Edition 5: Humans of The Builders Club

An inside peak inside the arena, spotlighting builders turning their dreams into reality.

Humans of Builders Club

[Edition #3] Written with by Chris Rickard, Rebecca Williams and Annie Liao

We are so excited to share the next instalment of “Humans of Builders Club”. A series spotlighting the authentic human story of ambitious AI Builders.

This week, we’re chatting with Chris Rickard, founder of Userdoc, which is a requirements management system that helps businesses build and maintain better software requirements using AI 🚀!

Let's start with your background! Can you share with us your career journey and what led you to what you're currently doing?

I've loved programming since I was 14 - and I'm not ashamed to say it was inspired by the movie Hackers 🙂 What started off as an anarchistic teenage pastime, helped me build a career I'm proud of. And without programming, I would have no idea what my life would look like!

I graduated from Monash in 2003 with a bachelor of Applications Programming, and from then until now I've done a bunch. I led the frontend team of a 3D social network startup in Vancouver Canada, was a CTO at 27, founded a startup Setkick and went through the Startmate accelerator in 2012, I lived in Silicon Valley for a while, ran my own software consultancy for 8 years that built internal tools for businesses, and which was acquired in 2020, I then took  a year off to travel Australia in a motorhome with my wife,  and most recently, I'm helping businesses build better software requirements with my current startup Userdoc.

What led me to starting Userdoc was a culmination of my history, and my experience understanding how important accurate software requirements are to a product and to the business.

Plus we now live in a time where AI can help businesses move faster in many aspects, so I chose the software requirements niche.

What inspires you as an entrepreneur?

Creating something that didn't exist before you were here, plus taking control of your own life.

I should say though, I feel I am a lazy entrepreneur comparatively speaking.

I'm relatively risk averse, and I feel building software is being an entrepreneur on "easy mode".

I don't think I'm the type of entrepreneur that would open a food truck, or design and productize a widget to massage your lower back. That stuff seems like so much work, so much logistics, and so much risk. It totally works for some, but I'm also not a 90 hour per week entrepreneur. I like a life balance.

I've built all my businesses from my laptop, with zero expenses, and all were profitable within a month or so.

My software consultancy was the most profitable so far, and I've detailed my entire journey on my blog Dev to Agency - but TLDR; I did it slowly, and mitigated my risk. It started off freelancing, and ended up something much bigger.

How did you build up your technical expertise during a typical week?

I keep an eye on a lot of tech news…

My day starts and ends with Hacker News, and it has since 2008 or so.

I like the articles, but it's the comments that have the real gold in them. I also use Twitter / X daily a bit, and have a specific list focusing on AI tech.

I'm in around 15 Slack groups (including Builders club!), and on around 10 AI related Discord servers.

In terms of more hands-on expertise - I tinker quite a bit, whether that's on new Userdoc features, or building new GPTs, I think you can read all you want but it's not until you start writing some code until you truly get the technology.

Can you recommend any books, podcasts, links that have helped you on your builder journey?

Book wise, 2 good ones by Rob Walling Start Small, Stay Small (A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup), and The SaaS Playbook (Build a Multimillion-Dollar Startup Without Venture Capital). Another recent classic is The Mom Test (How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you) by Rob Fitzpatrick.

Podcast wise I like Latent Space for AI content, and My First Million as a guilty pleasure.

What are you most excited about right now?

I think just the speed in which generative AI is moving. 

I lean more towards the e/acc (Effective accelerationism) rather than being an AI doomer, and I feel technological progress (albeit with guardrails) is the best bet for a better long term future.

What are you currently building right now?

Userdoc is a requirements management system that helps businesses build and maintain better software requirements using AI.

We support the agile concepts of User stories, user personas, and user journeys - and within 5 minutes of using our AI project wizard you can have a very fleshed out set of requirements.

But many projects don't need a wizard as they specifically know their software requirements. In this case you can easily just create the components one by one, and let Userdoc help flesh out the detail and acceptance criteria as you need.

Userdoc went live at the start of 2023, and as of today has customers ranging from healthcare companies, governments, many agencies, and some very large worldwide consultancies.

One of our customers, Infosys, recently did a study on their use of Userdoc, and found that it helps them move 70% faster. 

You certainly still need the human-in-the-loop to confirm and often amend the AI generated software requirements, but I think this is the future - humans and AI working together.

You can stay up to date with Chris’s builder journey by following their LinkedIn here

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