Esteban Dalel, CTO/Co-Founder of Watermelon Tools, raised $250k before getting their first customer and now has over 4,000 users. Get insight into how a scrappy team of two programmers got their first investors, users, and how they plan to get their first paying customers.
Show Links
- Watermelon Tools https://www.watermelontools.com/[1]
- Esteban Dalel LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/estebandalelr/[2]
- Apple Podcasts[3]
- Spotify[4]
- Google Podcasts[5]
- Amazon Music
- iHeart Radio[6]
- Radio Public[7]
Show Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically, please forgive misspelling or awkward phrases. The robots are doing their best.
Paris Vega (00:01.140)
welcome to the first customers podcast everybody today we have esteban de lal and he is the c t o and co founder of water melon tools and they raised two hundred and fifty thousand before getting their first customer and now they’ve got over four thousand users esteban welcome to the show
Esteban Dalel (00:22.351)
thank you thank you perry it’s great to be here
Paris Vega (00:25.800)
good to have you here thank you for making time for us today how did you get your very first let’s start with
Paris Vega (00:36.020)
investors and then go into users and then customers so how do you get your first investors because that’s a type of customer
Esteban Dalel (00:43.031)
yeah okay so let’s buck up we were i’ll go back to the original story of why water melons called water melon we started during the pandemic were two extra verts developers working in the same company and we were tired of not meeting new people like we wanted a beer wanted to go out and party and we honestly decided to take over the companies slack and start creating channels to meet people like
Paris Vega (00:45.300)
okay
Paris Vega (00:51.600)
let’s go
Esteban Dalel (01:13.451)
song of the day let’s watch serious and comment on it like book lub for serious um we had buldible thing that when crazy uh and after a few harcame to us until this like we love what you’re doing you’ve got to stop doing it it’s getting out of hand we’re going to do it from now on and we got together had a couple of years and noticed that we could productise this
Paris Vega (01:37.380)
yeah
Esteban Dalel (01:43.531)
so that’s when water mellen is born as a company group creator that helps companies connect for remote workers we were a remote company and we started talking to people in linkedin they liked it but as we were talking to a char they wanted to be in control of what was the themes but if you’re going to talk about the latest release
that’s work stuff you don’t want to be in a group that talks more about work stuff so it didn’t work out but we noticed that my my describing herself
Esteban Dalel (02:29.871)
and in okay you didn’t want to be in a group that talked more about were afterward right so we noticed that that wasn’t the route we wanted to take but we found out we could work together so we went to miami hot week which is a crypto hackerton after talking to a lot of developer friends to figure out the problem that they had the biggest pain on
Paris Vega (02:37.780)
right
Esteban Dalel (02:59.691)
and they all told us pretty much the same thing nobody documents code and we asked do you document code no i don’t so nobody thought you would go that was the answer and we started coding thing to automatically document code we started applying to accelegrators in the hackton it was a week long so we were rushing and by the end of the hakathone we had small little thing that were on his code to help developers
right documentation um and an accelerator here in america contacted us and said that we were in gave us our first hundred thousand just one promise just on the power points and the people on the hakathandunloading our extension
Paris Vega (03:49.600)
that’s really cool
Esteban Dalel (03:50.851)
thank you
Paris Vega (03:52.340)
um and so you raised a little bit more after that how did you raise that additional those additional funds
Esteban Dalel (03:58.331)
um okay the first time that allowed us quit and we on this full time we change the idea a little more because documentation wasn’t the way it was more about transmitting ideas from one ring to another telepathy is how we like to call it um because nobody likes reading documentation either so we had to think about something else after demode we raise a little money from like memory
investors and we got popular in japan like a week before m de day we think it’s because of the cute waterman with huge animas we have a log we think we like to think it’s about that but we actually can’t reach japanese so we’re not totally sure so we raised like fifty from those angels on
Paris Vega (04:53.580)
paul is really really quick so where were they able to download the waterman tools to interact with it was it on get hub okay got you okay
Esteban Dalel (05:02.071)
