Let me tell you a story about a startup. How this story ends is up to you. It begins at UC Berkeley in January 2009. A group of 7 Computer Science students, most in their last semester at Cal, get together to cook up a great class project for CS 169, Software Engineering. They’re graded on how far they get based on where they start and boy do they want to impress their professor (Eric Brewer of Inktomi fame).
Brainstorming sessions happen often. Designs come forth, get tossed out, adapt, evolve, and get incorporated. Code gets written and rewritten. Many photos are taken of busy whiteboards. Rubies & gems are coveted. They drown in JavaScript.
Less than 4 months later, they have it: Outspokes. It’s a widget that lives at the bottom of every page of a web site and facilitates collaboration for anyone involved in building that site.
Hi, I’m Arthur, one of those 7 folks and now the Chief Executive Outspokesman.
Why did we build Outspokes? A lot of us have designed and built web sites for others so we know how hard it is to communicate throughout the process of creating a new site. Whether you’re a lone freelancer or a firm with a team to manage, the time you spend communicating with the client and others involved is one of the hardest things to estimate and get right. There are endless emails, links, screen shots, phone calls, clarifications: a whole sea of feedback to drown in. How in the world are you supposed to take it all into account in your hourly estimate?
Our widget will replace all that. Right now, it’s just starting to help with that really heavy feedback process. Instead of writing a long, detailed email describing what’s broken on some page, just go to that page, click on the broken part, and make a comment through our widget. Whenever someone reads your comment, the broken part of the page can be highlighted. This is ridiculously easier and faster than taking a screenshot and wrestling with Photoshop just to get your point across. Just ask one of our customers, who at one point received hand-written notes of printed out screenshots… via fax.
Back to the story. So it’s the dawn of the summer, I have my Berkeley degree, and no clue what to do next. I can find a job, but who wants to go do a boring thing like that? I’m in love with Outspokes but how can I possibly start and run a company on my own?
That’s exactly what I asked my friend Jerry Cheung. His reply?
Try it for a week. See how far you get.
I did. That week never ended.
Fast forward to now. In the last 5 months, we’ve gone through customer development, talks at meetups, getting advisors, doing venture competitions, pitching to VCs, dealing with lawyers, incorporating, intellectual property issues, the TechCrunch50 DemoPit, SF New Tech, our first paid customer, and saying goodbye to a person instrumental in getting us to where we are now. We’d love to tell you all about that in the lifetime of this blog.
We are currently 3 Berkeley folks building our first company: Arthur Klepchukov, Jerry Cheung, and Nikki DePaola. Arthur and Jerry are the founders & engineers and Nikki’s our brand new marketing intern.
And how this story ends is up to you.
2 Comments