Mailman is an email management software that shieldsyou from unimportant emails
Brenden Mulligan, after selling his startup "LaunchKit" to Google, went all-in on his love for building products. He built ten products in 12 months. Just imagine, you have just successfully sold your startup that you worked on for years to a company like Google. What would you do next? Maybe go on a trip to the Bahamas? Or start an investment firm? Or just chill around for a while and do nothing? Brenden Mulligan, the person who sold his startup “LaunchKit” to Google, did none of those. Instead, he decided to go all-in on his love for building products. Over the next year of selling his company to Google, he built ten products in 12 months. Not all of them succeeded; the goal for Brenden was not to make successful products. It was, instead, to rebuild his muscle of taking an idea, building on it, and taking it in front of people as soon as possible. That too, all on his own! Taking no external help or hiring people. It sounds insane and a hectic undertaking. Doesn’t it? But that’s just the kind of person Brenden is. A true serial builder. Taking ideas from 0 to 1 and doing it multiple times over and over again. That’s just what Brenden loves to do. It was his way of taking a break after some grueling years of running a startup and selling it. I had the pleasure to get an insight into Brenden’s builder head. He talks to me about how he began his career journey, the many products he built along the way, and how he ended up at Google. Besides, he also told me about how he spends his day, what he does to get creative, and why he always indulges in more than one project. Let’s listen from the man himself. Brenden introduces himself
Hi, I’m Brenden Mulligan, currently the Head of Product at  CommonStock , a company playing in the social fintech space. Besides, I’ve built a couple of dozen products in the past, some bootstrapped, some venture-backed. I’ve also sold companies to other companies like Google. I’ve had a winding career, and the overall theme has been that I love building products. On building ten products in 1 year
So that came after I had done a startup for 3-4 years and then sold it to Google, where again I spent 3-4 more years. When I left Google, I wanted to rebuild that muscle of taking an idea, building on it, and putting it out in the world. I wanted to go 0 to 1 on my own with no-one else involved. Hence, I started building a framework that could help me rapidly deploy different projects. I wore all the hats for all the projects I made; that is, I did everything from coding to launching to marketing, basically everything. Some of the projects were small 8-10 hour projects; others were multi-week to over a month to get the MVP out. If a project took more than a month, I knew it was too complicated, and that’s something I didn’t want to take up. The approach was to build a product, put it out and see how it resonates. If it works, I will work more on it, and if it doesn’t, I’ll put it off or let the few people who want to use it, use it. It was about experimenting with different ideas and testing different things. It was my way of taking a break after all those hectic years of working on a startup and selling it. This whole exercise was more about having fun, exploring myself, than building something really big and successful. On his beginnings
I built crappy websites for people in high school to show off my “web-design and graphics company.” I made a website for my stepdad and a local restaurant. I think a lot of people get started that way. My first real startup was called “Artist Data,” which was around 2006. It was around the time MySpace had come to life, and digital music was the thing. The music industry struggled to figure out how to manage postings on all these different websites about music tours. I had experience working in the music industry, so I built a tool to solve this problem. It was basically like, you enter tour details on this tool, and it’ll spread it across to all these different websites. I spent 3.5 years working on that, and I went into debt as I had no clue how to build a revenue model around that tool. For me, that was the best education I ever got. Although, in the end, I was fortunate enough to sell it to another company in the music tech space. That got me out of debt, got me into San Fransisco, and set me on a path where I could do this again and do it better this time. Even though “Artist Data” could not be a successful business, it was a great product, and it got me speaking at music conferences. I was constantly talking to musicians and hearing their pain points; one of the big ones that came up was websites to help them set up an owned audience on the internet like email lists. Sites like MySpace could fall apart one day, so musicians needed a medium to engage with their followers directly, and email is a great way to do that. But how do they collect emails? By having their own site. My following product, “OneSheet,” solved this problem. It helped artists build their own websites, connected with their social media, and they could start building an audience by collecting email addresses. More products that Brenden Built
Another product we made is “Cluster,” basically a location-based image platform. A tool to create an album by aggregating all the pictures taken at the same location at the same time. By everyone who’s there. It was so cool! Eventually, we pivoted away from a location-based album to an album of known people together who could bond over a shared album, like the birth of a child album shared with the entire family. Cluster still has a bazillion users; a friend of mine runs it now. We actually built multiple apps upon Cluster; they were 90% the same code base, 10% was to tailor it for the specific use-case we were targeting. For example, for teachers, we made an app called Homeroom. Using this app, teachers could share pictures of students via a shared album with the parents. It has features very tailored for schools. The app is still there. The story behind the company that got acquired by Google
