All posts by John Paul Narowski

I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.

Announcing Deals v2 – Visual Pipeline and more

In a CRM, deals are typically our lifeblood. After many customer discussions, surveys and white-boarding sessions we’ve made deals in karmaCRM a first class citizen, are proud to announce deals v2!

We’re best friends now.

What’s it all about?

Visual Deal Pipeline

The new deals system comes with a number of enhancements. First and most importantly is a visual deal pipeline. I don’t know about you but I’m a visual person. I like to see my pipeline in simple visual display, which is why we revamped the homepage of deals to contain this format. If you love the list view don’t worry, you can still get to that as well.

You can drag deals to different stages and if they are won or lost, simply drag them to the won or lost buttons and taaaa-da, you’ve closed a deal! By the way, karmaCRM keeps track of won and lost dates so you can start to get an idea of your deal lifecycle and timing.

Deal progress


Within a deal you can now see the progress visually here as well. To switch stages, simply press the stage that you want to switch to. Once the deal is won or lost, simply press won or lost in the top right.

Deal stats


Right in the deals section you can switch to stats mode to see how you and your team are doing this week. This will give you the at-a-glance info you need to grow your company.

How do I get it?

If you’re on the per user plans, you can get access to this feature right now. Simply go to the deals page and press the black link where it says “new layout available”. This will switch your entire account to the new deals page. You can also switch back at any time if you prefer the old way of doing things.

Many many many thanks

Thank you to everyone who has worked with us to design these new features. We realize how important it is to have clarity in tracking your pipeline and are here to support you. Keep the feedback flowing as we treck along on the journey of CRM and business clarity!

I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.

Announcing Business Card Scanning

Do you ever end up with a stack of business cards from strong leads, but they just gather dust sitting on your desk? Us Too! The last time we spent 2 hours entering business cards into karma we decided it was going to be the last time.

We’re proud to announce our new business card scanning feature. This allows you to take a picture of a business card with our karmaCRM mobile app, then a new contact is created in your CRM from the information on the card. These cards are scanned by humans so you don’t have to worry about errors.

Once the card is entered, you can apply automations to the contact and even send them a thank you email. Fight back against the business card stack, and save time!

Business Card to CRM Card Scanner

How to use it?

This is a beta feature so please reach out to us at support@karmacrm.com and we’ll get it added to your account.

How much does it cost?

This feature will be $5 per month to add it to your account for 25 scans. Each scan after 25 will be $0.25 a scan.

How do you like it?

Since this is a beta feature, we’re looking for feedback on how you like this feature, and how we can make it better.

I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.

Announcing Browser Notifications

Stop competing with your team’s busy email inbox and keep everyone in the loop with our new Browser Notifications feature. This has come from a few conversations with our users who often lose the battle for people’s attention throughout the day.

Enter the browser notification hero!

If you’re using either Chrome, Firefox or Safari, you should have seen a recent request to allow karmaCRM to send you browser notifications. As long as you accepted, you’re in.

What is a browser notification?
As long as you have karmaCRM open somewhere, a browser notification will show up in the top right hand side of your monitor (see above screenshot). This helps you keep track of things in karmaCRM even if you don’t have that tab open at the time.

What notifications are supported?
We support notifications for all of the following activities:

  • When a user is assigned
  • When a task or event is due
  • When a user is added to a note

We’re also working on mobile push notifications as well. Those are coming soon so stay tuned.

What do you think? How else can we help keep your team communicating and working together, we’d love to know.

PS: Notifications on events and tasks will only start working after today. These also only apply to non all-day events and tasks with a specific due at time.

Enjoy!

I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.

Announcing Print Templates

If you print contracts or PDFs based on information from your info in karmaCRM, then this feature is for you. Now you can easily create PDFs from the data you already have in your contacts, companies, and deals.

This feature is for the Per User Plans only.

To create a template, go to your settings and then print templates

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To use the templates go to the actions menu of your record (in this case we’re in the contact record) and select “Print Template”.

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You now have the option to make any final edits to the template before it’s turned into a PDF.

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And VOILA, your template was generated and downloaded. Process shortened and time saved, for the win! Thanks to our customers for helping us develop this handy and time saving feature. We now generate all of our karmaCRM service contracts and NDAs using this tool.

Cheers folks.

I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.

Announcing Engagement Tracking

Today marks a major milestone in our history. Our primary goal here at karmaCRM is to help you nurture personal relationships at scale, and we’ve just released a big step in that direction – engagement tracking!

