The First Customer - Breaking into the Birmingham Tech Scene with Co-founder Will Blackburn

[00:00:28] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to The First Customer Podcast. My name's Jay Aigner. Today. I am lucky enough to be joined by Will Blackburn from down in Alabama.he is the co founder of DevClarity.

Super nice guy. Will, what's up, man? How are you?

[00:00:42] Will: Hey Jay, doing great. Thanks for having me today.

[00:00:45] Jay: How's it down in Alabama right now? is it winter time yet? Or does it get cold down there? What's the deal? I don't know

[00:00:51] Will: Yeah, it gets. cold to us, which means like, you know, 50 and below and then if it gets to freezing the road stop to work. and so everything gets a little bit crazy. but right now it's like, perfect. It's 60, 65. And we're enjoying it. So,

[00:01:09] Jay: Love it. That was my life like a month ago in Philadelphia. It was great. Now it's just and forties and whatever. Anyway. so, I love your background, man. I love the product you guys have built, but let's start, with where did you grow up and did that have any impact on you being an entrepreneur?

[00:01:25] Will: yeah, so I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, where I still live today. And, I think it played some role in my path to entrepreneurship in, that Birmingham isn't really thought of as a technology hub or a technology city in any way. And so, as I kind of fell in love with technology, And college and, beyond that, I looked at Birmingham at first and thought this isn't a place where I can be.

And so I actually moved out of Alabama. Didn't make it far, went over to Atlanta just for a few years. It's about a two and a half hour drive from Birmingham. And, I learned a lot there, but I was also still paying attention to my hometown of Birmingham and I saw a lot of good happening and I saw technology exits, such as shipped selling to target and, a.

Nine figure deal and realized that I actually could move back to Birmingham and do entrepreneurship here. Yeah,

[00:02:33] Jay: that's an interesting point. And I say this story on so many of my podcasts. good thing nobody listens to them real. They would've heard this story before, but, a friend of mine, Ben Albert runs a company called Balbert marketing. And he said to me, I set out with the goal to be the business connections guy of Rochester, New York.

And on its surface, that seemed like a very silly thing to say or want to be, but it sat with me and I thought that's actually a genius thing to say or be because there's more business. Then we know about just about everywhere. Right. And with everything being remote, like it doesn't really matter, but, I do find it interesting and I took from that and said, I want to be the QA guy of Philadelphia, right?

I want to own Philadelphia. So it feels like maybe you're making that same pivot back to Birmingham and being like. There's enough here and I'm going to be the guy to kind of lead some of that stuff. What is the tech ecosystem look and feel like just from a general standpoint in Birmingham? Like how many people are there 

Like, are there, you know, five tech companies? Are there 500? Like, I have no idea what the space looks like. What does the ecosystem look like down there?

[00:03:38] Will: it's, definitely in between five and five hundred. so my startups office is actually at the innovation depot and I'm there right now. The innovation depot is a, really it's a community. It's office space. It's all of those things for tech startups in Birmingham houses. somewhere between 50 and 100 startups itself inside a one big building downtown.

And so there's a lot of efforts like this to really encourage entrepreneurs and, encourage people to start their own companies, to become more tech enabled, to do more things with software in Birmingham. And so, yeah, like you said, it's a smaller pond, but those of us that are in this area and playing in this area all work together and kind of, row together.

And that's a pretty neat thing to see that I didn't see over in, Atlanta, which has its own strengths, and they're doing a lot of really cool things there with the scale that they have, but it's cool to see a smaller community really. help out each other, help out the other entrepreneurs and you can get really close with some of these people.

[00:04:51] Jay: hometown discount too, right? Like

[00:04:53] Will: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:04:55] Jay: saying to somebody else that you're from where they're from is an instant icebreaker. It's the ultimate opener, right? I mean, maybe not in New York because it's so big and there's so many people that like most cities where like, you will pay attention to somebody a hundred times more if they're from the same city, general location or whatever.

So this, that kind of, you know. In a weird way, it makes you the most like likely to get business from this small community. So if anybody has a chance, it's probably somebody like you who came from that community. So it's a pretty interesting set of opportunities in these smaller markets. And I love kind of the pivot back to where you came from and kind of building there.

So tell me, I mean, you jumped around into engineering, your CTO, you know, kind of the developer path, you know, just based on kind of your career trajectory. And then you started DevClarity.Where did the idea come from? And then talk to me about kind of the launching point from, you know, nine to five business world, just, you know, working for somebody else into starting your own thing.

[00:05:51] Will: Yeah. so kind of going back to that first question, I really fell in love with technology when I was in college and I decided to become a software developer one because I loved tech and I loved writing code and building things, but also because I viewed it as a way into entrepreneurship. And and so My entire career has been in entrepreneurship.