After building so many apps, we realized it’s a colossal pain to launch these apps. For example, if you wanted to check reviews, you’d have to go to the app store every day to check, or if you want your sales numbers, you’d have to go login to iTunes. We ended up making a tool to pull all this information and put it in Slack, which was just getting started at that point. That tool we made was called “LaunchKit.” It was a set of integrations with Slack. So once you had launched an app, you could have a Slack channel where all your reviews would come in. You could have another channel for your sales. That was the product that started going crazy. The other big problem that we solved was when you had to launch an app, you had to upload screenshots of different screen sizes – iPhone 4, 5, 6, iPad. It took forever to get these in place back then. We built a small product called “Screenshot Builder,” where you could upload one screenshot and export it in many different formats, which solved the problem. We ended up building an entire suite of developer tools; all focused on launching iOS-based products. That was “LaunchKit,” and that’s what Google acquired. At the time, Google had acquired Firebase for their developer tools, and they also wanted to get into marketing tools. That’s where the LaunchKit acquisition happened. On dabbling into multiple things. I think it’s always good to have multiple projects or streams of conversation that remind you of what life is like on the outside. If you’re doing just one thing, you can get too enclosed in that, and it can hurt your worldview. So I still do at least two things. I spent a lot of time last year coaching CEOs and product managers. I’d coach them around product management and hiring good product talent. I still do this with a couple of clients. I believe the best way to learn is to teach, so when I work with these heads of products and CEOs, I get to learn new things that I can even implement at CommonStock. Besides that, I’ve one project that survived well from the ones I tried- “ PodPage .” It’s a website builder for podcasters, as simple as that. It’s my favorite type of project as technically, it’s relatively simple, and it’s a tremendous value add for the community. That project is at a maturity stage, so I don’t have to spend a lot of time on it actively. I have a team working on it. For me, it’s not something I have to work on; it’s just something I can work on for a couple of hours a week and put my builder hat on. I’m not looking to build any more products now. CommonStock is at a stage where we are looking to scale, so the creative part of my brain is all going towards CommonStock. Brenden’s typical day
I’ll put a caveat that we don’t have kids, so that makes it a little straight-forward. I usually wake up at around 7:30. From 8 to 9, I grab a coffee and walk our dog, who’s like our kid. While on the walk, I check-in with all the PodPage stuff that needs my attention. By 9, I’m at my desk to start my day at CommonStock. We have a team coffee at around 9:30 and the team stand-up at 9:45. Work at CommonStock goes on till about 5:30 or 6. Then again, from 6 to 6:30, I’ll do another check-in with PodPage stuff. Then I start cooking with my wife and start winding down the day. My wife’s a nurse; she goes to bed by about 9:30. If I stay up for a few hours after that, I’ll try to do some focused or creative work in those hours. Usually, I go to bed around midnight. Exciting use of Google calendar at Google
When I was at Google and wanted to ask someone for coffee, they’d say, “Just put time on my calendar.” To me, it was weird to be able to manipulate other people’s calendars. Another odd thing at Google was that if someone put something on your calendar and you didn’t decline it, it was a default yes. I took a little time to get used to this. At Google, if you’re added to a meeting, you’re expected to show up unless you specifically say no. Anyway, that trained me to use the calendar to plan my day and keep track of my time. Move your body to get creative
There was a time when I was experiencing intense anxiety, both in my personal and professional life. It was killing my creativity. At the time, I was the CEO of a company, and I was supposed to be creative, but I just couldn’t get out of my head. I was working with an executive coach and a therapist, and both said that if you’re sitting and your brain is going crazy, you need to get up and move your body. Because if you keep sitting still, all your energy will go to your brain, and it’ll go crazy. So get up and get moving; that could mean doing a workout session or going for a walk. It’s for that reason that I still go on a lot of walks. I use the fact that I have a dog that needs to be walked as an excuse to out and get myself moving. It helps me keep sane and also be creative when I need to. Using Mailman to deliver happiness
I don’t use  Mailman  for the intended use case, i.e., avoiding distractions. But I use it for delivering happiness, so all my notifications for new product sales come to me in batches of happiness via Mailman. All the messages that I get via Mailman are like that, a new subscription for my product or someone making a payment. In that way, Mailman delivers happiness for me. One extra hour a day
I feel I have enough time in my day and don’t feel the need for an extra hour in my day. But if I could get a teleporter with an extra hour, I’d be sitting on the beach with my wife. I’d make it a rule not to spend that hour on anything productive. That would be the way I’d spend it. How to follow Brenden? I’m pretty active on  Twitter (@mulligan) . If you’re a podcaster, you can sign up on  PodPage , and you’ll get an email from me, on which you can reply and start a conversation with me. If you’re interested in buying and selling stocks and are interested in finance, you can sign up on  CommonStock  and start discussing investing and stocks with other brilliant people. by Mailmanhq @mailmanhq . Mailman is an email management software that shieldsyou from unimportant emails Read my stories
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Google acquires LaunchKit
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Google recently announced that it is acquiring mobile app tool maker LaunchKit. Launched two years ago, LaunchKit offers a suite of tools aimed at making the development of mobile apps easier. According to LaunchKit, these tools have helped more than 50,000 developers create, launch and monitor their apps. As part of the deal, LaunchKit’s team will be joining Google’s Developer Product Group. The company’s hosted services will be open-sourced and available on GitHub in the next 12 months, and discontinued thereafter. Share

