title: Building Community The Heart of Entrepreneurship
author: Founders Podcast
contenttype: podcast
publication: Founders Podcast
published: 2026-01-13T09:00:00
sourceurl: https://anchor.fm/s/10542bd40/podcast/play/112325564/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-11-8%2F413993288-44100-2-f54982abda1b9.mp3
word_count: 6386
Hello there, Greg. Welcome to the Founders Podcast. Thanks, That's nice to be here. How are you doing today? Finally Friday. Yeah, Friday, it's a little dark and gloomy here in Portland, OR. It's a bit of a rain so day but other than that not bad. Great stuff, great stuff. Before we start, Greg, do you want to share motivational code? Something that motivates you, inspires you, you know, could relate to our audience also. Yeah, for sure. I, I, I have actually 2 that I wanted to share, if that's OK. The first one is from one of my, from early childhood on favorite motivational leaders, and that was George Lucas and I, I, I studied a lot of how he worked creatively and I've always worked on a, from a scientific and a creative background. But one of his favorite analogies, and this is kind of a summary of what he said, but had to do with about building a company and that it was like being on a wagon train headed West. And this, I think this also works with me because I live in Oregon City, which if you, if you know anything about the US westward expansion, this is the end of the Oregon Trail. And one of the things that he said is on the long journey to the the land of Ponti, The Pioneers would be full of purpose and united by the goal of reaching their destination. Once they arrive, people would come and go. It wasn't so much the destination as it was the journey and the process and the moving forward of something together having not yet arrived on what was idealized. And I think that's such a, for a founder, especially, but also through, I think a life journey. It's about following the, working with others, following along, enjoying the journey along the way and making sure that you're getting there in a, in a proper way. And, and then I think from the creative side of this and, and the blend of the scientific, Richard Feynman is another quote that I, I think about a lot. And that's, it's a very simple quote, very short. It's and it's a until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art. And I think a lot of what that had to do for for him, and this is sort of extrapolating based on some of the things he's done is, is that art of itself wasn't interesting to him until he learned how it was made. Like it's the, the, the struggle and learning how to, and that's again, part of the journey is, is learning how to do something the right way, the craftsmanship of the effort that goes into it, and then being able to use that in your day-to-day life and then understand it better. I think it's both kind of connect to me in a, in a in different ways, but kind of about the same thing and enjoying the journey. Indeed, indeed. And thanks for that. Thanks for sharing it, Greg. And I want to take you through that, you know, hypothetical scenario. But before we go into that, I want to ask you, would you be able to tell us more about like what's what's the product do, who is it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve with visually? Yeah, I think it's a like a lot of founders what I've brought with buildly it was were things that were solving problems for me. And one, the the first one I think was having to do more with the technical software architecture approach where I our open source tools were the things we built 1st and that had to do with component architecture and being able to reuse things, not having to rebuild the wheel every time. So that, that our open source tools that was the first access point I think for us and build the sort of forking that out of a previous startup that we had done. And then I think the other part is I guess sort of a career long struggle I've had as a software developer and team lead and then eventually CTO and product manager as well is that creatives and business side tend to be on one side of the equation for a software development process. And the software developers and the technical team tend to be on the other operations and all of that. And there's a lot of mistrust and there's a lot of confusion and, and misunderstanding really more than anything else around the communication and how those two teams work. So build Lee sort of our our main product, which is our labs product is where those two teams come together. And so it becomes really one team and we take away some of the artifacts that were created by using agile, which you know, is intended to be anti artifact. But what we do is we, we create an automated process using AI to put guardrails around software development and product management so that they can use the AI properly, create, use a way to manage and communicate better. And then also, I think just speed up the process to to meet those AI demands and the compete with the vibe code type offerings that are out there with real craftsmanship based software development processes that use AI, but in the right way, not overusing AI. And I think that's, that's really the goal of our platform as a whole is to is to sort of speed up the processes increase and and make the communication better and then use AI as a team member to enhance everybody else's process, not to replace. Indeed, indeed. And you will see hundreds and hundreds of videos on YouTube and many other platforms where a lot of so-called expert are saying, oh, you don't have to be a programmer or you don't understand programming. You can build the the production ready apps