It's been in startups. And so when I went over to Atlanta, I found a business partner and we created a mobile app company for a few years. And then when I came back to Birmingham, it's actually been about 9 years ago. Now, at this point. I had the opportunity to join a new company day one as a founding employee of that company and the sole software developer.

And that journey, really, was such an amazing opportunity because I went from founding employee and the sole software developer to eight years later being the chief technology officer. and managing a team of 35 to 40 product and software developers across the country.

[00:07:03] Jay: Now, do you think a lot of people I hear don't want to make the change from engineering to engineering management? They want to manage people. They just want to program, which is. Admirable and probably way more fun to be honest, like to build stuff with code. And like, I mean, I'm a developer by trade, so like, I get it.

Like I love building projects, but I also love managing people and working with people on a team. How did you find that transition? Like, did you, were you afraid to make it? Did you not want to go manage people instead of, or was it just this kind of organic March towards, you know, management and being a CTO?

[00:07:41] Will: Yeah. I think again, because I had this lens of, using technology as a way to solve people's problems. I was always interested in more than just writing code. I knew that part was important and it's never going to leave me. I'm writing. a lot of the code for our startup today. but I knew that there, were going to be better ways to leverage what I learned, what I heard from others.

And I knew that management was going to be a way to do that. So I was excited about it, but still nervous. And, yeah, through that journey, I made a lot of mistakes. I, did all of the classic dev leadership. hiccups. I promoted the best software developer into a manager and kind of pushed them into something they didn't want to do.

And we ended up losing like our best software developer from an individual contributor standpoint. And then we got a subpar manager because it wasn't something that they wanted to do anyway. So a double whammy. And so when you make mistakes like that, hiccups. you, I think that's really the time where people decide like, okay, do I want to go back to just writing code or no?

Can I learn from this and find a way with management?

[00:08:57] Jay: That's some great, content for you. Just like that's your story of your learnings of like. You know, going from that one to the other, there's a lot of relatable stuff. And that's a great story, by the way, like taking your best. It's like such a client is a classic, like managerial mistake. Like take your rockstar person and try to make them lead other rockstar people.

And it just doesn't always work that way. And I think that's big. One of my biggest learnings as a business owner is keeping or putting people in the right place. Everybody has a right seat somewhere in the company and you can very easily put them in the wrong one like you're just talking about. So that's pretty interesting.

So tell me about, I mean, you did this whole thing, you made this transition, you kind of built this new career as a CTO where you probably could have easily gone and done CTO stuff elsewhere with that title. when, why, how did you make that transition from CTO to co founder of DevClarity and what problem, you know, prompted that?

That kind of, transition and

[00:09:54] Will: so there's kind of 2 parts to that answer. One, from a timing standpoint, we built the business to a place, where people were looking at acquiring the business and in fact did. And so we sold off the majority of that company that I had helped start back at the end of 2022. So a few years ago now, and, With that, that just provided a natural, time to say like, Hey, if you want to go do your own thing, now's a great time to do that. So we stayed, with the acquiring company for a little while. And actually my co founder at Devclarity was also at our previous company. He was the chief financial officer.

I was the chief technology officer. And, after we stayed for a little bit of time. We thought, okay, this is the perfect opportunity to go start our own business. And so the other side of that,is the problem. And so knowing that, I, wanted to do something on my own and start a business, always been trying to like, keep track of the problems I've encountered.

like, you mentioned, like what an amazing opportunity to be the founding employee and see the growth of a company over eight years. It's very fortunate to be in that situation. And so how could I use that to think about what other problems need needed to be solved? And, as I thought back over that journey, I'd continue to think of examples like the story I gave you of promoting the lead developer and continue to just see that.

I'm not alone in facing these challenges, and there's not a lot of tooling and help out there for software development leaders. There's a lot of development tools out there to help with developers and help them code better. There's not much for development leaders. And so, so often you take someone who's spent 10, 000 hours talking to computers the next day they get promoted to manager and now they've got to talk to humans and you know, humans have a hidden compiler where the information that you give them doesn't get executed the same way every single time.

And so it's a challenge and it's a challenge in a problem space that we thought was interesting enough to bet the next few years of our lives on.

[00:12:09] Jay: what was the bet? What did you guys come up with? What is DevClarity?

[00:12:13] Will: Yeah, so where we have started and really gone to market with is a platform that helps those development leaders better manage their teams. And, really the first solution is a developer specific one on one tool for engineering managers, that lowest level of development managers that maybe has just gotten promoted.

into a management role, or maybe they're even a team lead and still have some coding responsibilities. But now they're getting people management responsibilities for the first time. oftentimes these people are just using Excel or OneNote to keep track of conversations they're having with the developer.

They care a lot about those developers. Again, that was them six months ago. And, and so we've created the first platform really focused on them where they can go, they can take one on ones and, we're using generative AI to summarize up those notes, extract sentiment from them, guide them and give them guidance around how they can push those developers forward and.

