Relay - A diverse, context-rich second brain for SaaS startups

Hey PH community, very excited to share Relay with you today! :)) We are building Relay with a belief that there are many ways of building a startup and all of them uniquely challenging and interesting. Many founders questioning long-held playbooks and ways of doing things. These stories are often not documented and not given as much space as they deserve, we are hoping to change this with Relay, through contextual, diverse conversations that do justice to the "day-to-day of starting up", as a founder once shared. Excited to hear your thoughts.

Thank you, @jamesjgill, for the hunt and for your amazing support! :)) Hey PH, I’m Krish, one of the co-founders at Chargebee. Incredibly excited to share Relay — a diverse, community-driven second brain for SaaS founders or, as someone recently put it, their go-to anti-library. Curated with an immense love for SaaS and a singular belief that there’s no one way to build a business. Tl;dr, on Relay, you can find: 🙌 Exhaustively (and endearingly) context-driven AMAs where founders reflect on past choices, paradoxes, hard-won points-of-view, and the uniquely inspiring journeys they’ve crafted. ✨ Incisive interviews where up-and-coming founders question standard playbooks, share how they adapt inventively based on constraints, and document the think and feel of starting up today. All rooted in fostering a thoughtful, cross-path dialogue — between bootstrapped and VC folks and those who’ve been both, exceptionally lean teams and big ones, those who got acquired and those who never want to exit, and other such distinctions — across founding philosophies. 😇 And now, a little backstory for the PH curious: “Whatever else anything is,” to invoke You’ve Got Mail’s Kathleen Kelly, “it ought to begin by being personal.” More than a decade ago now, a good bunch of our first ahas on starting up came straight from New York City via Joel Spolsky’s irreverent, always insightful blog posts on building software businesses. FogBugz (the venture Joel was documenting back then) was very different from how Chargebee has turned out, in a lot of ways. Even Joel’s background, plus the constraints and challenges he was dealing with, were certainly different from ours. Yet, those very distinctions helped us make sense of some of our early decisions. Because Joel’s reflections were always context-driven and never abstract/prescriptive. That allowed us to model insights onto our own goals. And we’ve carried that lens ever since as we’ve sought helpful advice from many different founders around the world. We wanted to build Relay because we believe that kind of access for founders is either hard to discover, scattered across crowded forums or increasingly troubled by: 1) an ever-strong presence of camps that precisely dictate how companies must/must not be built, the paths founders can/cannot pursue, and what is/isn’t deemed a success, 2) and within these camps, for inexplicable reasons, we keep hearing from the same set of names again and again. What if, as Referral Rock’s Josh Ho noted recently, we were “open to all roads”? What if we could learn from the unheard struggles and inner battles that have dotted the very public wins of senior founders? What if we were privy to refreshing insights from the 100s of SaaS founders starting out each year and not just the loudest 20? It gladdens me to write that we’ve had the privilege of documenting many such diverse and thoughtful founder journeys: To circle back to FogBugz, Trello’s @michaelpryor recounted how “none of it is easy.” ProdPad’s Janna Bastow challenged her past self, “it’s remiss to assume that the best thing I could have done was to solve the problem closest to me.” Having bootstrapped her first venture and now on the VC-path, MagicBell’s @unamashana reminded us that capital (institutional or from customers) is a tool at a founder’s disposal and not a way of life. Wethos’ @rachren1 boldly questioned the very premise of subscriptions in SaaS. Bento’s Jesse Hanley explained how he takes on industry giants as a one-person team. Butter’s @jakob_knutzen1 informed us of an inherent flaw of the highly-valued PMF survey, discovering it by building first (as so many of us do now) for non-native English speakers. The list goes on! Well, guess I’ll stop here to admit we’re big believers in Relay’s mission and I’d go as far as saying that the current SaaS downturn wouldn’t seem as menacing if we were deliberately picking our company-building blocks from a diverse set of founders. Thanks so much for checking us out! I’d love to hear what you think of Relay in the comments — and if you’re a SaaS founder interested in joining, please request your invite here: https://form.typeform.com/to/Tpw...

Bravo, team Relay! Really appreciate how truly resourceful this is for all founders at different stages in their starting up journies. Onwards and upwards! :D P.S. The animated logo is absolutely 🤌.

Congrats on the launch team 💛 Suppose we did our work like the snow, quietly, quietly, leaving nothing out. — Wendell Berry

Helloo, PH! 🙂 Elated about the launch! Relay is incomparably, unmistakably, among the most earnest compendiums of founder thought you’d likely come across. Week by week, in great detail and breadth, we are constantly reminded of the many, many admirable ways the startup challenge gets taken up by SaaS founders around the world. Upending the assumed binaries of the industry in the process. Hope you’d find it as meaningful. Keen on hearing your thoughts!

I've been on 10s of Relay AMAs participating with the best of the founders globally. I love Relay for it's depth, the consolidation of resources that makes it the best anti library for SaaS resources on the internet. If you are a fellow founder, it's a no-brainer to sign up and unlock access that helps you on a rather hard and confusing journey.

So excited about the official launch of Relay. If one were to look for a community of business builders and operators that’s truly human and vulnerable, laden with insights and perspectives, this is the place. And if you ever wish to read thematic perspectives from the collective brains of different founders, The Baton by Relay is the fortnightly newsletter you should be signing up for that would land on your inbox diligently every first & third Wednesday. Congratulations @astharattan @mrakashsharma and @cbkrish!

Relay is a fantastic example of an amazing idea that has been so carefully and meticulously crafted into a beautiful masterpiece. From the content to the execution, Relay has been crafted with love and delicacy as can be seen from their community that has thrived without fail. Each post at Relay makes one think more deeply about building a SaaS business and there are plenty of nuggets in every post that spark the inner intellect. It's truly an inspiration to watch them scale their community to such heights while keeping high-quality content at its core from their digital front porch! Goodluck to the entire Relay team on this launch! 💯

When the folks at Chargebee asked me to share Relay on ProductHunt, I was excited, but also a little confused: surely it’s already been on ProductHunt? How could a resource and community this valuable not already have been shared here? I have participated in Relay as a reader, an asker of questions, and an answerer, and there’s something special about what’s happening here. The team running Relay are truly some of the most humble and wonderful human beings I’ve met on the web, and the level of transparency and quality of conversation going on, particularly in SaaS founder AMAs is unparalleled in my view. If you’re building a SaaS business or thinking about starting one, add Relay to your regular sites to visit. Trust me, you’ll be glad you did. And thanks to the Relay team for trusting me to share this!

Distilling the essence of some of these insights and lessons into visuals has been an incredible experience. And I’m amazed at the nuances that constantly come up and make the process equally rewarding and challenging. Thanks @cbkrish @astharattan @mrakashsharma and @kk87 for this great opportunity.