For those who missed it: The Story of Synapp.io, Part 1

Starting up our startup

When Mike and I hitched our wagons together to form Synapp.io, Mike suggested an equity split of 75/25 in Mike’s favor. Not having any experience in such things, I sought advice from the Google as to how much equity a technical co-founder should receive. Obviously this is a contentious topic, and unfortunately there are no clear answers. What I found when I searched, however, was a nifty flowchart on Nathan Hurst’s blog. Following the chart, depending on exactly how I answered questions, it looked like 20-30% was about right, so I accepted the offer, and we got to work.

I had read Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup, and I figured that Mike had already done the necessary customer discovery, so we set out to make a minimum viable product (MVP) based around a few key ideas:

1. Customers would “link” their email service provider (i.e. ESP — e.g. Mailchimp, Constant Contact, etc.) accounts with us
2. We would look at what they’re doing and tell them how to improve (“actionable insights”) using all the stuff their accounts tell us about them (“big data”)
3. ???
4. Profit!

Let’s build stuff!

So we set out to build a multi-ESP optimization platform. (If we’d actually been insightful at that stage, it would have been clear to us that we just gave up the “M” in “MVP” — and probably the “P” as well, since we weren’t 100% sure how to charge.) At the time, we had a couple of other folks helping us part-time: my fraternity brother who initially did startup weekend, and another friend of his who was going to do the front-end of the platform. We had no money, so we offered to figure out an equity compensation at some time in the future. (It turns out, when you don’t pay people, they have to spend most of their time doing things for people who do pay them, so the other 2 eventually had to drift away.)

Now Mike had a business before Synapp.io that was tangentially related called DataValidation. What they did is remove undeliverable email addresses from databases, reducing bounce rates and getting more email in the inbox. Seemed pretty simple, and as a developer, I figured I’d attack the problem as our first “optimization.” I will say that, while it’s not rocket science, email list cleaning is not trivial, either, especially at scale.

Baby steps in the Atlanta startup scene

So in early 2013, we were in build-build-build mode, meeting at coffee shops, Regus business lounges, and wherever else we could meet. Eventually Mike mentioned that there was this thing called Startup Gauntlet at the Atlanta Technology and Development Center (ATDC, a local startup accelerator/incubator) that we should check out. Basically we got up in front of people and said what we were doing, and were told we didn’t know what we were doing (fair point, and it was the same for everyone). We did a few customer interviews as a result of the Gauntlet, but eventually the 7am start time was too much for Mike and me (we both live a bit north of the city), so we dropped out, thinking that we’d discovered something (but not knowing exactly what we’d discovered).

So Mike’s first idea of a “startup thing” (the Gauntlet) we could do didn’t quite lead to riches and glory. He had one more idea that he’d been sitting on since startup weekend that he’d bring up to me next that made all the difference….