Atlanta Founder Stories: Amanda Sabreah, Founder of Staat
We are kicking off Women’s History Month with another Atlanta Founder Story and a spotlight on Amanda Sabreah, a founder who is set to revolutionize the future of work for software engineer teams. In 2020, Amanda and the Staat team launched early access to their automated engineering reporting tool that captures and organizes updates from Jira and Github into a simple and beautiful dashboard. This helpful tool has already helped startups communicate, collaborate and make stratgic decisions on the fly! Learn more about Staat in our interview with Amanda on her #AtlantaFounderStory.
Introducing Amanda Sabreah:
Originally from Durham, North Carolina. Amanda landed in Atlanta to attend the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). Amanda detailed her experience as one of the best decisions of her life. In our one-on-one, she shared how her experience at SCAD introduced her to her own entrepreneurial style:
“While at SCAD I studied film and always had my eyes set on owning my own network. So I believe entrepreneurship was in my blood young.
However, as I started working for Coca-Cola I started recognizing very serious problems in workflows. Naturally, I’m a reverse-engineer type of gal and I set out to solve some of those real life problems.”
Building products customers love
After building a well established career in product management and product strategy, Amanda’s vibrant entrepreneurial spirit has manifested into Staat, and a few other ventures as Founder of Thought Factory, a full funnel media agency; and as Advisor to Hairbrella, an rainwear company with innovative designs to that protect women’s hair from rain and humidity without sweating it out. Through each of these ventures Amanda has clearly put one thing in the forefront of each of her products: the customers.
“Bulding a startup is both exhausting and rejuvenating at the same time.
I’ve learned a lot about myself — that I’m most creative with a very solid routine, and I’ve learned a lot about solving problems — having candid conversations with customers over and over again.”
In fact, Amanda’s customer focus drove the inspiration for an important pivot for Staat back in 2020 when she took a pivot from a marketplace platform to an insight driven dashboard:
“I started my this journey building a marketplace for large brands to hire freelance creative talent. However, looking back, I was too emotionally attached to the idea to be able to listen to my customers well enough. As that idea started to fail — we pivoted and tackled a problem that we ran into consistently while building the company which was “efficiently managing engineers.” Then, Staat was born.”
Gaining momentum
Amanda has been gaining quite the momentum for her work on Staat, some of the biggest milestones for the company this year include being accepted to Atlanta Founder’s Academy, an initiative headed up by Head of Google for Startups’ Jewel Burks Soloman; securing their first customers which include companies like Twilio, Cashapp, Newstory, Honey, and Etsy; and forming a customer advisory board. While Amanda and the team at Staat continue to make progress, she closes us out with what we else we can look forward to:
Everyday we look forward to iterating and building a product that delivers exponential value to an engineering managers workflow. We look forward to more and more conversations with customers that say “this is exactly what I needed.”
Want to find a way to support Amanda? Share and learn more about how Staat can help streamline your engineering team and sign up to get early access on staat.co.
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Thanks for sharing your story with us Amanda! For more exciting stories of the founders that are making our Atlanta startup communtiy so bright, share this story and stay tuned at StartupAtlanta.com.
Are you a founder looking for resources in Atlanta’s startup community? Download the latest edition of Startup Atlanta’s FREE Guide to the Startup Ecosystem today!
