Those of you who’ve been following ChartMogul for some time may remember that Mogul I/O was originally an event series that we held back in 2018 in four cities (SF, NYC, London, Berlin).
We planned to reboot the event in 2020 as a single larger event in SF or NYC, but then COVID hit and put that idea on hold.
We considered re-launching it as an online event, but it felt like everyone was launching those. Also, in my view the biggest benefit of events is meeting people in real life and building lasting connections.
We then thought about re-launching Mogul I/O as an online community, but for some time couldn’t think of a good angle to make it unique and worthwhile.
Then I got to thinking, our VC, Point Nine Capital, runs a Slack community for portfolio companies, it’s open to founders and employees of their portfolio companies, as well as team members and close friends of Point Nine. Within their Slack community, my favorite channel is the founders-only one; it’s a private place for founders to connect with each other. It is however just for founders Point Nine have backed, which excludes the vast majority of SaaS founders.
So the idea for today’s reboot of Mogul I/O was born – it’s simply a Slack-based community, exclusively for SaaS founders and CEOs.
We’ve been running it as a pilot for the past few weeks with around 45 members, and there has been enough of a positive reaction for us to pursue this concept, do an official launch, and start opening it up to a wider audience.
We want the sweet spot for the community to be founders and CEOs operating SaaS businesses doing between $0.5M to $50M in ARR. Below half a million in ARR ($42K MRR) the challenges are quite different, e.g. the search for PMF, survival, etc. There are also quite a few communities serving very early stage startups and bootstrappers (e.g. IndieHackers, etc).
As companies scale from $0.5M to $50M in ARR the daily challenges facing founders tend to be some combination of team, hiring, making oneself redundant, becoming a better leader, fundraising, scaling, compliance, international expansion, etc, etc.
Above $50M the challenges are also very different, e.g. figuring out how to manage hundreds of employees, raising mega growth rounds from Goldman Sachs, preparing for an IPO, etc.
In time we may open up the community to earlier stage founders, though for now we’re going to start things off with these rough parameters for membership 🙏 and see how things go.
We’re doing this for fun, mainly because I love connecting with other founders and CEOs, it’s not going to make money and it doesn’t need to grow too large.
If you are a SaaS founder or CEO and want to be part of this community, please head over to mogul.io and click “Apply to Join” 🙂
P.s. Mogul I/O is on ProductHunt today, please check it out and give it a 👍 if you like what you see 🙏