in the in the vis code marketplace think about it like going to get help and clicking cloudreple you get at that that’s pretty much it and insult on the on the side bar of the i v the integrated development environment so you’re looking at code and there was water melon um and we start noticing that more people from america we get popular and twitter were popular and read it and a lot of people are in america and were
Paris Vega (05:10.000)
got you
Paris Vega (05:16.780)
yeah yeah
Paris Vega (05:21.280)
okay
Esteban Dalel (05:31.951)
serving that market because we’re in latin we have the team same times we do speak english but we have to be here in the states to be able to actually serve it so we start looking at the options we applied to why and get rejected we applied to why c with doing the context thing with a i and they said like it’s not going to work nobody’s trained up good enough a i this was way before chap so
Paris Vega (05:38.160)
hm
Paris Vega (05:59.460)
right right
Esteban Dalel (06:02.211)
right now of course we intergretatit like in a week yeah m i got accepted into taxursmiami so we’re now head quartered in miami they gave us a hundred k we’re half way through the program right now and we’re launching new stuff like every week it’s been crazy we’re moving so fast
Paris Vega (06:03.640)
co pilot
Paris Vega (06:13.480)
awesome
Paris Vega (06:24.800)
so give us a little insight into the like technical co founder lifestyle because you hear you know there’s like stereotypes of how much effort it goes into i mean you see like young guy you you’ve probably not got a whole life built out yet so you’ve got a bunch of time to put into this what’s it like like what is what’s the demand on your time like how much how much time do you work a day on this projec
Esteban Dalel (06:49.411)
okay so i have a hard time tracking it because sometimes i wake up like at six a m and start coding then go walk my dog come back for breakfast and not do anything that day so like one hour and some days it’s sunday and i’m watching the clicks and i turn off the t v and sit down and code all the way till the sun comes up again so i would say that because of yeah i’m young and i don’t have a wife i don’t have a gerfrencurnly the only thing that
Paris Vega (07:11.680)
hm
Esteban Dalel (07:19.151)
takes out where my time is eating going to jim and my dog so pretty much any time i’m not doing that i’m thinking about watermelon h you’re supposed to not be your start up but it’s two persons start up and we’re doing very good with two people so whenever i’m not working fifty percent of the company is doing nothing so it’s heavy on my brain
Paris Vega (07:23.440)
yeah
Paris Vega (07:32.780)
right
Paris Vega (07:39.360)
right
Paris Vega (07:42.040)
sure so literally most of your time you’re working on the project
Esteban Dalel (07:47.131)
yeah any time i’m awake the gem like pulling weights i’m thinking about like the the product thing i left a bug over there i’m going to go fix these send this email all the time all the time
Paris Vega (08:00.800)
okay so the dream is um go from where you are now and you said you have about four thousand users but right now you don’t have actual paying customers you said so talk a little bit about how you guys play on going from four thousand users to paid customers
Esteban Dalel (08:18.951)
okay i’m going to be blown here developers are as holes getting a developer to pray for anything is very hard like you know that in netflaxes they even pay for their spotify you can buy books on the netflas car it’s crazy like we get the best breaks in the world so getting a developer to pull out their own car and paid for anything is very hard and developer tools always start by getting a critical mass to move
Paris Vega (08:20.600)
okay
Paris Vega (08:26.440)
sure
Paris Vega (08:34.040)
all right
Esteban Dalel (08:48.751)
with the tool to create a product that every developer would like to work with and move up to the manager for them to buy it so that’s a story of tile that’s a story of cloud flor that’s a story of get lab the big names have all gone that way and we have to do it that’s the play book
Paris Vega (08:58.220)
okay
Paris Vega (09:06.260)
interesting
Paris Vega (09:09.180)
right
Paris Vega (09:11.280)
okay so what do you think is critical mass for your tool how many users
Esteban Dalel (09:16.711)
honestly we think that after ten thousand downloads we have grape on how to do this properly we’re getting more and more people to try our product and we’re removing the pawl we noticed that having on pale doesn’t work so we’re going to it out for three differ product up to a point like you can only use it fifty times a month or some number we haven’t decided but you get the whole experience right you know the whole
Paris Vega (09:44.840)
okay
Esteban Dalel (09:46.271)
you’re going to tell your manager like hey i was doing it with this tool but they need my credit card please give me the credit card that’s how we go about it
Paris Vega (09:52.460)
