The Q3 Update

Startups, Communities and Funding.

This quarter was full of learning, fun, and, of course, building.

Here’s what happened during the past 3 months, and what I’ve learnt during my journey.

Progress

Having finally completed my GCSE exams, it was time to enjoy the 2 month break that followed. I chose to focus on my ventures - Dimension & Buildergroop.

Dimension

If you haven’t heard about Dimension, we’re building one of the world’s first developer experience platforms. We enable engineering teams and developers to plan, build, and deploy their projects on one platform using Dimension.

We’re a small team with ambitious goals, creating a magical software development experience. We’re hiring btw.

So many things happened during these past 3 months that it requires a dedicated article (coming soon), but here’s the summary:

Incorporation - We’re officially Realm Software Inc - the company behind Dimension. Realm is my second officially incorporated venture (after Buildergroop Corporation), and I’m incredibly excited for the future of what we’re building.

Team - Currently we are a small team of 3 (myself included). I enjoy collaborating with my incredible teammates Arnav and Daksh as we build the platform together!

The Split - As a developer without experience in the web development space (I do Systems Engineering), I’d previously been building Dimension with Varun.

Varun is truly one of the most talented developers I’ve worked with - his problem solving skills and mindset is something I’ve always found inspirational. As we progressed through our journey building the platform however, due to school taking away weeks of his time to code every month, we weren’t able to hit deadlines and ship features at the speed we wanted.

Upon further discussion with Varun, we made the tough decision to split up.

We’re currently at the stage where we’re making steady progress on the platform by the day, and I’m grateful for the incredible team I get to work with.

Buildergroop

Building and engaging with the community at Buildergroop has been a great learning experience. We recently hosted our largest hackathon ever, with over 600 participants and a $7,500 prize-pool.

Scaling our perks program by 17x

While browsing through Dimension’s inbox, I noticed an email from Shaun, CEO at Loot.

The first thing that popped up in mind was, how do we leverage the value Loot is able to offer and add it to our perks programme? So, I replied, and I got connected to Dexter, VP of Growth at Loot, previously Director of Partnerships at Honey (which got acquired for $4 billion by PayPal).

After a quick chat with Dexter, we decided to create a joint partnership - one that would empower the incredible builders in our community. The partnership increased the value of our perks program from approximately $29,000 to around $500,000 today - thanks to Loot.

If you’re a young builder, and would like to get access to this exclusive list of perks, join Buildergroop.

Fun fact - if every Buildergroop member were to avail every perk we offer, that’d be around $1.7 billion saved.

Numbers 📊

Buildergroop 🔨

• Buildergroop (3475 members) (+51% growth since Q2)

• 818,000+ messages

• Average message count: 2,834 / day

• $17k+ raised (+53% since Q2)

• Perks Program Value: 500,000$ (+1600% since Q2)

What I’ve Learnt

Member count is the wrong metric for community activity

Although member count is widely used to showcase growth in communities, as we scaled Buildergroop, we realised member count isn’t the best metric to watch for growth. Let’s take a look at how member count can be a misleading metric with respect to the actual activity within communities.

Buildspace:

Member count: 134,975 members

Average Message Count: ~3300 messages / day (appx. 300 per cohort)

The Rust Programming Language (Community)

Member count: 46,440 members

Average Message Count: ~1900 messages / day

Buildergroop:

Member count: 3,475 members

Average Message Count: 2,834 messages / day

The above statistics show that there isn’t necessarily a correlation between server size and server activity - the largest server on the list above (Buildspace) has just 16% more messages per day (~3300 messages) as compared to Buildergroop - despite being approximately 39x larger. I thought this was interesting, so I wanted to share it with the world :)

Quick Note: The above section wasn’t aimed at taking a jab against any of the communities mentioned. I am a part of these communities, and enjoy engaging with them.

Deciding on scope

I previously mentioned that I worked with Dexter to create Buildergroop’s partnership with Loot. Having been a part of multiple startups previously, Dexter shared his thoughts on product development and the scope of a MVP.

We always built the bare minimum first. We bolted on new features after.

Dexter explained that it’s important to reduce scope, and that less important features can always be “bolted on” to the product.

While I agree with Dexter that it’s important for startups to minimise the scope of their MVP, I believe that having a brutally minimalistic MVP without a few additional features might disadvantage startups looking to test the waters. What might be a “secondary” feature in your eyes could end up delivering the greatest value to your users.

Deciding the scope of your MVP as a startup is a process that deserves time and extensive thought. I was able to apply Dexter’s advice to Dimension for our MVP, and I hope you find value from this as well :)

Wrapping things up

As for what I’m looking forward to during the next quarter, I hope to work with the team to put together a mentorship programme at Buildergroop, and ship an MVP for Dimension.

That’s it for this quarter, I hope you enjoyed this read. Feel free to connect with me on Twitter. I’ll see you in the next quarter!