How a Frustrated Lawyer Quit His Job & Launched a Successful SaaS Startup [065]

Walter Chen is the co-founder and CEO of IDoneThis, an email-based productivity tool that allows people to track their productivity with a daily email reminder. You reply to an evening email reminder with what you did that day. The next day, you get a digest with what everyone on the team got done. The company was founded in 2011 and its investors include folks such as the CEOs of Zappos, Shopify & Wistia. Walter is a software engineer and former big law firm lawyer.

In this episode we talk about:

• Why Walter quit his job as a lawyer to launch a SaaS business
• How iDoneThis was just supposed to be a side project, not business
• Why bringing on a co-founder was one of Walter's biggest mistakes
• The single most important metric that many startups ignore
• How a single email to a customer resulted in a high profile investor

Success Quote

• “Doing the best that you can and by the people who care about you”

Links, Resources & People Mentioned

• iDoneThis – @idonethis
• Zappos
• Hacker News
• AngelPad
• Tony Hsieh – @tonyhsieh
• Rodrigo Guzman – @rodguze
• Will Young – @whatupwilly

Contact Information

• Walter Chen – @smalter
• Omer Khan – @omerkhan

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