2022 has been a Rollercoaster for my Co-founders and me. This year we started building PipeOps; from what started as a casual kitchen conversation in retrospect of certain events in 2020, to Designing the PipeOps User Interface which proved to be a challenge for me personally (easily the biggest design challenge of my professional career); and rightfully so because of the technicality of the product. Fortunately, my Co-founder Alex Idowu absolutely loves to teach DevOps and is quite good at it, I must say. I had countless sessions with him where he broke down DevOps Engineering concepts for me in detail, this helped me immeasurably.
When we started building, we set up an accountability system where we shared the progress of our MVP with our friends at Flux in weekly demo sessions. I remember one session in particular; that week, we planned to demo Project Deployment. Here’s the thing, not only did Project Deployment not work, but features we demo-ed in previous weeks also did not work! It was awful really😂
After about 3 months of iterations, hacking, failed demos, & bug fixes that raised eyebrows as to the competence of the team😂, we went into Private Beta with our MVP.
1 week in Private Beta, we had no paying customer. 3 weeks after we still had no customer🥲. This was by far the most frustrating stage for us; apparently getting your first paying users is not as straightforward as you’d wish it to be (most especially when you’re building in Stealth). However, we did not waiver, we remained optimistic and continued to refine our strategies.
After countless demos, product restructuring, & hundreds of cold DMs & emails to startup founders, we successfully onboarded our first paying customer in the 5th week! (just over 33 days😭 for better context). As nerve-racking as this was, this period was super pivotal in our growth as a business, as a team, & as individuals–We developed a deeper understanding of our market, a deeper co-founder relationship, and an even greater resolve.
The end of 2022 marks a new phase for us as we prep for public launch in January. We’re super excited about what the future holds for PipeOps in making cloud deployments and infrastructure management easy and affordable for Startups and Software Engineers.
A lot more happened in 2022, but that’s talk for another day and maybe a different medium. I’ve only just started, but I know enough to say Startup Life is hard and you’d not get it until you’re in it. That being said; I’ll leave aspiring startup founders with these words from Steve Jobs “About half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance”. Surround yourself with self-motivated & highly productive people, develop a culture that works with them, and wear your resolve on your sleeves. LFG, WAGMI 🚀🚀🚀
Check out what we’re building at https://pipeops.io
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