Growth is a key focus for a Birmingham tech startup that recently received a cash infusion from the Alabama Launchpad competition.
DevClarity, an AI-enhanced software platform dedicated to helping development teams streamline operations, received $25,000 in non-dilutive funding from Alabama Launchpad in December 2023 after winning the concept stage prize in a competition finale.
Peter Inge and Will Blackburn started DevClarity in July 2023 and are coming up on almost a year of operations. The two co-founders said that they used most of the $25,000 on independent software development contractors to accelerate product growth and better respond to customer feedback.
“After we completed Launchpad... we realized that we still needed to take a step back and get very clear about our focus and who we were serving,” Blackburn said. “One of my favorite sayings is ‘Startups do not starve, they drown.’ They drown by trying to do too much. Over the past four months, we've really gotten more clear about our ideal customer and their problems. We put other opportunities to the side to focus on this and because of this, we're now seeing great usage from our early customers.”
As part of the Alabama Launchpad program, startup founders got access to mentorship and seminars from industry experts, which Blackburn and Inge said was invaluable as they continued strengthening their company.
“If you were going to pay people for their time for that, (it would) be thousands and thousands of dollars that people like us aren't willing to spend at these early stages, and so that's already massively valuable,” Blackburn said. “And then the cherry on top is whoever wins the pitch competition gets non-dilutive funding to then go out and accelerate their product.”
Because DevClarity is still a young company, Inge and Blackburn are primarily monitoring frequency of customer use, as opposed to number of customers who pay for their platform.
“Something I learned is the most important thing is user activity because people will lie with their mouths. They don't lie with their time,” Inge said. “Using the platform is the truest indicator of value because we have had people pay us and not really use the platform, which means they will turn at some point. Later stages, you're trying to get the sale, the motion going, but right now all you’re trying to figure out is ‘Do people actually care and is this solving a problem for somebody?’”
The software platform is not yet open to public use, as Inge and Blackburn have spent almost a year working out the kinks and narrowing down their target audience. As DevClarity comes up on its first-year anniversary, the business will soon have its platform available publicly.
“We are moving towards a true product launch; even though we have live, paying customers today, we have not opened the product up for anyone to easily be able to sign up. Everyone still goes through us right now,” Blackburn said. “We've intentionally done that so we can talk to them, learn from them, but now that we have clarity about who our target customer is and how we're solving their problem, we plan to open up the product in the next few months.”
