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

51: Recast - The Origin of Level from Startups for the Rest of Us 35:27 Share

The Art of Product

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51: Recast - The Origin of Level from Startups for the Rest of Us