Emilie Kormienko

Institute off-the-grid time: Reitano started having regular weekly dinners on Sunday night with a close group of five to six friends. “We shut off our phones. We don’t check our e-mail,” he said.

Last month, we closed $6M in funding (at an $80M valuation) from more than 100 customers and investors, using a link and no pitching. Here’s how it happened, step by step.

EZRA KLEIN: You’ve said that the world is, and I’m quoting you here, “The world is an existential hellscape with too many values and games offer a temporary relief from that.”

We leveraged the groundswell of support to close the round. By this point, we’d raised $2.3M without a single pitch meeting. It was a result of natural enthusiasm: taking care of the people who made us who we are, giving them the chance to move first, and letting their enthusiasm drive our leverage with VCs — who, by this point, got interested.

Let go of unnecessary detail and coordination. Is the project converging to a good enough outcome on a good enough timeline? Good enough! Perfection is impossibly expensive, especially when there's a big coordination headwind.

Your goal should be to welcome people into your product in a way that excites them to become lifelong customers. Excitement is achieved through a delightful onboarding experience.

Building relationships was, in parallel with hypothesis generation, the most important part of this phase. I got a strong response to my initial post, which I think was an unintentional effect of spending a lot of time trying to get to know open source developers beforehand. Once I started publishing, those conversations meant that there were a... See more

When onboarding is designed correctly, it increases the likelihood of successful adoption, and can drive major growth and retention for your product.