Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob interviews Derrick Reimer about the selling of his product Codetree. They discuss everything from the inception of the idea, to gaining traction, to launching, and finally the negotiation and sale.
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Transcript
Rob [00:00]: In this episode of ‘Startups for the Rest of Us,’ I talk with Derrick Reimer about what it’s like selling a $128,000 side project. This is ‘Startups for the Rest of Us’, episode 311.
Welcome to ‘Startups for the Rest of Us’, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching and growing software products whether you’ve built your first product, or you’re just thinking about it.
I’m Rob.
Derrick [00:28]: And I’m Derrick.
Rob [00:31]: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, sir?
Derrick [00:35]: Well, I’m getting geared up for a real winter to come for the first time in my life.
Rob [00:40]: Indeed. It’s been getting chilly the last couple of weeks, huh?
Derrick [00:42]: Yeah. We had our first drop below freezing last night, I think. For those who don’t know, I recently relocated, along with you, from Fresno, California out to Minneapolis, Minnesota. I’m a born and raised California native, so this is all a new experience for me.
Rob [00:56]: Well, I guess the highs have been in the 50’s, which isn’t bad, but when I’ve been getting to work in the morning it’s like 44 with wind. And realizing that it’s going to be 50, 60 degrees cooler than that here in a few months is a little chilling. But it’s been like, “Boy, I’ve got to get the big coat out of the closet.”
Derrick [01:12]: Yeah. My wife and I went out and bought jackets that can actually keep you warm in this type of climate, because we’re used to just our California jackets. Right now we’ve basically reached California winter status and it’s only October.
Rob [01:23]: Yes. That’s right. It’s really October. Cool. We’re here to talk today about your recent sale of Codetree. To give folks a little bit of background, you’re Derrick Reimer, cofounder of Drip. You were CTO to my CEO, nd we were acquired three months ago by Leadpages, everyone knows. But during the time that we were building Drip I have always had my little side projects, podcasts, and conferences, and I had HitTail going, and you went and built Codetree.com which is lightweight project management that lays over GitHub Issues. This actually came out of a need that we had internally, right? Managing multiple developers and prioritizing?
Derrick [02:02]: Yeah. We were using FogBugz before we switched to using GitHub Issues, and we were just starting to see the product wasn’t totally actively maintained and it wasn’t meeting all of our needs. So I really wanted to start using GitHub Issues. We were already using GitHub in a lot of our processes, so looked at that idea of using GitHub Issues, and it was not quite there. It was about 80% there what we needed. It seemed like there was an opportunity to just build a little layer on top, something that would give us the ability to prioritize things, and maybe view things in a little bit more compact manner. And so I looked into what it would take to do that, and then the light bulb went off in my head and I thought, “You know, I wonder if other people are using GitHub Issues in this way, and need to do a little bit more project management type of stuff with it?” So it was right around 4th of July, just about a year and a half ago, when I threw up a landing page for it. I just threw it together in a weekend, and started tweeting about it, ran a little bit of Twitter ads to push it out to basically the people on Twitter who are following GitHub, so I could target them pretty easily, and immediately started getting a bunch of interest, which kind of set me off on the track of building it.
Rob [03:09]: And were there a lot of competitors doing similar things at the time, or were you the one of the early ones?
Derrick [03:13]: There were a few. There have been more that have popped up in the last year and a half for sure. I did take a look at them, and they all were kind of lacking exactly what we were looking for. I had a little bit different vision for how it would work. Most of them were kind of locking you into a Trello-style task board view. It wasn’t quite exactly what we were looking for.
