Dewey interview

[tomharari]

Dewey

1. What's your startups name, what does it do, how long have you been working on it and (optional) your MRR?

Dewey, search sort and organize your X bookmarks. v1 launched in 2021 as a free project and v2 launched in January 2023 as a paid SaaS. $4,100 MRR.

2. What's your name and what were you doing before?

Tom Harari. I was VP Corporate Development & Strategy at REGENT, a deep-tech aerospace startup and prior to that I was co-founder of a YC backed startup called Cleanly.

3. How did you come up with your startup and it's name?

I was saving lots of tweets as bookmarks and realizing that I had no good way to go back and find what I'd saved, The bookmarks feature was underdeveloped and doing a quick search on Twitter showed lots of people had the same struggle.

4. Are you a programmer, if so, how did you learn and how long did it take?

I am not. I partnered with my friend Alex who was also my VP Engineering at my first startup.

5. How long did it take you to build a mvp, did you do any validation?

We built the MVP in about a week and started inviting people through DMs to try it out.

6. What was your launch like, what did you do, was it a success?

We launched the free version on ProductHunt and through OnDeck'a accelerator weekend. When we launched the paid version, we had built an email list of 17,000 free users to launch to.

7. How long did it take to get your first customer?

First paying customers came the moment we launched the paid version but that was technically a year and a half after launching the free version.

8. What's your top marketing methods and how can others start doing them?

Working on making the product simple and solve a real need has led to a lot of word of mouth. Aside from that we work on SEO and some build in public type content.

9. Whats the top 5 tools you use to run your startup?

Stripe, AWS, Sendgrid, Typefully, and Google Analytics.

10. What would you do differently if starting over?

Start charging sooner.