NotionTheory Founders Story

Startups are challenging, that’s the bare minimum. In the majority of cases you’re completely strapped and the odds are not in your favor - only 1 in every 10 startups succeed. Luckily, the team at NotionTheory has beaten those odds before and now provides companies with in-house expertise on building, validating, and delivering products to market in record time.Kristian Bouw & Mike Keung are the founders of NotionTheory—an in-house tech team for startups based in Washington, DC. Kristian is a serial founder turned full stack developer pursuing a degree part-time in Computational Physics. Mike is a former data maverick at Qualcomm where he led their marketing text mining efforts, and now leads development and predictive analytic efforts at NotionTheory.Eight years ago the two met as roommates and in 2010 ventured into their first startup together called Thryv, a client management platform for personal trainers. As most first-time founders do, they built the vision of the product they believed customers would want, rather than validating a first version of the product customers would demand. Ignorance clouded their judgement and instead of delivering a minimal four week product that focused on their core value proposition, they instead spent over a year building the “perfect” product before getting it into the customer's hand.In the trenches of a startup, you have to maximize the amount of information you can extract with the smallest investment possible. Needless to say, we know this now because we screwed up then. Thryv shut down 3 years later from its inception and while the primary offender was product validation, this wasn’t the only struggle we faced.We also witnessed firsthand when you lack a technical background, you’re limited to two options in getting your product built and delivered to market:1. Find a technical co-founder, which is next to impossible with today’s demand for technical talent or2. Outsource development where a lack of transparency often leads to absurd costs.Entrepreneurs have limited resources to pursue their dreams making every second and penny count. The day you start your company is the day the countdown timer begins; you have to do everything you can to extend the runway because once the clock strikes zero, you become a statistic.We knew early stage founders needed a cost-effective, quick turnaround solution to get a product to market and test if they had a viable business. They needed to learn whether they were solving the right problem, for the right customer and if those customers would pay for their solution. But even more important than the product itself, startups needed a stand-in CTO they could trust to manage the technical side of the equation so they could go forth with confidence in the product they delivered to customers.Keeping this vision as his north star, Kristian left for Washington, D.C. the very next day. He spent the first month couchsurfing wherever he could find a generous person with an empty sofa and in the first two weeks secured $20,000 of pre-sales to jumpstart the company. They validated the concept of product validation as a service and in less than 2 years of operating, NotionTheory has served as a stand-in CTO and helped over 28 companies deliver their products to market.Their road (or maze we should say) to success took years of dedication, perseverance, trial and error, but they also had a few supporters along the way. One who played a pivotal role in developing Kristian and Mike into formidable founders was Scott Moody, the co-founder of AuthenTech and K4 Connect. Moody saw the potential in these two scrappy entrepreneurs, taking them in after they closed Thryv and provided the essential mentorship they needed for growth and perseverance. It’s hard to know whether you’re headed down the right path and having a mentor who’s walked in your shoes before makes all the difference in allowing you to confidently move forward with the decisions you make, as Kristian did when he left for DC to validate an idea with nothing but a landing page and a duffel bag.NotionTheory has built a reputation for delivering high quality products in record time and is continually relied on as a stand-in CTO by startups and venture-backed companies alike. While they built their reputation with web and mobile applications, they’re expanding their palette of services to include hardware, wearable, and virtual reality product development.