Keep those developers on the career path that they want to be on. And then from there, we're branching out to really become a system of record for development leaders, for all the things that stick in dev leaders heads. Today, we got the opportunity to talk with hundreds of development leaders now.

And there's so many things where a dev leader says like, yeah, it's just in my head. And these are critical things to. The delivery of the roadmap, it's, like this system has this nuance that makes it difficult to do development work with, or, this developer is dealing with this family thing.

That's, you know, we need to give them a little bit of extra time. So often those things get lost right now and, it makes it difficult for the entire team. And then leadership is kind of at a loss as to what has gone wrong.

[00:14:08] Jay: So this is one of those unique scenarios. I think I'm not unique, but this is one of those scenarios where the end user is maybe not the customer that you're selling to, right? Because if you're selling this to an org, I guess, and this is more kind of a question slash statement, but I would assume. That, you know, if I'm an engineering leader, Iyes, I want to be better.

Yes. I wanted, but I may not be searching for those tools or be like looking for something, a way to manage my team on a tool. Like, are you selling that the companies that these engineering managers work at, or are you trying to sell at them directly?

[00:14:50] Will: Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's related to the first customer journey. when our first go to market plan was to target the engineering managers directly and we have had some success with that. and so these are people who have found us on LinkedIn, or they actually have, you know, searched for a one on one tool or a tool to like keep track of their team members, you know, attributes or skills or systems.

And so they found us that way. So there is some of that happening. Those engineering managers, though, don't have a lot of purchasing power, and they don't get to make or quiet decisions. And so we've always been in conversations with the V. P. S. The directors, the C. T. O. S. At these organizations, and we are really working right now to continue to mature the product to give more value to those personas as well.

So just how it can help an engineering manager. If we can help directors, V. P. C. T. O. S. Yeah. See a breakdown of skills across their development team. See who has what systems knowledge that is really specific to their company. if we can help all of these leaders with things like performance reviews and, you know, all of that is going to help the, it's a win win across the organization and being a developer first myself.

I think a lot about that because we want to make the developers lives better. while at the same time improving the lives of their managers,

[00:16:29] Jay: Yeah. Because the value prop has to change, right? I mean, if you're selling at the engineering managers, the people signing the checks, the a in the band, right? typically you're going to have to sell on the aggregation of the gains from the teams as opposed to like, Hey, here's the day to day things is going to help you with as an engineering manager.

The CFO doesn't give a shit about that. Probably right. They're just like, this is just another expense. It's another thing. Like, why do we need this? Whatever. So you kind of have to craft a story towards a completely different audience and almost from a company perspective instead of a individual perspective.

is that accurate?

[00:17:04] Will: Yeah. And that's, it's spot on, with the engineering managers, we can make a lot of headway by saying like, Hey, this is how much time this will save you on a week to week basis. And this is like how much better you will be having these conversations with your developers. And they're excited about that.

but you know, the minute you begin to walk up the organization, development leaders are just judged on outcomes. what did they say they were going to ship and then did they ship it and everything else comes back to that even things like employee retention, satisfaction, those are all judged as like 2nd order effects of getting things done.

And, and so that is what, at the end of the day, we have to show. And the good news is that just like you want to create scalable technology, you do want to create scalable management practices and leadership practices because it does impact your outcomes. And so, we are painting that line more clearly as we go up the organization.

[00:18:05] Jay: Yeah. I love that. It makes a lot of sense. I mean, you gotta, I think you're dead on too. I think literally nothing else matters in a, you know, from a top line, bottom line perspective in a technology company than. much stuff we're getting out and how much is that increasing the value of our brand, right?

Period. Like nothing else matters because then they can't pay the bills if that isn't the case. Right. You have to focus on that. So it does, it makes a lot of sense. Well, tell me about your first customer. Who was your first customer and how did you get them?

[00:18:34] Will: Yeah. I thought it was, interesting that we talk so much about Birmingham and how, I'm a native because it would seem.

And, so, we have been very active on LinkedIn and that's been a strength of ours. And one of the things my co founder and I always say is that we're not going to, if we failed, it's not going to be because people haven't noticed us or haven't seen us or haven't tried the product. We want to get in front of people and then we want the idea and the problem solving to happen.

To be measured. And so we've done a good job with that. And, through our connections, we stumbled into a fast growing series. A startup that was growing their development team from 7 to 15 and in 12 months. And when they heard that our platform Kind of gives them a place to keep track of their developers on the things that aren't tracked in a system like Jira, and, it begins to create a scalable management practice that can help them go from 7 to 15 without adding.

