Building Churnkey in the open: Everything we did in the first two weeks
We recently started working on a 4th SaaS, Churnkey.
We decided to build in the open a bit more this go around in hopes it helps other founders.
When we say "build in the open", we mean talking about building the business publicly, not so much the app/tech.
This is our first installment and contains a list of everything we completed in the first two weeks working on Churnkey. Drop a comment if you have any questions or find it helpful. Hoping we can look back after a few installments of this and show everything thing we did to get to launch/first sale.
For context, we have 4 co-founders in this company. (This felt like a lot of work for 4 co-founders that run other SaaS businesses as well.)
✔️ Set up Slack for communication
✔️ Notion for notes, planning, etc.,
✔️ Choose a name. Spent a few days on Slack coming up with ideas and checking availability & trademarks. Decided to go with Churnkey over Deflector.
✔️ Create LLC through the Secretary of State. (We may convert to C-Corp later)
✔️ IRS & EIN Filing
✔️ Discuss and Agree on Ownership between partners
✔️ Draft operating agreement (for company governance)
✔️ Buy domains and secure social accounts
✔️ Created business bank account using Mercury.com
✔️ G Suite for email, docs, sheets, drive, etc.,
✔️ Chose Nuxt and Netlify CMS for our Marketing Site.
✔️ Design Logo and Brand Assets
✔️ Design & build custom website
✔️ Write 4 blog posts including an announcement post
✔️ Build churn calculator tool for homepage
✔️ Install Intercom for website chat, email marketing, & support
✔️ Setup Mailchimp for email collection
✔️ Launch website with waitlist signup form
✔️ Google Analytics and Google Search Console setup
✔️ Bannerbear for automatically generating og:images
✔️ Launch and promote on social media, Indie Hackers, etc.,
✔️ Create company listings on Angel list, Indie Hackers, LinkedIn, SaaSworthy, etc.,
✔️ Get 25 wait-list subscribers
✔️ Reach out to waitlist subscribers and confirm 5 beta customers
Questions? What did we miss?
Thanks for sharing!
You have some idea where you got your first 25 subscribers? Through the blog posts? IndieHackers? Or directly recruited them?
Also, I can imagine it is very hard to find a good split and agreement with 4 founders? How did you manage this? It must be hard to manage expectations/
Hey @eduardme!
Those first 25 came through a combination of direct outreach, IH, Twitter, etc...
Regarding your second question, the decisions around equity splits and governance is always tricky. In the past, we've started companies with just two founders, so it's typically easy to just split things down the middle.
The jump to 4 co-founders has some challenges, but we've all worked together in various ways, so there's a certain amount of trust already there. We all have different strengths which complement each other well, so at the end of the day it's more art than science.
For instance, I'm an attorney / software developer so in addition to engineering work, I also handle entity formation, drafting governance documents, and other legal agreements. Baird, Scott, and Rob all have their own unique strengths that I don't possess, so part of the deal is to trust the team and know that they'll fully own the areas they're responsible for.
Since we're building @ChurnKey in the open this time around, we'll keep everyone updated with how this goes.