Wayne Sutton

8 months ago

LaunchPie’s Experience Winning the Zero-to-One Hackathon

From January to March, Convex hosted the Zero to One Virtual Hackathon with the challenge “Build fullstack apps at light speed with Convex.” The hackathon was completed with over 2400 participants and 79 full-stack apps submitted. After an intense round of judging, the top winner of the Best Overall App was Konrad Hylton, who built LaunchPie. LaunchPie represents a unique approach to improving equity distribution among startup employees. Below is an interview with Konrad on building LaunchPie and his Convex experience.

What is the core problem that LaunchPie solves for startups and investors?

LaunchPie helps founders make informed equity decisions. It provides a framework for fair equity distribution that values each founder's contributions—whether time, expertise, or resources—in a balanced and equitable manner. This not only motivates teams but also provides investors with clear insights into the company's operations and commitment levels.

As startups mature and founders seek a more stable equity structure, LaunchPie facilitates this transition with cap tables and scenario modeling.

In other words, LaunchPie provides clear answers to questions like 'How much equity should a new co-founder receive?' or 'Will my equity dilute after a rights issue?' ensuring founders have the knowledge to make informed decisions.

What experiences led you to build LaunchPie?

As a corporate attorney, I've seen more than my fair share of equity disputes. It's a frequent and ugly problem. Founders generally have good intentions but often fall into the same traps. Having witnessed these conflicts first-hand and experienced similar challenges myself, it's clear to me that much of this is preventable.

After a deep dive into equity management, I began working on LaunchPie. I designed it to preemptively address the root causes of equity-related tensions by providing a clear, automated framework for equity distribution.

How did you learn about Convex?

The first time I heard about Convex was through AI Town. Not long after, I began seeing @YTCodeAntonio and @webdevcody using it in their projects. What stood out was the real-time dashboard, which allowed for live edits and instant updates. It looked like a good way to improve my workflow so I began checking out their docs.

What was your developer experience like building LaunchPie on Convex during the Zero to One Hackathon?

I don’t say this lightly: Convex offers the best developer experience available for a backend as a service today. If I ran into trouble, the support from their Discord was instant and always helpful— though I rarely needed it, given the quality of Convex’s docs. Their docs have a well implemented fuzzy search that grabs relevant matches from their docs, stack blog and existing Discord discussions. This is complimented by their chatbot that had no trouble deciphering my vague, error riddled prompts and provided very useful answers. Regardless of your skill level, it’s impossible to feel lost when building on Convex.

Convex also simplifies many of the more time-consuming parts of backend development. Security, real-time updates, and caching are either ready out of the box or greatly simplified. However, the dashboard truly stands out. It gives you an intuitive GUI that lets you test functions, view logs, edit data, monitor cron jobs, and inspect uploaded files, all in one place. It’s hard to express just how much this streamlines development until you’ve experienced it firsthand.

What top Convex features help build LaunchPie?

If I had to choose the three features from Convex that helped most in building LaunchPie, they would be:

1. Indexes: These allowed me to query documents quickly and efficiently, invaluable for managing a data-intensive application.
2. File Storage: I used this to store and serve important company documents as well as audio files from board meetings.
3. Vector Search: LaunchPie uses a lot of AI. Convex’s built in vector search and ability to define vector indexes made storing and retrieving embeddings pretty easy

What advice would you give to developers just learning about Convex to dive in to start building their app?

First, go through the Quick Start in their docs, then jump into their Stack. It’s full of well-thought-out articles, walkthroughs and perspectives on how to use and think about Convex. Find an article that aligns with your interests and use it as a springboard for your next project.

If you get stuck, use the search feature in their docs or consult their chatbot.

What’s next for you and LaunchPie?

I’m turning LaunchPie into a fully-fledged business. I spent the last few weeks speaking with entrepreneurs to make sure there’s a real demand. I’m also reaching out to potential investors and strategic partners who are interested in getting involved. If you’re interested in joining the waitlist or learning more about LaunchPie, check out launchpie.com.