Gondola doubles revenue as its team builds more with Codex

While running his creative production agency, Fresh Tape Media, Jared Kleinstein noticed a problem: incredible creative work was being made for social media, but the makers weren’t getting proper credit. So he built the Gondola⁠(opens in a new window) platform to help creatives show what they made, prove its impact, and turn their work into their next opportunity.

For Gondola’s small team, one of the biggest constraints was how much product and operational work it could take on. Even small experiments competed with core product priorities for engineering time, and finding information and drafting work required sifting through tools and systems.

Today, the team uses Codex to turn more ideas into software and ChatGPT to simplify daily operations. Monthly engineering output is up 25% across the team and up 50% for its lead engineer. Company revenue has more than doubled year over year. For Jared, this has changed what feels possible for the team.

“Using OpenAI has increased the ambition of what we think a company our size can build.”

—Jared Kleinstein, Founder and CEO, Gondola

Enabling business teams to build alongside engineers with Codex

Many of Gondola’s product ideas come directly from customer conversations and operational problems that the business development and leadership team sees firsthand. Before Codex, they would have to define the need and write requirements and then wait for an engineer to have capacity to build the first version.

Now the same team uses Codex Cloud to explore the codebase, prototype an interface or workflow, test assumptions, and often get to a functional first version before an engineer needs to step in. Jared and Gondola’s Creator and Client Partnerships Manager Jojo Hesketh have both merged their first-ever code contributions into the main codebase.

“A product manager doesn’t need to stop at a written product requirement anymore. They can bring engineering a working prototype.”

—Jared Kleinstein, Founder and CEO, Gondola