Ivan Huerta, Parabeac CEO, made every mistake in the book until he pivoted the business

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

5 years ago, I was studying Computer Science where I got bored with school and started building apps in my free time. I was fortunate enough to have other developers want to join me, then eventually I started pursuing an idea I had and raised a small amount of angel money for it so I dropped out of college.

As a young entrepreneur working on his first idea, I made every mistake in the book. Eventually, we pivoted to a dev shop where we consulted many startups around the U.S. It was during this time where we discovered this problem between design & development and decided to tackle it beginning in December 2019.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Our startup is called Parabeac, and we make it easy for both designers & developers to make accurate and responsive designs. We do this by taking design files, converting them into code, and integrating each design change directly into the developer workflow (via Pull Requests).

What is the origin story?

When we were a dev shop a few things happened.

1. Flutter, a new app development framework by Google had come out, and we found it to be absolutely transformative really early on.

2. As a small shop, in order to stay competitive, we had to build internal tooling. One of the biggest bottlenecks we needed to fix was the handoff between design & development.

3. We went out and tried as many tools trying to tackle this problem, and none of them quite fixed it the way we needed it to.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

What I love about our team is that we range from young, homegrown El Pasoans to some of our part-time executives who are seasoned veterans at companies like Sprint & JC Penny. We are specifically suited to solve the problem we are working on today because we’ve experienced this problem first hand, and we are early Flutter adopters.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

I would be working at some other startup, working on another startup, or working in venture.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

We measure success by seeing companies using our product in a production environment. Once we start scaling customers our core metrics will primarily be around usage.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

While we don’t have a whole bunch of companies using our product today, it is exciting to see the few that are, and how many are interested in solving this problem. We’ve learned a lot talking to users and are excited for our upcoming release where we make the product available for everyone!

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

I’m still most excited about Flutter - its amazing technology because, with one codebase, you can create apps on iOS, Android, Web, Desktop, and even embedded systems.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

I’ve read articles on Hackernoon that I really enjoyed, so we like to publish our stories on Hackernoon too.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

While that wasn’t too long ago, I remember this was a low point in my entrepreneurial career. I would tell myself, that I will inevitably fall on my face, and it is all part of the process.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

Because I’ve spent a lot of time talking to investors this year, I think the one key thing that I’ve learned this year is to play offense instead of defense. This is something I’ve observed from other founders that I know personally and look up to.

https://startups.hackernoon.com/us/el-paso - Parabeac