Website Launch Crisis

A story about how Thrive Market's founders discovered their web development agency hadn't started their website, leading to a crucial hiring decision.

"We spent $100,000 on an agency to build the website, and we found out 2 weeks before we were planning to launch that it basically wasn't even started. This shows our level of sophistication at the time.

At that moment of crisis, I went to Sam Teller, who was running the startup accelerator Launchpad LA, and said, 'Who in LA is the best CTO for startups? Wherever they are, whatever they're doing, we need to hire them. We'll give them whatever percentage of the company they need right now - we're in an existential crisis.'

He said, 'Sasha Sartha,' but unfortunately, he was talking to 40 other companies at the time. We more or less locked him in a room and didn't let him leave until he came on as our cofounder. Had we not done that, we wouldn't have gotten to launch.

In the end, it turned out to be one of the best things that happened to us. We failed to build a site, but we brought on the right cofounder who to this day is our CTO and head of products and drives huge amounts of value in the business."