Eric Leebow was born in New Jersey, and bounced around a few states growing up. He has always been a gadget and tech enthusiast, growing up curious. At a young age, he could be found drawing, creating new things, and tinkering with headsets. Outside of tech, he is into juggling, playing and watching basketball. He's based in New York, and has been a vegetarian since he was a kid.When he went off to college, Eric had with him picture books. He noticed that there were key words next to each person, which indicated their interests. He thought, wouldn't it be interesting if we can use this information to connect people within school?This is the creation story of FreezeCrowd.SponsorsRapyd CloudSpeakeasyQA WolfSnapTradeLinkshttps://www.freezecrowd.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericleebow/Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.com* Check out Vanta: https://vanta.com/CODESTORYSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
This episode is sponsored by Kinsta. Between juggling client meetings, managing your website, and keeping up with everyday tasks, who has the time to stress out about website security? Well, with Kinsta, the technical stuff is taken care of so you can focus on what you do best.
Kinsta provides managed hosting for WordPress, offering lightning fast load times, top tier security, and unmatched human only customer support. Whether you're a business owner, web developer, or running a digital agency, Kinsta makes managing your website easy and efficient.
Kinsta provides enterprise grade security, being one of the few hosting providers for WordPress with SOC 2 and other certifications, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Thanks to their unlimited free expert-led migrations, Kinsta ensures a smooth transition for you from other hosting providers.
Customers have reported 200% faster load times post-migration to their platform. What I find cool about Kinsta is their fast and reliable customer service and premium features that are included at no extra cost. Ready to experience Kinsta's hosting for yourself? Get your first month free when you sign up at kinsta.com today. That's K-I-N-S-T-A dot com.
Today's episode is brought to you by RapidCloud. Did you know that 53% of users abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load? For businesses relying on WordPress, every second counts for user experience, conversions, SEO rankings, and revenue. And that's where RapidCloud comes in.
RapidCloud is a high-performance managed WordPress hosting solution with advanced technologies like Lightspeed Enterprise and Object Cache Pro designed to deliver lightning-fast load times and handle the demands of today's dynamic websites.
Whether you're running an e-commerce store, online learning platform, or a bustling media site, RapidCloud ensures lightning-fast performance, unmatched scalability, and enterprise-grade security, all backed by 24-7 expert support. RapidCloud empowers developers, business owners, and agencies to deliver seamless online experiences without ever worrying about downtime or slow load times.
Use the promo code CODESTORY to get up to 25% off on all annual plans and 10% off monthly subscriptions. Offer valid for two billing periods only. That's promo code CODESTORY, all one word. Visit www.rapid.cloud and get started today. That's R-A-P-Y-D dot cloud.
We actually launched something in 2009 and the reality is they had to shut it down because it wasn't working perfectly. And it was very challenging for me because we had a lot of room for improvement and there were certain things that I wanted to do that would ameliorate the platform in some ways that would make it like no other. The first MVP, I should say, was working back then.
But the reality was, is we had to move in another direction and recode some things. And there were certain features that we had. And one of the thoughts that I had was that we can do some things that make it more educational and put some study guides and whatnot in here. But I actually threw out a lot of those ideas because it wasn't really focused on my main platform. My name is Eric Lebo.
I'm the founder and CEO of FreezeCrowd.
This is Code Story, a podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries who share what it takes to change an industry, who build the teams that have their back, keeping scalability top of mind. All that infrastructure was a pain. Yes, we've been fighting it as we grow. Total waste of time. The stories you don't read in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve.
Took it off the shelf and dusted it off and tried it again. To ride the ups and downs of the startup life. You need to really want it. It's not just about technology. All this and more on CodeStory. I'm your host, Noah Labhart. And today, how Eric Lebo is connecting you to your college friends based on interest and common connections to break the ice. This episode is sponsored by Speakeasy.
Grow your API user adoption and improve engineering velocity with friction-free integration experiences. With Speakeasy's platform, you can now automatically generate SDKs in 10 languages and Terraform providers in minutes. Visit speakeasy.com slash codestory and generate your first SDK for free. This message is sponsored by QA Wolf.
