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Dear investors and friends,

Welcome to the very first public Val Town Investor Update. I decided to start publishing these publicly, because I want to bring those of you who care about Val Town along for our journey.

Val Town is a JavaScript developer platform. Our mission is spreading the joy of programming.

We’re still trying to find product-market fit. We have a small team, customers, and revenue, but we do not yet have the kind of product-market fit that makes growth feel inevitable. Right now, our focus is helping small teams build useful custom software and agents.

Our goal this year is to grow revenue 20% month-over-month.

In February, we grew revenue 2%. Most of the month went into supporting one large enterprise opportunity. If it closes, it could increase revenue by 40%.

The biggest lesson from February is how easy it is to drift from product work into consulting work, and how carefully we need to guard against that. Once you’ve built custom software for a customer without them in the room, it’s hard for them to take ownership of it, leaving our product company on the hook for ongoing maintenance and feature work of their custom software.

By contrast, our best success story in Feb was with our existing Teams customer Kilo Code. They asked us to help them build a customer support agent. After just ninety minutes, we had an early prototype. They use it daily, and continue to add features and iterate on it on their own. We wrote more about it on our blog, and Kilo did too.

So we’re trying a new rule: we only code on behalf of customers with them in the room. That helps ensure the work is valued, that someone on their team can own it afterward, and that we get product feedback at the same time.

We’re starting to see flickers of product-market fit around custom agents, from customer support to recruiting to lead qualifying. We seem to sit in an interesting middle level-of-abstraction:

• No-code/low-code platforms (Retool, Zapier, Clay)
• Val Town
• Classic deployment platforms (Vercel, Render, Railway)

Especially with Townie, our AI Agent, Val Town may be the right level of abstraction for business people and programmers to collaborate on fully custom agents connected to their real data.

For March, we have two goals: close the enterprise customer, and add 11 net new Teams customers. The first would be a big win and validate all the hard work we put into February, but the second is the more important work of finding product-market fit for Teams.

Our ideal customer profile (ICP) remains early-stage technical startups, especially small YC-style teams. They move quickly, care about developer experience, can justify paying for tools that save them time, and the people buying the product are the same people using it.

Our growth strategy for March is engaging existing Val Town users who are not yet Teams customers, but we think should be.

From a product perspective, our focus is conversion, onboarding, and pricing. We need to make ourselves more legible: who Val Town is for, what we can help with, and what it costs. Then, once someone signs up, we need to help them get to an “aha moment” as fast as possible. In other words, we need to iron out the frictions in our self-serve Teams motion.

Team: 5 Hiring: 1 (Product Engineer) February revenue growth: 2% Revenue growth goal: 20%

• Built a customer success bot with Kilo Code in 90 minutes
• Built an analyst bot for a private equity firm (an enterprise customer)

• Got distracted with consulting work
• 2% monthly revenue growth (Goal: 20%)
• Fighting a new crop of phishers

• If you’d like to pair program a custom agent in 90 minutes, email agents@val.town.

Best, Steve