This was the #2 requested feature in our most recent relationship survey. Thank you for helping us define what this feature should look like!

If you’re on the per user plan, this feature is available to you now.

What is engagement tracking?

engagement tracking header

Engagement tracking will help you answer questions like: “When did I last talk to them,” “Who haven’t I talked with at all,” and more. Now karmaCRM automatically tracks both the last engagement with a contact and the number of times you’ve engaged.

What is tracked?

Anytime you log a phone call, send an email, or complete an event with your contact, the engagement count and date will be automatically updated.

Sorting and filtering by engagement

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The new engagement columns can be added to your list, sorted, and filtered. This makes it easy to see who you haven’t connected with and who you’ve spoken with most recently.

Where is this going?

This is just the first feature of a series designed to help you know who to contact and when. As we develop more features around engagement, we’ll be able to suggest contacts you should reach out to. That way you can spend your time growing relationships instead of fishing in your CRM for the next bite.

I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.

Announcing Email Reply Tracking

Hello folks! Today, we’re proud to announce another exciting feature, driven by your survey feedback. Tonight we’ll be releasing email reply tracking for all per user pro plans. This was the #1 requested feature from our most recent email automation survey.

So what does this feature do?

Reply tracking

Now every email you send comes with reply tracking. If your contact replies to an email, you’ll see in history the date they replied. Soon, this will be factored into our reporting, so you can see how effective you are at getting replies and who your most engaged contacts are.

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Reply reminders

Ever send an email and wonder days later, did they ever respond? Those days are over. Now with the reply reminder feature, you can set a reply reminder.

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If your contact doesn’t reply within the reminder window (EG: 5 days), then karma will create a task for you that tells you your email wasn’t responded to.

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More goodies coming soon!

We have other goodies coming this quarter too, like email automation, bulk task creation and more. Keep up the stellar feedback. We’re listening … closely.

I’m personally honored to have such an engaged user base. It’s clear you really care about making karmaCRM the best it can be. Here at karmaCRM we’re deeply committed to being customer driven.

No survey response or suggestion will go unnoticed!

I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.

Work Softer, Not Harder

I’ve always had a problem with the phrase “work smarter, not harder” and I didn’t know why. Sure, I agree with the premise – who doesn’t want to work smarter?

I’ve done my best to work smarter and to encourage the idea within my companies. The problem is, I never fully connected with this concept. It’s possible that I resisted it because it’s a cliche, but I think it’s much deeper than that.

The phrase “work smarter” doesn’t provide enough clarity on the underlying philosophy. It seems a bit empty.

It needs a little more intuition, more voice, more gut.

What if we changed the phrase from “work smarter”  to “work softer”?

How does that land for you? What images come to mind?

Take a minute to ponder. Give yourself a little space. I promise I’m not going anywhere, and that never-ending to-do list isn’t either.

OK, now that you’ve formulated an idea of what this means to you, let’s dive in.

What “work softer” means

This inspiration came from a poem I read recently: “Fire” by Judy Brown.

Here’s my favorite passage:

What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.
Too much of a good thing,
too many logs
packed in too tight
can douse the flames
almost as surely
as a pail of water would.

While building my businesses over the years, I’ve packed as much wood into the fire as possible. With all the brute force and willpower I could muster (and a shit-ton of coffee), I’ve barely managed to singe the edges. There have been a few brief flickers of flame here and there, but that only prompts me to shove more wood onto the suffocating pile of sticks.

There has to be another way.

We only need to lay a log
lightly from time to time.
A fire grows
simply because the space is there

Wait, you’re telling me less is more? That fire grows on it’s own without my dominant superpowers?

Working softer means giving your fire room to breathe.

It means …

Giving yourself time to sit with ideas instead of acting immediately
Giving yourself permission encourage creativity
Giving yourself space to listen internally to the softer voices

I realized that most of my decisions, my leadership style, and my personal life were governed by a willpower-heavy “stick-packing” approach. I’ve come to realize (in my cold, fireless room) that willpower is only a small piece of the puzzle.

I’ve known deep down (enough to journal about this a billion different ways over the years) that the missing piece was giving myself permission to work softer. To explore creativity, to learn new things, and to approach problems in my business with the space it needed.

It doesn’t just apply to work

Part of working softer means exploring your own creativity and creating your own space. I believe that “work hard, play hard” makes Jack a dull boy.

What do you mean by creating space?