QA Wolf gets engineering teams to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage and helps them ship five times faster by reducing QA cycles from hours to minutes. With over 100 five-star reviews on G2 and customer testimonials from SalesLoft, Grotta, and Autotrader, you're in good hands. Join the Wolfpack at QAwolf.com. Eric Lebo was born in New Jersey and bounced around a few states growing up.
He's always been a gadget and tech enthusiast, growing up curious. At a young age, he could be found drawing, creating new things, and tinkering with virtual headsets. But outside of tech, he's into juggling, playing, and watching basketball. He's based in New York and has been a vegetarian since he was a kid. When he went off to college, Eric had with him picture books.
He noticed that there were key words next to each person in the book, which indicated their interests. He thought, would it be interesting if we could use this information to connect people within school? This is the creation story of Freeze Crowd.
Back in my camp days, as a child, I would look at the pictures and the photographs that we would have in our yearbooks. And we'd have group photos. And every year we'd take this group photo. And interestingly enough, that yearbook would be sent back to us. And I would look at the photos and try to find people in the photos.
And the camp counselors would tell us stories about campers and counselors that were previously on camp. When I went off to college, we had address books from pre-college programs and we had freshman picture book. When I went to a college, I went to a medium-sized college in Pennsylvania, Lehigh University.
And it was really interesting that I would look through the picture book and I would see the people in the picture book. It would be video games and basketball next to my name as an interest. And I would figure out a way, like over time, there's got to be a way to connect these people with these keywords and interests.
Throughout my college years, I would always think about this idea and ponder, there's got to be a better way to connect people on a college or university campus. It would be more private, community-oriented. It would be through the photos, because I would look at the photos and the pictures on the wall in the gymnasium.
I would look at those pictures on the wall, and I'd say, wouldn't it be interesting if someday we can have some sort of bubble chat where people can communicate in these photos? This was before a lot of the social networking sites even existed. And I had a different concept and different ideologies and thoughts and theories that people are connected through these photos.
And I was thinking about more ways to connect people and not just photos, but crowds. We're in crowds through classroom crowds or we're in crowds through our groups and whatnot. Some of these ideas may seem like they were sci-fi at the time. I remember my mother coming home to hand me something from Radio Shack, which was a QCAT. And that was somewhat similar to my original kind of concept.
I want to make some sort of game controller that would interact with the actual picture book that would warp someone like in a video game from the picture book to the actual profile page of the person where they can interact with that person and somehow connect with that person on the other end. I didn't feel comfortable telling it to a lot of friends because I didn't know how to build the QCAT.
However, this is like pre-mobile phones popularity and they weren't ubiquitous. So I thought there's got to be a better way to do it. And over time, I threw out the game controller idea and worked towards actually launching the site.
We had some struggles getting it up and running, but sat back and said, this is something that really needs to be done because there's a really strong need for a college connection with people that you have on your campus. That's where Freeze Crowd essentially serves its purpose, where you have this platform where you can break the ice and connect with people on the other end.
And people feel appreciated when they actually have someone they can connect with. So we hope people graduate, obviously, and they can come back to Freeze Crowd as a place where they can connect with their college and university community.
Let's dive into the MVP, that first version of the product you built. How long did it take to build and what sort of tools were used to bring it to life?
We actually launched something in 2009 and the reality is they had to shut it down because it wasn't working perfectly. And it was very challenging for me because we had a lot of room for improvement and there were certain things that I wanted to do that would ameliorate the platform in some ways that would make it like no other. The first MVP, I should say, was working back then.
But the reality was, is we had to move in another direction and recode some things. And there were certain features that we had. And one of the thoughts that I had was that we can do some things that make it more educational and put some study guides and whatnot in here. But I actually threw out a lot of those ideas because it wasn't really focused on my main platform sort of thing.
So I had to go towards in another direction with the platform. And focus on actually working towards a group photo aspect where I thought was valuable because that's more of a social aspect that I originally intended the platform for.
Took probably four to six years to eventually launch the platform and we were up and running in 2011 and I was very appreciative that we were able to get something up and running and we've been building it and improving it over time. It's always improving. And that's one of the things that we want to make our users know that they're not just stopping at what we have right now.
We really want to make it an amazing platform, not just something that's going to be something they just go to once, but we can come back to. And this is something that they appreciate their time with their college and university community.