Rob [03:35]: Right. That’s what I liked about Codetree. We – just to give folks full disclosure – this is still what we use – even though you don’t own it anymore – we use it as it runs all of Drip’s [basically?] engineering prioritization. So all of our issues, bugs, new features go into Codetree, and we assign them out to all the folks who are working on them. We have our DBA in there. I’m in there for some kind of project management level stuff, and decision making stuff, obviously not pushing code. But one of the coolest parts of it — well there were a couple of cool parts. One is that you can do prioritization, which I think at the time you couldn’t do in GitHub. And the other thing was the fact that I can look at a table-based view per developer. So the Home screen for me is just each developer with a table of the first 15 issues that are assigned to them in priority order. But the developers themselves can just switch to basically a task-based view, I think you call it – task list view – and it’s like Trello. And so you can just work in that view. That was like the ray of sunshine. It just made tons of sense to do that.
Derrick [04:30]: Right. So it was very specific use case around GitHub Issues, and so it was something that I felt like was pretty safe from GitHub building themselves. I felt like this was a good alternative use case that that would be, hopefully, pretty resilient against GitHub kind of clobbering what I was trying to do.
Rob [04:48]: Right. I mean we had conversations all during this, because you and I were in a Mastermind with Phil, and we would meet every couple weeks. We were talking through like you need to be agile enough to stay ahead of them. It could potentially be an acquisition target later on, which is good. They very well may clobber you, but you have to think about innovating and doing things that they aren’t doing.
Derrick [05:06]: Right.
Rob [05:07]: And, you know, when you initially launched it, if I recall – I mean this was before you had an ownership stake in Drip, and you were essentially an employee of the Numa Group, which is what owned Drip at the time. And you were looking to grow this into like a full time gig.
Derrick [05:24]: Yeah. I definitely had the itch at that point to have equity in something, and to be using my skill set that I had built up over the last few years building products and then working alongside you on HitTail and Drip. I was really looking to leverage that into something that I could have ownership in. So I saw Codetree as a good stepping stone. You know, you talk about your stair stepping approach, and I felt like it is SaaS – which is a little bit more complex than something like a Word Press plugin or a one-time sale product – but I also felt like it was small enough in scope that it was manageable for my first crack at a SaaS app.
Rob [05:57]: Yeah, for sure. And this kind of was part of the reason we started having conversations about that, because it occurred to me like, “Wow! Derrick’s really valuable to Drip.” And you, obviously, had ownership and kind of a love for both of these products, right? You kind of had the desire to do them both, I think. And you were doing them both for quite some time. And I think you had dropped down to three quarter time with Drip at one point. And that’s when you and I really started talking about, “What does the future look like? Where are we 6 to 12 months?” And that really led to the conversation of, “All right. Let’s talk about cofounder status. Let’s talk about ownership.” And you communicated well. You were like, “I need to feel ownership in something. Like I’m the founder, I’m an entrepreneur. Can’t keep doing this stuff forever and working for somebody else.”
Derrick [06:37]: Yeah. There were like two conversations that stand out in my mind. There was a conversation we had right around the time when I was starting to build Codetree. And you approached me and were like, “All right. So, where are we heading?” Basically, “Is my long-term with Drip, or is my long-term with Codetree?” And at that point you were looking for a commitment, like which way is it going to go. And it was a tough decision at the time, and I ultimately decided to continue development on Codetree and forego setting that aside in favor of an equity stake in Drip. And then I think it was maybe seven, eight months later when Codetree had launched, and it was just starting to gain traction when we had a second conversation that ultimately led to me kind of doubling down my time on Drip and letting Codetree remain a side project.
Rob [07:19]: Yeah. I mean speaking of that launch, let’s give folks a context of how long did you spend developing it? How big was the list by the time you launched? How did you do the launch? Did you just email everybody? What was the early traction? We can talk numbers if you want, loose MRR, or if you don’t feel comfortable, that’s cool too.
Derrick [07:35]: I broke ground on – at least launching a landing page – in July. And –
Rob [07:41]: Yes. You started marketing before you started coding.
Derrick [07:43]: I did, yeah.
Rob [07:44]: I love it.
Derrick [07:45]: It was the first time I had done that. I had tried building other projects before, and I, of course, spent months building the product before anyone had even heard about it. So, I was determined not to make that mistake again. So, I put up a landing page, got the early traction. I started running Twitter ads and I felt like I could target the GitHub audience specifically. I felt like that was a good medium, and a lot of developers are on Twitter. I managed to find some things that converted well. I was gathering maybe 20 to 50 email addresses a day of just people clicking a button saying, “Yes, I’m interested in this product when it launches.” I had basically a one-page landing page set up that kind of described the problem it was solving. It had a headline something like, “You love GitHub Issues, but you hate project management, and here’s how Codetree can help you do your project management in the GitHub flavor.” basically. So that seemed to resonate really well with a lot of developers. I would say I didn’t have as many conversations up front as I probably should have had, but I took the signal of people clicking this button at least signaled their interest enough for, hopefully, a few people to be willing to pay for it once it launched. So with that bit of traction I started development probably a few weeks after I launched the first landing page. It really was a nights and weekends project for me. I was fulltime on Drip. It took me a good six months before I was able to launch an early access. I had a list of maybe about 20 people who I had more direct conversations with later on in the process, and I think I just gathered those based off of sending out an email to the mailing list that I had gathered through the process of running Twitter ads. By the time I launched early access I probably had maybe 1,500 people on that list; so a good chunk of people to start trying to get for my early access program. The response was good, but it was a good learning phase, as is most early access programs for SaaS apps. I learned a lot about what things people wanted built, and I kind of had to come to the decision of: Was I going to spend a bunch more time building full laundry list of features that people wanted, or was I going to launch what I had? And you, me and Phil sat around Mastermind meetings talking about strategy about this, like ‘Should I just get it out there, or should I try to build more features?’ Ultimately there were a few 11th hour features that made it in. Like I built a rough version of the task board, I believe, right before launch, but a lot of the things I just saved for post-launch. So it launched in January. First landing page in July, launch in January.
Rob [10:12]: Very cool. Do you remember what the conversion rate was to trial? And did you ask for credit card up front? I don’t recall.
Derrick [10:19]: Yeah, so no credit card upfront. I felt like developers especially would have a big aversion to that. And the conversion rate, that’s a good question. I’m pretty sure I got hundreds of trials after the launch, and I had a 14-day trial, so of course, there was the waiting game of waiting to see how many of those would actually convert. I believe at the end of my first month I had maybe between $400 and $500 a month in MRR, which felt like a big win at the time.
Rob [10:44]: Yeah. That was a nice little jump, kind of from a standing start, right, because you weren’t working from a network you had, you weren’t working from an audience. You just kind of proposed an idea, landing page, and built enough of a list to hit that. And that, if I recall, covered your expenses at the time. I think you were on Heroku and stuff, and maybe you made just a trivial amount of money.
Derrick [11:03]: Yeah.
Rob [11:03]: That’s cool. And then, it was a side project but you were investing time into a little bit of marketing and a lot of feature-building for the next, what was it, like four to six months before we really had the conversation about Drip, and you kind of shifted focus and really put it on? It wasn’t autopilot so much. You were still fixing bugs, and I remember you released some tiny little features stuff over the next six months after that maybe. But how long was that initial kind of investment after launch, and then we can take it from there.
Derrick [11:31]: Yeah, so I definitely spent a lot of time – nights and weekends – building out functionality in those months’ post-launch. I was trying to keep momentum going, and also trying to address all of the feedback that I had gotten from early access and from the initial wave of interest. So I think my wife could attest to that time was pretty crazy. We were still super aggressive on building out Drip, and so my days were filled with a lot of high intensity work, and then nights and weekends I was spending a lot of time building out features and probably not focusing much on marketing at that point. I was really just trying to keep the momentum going from the initial wave after the launch, and I remember, I think it was in March, I actually took a work retreat where I knew there were some features that I needed to bang out but I wasn’t going to necessarily have time to do them split up into small chunks. I really wanted to get some long stretches of time to get stuff done. So, I think I stole away to the central coast for a few days and just worked around the clock trying to hammer out some of those features. So I definitely tried to get creative during that time to get some big things done.
