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I co-founded StatusPage and joined LaunchNotes as Head of Growth. AMA.

Hey folks! My name's Steve Klein (@stevenklein on Twitter) and I co-founded Statuspage (almost a decade ago 🤯). We barely raised any money and to be honest, never even really spent most of it!

Now I'm Head of Growth at LaunchNotes where we'll probably have raised several million before it's all said and done.

Ask me anything!

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    haha we might have meet on cal train. You had a boosted board and I worked at Ustream which had just had a major outage. We met up and I got to try the boosted board and you got to find out I knew nothing of the down time lol. If not you a co founder. Just thought Id say hi!

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      That would have been my co-founder (and brother!) Scott - he loved that thing.

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    Wow, LaunchNotes looks like just the tool I have been looking for (for a long time!) !

    No interesting question, unfortunately, aside from, do you have an IH pricing discount?

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      Not exactly sure what "IH" means but there are startup discounts and community licenses available - https://www.launchnotes.com/pricing

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        Thanks Steve! I checked; awesome discount 🙏

        IH = Indie Hacker 😁

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    I'm intrigued by the customized roadmaps feature of LaunchNotes - is this something your clients asked for or you provided?

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      It's something that we had always planned to build. A dedicated place to talk about what you're building is critical in my opinion:

      • you need a place for talking about customers about what's coming next. Starting to build excitement about a release well before it's launched is a cornerstone of getting good adoption of new products and features.
      • It's equally as important to have a dedicated place for telling the rest of your company what's coming as well - a product team needs good processes in tools for giving sales/support/success ample time to prepare for changes. Most of the teams at ~ Series B and above describe this hold communication process as an absolute disaster and we think LaunchNotes goes a long way towards getting your whole org aligned on product changes.
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    Hey Steve,

    Just want to be sure we're talking about the same SP - is this the StatusPage you founded? https://www.atlassian.com/software/statuspage

    How long did it take to get the company profitable?

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      It is! So we worked on it part time while we were still doing some consulting work for 3 or 4 months. And then it probably took another 6 months after that.

      To be clear I'm talking "ramen profitable" here. There were 3 co-founders and by then we were making about 10k MRR so it was enough for us to just barely get by.

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        Great to chat, Steve. Questions:

        • how hard was it working on the project PT while still holding down a FT job?
        • how long was the project bootstrapped too?
        • what made you decide to sell it and how much? i.e could you have bootstrapped indefinitely?
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          It wasn't terribly hard as we were just working on it in between consulting jobs so it's not like we were pulling double duty.

          We funded the project with money we were making consulting for the first three or so months while we built the MVP and then three months after launch - through our first handful of customers. We started in Nov 2012 and took first funding when we got into YC S13.

          Decided to sell because we thought that ultimately status pages would generally become just a feature of other tangential (but much bigger) spaces like monitoring, alerting, or potentially even customer service. Figured we'd either need to raise and preemptively foray into one of those or get acquired by a company where we fit in to their strategic vision.

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