In that MVP, you told me you had to go back and kind of rebuild it. Tell me about the decision point because that's a hard decision to make, right? You got to work through decisions and trade-offs when you're building something or when you decide to have to go back and redo it. Tell me about those decision points and how you cope with those decisions.
Obviously, it wasn't easy. Those were decisions that you have to make, and they're not always the easiest decisions to make. However, I went ahead and followed through and found a new developer team that we would work with that can help us. get in the right direction to make this product a success.
So that was one of the things we didn't necessarily have the perfect product on the first run around, obviously. And sometimes it takes more than one run around to actually get something up and running to make a success. And over time, you have to think about it this way, that Rome wasn't built in a day, right? And the greatest ideas in the world weren't necessarily built overnight.
They say that sometimes it's 10, 20 years to have a overnight success. And great ideas are fascinating to think about because not everybody thinks about them the same way as you sort of thinking. So I think that's interesting to think about. I was more of the creative mind behind the platform and the creative thinker and the ideas person that really drove the platform to where it is right now.
And I think that it's interesting to move ahead in a direction where college students and alumni can come together in their communities and connect in a way like no other.
This message is sponsored by SnapTrade. Link in-user brokerage accounts and build world-class investing experiences with SnapTrade's unified brokerage API. With over $12 billion in connected assets and over 300,000 connected accounts, SnapTrade's API quality and developer experience are second to none. SnapTrade is SOC 2 certified and uses industry-leading security practices.
Developers can use the company's official client SDKs to build investing experiences in minutes without the limitations of traditional aggregators. Get started for free today by visiting snaptrade.com slash codestory. This episode is sponsored by Speakeasy.
Whether you're growing the user adoption of your public API or streamlining internal development, SDKs can turn the chore of API integration into effortless implementation. Unburden your API users from guessing their way around your API while keeping your team focused on your product. Shorten the time to live integration and provide a delightful experience for your customers.
With Speakeasy's platform, you can now automatically generate up-to-date, robust, idiomatic SDKs in 10 languages and Terraform providers in just a matter of minutes. SDKs are feature-rich with type safety, auto-retries, and pagination. Everything you need to give your API the developer experience it deserves. Deliver a premium API experience without the premium price tag.
Visit speakeasy.com slash codestory to get started and generate your first SDK for free. Let's move forward then. So you've got your MVP, it's working, and you work through those hard decisions, which are difficult, and sometimes it takes iteration. And now you're moving forward. How are you progressing and maturing the product?
And I think to wrap that in a box a little bit, what we're looking for is how do you build your roadmap? How do you decide what's the next most important thing to build or to address with FreezeCrowd?
Henry Ford said, if you ask your customers what you need, sometimes they want a faster horse. And I know that quote is exactly right. But I think about quotes and things that we want to put in there that are some way would emulate a school yearbook in a way that would connect people. And there are certain things that I would love this feature or functionality on the platform.
But the reality is it's no way too much, obviously. We have to sit back and say, is this something we want to focus on? Or is this something that's a nice to have? Or this is something that is a want?
These features and functionalities, sometimes you have too many features and you have to prioritize on the features that actually mean something to the members that's going to make a difference in their life. So we did work on a mobile application and the mobile application was leased. However, we were going back to the drawing board on that to make it better.
And I think you always have to think about making things better over time, because if you improve things for people, there's more likelihood they're going to use it and appreciate it. It's important to realize that technology itself doesn't necessarily make a difference in people's lives unless they actually use it.
And I think that technology itself needs to have some sort of differentiation in it. It's not just about the AI, but the concepts that lend itself to helping people, improving our world and making a difference.
When people say, oh, they're going to change the world sort of thing, I think that's a little bit overwhelming because when you think about it, how are you going to change the world is going to make a difference in one person's life will make a difference in someone else's life eventually too.
Because once you get one person onto the platform, another person will come onto the platform to connect with them.
you
When you're looking for a great team, you have to find people who have complementary skill sets to yourself. If you're a creative person, you have to find someone who's more technical or someone who's more logistical or someone who's more understanding of technology sort of thing.