Rob [12:33]: Cool. And then at a certain point, obviously, you know, we had this conversation, and then you kind of made that transition. It was doing a few thousand dollars a month at that point. Is that right?
Derrick [12:41]: Yeah. I think it might have been around $2,000 a month at that point.
Rob [12:44]: Cool. And then at a certain point late last year — it was funny. I think I had gone on a retreat, or something, and I had written in my notebook – it was a bunch of stuff for me. And then I thought, “You know what, I wonder if Derrick should think about – he has enough revenue history, and I wonder if he’s still kind of committed to Codetree long-term, or if he should think about maybe selling it? And I wonder what he could get for it.” It was kind of just this thought process, and I think at the next Mastermind meeting you brought it up. And you said, “I’ve been thinking about selling Code -.” It was just funny that it had like both hit us at the same time. It was either late 2015, or maybe early 2016?
Derrick [13:17]: Yeah. I think you’re right. Something like that.
Rob [13:20]: Cool. What was the process for you? What made you – the thought process? You know, why did you decide to sell it?
Derrick [13:26]: You know, I was feeling like the product had a lot of potential still, and I felt like I just — especially with my decision to double down on Drip, I didn’t feel like I had the time to commit to it. The product was relatively bug free, and there was a happy base of users using it. I was growing by a handful of customers each month, so MRR was slowly ticking up. But there was still kind of an ever-mounting list of kind of larger, high level features and directions that I could take the product to really provide a lot more value to the customers. And I just didn’t have the bandwidth to tackle those larger things. I knew that in the hands of someone else it could definitely reach a much higher potential then where I was taking it. Also, I felt like ‘This can’t last forever.’ This market is competitive enough, and there’s enough innovation happening with project management in general, that Codetree can’t maintain its growth and its revenue in an auto-piloted state. So really, if I am going to sell it, probably the right time was then before the product started to decline.
Rob [14:29]: Yeah, and if I recall I said I would kind of check – I think I even checked anonymously. Didn’t I say, “Hey, I’ll talk to Tom Smale at FE and just check, “Hey, hypothetically I have this friend who has an app doing this much per month, and this much history, and what do you think he could get for it?” And he kind of asked some more questions and threw some multiples around, and I think you were like, “Yeah, I think this is worth investigating.” And so I made an intro between the two of you guys. What came next?
Derrick [14:55]: Yeah, you introduced me to Thomas, and we talked back and forth a little bit. I provided some more numbers, and he came back and said, “You know, I think this is a really strong app. There’s a lot of people looking for SaaS apps in this price range. There’s a lot of people wanting a first app to buy, and many of their best ones are in the $500,000 and up range which are just kind of out of the range for a lot of beginning folks. Then on the lower end there’s like the types of products you see on Flippa, that are maybe $30,000 to $50,000, and not great code base and all the other problems that come with that.” So, he made me believe that Codetree really kind of sits in that sweet spot, and he felt like we would be able to sell it quickly and be able to get an all-cash buyer. So all these things sounded really attractive to me. At that time, we were already knee deep in negotiation with Leadpages and, I believe, we were starting to near letter of intent and due diligence phase with that. So really, all these things were compounding at once, and that made it especially attractive to me the prospect of getting this sale done in a relatively short period of time.
Rob [15:59]: Yeah, if I recall you and I sold Drip; you sold Codetree; you sold your house; I sold my house. Did you sell a car or anything during that time?
Derrick [16:09]: I didn’t, but, yeah, it was really like a period of mass liquidation.
Rob [16:13]: Yeah, it was such an interesting and chaotic time. But there was a feeling of energy. I remember us kind of talking about it, of like, “Man, it’s good to kind of get some of the fruits of your labor.” You know, or like to be able to take some money off the table. And also to feel – I know that it had bothered you for a while that Codetree was there, and you knew it was solid, and you knew it could grow, and you felt like — It’s just a shame. I felt the same thing with HitTail. It was like, “Somebody should be growing this, and it’s just sitting there.” And so I knew it was going to be a relief for you when it finally closed.
