Reflecting on a Year of Growth and Gratitude: The Springboards.ai Journey

Back to Posts

1 year ago today we onboarded our first agencies onto Springboards.ai. We’ve nearly onboarded 100 agencies since then and while the last year is full of milestones the Springboards story really started 2.5 years ago.

July 2022. Both Amy Tucker and I were laid off within 3 weeks of each other.

We spent about 12 months experimenting, learning playing and a doing some contract work to tie us over and feed our young family.

It was one of those experiments that led to springboards. We convinced Cat McGinn and Tim Burrowes to put us on stage at an AI conference. With a deadline and the threat of public humiliation in front of peers we had to take this experiment and build a working MVP.

We luckily didn’t embarrass ourselves, instead we had agencies ready to give us money, money we used to build V1 of springboards.

We struck gold meeting our CTO Kieran and convinced him to help build this idea. Kieran is a mythical creature (he doesn’t even have a Linkedin profile!). An art student who decided to get a PHD in machine learning and ended up in Google’s creative lab playing with Gen AI tools before gen ai was a thing.

This was the hard part. 18months of taking every cent we earned and pumping into this experiment and chasing a feeling not really knowing what would happen with the added pressure of a 2nd child on the way.

The last 12 months of accomplishments seem easy in comparison!

There is a heap of people we need to thank. And I’m sure I’ll miss some but here goes.

  • Chris Boden for the constant stream of inspiration, teaching, connecting and pushing us and politely telling us our other idea was horrible.

  • Simon Lenoir for the early mentorship when we didn’t even know was SaaS stood for.

  • The whole Peregian Digital Hub for the support, inspiration and connections.

  • Charlie Murray for intro’ing us to Kieran the magical unicorn

  • Christian Navarro, Uma Mantravadi, Ilana Bryant, Christian Hughes, Chuck McBride, Kira C., Olivier Starck, Michael Fishwick for giving us projects to keep the lights on!

  • Amy’s parents for supporting us with a roof over our heads!

  • Chris Colter, Emily Taylor, James Collier, Andrew Dowling, Hugo Cutrone, Graham Sweet, Miles Joyce, Mitch Hunter, Glen Cassidy, Sarah Heitkamp and all the other OG springboard users who took a risk on us.

  • Zoe Scaman for leaking us to the world

  • Tom Humphrey and Blackbird for believing and trusting in us with our Seed round (which we still haven’t announced!)

And to the whole springboards team we are building this with now.

The last 12months we’ve been building a base, the next 12 is what really gets me excited when we actually talk about this thing to the world (ie with a proper website and PR!)