Journal · Apr 2026

NYCFC: May 2026

Joseph Lee of Supademo's Founder Spotlight, Databricks AI Demo Day recap, more events!

By , , , ,
NYCFC: May 2026

Opening Remarks

News from Members 🎉

  • [NEWS]

This edition:

  • Joseph Lee of Supademo’s Founder Spotlight

  • April event highlights – including another edition of our AI demo series w/ Databricks

  • May events

  • Open roles at NYCFC startups

Let’s get started! 🚀

Member Spotlight: Joseph Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Supademo

Mike: “Talk to me about the early days of Supademo. What were the first things you did? What were the biggest challenges?”

Joe: “I think the biggest thing for us was – now that we had gone from a sales-led enterprise play to more of a lightweight product-led growth motion – it was all about how do we get the initial flywheel going? It’s easier to build this type of business that is lightweight, viral, and product-led, but it’s a lot harder to build defensible momentum and distribution. Supademo in itself is a viral product – you create demos not to keep them confined to your own team, but to share out with prospects, customers, colleagues to demonstrate your product and workflow. By the time people click through and experience it, they’re like, this was really cool, how do I use it for my own use cases? So there’s a flywheel there. But there’s a lot of noise – even more noise now with AI, there’s a new tool launching every single day. For us, the problem was more about how do we get that snowball rolling down the hill, and the product will do the heavy lifting after. It was all about: let’s get to our first one hundred customers in whatever fashion we can, exhaust as many channels as we can, and do the work so that it becomes almost impossible for people to say no to our product.”

Mike: “How did you find those first one hundred customers?”

Joe: “A lot of different ways – a microcosm of a hundred different things. The biggest thing was cliche, right? Don’t do things that don’t scale. But I think a lot of people say that and still make it so hard for people to buy. So some very tacit examples: I posted on Reddit. I scoured every Reddit community, every startup community. Whenever I could mention Supademo, I would. I would even start my own threads saying, drop your product URL and I’ll go in and actually sign up for your product, learn what it does – this was pre-AI – and I will create a showcase demo for you that you can use in sales and marketing efforts, without you having to pay for anything. I would respond to people’s comments inline on Reddit so other people landing on that community could click the link and see their product demo. I would sign up for every single product update from dream customers I could find – whether it be Airtable or Linear – and respond to every single product update. Usually product updates have some text and a screenshot. I would actually respond with a click-through demo using Supademo of that feature and say, hey, you should actually embed this directly in your product update. You don’t even have to pay me – here’s the link to sign up for the free plan, click duplicate, and you already have your demo. Do that enough times and enough people are going to be like, all right, this guy is leading with value. He’s not asking for anything but he’s giving me value first. Let me just poke around and see what this is. I would also share building in public on X, on Indie Hackers, launching on Product Hunt – just being a megaphone anywhere and everywhere anyone would listen.”

What’s your biggest ask right now? How can others help?

Mike: “For Supademo, what could listeners do to help you today? What do you need?”

Joe: “Helping amplify our story. I don’t want to say become a customer if it doesn’t add value – but if you have the need to create product demos for onboarding, sales enablement, marketing, go give it a try. We have a free plan and a free trial, so it doesn’t hurt poking around. Engage with the content that we put out there. Read it if it’s valuable to you, and reach out if I can be helpful – not just through the Supademo lens, but as a founder. I’m always looking to connect with other people.”

Mike: “Give Supademo a demo, basically.”

Joe: “Hey, yeah – give Supademo a try to demo your product. It’s very meta.”

If this sounds like you or someone you know, reach out at joseph@supademo.com or via LinkedIn.

Read our full interview with [MEMBER] here.

April Highlights

4/16: How the Best Companies Use AI - Engineering Lessons & Hacks w/ Databricks

On April 16th, we hosted three great speakers (including member Vrijen Attawar!) at another AI demo event with Databricks. ICYMI:

  • Stephen Orban (SVP of Product Ecosystem & Partnerships at Databricks) – shared how Databricks is tackling the data fragmentation problem facing large enterprises – from proprietary formats and siloed tools to disconnected AI models. He walked us through their open data lakehouse approach, data sharing capabilities, and a growing marketplace that helps partners and customers collaborate on top of a unified data foundation.

  • Rob Cheung (Co-founder & CEO of Zo) – presented a compelling vision for personal computing in the age of AI – a cloud-based personal computer that lives on the internet, knows your data, and can act on your behalf. Think of it as AWS for everyone: your health data, transaction history, and digital life all in one place, accessible and actionable through natural conversation.

  • ⁠Vrijen Attawar (Co-founder & CEO of CareerSpan) – shared how to rethink how we use AI tools. Rather than treating ChatGPT like a calculator, Vrijen advocates building structured, reusable workflows that let your information flow to the right place, compound over time, and make you measurably more capable. All without writing a single line of code.

Coming Up 🔥

Events:

Founder Opportunities:

🗽 = NYCFC Event

Subscribe to our Luma calendar here.

Email jordan@nycfounders.club to have us feature your event!

Roles at NYCFC Companies 👩🏻‍💻

See you next month!

Thanks for tuning in!

– Aakash, Adam, Mike, and Jordan

P.S.

New here? Check our website to learn more about NYC Founders Club, or follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram!