Although it might sound complex, the main point is that VCs invest other people's money to make high returns. They invest in many companies and are focused primarily on businesses which grow fastest. If your business grows fast you get a lot of support from your VCs aka more money. If it doesn't, too bad. This typically means you are caught between rock and a hard place. So the moment you raise money from VCs, growth becomes the focus. If you forget, you are reminded about that every other month in board meetings. Besides VCs, the moment you start growing and gaining recognition in the market, you gain the privilege of being recognized by the competition. The best weapon to outcompete your rivals is to grow fast and outpace them. Growing fast also helps in building your position in a market. That helps in hiring the best people and getting more customers. Your customer base grows, people talk about you, you become more recognizable which typically leads to even more customers. Because you spend more money than you make, you need to raise additional capital from VCs to keep the momentum. That leads to following rounds of financing and now all eyes are on you and you really should be growing fast. At some point your, company makes more money than it spends, it doesn’t require additional external capital, so theoretically growth might not be a priority any more. In reality though, if you managed to get this far, you still focus on growth. It’s  in your DNA and it’s addictive.

Taking money from VCs influences the way you’ll most likely need to run your businesses. Jeff Bezos described it best in his 1997 shareholders’ letter:  

“Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before.” 

The challenge is that it’s nearly impossible to build a fast-growing company without external capital. There are a few exceptions, one of them being Mailchimp which did not raise money for the first 20 years of its operations and became a multi billion business, but it’s more an exception than a rule.  

Going back to the typical path of a startup though, the unfortunate part is that many startups don’t follow the route I described previously as their growth stalls at some point. The good news is that if you are able to grow for a longer period of time, the journey is phenomenal. You really start feeling the impact your company makes. 

With Base it took us nine years from the release of MVP until the Zendesk acquisition. Our story was similar to a typical startup journey. 

Knowledge that I acquired which I share is closely related to the context of how our startup worked. Base operated in a CRM space, a huge and growing market with many players trying to become number one. You might ask why we chose a market with competitors. The answer is actually pretty simple - most large and established markets are already occupied. We believed that the solution we built was unique  and that’s what would allow us to win customers. We were right to a certain extent. 

What is the acquired knowledge then? 

As a startup, you always operate with limited resources. In order to grow fast you need to focus on the right things and solve them efficiently. Sounds simple, but it’s easier said than done. 

The one common element for both categories are people who are your comrades on the journey. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of the team. 

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The people  

There are a few parts to it:

Mindset 

Some people say the glass is half-full, others point out that it's half-empty. It’s extremely difficult to build a startup with people who tend to see half empty glasses. There are a lot of difficulties along the way. Many tough moments when you just have to keep pushing  even though the odds are against you. The right mindset is so critical then. You just don’t want to explain in these moments why someone is wrong by saying that “X is not possible”. 

I remember implementations of Base for bigger and bigger clients. Often

the feature set available in the product wasn’t perfect for our new biggest customer. Since we really wanted to win these clients, we typically expedited development of the necessary functionalities. One of the most critical aspects of these  projects was to quickly understand the gaps between our product and the necessary changes we need to make. Those were stressful situations, as even before starting, we already knew that we were late with the development. Kuba and Ewa from the product team were amazing people to get involved in situations like this. They were infinitely positive and hard working. They always focused on the good - “It’s so amazing that a company like that wants to use Base!”.  It was such a pleasure to work with them. The mindset is critical.

Motivation  

During the recruitment process one of the questions I asked was “Why do you want to work at Base?”. It’s a simple question which carries so much weight. 

Many people would answer in the following way: “I like what you do”, “I always wanted to work in a startup”, “You have a nice office and people I spoke to are cool”, “I like technology and it seems that there are interesting problems to be solved” etc.  Those were bad motivations in my opinion. Not specific, shallow and general.  There are many companies that meet these criteria. 

Some people would answer in the following way: “I checked your product, talked with a friend of mine who is a sales person and uses X daily.  He really struggles with it, so I thought it would be interesting to work on a better solution”, “I love technology. The best part is that it can help people in solving their problems. Business software seems to be an interesting use case as it impacts so many people”, “I’ve always wanted to build a product which makes people’s lives easier”. These are very different motivations. User centric, impact oriented. 

We always tried to hire people who first and foremost were motivated by helping customers and having an impact on other people. 

Actions speak louder than words

Ultimately the result of a startup is the total effort of the people who build it. You don’t want to manage simple, obvious things, telling everyone what to do, verifying if necessary work has been done or manage daily tasks. You want to be spending time on coming up with the next big customer initiative, hiring a key employee, rather than constantly worrying if deadlines are being met or tasks completed on time. 