and you can build a business. You can actually create production ready apps and and start charging people. But you will reach to a point where you will need somebody expert in in the technology to help you out to to help you to scale it. And there are a lot of things which you can hook things up. But when you're crafting a new product, you want things to look in a certain way, you want things to behave in a certain way. You want things to have get integrated with in a certain way. There are bits and pieces here and there which you can couple up for sure. That's not exactly how customer want their the platform to be when they're paying for it. They want crystal clear flow. They want the app to be to that top standard when they're paying for it, right? Even when Elon Musk started charging to get a blue tick on Twitter, that didn't quite worked out well for him because it was just a, you know, thing for and then now they have kind of provided quite a lot of value with it. Grog and what else, you know, So it might be working. But yeah, I, I totally agree with you that the current AI gold rush in that sense, it is like everybody is trying to create application builders for developers. Because you know, we have seen how fast the copilot, the the cursor, the windsurf has grown up instantly within couple of years. But what they forget is AI could actually help you and argument you if you have the fundamental understanding of how the software development works, right? That is crucial to, to, to the nature of it. OK, great. So let's, let's let's take you to into the hypothetical room situation. Then let's say we are in a room full of ambitious founders and the state builder. They're sitting there, some of them are standing networking. And in a moment, you, you walk in, you have the stage, you have the mic. Everybody's looking at you and thinking, oh, who's this handsome chap? What is he doing here? Why is he here on the stage? And the, and the whole, you know, spotlight is on you. What would you share with them that after listening to you, they will stick with us for the rest of the hour? Yeah, I mean, I think the, the main thing for every founder like that, they, they, they want to hear from other founders usually about the successes, right? They want to hear and understand how did you get from point A to point B and what were the, you know, the main things that you did right to get there. And I, you know, I, that's interesting for sure for me. But what I like to share and what I usually say is I, I want to talk about the failures and the things that I did that I wish I had done differently or that I really learned from. And, and in that sense, not glad that I glad that I went through that process and learned from that mistake. And then I became a better software developer or a better manager because of it. And I, I start with usually the, the first thing that I learned in this SEC. So I, I started off in the late 90s working e-commerce websites and then into software development for the web specifically. And, and I learned a lot during the, the first bubble as it was the web two point O bubble later on, and then I guess the web three bubble and now the AI bubble. But I think the thing that I, I always take away from, from each one of those struggles and as I went through all these different phases, is that to me, learning from failures and accepting failure as part of your process is important. And understanding that improving your, yourself and your products is part of that. And being able to iterate and build from that and, and improve and not accepting what had happened in the past, as this is the way it always has to be. And learning to evolve. And I think that's the biggest lesson that that I would want to share with everyone is embrace your failures, learn from them. Don't look for blame, Don't look for who caused this problem. Instead, look for how do we avoid it in the future and how do we get better from it. And one of the, the, I think the, the early lessons that I learned that I usually share is my initial goal when I first started this second round of startup growth that I was looking for, I moved overseas to Berlin to, to found a startup there. And one of the reasons I did that was I, I wanted to the to one increase, you know, and I learned a lot from moving into another culture and, and, and another community, but, and I wanted to, to benefit from that and increase my overall knowledge of how to work in a global ecosystem. But I think what I forgot in that process was that the, the community, the local community that supports you, it doesn't matter where you are, as long as you're contributing and being part of a community and helping others grow, that, that that growth happens organically through that community. And I, I'm just having a conversation today on LinkedIn about this, about how to the, the information in the community that you build and help build how that helps other people, but helps you along the way as well. And founders helping founders is such an important part of that. And, and open source communities really help to grow that, but just business communities as well. And so I think one of the things that I learned being in Berlin and then coming back and then spending some time in New York as well, is that the community is, is wherever you are. And you have to embrace that community and be part of that community to help not just yourself, but those around you. And they kind of lift each other up in that process. And, and I, I learned a lot early on from that to, to not focus on financial goals initially, but instead focus on how do you, how can you grow a product organically? How can you work on a