Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Alex Chiou, Co-Founder of Taro, located in San Jose, CA, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

My business is Taro, and our customers are software engineers. We help software engineers become happier and more productive at their jobs through premium community and content. In particular, we focus on everything but the tactical coding portion. There are 1,000+ tutorials on how to write code with the latest JavaScript library, but there is almost 0 credible content online about greater, more impactful software engineering skills like submitting clean pull requests, having more efficient one-on-one meetings, and asking effective technical questions. Taro fills this gap and is what I wished I had 7 years ago when I was an earlier-in-career software engineer who didn't really know what he was doing.

Tell us about yourself

In the beginning, my cofounder Rahul and I weren't even trying to build a business. During the height of the pandemic (early 2021), we created Tech Career Growth Community and started holding free live webinars going extremely in-depth into software engineering topics. These talks spread like wildfire, with the LinkedIn events regularly having 5,000+ marked attendees.

I have always enjoyed mentoring software engineers, taking well over a dozen under my wing at Meta and Robinhood and getting them promoted incredibly quickly. Tech Career Growth Community was my way of doing that of scale and giving back. Rahul and I had such a fun time with the community that in late 2021, we decided to quit our jobs, turn it into a business, and pursue this mission for the rest of our careers.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

What I'm proudest of is that we have gotten where we are completely organically. We have a 6-digit ARR for Taro, and we didn't spend a single cent on customer acquisition (0 paid ads). Rahul and I have hundreds of thousands of followers across LinkedIn and YouTube, and it's because the software engineering community loves the career advice we have to share.

What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?

It's 100% staying focused. As a startup, there are an infinite amount of ideas you can pursue. Rahul and I also naturally get lots of inbounds as we're a part of Y Combinator and have large social media followings. It's hard judging these opportunities while not getting too distracted and staying the course to continue improving Taro for our users.

Contrast this to working at a big company like Meta, which is where I spent most of my career. Of course, there's lots of ambiguity with projects, but the overall space you work on is defined by your team and organization. I can't pivot the entire company to do something else like I could potentially do with Taro.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Start with the audience - Most entrepreneurs will launch their product and then try to build an audience around it. With Taro, we went in reverse: we built the audience first, spending thousands of hours providing free value, and then crafted the product around them. When you start with the product, it's much harder to build the audience as everyone knows you're trying to sell something.
  2. Listen to your users - Rahul and I do a one-on-one meeting with every new customer that joins Taro Premium. This really helps us understand what they're looking for and actually improve the product. When you're building a startup, it's really easy to do "Solution In Search Of A Problem" (or SISP), building something you think is cool that you hope helps someone.
  3. Just launch - If you're not embarrassed by your v1, you have launched too late. The initial product is always going to be ugly; it's important to come to terms with that and get what truly matters: User feedback.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.jointaro.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/join_taro
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-chiou/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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