Summary: <p>Ben is out of town on a retreat with his Tuple co-founders, and Derrick is deep into building Level. So, this episode features Derrick as a recent guest on the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast. Rob Walling interviews Derrick about Level - what inspired the idea and how he went about trying to validate it.</p> <p><strong>Today’s Topics Include:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Level’s landing page and current query of number of members; scarcity play is effective</li> <li>Level is a Slack competitor, but much less interruptive and more asynchronous </li> <li>Derrick discovered Slack does not scale well as a team grows, interrupts people’s flow; Level is Derrick’s take on the solution to those issues</li> <li>Derrick hit the ground running with his manifesto and getting people signed up for Level</li> <li>His efforts on Twitter were effective because it’s a product marketed toward developers</li> <li>Dealing with feedback, ill-informed comments and conversations</li> <li>Derrick wanted to talk to too many, rather than too few people about value of creating a new product to address pain points</li> <li>Differentiation from Slack: Level niched down to developers and open sourced</li> <li>Derrick plans to offer free and on-prem versions of Level</li> <li>Whiteboarding to go over ideas and transform them into something tangible</li> <li>Derrick is working on mock-ups; challenging to lay out UI elements, such as the Inbox</li> <li>Risks are involved; when building something new, the challenge is to validate your most risky hypotheses - the ones that are most likely to fail</li> <li>Level is the third Saas startup that Derrick has worked on; first time he will not earn income or revenue while building Level, so had to make adjustments</li> </ul> <p><strong>Links and resources:</strong></p> <p><a href="http://www.derrickreimer.com/" rel="nofollow">Derrick Reimer Website</a><br> <a href="https://twitter.com/derrickreimer" rel="nofollow">Derrick Reimer on Twitter</a><br> <a href="http://www.benorenstein.com/" rel="nofollow">Ben Orenstein Website</a><br> <a href="https://twitter.com/r00k" rel="nofollow">Ben Orenstein on Twitter</a><br> <a href="https://level.app/" rel="nofollow">Level</a><br> <a href="https://level.app/manifesto" rel="nofollow">Derrick’s Manifesto</a><br> <a href="https://tuple.app/" rel="nofollow">Tuple</a><br> <a href="http://artofproductpodcast.com/episode-42" rel="nofollow">Fostering a Culture of Creativity with Rob Walling</a><br> <a href="http://artofproductpodcast.com/episode-44" rel="nofollow">Exploring the Open Source Business Model</a><br> <a href="https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-399-how-derrick-reimer-is-validating-his-ambitious-third-saas-application" rel="nofollow">Startups for the Rest of Us: How Derrick Reimer is Validating His Ambitious Third Saas</a> <br> <a href="https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-399-how-derrick-reimer-is-validating-his-ambitious-third-saas-application" rel="nofollow">Application</a><br> <a href="https://www.drip.com/" rel="nofollow">Drip</a><br> <a href="https://codetree.com/" rel="nofollow">Codetree</a><br> <a href="https://www.microconf.com/" rel="nofollow">MicroConf</a></p>
