I'm Cat Noone, founder of Stark, AMA! 🔥

@royal_rishav_malla_thakuri thanks a bunch!

@chen_reuven Thanks for this question on our USPs. They’re core to what make us successful. - Integration - Intelligence - Community - Content - Brand In no specific order ;) For starters, Stark’s vision is to make the world’s products accessible for everyone. To achieve that we need accessibility and compliance tools that meet designers, developers and product managers right where they work—baked into market-leading design and dev software, and have it connected to Stark’s AI-powered platform to offer seamless, assisted, and automated workflows that remove re-work, reduce cost and time to compliance for software companies, and increase customer satisfaction for end users. So a key differentiator from the beginning is that we baked ourselves right into the workflow and tools you already know and love. No more complex spreadsheets, old-school checkers, clunky workflows, misunderstanding of product dev processes. Instead, Stark empowers you to do intelligent contrast checking, instant color blindness simulation, and seamless auditing right in Figma, Adobe XD and Sketch. And soon, like I mentioned in a comment above, we’ll roll out our first developer integration as Stark moves away from being design-only to being the foundation for accessibility and compliance for the entire product development team. At Stark we want to lead the next generation of that accessibility technology—removing the dated thinking, approach, and technology so many have come to expect in this space. If we think of the process for product development for software in pillars, what Stark is doing isn’t for any particular pillar, but rather for the horizontal foundation that cuts across. Accessibility and Compliance are a byproduct––and a non-starter for bigger orgs now that accessibility/compliance is becoming par for the course throughout orgs at all stages. In addition to a suite of products, we’ve worked hard to create a community, content, and brand that delivers quality and value at all touch points. Anyone can build tech, we want to give you the platform and an entire community you can invest in because we all invest back.

@tallneil hmm I would say I generally pitched them the same. With the only differences being that the angel convos were inherently more lax. Institutional you know is going to be several meetings over time. With angels it was a virtually “coffee convo” and is much easier to read buy signals. Much easier in turn to “close” them right then in the meeting. In addition to that, they’re looking for different things so you’re pitching more team and mission at this stage. That’s the key difference. That’s what angels look for generally. Whereas institutions look for the same PLUS the heavy hitter questions (market size being one). Does this make sense? Happy to further clarify.

@tallneil @imcatnoone important to note: from my own experience and from others in the space this is EXTREMELY different for (white) men. Black people, specifically black women, have a significantly more difficult time. Not much “lax” to be had. A lot more proving needing to be done for black people (both men and women) and women in general. Not much room for not knowing your shit.