Engineering Founders

Lessons from building in public & re-discovering product-market fit w/ Charley Ho & Alexander Embiricos

Episode Summary

Charley Ho (Co-Founder & CTO) & Alexander Embiricos (Co-Founder & CEO) @ Remotion share their co-founder story, along with how they found, lost, and rediscovered product-market fit throughout their journey with Remotion. We cover what it’s like building in public & their decision to be transparent with their co-founder ups and downs. Additionally, Charley & Alexander share strategies for pivoting / iterating and communicating with stakeholders, while keeping your team up-to-date and engaged with pivots. We caught up 4x months after our interview to learn the results of their big pivots and PMF experiments - so this is one you want to listen to all the way to the end.

Episode Notes

Charley Ho (Co-Founder & CTO) & Alexander Embiricos (Co-Founder & CEO) @ Remotion share their co-founder story, along with how they found, lost, and rediscovered product-market fit throughout their journey with Remotion. We cover what it’s like building in public & their decision to be transparent with their co-founder ups and downs. Additionally, Charley & Alexander share strategies for pivoting / iterating and communicating with stakeholders, while keeping your team up-to-date and engaged with pivots. We caught up 4x months after our interview to learn the results of their big pivots and PMF experiments - so this is one you want to listen to all the way to the end.

ABOUT CHARLEY HO

Charley Ho (@potatoarecool) is the Co-Founder and CTO of Remotion, a virtual office that puts your hybrid-remote team right on your desktop. Before Remotion, Charley was an early engineer at Bebop, a startup that was acquired by Google. Charley has a BS & MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

"There's like a really intoxicating idea of just one more bug fix, just one more critical blocking feature and suddenly everything's gonna change because we know our users love it so much. We fell into that pattern a little like super easily, probably because we're such heavy dog fooders."

- Charley Ho  

ABOUT ALEXANDER EMBIRICOS

Alexander Embiricos is cofounder and CEO at Remotion. Prior to starting Remotion with Charley, he fell in love with desktop software while working as a PM at Dropbox. He studied Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering at Stanford, where he met Charley. Alexander lives in Brooklyn, New York where you might find him exploring new foods or on the badminton courts. He swears by charging your phone outside the bedroom.

"There was this growing dissonance between how we felt about what we were building and how we felt about the progress of the product. There was this tension between stay the course and keep going versus, ‘Hey, the metrics don't lie and they're not good. We're not going quickly enough. One more iteration isn't gonna help it. We need to make bigger changes.

- Alexander Embiricos   

ABOUT REMOTION

Remotion is a fresh take on Zoom that makes any app collaborative like Figma. It's great for pair coding or debugging, but why stop there? Remotion improves all your engineering team's internal calls, with support for 40 participants on Zoom's video infrastructure. 

Here's a short video of their updated product vision

Check out their change log for the latest core feature releases

If you're interested in joining their closed beta - send us a message at hello@sfelc.com and we'll connect you!

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SHOW NOTES:

LINKS AND RESOURCES

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/