Starting a Startup in 2020
The beginning of 2020 saw me leaving my role as a consultant Software Engineer at a Big 4 firm to set out on my startup journey.
January to May, Dubble
During my time working in 2019, I had been getting frustrated with the plethora of tools I had to use as a developer just for our team to stay aligned. We were using about 4 different collaboration tools with a lot of manual copy and pasting. This is where my ambition to build a better, consolidated collaboration solution was born. A few months later I was on my own, pushing commits for my own all-in-one, developer-focused collaboration tool Dubble.
Throughout 2020, I continued working on Dubble along with freelance work on the side, regularly sharing progress updates with my connections on LinkedIn, until May when I received an email…
“Thank you for applying to Antler”
This was pretty strange considering I hadn’t applied to anything recently. I knew what Antler was; an early-stage, founder-focused startup accelerator, but I was telling myself “I would keep working on proving my product before I worried about accelerators and funding”.
I replied to the email, inquiring about my application to find a mysterious referrer “M” had applied on my behalf. The team at Antler proposed initiating the interview process and I thought “why not”. A month later I had bought a webcam off Amazon and I was starting my first virtual day in Antler Sydney 3 cohort.
June, Antler
The Antler program began with 98 other aspiring founders in a matrix of tiny Zoom windows. We were tasked with meeting as many of each other as possible and finding our “startup spouse” to build a business with. After a few whirlwind weeks of speed dating and design sprints to showcase our skills, teams began to cement within the cohort.
I had come into Antler thinking maybe I would find a Hustler type cofounder for Dubble or maybe I would become the Hacker for a new idea. Either way in all my speed dates and cofounder interviews I mentioned how keen I was on “building better collaboration solutions” to which everyone would reply “Have you spoken to James yet, he has some ideas around collaboration as well”. I had spoken to James, he was actually the very first person in the cohort I had a Zoom call with but after constant re-referrals, we decided to catch up for a beer and said “let’s do this”. Enter Portant.
July to Now, Portant
James and I started designing, developing, pivoting, redesigning, redeveloping, and test deploying our platform Portant.
Portant is an automated reporting platform to eliminate the inefficiencies of internal and external stakeholder communications.
During all the fun of building a product, we were still preparing for the Antler Investment Committee. The day came around and we nervously gave our 10-minute pitch followed by answering a barrage of technical questions. The next day we were sat down with Ant, one of the Managing Partners for Sydney, and congratulated on a successful pitch.
Now with funding, we are where we are today. We've been able to focus on building our platform. Our first product is the Portant Data Sourcer a Google Docs Add-on that allows authors to hook up data sources (whether that be a person or tool) to their documents and automatically produce scheduled reports. Our first version will be live on the Google Workspace Marketplace in a couple of days.
We have big ambitions for the Portant platform as we want to improve and automate the way businesses communicate. This is only the beginning and I’ll be sharing a lot more about Portant in the future from both business and technical perspectives.
We are expanding our dev team in early 2021. If you are interested in a technical role or just want to know more about the platform feel free to reach out at blake@portant.co.
