For the last decade, I've neglected my personal relationships. I was heads down working on my company, and it always felt like taking time to socialize and talk to others was "not getting any work done". That mindset was... incredibly stupid, and it became obvious in an exchange I had on Facebook. First, some context:

My oldest son just turned 4, and I was thoroughly disappointed with the schools available. So I decided to purchase a building^[1] in the US to build a charter school with an accelerated curriculum^[2], starting with teaching 3-year-olds to read.

I didn't have enough money to buy it outright, so I went looking for a bank to finance the deal. The building I found was an office building with a high vacancy rate, but discounted enough that it was still cashflowing after debt - this would allow me to use the profits of the building to subsidize the development of the school curriculum!

Well, it turns out that banks don't like high-vacancy buildings (even if cashflowing), especially during a downturn in commercial office space! I must have called about 200 banks and lenders, and nearly all of them were an instant rejection. There were a handful of banks where the front-line loan officer loved the numbers on the deal, but when they pitched it to their higher-up lending committee, the deal was rejected because of, you guessed it, a high vacancy rate.

I was finally down to a single local bank that seemed like it might be willing to do the deal because they knew the building. But there was a catch: all of my assets and credit history were Canadian, and they were afraid that I might go bankrupt and flee the country. So they needed a US citizen to sign as a guarantor on the deal.

Fortunately, I had interned at some software companies in the US in the early 2010s and made a bunch of friends there. Some of them were even US citizens! So I started reaching out to them on Facebook to see if anybody trusted me enough to guarantee the debt.

Spoiler alert, nobody was interested 😐. Now, in all fairness, they would be guaranteeing about $4 million. That's a lot of money, if for some reason I wasn't able to honor my commitments. A life-changing amount, but in the wrong direction. And there was nearly no upside for them^[3]. Still, I didn't expect a 100% rejection rate. Of the people I asked, there were certainly some that I would have helped if the roles were flipped.

In my head, the relationships I had built a decade ago were "paused", despite not spending time to maintain them. But one person (we'll call him Andrew, because that's his name 🙂) quickly shattered that illusion. After explaining my situation with the banks and giving my ask, Andrew responded with:

When was the last time you saw me or talked to me?

Uh oh. It had been more than a decade. There are times in life when reality has a long-awaited reunion with the thoughts brewing in your head, and this was one of those times. Relationships don't pause, they decay, and it's time to change course. Thanks, Andrew, for being so blunt. I'm sure there were others who felt the same way but weren't as willing to let me know. The last decade was about engineering, the next one will be about people! (and engineering)

With that way-too-long preamble out of the way, let's talk about marketing. I've neglected marketing for the last decade. Sound familiar? Nobody knows what I'm working on. I've got only 290 followers on Twitter, and half of them are pornbots (you can help change that 🙂). We're building some great stuff, and it's time to get the word out.

I hate the blogspam that many call marketing these days. Companies will create blogs stuffed with keywords to rank on Google. These blogs are optimized for computers, not for people. It's why, when you search for a recipe, the top results dedicate 98% of the words on the page to a backstory about the author's Italian grandma. These blogs are inauthentic and undifferentiated, and will have no way to stand out from the AI slop that is about to crowd the internet^[4]. They feel like unseasoned tofu.

I want to do something different. Something intentional. Something fun. Something for people! Moment's ideal customers are early-stage founders. How can I attract them?

One idea that I've been obsessed with: seeing how more experienced entrepreneurs make decisions. Could I get 23-year-old idiot me to grow his company twice as fast by offering 34-year-old slightly-less-of-an-idiot me's perspective? And can I make it entertaining enough that 23-year-old me would have actually read it? I've got plenty of juicy stories and bad memes to space out the walls of text.

So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to detail how we build our company. There will be jokes, and learning, and dumb mistakes.

This is not an original idea. Others have built in public before. But they seem to focus on the product instead of the decisions. And somehow they all stop publishing when they start making money 😐. I'm not sure if that's because of legal or because they don't want to attract competition or just because they got lazy, but I'll try not to do that.

I've spent the last 6 years working on Moment. The most recent 4 of those have been with a fully-staffed team^[5] of engineers.

We broke the "rules" of building a company. What you're supposed to do is talk to customers non-stop, even before you have a product. And in my defense, I did that for both Debuggex and ParseHub, the other products I worked on. But with Moment, all I went on was my gut feel that there was a better way to manage relationships with customers (the irony is not lost on me). There are unicorn companies in many of the verticals we're attacking, so the demand is definitely there.

It helped that Moment itself needed Moment. That made it natural to dogfood our product to make sure it was valuable - I had planned this from the start. If revenue could not be the guiding light for our product, then at least our own subjective feelings of delight (as users) could be.

Did I mention we are attacking more than one vertical? That's another rule we broke. You're supposed to use the bowling-pin strategy: start by providing a great solution to a small problem, and tackle nearby problems once you've conquered the first one.

We started by trying to solve two problems at once: live chat and time rewind. The idea was that these products joined together produce an obvious benefit compared to using each separately, and it would be difficult for any competitor to replicate the benefit using only 3rd party integrations.

This strategy hatched a great product, but it was painful. In hindsight, I'm not sure it was necessary, but the whole point of Moment is that you can make dramatically better decisions about your business if all your customer data is automatically collected and stored in one place. It's hard to demonstrate this benefit if you're not in multiple verticals.

We have now spent a few million $ on development, with only a trickle of customers to show for it. In spite of that, I'm feeling increasingly optimistic. My own usage (as a customer of Moment) and delight increases every month. Same story with the rest of our team. Now we just need to get the word out, so that's what the next several chapters are going to be about.

Oh, and the building? The seller recognized that he likely wasn't going to get too many other buyers and agreed to finance a majority of the deal.

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1. I had actually been looking for a building for a few years. I was very fortunate that the one I ended up purchasing included an already-licensed childcare center as part of the deal, so I could immediately start implementing the curriculum. ↩︎

2. The financial and political incentives for education in the US and Canada are fascinating in their own right. Many of the problems with schooling can be fixed by simply aligning incentives correctly. ↩︎

3. Though after the first few rejections, I did start offering a percentage of the guaranteed amount as an annual fee. ↩︎

4. Improvements in artificial intelligence will soon beat out even exceptional human content, but at least I will go down knowing I did my best. ↩︎

5. Our team, by the way, is exceptional. They've accomplished more than teams 10 times their size, and I feel extremely lucky that I get to work with them. ↩︎

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Stats

Paying customers: 5 (+1, -1)

Monthly revenue: $199 (+$74)