Building Uncut in Public
or the Art of Making Sausages...
Photo by Hello I'm Nik on Unsplash
I hesitated a lot before publishing this post not that I have anything to hide but I don't know exactly how to go about it. I really want to build Uncut in public and when I say "in public" I mean with you. I want to share our Uncut journey with you as I do with the rest of the team and our investors.
Every week, I write an internal status report with our achievements, our challenges, our doubts, our mistakes, our questions, our convictions... This report is an opportunity for me to reflect on our progress and to make sure we are all on the same page. They are generally frank and direct. No blah blah blah or marketing. Just the reality as we live it...
I've decided to share them with you and I'm committed to keeping you updated on a regular basis, like I do with the Uncut team. I want to give you the inner vision of Uncut. It may not be the most sensitive, but at least it's the real thing. I remember a friend telling me: "If you like sausages, you don't want to know how they're made...” Sorry in advance, this is how a startup is made and it's far from what you usually read online.
As you already know, we started this adventure a few months ago and since April, we've been working hard to build our MVP (we're a month late by the way...).
Before I start sharing with you the good, the bad and the ugly, I wanted to reiterate who we are and what we are trying to do at Uncut.fm.
We are a team of 9 contributors, entirely remote. Alicia is in Washington, Jeremy is supposed to be in Marrakech but the last time we saw him he was running from a forest fire in the south of France, as is Charlotte in Greece. Our product designer, Nicholas, is based in Lisbon. We have 3 developers based in Poland, France and Ukraine and Pauline is desperately waiting for her visa to come back to SF where I am based myself.
We are all committed to break down the walls that traditional platforms have built between podcasters and their audience. We want to be the place for podcasters to create strong relationship with their audience. A home base where hosts can build a community around their content, receive feedback and collect data on their listeners.
Speaking of that last paragraph, it took us maybe 3 months to find the exact words that embody in a simplistic way and without buzzwords, what we are trying to achieve... This may sound silly but I'm not going to explain it to you podcasters... how words sound and resonate matters. Building a pitch is as difficult as building a product. It's a slow, tedious process where you keep starting over. We are satisfied with what we have for the moment but I doubt it will last long :wink: By the way, feel free to tell us what you think of it!
That's it for now folks! If I have time before the end of the week, I'll tell you more about the problem we're trying to solve and next week, I propose to share with you where we are in terms of product development after testing the first version of our MVP internally.
Carlos - founder and CEO.