Week #8 ODNC — Getting Close
Hi, I’m Kavir! Here's recapping Week #8 of ODNC1.
If you're new here, I’ll be chronicling the 10 weeks of ODNC1 with key takeaways of events, noteworthy quotes, and my perspective while I build in public. Subscribe to get updates:
Week #8 just went by and now we're almost at the finishing line. While we were working on our capstone project, we still had time for a Fireside chat with Brianne Kimmel and workshops from ODNC folks Madhuri Maram (Building Systems in Notion), Christian San Jose (UX Fundamentals for No-code), and Mike Wiendels (How to Build a No-code Agency). So much good content, so little time.
The Mastermind groups continue to be a source of ideation, feedback, and frankly just good moral support. Despite being at different stages of our builder journey, it's always good to offer help and receive help from like-minded peers.
Let's dive-in to the takeaways from the fireside chat of this week:
Brianne Kimmel — Work Life
Brianne is the founder of Work Life, an early-stage venture firm in Silicon Valley. She’s an investor in Webflow, Voiceflow, Tandem, Command E, and 20+ startups. Here are 3 takeaways:
Explore, then exploit
In your early career, you want to meet as many people as possible. In the evolution of your career, as you start to have a focused network you can go levels and levels deeper.
This is an interesting insight that goes hand in hand with career specialization. At the start of your career, you don't know what you really like + what you're good at. With experience and trying out different things, you start to figure out.
Meeting more people increases the surface area for serendipity. Programs like On Deck really helps with that. Sahil Lavingia, the founder of Gumroad, mentioned in one of his talks that he did 100s of coffees in San Fransisco when he started off his career.
Venture scale businesses in No-code
We've seen venture scale businesses that are Shopify plugins and Slack integrations
The key insight from this answer from Brianne was that these tools are built on top of a platform that offers distribution and discovery.
You have millions of Shopify and Slack customers that use the platform everyday. Building an app on top of the ecosystem with low-code or no-code tools is the best bet if you don't have massive distribution of your own.
That's one of the reasons I decided to build a Slack bot for employee onboarding rather than build a standalone web app. This also helps with adoption at companies who don't want to use yet another web or mobile app.
On Angel Investing for the same time
It's helpful to companies when you're known for a specific thing and known for something you can help with.
In this case Brianne was known about GTM with her experience at Zendesk and with her network in companies in Airtable, Dropbox.
With money being commoditized, it's the clichéd "value-add" that is really important. I find that Lenny Rachitsky is another example of someone who has a strong niche and his involvement in angel investments is less about the cheque invested and more about his network, audience, and influence in the space.
My Build in Public Journey
I was able to finally get something working in Autocode. It's an onboarding bot that welcomes a new person who has joined a team or community and walks them through the first steps. This was all built without writing code (just rearranging some of it in Autocode :p)
Thanks to Kyleigh Smith and Kishan Patel for their encouragement and support.
By next week, I aim to build something more robust using Block Builder in Slack and link it up to an Airtable. If you have any questions about what I'm building or Autocode, please DM me on Twitter.
That’s it for this week! See you next time.
Follow me on Twitter @KavirKaycee!
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