# Rishabh Call Class: Customer Recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sdLp6wd9zIb0LuDAH91GkI6MfvyJ34Xc/view?usp=sharing # Interview Questions 1. Opening: 1. Introduce problem space and invite honest feedback: I want to help technical founders focus on feature code that actually matters to their users instead of wasting time on getting infrastructure and entry points ready, like learning React Native or Flutter, or managing servers and databases for logging in users and transferring data over the internet. I think the problem is not that great services don’t exist, but that there are too many, so it’s hard to learn, maintain, and update all the different parts all the time. I want to understand what technical founders want control over and what they want abstracted away, so that I can give them a managed stack on which they can focus on actually differentiating features. Today, I want to ask you questions to understand what you are experiencing as a technical founder, share what I currently have been thinking is a solution that would work, then get your feedback on whether it’s a solution that would work or not. I don’t have a working product yet, so please feel free to give me your honest feedback. It’s cheap for me to pivot right now. 2. I want to understand what you are working on. What is the product you’re building? 1. What stage are you in? Do you have a product today that customers can use, or are you working towards one? 2. What is the expected entry point for your users? Will users be using an app? A website? 3. Do you have any estimates or targets for how many users you want to get by some date? 3. What is your technology stack? Frontend? Backend? 1. What alternatives did you consider? What were your decision factors? 2. How much does your infrastructure cost you, for how many users? 3. What are other surfaces through which users interact with you? For feature requests? For customer support? 4. Propose current solution: Full Stack Infrastructure + Managed Entry Points. Custom Feature Code, Server Integrations, Data Access. My goal is to let startups not have to hire and maintain infrastructure architects or app developers, and focus just on feature-level UX and the actual core competencies. You’ll not have to manage an infrastructure or the entry points, and just focus on two: pages and components. You’d be able to maintain code on git, edit with VS Code, and use any other tools you’re familiar with. 1. Would this solution solve your problems? 2. $10 per Monthly Active Users per Month. I set this price so that price per user is cheaper than what Auth0 charges for providing just the user login feature. On top of user login, I would provide entry points, server, database, storage that would work for majority of apps. And if you outgrow, you can integrate your own servers, or take users elsewhere since data is just on a Postgres DB. Would you be interested in building your app on this solution? 5. Closing: Where do you talk to other founders? Where do you get news about developer tools and services? Is there someone you think I should talk to next so that I can learn from them and they can benefit from the work I am doing? Email me if there is anything that comes to your mind after we end this call. # Interview Notes ### Introduction - Making an app where retail investors can buy “baskets” of fund managers. - Currently pre-product. Seeking investments. Planning to launch in October. Targeting to get 1K users by end of 2022. 10K by end of 2023. To get 10K users, need O(10) fund managers. - Currently need to focus on getting fund managers to kickstart the marketplace. ### Technology Stack - Flutter for frontend. Kotlin KTOR for backend server. MongoDB. KTOR is like Netty or JVM. - Will start with mobile first, because Flutter does not support Web well yet. - Flutter, KTOR, MongoDB are hosted on a free-tier AWS EC2 instance. - No plan to support fund managers. Will get documents from them, and enter information manually, since there are only O(10) fund managers until end of 2023. - Planning to containerize Flutter, KTOR, MongoDB, then scale out each individually on container clusters. ### Time Cost - After learning Flutter, spent 1 month developing the Flutter app and the backend. Team was already familiar with Kotlin. ### Other User Support Channels - Not planning anything other than just an email address for customer support and a Google Form for feature requests. - Have not heard of Canny. Have heard of Intercom but have not spent a lot of time thinking about customer support. ### Reaction to Junwon App My team is not familiar with infrastructure things. Containerizing. Best practices for scaling. We are just familiar with creating the frontend. Creating the backend. And connecting them. We are not familiar with scaling them. For us, that is more important since that is what we are not familiar with. For scaling, we would not have hired anyone. We would have done it ourselves after learning it ourselves. No idea for how much the server will cost in 2023. I think [the product] is very interesting. Can you explain what the “Page” part [and Component part] was? If I understand correctly, I just need to create pages, then components on the pages, then I can set up actions on the components, for database calls… For the backend, how does it work? … Makes sense to me. Not sure if it will support scenario of Wish [current day job] which needs to run cron jobs and offline processing of data. $10 for 100 users per month. I think it’s a little cheap. There are a lot of things you are providing. Let’s assume I don’t have that requisite knowledge. If everything is taken care of, $100 for 100 users, $10K for 10K users. $1K per month. It’s not that expensive honestly, because I’m not paying any additional server cost. I think it’s kind of cheap. But I don’t know what my server would have costed if I were to do it on my own with requisite knowledge. If it was going to be $700 if I were to do it on my own, and if your service costs $1K, then I don’t mind spending that $300 extra per month. If I have 10K users and some other company has 1M users, how will this impact the performance of my app and impact the user experience of my users? As a customer of your platform, I may also want to pay extra to get private resources [that I am not sharing with other customers on your platform, to make sure that my users are not impacted by other heavy apps on your platform]. For us, we are planning to add logging, analytics, experimentation. We are planning to use Firebase. If you support this, it would make my experience more complete, since then I wouldn’t have to deal with Amplitude or Firebase. ### Conversion to Customer I’m interested to know more. I still have to understand how it will work exactly. I’m not sure if you will be able to migrate our stuff or not, since we already built it. We are also Flutter. You mentioned React. Are you going to support Flutter? I’ve always liked Flutter more than React Native. We are also using FlutterFlow to drag and drop UI. Get the code without paying anything. We customize it to our needs after that. I totally agree with what other customers said [about low code and no code]. In the end, we have to go in and write full code. Supporting full code well is more important than supporting low code or no code. # Action Items 1. Look into supporting migration from existing apps. 2. Look into supporting Flutter.