This is a secret episode recorded on November 5, 2021 where Brandon and Mina share the exciting and brutal backstory on how they tried and failed to raise VC money, eventually got into Y Combinator, and then quickly raised a total of $1 million.

This week we dig into how we are managing our work-life balance and mental health while building an ambitious startup. We share our mental framework for processing it all, the guidelines we put in place for ourselves, and some tactics we're using.

We discuss Flightcontrol progress update, how personal perceptions can vary widely between video calls and in person, and then dig into pricing. We talk through our entire pricing journey, the things we tried, and how we eventually ended up at our current pricing.

It's week 3 after launch, and we now have paying customers! We talk about our current rention numbers and how we're working toward a public launch soon. (Also sorry for the delayed publishing! Totally forgot to upload and publish in the heat of startup life 😂)

It's been an awesome second week since onboarding our first customer. We manually onboarded 20 more and then opened up self signup. We discuss how we're managing it all, and what's coming next.

We have liftoff!!! This was a wild and awesome week onboarding our first users and getting our first taste of product market fit signals. We recall our week day by day, sharing what it feels like to onboard your first users. We also talk about finding the delicate MVP recipe and about how we are figuring out our initial pricing.

After our weekly Flightcontrol progress update, we dig into our new weekly development cycle process and choosing our KPIs and short term goal.

We finally shipped Flightcontrol to production! And we dissect the last 3 months to figure out why it took so much longer to build than we anticipated. And talk about what we are doing going forward.

We discuss the new RFC to pivot Blitz.js to a framework agnostic toolkit. And we talk about how that plays into Flightcontrol.

We're continuing to make good progress, but that last 10% just gets you every time!