Chaser

Josh Martab spent five years at Thriver Technologies, a Series B corporate catering company, where he held three director roles spanning sales, product, engineering, growth, and business intelligence. The company was thriving until COVID hit and revenue tanked 97% overnight—offices emptied, corporate catering demand evaporated. But before the collapse, Josh had watched firsthand how broken project management workflows were. Teams using Asana, Monday, or similar tools rarely adopted them deeply. Nobody wakes up excited to log into their project management software. Josh realized there was a gap: what if you could delegate tasks without forcing everyone onto the same platform?

Josh partnered with his former head of engineering at Thriver to co-found Chaser. They built an MVP that lives entirely in Slack—the one place everyone actually uses. The core innovation: you can assign a task to anyone, even if they're not a Chaser user. They receive it via Slack or email, click to mark it complete or push back the deadline, and Chaser tracks progress on your dashboard without forcing adoption. The team bootstrapped initially, then raised $100k from a VC on a $7M valuation cap (SAFE instrument) about a year and a half before this interview, followed by $20k from angel investors at a slightly higher cap six months later—total $120k in funding. They kept things lean: Josh and his co-founder are unpaid, plus two full-time contract developers and a part-time head of marketing joining from Thriver.

Chaser launched on the Slack app directory and immediately started getting organic installs. To accelerate discovery, they've also been running Meta ads—spending about $2k per month. They've acquired 100 companies using the free MVP, many of them sticking around for months and reporting that Chaser is changing how they work. Josh is deliberately holding off monetization; he doesn't want to distract from product-market fit.

The retention metric tells the story: 43% of the 100 companies that signed up over the past 16 weeks still sent at least one task per week 16 weeks later. That's strong for a free MVP, especially one as bare-bones as Chaser was at the time of this interview. Josh credits Segment and Mixpanel for revealing user behavior—they can see that users engage daily with Chaser, far more sticky than Trello's Slack app which just pings a channel when cards move. The challenge: discovery through the Slack app directory is difficult because popular apps like Drive and Google Calendar dominate the default sort-by-popularity ranking. Josh is betting that better retention metrics and daily engagement will eventually bubble Chaser higher in the directory rankings, but he acknowledges this might not work—in which case he'll have to rely on paid ads and guerrilla marketing, which is expensive.

With $120k in runway, a 43% retention rate, and 100 early adopters validating the core concept, Josh is all-in on growth and product stickiness. He's learned from his five years at Thriver that product-led growth beats demo-heavy sales—he wants customers to self-serve, try for free, and fall in love with the product before any paywall conversation. His thesis: get millions of tasks flowing through Chaser weekly, nail the experience, then monetize. The next milestone is obvious: grow from 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 companies. At 31, living in San Francisco on equity alone, Josh is roughing it out with his co-founder—a repeatable pattern from their previous work together that bred mutual trust and a clean 50-50 split.