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I got the chance to speak with Xavier Pladevall and Eduardo Portet, co-founders of Index, about what they are working on at their startup and any advice they have for emerging entrepreneurs.
Xavier is the co-founder & CEO of Index. Born and raised in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Xavier moved to the United States to attend college. While in school Xavier worked at Facebook where he spent most of his time working in internal tooling for product & operations teams. After graduating from college, he decided to partner w/ his childhood friend Eduardo to build beautiful tools that they wish had already existed.
Outside of thinking about technology and startups, Xavier also enjoys reading about psychology research (particularly anything related to memory & biases), learning about art (particularly anything w/ a phenomenal backstory), and playing soccer.
Xavier has a B.A. from Columbia University where he studied in History, Computer Science and Neuroscience.
Eduardo is the co-founder & CTO of Index. Born and raised in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Eduardo moved to the United States to attend college. While in school Eduardo worked at Medidata - a large medical technology company where he spent most of his time working as a data engineer working on systems migration. After graduating from college, he decided to partner w/ his childhood friend Xavier to build beautiful tools that they wish had already existed.
Outside of thinking about technology and startups, Eduardo also enjoys reading about physics and (particularly anything related to scientific experiments used to explain real-life phenomenons), tinkering with devices that need to get fixed, and playing soccer.
Eduardo has a B.S. from Boston University where he studied Computer Engineering.
Index is hiring! Please send your resume to astoryforsoda@gmail.com for me to forward it to the cofounders. Share this article with others for them to apply for the role too!
Startup Spotlight: Index
Index cofounders (from left to right): Xavier Pladevall and Eduardo Portet.
Problem: Here are the current pain points people experience when trying to craft their metrics:
Defining: Every team has to figure what set of KPIs to report on. The data for these KPIs increasingly lives in 3rd party APIs - not just your database.
Building: For a non-technical user, it's hard to manipulate this data to get the output they need.
Sharing: Once you have a dashboard, it's hard to share w/ other people in your organization and externally.
Market: Index operates in the business intelligence market, which is mature but absolutely massive. Instead of approaching the question of how big the market is from a top-down approach (e.g. using a market research report), Xavier and Eduardo decided to calculate the TAM using a bottoms-up approach based on how much they can charge per editor year ($600) times the number of operators working in technology companies (+600k), yielding a TAM of over $3.6b.
Solution: Index is a no-code dashboard builder. We let users import data from multiple sources, remix it inside Index, and quickly get started w/ a set of pre-built templates.
Team: Xavier Pladevall - Co-founder & CEO, Eduardo Portet - Co-founder & CTO. We’ve been great friends since we were 3 years old. We grew up together in the Dominican Republic.
The Young Index cofounders together in childhood.
Recent Success:
Pladevall and Portet: We’ve had to get really good at being able to hold in our minds to two contradicting beliefs at the same time. On the one hand, we need to believe that we’re truly going to build a massive company that’s a category leader. On the other hand, we need to understand that given where we’re today we will die unless we fix everything that’s wrong or missing with our product. Over time we will find more evidence to support the former but hopefully, those two thoughts will always live in our minds because in all honesty, it’s what keeps us hungry.
Recent Struggle:
Pladevall and Portet: Scoping is hard. We both try really hard to figure out exactly what we should be building and make sure we’re as efficient as possible with our time. This is harder than what we initially expected because we always have more things that we’ve time to build and we tend to fall prey to planning fallacy. The second-order effect of this can be discouraging because you might doubt your own ability to execute and this is perhaps worse than being a few weeks behind schedule. We’ve addressed this by trying to build a tight feedback loop between planning → building → reflecting so that we make sure we can still experiment with different ideas but not spend too much time on something that is overkill.
Founder Advice:
Pladevall and Portet: Momentum is key. If you don’t have momentum try to find a way to get it. All of our progress to date has come from bursts of momentum that just compound over time. It’s easy to underestimate this idea of momentum if you haven’t experienced it but it becomes pretty clear how powerful it can be as soon as you find yourself hitting your stride. If we do things right, momentum will always precede the moments when you unlock certain milestones towards product-market fit. It’s the canary in the coal mine if you will.
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Pladevall and Portet: Here are three founders you should check out next!
Sara Du, Founder of Alloy: Alloy is a YC-backed eCommerce automation platform to help you reclaim time and focus on growth.
Parthi Loganathan, Founder of Letterdrop: Coming soon, they say!
Steven Fitzsimmons, Founder of Freshpaint: Freshpaint collects data from your website and sends it to your favorite marketing and analytics tools without writing code.
Who should I profile next? Leave your suggestion in the comments:
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