Layers into their system because they still want to move fast right now. They were excited about it and they signed up and they were our first paying customer and proud to say that they are a continued customer with us and have only grown their development team. And so it's been a super cool story to see their growth over the past year since they've been a customer and, how we've helped them in that journey. but it's also kind of leads me into another story that I can go into if you're interested, which is that the first customer is not always the prototype customer that you're going to be able to find

[00:20:22] Jay: we are going to get, we are going to get to that. That is the next question I'm going to ask. I, your, you and your co founders quote though. I love that because I heard from a guy that lives near here. I think he was like a photography guy or whatever. And he said, you know, if people don't want to work with me because they don't like my work, I'm okay with that.

If people don't want to work with me because they don't know who I am, I'm not okay with that. And it's the same sentiment, right? Like you, if you're out there or people are talking like, you know, that's all you can ask. You can't make people try you, but you just got to be as attractive as possible.

that point you were just making, I think, is a beautiful segue into, one of my favorite questions. And I was waiting for you to say, I've been trained by my guests to wait for when they say, and there's still a customer today. So I'm very glad to hear that there's still a customer today. So I was waiting for that and I did get to hear it.

So, Tell me how, you know, who your customer was when you started versus who they are today. Right. And how that has changed since you guys started the company.

[00:21:20] Will: Yeah. so I think when you're really early on. So in the startup world, there's this concept of your ideal customer profile, your ICP, and it's really important to think about that to get as specific as you can to, craft everything around them. But still day one, you might have a hypothesis of what that is.

But most people are not fortunate enough to, reject everybody else. And so as you go out into the market and you begin to share your story, you, take what comes and you talk to people and you listen to them and you understand the different pain points that. Different customers feel in. So, after we got that first customer, we pretty quickly after them, got a few other customers and we ended up with kind of three different profiles.

We had these fast growing series a startups. we had kind of a medium size. Software company, and then we had a, larger organization and, that really, was great because we see that we're starting to hit pains in a lot of different areas, but I also can. Quickly become confusing and you want to be focused.

You have very few resources as a startup, and you want to put them all into 1 effort. And so, even though we try to find a repeatable way to find fast growing series, a startups, what we found is that. Most of them are not as forward thinking as the customer who's still with us today. And, you know, so often they're still thinking about product market fit and solving that pain that every other pain is just not important to them or they're willing to just live with.

And so we were unable to find. Really repeatable customer there. And really where we have gotten more success recently is in larger organizations, that may have 75 plus developers, where when you think about scaling. Good management practices and you think about like who in that company could benefit from a tool that helps them be a good dev leader.

There's obviously going to be more managers. There's going to be more at stake with the increased investment in software developers, and so that is where we've had more success. Recently.

[00:23:58] Jay: Beautiful. Well, I love I love the, everything about what we just talked about was fantastic. There's a lot of good information in there. I have one final question for you. Non business related. Just this is will be in will, if you could do anything on earth and you knew you wouldn't fail.

What would it be?

[00:24:15] Will: Oh, if I could do anything on earth and I know I would have fail, what would it be? I think I would just never stop creating companies and maybe that's a cop out because that's what I'm doing and I will actually keep doing that. But even to be clear, even without the guarantee, I will continue to do that. because it's just so important to me. it's what I love to do and I love to build.

I've got, married to a beautiful wife. I have two amazing boys that are five and two, and I cannot think of a better example to set. For them, then getting up every day and doing something I love and building something to create a better world for all of us to live in. And so, that's what I would do.

And I would be even more driven knowing that I couldn't fail.

[00:25:06] Jay: Beautiful. Look at that. Or maybe you wouldn't be as driven because you knew you wouldn't fail. Right? Like that's

[00:25:11] Will: Maybe so, yeah.

[00:25:12] Jay: of it, right? Like you're, we're all constantly terrified that we're going to be poor and, you know, eating ramen noodles again tomorrow. So, you know, well, I love the story, man.

I love the journey. we will be cheering you on and we've talked about, you know, ways that maybe we even could work. Together from a QA agency perspective who works with a bunch of dev agencies. So I think there's a lot of legs for what you're doing. you know, so I wish you the best of luck, happy holidays, happy new year, all that fun stuff.

if you want to find out more about you, specifically about something they heard or dev clarity, how do they do that?

[00:25:42] Will: yeah. Find Dev Clarity. You can go to devclarity.ai and then you can find me on LinkedIn search Will Blackburn and I'll come up. I'm sure we can provide a link, but I'm active on LinkedIn. talk a lot about dev leadership. I also talk about how AI is changing the software development space. And so, if you're interested in any of those topics, come and find me.

Let's have a chat.

[00:26:04] Jay: We'll link you up, brother. All right, man. Well, you're awesome, dude. enjoy the rest of your week and the holiday season, brother. We'll talk again soon. All right.

[00:26:11] Will: Thanks Jay. Thanks for all you do.

[00:26:13] Jay: Thanks Will. See you man. 

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