I'm Alex MacCaw, founder of Clearbit and Reflect, ask me anything. 🔥
Alex MacCaw
116 replies
Hey, I'm Alex and I like writing English and TypeScript. I have founded a few companies (most recently Clearbit and Reflect), was an early engineer at Stripe, and I've also written a few O'Reilly books.
I'll be answering questions on November 9th 🔥
Replies
Vinh@kureikain
What exactly method you yourself(not your marketing/PR team) use to marketing your own products?
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@kureikain I pretty much just use my Twitter account and a newsletter. I have ~30k followers on Twitter, and 20k emails in Reflect's database (using customer.io).
Our strategy is very basic - we just launch and launch and launch, blasting those channels each time.
The truth is, I'm not that good at marketing yet. This is one of my main areas of improvement for next year.
Reflect's product is too cheap to make it profitable to gain customers by advertising, so we need to come up with other ideas.
@kureikain @maccaw How do you feel about Twitter these days? Do you think it still remains the top social network among founders/tech people? Have you ever considered switching from Twitter to LinkedIn or may be even Threads?
Huge fan of yours since I saw you on a podcast. You're an inspiration and I've been following and reading your stuff for years.
My ama, is a bit more personal. With your incredible success how do you remain so humble? Even when stepping down from Clearbit you take the extra step of giving the new ceo credit of being far more qualified than you. I've seen this same behavior so many times from you and always wanted to ask you.
You're an inspiration to tons of silent readers and followers.
@moe3615 You are very kind! And to anyone reading the above comment, I swear I didn't write it with my alt 😂
To your question: I think, when you've been wrong as much as me, it gives you a degree of humility. We're all pretending we have all the answers, but in reality nobody really knows what's going on.
Huge fan of all your work, following you from when you were in stripe.
my question is
I live in a 3rd world country, working full-time as a Frontend dev in lugg(YC S15).
i want to build a sustainable lifestyle software company, but i have no clue how I can move forward.
there is a popular theme to come up with the idea, “solve your own problem” but i don’t feel confident in them that i can build a good business.
then if i can build a business, how can i approach sales
I’m really confused how I can more forward, can you suggest some advice please about
- building a good product
- sales that product
@tanvirraj I've written a bit about this [1] and [2]
I highly recommend starting a B2B business - they are much easier to run as lifestyle businesses than B2C companies.
I would start with looking around with the problems at Lugg. What are the kind of products they buy? What problems do they have internally that you could build a lifestyle biz to solve. Who knows, they might be an early customer. Like Stripe was for Clearbit.
[1] - https://blog.alexmaccaw.com/the-...
[2] - https://blog.alexmaccaw.com/life...
What are some learnings from clearbit that you can share with other product crafting folks? (Anything ranging from Product, Strategy, Eng, Operations, Design,Marketing, etc.)
@bruno_belcastro_pinto That is a question with lots of answers. I'd going to cheat and point you to the resources I've written - they contain a lot of my learnings:
- https://themanagershandbook.com/
- https://www.amazon.com/Great-CEO...
- https://open.spotify.com/show/71...
No question but just wanted to say props on Clearbit. 👏 Brilliant product.
After an exodus from the venture-backed startup, what motivates you to keep pushing (with Reflect or not)? What are you driven by?
@alexander_nevedovsky I believe all humans have to feel creativity in their lives to be happy. Different people feel this feeling in different ways. Some people by writing books, some by acting in musicals, some by managing large teams. I feel it by writing code.
At Reflect I write code every-day and I feel happy.
Big fan of your writing on software (Spine!) and thoughts on entrepreneurship.
What do you think of executing multiple ("smaller") bets (Pieter Levels, Daniel Vassallo) vs focus on one bigger bet?
@__tosh I have mixed feelings on this. There is a similar question around how do you know when to pivot or not. It is hard to know to be honest.
I know examples of people who pivoted five times and on the fifth time built a massive business.
I also know people who stuck with the same idea idea for years, and only in the fifth year of business did it take off.
I guess it depends on the problem you're trying to solve. With Reflect, for instance, it is an extremely hard problem - it requires many years of work to even begin solving.
1. What is the average conversion rate on the main page of the Reflect website?
2. Do you sell your Motivation browser extension?
what inspired you to build clear it and reflect?
@edun_kerry I find nothing in the world more fun than startups.
