Launching The Network — Part 1
Ahoy, I’m Jamahl, founder of The Network.
I used to be a bottleneck, and now I’m creating software to relieve those bottlenecks for others. This is Part 1 of 2 posts where I’ll give some insight into building a B2B SaaS product for the VC + Investment industry.
Journey so far
Earlier this year, alongside with the team from Sompani, I started to scope out building a new software product for the Venture Capital / Investment industry.
Sompani has spent two years understanding and supporting the talent & hiring needs of VCs and their portfolio companies all across Europe & US. But we knew there were more problems to be solved. Spending two years myself formally running Talent & Platform at Seedcamp, experiening first hand the problems we’re attempting to solve, we had a good idea of where to start.
I built a prototype in Webflow (#nocode) and spent the next three months speaking to ~70 VCs. Listening, taking feedback, iterating, more calls. Proper lean startup stuff, Eric Reis would be proud.
Big shout out to Maddy at Notion, Sylvan & Carl at Entrepreneur First, Joao at EQT Ventures, Kathy at Downing, Erica at Anthemis, Petra at Manta Ray, Sonia at Backed and so many others (Genevieve, Miguel, Oliver, Charlotte et al) for your incredibly useful early feedback.
In May, we started building the product with Daniel, our Lead Engineer responsible for development (check out Part 2 next week for more insight into our tech). It took just over 3 months to go from an embarrassing prototype to a functional MVP.
Now we’re rolling out The Network to our beta customers, learning which processes we need to standardise and taking in feedback to improve the product.
Why building software for VCs isn’t a bad idea
VC is an underserved market by software. Invariably, most VCs use an amalgamation of tools from airtable, zapier, pipedrive, trello, spreadsheets, notion, google groups, slack, whatsapp and a variety of others to manage day-to-day processes. This is a typical square peg, round hole scenario.
There is so much opportunity here, and VCs can serve as a perfect distribution mehancaism to build a product that goes onto to service more than just the needs of VCs.
The inspiration
For the product
There are several ways a product like The Network could develop. I suppose the magic of product management and company building is figuring this out, and that’s what I’m most excited about.
This tweet from Sam Altman inspires me everyday that we’re building something valuable. While Bookface and The Network will have their differences, the premise is the same. A private community and network for portfolio companies to gain their unfair advantage.
For the company
I look at other Founders & CEOs and see who’s doing what, really well.
Recently I’ve taken notice of @domm, @dennismuellr and Joe Perkins
@domm has led the way of how to go from zero to hero in 12 months. His product is leveling up an industry. Fascinating to watch in real-time. And what a launch.
@dennismuellr is growing his following and status through being active on Twitter, and him and his team are building what looks like to be an amazing product in Amie (bump me up the waitlist please!). You can tell that he takes design & UX seriously. And IMO this was genius.
Joe also deserves a shout out. Landscape.ventures is an idea that I guess many of us have either had or wished existed and I’m excited to see what Joe builds. He wrote about his journey here which in part, was also an inspiration for me to get cracking on writing this.
Part 2 coming next week where I’ll talk about how we found our early beta users, our tech stack and what our roadmap has in store.
Until then.
Jamahl
If you’d like to learn more about what we’re doing or have any questions / feedback, I’m on jamahl@the-network.io