I mean not jamming your day from start to finish with action items. I mean taking breaks throughout the day to walk, to think, to breathe. I mean mono-tasking and closing your applications, so you can be present with the task at hand. Enjoy the taste of your food at lunch, look people in the eyes.

When I give myself permission to create space, I thrive. In the past, reading poetry and growing a business have seemed innately at odds. I’ll do that stuff when I’m successful, when things settle down … THEN I’ll learn piano and figure out how to be happy.

Who’s said that before … Anyone? Anyone? I’m guessing we all have.

Working softer also means doing those things now, integrating them into your life and into your work. Not work-life balance, but work-life harmony. I’m finding that the more I read, the more I write, think, and explore, the more I see the invisible lines that connect the dots in my business.

It becomes more effortless, and the fire grows on it’s own when you give it space.

Woah.

You mean I don’t have to work 20 hrs a day, forcing my business forward with the strength of a thousand Thors?

Nope.

Give it a try

Give this post a chance to sink in. It’s not a get-rich-quick tactic you can apply and 20x your growth overnight. It’s a philosophy that requires a lot of smaller decisions to bring to life.

I am at the beginning of embracing this concept, but I’m ecstatic for the journey.

Go for a run, actively listen to a song, read some poetry, dance. Do something to let yourself fly today, and bring that energy back into your job.

Work softer. Give yourself permission to cultivate creativity and space in your life and see what happens to your business, to your leadership, and – most importantly – to your happiness.  

I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.

How Giving Helps You Sell More

Take a minute to imagine a “salesperson.” If you’re anything like me, you imagined a used car salesman in a tweed suit jacket or a smooth-talking, cologne-soaked peddler of mysterious tonics. These images typically come along with the perception of pushy, deceitful individuals, working in their own self-interest to close more deals. In short, takers.

Now imagine what would happen if we flipped the script. If salespeople were known as givers instead of takers. Contrary to what some people might think, the more you give the more you get.

First, let’s define what we mean to give in sales.

What does giving mean in sales?

Giving means focusing on the customer, not on yourself. Instead of thinking about how to best sell your prospects, think about how you can add value and improve their life. This requires getting to know your prospects beyond the scope of your product or service. Find out what else they’re struggling with and how you might be able to help.

Sound difficult? You’d be surprised what you can find out about people just by asking. Once you widen the scope of the conversation from “How can I sell?” to “How can I help?” it opens the door to so many more questions.

  • Who are you looking to meet right now?
  • How are you getting adjusted to your new town?
  • What’s the biggest challenge in your life?

Why give in sales?

Giving builds trust

The immediate benefit of thinking about your prospect’s needs first is that it builds trust. Trust is the backbone of any good relationship, and it comes free when you give freely.

The prospect in any sales relationship typically comes with a healthy dose of skepticism. Is this product right for me? Is this salesperson looking out for my best interests? Etc.

When you focus on giving, you prove that your motivation goes beyond your prospect’s checkbook. It shows them that you can be trusted. I’ve even gone so far as to suggest a competitor’s product or service if it’s the best fit. Then, if you recommend your product, they know it’s because you genuinely want to help them. This goes a LOOOOONG way in closing a sale.

I’m sure all you salespeople out there have experienced this. You KNOW your product will save your prospects time | money | energy, etc., and that it’s a fantastic fit. But they still question it. You can’t explain enough how confident you are that your product will help them. But they’re still skeptical.

Your prospects doubt your motivation because you haven’t earned their trust.

Giving builds reciprocity

The more you help people, the more they want to help you. It’s just human nature.

I have people in my network who’ve introduced me to hundreds of people, without ever asking for my business. As a result, I’m passionate about helping them and I refer business to them every chance I get (and feel great about it). I do this because 1) they’ve helped me so much and 2) because I know they won’t hard sell anyone I introduce.

Giving injects you into the conversation

If you’re making an introduction between people in your network, you bet they’re going to chat about how they know you. If you’ve made a positive impact, you bet they’ll chat about that too. This will make them see you more positively, and it will build goodwill. Goodwill helps people like and trust you more, which in turn helps you close more deals.

Oh and giving feels good!

Giving has many health and emotional benefits. Giving makes you happier. It’s good for your health and it actually benefits your brain. I could tell you more, but I imagine that you all know this intuitively.

Nuff said.

How do you give in sales?

Giving in sales isn’t so different from helping a friend who needs your advice. You want to put the other person first and spend some time in their shoes. Ask: What are they struggling with? What do they need? How can I brighten up their day?

Giving builds your sales empathy, which — surprise, surprise — is also a massive tactic for closing more sales.