If you're more of a marketing person, you have to find someone who is not just the marketing person, but the person who's the technical person who's going to help out the marketing person. So if you're the promoter, you have to find someone who's going to go out there and make the great technology that you can promote. Finding the person actually is not always easy.
You have to find someone who has skill sets that basically are the opposite of yours. Maybe not the direct opposite, but they have skill sets that they understand something in a different way than you understand.
This message is sponsored by QA Wolf. If slow QA processes bottleneck your software engineering team and you're releasing slower because of it, you need a solution. You need QA Wolf. QA Wolf gets engineering teams to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage and helps them ship five times faster by reducing QA cycles from hours to minutes.
With over 100 five-star reviews on G2 and customer testimonials from SalesLoft, Drada, Autotrader, and many more, you're in good hands. Ready to ship faster with fewer bugs? Join the Wolfpack at QAwolf.com to see if they can help you squash the QA bottleneck. This episode is sponsored by Vanta. You're a startup founder. Finding product market fit is probably your number one priority.
But to land bigger customers, you also need security compliance. And obtaining your SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification can open those big doors. But they take time and energy pulling you away from building and shipping. And that's where Vanta comes in.
Vanta is the all-in-one compliance solution helping startups like yours get audit ready and build a strong security foundation quickly and painlessly. How, you ask? Vanta automates the manual security tasks that slow you down, helping you streamline your audit.
And the platform connects you with trusted experts to build your program, auditors to get you through audits quickly, and a marketplace for essentials like pen testing. So whether you're closing your first deal or gearing up for growth, Vanta makes compliance easy. Join over 8,000 companies, including many Y Combinator and Techstars startups who trust Vanta.
For a limited time, get $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com slash codestory. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash codestory. This message is sponsored by SnapTrade. Link in-user brokerage accounts and build world-class investing experiences with SnapTrade's unified brokerage API.
With over $12 billion in connected assets and over 300,000 connected accounts, SnapTrade's API quality and developer experience are second to none. SnapTrade is SOC 2 certified and uses industry-leading security practices. Developers can use the company's official client SDKs to build investing experiences in minutes without the limitations of traditional aggregators.
Get started for free today by visiting snaptrade.com slash codestory. Let's talk about scalability. There's a lot of connection points and data and things like that behind FreeScout, I would assume. Have there been any interesting areas where you've had to fight the scalability of your platform as you've grown?
Absolutely. There's no perfect answer to this question because things are hard to scale, obviously. There's a lot of different companies out there that are doing things in tech and social. And we would find people out there as representatives on college or university campus who can help us grow.
But I think that's not the only way we can grow over time because there's more ways that people will join the platform through word of mouth or through friends who are joining the platform and knowing that they're on the platform. scaling isn't always easy, but we didn't start at one school. So we started at multiple schools and that made it challenging for us to scale right away.
So I think that maybe over time, if we were to start at maybe one school instead of just launching at a lot of different schools, it would be easier to scale. But the reality is we didn't start at one school. So I think that scaling isn't always easy, but when you think about it in this way, we have members from multiple schools on the platform and
And it's really interesting to think how students from over a thousand colleges and universities have joined worldwide.
So as you step out on the balcony and you look across all that you've built with Freeze Crowd, what are you most proud of?
I would say that the database that we build, as well as the community of members who have joined the platform, make a difference in our lives because these members aren't just people who are just going to school and they're going to a college or university. They're hiring, they're education, they're people who are... wanting to make a difference in our world as well.
So I think these people who are on our platform are making a difference in their communities. So bringing on people from college and university communities helps people connect better because people want to be part of their community and connect with those people who have a common interest and We're all on the planet Earth, so we all have something in common being on our planet.
And I think it's a great idea that we can bring people together who share some sort of camaraderie, school spirit, connection. And we have that concept where they can come back to this community that they've shared a great experience at. It's not just about changing the world, but making a difference.
And there are certain things that I want to do from an angle that are differentiated from some other platforms out there. We have a cool concept of this breaking the ice and this ice cube. And I always think about the gift of life that we have and that the water and the ice and how we can make a difference through connecting people through this cool concept of breaking the ice.
Let's flip the script a little bit. Tell me about a mistake you made and how you and your team responded to it.