You want to work with doers - people who are proactive and have a sense of urgency. It’s motivating. Positive energy is infectious, it’s inspiring to others, creates momentum and drives progress. 

In the summer of 2012 the product was already 3 years old and in order for us to keep improving it, we had to dramatically change the interface. There were also areas of the product we knew were not good enough anymore. We started with a tool for freelancers, 3 years in, bigger teams started using Base, different functionalities were necessary. We decided to redesign Base. We wanted to do it quickly. Rather than spending months we chose to bunker down in one office for a week and just make it happen. It seemed like a completely crazy idea but we went for it. The team of 4 people Marcin, Atek, Werbel and myself arrived in Chicago. Uzi and Eden, our designers, joined us. We spent a week, or maybe 10 days, in the office. During that time, with some help from the team in Krakow, we managed to redo the vast majority of the application. It wasn’t 100% ready, however it was good enough to onboard first customers, get feedback and fix bugs. A couple of weeks later - a new interface was available to everyone. It was spectacular. It happened so quickly. 

The amount of work which can be delivered by a small group of committed people exceeded our own expectations. 

Being authentic 

In a startup, things move quickly and tensions appear naturally. It's important to fix problems fast. If problems are left unaddressed, they can grow and cause negative feelings and even bigger issues later on. So, it's best to deal with any problems as soon as they arise to prevent things from getting worse. The worst thing that can happen is when people accumulate bad feelings towards others, don't address problems on a regular basis and things blow up at some point. To prevent this, we established a culture of open and direct communication, free from hidden agendas and politics. We encourage team members to assume the best intentions of their colleagues. Creating a culture like this helped in focusing on things that matter rather than managing expectations. 

Telling a designer that their proposed solution might not be the best for customers due to X should lead to a discussion which ends with a better solution rather than an emotional discussion about who is right. If an engineer ships code with bugs, it should be ok to immediately tell him to do a better job.  Direct feedback based on merit, without worrying about someone's job title or level of seniority, is best. The team which understands that can self improve quickly.  

I always admired people who tried to learn from the feedback they received, rather than prove someone wrong. 

Skills 

The nature of a startup is that stuff changes over time. Skills required today will most likely be not good enough in the future. Because of that, we always tried to find individuals who have a desire and ability to learn and adapt rapidly. That desire would typically come from curiosity. 

When we first launched Base, I was primarily focused on coding. However, as the company grew, I found myself leading multiple teams, including product, growth, and analytics. I also became involved in customer implementations and sales. Those who joined us early on and stayed with the company had to adapt and learn quickly. Junior programmers became system architects, while others transitioned into engineering management roles. Most individuals became proficient in multiple programming languages, even if they started with just one. This pattern was similar in sales, customer success, and marketing. Startups are inherently dynamic, and changes occur frequently. It's critical to have the right people on your team who can adapt to change and grow with the company.

In summary, teams composed of people who are thoughtful, value quality, learn quickly, are properly motivated, see the glass as half-full, and are team players can move mountains.

In this post I primarily focused on lessons related to the team aspect of building a startup. That wraps up the first part. I hope you enjoyed it. 

As mentioned before, in order for a startup to grow it’s best to focus on the right things and solve them efficiently. In my next post I will share observations related to this. 

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Additionally, ​​I’m open to invest and/or help your startup grow. If you have any questions or thoughts don’t hesitate to reach out at bart@founderspond.com or DM me at @kiszal on Twitter.

I believe that the journey toward goals often matters  more than the destination. Because of  this it has always been crucial for me to start important endeavors with good people. Achieving things takes time so being surrounded by the right crowd has always been a priority for me. 

Let me tell you a story about my journey.

I've always valued independence. I didn’t like anyone telling me what to do or what not to do. In high school it wasn’t clear to me who I wanted to become. I wanted to be self-reliant - and the sooner the better. That attitude meant I could try different jobs early on. Towards the end of high school, I started looking for seasonal jobs. I wasn’t picky. I worked in construction, restaurants, etc. The fact that I was getting paid for fairly simple tasks was mind blowing. 

At university, a friend of mine invited me to join him on a work trip to the US for the summer. As it turned out the group grew to nine people. All high school friends. My English wasn’t fluent. I needed to borrow money to go. To remain throughout the summer, everyone had to secure a job within the first two weeks of the trip. Those two weeks were stressful. I vividly remember our conversations on how to find one, where to look for it and who to speak to. Going through it together made the process easier. I was among peers who faced similar challenges, I could learn from them and help them. Additionally seeing friends finding jobs added encouragement. To some extent, it made the process simpler. We all made it through. 

