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The Journey to Build a Large, Profitable Business with Aleem Mawani of Streak

Episode #176

After raising money from VCs, Aleem Mawani (@aloo) chose a path that most VCs would consider a failure: to turn his company, Streak, into a large, profitable, and lasting software business. To do so, he'd have to pivot away from a failing idea, start charging customers who'd always been free, and bet everything on a risky platform controlled by another company. But today he's never been happier. In this episode, Aleem and I discuss when to work harder vs when to call it quits, how to pick the right community to surround yourself with, and how he chose a SaaS idea that scaled to millions in revenue.

Show Notes

  • Streak – Aleem's CRM for Gmail

  • @aloo – follow Aleem on Twitter

  1. 1

    Great show, you guys. Good to hear 2 ex YC people from last decade having a candid conversation in 2020. You guys are like old timers now. ;)

    Good insights. I like the point of no-code / low-code bring perfect for internal tools / corporate intrapreneurs.

    PS: I used to run Streak in like 2012. :)

  2. 1

    Haha, your approach (at around 15:30) for coming up with ideas is priceless: start building anything (literally anything), then you'd come across tools that you want to use and would have to pay for, and then start building one of THOSE.
    I actually did the exact same thing while building a web scraping service (https://datagrab.io) and also built out an email marketing automation tool. However, if getting traction for one product is hard, working on multiple products simultaneously seems almost impossible to me. So I've put this email marketing tool on a pause for now and I'm focusing on the scraper.

  3. 1

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.