product that you know will fit and have a product market fit, but also how do you include the community around that? And how do you build a community on your own to help that grow? And I think that's something that I didn't and I don't think that the team that I even founded the company with at that time knew or was able to to do until much later on. And I think that's something if you, if you start off just looking to raise funds, build a good pitch deck and hope that somebody comes in and and builds a good product for you, that's one way to do it. But I think in the end, you're, you're looking at short term success. If you want to grow something that has long term success, you've got to build a community around it. I think that's the the biggest lesson I've learned from that process and the biggest failure I had in that process. And it's helped me to grow a lot in the since then. No, definitely. And I couldn't agree more with you on this one. I mean, I I run my own startup also, it's a simple sauce platform called art circles where we empower people to create communities, have communities from all over the world. We have communities of 65 old year, 65 years old ladies who do you know, knitting in a coffee shop. We have community of people who work on this open source computer called Raspberry Pi from Edinburgh. We have communities in London where people meet for, you know, helping each other with founders and we have communities of churches, we have communities of mosque, we have communities of temples, We have communities of moms of, you know, young kids who come together. So when you look at these communities, you see like, because they're getting together, they're adding value into their each other's life. It's, it's communities in it's a paramount for, for, for the growth of the social values we have in our, in our society, right. So no doubt about that. So let's take a step back then, Greg, let's talk about where the story begin. Where did the idea for Billy Lee came from? I mean, I understand that you've already said that there is a saying in, in, in America called each your own dog's food. Or is it? Something. It's something. My favorite. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Yeah. So something like that, this is something like that. So, so you were facing that problem, but when, when you had that epiphany, did you look at the market, what are the products were there, what was going on at the time and what did you see from your research that encouraged you to move ahead with the idea? Yeah. I think like I said, the, the 1st, the aspect of this was that dog fooding approach where I, I, I wanted us to be using our own tools to build our own internal infrastructure. And I, I think that that was a definite must have for me was that we were, we were learning from our own mistakes and helping to grow the product as well. But what I saw early on was that communication gap. I think for me, as I, as I started to grow, really it was in 2019 when, when COVID hit and everyone started working remotely, that's when I really started to see the need for this tool, which was a different way of, of managing products, right? And, and increasing communication, including the entire team. And as I started to talk to more and more founders. And really what we did is we were using, again, we had the benefit of these open source tools. We had already built that to work with startups. And so we were working with these startups and these remote software development agencies. And the, the lack of trust between the two, especially when they're not in the office was, was evident on both sides. And I think the, the communication gaps were, were clear, but also I think just the the mystery of what is it that the business side, how are they making these decisions? And then on the development side, this sort of black box that, that sometimes the business side couldn't understand of what was going into the decision making. Why was one feature taking longer than the other and things that seemed small and quick fixes weren't and and why was that so why did why did things? There was always this why, why, why? And I think that's the first thing we decided to tackle. And the more startups we work with, the more we solve this problem, the easier we found ways to, to solve this, which was just automating communication, going to where the problem was going to where the, the, the, the things were being fixed and bringing that in. So pulling from or whatever it was that they were using for a product backlog and then pulling from JIRA or GitHub these issues, combining them. And then once we saw AI starting to evolve, we saw this opportunity to through machine learning and eventually LLMS to create this sort of centralized dashboard so that everyone could have transparency into the different tools. And eventually we just started to merge these into to one set of tools that's managing the product backlog alongside the issue backlog and then communicating around this in the dashboard. And it may that whole process so much easier for everyone. The transparency around it was, was really clear. And then I think the last thing that that really sort of helped us was in the communication with software teams as they started to use and, and are now using even more using AI to help them clear up in old code or help them test code or even in some cases now write code. They needed a way to sort of stay in that, in that tool and compete, I think with these vibe coding tools, but also communicate and speed up their process because the agile way of doing things was based on a very different approach. And so this idea of RAD process came up as well, which is our sort of attempt at a new version of agile, let's say that's that's really about including AI as part of the team. Understanding that automation can help speed up the process, understanding that developers want to stay in their IDE, work things really quickly with the AI and push it out and automate all of that. So that I think that was the last step is, is both sides coming together as one, bringing AI in as a, as a true partner, not to replace software developers or replace product management, but instead to enhance it and speed up the boring parts. So we could focus and the teams could focus on the creative work or, or the OR even the, you know, more complicated work that AI is not good at yet and well, probably won't be for a long time. