8base

I am happy to report that 8base was accepted into the very prestigious Techstars Austin Accelerator Program under the leadership of Amos Schwartzfarb. We are excited to be joining the program that launched companies such as SendGrid and Digital Ocean.; and, equally excited to become a part of the Austin tech ecosystem.

One of our key customers, Collabtogrow, finalized their product on 8base and went to market as a company. Many of our clients build using their own developers but this is a startup that is both built on 8base and by 8base, because they hired our 8base Labs team to design and build the product on our platform.

We've been receiving amazing feedback from developers all over the world about 8base in the past few weeks.

It's both extremely encouraging and invaluable feedback on where the product is deficient and what customers want our product to do.

Here is an awesome tweet-storm from developer Sam Wight:

Need I say more? This was the rocket ship we had been building, sitting on the launch pad, igniting for the first time and actually taking off successfully. The full cycle of customer awareness, self-service adoption, 0 human touch, compelling platform use and payment was completed. Now it is time to carefully step on the gas and make it land on the moon!

For months, we had been working on:

1. Rapidly improving the product based upon user feedback and our roadmap.
2. Revamping our positioning, messaging and website.
3. Figuring out our pricing (not trivial).
4. Building our paywall (also not trivial).

On June 21, 2019 we finally launched the paywall and grandfathered in existing users for a 6-month free-trial on our Developer Plan.

Time to ramp up marketing efforts and test the entire machine!

We raised an additional $1.1 million from angel investors and $700 from 3 seed funds to cap off our capital needs. This provided runway to continue doing what we needed to do, including initial marketing efforts, in anticipation of closing a priced round by end of Q1 2020.

We received an inbound request from a chief architect at IBM Global Services who was interested in 8base. This led to a proof-of-concept with 8base that ultimately led to a signed contract with them. Today, IBM is using 8base every day and building a complex SaaS product for a large, strategic customer on the platform.

Our first paying customer was actually signed offline, rather than through the website. It was a startup looking to build on 8base and who wanted our professional services team to take the lead on design and development of their SaaS application. This was a six-figure deal with an incredibly saavy customer so we jumped in with both feet and really road-tested 8base for the first time.

After 14 months of hardcore development, we launched 8base as a free product at a launch event with about 300 people in attendance. I remember being so incredibly grateful to the team for their hard work. Bittersweet was the fact that some of our team was offshore in Saint Petersburg, Russia and were unable to be there in person.

Between myself and a number of angel investors, we invested $1 million of seed capital into 8base. This was purposely the least amount of seed capital I had raised for my startups but we wanted to bootstrap as much as possible. For some $1 million is a lot but for what we were attempting it wasn't.