yeah right so kind of like how chat g p t for example a recent example of something that launched for free got a lot of people hooked on it because it was such a powerful tool for some people and then eased into hey now there’s a pro version for even more reliability or performance or whatever upset to those pro level features and a lot of people like me i was glad to swipe the
a card because i was like man this is super useful for me um for lots of different reasons and so i easily swiped for twenty bucks or whatever the chat g p t f is and so i guess it’s that same kind of thing like you want to become so ingrained into a developers process of doing their daily job um that it’s of course type decision they’re like well yeah i just have to keep having this or have this next level feature that they’re launching or whatever it is
Esteban Dalel (10:47.391)
yeah
Esteban Dalel (10:51.211)
literally we want to be able to win the scream test you know that when you disconnect a service and so when screams you know it’s required so we want to be that like when we pull the plug are you going o jell or are you going to be like oh okay we don’t want that they okay we want like you to be stock to go take a walk after like how do we solve this i need water mill water used to be like this like whenever compiler to sound
Paris Vega (10:57.600)
oh yeah okay okay
Paris Vega (11:08.000)
yeah
Esteban Dalel (11:21.351)
my brain goes into panic i know about to search and ungogle but it’s so easy there so easy
Paris Vega (11:25.680)
yeah
Paris Vega (11:27.920)
and so co pilot you’re referring to the the a i like coding assistant tool that hub has where it will help fill out as you code it will predict what you’re trying to code and a lot of times it helps fill in yeah
Esteban Dalel (11:32.231)
yeah
Esteban Dalel (11:39.651)
yeah it’s very good they say get help that like fifty percent of the code that has been uploaded in the last like years since capelle was released has been written by copilot so half the code that has been sent out by developers is a mate
Paris Vega (11:57.920)
wow
Esteban Dalel (11:59.171)
we’ve become like approvers of the a i more than anything so i think it’s great i think that’s great because people that used to write i don’t know ten features a week count of write fifteen so it’s not about lines of code like everyone knows how to make a button but that’s not where the value is what does the button do where does it take me is hit faster for me to pay with these new buttons that’s the kind of thing that the new features are going to
Paris Vega (12:04.900)
yeah
Paris Vega (12:12.280)
right
Paris Vega (12:15.000)
yeah
Paris Vega (12:19.860)
right
Paris Vega (12:25.740)
yeah
Esteban Dalel (12:29.351)
so we want water mill to be that we have a lot of designed partners i cannot give you names but we got a couple series a startups that are using our product inside them that we on’t charge to but they are like on a free plan the whole team is useagainand they re loving it
Paris Vega (12:36.000)
yeah
Paris Vega (12:49.560)
well so eventually are you going to do like hey it’s a price per set or something like that
Esteban Dalel (12:58.651)
we always say it’s thirty dollars per person per month if you pay by the year you pay less but imagine this like you’re saving your developers two meetings a week and at the price point of developers time that’s a lot of money per person
Paris Vega (13:14.500)
right for sure okay so let’s so now we’ve talked about kind of your initial story and the kind of overall goals of of where you’re at users wives customers wise let’s go a little deeper into what it actually does what your company does what the tool you’ve built actually does because we’re kind of talking around it now and why would your tool water melon save a developer two meetings a week
Esteban Dalel (13:42.691)
okay the worst case in aria is your remote distributed company and the people in your team are in japan in portugal san francisco and brazil right like that’s the worst case in ari everyone is everywhere you’re so far away one person has a question and it has to go like two any four hours around the globe before everyone has had their safe and if they have a follow question you’ve lost half the week without work that’s the absolute word
Paris Vega (13:57.640)
right
Paris Vega (14:11.940)
right
Esteban Dalel (14:12.531)
scenario so people are terrible at searching honestly and people are lazy like it could have been in your slack for days and you wouldn’t have found it because you don’t know exactly how to search for it we do that digging for you in gera and slag were bringing in more services like every other week
Paris Vega (14:14.380)
yeah
Paris Vega (14:34.320)
and so if i’m a developer and i just glanced at your site and says it gives code context and you can like high light a block of code and basically somehow get insight into everything related to that piece of code can you maybe give a really specific example like i’m a developer working on home page of a website working on a specific feature
Esteban Dalel (14:41.731)
yeah
Esteban Dalel (14:52.311)
yeah
Esteban Dalel (14:58.031)