Mistakes are normal for any sort of founder, so it's not going to be something that you're not going to have ever, obviously. There are certain times when the mobile app wasn't working perfectly or there are certain times when we could have done better on that mobile version that people have wanted or getting the activation links were some things that we could have done better, obviously.
And I think there are certain mistakes that we've done in that capacity that really could make the site better over time. And there's other mistakes that we made, obviously, but every mistake is a learning experience. And that learning experience hopefully will move you in the right direction to make something better for your community.
Let's move forward then. Tell me what the future looks like for the product, the company and for your team.
The future is a mystery, obviously, and you can't really always say what the perfect future will look like for any sort of product or service that's out there. When you look at products or services that are out there that are really amazing, sometimes they told people that this is going to be this type of product or service and they misled them.
I don't want to mislead anyone to saying that we're going to do this or that. with the product or service. However, I feel in the direction of technologies that have AI or technologies that have aspects to them that can connect people in a way are much better and connect people in a way, not just in a real life situation, but more virtual too, and fuse the two together in some way.
People want to connect both ways, not just in the photo, but I feel the photos are the perfect example of a connection because community comes together in photos and real life experiences and events and stuff like that are some things that I really think about are valuable to connecting people.
Let's switch to you. Who influences the way that you work? Name a person or many persons or something you look up to and why.
There's no perfect person out there. However, when you look at technology, you like to think about people like Bill Gates or people like who started Google, looking at things that were very simple that eventually caught on. When you say some one person makes a huge difference on you, it's challenging to say that. always that one person who makes a difference.
But I think the main person who matters is yourself. However, you do have your influences and those influences hopefully are positive people who you can come back to and say, those people were people that I saw years ago. They're big tech people that I really appreciated and I understood their product or service in some way and I use their product or service.
These technologies that they've created and built for communities have made a difference in the world. I feel that these technologies that we have today are not just about technologies, but how they can help people better connect or how people improve the state of the world in some way. And I think that's interesting to think about.
All the people in big tech are interesting to me when it comes to technologies. It could be not just the people in big tech, but you have someone that nobody knows that kind of was an influence on you, such as a camp counselor. And or a teacher. And I think that's always interesting to think about as well. They may have had an influence on you in some way, shape or form.
So when you were a kid and you were in camp and your camp counselor said to you, we're going to have this photo and we're going to we're going to freeze here. Everyone take this camp counselor group photos. That's always interesting to think about how we're going to connect with people in some way that we've had some sort of connection. Last question, Eric.
So you're getting on a plane. You're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing. They're jazzed about it. They can't wait to show it off to the world. And can't wait to show it off to you right there on the plane. What advice do you give that person having gone down this road a bit?
You got to move carefully, do your research, understand the market and appreciate what's out there already. But you have to still move forward with your dreams, right? You look at video game systems that were out there. It didn't stop one system from starting after one other system was out there. Go ahead and move forward with it and follow through with your dreams.
And maybe someone else out there will appreciate it and maybe they won't. But the reality is there's no reason why you shouldn't go forward with it because you have to think optimistically, positively about your ideas because no one's going to see it the exact same way as you. Your creative way is not exactly the same as someone else's.
So move ahead with it and go forward with it and follow through with your dreams. And you have something that's out there that's unique. And everyone in this crowd that you have connected with is unique, like a snowflake, as we say on Freeze Crowd, because everyone has something that is different about them. And your idea could be the next big thing.
You have to be understanding that this idea that you have should be something that you really are interested in and have some sort of passion towards. Move forward with it. Maybe there's something in your early life that you had in your school or your teacher or your classmates that connected with you in some way that had some sort of commonalities.
Not everyone is going to think about things the same way. So I think that when you're in any sort of technology, there's no reason why you shouldn't go ahead with your dreams and follow through with them because everyone is unique like a snowflake. As the snowflake concept goes, There's a unique concept or a unique idea out there. And you have to think about moving ahead with that.
That's fantastic.
Well, Eric, thank you for being on the show today. And thank you for telling the creation story of Freeze Crowd.
Thank you.
And this concludes another chapter of Code Story. Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Laphart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the podcasting app of your choice. And when you get a chance, leave us a review. Both things help us out tremendously. And thanks again for listening.