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And and I cannot emphasize on the fact that as much as I can help you out to actually build the software, it is there to augment human capabilities, right? It is there to augment Fast forward or support you with your productivity. It is not going to replace humans at least for the next 3 or 4, five year until that superpower of AI comes into the scene. And we don't know what that's going to do anyways, but at least that's how it looks like right now. Thanks for sharing that, Greg. It makes super clear the the USB then the reasoning behind the product. Would you be able to share with our listeners, you know, give us a sense of size of the business where you are in terms of revenue, number of customers, size of the team? Yeah, of course. So we as a as a product, we've been working on parts of this really since like I said 2019. And each iteration we've sort of opened it up a little bit more, had some setbacks that we've learned from and then started to grow back up again. So right now as of I think it was first of September, we released the most recent version and started to open it up to the general public. So we have a little over 100 organizations signed up right now. And I think that's, I think it's a little over 200 users. It's a organizational plan. So you, you pay for one license and then all the users in your organization, it's not per seat and it's, it's $50.00 a month to, to join. But there's a $30 a plan for foundry members, which is essentially folks that are working on early stage startups, which is our, our key demographic. Those are the folks that we work on and focus on the most. Our, our growth rate is, is pretty consistent. We're, we're growing intentionally right now through our network. We're just starting to to advertise, but we're, we're, we're doing well. And I think our focus over the next, you know, probably next 1:45 quarters is going to be start to be on marketing and, and sales and, and really starting to grow that way. I think the the plans with the 30 day free trial as well as as helped to people to get an idea of how to use it. And I the, the thing that we want I think founders to take away from our, our idea stage, founders especially, is the idea to come in, use the tool to plan your product first, get an idea of what it should look like and get a budget together. Then go and look for a, a technical team to build it or, or a technical Co founder. Unless you are, and hopefully you are a technical Co founder as well. And looking to do this 'cause this is our, our key demographic is really software developers who want to start a business or want us build their own product and sell it somewhere and don't know that side of it. And we can help with all bringing that all into one place. So whichever side of the coin you want to grow. But yeah, the growth for us is, is starting to be key in the next couple of quarters and we're going to see how how much we can help people where they can, where they can grow from from that. And then also, I think the other side of it is to help them once they're ready to really build the team out as well. We have some great resources in our open source community to help to help find technical Co founders to build that product instead of, you know, going to AI and trying to vibe code it, not being able to support it because the AI has now forgotten everything that you initially put in. I think we have AI driven processes that will speed up that, but then software developers, man in the middle sort of approach that will help keep that growing for you. Got it. So let's talk about the most difficult part then. How what? How does your top of the funnel looks like? Where are you getting your customers from? Are you doing the traditional, you know, meta ads or or any advertisement on these giants? Are you focusing more on organic traffic by by distributing your content through different mediums? Are you doing sales calls, outbound calls or outbound emails? What is the strategy in place and how it is turning out for you? And if you could share some specific numbers that would be great. Yeah. So right now our we have two approaches. 1 is that organic networking approach and we've we've done OK. Like I said, we've got about 100 or so organizations signed up through that just through our networks as a team. Our new approach that we're looking at is, is really twofold. 