let’s say let’s say you had a bag with the american express cards you’re looking at the code that posits american express so we’re going to search everywhere that says american express cards building um it has like for digits anything that has four digits in text everywhere is sex right any request that has it any slackness is that has it and we’re going to surface it eventually you’re going to be able to get into the conversation of why
Paris Vega (15:05.320)
all right
Paris Vega (15:24.560)
m
Esteban Dalel (15:27.851)
like we cannot handle american express carts property someone has had this fight before and they can probably solve it so it’s like talking to the ghost of the person uh and bringing in those ideas
Paris Vega (15:40.000)
yeah so it’s like okay so it’s almost like a universal search tool for any piece of code in your project and i’ll search across all of your apps that you use to communicate or deal with the code and give you results across everything that’s connected okay okay
Esteban Dalel (15:49.751)
yeah yeah
Esteban Dalel (15:56.231)
yeah precisely precisely and you we’re moving on to like we started in your code and now we’re moving on like we are serving right now jes like an get help we want you to be able to search in gera in slack and get help across all the other services so you’re always in a contextual context
Paris Vega (16:16.660)
who so is that like through a like a browser extension or something how would you achieve that
Esteban Dalel (16:24.571)
we have as for every service and we’ve thought about like an extension but it’s a little far for so we’re think about like where does the developer actually live so we’re like primarily using keyboard
Paris Vega (16:27.160)
okay
Paris Vega (16:31.620)
okay
Paris Vega (16:42.480)
hot keys okay
Esteban Dalel (16:42.611)
hot keys yeah thank you deeper hotkeys we’re moving like to make the services faster with a strong caching it’s very complicated like er r are hard to serve so if we can serve the hardest developers the most annoying ones the rock starts we can serve the other ninety nine percent right and everyone’s going to be benefited like people from marketing are going to be able to know it
Paris Vega (16:57.580)
right
Esteban Dalel (17:12.451)
what state is this piece of code that i requested and why did they remove it why did they change it why did the team talk about it that they didn’t include us in so it’s gonna be context for everyone in the company that’s a dream
Paris Vega (17:31.740)
okay also providing more context all right and so that’s why it saves like developer meetings because instead of having to talk to all these people you can just search through all the conversations that have happened and all the activity that’s happened and probably answer a lot more questions and reduce the amount of meetings or slack messages you’d have to send and so that means less interruptions of everybody’s time everybody can stay in flow and keep being productive and not having to
you know re align themselves and get back into what they were working on okay
Esteban Dalel (18:07.291)
you brought you brought a thing that we love to say like our biggest competitor is the tap on the shoulder that is when two people get together and can actually look at the same screen use the same keyboard that’s when you’re like transmitting the best ideas because you see their faces you’re moving your brain to the other person so in a remote world that it’s where everyone is going to m w
Paris Vega (18:14.660)
m
Esteban Dalel (18:36.911)
are going to be the tool that all companies used to communicate without interrupting others
Paris Vega (18:42.900)
wow water melon tools okay
Paris Vega (18:49.380)
and are you like ramping up for more fun raising taking on more investors um what’s kind of your current goals as far as that one thing
Esteban Dalel (18:59.091)
yes yes we dream with being what kind of story a company that gets huge with very few people by hiring the correct ones only we’re going to raise big money very soon i’m not available to say big money very soon to get to that point
Paris Vega (19:12.720)
okay
Paris Vega (19:19.560)
yeah that’s fine
Esteban Dalel (19:28.931)
trying to get customers right now and designed partners especially big companies that have pains that we can solve to create a product for for them and then like pended for everybody that’s our target right now where we’re moving fast faster actually now that we have more money in the bank and not using it honestly
Paris Vega (19:56.380)
so you’re just surviving going to the gym getting back to the code
Esteban Dalel (20:01.971)
that’s that’s the start of life like it is started in a garage i like having an office but this is software like i only need a keyboard a good screen and my head phones to get into the flow and build a world class product it takes a lot of time a lot of effort a lot of zoom coals with customers but i mean i don’t consider myself the smartest person in the room like it
Paris Vega (20:04.560)
yeah
Esteban Dalel (20:31.691)
a lot of great
