Think back to the last time you failed at something you cared about. It is likely that it not only left you feeling demoralized and helpless, but also as if the goal was no longer attainable and that you, somehow, no longer had the skills or knowledge to achieve that goal. According to Psychology Today, this is because failure tricks your mind into believing things that are untrue. This means that the real problem isn't the failure itself, but instead how the average person reacts to that failure.
Anthony Christian is a young co-founder and remarkable software engineer who has an extremely mature relationship with failure. Personally, he sees failure as a reasonable option in any endeavor, and recognizes that it is an essential part of the learning process. Thankfully his team shares this sentiment as well. In fact, he reflects on their process: "Through hard work and determination, we learned to identify our strengths and weaknesses and made failure an integral part of our iteration process. By embracing failure as a learning opportunity, we could quickly push out new features, get honest feedback, and iterate on our product. An open mindset towards failure also allows us to be honest with ourselves, to always be skeptical, and to seek the brutal truth instead of finding ways to trick ourselves into thinking that things are going well."
Anthony Christian - expert software engineer
Anthony was born and raised in Singapore. He was grateful to have the opportunity to attend the University of California, Berkeley, and it's in California where he met the amazing group of friends that would become his future business partners. As someone who had always been interested in technology, software engineering, and entrepreneurship, he couldn't help but fill his college years with as much experimentation and education as possible. He was young, energetic, inspired and eager to kick off a successful career after graduation. During that time, he worked on various projects, while also attending workshops and networking with successful entrepreneurs to learn from their knowledge and experiences. "I built and failed at least six different projects during that time," he recalls.
Each of those failures was a lesson learned for this software engineer, and he refused to give up. This perseverance led his team to found their first company, Govest, which earned them a position in the globally-renowned Y Combinator accelerator program. At the time, Anthony was only 21 years old.
The concept behind Cotter was a winner - a passwordless authentication platform. Anthony built and maintained the backend infrastructure, deployments, and databases. He also developed a deployment CI/CD for Cotter, in order to improve the engineering team's workflow and deployment cycle. Even though the business was lucrative, it wasn't quite achieving the growth rate that they hoped for. Given that they were better positioned to take Cotter to its full potential, it was a blessing when Stytch, a unicorn authentication company, purchased the product at the end of 2021.
The success of Typedream
With this team's unmatched ability to move forward instead of ruminating over the past, they already had the wheels in motion for their next venture at the time of the Cotter sale. As a marketing effort, they built Cotter plugins for simple website builders, like Webflow and Bubble, so that people with no coding skills could add login and signup functionalities to their websites. However, after receiving countless requests for a Cotter plugin with Notion, they had to step back to evaluate what was really going on.
Yes, there were some easy-to-use, template-based website-building platforms on the market. However, the team discovered that many individuals and businesses were looking for something even more simple. For those who weren't interested in hiring a website developer, Notion was a decent alternative. Since it was similar to Google Docs or Microsoft Word, the non-technical users were already familiar with the interface. It was popular, but Notion was far from perfect. It was developed for note-taking purposes, so it limited users' abilities to add design elements - things like buttons and navigation bars. The lightbulb came on, and Typedream was born.
Thanks to the great design and effortless functionality, Typedream is quickly becoming this generation's no-code website builder. The interface was inspired by Notion, but the platform has been designed with the future in mind, and the team is committed to keeping up with the trends as well as the technology. Not only have they included appealing design features like gradients andcontainers with shadows and elements over assets, they have also developed tools for digital creators and founders. With Typedream, users can build a converting landing page, accept payments to sell digital products, make forms to collect emails and surveys, write blogs, and optimize and analyze their sites for SEO. There is even an AI feature in development which will make all these processes much faster and easier.
Similarly to Cotter, Anthony developed the entire service and database infrastructure for the platform, which serves as the core of Typedream's technology stack. On top of that, he also built the software engineering team at Typedream from the ground up, which has expanded rapidly in the past couple of months. To empower the expanding team and business, Anthony built a system to improve observability and reliability and implemented backup and disaster recovery procedures, which have become crucial as the platform serves a growing number of businesses. As CIO at Typedream, his prowess as a software engineer and his leadership skills in managing the engineering team have been critical for the company's rapid growth and fast-paced innovation.
We're not the only ones excited about Typedream and this inspiring young team of founders. They were named #1 on Product Hunt's Product of the Day, Week, and Month, which received major media coverage on both Forbes and Tech in Asia. The founders were also featured in the Forbes 30 under 30 list. Without the fear of failure getting in the way, Anthony Christian and his team are sure to continue on their trailblazing in this highly competitive industry.
