Introducing Port — Fueling Community-Led Growth
TL;DR: Today, I’m proud to announce I’m joining forces with two of my former teammates from my previous startup - Nick Dijkstra and Jake Stott. I’ve spent the past year working with them on ideation, iteration, research and development, moving during that time from mentor, to advisor, to now being a co-founder and CEO of the newest venture in their Beyond Ventures portfolio.
Introducing Port. — Port helps you grow, engage, and retain your community members. Wherever they are. With clever segmentation and our automated Port Score and Community Health Score, you know who to focus on in a heartbeat.
But first, a little story explaining how we got here
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Early in 2020, just before COVID began to rear its ugly head, I received a message from 2 of my former team from RetentionGrid / AVARI, our startup which was acquired in 2015. They had been working together for a few years after AVARI building a successful agency supporting blockchain / crypto and open source technologies in GTM and growth efforts.
The guys asked me to be a sounding board to take what they learned from their clients and to turn this experience into a SaaS product that supports community-led go-to-market approaches. The tooling in this space has been immature and fragmented — none meeting their needs. And as great companies are so often born, Nick and Jake envisioned a product that could scratch their own — and their clients’ — itch. As a career B2B technology entrepreneur, I know firsthand what product-led and bottom-up go-to-market means and the pain it can bring with finding the right tools. The idea of being a part of this massive shift in GTM technology — focusing on community-led adoption — really resonated with me.
Looking back
I’ve known Nick since 2013 when he was freshly in Berlin and joined as the first employee of our startup RetentionGrid. He rose and adapted with our team as we raised funding, grew, raised more funding, launched a 2nd brand and navigated all the absolutely mad things that a startup brings. He took on anything we could throw at him and went on as a key employee when the company was acquired. Nick also grew mad chops in product strategy and product design along the way before stepping out to scratch his entrepreneurial itch — joining Jake with the agency.
Jake joined us at AVARI in 2014 in our sales team at an exciting but absolutely ridiculously stressful time. We’d launched the new brand and pivoted most of team to focus there. As we struggled through fundraising and M&A, he stepped straight into the boiling water and stayed calm and focused on the mission. After AVARI was acquired, one of my co-founders and I convinced Jake to stay behind with us and help us to grow our next venture, Exit3x, as an EIR. Ultimately, Jake’s entrepreneurial spirit pulled him away to launch Hype Partners.
Over the past three years Jake and Nick built built an amazing team of 40 people in 20 countries, working with over 70 organisations on their marketing and communities. In 2020 they combined all projects under the umbrella of Beyond Ventures, their venture studio.
My past 5 years also running a venture studio
Since the AVARI acquisition, I spent the years building Exit3x along with my long term co-founder from RetentionGrid / AVARI. Exit3x operated as a venture studio in partnership with corporate innovation teams to create operating startups and attack new markets together. These were exciting years during which we partnered with large global organizations and one of the largest energy companies in Germany. Our team created, launched, led and eventually staffed 5 new digital product ventures as well as consulted on and developed strategies for several others. And, we worked with some amazing people along the way.
While we fell in love with the venture builder model and so many of the team we brought into these startups we launched, we didn’t find startup-corporate collaboration to exactly be the ‘unfair advantage’ that we’d hoped for as entrepreneurs. There was simply too strong of a culture clash between true startup founders and the corporate innovation mindset, which in general much prefers paying consultants to coach employees over enabling entrepreneurs to move fast and get concepts into real world market conditions.
So, in the Spring of 2020, I took much some needed time away while exploring going back to my roots as a founder. And then COVID. While the year was generally awful for most of the world, it was also serendipitous in that it allowed me to think about the kind of work that I’d be happy to do every day and to consider collaborating with Jake and Nick again. And, due to the massive transition from face-to-face community engagement to social distancing, created a clear ‘right now’ case for Port to be built and launched. Port helps solve a huge problem for community managers, especially those running devrel and developer marketing programs.
Joining forces and Port is born
As the lockdown that began last March prevented any ongoing, casual meetup for a coffee or beer, Jake, Nick and I decided to turn this into a regular Wednesday advisory video session. We spent a lot of time exploring the early product vision of Port, working through the startup validation & fundraising process — me generally being a pain in the arse and challenging them every time I heard “I think” or “in my opinion”. It was fun re-engaging with them and it became quite clear that they know their market. It also became abundantly clear that the opportunity looks exciting as the next product to to be spun out of their venture studio.
As my excitement grew in the product, so did my desire to join Jake and Nick as co-founders. My partner and I agreed it was time to start winding down Exit3x, and I decided to add my experience in rapidly building and funding new ventures to lead Port as co-founder and CEO. As a career entrepreneur, I know the challenges of finding founder fit. Founders need to be able to stand back to back and fight off the dragons and after so many years working together, I know that I can do that with these guys. And, excitingly, we’re bringing more of our old team back together to focus on Port.
With Port we’ve built a tool that helps you grow, engage, and retain your user community. Wherever they are. Over the coming weeks I will write more about our vision, why we believe that a product-lead approach is changing the way tech companies go to market, and why building healthy communities is slowly replacing sales teams. In the meantime, please check out Port.
If you’re interested in what we’re doing — or would like to be part of our private beta — feel free to get in touch with me.