Paris Vega (20:33.420)
yeah
Esteban Dalel (20:34.611)
it takes a while to learn how to code but you can now coded now we chose to do something that we enjoy as founder we have found er market fit we we’re developers and we like solving developer problems just like we were extra verts solving extravert problems and we’re not getting tired of this that’s why we want to have money in the bank to be able to do this like for years and years and years
Paris Vega (21:03.440)
that’s cool so you’re dedicated to the craft of building software and being a programmer
Esteban Dalel (21:08.571)
yeah the heart art is selling like you know developers always like to build solutions and then they have to go out and sell it and panic but luckily i’m an extra bert and well i feel no shame in telling you like hey i sell it right now we’re charging but it’s going to cost you thirty bugs starting i don’t know jude and people are going to be like sure i just meant the guy just unload and it’s going now bow into eventually them trying it out having a high moment
Paris Vega (21:09.640)
if you ever read the yeah
Paris Vega (21:17.620)
exactly
Esteban Dalel (21:38.931)
and actually knowing like hate these worries i don’t what it is because i like the guy but the thing works and that’s our goal right now
Paris Vega (21:49.520)
that’s exactly why i started this podcast is because i’ve come from a design and development background back in the day and been a part of a lot of small projects or trying to start my own project and then you build something or you work on something or you help launch something you quoting what launch it where it exists somewhere on the internet but nobody cares you know like nobody knows exists nobody knows what you’ve been doing in the dark
you know heads down just making stuff and so there’s that moment where i’ve realized on past projects i was like oh well just because this exists doesn’t mean customers automatically you’re going to flock to you you have to do something between finishing your product or the first version you know that m v p or whatever it is that just works or solves a problem and there’s something that has to happen between that and convincing that first person to give you money and that’s what this whole show is about is the something in between
Esteban Dalel (22:32.531)
yeah
Paris Vega (22:49.420)
they’re what are people doing to build that connection between hey we got a product of service and now we’ve convinced the humans who actually give us money for it
Esteban Dalel (22:58.651)
yeah they say build it and there will come that’s both that’s vot like you can have a terrible product but when in distribution like i don’t know cretlist or wikipedia which are horrible products like wait they renewed wikipedia but that was like a year ago like very recent but they were horrible products that just worked and people loved them because they worked and they want in distribution wikipediis the first result pretty much any time you search and go
Paris Vega (23:01.660)
yeah
Esteban Dalel (23:28.511)
but correct list was simply like the college student thing and when they graduated college they kept on using it um face book beat my space because they were like exclusive at the beginning so yes distribution beats product anywhere if you have a decent product you can win on a decent product with great distribution but you cannot win on a mediocre distribution with a great product
Paris Vega (23:35.660)
hm
Paris Vega (23:49.180)
yeah
Paris Vega (23:59.320)
all right so maybe talk a little bit about how you’re planning to make that transition because you’re at that point you’ve got users which type of customer for sure um but like you’re saying you’re just trying to hit critical mass to where it makes sense to start charging people or risk charging people because i know you might be concerned about losing users or whatever but talk about maybe some strategy or tactics you guys have talked about about how to make that
Paris Vega (24:30.280)
that cross over
Esteban Dalel (24:31.391)
sure free products are a very complicated thing like you got to know when the free part is too good and people are like abusing it where to turn it premium so i love the ample of the spotifie because you’re like they give you three songs and they only let this keep and every three song songs they give you and with the spotifiepremium you can bloblallala you’re like buying coding how
Paris Vega (24:42.220)
yeah
Esteban Dalel (25:01.751)
or like in the game and then you get the damn it i’m going to pay for it was by being so good because if you had four songs you could get through the whole shower without and a right like that’s where the cut up happens so you gotta be measuring all the time you got to understand your users psyche their brain when when it relaxes and just before that happens you pull up right you dangle the cook in front of them just