1 is paid advertisements. Right now we're focused on Reddit mostly because I think for early stage founders, the solo entrepreneurs, like that's the place that they, they go to ask those questions and, and sober, we're looking at paid advertisements there. We haven't actually started that yet, mostly because Reddit has a pretty strict process you have to go through in order just to get into that. But we have started to do quite a bit there just on our own. And then LinkedIn using sales navigator to do some along with a, a couple of different automation platforms to do some research and find those key outside of our network. So usually two or three levels out to look for early stage founders, but also we're starting, we want to start to focus more on late stage, you know, people that want to start to grow out, you know, outside of their traditional software development approach that they have now. So maybe those folks that did vibe code something and need something to actually start to scale for them. And that's really where our focus is around cloud native tools and how to grow for massive traffic eventually. And then I think the other aspect is the, the, the last piece of this is the enterprise and start to grow there. And we, we're, we're, we're looking at that from a like really product management or project management, portfolio management teams that need that kind of growth for them. So that, that's, that our, our, our numbers are, are really early on the advertising side, I think, but we're, we're getting a number of requests, a number of interest. But in terms of conversion, I think the LinkedIn has not been as successful for us so far. But Reddit, we've, we've gotten a number of new customers are interest, at least sign ups in those 30 days. So I think we had 40 or 50 new sign ups through Reddit. And I think there was only like we, and we've been doing this for about a month. We only had 10 or 15 new sign ups through LinkedIn. And that was those were people that were pretty close to us already that were already sort of we knew about audio bra. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So interesting. I think, I think Reddit and I think there's a number of other places that we're considering, but I know we've looked at Google Ads before. There's not much there for us. I think it's really difficult to get something constructive there, but I know they're doing some improvements with how they're doing that with AI. And so I'm, I'm interested to see how that goes. And then AX or Twitter is another area that we're looking at as well in terms of paid ads. Yeah. Yeah, no, that makes sense. Cool. So great. Tell me more about if the founder from our community reach out to you, what is the process looks like? Do they contact you? How does the onboarding works? Or it's just like, you know, love it, but you go online, subscribe to a subscription and then you just start using it. Or is there something they have to do before, you know, starting up and then when they will receive the value? I mean, it should be as early as possible, but you know, just so that. Hopefully right away. Yeah, I think so the the right, I would say for anyone that's planning a product early stage idea stage and has this idea going just directly to to labs dot bibbly dot IO. There's an automated onboarding process there that just asks a few questions, gets you started registers. And like I said, there's a 30 day free trial where you can actually, in the first day, you can go through our product wizard and it's a, there's a, it's a guided process to put in some basic information about the, the team that you have or don't have the product that you want to build as much description as you can. And the AI will help with a lot of that. But there's also some heuristic algorithms that we have running in the background as well to guide you through that process. And then you get a a pretty well planned out budget set of features and team recommendations and architecture recommendations for your product. So you start to see value in minutes really, because these are things that previously I with an idea like that, you would have to take it to an agency or find a technical Co founder to get this kind of information. And instead you're getting this almost instantly. And you're then able to take that. And if you want, you can reach out to us directly at that point and we can help you find a technical Co founder or a team from our community to help build that at A at a discounted rate. So it's you're saving money without the the initial idea stage ideation, but you're also now saving money with a better team that already knows how to build using reusable components and speeding things up a lot at that point. And then for the larger organizations, yeah, I think if you've got a portfolio of products and you want to manage them all in one place, that's what our platform is really designed to do. We can build out additional features around that that are part of our component architecture where you can have a larger organization, can have a custom built dashboard for inner source management as well as gamification of your product platforms so that you can have a team managed across multiple products in one place. And I think that's for larger organizations, that's a really a game changer. It's managing your products more like an open source tool using AI, but also using your your internal community to sort of build and support each other, which is again in, in in larger organizations, the competitiveness kind of comes out sometimes. And that gamification of that kind of a process is really interesting. It's fun. It helps drive the everyone to sort of compete against each other, but they're all headed towards the same goal of building an internal community that can really make things happen fast for their organization. Indeed, indeed. Great stuff. That was great. Thank you so much for sharing that. The next part of our interview is basically a quick fire round. I've got 6 quick fire question for you. At any point do you think you don't want to answer to one of them? Just give me a skip and I can move to the next one. How's that? Sure. Yeah, sounds good. Yeah. Great stuff. So Craig, tell