These four months on Long Island in 2006 shaped my perception of how the future should look. Many people, most younger than me, were self-sufficient. It was natural for them. Summer was “the season”. It’s when you make money. The smarter and the more hardworking you are, the bigger the prize can be. I really enjoyed an approach like that. It was different from what I was used to:  one finishes school, finds a position in a well established company, and builds career step by step. I met young people who were starting businesses. It was fresh, exciting. I loved it. 

That summer made me realize that becoming an entrepreneur was definitely an option to consider.

After getting back to Poland - Pawel, my high school friend and future co-founder of Base and Applicake - asked me to help him finish an on-line video editor project he worked on through the summer. I gave it a shot. We were inexperienced programmers. We asked Agata - also future co-founder of Base and Applicake - to join us.  The application was built in Ruby on Rails - a web application framework released by David Heinemeier Hansson two years earlier. Neither of us knew Ruby or Rails. We had to learn it quickly. We assumed that to finish the project would take us a month. It actually took us 6. It was rough. Never ending. But we made it. It was an achievement on many levels: we learned a ton, everyone showed their commitment, teamwork played out. We felt unstoppable. The commercial part wasn't great, but we didn't care. 

Having one project in the portfolio encouraged us to look for more.  We decided to start a business together, Applicake, a software development house. The fourth person to join us was Ela who would help in acquiring customers. 

Early on, we decided to show our clients who we were and how we worked. We believed that it would help us win customers.  It turned out to be a great strategy. The other outcome of this approach was that people wanted to work with us more.

Over the next 2 years we grew the team to 20 people. It was awesome. We mostly worked with our friends who we knew from before. It was going well, however there were things which started bothering us. 

Clients would generally build a prototype of a first version of a product with us. Most of them would fail after launch. Some would manage to gain initial traction after the release. Founders of those would typically hire internal teams quickly. In both cases we couldn’t continue working on projects and had to find new clients. 

We started wondering why to develop a product for others rather than build our own. 

In late 2008 we connected with Uzi, a designer, who also ran a web agency. Uzi noticed that sales management software available on the market is complex and expensive. In order to manage sales one needs to effectively track interactions with customers and prospects. We realized that a simple, intuitive and affordable solution, specifically for small businesses was missing. The challenge resonated with us. We managed Applicake’s sales in a spreadsheet - which was not perfect.  Solutions available were not great. We decided to give it a shot. 

There is a lot to say about what happens next, and I will, however my main conclusion even from the early experiences is that the key to success was always to start and enjoy the journey with the right crowd, rather than by myself. I believe that to be a fundamental principle of starting a startup.  Why?

Starting a startup is challenging for one person

First of all, there is so much work. I really mean it. Specifically in the beginning, when there is a lot of uncertainty and quick iterations, being able to move fast is key. Secondly, even if one person could do all the work - you need others to challenge ideas, brainstorm with and support you in difficult situations. 

The greater the range of skills among founders, the better

Ideally founders should have complementary skills. Between people who started Base there was expertise in: design, product, tech, marketing and sales. It was a pretty strong mix which allowed us to shorten early iterations. It was also simpler to decide who would be responsible for different areas of the business later on.

It’s easier to convince others to support the initiative  

Generally speaking, companies founded by a group of people who know each other well, build more confidence among investors and future hires. Investors know that building a startup by yourself is hard - not impossible, but hard. So all things being equal, in the majority of cases they will choose to invest in businesses with more than one founder. Some might just say a straight "no" for any investment in a company with a single founder.

There is a similar situation with hiring. The Founder's job is to convince strangers that a project that started 3 months earlier, with little or no customers and money in the bank, at some point will get off to a flying start. 

Helps in constant progress 

There are projects which take over all the attention of a founder. A good example is raising money. You want to spend as little time on it, just get the job done and move forward. In reality it takes so much focus. Reaching out to investors, prepping, pitching, providing materials, then additional materials, following up, negotiating a term sheet, due diligence. It’s a struggle. With more people in a founding team one person can lead this kind of effort and others can progress in other areas. 

It's easier to keep pushing

“You only lose when you stop trying”. With good people on board you might simply just keep pushing as you do not want to disappoint your friend. I experienced that many times myself: “How can I go home if Pawel is still coding?”. Sharing the same struggles, emotions and ambitions simply helps to carry on. 

Trust is stronger than any contract 

Starting a startup with someone you know well reduces the likelihood of disappointment. It's much easier to assess  the pros and cons of working together. Establishing a company requires considerable legal work around investors and employees, among other things. But with co-founders, all you need is mutual understanding and trust that joint decisions are final and don't need reconsideration.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for finding a co-founder. In my case it was always people who I knew for a while that I could trust, fast learners and doers. I was sure they could commit to an idea in a major way. We knew each other typically from school. We also liked each other. That helps as you’re going to spend so much time together. 

