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. Today’s Topics Include: Level’s landing page and current query of number of members; scarcity play is effective Level is a Slack competitor, but much less interruptive and more asynchronous Derrick discovered Slack does not scale well as a team grows, interrupts people’s flow; Level is Derrick’s take on the solution to those issues Derrick hit the ground running with his manifesto and getting people signed up for Level His efforts on Twitter were effective because it’s a product marketed toward developers Dealing with feedback, ill-informed comments and conversations Derrick wanted to talk to too many, rather than too few people about value of creating a new product to address pain points Differentiation from Slack: Level niched down to developers and open sourced Derrick plans to offer free and on-prem versions of Level Whiteboarding to go over ideas and transform them into something tangible Derrick is working on mock-ups; challenging to lay out UI elements, such as the Inbox Risks are involved; when building something new, the challenge is to validate your most risky hypotheses - the ones that are most likely to fail Level is the third Saas startup that Derrick has worked on; first time he will not earn income or revenue while building Level, so had to make adjustments Links and resources: Derrick Reimer Website Derrick Reimer on Twitter Ben Orenstein Website Ben Orenstein on Twitter Level Derrick’s Manifesto Tuple Fostering a Culture of Creativity with Rob Walling Exploring the Open Source Business Model Startups for the Rest of Us: How Derrick Reimer is Validating His Ambitious Third Saas Application Drip Codetree MicroConf