When I left Clearbit I only knew I had to get back to coding. I was searching around for ideas. I knew I loved writing and designing UIs. A note's app was the clear intersection of those things.
Hey Alex! Love what you're building with Reflect.
What have you found are some of the main differences in building a VC-backed vs. bootstrapped company, especially when it comes to building product?
@simonrohrbach They are very different types of hard. VC backed is hard because you're moving fast with a lot of expectations and often doing things you don't enjoy (like managing).
Bootstrapped is hard because you're moving slow with very limited resources.
In my experience it is easier to build a world-class product when you're bootstrapping though because the product is created from one mind (yours). You can always tell when a product has been designed by a committee.
Loving Reflect, but my ama is, do you believe that the VC model will continue to be the model for funding tech businesses given its propensity to drive profits at the expense of ethics and quality of life?
@julian_saunders2 I believe the future of most investing is crowd-funding. We just crowd-funded a few weeks ago [1] and raised over a million quickly without having to take Zoom meetings.
If you do not have a good shot at an IPO, or the stomach for it, do NOT raise traditional venture capital. It will only end in tears.
[1] https://wefunder.com/reflect
You've implied (e.g. https://twitter.com/maccaw/statu...) that the specific license terms a developer might make their code available under (e.g. non-MIT licenses) should not restrict the use of that code (e.g. in ML/AI applications like Co-Pilot). Is that accurate?
If so, do you believe that non-MIT open-source licenses are worthless? Should an open-source developer have _any_ power to control use of the code they create?
And following the second tweet in that thread (https://twitter.com/maccaw/statu...), would you say that it's therefore a moral imperative that _all_ software be open source (including all software in all private companies), since _any_ of it may contribute to ML/AI projects that accelerate The Singularity?
@lazyatom Yes, I believe training open source code with ML is fair use, and I expect when it's tested (with the GitHub CoPilot case) that the courts will agree with that.
Fair-use has long been enshrined under copyright law. I believe an AI consuming source code is equivalent to a human reading it. It comes back to the same arguments as in the Google vs Oracle case [1]
I am a singularity maximalist in that I think we have a morale imperative to bring it about as quickly as possible. I would be quite happy if Reflect's source code (private as it is) is used to train CoPilot.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go....
With the benefit of hindsight, how does it feel to have stepped away from Clearbit after 7 years? Would you make the same decision again?
Also, what have you learned about "only" being on the board compared to being an operator and a board member?
@mxstbr I would absolutely make the decision again. Indeed, I would leave even earlier, maybe at around 30 employees, and set the expectation with the team upfront.
I have learnt what I love which is a day of coding without meetings. So I should just stick with that.
r.e. the board - I can tell you the hardest thing about not being an operator in the company is that you feel quite impotent. You can provide advice (as best you can), and feedback, but ultimately it is the CEOs job to make the decisions.
Clearbit is very interesting. Can you dive into specifics about how the IP-DeAnonymization works? I understand how big orgs have their own IP ranges but you guys claim to be able to detect even smaller companies? Would love to hear about the process.
Huge fan of your apps! Wanted to know if you are interested in selling any of them?
Alex! I've been following Reflect since before your public launch and appreciate the non-VC, community-driven approach to your recent round of funding.
Curious to learn more about why you took that approach and any learnings for those considering doing something similar.
@rrhoover Hey Ryan 👋.
The reason I decided to crowd-fund over taking traditional venture capital is to do with incentives.
Reflect's goal is not to be bought or IPO. But venture's incentives are all aligned with these outcomes.
A community round, where you set the slow-growth expectation upfront, has much better aligned incentives. We even went a step further and aim to pay our investors a dividend. Now we have perfectly aligned incentives and expectations with our investors.
What have you found to be your most successful growth channel?
when did you know you had product market fit, and how long did it take you to get there?
@jared_lambert1 With both businesses I immediately felt product market fit. It's hard to define but you know it when you know it.
When you reflect on Clearbit... what are the three things/events that helped you go from 0 to 1M ARR, and what are the three things/events that moved the needle from 1M to 10M ARR?
Thx a lot! Rooting for Reflect!
@vedranrasic Going from 0 to 1 M ARR was a combination of us: a) increasing our pricing and b) creating a Salesforce integration and c) hustling.
Going from 1 to 10 was quite straightforward after we hired a sales team.