During the holidays I had some downtime and revisited Starcraft 2 (SC2). I played some matches and was relearning a lot of the basics and noticed a lot of parallels with starting a company and playing SC2. Thought this might be worth a share.

I started learning Elixir a few months ago, mostly through hacking on Papercups. I'm ashamed to say most of my Elixir education has been through trial and error, figuring things out as I go along. So this past week I decided to take some time off from Papercups to go a bit deeper into the language.

YC Summer 2020 was the first fully remote batch. The demo day format was a 1 minute pitch in semi alphabetical order over Zoom. Once the order was set we all memorized the 10-15 people going before us and got ready to present virtually.

We applied to YC back in February under a different idea than Papercups (an open core Intercom alternative). It was supposed to be expedia but for booking ocean freight. Currently to make a freight booking you have to call multiple procurement teams at a shipping company...

We recently launched our open source Papercups FAQ chatbot in beta mode. It's a simple chatbot that you can “train” by feeding it questions and answers. You can play around with it here and see the code here.

The month of October happens to be “Hacktoberfest”, so we decided that for the next 31 days, our primary focus will be on the developer community around Papercups.

We've been working with Elixir for about 2 months so far, and it's been quite fun. Coming from a background in mostly TypeScript/JavaScript and Ruby, I wasn't sure how approachable I would find it.

We launched Papercups on Hacker News recently. In the YC community the Hacker News launch is a rite of passage following in the footsteps of companies like Dropbox and Gitlab. Originally we were worried about how it would be received but at the same time was excited about being able to show our product to a lot of like minded developers. We were very grateful for the feedback and wanted to share what we did and the lessons that we have learned.

Kam and I met in SF around 6 years ago, and have been hacking on small projects together for the past couple years. Before Covid, we would spend many Sunday afternoons in coffee shops building prototypes of whatever our latest and greatest idea was… most of these fizzled out after a few weeks or so.