enough to make them go for the credit card so it’s a very complicated balance between um not pay walling because that’s probably what happens with me or times anyone shares you an article you read the headline you read the first paragraph and you have no idea what what it was about you close it and the don’t want to discuss it so they’re becoming this since this journalist thing that just gives create headlines without any kind
Paris Vega (25:32.820)
yeah
Esteban Dalel (26:01.351)
and um unlike you do like you get through have the video and then they pull it out so freezing products are very hard and you should start something that you don’t have to balance this out like start telling from the beginning
Paris Vega (26:02.380)
yeah
Paris Vega (26:20.640)
so do you guys have you considered like a enterprise approach like b to be style because i know like you’re saying freemium you know is one of the hardest like direct consumer and you mentioned that you know you’re trying to maybe go after managers somehow because it it does seem easier when you’re going out b to b because you don’t have to have you know serving all these customers with some product that has to work for whatever millions or hundreds of thousands of people you can just
kind of cater those initial features to those fewer higher paying customers
Esteban Dalel (26:57.411)
well yeah but going for the big players is a different beast um going for a big player it requires like several people to approve the butt yet see people to be sold to m you have to have like security things they’re not going to trust a company that was created a year ago by two random guys on the internet so yes we’ve considered it but we know that we’re not ready for it it’s gonna this
Paris Vega (27:02.540)
yeah
Esteban Dalel (27:27.551)
or moral and that’s the thing inside teams like growth heals wounds if you’re fighting you founder go out and sell and make your company work you’re going to see fighting or you’re going to change the fight for something else right you’re gonna be discussing analytic and suddenly you’re going to be discussing revenue and you’re goin to be talking about nice stuff in between the fights and eventually it’s gonna be about that so go for the right
Paris Vega (27:31.660)
yeah
Paris Vega (27:54.420)
yeah
Esteban Dalel (27:58.231)
level that you’re able to tolerate would be my recommendation we decided that we don’t go full corporate yet we don’t go for anyone over a hundred people and we mean people which means teams of development of fifty or less so we’re serving these nice where we know we can handle their problems they’re starting to paying the paying the big corporate
Paris Vega (28:12.320)
yeah
Esteban Dalel (28:27.411)
different pains and different ways of scratching their itches so not yet
Paris Vega (28:32.420)
yeah all right
Paris Vega (28:37.440)
so you’re looking at the kind of mass approach going after lots of different users
Paris Vega (28:49.140)
are there any other kind of tactics or oh that’s right you mentioned that you can you go out and sell you know if there’s a frustration or something you go out and sell and you’ve gotten four thousand users or more right now what type of selling are you doing is it just hey it exists in the market place are you running any adds with some of that money or you know what is the selling that you’re doing
Esteban Dalel (29:12.811)
okay going out go out and sell means a lot of things for a lot of different companies in our case and wearing a pink sweater to anywhere go so people ask me hey what the hell is water mill and i stand up there and pitch them in thirty seconds in a restaurant in bears in developer events anywhere i can pitch it’s an opportunity for me to get a sell right so i post a lot on twitter and i like retited from the
Paris Vega (29:17.060)
right
Paris Vega (29:24.660)
okay
Esteban Dalel (29:43.051)
water my own account i go out to link in and start hitting random people with the pitch um i go out and have stickers and like knock on offices and give out stickers it’s crazy like if i don’t feel like coating i’m gonna still be selling because it helps me communicate my ideas better you have to expose yourself to the nose to be able to see
Paris Vega (29:56.460)
really
Esteban Dalel (30:13.111)
into this yes it’s it’s hard i know like being in front of people is hard singing in front of an audience is hard but you got to do it that’s how you make a business
Paris Vega (30:28.380)
interesting because normally you know i don’t think for myself at least i don’t think of a developer tool is something that gets sold manually like you’re saying but it makes sense that you’ll definitely get an edge and you’ll get more customers if you do that because i think maybe there’s this stereotype of this kind of idea of how text start ups get started launched and grow and it’s like some
a mixture of social media or getting hot or viral on some you know dead form or hack or news or you know some something like that like where you like there’s just these few paths so that’s really cool to hear you using every old school tactic you can think of to just literally go to person to person sales to say hey go download down load or ap or tool and try it out
