I find myself yearning to learn from CTOs who are a few steps ahead of me, only to realize that it’s not that useful when step 1 is so far away from

Zero to One - by Eden - A Founder's Dev Diary

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2025-01-11 22:30:05

I find myself yearning to learn from CTOs who are a few steps ahead of me, only to realize that it’s not that useful when step 1 is so far away from step 0. So this newsletter is my attempt to document my process of getting to 1, no matter how long it takes my co-founder and I.

I quit my job at Slack as a staff software engineer a year ago now. It only gets harder to respond when people ask how your company is doing when you know you still haven’t reached PMF ( product market fit).

At the beginning I had the classic naiveté of most first time founders (uninformed optimism). I figured if I could bring millions of dollars of value to Slack, how hard would it be to do it myself? Turns out very hard lol.

Did not consider decision makers, interviewed SWEs who would use it but they couldn’t install because decision makers said no

Too many security concerns allowing a startup access to their messages / git commits AND still too early to trust OpenAI with their data