I don’t usually write about myself but some things have happened, big things, so it feels like an opportune time to break that mold. I’m hoping that sharing these updates will be useful to other founders, but also give me an opportunity to solicit help from some of the amazing people that read this newsletter.
Build was acquired by Seed Club
The first big update is that Build—the accelerator x hackathon platform we’ve been working on at Backdrop Labs for the past year—was acquired by Seed Club! We can’t disclose any amounts, but we’re not retiring just yet. In fact, we’ve already been incubating something new ourselves, but more on that later.
There are some Build numbers we can share though—over 10k builders have been through a program (each program bigger than the last), more than a thousand projects have been launched, graduates have gone on to raise millions and take the world by storm. All with the help of 40+ amazing sponsors ranging from Google Cloud to AWS to Coinbase. I’m so proud of our team and the Build community.
The numbers are great, but what always mattered more to us was hearing that a builder finally got that “what if” idea out of their head and into the hands of real people. That’s why we truly couldn’t have found a better partner to continue growing and improving Build. Seed Club was in many ways the reason we got started (see the article I wrote in 2021 before founding Backdrop) and they’ve been a close collaborator ever since. Watch out for the relaunch of Build soon, it’s going to be even better.
Lessons in pivoting
It took a few pivots to get to Build, and we will need to iterate quickly in what we are building next. I’ve worked with enough founders to know that nobody finds this process easy. It isn’t the idea of pivoting that people find difficult, it’s the question of whether you’re doing it right. Is it too soon or too late? A smart turn, or a case of pivotitis?
Over time you make peace with the fact that you will never know whether you made the right calls as a founder or not, and the larger world will apply some basic reductionist history anyways. If you succeed, your pivots will be genius. If you fail, they won’t. As a scientist I’ve always found that frustrating, but it’s the reality.
Knowing that, the only thing you can actually get precise about is your own intuition for what a good rep looks like. Even that is more art than science, but that art is our craft at its purest. If you aren’t completely obsessed with and addicted to it, that is when things will truly be challenging.
The mission that motivated my cofounder Rapha and me to start Backdrop—using frontier tech to improve how people bring their ideas to life—means we will always need to pivot as the tech changes. But that’s what we do best. Most people don’t know this, but we built the original Backdrop as a side project to explore how people were using crypto essentially as a form of equity to launch internet-native organizations (DAOs) in 2021. We are builders, so we learn by getting our hands dirty. It was only when that product exploded and we had investors knocking down our doors that we launched the company.
Predictably, things played out in unpredictable ways. The regulatory landscape around crypto developed much more slowly than we expected (which I’ve written a lot about) and we had to pivot our way through, launching and killing two products with a growing user base of 10k+ before we landed on Build. In hindsight of course I see ways to make those reps even tighter, but what I’m most proud of is that we pivoted when we saw the asymptote in the distance, not when we hit it. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that we then created Build, a temple to shipping and learning quickly.
The things you can build in a month
With Build, we wanted to create something that would give us a front row seat to how the process of building new tech is changing, especially in the world of AI. We also felt there was an opportunity to borrow some insights from Buildspace and Pioneer on accelerators that scale via software but to look at it as a marketplace, with builders on one side and infra companies on the other.
We got many of those assumptions right, and what was truly eye-opening was to witness what great builders can do with modern tech, especially AI. Fully-featured apps were being built in weeks, sometimes even days.
So why sell Build? Simply put, when we looked at the ways to make it 100X bigger we didn’t feel we had a unique advantage or insight as a team to deliver on any of them. One of the big opportunities we identified was pairing Build with a more traditional accelerator like Seed Club, and combining forces there was just an obvious win-win vs launching our own.
We also continued to develop our own AI capabilities through Build, and that gave us a lot of energy to start from first principles again. It’s hard to tell from looking at it, but Build is now almost entirely automated. We source tens of thousands of builders, review applications, onboard new members, check updates, match builders with relevant infra companies, and facilitate launches—all in a fully automated way via AI. By the end we were running Build on no more than 20 human hours a week.
Automating Build was partly just our nature—we’re a lean three person team that wants to spend most of its time building software. But recently, we also wanted to clear up time to experiment with something new. While I’ve been finalizing the acquisition over the past few months, we’ve been gearing up to bring a new product to life.
Which brings us to our latest announcement…
Introducing Grids
Grids creates a tight feedback loop between human experts and a specialized AI to help founders work more efficiently with outsourced designers and engineers. Let us know before you sign that expensive dev shop or agency contract to build your product and we’ll let you know if you’re overpaying, and importantly where to reduce costs without sacrificing quality.
Why Grids?
The original idea for Grids came partially from watching Build, and partially from being connected via my wife Emily (who founded a successful company as a non-technical team) to a lot of founders that have hired an agency or freelancers to build their product. It is shocking to compare the process of building your own product vs having it built for you.
Put simply, the world of outsourced product work is entirely broken. Teams routinely spend $100k+ and 6 months or more just to launch a product that would take a good team weeks to build. Founders with hard-earned insights squander their life savings trying to build an MVP. If you’re lucky you can get a few good referrals, otherwise you are on your own to sift through tens of thousands of agencies and millions of freelancers, trying to find the right one to build your particular product.
For years I joked to Emily that someday I’ll start a venture fund focused on helping founders outsource early product development. There are a lot of founders out there who are world class at something other than product, and I believe an increasing number of companies don’t win in the early days on software. Unless someone magically improves the needle-in-a-haystack process of finding an amazing technical cofounder, you’d get access to a lot of people the market doesn’t value very highly. Maybe someday I’ll start that fund, but we now see an even bigger opportunity to tackle that problem via our own product.
Now is the time to approach this problem differently. A lot of the issues in the past have come down to unclear scoping, poorly aligned incentives on pricing, and difficult matching between the two sides—problems that are directly in AI’s crosshairs. And of course, AI is making good engineers much much faster.
In short, we believe the demand for contract work will continue to explode as the cost of development goes down. And Grids is here to stop smart founders from getting taken to the cleaners in the process.
We have a lot more building ahead, but we’re already pretty blown away by what Grids can do. I’m eager to show more of the product over the coming weeks, but in the meantime this is a critical time for us and I’d love any support or connections.
How you can help
I’m actively looking for:
Founders looking to hire someone to get a product built,
Incredible agencies or dev shops we can work with,
VCs or angels that support founders in getting an initial product built,
Feedback, ideas, or introductions to anyone you think may be interested in Grids.
If you’ve made it this far, I truly appreciate your support and I’d love to hear from you.
-Joey
Thanks to Charles Logan for the edits, and big thanks to our team members past and present that made Build possible — Phil, Amie, and Emily.