is that kind of how the pitch goes or how do you do it
Esteban Dalel (31:30.791)
yeah i mean there the channels or fedora everyone wants to be in the top of hacker news everyone wants to go and read it and become popular everyone wants to be a product on number one so it’s you’re competing for attention that people don’t have any more so either you’re tiktok super star and create the best beams for twitter or you do it the hard way and well we haven’t gotten lucky with being popular and ready
Paris Vega (31:34.600)
right
Paris Vega (31:38.780)
yeah
Paris Vega (31:41.240)
sure
Esteban Dalel (32:00.851)
the japanese read it but not the american one so um you gotta do the foot work whatever it is like if you’re very good at doing at on facebook you go on ahead yue gotta figure out you’re going to test it out because people are not gonna know about this random lead like there’s millions of companies out there you’re not you’ve never heard of and distribution wins
Paris Vega (32:04.340)
yeah
Esteban Dalel (32:30.951)
distribution always wins you got to be the best at putting your company in people’s eyes so that’s why you see like bill boards of the night logo just with the night legal always been thinking about our shoes always so that’s where what you want to do
Paris Vega (32:42.800)
yeah
Paris Vega (32:50.400)
okay so you’re trying to make the little animate watermelon everywhere everywhere you can get it
Esteban Dalel (32:54.551)
uh yeah yeah yeah
Paris Vega (32:59.260)
okay so you did say that some of the types of sales and marketing you’re doing you’re posting everywhere you can on social media sounds like and just kind of a shot gun approach of just trying everything just to see what gets traction so that you can see what works and i think that’s cool how you’re using your own kind of personal rhythms like coding most of the day you need to break perfect time to go get some human action and take advantage of that to do a little sales so do you go to
like do you intentionally say i’m going to go to so many like developer events or conferences or like net working things
Esteban Dalel (33:37.911)
yes yes i go to the most again
Esteban Dalel (33:44.311)
luckily i’m told and seeing a tall guy with a pink sweater like open up conversation super ly uh so i thought about painting my head like red and green water man read that would that would start conversation a lot um but yes i mean start up is a merican if you’re lucky it’s gonna be come a sprint and you’re gonna be super
Paris Vega (33:53.360)
you can get a tattoo on your forehead of a water melon
Paris Vega (34:04.740)
yeah for sure
Esteban Dalel (34:14.211)
are in the first five months but in most cases either you go down or you become popular if the fifth year right so you got to hold on to that you cannot destroy yourself in the process the hustled culture has told us that you need to get to first hundred lovers in your first month holy ship now actually sleep people are gonna be there next month to a yes
Paris Vega (34:42.020)
yeah right
Esteban Dalel (34:44.131)
it’s important but if you destroy yourself there’s no more company as a founder so you’ve got to be careful about the balance i do recommend excertising and taking some on every day and talking to customers you want customers money it’s great raising money but that’s just like for flaunting it best the best companies are the ones that are
Paris Vega (34:50.780)
exactly
Esteban Dalel (35:14.131)
self sustainable and you make pay roll every month raising money puts a lot of stress in your life that will help you destroy yourself
Paris Vega (35:26.140)
for sure yeah hustle culture can definitely it can kill you for sure depending on how you interpret it and your own personal ambition you can definitely drive yourself to an early grave um so that’s good that you’re focusing on exercise and a little bit of balance so all right you got this tool out there anybody can download it i guess from your website
Esteban Dalel (35:55.811)
yeah from the website and on the vscode market place we’re gonna be soon in the market place gransnack to look for the happy water melon with the huge ice
Paris Vega (36:09.460)
all right and do you yourself and your co founder are you the only ones that handle like marketing related task like posting on social media are you kind of like building in public kind of like peter levels if you’re familiar
Esteban Dalel (36:27.331)
yeah yeah levels is a great example of a person that has created things by himself crazy guy i love the guy we have free lancers helping us goes right to be able to post all the time we of course look at it and edit it to make it sound like us
Paris Vega (36:34.040)
right
Esteban Dalel (36:50.111)
because the blank canvas is very hard but yes it’s us handling everything moving fast thinking a lot trying out new things fighting amongst ourselves without telling anybody it’s hard it’s hard having got co founder is very hard it’s worse than being married because there’s a contract that will make you very poor if you break it