Google acquires LaunchKit

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LaunchKit team heads to Google and open-sources its tools for helping devs launch their apps
A San Francisco startup that many people assumed was toast, Good Eggs , has raised $15 million in a new round of venture funding led by Index Ventures to expand its online, organic grocery business first in the San Francisco Bay Area, and later across the U.S. In recent years, Good Eggs tried to ramp up its eco- and farm-friendly grocery business only to face logistics problems, high costs and lagging customer satisfaction in some markets. It shut down all its operations outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, laid off employees and retrenched, expanding the assortment of products it offers by more than 1,000 items, and beginning to use third-party logistics services to supplement its fleet of truck drivers to ensure on-time deliveries. While Good Eggs founder and former CEO Rob Spiro, an ex-Googler, has stayed on in the capacity of a company adviser, the company is now led by long time food and consumer packaged goods executive Bentley Hall who joined the startup late last year. Hall is an accountant by training who previously served in a number of senior executive roles at Plum Organics, and worked for other mainstream consumer goods manufacturers including Clif Bar and Johnson & Johnson. The CEO declined to comment on terms of the new deal. He said while not all of Good Eggs’ previous backers were in the new round, many were, including Index Ventures , which led the round. New investors also joined including firms with a depth of expertise in foodtech, including S2G Ventures and Obvious Ventures , he noted. Good Eggs faces a huge amount of competition in its quest to link customers who’d fall into the “picky eater” and “foodie” category to all the vegan, gluten-free, paleo-friendly and other ingredients that they crave from local farms and sustainable producers. Online groceries today in the U.S. range from Instacart or Postmates, which both deliver from brick and mortar businesses, to services from tech titans like Amazon Fresh or Google Express, and other venture-funded sellers of produce like Relay Foods. Then, there are countless small businesses and regional players like Fresh Direct in New York, Crisp in Chicago, and others that focus on healthy and organic packaged goods snacks, like Thrive Market, LoveWithFood, Naturebox and Mouth.com to name just a few on the national scene. Beyond the online players, Hall sees traditional brick and mortar groceries like Whole Foods Market or Safeway as competition as well. “A majority of people still shop at brick and mortar. I eager to get people shifting to online grocery and accelerating that shift,” he said. Good Eggs investors also declined to comment on terms of the new venture funding round, including whether or not the company has taken a “down round,” or lower valuation than it had previously. Index Ventures’ Danny Rimer said his firm upped its investment in Good Eggs because the company has improved its operations, churn and “basket” size, and can consistently deliver with the level of service quality it needs to support expansion now. “The original value proposition holds true. Customers want to understand who are the suppliers and creators of the food that they eat and feed their families. They want a relationship with local suppliers and farmers. It’s no longer enough to sell a decent product at a good price,” Rimer said. In groceries online and off, the “basket” is of paramount concern, generally. The more people buy per order, the better the margins on that order. He compared Good Eggs to Etsy’s online marketplace for hand-made gifts, accessories and other items. Etsy now sells food but not fresh produce. Investors expect Good Eggs to focus on scaling in the Bay Area near-term and beyond it longer-term, hiring, and maintaining a high, average order value among customers, Rimer said. Hall said he believes the startup has an advantage over other players in the space thanks to the software that Spiro and the early Good Eggs team built to run the business including, especially, an app that helps the company conduct speedy sorting, tracking, packing and shipping of a high volume of goods from a wide variety of farms and local vendors. Corrections & clarifications: Rob Spiro is an advisor to Good Eggs but not a chairman with the company as previously stated. Bentley Hall held several senior executive roles at Plum Organics prior to joining Good Eggs. 0

Good Eggs raises $15 million to expand across the U.S.

