Going from engineer to entrepreneur takes more than just good code
At some point, a lot of developers think about becoming entrepreneurs. Some end up taking the jump. So what happens when it turns out that nobody wants your product?Cara Borenstein, co-founder at Stashpad, ended up in this exact situation. After a two year stint as a software engineer at Twilio, she saw an opportunity to create a notepad for developers to stay on top of context switching and manage knowledge-related tasks. V. 1 was a wiki that didn’t quite catch on. Embracing this reality, Borenstein and her team decided to dig deeper by talking with target customers. That process catalyzed a transformation of the core product into something people need and love, a second brain for busy developers that helps them stay focused and retain those stray thoughts that can add up to something big later on.
In today’s podcast, Matt, Ceora, and Cassidy reflect on Cara’s founder journey.
Cara shares her experiences living in New York and San Francisco— and why she and her co-founder ultimately located Stashpad in North Carolina.
She elaborates on the exact steps that she took to pivot her startup following limited initial interest in V1 of the product.
Despite being in the Bay Area and working at Twilio, she was struggling to meet people because her full brain power was going to her products.
She shares what it was like for her and her co-founder to hire Stashpad’s first employees.
The group discusses Stashpad’s pathway to monetization in the context of developers wanting free tools.
Follow, Ceora, Matt, Cassidy, and Cara.
Marchingband gets today’s lifeboat badge for their answer to the question about running C or C++ code from Node.js in an efficient way.