Paris Vega (36:53.020)
sure
Paris Vega (37:04.600)
uh uh
Esteban Dalel (37:20.111)
so
Esteban Dalel (37:22.611)
you got to be careful about you you pick to be your co founder and you should honestly balance out your strength you should have similar things be able to sit next to each other for for a long time but one person and this is like sort of bookish the hustler and the hacker have to get together some one has to be able to go out and sell and the other one has to be able to sit down built so
Esteban Dalel (37:52.551)
it’s better if both can do both but you’ve got to be specializing one thing you kind of be thinking about two things at the same time selling is very very hard very time consuming building is very very hard very time consuming so it’s not better to be one of the or the other
Paris Vega (38:07.600)
yeah
Paris Vega (38:12.500)
so how is your specific co founder relationship are you the you’re the c to so i’m guessing that the other one is is it design focused or business or what’s their focus okay
Esteban Dalel (38:23.771)
he’s a business guy he actually actually went for computer science in college he went for business in college we met in hakathon we didn’t like each other honestly the first because we were both extraverts fighting for an attention so we didn’t like each other but we kept bumping into each other and after we graduated college we were super best friends we had to organize a lot of parties we had created like a
roup of people that talked about start up during their free time for the whole college so like a club and we actually went separate ways and then came back i invested in his company he was working with another friend they went broke and then i started working with the guy we became roommates after college i rented out of place and he got
a room for it and that we played up again he went to bitnambut when we had already worked in by mon for a few months and we could actually test out what remote companies have to suffer the most literally it was a twelve hour difference so our product had to be that good for us to be able to work in that super difficult situation
Paris Vega (39:51.800)
because you are rarely online probably at the same time
Esteban Dalel (39:54.511)
yeah we we only talked about on now we’re a week face to face yet
Paris Vega (40:00.800)
so you’re using your own tool to help overcome that
Esteban Dalel (40:03.211)
yeah that’s very important dog footing using your own product is very important it’s cool that you bill for someone else but if you don’t feel the pain you’re not going to know where to put the bandit right you’re not going to find the bugs you’re not going to find the yeah the pain is not going to be there you’re gonna be looking at it and be in pathetic but it’s not your pain you can just walk out
Paris Vega (40:14.460)
yeah
Paris Vega (40:27.440)
yeah
Paris Vega (40:29.620)
okay cool and so does does he program at all or is it just okay so you both okay
Esteban Dalel (40:34.131)
yeah yeah he has he has his milita tasks
Paris Vega (40:40.400)
that’s interesting it’s always interesting to hear the dynamics of co founders and how you know which how the task get broken up
Esteban Dalel (40:47.871)
that’s the thing like he he talks more to the customers i hunt for the very hard developers that i want a cater to he goes with the bulk of people right so we’re putting together the idea the hard developer and the average one because we got to serve a little for everybody but we’re focusing
on several use cases um and you got to talk to them all the time so he will bring in a lot of ideas and i will filter them and sometimes i will pop out a lot of problems and he will filter them so i’m building and he’s selling and we’re going to we’ve different forces on different sides that hold each other accountable on properly prioritizing our time does he
Paris Vega (41:40.780)
yeah
Esteban Dalel (41:47.411)
think that we have the least stuff
Paris Vega (41:50.660)
yeah
Paris Vega (41:53.020)
well esteban appreciate your sharing your time with us or let you get back to coding here in a second let’s say pretend really quick that we got a room of another ten thousand of your target customers listening and they’re waiting on you to tell them why they should use your product
Esteban Dalel (42:12.011)
you’re going to be saving your developers headaches and race quitting every other day so your developers are going to be in a better mood and are going build faster by using water melon you’re going to be having a better place to work
Paris Vega (42:30.280)
all right and once again you can find water melon tools on waterman melon tools dot com and you mentioned vs cod market place and then the other market place is coming soon okay al right esteban thanks for being with us today man i appreciate it
Esteban Dalel (42:44.091)
yeah precisely
Esteban Dalel (42:49.231)
thanks a lot paris for having me it’s been great
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