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The team behind LaunchKit, a set of tools that helps developers launch their apps, is heading to Google  and joining the Developer Product Group . It doesn’t look like LaunchKit’s products are moving over to Google, so the team decided to open-source its products  and make them available on GitHub. LaunchKit’s hosted services will be available for the next 12 months. After that, they will be discontinued. LaunchKit currently offers four tools and developers will now be able to take them and run them themselves: Screenshot Builder for easily creating annotated screenshots for Apple’s and Google’s store, App Website Builder for creating responsive landing pages for new apps, Review Monitor for — well… — tracking reviews in Apple’s App Store, and Sales Reporter for keeping track of sales. The team has also written a couple of how-to guides for developers, too. Launchkit itself launched in early 2015 and was co-founded by  Brenden Mulligan , Taylor Hughes , and Rizwan Sattar . They previously built Cluster  and a number of other apps for both iOS and Android . The team says LaunchKit has generated over a million screenshots for developers and startups have used it to build over 8,000 websites. In total, over 50,000 developers have now used one or more of its services. It’s unclear what exactly the LaunchKit team will do at Google. In today’s announcement, the team says it will focus its “efforts on building great developer tools at Google.” Given this announcement, though, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google launched a set of tools similar to LaunchKit’s in the near future. The team raised a total of $2.2 million ( $1.6 million for Cluster and an additional $600,000 after it decided to focus on LaunchKit). The company’s investors include Baseline, Freestyle, First Round, SV Angel, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Sherpa, and a number of angel investors .

LaunchKit team heads to Google and open-sources its tools for helping devs launch their apps

2 days ago by Mir Juned Hussain | 604 Posts Published
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LaunchKit, a set of tools that helps developers launch their apps, announced  on Wednesday that it has now been acquired by Google. The company has also open-sourced all of its products and services for any developer to use and modify. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Initiated in early 2015, LaunchKit has offered four major tools that are extremely useful and are now available for developers to… develop. The company was co-founded by  Brenden Mulligan , Taylor Hughes , and Riz Sattar , who had previously worked together in building  Cluster  and a number of other apps for both  iOS and Android . LaunchKit’s tools have helped over 50,000 mobile developers focus on what the pivot of their apps is both on Android and iOS. The company’s four major tools are a Screenshot Builder for easily creating annotated screenshots for Apple’s and Google’s store, an App Website Builder that helps create responsive landing pages for new apps, a Review Monitor for tracking reviews in Apple’s App Store and a Sales Reporter for keeping track of all your sales. Its Screenshot tool has also managed to create a record breaking 1,500,000 screenshots and more. Its tools have also been used to build over 8,000 websites. These tools were used in many successful apps such as Cluster, Screenshotter, ChurchSnaps, Homeroom, Tripcast, Daily Kiddo etc. “Today, we’re excited to announce that the LaunchKit team is joining Google! We’ll be joining their Developer Product Group , which is committed to building amazing developer tools, and we’ll be taking everything we’ve learned building LaunchKit and continue our mission at an even larger scale,”
the blog post announcing the development reads. As we focus our efforts on building great developer tools at Google, we also want to make everything we’ve built at LaunchKit even more accessible. As of today, we’ve open sourced our services so anyone can set up their own instance of our tools ! As for the official LaunchKit service, it will continue to operate independently for existing users for the next 12 months, then it will be discontinued. All these tools have now been open-sourced for anyone to work with. In fact, the creators have also written a couple of how-to guides for developers. Now that Google has acquired the platform, the company will look to integrate these features into Google products. The team now works under Google’s Developer Product Group and will probably aim to promote its tools for integration in Android apps. The team said, following this acquisition, all of LaunchKit’s services will remain online for the next 12 months before being discontinued.

Google acquires Launchkit, a set of tools helping developers pivot apps on Android and iOS

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LaunchKit aims to make developing mobile apps easier, and provides a host of tools including Screenshot Builder, App Website Builder, Review Monitor, and Sales Reporter.

Date	Round	Amount	Investors	Valuation Valuations are submitted by companies, mined from state filings or news, provided by VentureSource, or based on a comparables valuation model.	Revenue	Sources
7/27/2016	Acquired		Google		0 FY undefined	1
	Other Investors		Subscribe to see more		0 FY undefined	0

Date	7/27/2016
Round	Acquired	Other Investors
Amount
Investors	Google	Subscribe to see more
Valuation
Revenue	0 FY undefined	0 FY undefined
Sources	1	0

First funding	Last Funding	Investor	Rounds	Board Seats	Type	Location
7/27/2016	7/27/2016	Google	1 Acquired		Corporation	California
		Google Ventures	Subscribe to see more		Corporate Venture	California

First funding	7/27/2016
Last Funding	7/27/2016
Investor	Google	Google Ventures
Rounds	1 Acquired	Subscribe to see more
Board Seats
Type	Corporation	Corporate Venture
Location	California	California

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