There’s no one way to build a SaaS business, but most advice makes it seem frustratingly so. 😬Relay is fixing this via candid, context-rich AMAs, interviews, and 100s of discussions with a diverse set of founders — across geos, markets, and philosophies.
Hey PH community, very excited to share Relay with you today! :))
We are building Relay with a belief that there are many ways of building a startup and all of them uniquely challenging and interesting. Many founders questioning long-held playbooks and ways of doing things.
These stories are often not documented and not given as much space as they deserve, we are hoping to change this with Relay, through contextual, diverse conversations that do justice to the "day-to-day of starting up", as a founder once shared.
Excited to hear your thoughts.
Thank you, @jamesjgill, for the hunt and for your amazing support! :))
Hey PH, I’m Krish, one of the co-founders at Chargebee.
Incredibly excited to share Relay — a diverse, community-driven second brain for SaaS founders or, as someone recently put it, their go-to anti-library. Curated with an immense love for SaaS and a singular belief that there’s no one way to build a business.
Tl;dr, on Relay, you can find:
🙌 Exhaustively (and endearingly) context-driven AMAs where founders reflect on past choices, paradoxes, hard-won points-of-view, and the uniquely inspiring journeys they’ve crafted.
✨ Incisive interviews where up-and-coming founders question standard playbooks, share how they adapt inventively based on constraints, and document the think and feel of starting up today.
All rooted in fostering a thoughtful, cross-path dialogue — between bootstrapped and VC folks and those who’ve been both, exceptionally lean teams and big ones, those who got acquired and those who never want to exit, and other such distinctions — across founding philosophies. 😇
And now, a little backstory for the PH curious:
“Whatever else anything is,” to invoke You’ve Got Mail’s Kathleen Kelly, “it ought to begin by being personal.”
More than a decade ago now, a good bunch of our first ahas on starting up came straight from New York City via Joel Spolsky’s irreverent, always insightful blog posts on building software businesses.
FogBugz (the venture Joel was documenting back then) was very different from how Chargebee has turned out, in a lot of ways. Even Joel’s background, plus the constraints and challenges he was dealing with, were certainly different from ours.
Yet, those very distinctions helped us make sense of some of our early decisions.
Because Joel’s reflections were always context-driven and never abstract/prescriptive. That allowed us to model insights onto our own goals. And we’ve carried that lens ever since as we’ve sought helpful advice from many different founders around the world.
We wanted to build Relay because we believe that kind of access for founders is either hard to discover, scattered across crowded forums or increasingly troubled by:
1) an ever-strong presence of camps that precisely dictate how companies must/must not be built, the paths founders can/cannot pursue, and what is/isn’t deemed a success,
2) and within these camps, for inexplicable reasons, we keep hearing from the same set of names again and again.
What if, as Referral Rock’s Josh Ho noted recently, we were “open to all roads”?
What if we could learn from the unheard struggles and inner battles that have dotted the very public wins of senior founders? What if we were privy to refreshing insights from the 100s of SaaS founders starting out each year and not just the loudest 20?
It gladdens me to write that we’ve had the privilege of documenting many such diverse and thoughtful founder journeys:
To circle back to FogBugz, Trello’s @michaelpryor recounted how “none of it is easy.” ProdPad’s Janna Bastow challenged her past self, “it’s remiss to assume that the best thing I could have done was to solve the problem closest to me.”
Having bootstrapped her first venture and now on the VC-path, MagicBell’s @unamashana reminded us that capital (institutional or from customers) is a tool at a founder’s disposal and not a way of life.
Wethos’ @rachren1 boldly questioned the very premise of subscriptions in SaaS. Bento’s Jesse Hanley explained how he takes on industry giants as a one-person team.
Butter’s @jakob_knutzen1 informed us of an inherent flaw of the highly-valued PMF survey, discovering it by building first (as so many of us do now) for non-native English speakers.
The list goes on!
Well, guess I’ll stop here to admit we’re big believers in Relay’s mission and I’d go as far as saying that the current SaaS downturn wouldn’t seem as menacing if we were deliberately picking our company-building blocks from a diverse set of founders.
Thanks so much for checking us out!
I’d love to hear what you think of Relay in the comments — and if you’re a SaaS founder interested in joining, please request your invite here: https://form.typeform.com/to/Tpw...
Bravo, team Relay! Really appreciate how truly resourceful this is for all founders at different stages in their starting up journies. Onwards and upwards! :D
P.S. The animated logo is absolutely 🤌.
@vanshika_rattan Thank you, Vanshika! 🙌🏾 We have @abhishek_ajithkumar1 and @kk87 to thank for that thumbnail's visual flourish and for all the remarkable artwork on Relay! They're the best! :))
@vanshika_rattan@kk87@mrakashsharma Thanks a ton for this praise, team Relay and Krishna have both been extremely helpful. It's been a pleasure coming up with visual metaphors, week by week. :))
Relay
ThreeDee
Relay
Relay
Relay
Relay
Flowace
Relay
Relay
Relay
Relay
Relay