Paul Katsen

https://blog.salesflare.com/interview-paul-katsen-blockspring

Jeroen: Yeah. Which parts of the story were especially interesting or challenging?

Paul: Well, there’s different challenges at every stage. In the first part, it was just, hey, we fell in love with this data visualization idea. How it started, actually, I was in Chicago, and I remember going to YC Startup School, which was a one-day conference where you saw all these super crazy tech people, like Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Balaji Srinivasan, et cetera. I remember leaving that being like, holy shit. I’m super inspired. I want to go start something.

Paul: I was like, oh, I can do this. These people are just normal people. It just so happened that I was having dinner with a good friend of mine in San Francisco that same night, and we both realized data visualization is hard. Let’s just build an easy app. It might not turn into a business, but something that makes it easier.

Paul: We ended up building something that. Super simply, you upload a CSV, a spreadsheet, and you get an interactive visualization, which is something that we spent hours and hours building ourselves at our older jobs. But we wanted to make it easier. What ended up happening was we got a call from the VP of data at one of the world’s biggest publishers. And he was like, hey, your product sucks but we’ve been trying to build this for the past six months. Can you fly out to New York, work with us for a few weeks, and then we’ll be your first enterprise customer?

Paul: So that was the start of that product. Actually, one of the biggest things that I learned from that was, one, when you build something, write good content so that people understand what you’re doing and what your mission is, because people can find you through that. Two, if you can get a customer to invite you to work from their office and gets super excited about you even though your product sucks right now, you’re probably onto something. So those few weeks were probably some of the most exciting parts of that business. Building for a customer, getting instant feedback, it was really exciting. That was one of the first big learnings for us just through that product, and then that ended up getting us into YC for the summer of 2014.