At South by Southwest, Brian pitched our idea to Michael, the CEO of Justin.tv, who offered to introduce us to angel investors.

We built the Twilio prototype in about four months, and early customers provided encouragement by building interesting ideas on the platform, validating our direction.

We aimed to launch our improved service in three months, incorporating payments and reviews to enhance user experience, and we launched our service just weeks before a major event, listing 800 properties to help locals make extra money during the influx of visitors.

We launched our closed beta on Twitter, which rapidly increased our followers from 50 to 10,000 and attracted 150,000 unique visitors a day.

We realized we would never feel ready to launch, so we set a date and worked hard for four months to prepare for it.

After we fully committed to Discord, we figured out how to make it work within four weeks, demonstrating the importance of focus and conviction in a startup.

We targeted major events like the Democratic National Convention and the World Cup to bootstrap our growth, focusing on PR and word of mouth.

When we realized our competitors were shipping faster, we shifted our approach to product development, setting ambitious goals like building 25 new features in one month to drive innovation and focus.

I decided to pursue my startup idea because it kept gaining momentum, despite the challenges I faced. I set up my startup as a four-week test to validate my idea without high expectations.