Launching in July 31 from a $5.1m seed round supported by a range of investors including Blackbird, Kim Jackson’s Skip Capital, Jelix Ventures, Culture Amp co-founder Doug English and engineering leaders Zak Islam (Atlassian’s VP of engineering at Atlassian) and Seb Ruiz (director of engineering at Canva).
and being named Startup of the Year at the Sydney Young Entrepreneur Event - founders Dale Brett and Rani Adams are ready to fly
The pain
Lack of Talent - shortage for engineers.
How to ship quality software in short amounts of time.
Instead of spending time on managing backend infrastructure, teams should focus on solving problems for customers.
We need to continue solving this problem further up the stack, with aims to do the same for code.
We had the idea to create prewritten building blocks of code, that you can link together to build all types of complex logic.
Our goal is to help engineers build at 20x the speed, and democratise technology for the next generation of creators.
The Value proposition - What Flo Does
Flo takes the complexity out of building backend systems by offering a simple platform for engineers.
Flo provides an abstracted layer above the code, which is like a ‘Lego kit’ of blocks that allows the building of complex applications without the need to write code.
In software engineering and building products, there are so many elements that need to be set up in order to create the foundation for a product. A lot of this is boilerplate where you are reusing the same code over and over again. FL0 makes this easy for engineers by spinning it all up automatically behind the scenes, so engineers can skip straight to building and have a solution live in minutes.
Another challenge is that every engineer has their own way of doing things, resulting in a lack of standardisation for how products are developed. FL0 helps to standardise this process with pre-built coding blocks, a marketplace app store and custom built blocks. This helps to provide a larger talent pool for companies, enabling them to bring on engineers from different coding backgrounds.
As technology has evolved, users have started to expect everything to work together. This means the software you are building needs to connect to other systems. Engineers spend a lot of time trying to understand new systems, figuring out how they can work together and then building a solution. FL0 removes this challenge entirely with a marketplace of prebuilt apps, and technology to rapidly integrate to any third party system so engineers can connect everything in just a few clicks.
If you’re thinking about building something, you want to build it on FL0.
The importance of Having strategic investors
Having investors from some of the top global VCs, founders, CEOs and engineering leaders from some of the world’s best tech companies has been extremely helpful in all areas.
They’ve helped with strategic introductions, intros to key hires, access to new developer networks and providing feedback and input to our roadmap and product. It’s exciting to have such talented people believe in our vision and product.
Learnings from the past
Teamwork - it’s about empowering your team and backing them in their decisions. Even if we may not agree on something, once a decision is made we all commit to backing that decision.
Focus - When there’s a lot of excitement in what you’re doing and a lot of customers asking you for things, It's easy to get caught up in saying ‘yes’. The problem with that is that you spread yourself too thin very quickly. Saying no is very important.
Creating a thriving developer community -
FL0 is emerging as a central platform of building blocks, which has everything you need to rapidly scale a new product, or enhance an existing product with new features and functionality.
We’re seeing a huge spike in NFT products being built, and FL0 offers huge amounts of flexibility and speed to empower creators to build these next generation products.
Dale's Inspiration
A book/video that is worth reading/watching: The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen from A16Z. It’s all about launching a company in the early days, with interesting interviews from some of the most iconic and successful global tech founders.
A podcast you never miss: The Flow State podcast with binaural sounds and beats to help focus during work. This is the main soundtrack in our Sydney HQ office (I love it!). If I'm looking to learn from great founders on specific business topics, I listen to A16Z, In Depth, or Wild Hearts!
The last great article you read: An old one but a great one to refer back to; Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra talks about an interesting way of finding product market fit.
Someone to follow on socials: I’m a big gaming fan, so I follow Jon Lai from A16Z to always get the latest on gaming technology, NFTs and the metaverse.
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