Looking back it seems much easier to find people to start a startup when you are young. Now, I’m 38, and even though I’ve met and worked with hundreds of people, it’s difficult to find someone my age who is ready to commit in a big way to starting a business together. Most people work somewhere, have families, have life routines and are comfortable. In my mid-twenties it felt that it was the exact opposite. 

In conclusion, it seems that the best time to start a startup is when it's easiest to find the right partners in crime, which is usually when you are young.

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I’m open to invest and/or help your startup grow. If you have any questions or thoughts don’t hesitate to reach out at bart@founderspond.com or DM me at @kiszal on Twitter.

I’m Bart. I started my first business when I was 22. A few years later I co-founded Base CRM. I worked on a product for 10 years as the CPO till 2018 when the company was acquired by Zendesk. 

Now I’m launching Founders Pond - an initiative to help new founders to build companies. Read on to learn who I am, why it might actually be a good idea and how I could help you. 

Going back to my story, I worked at Zendesk for 3 years - for the first time I was a part of a large organization and I didn’t work for “myself”. I love the idea of freedom, responsibility, nimbleness and impact. These are not the characteristics one can easily experience in a large organization. But there are other ones like a nice salary, a steady career path, job stability and work-life balance. There is no right or wrong, but personally, I choose to work in a startup.

But let’s start from the beginning. We founded Base with a group of 5 people. All founders previously run mid-size web agencies. Uzi - my partner and CEO of Base - noticed that sales management software available on the market is complex and expensive. So the problem was clear.  In order to manage sales one needs to effectively track interactions with customers and prospects. We realized that a simple, intuitive and affordable solution, specifically for small businesses was missing. It was 2009, the SaaS model was still in its infancy.  We believed, however, that more companies would use SaaS cloud solutions in coming years. 

We gave it a shot. Built the first version of the product in 6 months. Launched it and after a while, the first customer showed up. Paying customers changed the game. They made it real. Now the challenge changed from - how do I know if what I do is needed, to how to bring more customers in. It was a good challenge to have. 

The following 9 years was a fast paced roller coaster. Among  other things we managed to:

• Convince tens of thousands of sales people to use Base

• Introduce Base to companies where hundreds of employees used our software daily - imagine entering a huge office where each screen displays “your” software 

• Build an incredible team of 200+ people

• Raise more than 50M USD in 4 rounds of financing

• Run a tight operation between the two main offices, Krakow and Silicon Valley

• Scale production, tech, sales, marketing, finance, HR, customer success

• Get acquired and become a gate for Zendesk to enter the sales software market

It was fun. I loved it. With the right people and mindset it’s an absolutely incredible experience. 

After leaving Zendesk more than one year ago I started thinking about what I should focus on next. There are really two viable paths I think. The first one is either starting or joining an early stage company. The second is to help founders in the early stage of their journey. 

I haven’t yet noticed a problem which I would like to commit to solving for the next couple of years, so that rules out the first route, at least for now. At the same time I, did a few early stage investments. I found that working with founders is something which I enjoy doing and it seems to be bringing value to them. 

Given that, I went through the following thinking process: 

• There are problems and challenges which are not addressed. These can be solved with technology. 

• To build a successful startup, someone needs to notice an inefficiency in the world and come up with an idea of how to fix it. By creating and refining the initial solution, founders gain a deeper understanding of the root problem that requires solving.

• The founders are the key to a startup's success.

• Young people may have the necessary skills to handle the technological aspects of developing a product. At the same time their understanding of other aspects of running a business might be limited. 

• As a result some startups might not get started, others might face lots of challenges which could be avoided if the necessary expertise and experience was available to the founders. 

• There are immense advantages of starting a business early:

  • The biggest one is an ease of finding a co-founder 

  • Typically there are less overheads and responsibilities 

  • It’s much easier to commit to a project in a big way 

Founders Pond is an initiative which hopefully helps new founders gain necessary knowledge of how to start and run a startup.  I hope it will encourage people to commercialize their ideas more often.

By no means am I saying that I know it all. However, specifically in the beginning of a startup journey, there are so many questions to be answered which we had to answer ourselves many times in Base. Things like:

• How and who to start with?

• Is the problem I’m trying to solve a significant one?

• Who are my customers and how to acquire them?

• How to hire and build a team?

• What to focus on?

• What and how to measure things?

• How to raise and how to spend money?

I’m planning to write a series of blog posts with various learnings and insights from running Base. I hope that over time it will allow founders to learn something useful. 

Additionally I’m open to invest and/or help your startup grow. If you have any questions or thoughts don’t hesitate to reach out at bart@founderspond.com or DM me at @kiszal on Twitter.