Chris Best

really focus in on building this thing, which was really good.

I would say way more camaraderie.

I mean, there's a natural sense in which I'd say it raises your sights a little bit.

It's easy if you have a little bit of early success, you're sort of like, ah, we've got this.

And then you look around and even to this day, like there are more successful companies in that batch than us.

Like some of our friends and peers are just going on to great heights.

And I think it gives you permission to be more ambitious.

No, I'd say we were able to build it.

It was simple.

It was simple.

I sat down and wrote a bunch of the first things.

I managed to lure, so it was Hamish and I at the start, and then within the first month of YC, I managed to lure our other co-founder, Girage, to the company, who's a brilliant engineer.

That was a really big deal.

I think mostly what it did was sort of, it was a commitment device for us to decide, not only are we going to build this, but we're building like a really ambitious version of it.

And then after that, we sort of, you know, we got going, we had early customers, we had early momentum, the thing was starting to work.

And we sort of had an idea that we'd raise a series A at some point.

We had some like ideas for the metrics, but mostly we were just focused on building the thing.

We were focused on

getting the best and smartest people to come to the platform and write and make sure they were having a really good experience so that other people would see that and want to do it too.

And there was one guy we were trying to recruit named Andrew Chan, who actually had a very successful newsletter about growth for startups.