Chapter 1: What was Martina Zrnec's journey before founding Stacklist?
I think these startups, you make trade-offs every single day. Literally, I did trade-off today. I was rolling out entire billing platform and it's changed like 90% of how we do billing. And I'm like, in the morning, Kyle is asleep. I was like, I'll just push this to production and fix bugs along the way because we need this for today for new customers to enroll.
So I think trade-offs are something that we are doing daily. Own what you decide and move forward. Even if it was a bad decision, like, fine, it doesn't matter. Scratch that, let's move on. And I think that's how startups should operate. Moving mountains every day is the goal. My name is Martina Zrnec, co-founder and CTO at StatList. This is CodeStory.
A podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries. Six months moonlighting. There's nothing on the back end. Who share what it takes to change an industry. I don't exactly know what to do next. It took many guys to get right. Who built the teams that have their back. A company is its people. The teams help each other achieve more. Most proud of our team. Keeping scalability top of mind.
All that infrastructure was a pain. Yes, we've been fighting it as we grow. Total waste of time. The stories you don't read in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve, mind you. Took it off the shelf and dusted it off and tried it again. To ride the ups and downs of the startup life. You need to really want it. It's not just about technology. All this and more on Codestory.
I'm your host, Noah Labhart. And today, how Martina Zernick has built a way for you to share and discover. Collecting your favorite things into stacks. Today's episode is brought to you by .techdomains. And this one hits close to home. Back in 2016, I was building my startup and went hunting for that perfect .com and found next to nothing. So I did what every founder does, settled.
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Chapter 2: How did Martina and her co-founder Kyle come up with the idea for Stacklist?
This will be exciting. What does the future look like for Stacklist, for the product, the platform, and for your team? The product, for sure, I'm building at the moment. I know exactly where this should go and will go, like MCP connection to the cloud. Imagine you go into cloud or cloud code, doesn't matter, chat GPT, perplexity, whatever is your favorite choice, and go there.
Hey, can you pull up five best restaurants in Croatia, create a stack, Croatia restaurants, and put those in a stack? And it goes, it does that for you. And then you are like, okay, can you suggest maybe I have a couple of restaurant stacks, maybe I can merge those or put them in a collection. What do you suggest? Can you auto tag those or make some kind of improvements?
Then on the other side, there is also save. You know how LLMs produce so much text nowadays? Who reads that? Then you're like, okay, can you summarize this for me? I'll keep it simple so I can read it in three sentences. And imagine those summaries you can save as MD files and then work around those per project. Invoke them in ChatGPT, Cloud, Perplexity, doesn't matter.
And like, you don't even have to go to Stacklist to use Stacklist. That's the goal. And the whole AI enhancement. Oh, you save three cards that are from New York. Do you want to put them in a stack? You have actually two New York stacks. Which one do you prefer?
Like talking to Stacklist and talking to the Stacklist agents and MCPs all the time and having more structured way of saving everything in your life. That's for the product for sure. For team, I would like to have a couple of more developers who are same-minded as me that we all should ship really fast and explore stuff as we go and remove if we see that it doesn't work.
So I need to build team around me that's fast, executable and killer sales, go to market and just bring it to the level that we know it can exist. Let's switch to you. Who influences the way that you work? Name a person or many persons or something you look up to and why. We were in Accelerator in Hawaii and there I met what happened to be my friend now.
And I am proud that I can call her my friend. She's Miki and she's the CEO of Olelo Intelligence. And I think she's the most brilliant person I met. And the way she runs the company, and she's also a CTO, she has great technology and skills and ability to do amazing stuff. And the way she operates with the team and the company with such a calm structure and...
She knows exactly where she wants to go. Just turns something in me like I want to do that as well on that level. So she's the one for sure. And then my husband and my co-founder, like both of those guys are extremely good in what they do. And they both have one passion. item in common, which is they go into this executable mode and they will not stop until it's done. So I respect that.
And I'm not in that mode. I can be, but I'm more like all over the place. So I am really respectful when somebody goes, okay, yeah, you told me to do that. I'll do that. No matter the cost and no matter how much time will take me. Last question, Martina. So you're getting on a plane and you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing. They're jazzed about it.
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