Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Jay Meistrich, Founder of Legend, an all-in-one productivity tool.
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Here’s what Legend is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
The initial problem I was trying to solve is that people keep their to-do lists all over the place. In apps, on paper, in emails, or in their minds. It's hard for all those places to be working together, and equally difficult to multitask across all those different sources. This problem also applies to other productivity tools. There are document apps and email apps, but they just don't work together.
The Solution:
Legend is an all-in-one productivity tool that pulls all your most important tools into one place and makes them work together in the most efficient way. You can create documents and outlines, there is an in-built calendar as well as an email service. It seamlessly allows you to integrate your to-do list from emails and into documents.
The Team:
For the first few years, we were two technical co-founders building the product. My co-founder has moved on to other things now, so I am now the sole founder. I went to Carnegie Mellon University for computer science. I worked in Microsoft's Applied Sciences group on research projects for three years, before becoming a Digital Nomad and travelling while working on my own projects.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
I started working on Legend many years ago in the meantime. Back then, I was working on an iPhone app for a friend and I kept looking at my to-do list and then had to go search my emails for some screenshots he had sent me. And I had to do this for every task on the to-do list and it was a constant back and forth. I remember being so annoyed at the fact that my to-do list and email weren't connected. So, I started working on the idea in my free time and eventually it turned into a full-time thing.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
There are great apps for all the individual productivity tasks, but despite all the great new productivity tools that have emerged over the past few years, there is still no tool that does all of them well or allows existing tools to communicate effectively. With Covid forcing many people to work remotely, and the way we work shifting more permanently, productivity collaboration tools become more important than ever.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
I recently launched a rebrand from the old name Moo.do to Legend, and in doing that also increased the prices of the product. I was very excited to see that people readily accepted the new prices. I also introduced lifetime pricing, and that there are people wanting to pay to access Legend for life is just so cool to me.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
I'm a developer at heart and marketing is not my strong suit. So, something I continue to struggle with is that I always come back to improve the product first, and neglect working on growth tactics. I'm getting help from some great people for this and am trying to focus more on growth from now on.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
A lesson I learned a few years ago is just how important it is to talk to your customers. When I first started I would send out emails with product updates and receive occasional feedback emails in response, but I wasn't really communicating with anybody. And so, I set up a slack channel and invited some users and posted on the website, and ended up with hundreds of users giving feedback through real-time chats and it showed me that I had no idea of what people wanted. I was just building something that I wanted. That moment really changed everything for the product and me, in terms of learning.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
If you want to do something, you don't need to look for the perfect environment to start doing it.
A high school friend of mine gave me this advice when I told him I was moving to San Francisco to start a startup. He basically said: "Why do you need to start a startup in San Francisco? You can do that anywhere."
What advice would you give to other young founders?
Customers won't just come because you built a great product. You also need to work on growth. This is particularly important and not intuitive for the developers and technical founders.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
Question everything you're told because a lot of the path you think you're supposed to follow and the advice you're given is not necessarily going to be the best path for you. You don't have to believe what everyone else believes. So, when you're faced with something you think you're supposed to do because someone else said so, ask yourself why. Is it actually the best thing to do? Or are there alternative paths that might be more interesting?
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
My friend Melissa, (Co-founder of Bravely), continuously inspires me. She's a great person and always has good advice, and all that despite having gone through some extreme health issues recently.
What book do you think everyone should read?
Homecoming Saga - Orson Scott Card
I read this book series when I was a kid, but they have stuck with me ever since. It made me want to work on being unique and true to my interests.