Welcome to Full Steam Ahead 🚂 , the first edition of the Engyne Build in Public Newsletter!

Every Tuesday, we’ll share a weekly update about what we’ve accomplished the prior week and the learnings we’ve had along the way to help you learn what it’s like to build a startup from the ground up.

Who am I?

I’m Edgar, co-founder & CEO of Engyne. Engyne is a tool that lets you build programmatic SEO landing pages quickly—without writing a line of code. We help you build, customize, and publish hundreds of landing pages in seconds to boost organic traffic, leads, and sales so you can grow your business with ease.

Prior to starting Engyne, I was a former founder and early marketing hire at a few pre-seed to Series B startups and my co-founder Sukh was a founding engineer at several others. We both saw how tough it can be to scale your business as a founder, and decided to start Engyne to solve that problem.

Our vision is to help founders grow their startups using AI so they can increase their impact on the world while spending less time and money on things that don’t work like expensive marketing agencies.

Why Full Steam Ahead?

At Engyne, we’re big fans of the “Build in Public” movement, a method of sharing the journey of building your company online so you can share lessons, learnings, and hardships to help the next generation of founders (h/t KP, the leader of the movement and a former colleague and friend).

Full Steam Ahead builds on the idea of continually making forward progress by moving fast (and plays on our company name 😄). Shipping quickly and learning through experimentation are core values for our company, so we decided to use this newsletter as a way to share our learnings openly, while holding us accountable to moving the business forward every week.

In this weekly newsletter, we’ll share the journey of building Engyne from the ground up using the following format:

Format

• What is Engyne again?

  • We’ll start each issue with a quick one-liner. As with any startup, our business will change quickly as we grow, so the one-liner will describe the most current version of the business.

• Wins

  • We’ll share our top 1-3 wins for the week.

  • Celebrating wins (especially the small ones) is important at every stage of the business so we can build momentum over time and have gratitude throughout the process.

• Learnings

  • We’ll share our top 1-3 learnings from the week

  • These can be learnings about our product, customers, or lessons on building the company itself

  • We’ll also share challenges we’ve faced and how we overcame them, in typical “Build in Public style”. Every failure is an opportunity for growth, and we want to celebrate that.

• Gratitudes

  • It takes a village to build a successful company. In this section, we’ll shout out people we’re grateful for, whether they’re customers, investors, or individuals who’ve helped us grow the business and ourselves as founders.

  • Finding joy in the journey is crucial to riding out the highs and lows, and thanking the people who’ve helped us along the way is an essential part of staying grounded while we build the company.

• Additional

  • Occasionally, we’ll add deep-dives into specific topics, provide company metrics and in-depth updates, and share behind-the-scenes stories from building the company.

  • This format is also an experiment (like with anything), so we’ll update it over time based on your feedback.

We’ll send the newsletter out weekly (on Tuesdays for now), as it gives us time to summarize progress from the previous week.

With that in mind, here’s our first update:

Wins & Updates

• Established our co-founding team!

  • My co-founder Sukh and I met through the On Deck Founder Fellowship, a curated community for founders looking to build their next thing. Applications just opened for their next cohort, so feel free to reach out if you’re thinking about applying!

  • In a future issue, we’ll tell the story of how we met, and how working together was a natural fit from the moment we began collaborating.

• Got 3 new paying customers

  • We’re now at 3 paying customers ($300 MRR) for our no-code website builder for SEO landing pages. We’ve also generated revenue through marketing/SEO consulting but we won’t count that in these updates.

  • Many are On Deck fellows, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to help them grow their businesses using our platform.

• Shipped this newsletter!

  • We’re excited to kick off our journey of building in public so we can share our learnings along the way and bring you along for the ride.

Learnings and Lessons

• Team is everything

  • Having a strong co-founding team with complementary skill sets and shared values is the most important contributor to a company’s success.

  • At Engyne, I own non-technical functions like Marketing, Sales, and CS, while Sukh owns Product, Design, and Engineering. However, we both wear a bunch of hats, and support each other when needed.

• Build momentum early on

  • Momentum is everything in startups. It helps you land early customers, make key hires, or raise funding when the time is right.

  • Create momentum by setting clear goals for each day, week, and month. Then focus your time and energy on hitting them. Afterwards, update people around you on your progress, and establish new goals. Consistently doing what you say you’re going to do is powerful.

  • Momentum breeds more momentum—people want to support people who constantly make forward progress.

Gratitudes & Asks

• Gratitudes

  • We want to give a huge thank you to the On Deck team for running an incredible kickoff weekend for the fellowship as well as all the founders we’ve met thus far.

  • There are too many names to name here, but you’ve all been incredibly helpful and we wouldn’t be here without your support.

• Asks

  • If you know a founder who would find value in reading this newsletter or following along with our journey, share it with them! Demystifying entrepreneurship is why we’re sharing these updates, so don’t hesitate to let us know if you want to us to cover specific topics.

Thanks for reading to the end! We’re excited for what’s to come and grateful to have you follow along with our journey. If you have any questions or feedback, don’t hesitate to hit reply. We read every one :)

See you next week!

Thanks,

Edgar

Co-founder & CEO at Engyne