YourBase

We got our first paying customers! Even though our product isn't quite ready, some folks seemed excited enough to 1) share their code with us; 2) pre-pay for 2 months of the service.

So exciting!

Last week we received an invite to interview at YC in Mountain View, CA. I don't know what's going to happen, but I sure will learn a lot from the process. If it doesn't work out, that's OK - I'll probably try again for the next batch.

UPDATE: we didn't make it to the batch but the experience was great!

Our previous product scope was too large. We have something a lot more specific now. Here's how the product will work:

From your coding environment (CLI or IDE), you will be able to run or click "Deploy Stack". This ships your current code to our build service, and it (super quickly) builds and redeploys the service in the cloud in a few seconds. It then gives you a URL you can use to test this recently pushed version.

Our goal is to get from initial click to the playground URL working in 2 seconds. This won't happen overnight but I think it will be transformative when it does, because it could radically speed-up build-test cycle.

I decided to leave my job at Google and start working on my own thing.

The courage probably came from reading Jason Lemkin's answers on Quora, starting maybe in 2015. That's how I learned about SaaS and about the genius of recurring subscriptions (for the business and for the customers).

After reading everything Jason ever published, and a bunch of books, I realized I could probably figure out a way to make a business that works.

With a little bit of savings, I decided to quit. Because Google works on so many areas, it's hard to work on anything as a side project and retain ownership of the IP. The only way was really to cut ties completely. So I did.

It was a very happy day when I returned my badge after almost 10 years as a googler.