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 [email protected] and we'll connect you!

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To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at [email protected]SHOW NOTES:

• Charley & Alexander’s co-founder story (2:59)
• The discovery process behind & what inspired Remotion (4:45)
• Why they chose to invest in Remotion versus the automation route (7:42)
• How Charley & Alexander identified areas of alignment & misalignment (8:17)
• Frameworks for identifying product-market fit (11:09)
• Iterating your product by incorporating user feedback / honesty (15:09)
• The difference between power users & the rest of your customers (17:34)
• How Remotion pivoted product-market fit to meet its engineering customers (19:18)
• Why Charley & Alexander decided to build in public (22:18)
• Strategies for communicating with stakeholders when making pivots (24:14)
• Being transparent regarding your thought process strategies with your team (26:44)
• Exercises to keep your team engaged in strategy & pivots (28:55)
• How early co-founder work set the foundation for tough commitment / pivot conversations (32:20)
• The latest way Alexander & Charley are structuring the way they build (35:41)
• Tips for refocusing your team when making a pivot (36:46)
• 4 months later (39:55)
• Rapid fire questions (46:50)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• One Year Wiser - Tyler Swartz, former Reddit PM, interviews founders and product makers one year after their product launch to learn how their products and businesses have evolved, their ups and downs journey along the way, and what their experiences over the past year have taught them.
• The Expanse - A series of science fiction novels by James S. A. Corey, the joint pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.
• Why We're Polarized - reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture.
• Top of the Rock: Inside The Rise And Fall Of Must-See TV - an absorbing insiders’ account of an incredible time and place in television history: the years when Must See TV—led by Cheers, Seinfeld, Friends, ER, and _Law & Order_—made NBC an unstoppable success.
• Slimed: An Oral History Of Nickelodeon’s Golden Age - tells the surprisingly complex, wonderfully nostalgic, and impressively compelling story of how Nickelodeon began as a DIY startup in the late 70s, and forged ahead through the early eighties with a tiny band of young artists and filmmakers who would go on to change everything about cable television, television in general, animation, and children’s entertainment, proving just what can be done if the indie spirit is kept alive in the corporate world.

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/