The origins (and fuck-ups) of stagewise - Part 2 ;)
How did I end up building stagewise? And what are the fuck-ups I wish I had known earlier?
February 13, 2025
Posted by
Julian
Heyhey, Julian here 👋🏽
My journey to stagewise:
- Learned web development in 2021 (coming from an electrical engineering background) - Got my first job as a dev in a startup - Decided to go for my own startup in 2023 (looking for opportunities) - Met Glenn, decided to start something together in April 2024
And yeah, I fell in love with software and SaaS. I love building, and fixing problems by being creative and productive.
Our fuck-up story so far:
- Dreamed of a killer product (while ”validating” demand) - Started development without continuing with sales (for way too long) - Tried to sell the product, realized that life is hard ☠️ (We got 1-2 happy customers along the way)
We’re now ~10 months in and realize we need to do something dramatically different.
Doing things differently
We know we can’t keep doing this forever. We have to do things dramatically differently to build a business. So we stopped developing completely to find REAL demand first. And started talking to as many people as possible, making meaningful connections. We are now going to sell before we build. I'm not quite sure where we're going, but it's going to be awesome as long as we're having fun doing it.
