I'm Alex MacCaw, founder of Clearbit and Reflect, ask me anything. 🔥

@rrhoover I would also really want to know the answer to this question 🫶

@rrhoover Hey Ryan 👋. The reason I decided to crowd-fund over taking traditional venture capital is to do with incentives. Reflect's goal is not to be bought or IPO. But venture's incentives are all aligned with these outcomes. A community round, where you set the slow-growth expectation upfront, has much better aligned incentives. We even went a step further and aim to pay our investors a dividend. Now we have perfectly aligned incentives and expectations with our investors.

@__tosh I have mixed feelings on this. There is a similar question around how do you know when to pivot or not. It is hard to know to be honest. I know examples of people who pivoted five times and on the fifth time built a massive business. I also know people who stuck with the same idea idea for years, and only in the fifth year of business did it take off. I guess it depends on the problem you're trying to solve. With Reflect, for instance, it is an extremely hard problem - it requires many years of work to even begin solving.

@maccaw ty!

@vedranrasic Going from 0 to 1 M ARR was a combination of us: a) increasing our pricing and b) creating a Salesforce integration and c) hustling. Going from 1 to 10 was quite straightforward after we hired a sales team.

@cristinaibunea 1) I will do a write up of all of this once the round has finished. Too many learnings to put here. 2) It is definitely an investable trend and I wish I knew this last year when I passed on many of the AI copy generating companies, dismissing them as GTP3 wrappers. Today they are some of the fastest growing companies in history. There is huge potential in productizing complex ideas as simple ones.

@mxstbr I would absolutely make the decision again. Indeed, I would leave even earlier, maybe at around 30 employees, and set the expectation with the team upfront. I have learnt what I love which is a day of coding without meetings. So I should just stick with that. r.e. the board - I can tell you the hardest thing about not being an operator in the company is that you feel quite impotent. You can provide advice (as best you can), and feedback, but ultimately it is the CEOs job to make the decisions.

@alexander_nevedovsky I believe all humans have to feel creativity in their lives to be happy. Different people feel this feeling in different ways. Some people by writing books, some by acting in musicals, some by managing large teams. I feel it by writing code. At Reflect I write code every-day and I feel happy.

@liz_obee ProductHunt was definitely a big driver early on. And so was Twitter DMing people.

@maccaw Awesome, thanks for the insight. Hadn't thought of Twitter DMs. We're live on Product Hunt today with the goal of awareness (https://www.producthunt.com/post...) - hoping it will be a driver for us too!

@philipsnyder This is our secret sauce :)

@maccaw Great answer! After learning about Clearbit I started researching ASNs and the Arin Database. Interesting stuff.

@altryne The hardest times were, in order: 1) Performing a layoff of 20% of Clearbit during COVID 2) Getting my first Green Card application denied and being forced out the US 3) Clearbit getting a frivolous lawsuit 4) Coming to the conclusion that I should no longer be CEO of Clearbit 5) Getting a notice from the city of San Francisco that our office wasn't zone correctly and we needed to vacate (I loved that office) Along the way there's been folks that believed in me, and folks that haven't. I've always had a quiet inner confidence that propelled me regardless. In general, most of the problems above resolved themselves with time. Here's a good mental model when it comes to problems: will I still be worried about this a year from now. If so, it's probably important and worth worrying about. If not, resolve it and move on.

@simonrohrbach They are very different types of hard. VC backed is hard because you're moving fast with a lot of expectations and often doing things you don't enjoy (like managing). Bootstrapped is hard because you're moving slow with very limited resources. In my experience it is easier to build a world-class product when you're bootstrapping though because the product is created from one mind (yours). You can always tell when a product has been designed by a committee.

@pauline_rossi Yes, learn TypeScript and Next.js. You will be well prepared for the future with those technologies under your belt. And you can use TypeScript on both the frontend and backend. There are lots of free online courses and resources (YouTube).

@stpe After I left I did a lot of writing. About my experience, my learnings, and what I wanted out of life. It was very cathartic. I also did a lot of therapy. I jumped into Reflect quite quickly because it was smack bang in the venn diagram of things I wanted to do. I wanted to build a tool I used every day, that was UI heavy (I love designing), an Electron app, and something around writing. Sometimes I worry about being ambitious enough. But then I think about the leverage in improving people's thinking through note-taking. That is enough for me.

@moe3615 You are very kind! And to anyone reading the above comment, I swear I didn't write it with my alt 😂 To your question: I think, when you've been wrong as much as me, it gives you a degree of humility. We're all pretending we have all the answers, but in reality nobody really knows what's going on.