Here are a few specific ideas for how you can give in a sales relationship.

  • Make useful introductions – Build a robust network and cross-introduce as you see needs arise. Maybe Jane needs a roofing contractor and you have just the one!
  • Share helpful articles – Look to the needs or interests of the network around you.
  • Send actual gifts – Sometimes a small gift can make a big difference in someone’s life.

Giving is the best tool you could possibly add to your sales stack. It’s easy, it’s free, and you can start using it right now — no credit card required. 🙂

I’d love to hear how you give, and what your experiences have been as a result of giving!

I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.

Announcing Better Site-Wide Search – Our Most-Requested Feature!

The #1 request in our most recent NPS survey was to fix the site-wide search feature, i.e. “Search Everything Here…” Since search is the cornerstone of karmaCRM, we don’t blame you for wanting it to be perfect!

Over the last month we spoke with many of our customers to make sure we get it right. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback! karmaCRM is customer driven. We’re humbled and honored to have users investing in making the platform better for everyone.

Today, we’re pleased to announce several enhancements and fixes that should dramatically improve your experience with site-wide search.

First, what is site-wide search?

It’s the bar in the top left of your app that allows you to do a quick search of your database for names, emails, phone numbers, etc.

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Here’s what’s changed.

Order doesn’t matter anymore

Let’s say you have a contact named John Peter Doe. You can now find this contact with any of the following:

  • “John D”
  • “John Doe”
  • “John Peter”
  • “Doe John”

You can omit middle names from search queries

Middle names are easy to forget, and now you don’t have to worry about it. A search for “John Doe” will still find John Peter Doe.

No more white space issues

In the past, you might have searched for a record you KNEW was there, only to get empty results. Often this was because of leading and trailing spaces in names. karmaCRM now eliminates these spaces so you get the correct results every time.

See expanded information about a single result

You might want some quick info about a record without opening it completely. If your search returns a single result, the bar will turn green and you’ll see expanded information about the record, such as their events, tasks, and files. More information all in one place!

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Thank You!

The feedback from the survey was clear. You wanted a better site-wide search experience, and today our dev team has delivered one. We can’t do it without customers like you.

You rock!

I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.

Tips for Hiring Your First Employee and Growing Your Team

The early stages of growth in a company can feel a lot like riding a bike blind – you’re going fast, need help steering, and might faceplant into a pole at any point.

Going from a solo operation to a team is infinitely more complex than going from 100 to 101. Hiring slouches early on is downright ruinous, while getting it right … (singing) the clouds part as light pours onto your paper-steeped desk.

Your first new hire is an integral “can’t-live-without” cog in your growth machine, your #2. (The same goes for #3 and #4.) Your very sanity depends on it. It’s VERY expensive to get this wrong. Trust me, I have.

I’m not going to lie, hiring is tough. The entire process is lengthy, and you never really know if you’ve found “the one.” Even knowing when the right time to hire is a challenge.

Here are a few things to consider.

When is the right time

It’s easy to look at your revenue and think “I can’t afford anyone else.” Early expansion can be painful, but it’s like starting a family – once you’ve done it, you can’t imagine how you lived without them.

Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of trying to do everything themselves. I mean EVERYTHING. You are actually losing money by doing this, no question. Sure, as the owner of a small company, you’ll wear a lot of hats. But you don’t have to wear every hat. Balancing 30,000 things on your head might be a cool Cirque du Soleil trick, but it’s a major drawback in running a small business.

Side note: If you ever want to consider selling your company, the superhero “nobody-can-do-it-better” founder is a huge deal breaker. You need to show robustness and distributed dependence on more than one person.

How I decide to hire (and whom)

To decide if I need to hire someone, I start by valuing my time at an hourly rate, based on what I could get working for someone else. Then, I look at all of the tasks that I consider outside of my core competency. Since I’m a developer, I look at things like how much time I’m spending on admin, bookkeeping, and customer support.

Then, I consider the potential upside. If I was able to focus more on the thing I do best – coding – could I positively affect growth? If the answer is yes, then I hire.

The single most important hire I’ve ever made was my customer success person, Shirley Robinson. She has a magical knack for solving problems and a deep, genuine care for our customers. She has a patience and disposition that I could only dream of.

I started karmaCRM doing both development and support, but quickly realized that by focusing on one the other suffered. Shirley solved that and has quickly become a cornerstone of my company’s foundation.

