Startup Spotlight #127: Explo
Explo is a tool that lets you build customer-facing dashboards, lightning fast.
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I got the chance to speak with Gary Lin, co-founder and CEO of Explo, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.
Explo helps companies stop wasting time building custom dashboards and one-off requests.
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Startup Spotlight: Explo
Problem: As a business (especially B2B SaaS), providing analytics to your customers is a crucial necessity to allow your users to most effectively use your product. However, creating and maintaining customer-facing dashboards is not only engineering intensive, but a difficult problem to get all of the key components right — security, performance, design.
Market: There are roughly 15,000 SaaS companies in the world (that all need some kind of analytics reporting), according to a report that analyzed Crunchbase in 2020, with the sector expecting to reach about $600 billion by 2023.
Solution: Explo lets you build beautiful, customer-facing dashboards that seamlessly and securely embed into your web application. Connect directly to your database or warehouse, build custom-styled dashboards, and embed in your application within a day.
Team: Our strong, tight-knit team is composed of 7 full-time employees and 1 intern - Andrew Chen (founder), Rohan Varma (founder), Gary Lin (founder), Carly Stanisic (product designer), Austin Piel (software engineer), Jordan Greissman (software engineer), Josh Zhang (software engineer), and Natalie Tedeschi (software engineering intern).
Recent Success:
Lin: Aside from rapidly maturing the product and closing sales deals, our team has been successful at creating an amazing, open culture. Despite being partially remote since April and fully remote since November, the team has remained extremely close. Special shoutout to Carly for being a thought leader in this domain and helping us feel so closely bonded despite being so far away from each other. The team has crazy grit, is scrappy, and executes with a positive attitude.
One of the best traditions we have is our Friday "show and tell" where one member of the team presents something to the team. Some examples are presenting travel memories to Thailand and South Korea, teaching proper gym squatting techniques, and encouraging everyone to start a capsule wardrobe. We've done more than six iterations already and we hope to never stop sharing stories.
Recent Struggle:
Lin: Since going fully remote, it has been hard for the team to recreate organic "in office" experiences. Most notably, organic, unscheduled conversations that lead to new ideas and product directions. When a good portion of us were in SF towards the end of 2020, we tried spinning up an office, but with COVID flaring up, we eventually had to let it go. Being a remote team now, we are trying different ways to, as closely as possible, create a forum for these serendipitous conversations. We purchased Facebook Portals, in hopes of creating an always-on video channel. While in practice it could work, it just didn't feel the same and could feel a bit intrusive to some members. We're still looking and iterating on ways to best recreate the office experience, remotely.
Founder Advice:
Lin: Building a startup is a marathon and not a race. The grind is an inevitable and necessary component of building a startup, but the grind isn't one-dimensional. There's no doubt that as founders, we are giving our all to our startup, but we need to be smart about how we are doing that. Over exhaustion and quick burnout over the course of 6 months is objectively worse than a more steady, sustainable environment that allows you to effectively work on your startup for years.
That being said, every person is different - for instance, the amount of sleep, exercise, fresh air, etc we need to be sane and healthy is different from the person next to us. This is my friendly reminder to founders to get sleep, eat healthy, exercise, and call their parents — being thoughtful about these things will only allow you to more effectively grind on your startup.
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Lin: Here are three founders you should check out next!
Jessica Ouyang and Jolena Ma, Co-founders of Ditto: Ditto allows teams to manage their copy from design to production with a single source of truth.
Omar Skalli, Founder of Flowdash: Flowdash helps you build business processes for your team in minutes.
Mohamed Abedelmalik, Founder of Brevy: Brevy enables teams of all sizes to collaborate on their website without losing any detail - visible or invisible.
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