51: Recast - The Origin of Level from Startups for the Rest of Us
Ben is out of town on a retreat with his Tuple co-founders, and Derrick is deep into building Level. So, this episode features Derrick as a recent guest on the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast. Rob Walling interviews Derrick about Level - what inspired the idea and how he went about trying to validate it.
\n\nToday\u2019s Topics Include:
\n\n- \n
- Level\u2019s landing page and current query of number of members; scarcity play is effective \n
- Level is a Slack competitor, but much less interruptive and more asynchronous \n
- Derrick discovered Slack does not scale well as a team grows, interrupts people\u2019s flow; Level is Derrick\u2019s take on the solution to those issues \n
- Derrick hit the ground running with his manifesto and getting people signed up for Level \n
- His efforts on Twitter were effective because it\u2019s a product marketed toward developers \n
- Dealing with feedback, ill-informed comments and conversations \n
- Derrick wanted to talk to too many, rather than too few people about value of creating a new product to address pain points \n
- Differentiation from Slack: Level niched down to developers and open sourced \n
- Derrick plans to offer free and on-prem versions of Level \n
- Whiteboarding to go over ideas and transform them into something tangible \n
- Derrick is working on mock-ups; challenging to lay out UI elements, such as the Inbox \n
- Risks are involved; when building something new, the challenge is to validate your most risky hypotheses - the ones that are most likely to fail \n
- Level is the third Saas startup that Derrick has worked on; first time he will not earn income or revenue while building Level, so had to make adjustments \n
Links and resources:
\n\nDerrick Reimer Website
\nDerrick Reimer on Twitter
\nBen Orenstein Website
\nBen Orenstein on Twitter
\nLevel
\nDerrick\u2019s Manifesto
\nTuple
\nFostering a Culture of Creativity with Rob Walling
\nExploring the Open Source Business Model
\nStartups for the Rest of Us: How Derrick Reimer is Validating His Ambitious Third Saas
\nApplication
\nDrip
\nCodetree
\nMicroConf