Think what would have happened if I had tried to save money and keep doing it myself. I’d be swamp wading through support requests, doing a mediocre job, while watching my product slowly die.

Before you hop over to post a job on Craigslist, take some time to really think about what type of person you want. Not their skills but their essence. Are you hiring a superstar “ninja” with an ego the size of a hot air balloon, or do you want someone with humility, energy, and hunger to learn?

At this stage, experience matters a whole lot less than essence and raw talent.

Hiring for experience or talent

The first step is deciding what you’re looking for – raw talent or specific skills. They both have a place, but personally I’ve had much better luck hiring for raw talent instead of a specific skillset.

What I mean when I say “raw talent” is that the person you are hiring is intelligent, capable of learning fast, and is hungry to learn. They might not have done the specific job before, but because they have talent, they can learn fast.

They’re clay, waiting to be sculpted (and excited about it).

I’ve hired “seasoned” employees before, and let me tell ya, they come with a lot of baggage. I once hired a 100k senior project manager who professed his “cold lunch” project management style. This meant he kept people so busy that they didn’t have time to eat their lunch warm.

The first week, he took two-hour lunches every day and was caught reading a magazine at his desk multiple times.

He came with a jaded, enterprise-entrenched sense of work ethic. While this may have worked at Acme Corp X with a billion employees, it certainly wasn’t going to cut it in my team of 5.

Sometimes the seasoning is too strong and the food is best with just a little salt and pepper.

People with raw talent are hungry and moldable. They are also inherently versatile and can help fill a lot of cracks. I typically seek out people who are comfortable being “thrown in the fire” instead of those who expect manuals and procedures.

Let’s be honest, if you’re anything like I was, you have no employee handbook, your processes are scribbled on napkins, and you need a firefighter, not a gas station attendant for your #2 hire.

Know thyself

With every new hire, we have everyone on our team do a personality test. This helps us understand our current dynamic and how the new hire might fit in. Culture cannot be an afterthought while growing your team, and investing in understanding what makes each person tick can be paramount to getting stuff done.

We took the free version of the Myers-Briggs test (but there are plenty of other options out there) and analyzed the results. Then we discussed our results as a team. We were sure to highlight aspects of the results that were accurate, and others that were not.

These tests have some very useful insights, but it’s important not to put yourself in a box. Personality tests can help you understand the current dynamics powering your decisions, but since you’re dynamic, so are your results. My long-term team members and I have taken the test multiple times, and our results have changed over time.

How powerful it is to work, change, and grow with others.

Ok, so now you know what you’re looking for and you have a solid understanding of your team’s genetic makeup. Now it’s time to decide what this new hire looks like. Is it an individual, a group of people, or a robot? Are they sitting next to you, or across the ocean?

These days, you’ve got options!

Consider contracting instead of hiring

As a bootstrapped small business owner, you learn to think outside of the box. Does it need to be a real-deal W-2 employee, or could it be a 1099 contractor? Does it even need to be one person, or would the job be done better by a few part-time people.

Don’t pigeonhole yourself when making this huge hiring leap. I’ve had businesses run entirely on a crew of contractors, hired mostly from sites like www.upwork.com. It’s affordable, and you can hire much better talent when location isn’t as important.

This can’t work for every company, but it’s important to at least consider a contractor instead of an employee, especially to start. They are less expensive from a tax perspective, and you can do a contract-to-hire, giving you a trial period with the person.

Please consult your lawyer and HR person before pulling the trigger. The contractor vs. employee lines can be quite blurry.

Once you make this determination, you’re off to the races to write your shiny new job posting. DON’T SKIMP on this part. If you write a zombie-inspired job description, you’re going to get zombie applicants. Spend the time and write a zingy job application that has personality. You’re fighting for the smartest, most versatile people. Show them why they should pick you.

So with the post up, how do you actually go about the hiring process. Everyone probably has their own opinions here, but we’ve shared a peek into our process for your enjoyment.

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Hiring is a daunting, yet rewarding, process, but don’t rush it! Budget some time for a little introspection. What do things look like right now, what’s your culture like, what are you like? Each hire will make a resounding and definitive stamp on your company’s culture, so it’s best to be intentional. Otherwise, your culture will grow wild like weeds.

It’s almost a guarantee that while growing, the vision you have for your company will get foggy. I’ve found it a very healthy practice to do a personal retreat at least once a year and make sure my “why” is secret-island-mountain-spring clear.

Continuously revisit your passion, and course correct when necessary. If you do, it will be easier to identify who you need alongside you to actualize your vision.

I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.