At the Metal #1

Chronicling my journey as a founder, software engineer, and agency owner building Fullsend.

First, a bit of introduction.

My name is Sawyer - I co-founded Fullsend Solutions, a software agency in Los Angeles that builds mobile apps and websites for startups like Hopper, Locket Camera, and Recover Athletics.

For a while now, I’ve had this nagging concern that as the greatest years of my life whip by I’ve failed to sit down and chronicle all of the things that I want to remember. It’s easy to look back on the first few years running Fullsend, roll it all up into some blanket statement like “yup, learned a lot. Went well. Wasn’t without its headaches. Labor of love!” but nobody gets anything from that.

At the Metal is an attempt to bring you on our journey building Fullsend. With the obvious exception of client confidentiality (I don’t run a zoo, dude) - this newsletter is gonna peel back the curtain and bring you right down to the metal with me.

I have a laundry list of topics I plan to cover over the next several issues of this newsletter. How we got our first customer, the decisions that went into making our first hire, the advantages and disadvantages of 1099 vs. W2, and tactics we’ve used to scale to millions in revenue and beyond.

But before we can get to any of that, we have to wind back the clocks and set the stage.

A brief history.

In the fall of 2016 I was a junior at Bowdoin College studying Computer Science. I entered college knowing I wanted to be a CS major because I had been lucky enough to get exposed to programming in high school (St. John’s Prep in Danvers, MA) by Mr. Bernard Gilmore who taught a number of CS courses including AP CS. Exposure to programming in private high school education nowadays is probably incredibly common, if not a requirement. In 2014, it was still considered cutting-edge.

That fall, the career planning center at Bowdoin took a group of us to Boston to meet alums working in tech. I had the pleasure of meeting Ben Johnson who at the time was a Managing Director for an agency called Raizlabs that was fairly well known for their mobile app development. He told stories of building apps for companies like Six Flags, RunKeeper, and AAA. I was immediately hooked - I had an email in Ben’s inbox on the bus ride home and had secured a summer internship at Raizlabs a few weeks later. Quick story on securing the job: I had zero clue what to wear so I bought a suit. I’ve worn that suit exactly twice since that purchase. Once to the Raizlabs interview and once to a cousins wedding. I got dunked on by all 4 interviewers that I spoke to at Raiz for being in a suit that day. Long tech, long flip flops, long hoodies - leave the suits at home.

Fast forward a couple of years. An internship with Raiz in Boston led to a job offer and a move to San Francisco to join their team in Oakland. They were acquired by Rightpoint during my senior year, but it was Ben himself who called me at Christmas to let me know my job was safe. I met Dick Lucas during my internship—he was an Android developer at Raiz, living in Boston after graduating from Boston College. Soon after my internship wrapped, he relocated to San Francisco where I would join him a year later.

Fast forward 12 months from my start at RP - Dick had left to hike the Pacific Crest Trail with his sister. Meanwhile, I was slowly climbing the corporate cog dev ladder- working on an iOS app for Verizon, coaching Crossfit at Pacific Strength in the afternoons, and moonlighting with a startup in Boston building their iOS app all in an effort to burn down my student loans.

Taking the plunge.

I am admittedly not sure when it happened - I’m not sure Dick is either. We always say that we “agreed if Fullsend were still a good idea after the trail that we would do it” but I would be lying if I said I remember that conversation. Soon after Dick’s return from the PCT he visited the RP office in Oakland to see old coworkers. We had dinner that night and spent the entire time riffing on the future. I distinctly remember thinking to myself “holy shit, this Chad just walked from Mexico to Canada and he still wants to start a business with me.” So we did just that.

Taking a step back.

We registered Fullsend Solutions LLC in December of 2019 but we formally broke ground in March of 2020 after I left Rightpoint. In early 2019 we bought the domain name “fullsend.io” off of the then squatter - it’s a miracle that the idea didn’t die right there. I don’t think we ever bothered to check the .com but it would lead to some funny misunderstandings in the years to come (go ahead and see for yourself - in 2020 the masthead of their site read “a Corona a day keeps the ‘rona away” and pictured above the fold were dudes in hazmat suits chugging Corona while girls in bikinis watched). We’ve never had any run in with them - I suspect we work on different things.

The history lesson above is a speed run of the events in my life that led to me meeting Dick Lucas and eventually making the jump to start our own business. This newsletter is a place for me to document the amazing journey that we’ve been on, double click on some of the things we have discovered and learned along the way, and give an inside look at the week to week life running Fullsend.

This first edition of ATM has been pretty vanilla. I’ve kept it chill, kept it tame and my voice has been nerfed by the need to lay some foundational bricks. Moving forward you should expect this to get pretty loose. I want this to be fun for everyone, myself included.

Fullsend’s first “office” - the loft at our apartment in Venice Beach. Picture taken some time in 2020. Impossible to read but that chalkboard on top of the book shelf outlines our original bylaws. The last line reads “Laptops closed by 3pm.”

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