Hi founders and fellow VC Friends!
Each week we deliver one awesome person to your inbox. These are the people you need to know—the marketers, sales gurus, engineers, ops wizzes— who give your startup superpowers 🚀. The best part is, everyone is hireable on an interim basis.
Please meet Adrian, your part-time engineer & product discovery expert 🤩
Adrian was referred to us by Carson Jones, one of our awesome portfolio founders. Carson tweeted about his amazing eng friend who wanted to get into freelance. Pure Julia-catnip!! It turns out that Adrian is an engineering and product swiss-army knife.
Most recently Adrian founded 🌶️ Chilipepper, a tool to create beautiful Notion forms, and Parretir, a natural language processing tool to analyze SEC filings. He's also trusted by New Classrooms, an ed-tech startup with funding from Gates, Bezos, and Chan-Zuckerberg.
He’s one of those unicorn engineers who can code, has product sense, and has led teams. He’s grown 🌶️ Chilipepper to over 6K users in 1 year with 100% organic growth and regularly contributes to the Notion Ambassadors Community. At New Classrooms, he led product across a team of 25 people, supporting daily programming for 10K students. Fun fact: Adrian is just as creative with a crochet hook and yarn as he is with code 🧶.
You can hire him part-time to build software — JS/Python backend and React frontend — or help define and manage products, including the initial discovery of customer problems.
Need a part-time engineer to help your team? Reply to this email and I’ll connect you!
He was gracious enough to share some pro-tips 🙏
*I intentionally asked him for non-technical tips to make sure we’re all on the same page 😉
Create templates and processes for reoccuring workflows
As an engineer, I encourage my teams to create small processes to reduce things that distract us from our real focus: developing an amazing product.
For example, think about all the time you spend answering the same question from different customers and internal teams. After you get the same question more than 3x, it’s probably a pattern.
Rather than repeat yourself, create an email response template to address the issue (this is a handy underrated feature in Gmail!). If it’s a more technical question, consider a screen or video recording to break down the process step-by-step.
Recognize patterns and build efficient workflows. Spend less time on the small stuff and more time on the big picture.
Document key insights to make better decisions
Successful organizations are always evolving and trying to understand their customers' needs.
As your product evolves, it's important to understand how people interact and feel about their experience.
At 🌶️ Chilipepper, I speak with several users each week to understand their pain points and gather feedback. At first, we tried to document every point. Then we realized most of it wasn't helpful. Now we capture 1-2 key insights from each user conversation, store them in a central document, and prioritize the consistent feedback.
Collect user insights and keep a backlog to make strategic, data-driven decisions. Beyond just user interviews, I’m a huge fan of documentation. Content scales as a communication channel.
Successful products solve real problems
Often, when exploring a new product idea, people gauge interest by talking to consumers. It’s a best practice to evaluate demand for your product, before you build it.
However, generic statement-like questions such as "Wouldn't it be great if you could [insert product feature]?" or "Would you pay for [insert product]?" will not lead to a product that people actually want to pay for.
I made that exact mistake a few years ago.
I was exploring an idea around summarizing news articles. I tested out the idea with friends. I asked questions like “Isn’t it so hard to keep up with the news these days?” and “Wouldn’t it be easier if you just had a quick set of bullets to read each day?”
These are all leading questions. Each leading question was met with agreement. I believed I had a real product in my hands. I whipped up a prototype and sent it out to my network.
What happened?
Crickets 🦗🦗🦗. Maybe one person tried it. Once.
Instead of viewing this as a failure, I took it as an opportunity to understand where I went wrong.
With a little help from Rob Fitzpatrick's book, The Mom Test, I realized I didn’t validate real demand for my product because I didn’t ask the right questions.
Instead of asking leading questions like, “Isn’t it annoying when x happens?”, I should’ve asked, “What do you do when [insert problem]?” or “Why do you spend time doing x?”
When validating demand for a product, have an “explorer” mindset. Ask questions that allow you to identify a problem, gap, or opportunity to make something faster, better, or cheaper.
Want an intro to Adrian? Reply to this email and I’ll connect you!
As always, let me know if you have any questions and if you want an intro to any of the folks in this email (including the PS section 🎉).
Stay awesome,
Founder of Awesome People Ventures (join the syndicate here)
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Awesome People Continued 🚀
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Alex is a founding member of Tack Advisors, a recruiting and career development firm that specializes in administrative roles. She leads biz dev and client strategy. Throughout her career, Alex has built and launched several communities including a community of 30K+ administrative professionals at Tack.
Michal is your comms, brand, & fundraising pro. He helps startups with fundraising narrative, messaging, and media relations. He can help you raise early-stage venture capital (pre-seed through Series B), define your product and brand voice, and show you how to get TechCrunch coverage.
Vicky is your content strategist. Most recently she helped start and launch Currant, a very cool food publication -- it’s a great blend of artsy, techy, and worldly. Over the course of her career, she’s led creative marketing campaigns for B2B and DTC companies
Want intros to anyone here? Lmk and I’ll connect you!
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