We launched Polywork last April when the world was in the midst of a pandemic. The reaction was more than anything we could have expected (I documented it here after one month live in the world). We had our viral moment, it seemed that we could do no wrong May through August. Polywork got more traction in its first 3 months than my previous company got over the course of six years (albeit very different companies) but you get the point. Our message about people being more than their job titles really struck a chord. The world was excited about how we were approaching the problem of professional identity and how people connect with one another today online.
The good, the bad and the brutal.
With this growth and hype came funding, (there were just three business days between our Seed and Series A funding). I mean we were one of the first consumer professional network apps to have seemingly drawn a little blood from the monolith that was LinkedIn, for the first time in a meaningful way, and in the 2021 market? Funding came very fast. Growth kept coming too.
We had 100s of thousands of amazing professionals from Airtable, Tesla, Webflow, Snapchat, Github and more using Polywork to showcase what they do. Expressing their personality, their highlights, both social and professional. We then capped off the end of an incredible summer immortalizing the word ‘polywork’ in the dictionary. Lightning in a f*cking bottle. Why consumer founders do what they do.
The brutal
After the dust settled on the mega summer of hype, the data was telling a different story. There were early adopters who loved the product but retention was lacking in the broader group of users. We had serious work to do. We went heads down, not a single marketing effort, no PR, I barely tweeted. We spent September through December heads down, with our community, talking to them and shipping features.
I shared this graph yesterday on Twitter mainly as a public declaration that will always be there to remind me to keep f*cking going. By Christmas, our engagement had nose dived. We hadn’t worked out shit. I remember an investor joking with me with ‘You raised from everyone under the sun, if this one doesn’t work, you gotta move to New Zealand dude’. I chuckled nervously. Joking aside, S/O to the many folks that helped during this period, notably Joel Flory, founder of VSCO, who said (I’m paraphrasing) ‘Welcome to consumer, buddy’. He gave me some great tools to make sure my own health and mental well-being and that of my team, was being taken care of while we tried to wean ourselves off the dopamine we’d all engorged on in the months prior. Ultimately though, we kept shipping, talking to users, made some bets — and the hard work is starting to pay off.
2022 and what’s next — how do you connect the professional world?
We started Polywork to make it easier for professionals to connect with one another. We were frustrated that the focus of existing networks of job titles and schools attended and how in turn, this lack of ability to express ourselves was limiting our ability to connect with others and with opportunities.Thanks
Lastly I want to give a huge thanks to my team for their relentless work over the last year to get us where we are today, for keeping their heads down and shipping. And to Nat Friedman, Ray Tonsing and Sriram Krishnan for working with me over the last year and doubling down on us — I’m learning a ton from all of you and am super grateful to have you onboard for the journey. To Bobby Lo, Ryan Hoover, Heston Berkman, Joel Flory and others who helped be a sounding board for the product over the last year, thank you.
We are still in the 1st innings, but we now have the capital and the runway to build towards a massive vision. We’ll be focused on empowering every person on the planet to polywork. My team and I will continue to execute relentlessly and ship what our users need in order to connect and collaborate together. We believe that particularly in a post pandemic world, that we have all considered more and more, what the f*ck is going on? Who am I? What do I want to do? We believe people are not meant to do just one thing for one company their whole lives, we believe they’re meant to explore, follow passions, collaborate with people, try things and fail. And as long as that’s true, there will be a place in the world for Polywork.
