One of the good things about Datasmoothie being part of Seedcamp is the entrepreneurs they drag in to share their experience with us Seedcamp founders. Last week John Collison, who founded Stripe with his brother Patrick, came over and told us his story. In five years they’ve built a company that is valued at over $3.5Bn with tens of thousands of clients, among them Kickstarter, Twitter and even Walmart.
The first part of the chat has been released as a podcast and the second half was off the record. It was even more interesting than the first half, but I obviously won’t quote it.
The part of the talk that resonated most with me was when he told us about trying to estimate when they could go from an invite-only beta to launching to the public:
We spent two years from writing the first line of code to actually being able to launch the product publicly. And if you’d have asked us at any point in those two years how far away we were from launching it was always a month. We were one month from launching for two years.
If you’d have asked me in December how long away the Datasmoothie MVP was, I probably would have said one month (although I did warn interested parties to multiply all estimates with Pi). The same goes for February, March and April. Luckily, we are now actually even less than one month from having an MVP to demo to prospective clients. But it feels like we’ve been at the cusp of this MVP for months.
So, when will you be able to try out Datasmoothie for yourself? Give us a month.
You will be able to see a demo video sooner that that though. It’s coming up.