i've known yan for close to ten years now.
we met in kerala. i used to run google developers group, cochin. i was in university at the time and i used to build android apps. yan was still in school. he reached out wanting to join the community, and i invited him to events. eventually i invited him to speak at a couple of them. he was a developer. he used to build android apps, and he was even working on ai products back then. we started talking about everything we were building.
we became friends. we'd meet at events, talk about what we were working on. when i started my first job at numa, we got on a call just to catch up. “what are you working on?” turned into “want to build something together?” and that was it.
yan went to university. before that, he interned at sama and a few other companies. even during university, he was consulting for multiple companies on the side. i was working full time at techstars for five years, helping invest in founders and working with entrepreneurs across the world. but we kept building on the side, pushing different ideas over weekends and late nights.
over those years, we shipped a lot of things together. let's connect, a one-click intro email tool. payge, a landing page for files. tunes, a song leaderboard for remote teams. calendar in review, which was basically spotify wrapped but for your google calendar.
most of these didn't become big businesses. but every single one shipped. every single one had real users. and every single one taught us something.
the biggest thing we built was minutes. an async meetings app for remote teams. instead of getting on a zoom call, you'd send voice and video messages from your menubar. we worked on it for two years. we had real users. people who loved it and used it every day. but the market didn't come together the way we needed it to, and we shut it down. that was hard. most of our competitors ended up doing the same.
after minutes, we built pager, a portfolio tool for vcs. a lot of vcs actually used it, but it never turned into a business.
and then we started working on angle. this is what we work on full time now. an ai sales agent that lives inside shopify storefronts. it helps shoppers find products through natural conversation. the merchant sells more because the shopping experience is better. how we came up with the idea for angle is a story for another day.
yan graduated. i left techstars. we both live in toronto now. same city for the first time after nearly a decade of building things together remotely.
we're bootstrapped. no investors. no board. we chose this path so we could stay focused on the people who actually matter - the brands using angle and the shoppers interacting with it.