me, what are the top 3 strategies founders should adopt to generate more eyeballs, more traction, more top of the fun of traffic for their start-ups in 2026? Yeah, I would say the the first one for me just getting to get eyeballs is like I said, reaching out to your network, focusing on your your community and growing your community first. I think secondarily is it's you want with that, along with that, you want to build your yourself up or your organization up as thought leaders. That means going on, you know, podcasts like this, going out and writing articles, generating that kind of traffic. And then I think third is, you know, at that point you want to look at marketing and, and sales and direct outreach depending on, you know, B to BB to CI think. But if you're especially B to B, yeah, like a good sales team that's internal is, is super helpful, I think. But if you've, if you've got a group that you can read that you trust that you can, you know, can build that organizational strategy for you as well, that's helpful. But I think the the 1st 2 are more important for sure starting out that way. Indeed, indeed. What book would you recommend to our audience and why? There's a there's a great book, I forget the the author's name, but it's called Creativity Inc and it was by this Ed it's Ed Cattermole, I think is his name. He worked at Pixar managing creative organizations and people and, and has some amazing insights on how to work with creative, but also how to work with. Yeah. And, and I think this gets lost a lot is how to work with technical folks who are creative and have to be creative in their problem solving and those that combination. Obviously Pixar early, early Pixar and Apple had that blend and it was a great lesson learned I think for a lot of, but that book specifically helped me a lot and learning to manage with with creatives and be creative more myself. Indeed, thank you. What's What's an 1 attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder? I, I would say probably it's, it's the the drive to succeed. I think that a, a good founder just has an engine that doesn't stop right. And they're, they're, they're constantly working, constantly improving, while at the same time I think being inclusive and not trying to do everything themselves. So if, if you've, if you find a, a good founder that has that drive but also knows how to delegate, I think that's the that that person's going to be successful in whatever they do. Yeah, no, then definitely. What about your favorite personal productivity tool or habit? I, you know, I think right now it's Notebook LM. If you've used the Google's Notebook LM tool for research, just for, I just, I think using it for, for organizational strategies and I, I use it constantly. Every new customer that comes on board, I create every output of of a call from an AI transcriber. Every document that is shared with me, I put that into that a new project in notebook LM and that becomes my, you know, project brain. And I I think the I'm working on connecting it to other pieces and stuff. But yeah, that's to me. That's my number one tool. Equate what's a new or a crazy business idea you would love to pursue if you had time? You know, I'm really interested in the intersection of AI and robotics right now and I would love to get involved more in that, especially the the process of writing software for AI driven robotics platforms and, and how those guard rails especially are established. I think it's fascinating where it's headed. It's a little worrisome, like some of the things that you see, but also I think there's so much capacity there that could be really interesting, especially if you look at it from again and enhancing other folks and and being able to make them use these tools better, help them use these tools better instead of trying to replace them. That is very interesting. And last but not least, what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know? I used to do they used to do what was it 3 two lies and a truth or and I always had I had one that no one ever was ever able to get right, which is I at one point was I was a a musician before I became a a software developer. And I actually I'm on people I don't know for whatever reason, don't believe that. And I at one point was shared a stage with two of the original members of R.E.M. And I think it was a it was one of the last things I did as a playing in local rock bands. But that's something that most people don't know about me, wouldn't guess about me, I guess. And I think that's the I've always found the intersection between art and music and science fascinating. And that's kind of one of those that was one of those launching pads for me was at that point deciding music is going to be my secondary thing and I'm going to start to really focus on software. Got it, got it. Well, Greg, thank you so much for joining me and sharing your story and backing the last few years of building this product and some of the ups and up. The people want to check out the product. If people want to get in touch with you personally, have some questions answered, what's the best way to do it? Yeah, I think going through build the IO, there's a contact form there also LinkedIn, I'm out. It's really easy to find me on LinkedIn. I'm posting a lot there. Either of those ways is a great way to get started and then I'm always happy to to meet with folks and have a call and and see where we can help or where I can help. Indeed, indeed. Well, Greg, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your inspiring journey. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on Founders Podcast. Thanks, it was my pleasure. Great to be here.