Today we’re in conversation with Seb Poole, the co-founder of med-tech startup Frankie Health, a Giant in residence for Blackbird and the former CPO/CTO for Hulii. 

Seb brings a wealth of experience on the operations and tech side of growing tech startups. Lucky for us, he’s sharing them through practical tips and tools and some straightforward advice. If you’re a CTO, engineer or someone interested in starting a tech startup, this episode is for you.

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Timestamps:

• 00:00 - Welcome to The Way Forward
• 00:47 - Intro to today’s episode
• 1:30 - Seb’s first foray into the startup space with Grana 
• 2:50 - Mistakes and lessons learnt at Grana 
• 3:42 - How do you differentiate startups at Seed vs Series A?
• 4:38 - What growing from 0 to 20 engineers looks like 
• 6:37 - How smaller teams can replicate a QA process 
• 9:40 - Tidying up multiple stacks and frameworks across teams
• 10:43 - Journey with Frankie Health - Seb’s why, discovering product-market fit
• 13:20 - Indicators of product-market fit
• 14:45 - How do you make your product commercially viable? 
• 17:19 - Using tech to beat traditional business models
• 20:39 - What tech founders should focus on when building an MVP
• 22:50 - Is UI important? 
• 24:28 - How technical founders can do sales
• 25:30  - Seb’s sales messaging advice 
• 26:53  - Where there’s chaos there’s opportunity
• 28:45 - Seb’s advice for taking care of your mental health
• 30:42 - How startups founders can ask for help
• 32:40 - Seb’s hopes for Australia’s startup space