How a Frustrated Lawyer Quit His Job & Launched a Successful SaaS Startup
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
Getting to $10K MRR
Weekly coaching, proven frameworks, and a community of early-stage founders.
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Scaling to $1M ARR
Strategic guidance, direct mentorship, and a peer group of 6-figure founders.
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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