Today we launched Flyflow through YC. It’s a good milestone for us because I think it commits us to this general product direction and gives us a boost of initial traction. It’s a good moment to reflect on the journey so far and get ready for what’s to come.
I really started this journey 2.5 years ago when I started Coherent. I wanted to start a startup, but didn’t expect to fall in love with it this much. In a lot of ways, I consider what we’re doing at Flyflow a continuation for me, even though essentially all of the other variables are new (cofounder, investors etc). The way I like to think about this is that it’s really going to be a 10-15 year journey, and year 2.5 is really still just the beginning. It was a good 2.5 years to make a lot of mistakes and learn a lot about who I am as a builder.
If there’s one key lesson I’ve learned about startups: you can’t fail if you don’t give up, and the founders with the most resilience win.
The journey so far:
Raised $3.5m with literally just a notion doc to build web3 infrastructure
Hired a team, built a product, web3 market was crashing, raised a $1.5m extension on that seed to dilute myself something like a total of 40% to make sure we had runway to survive a bear market
The product we built served a segment that was too small and had too low of ticket sizes - realized we needed to go enterprise and pivoted to big data for web3 (data warehouse)
Built the data warehouse - the market was shrinking (and hasn’t bounced back since), realized we couldn’t build something venture scale there (both market and then legal blockers for any sort of token play). Got to like $15k MRR on this in total, which wasn’t even close to supporting the team. No good path to growth.
By that time we had too big of a team, and were burning investor money, knew we had to do a reset. Spent the next 6mo in some level of denial about the situation. Layoffs. Pivoting around trying to find lightning in the bottle.
Eventually just returned money to reset the cap table instead of doing a recap. Seemed like the most respectful thing to do, and we were at square one anyway. We were failing, and it would have been too hard to get the investors to sign up for more pivoting, especially since most of our investors were in web3 and we were exploring other ideas. Returned about 35-40% of the capital.
In January had a clean slate, but no team and no idea. Booked a one-way ticket to San Francisco and cheap Airbnb with essentially no plan but I was going to work with Pritee and we were going to try to figure something out. Paid out of pocket for servers and OpenAI bills.
Spent the next 6 months totally in the idea maze. At this point, we’ve probably explored 20+ ideas, killed many, and spent too much time on a few, essentially working days, nights, and weekends for 8 months. Got into YC.
Things changed about a month ago around the time we met with PG. We were looking for a new idea, and we really dialed in on this problem that we had had while trying to sell our previous products: getting *actually* good leads. We had this insight that none of the tools that existed were actually good (Clay, Apollo etc), and that a better product needed to exist.
We started by manually signing up our batchmates (20 of them), and doing the hours of legwork to find them a small but *very* high-quality list of leads. This taught us a lot about the process. Then, we sprinted to build a product that could do something similar but self-serve. Here are our metrics on launch day:
350 users, growing 30-50% w/w (sometimes more) for the past month. This week with launching we will probably grow more. The chart looks *super up* on launch, but the reality is it’s been compounding up until now
72% activation rate for new users (creating workflows and getting leads)
Found close to 30k leads for users
Growing revenue
We’ve captured a good chunk of the YC summer batch as avid users
“I don't know how I would have found these leads myself.“
“Flyflow did the best job possible finding companies in what is probably a non-existent niche.“
“Flyflow has helped us surface the signals that matter most in customer qualification. Our lead list is already better than what we've been working off before.“
I think I’ve pushed close to 60k lines of code in the last 30 days (at least that’s what github says). It’s been very little sleep haha
This moment is a bit nostalgic for me because I know how much work, mistakes, general suffering (both professional and personal) etc went into it to get here, and ever more respect for founders, knowing what it takes to build something real. It’s still a long journey ahead, but find myself feeling grateful for the partners and friends I’ve made along the way. Especially grateful for Pritee’s partnership over the past 8 months. It’s super impressive what our small but mighty team of 2 has done this year (especially over the past month). It’s moments like this that not giving up buys you. Ok now back to building :) .