Early Stage Development SaaS Startup

Landing in early stage startup development for a Software as a Service company was certainly not in my 5 year plan after undergrad.

I thought I would work in communication, marketing or other media creation for a bit before returning to journalism. And, I did. For a stint. What I didn’t know was how much I would be itching to position myself into executive leadership and entrepeneurship during this time.

In high school, I once tried to teach myself fundamental coding skills on Khan Academy. I always liked science, math and anything analytical — although they seldom liked me back. An elementary understanding of it is what I would generously call my coding skills.

Still, I found myself assisting the early stage development of a SaaS startup during my time at the entertainment nonprofit. The product need was identified by the nonprofit, then incubated within it alongside another local incubator space with venture capital firms connections.

My project manager title transferred over to the startup, and before I knew it I was facilitating conversations between key stakeholders on a daily basis. At some point, I picked up the skills and learned how to streamline our development.

Who I Learned From

It has become a Linkedin trend to identify one’s self as a “lifelong learner,” and this is a great quality to have. Alternatively, I have always labeled myself as “a forever work in progress.” Most likely, this is because I don’t like to keep too many skills in my backlog — add Kan Ban Board lover to my professional personality — and feed off of putting more on my plate.

The best way to continue working in an efficient way is moving forward inquisitively and taking the initiative to learn yourself rather than leaning on experts. Here are the type of experts who I can contribute my baseline skills to:

• CEOs
• CTOs
• Front/back-end developers
• Cloud architects
• AWS ProServ
• Data Analysts
• I.P. attorneys
• Business law attorneys
• Venture Capital Firms
• Angel Investors
• Web3 & Blockchain Developers
• Executive Leadership Coaches

My Major Contributions to the Startup

Writing, planning, organizing and communicating have always been my forte. I transferred this over to produce:

• 42 page Business Plan
• Funding Requests
• Copy for Pitch Deck
• Project Summaries
• Manager of Stakeholder Relations
• Market Research, Competitor Analysis, SWOT Analysis

My most challenging task was comparing our business plan and white-paper research to similar early stage startups — even those that are not in the SaaS industry — to market ourselves to VCs accordingly. The business plan oddly became my happy place and pride-and-joy.

Many more tasks were day-to-day project management and execution.

I am always seeking new opportunities to give back to other early stage startups!

How This Comes Back to Journalism

Like I said, I always knew/thought I wanted to return to journalism. I planned to use my skills to find my niche in business and finance reporting, data journalism, multimedia editing and capitalism-based power investigations. However, I found myself reporting on these topics and missing being in the thick of them.

So, contributing to startups and creating my own is in my newest 5-year-plan.