INTRO GROWTH MARKETING PROS About Me I'm Phil Reynolds, CEO and co-founder of DevStride, an Enterprise Agile Planning tool that frees your team from project silos. We closed a $3.3m Pre-Seed Round 2 months ago, following an 18 month product build. We are now live and spinning up full scale GTM activities. Background Prior to DevStride I was the CEO and co-founder of BriteCore. I grew the company from a bootstrapped startup to a successful enterprise SaaS provider with $26m of ARR, 42 products, 87 enterprise customers, and a Series B valuation of $180m. The Problem Current project management software organizes work into siloed Projects (or Boards). This works well for project-based teams. However, if instead you have cross-functional teams that work across many interrelated programs; you have a real problem on your hands… you can’t readily analyze performance ACROSS projects or products. Turning Point BriteCore struggled mightily with this problem as we managed 42 products with over 3m LOC. Every individual customer implementation required new capabilities across various products. Keeping the dependencies straight between product and services was incredibly difficult due to the silo effect of each roadmap and project. We had a great team, and managed to overcome this challenge via sheer determination, enjoying 100% customer retention over a 10 year window. However, eventually the complexities overran the team, and in 2019 we missed a project deadline by 90 days, leading our largest customer to terminate an implementation worth $4.6m in ARR. What I Did About It I barely slept for the next 6 months as my brain tried to solve the issues. For a year, our founding team at DevStride brainstormed daily around scalable solutions. In 12 months, we had a plan and DevStride was born. In March of 2020, I left BriteCore and began working on a formal product roadmap. By 2021, I personally funded an angel round and we began building product. 18 months later, we delivered that product and raised a pre-seed round to initiate GTM activities and here we are! The Ask I would really love to meet other people in the group experiencing similar issues in project and portfolio management. If you have this pain point, or know someone else struggling under the load of making sense of a complex portfolio; I would be delighted to visit with you.