(30th January) Daily utility SaaS tool that enhanced the greater supply of talents
++ Platform that saving founders $100k in their first year
Welcome to the 17th edition of the Geeks Of The Valley (GOTV) Newsletter, where we dive into exciting insights on ventures & trends + feature two interesting early-stage companies every weekend. If you enjoy and want to keep abreast with insights and interesting early-stage startups before they go big, make sure to subscribe to this newsletter ✌️.
Did you know? 🤔
Figma - what started out as a side project is now worth $10B.
They're a great example of a daily utility SaaS tool that enhanced the greater supply of talents in the era of the knowledge economy. Figma’s unique positioning as a “tool for design, not just designer” gives them a massive win against its competitors.
It was hard for anyone other than designers to participate in the design process in the early days. Normally it’ll take layers of communication to get everyone on the same page. The management brings the PM and the PM to share it with the designers. Every change made will be directed to the management through the PM, and the cycle keeps rotating.
Or in a “much easier way”, the designer will share the design file with the management. But it’ll still be challenging as it was hard to navigate through the file without the designer’s guidance. And for every update made, a new file needs to be shared again. This creates a negative experience as the feedback cycle was so inefficient that they need to hold back their work while waiting for feedback.
Here is where they thrive in a competitive design space predominated by large enterprises. The simplicity of working with Figma has made it is loved by its users. As an individual, the ability to work on your task or project and publish it publicly can enhance your work’s credibility via the number of likes or duplicates you received. The adoption rate grows as they bring together this tool whenever they move to another job.
Hence, resulted in virality through words of mouth which are then spread among their new co-workers. Power contributors could easily build up thousands of likes, hundreds of clones, and tens of thousands of views. And this could help them in finding a new job too.
Geeks of the week
Startup name: Maple
One-liner: Maple helps you discover, use and apply the discounts from the networks you belong to.
Founder(s):
Bruno Faviero: Founding/early engineer @ Kesho (acq. by S&P Global for >$600M), co-founder of Synapse Technology (acq. by Palantir).
Startup name: Alias
One-liner: Auto-generator tool that has all of someone's podcasts, essays, etc in one place.
Founder(s):
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