Derrick [16:41]: Right.
Rob [16:41]: And so, it’s due diligence, but it’s essentially like all the requirements gathering and all the numbers, right? The FE has a really intense process there where they ask you a lot of questions about MRR, and where the traffic comes from, and growth opportunities and all that. How was that? How long did it take?
Derrick [16:56]: I had been warned ahead of time. I think at MicroConf earlier that year, Patrick McKenzie had talked about his experience selling Bingo Card Creator. You had the experience of selling HitTail. And so, I knew that it was going to be an intense process, but I feel like you’re never prepared for that; for just the amount of in-depth questions that need to be answered. So preparing income statements, and deep in-depth discussion about what marketing has been done, and how much has been invested in all the different areas to grow the business, and on and on and on. It probably took a solid two weeks of time just in my off-hours compiling together information and pulling data out of Stripe and all the different places.
Rob [17:34]: Cool. And then the sale happened pretty quickly, is that right? If I recall, you had several offers or at least several highly interested parties pretty early on.
Derrick [17:42]: FE likes to do like an early access circulation of a new prospectus. So they emailed their insiders group and tried to drum up interest that way. I think there were maybe three interested parties who came forth during that period before it even went to the broader audience. And, ultimately, the buyers who bought Codetree came through in that early phase.
Rob [18:05]: Right. And for folks interested in hearing more about this – especially from the other side – the buyers did a really good job of putting together a series of three blog posts. The third one culminated in this extremely long, very highly informative article about all the terms of the deal, and negotiation, and all that stuff. That’s really why you and I are able to come on here and talk about it, and why in the intro, or in the title of this there is going to be a price. Otherwise you wouldn’t have done that. But they wrote a blog post called ‘What It’s Like Buying a $128,000 Side Project.’ And we’ll, of course, link this up in the show notes. During the negotiation, once you had all the docs in there and then you started getting offers, was that stressful for you? Or was it — you know, compared to the Drip sale, I know that they are different orders of magnitude in terms of stress – but were you stressed or concerned or, I don’t know, did you feel out of control at all with the Codetree sale?
Derrick [18:53]: I think I would have felt that way if I were handling it on my own. I think having David from FE International, my broker who happened to also work with us on the Drip sale, was really pivotal for me in just keeping a level head. He bore the brunt of circulating this to perspective buyers, and vetting incoming buyers, and handling all of the follow up. We would have discussions and he would say, “Okay, this is what they’re offering. What do we want to say? Are you okay with this?” And I could just give him back an answer like, “No, I’m not okay with that.” Then he would handle the whole process of thinking through the best way to craft a response to the buyer that would not totally tick them off, or turn them away, or whatever. So just not having to deal with those finer points of the negotiation really eased my mind. It was in that first weekend – right after David had circulated the prospectus to the FE insiders – when I got initial interest from the ultimate buyers of Codetree. We had a call with them, and that was a little bit stressful to jump on a call with potential buyers. You want to make sure you don’t say something wrong, or something that’s going to hurt your negotiating position. So I definitely felt on guard with the first one, but David did a good job of kind of mediating the conversation and making sure that he jumped in any time there was a question that maybe was not something that we were willing to disclose at that time. So shortly after talking to them on a call an offer came through. That was a really exciting – just to get the first offer was a really exciting thing. We can talk about numbers, talk about what we’re going to ask for it, but actually getting a cash offer was pretty exhilarating. But the cash offer was for $103,000. So it was way lower than what I was asking at the time. And so, that stuck in my head where I was – there was a lot of emotions around it. One, I was exhilarated, but I was also mildly offended maybe that I would receive such a low ball offer. I remember thinking I had to decide at that point, was I willing to take less than what I was asking or was I willing to sit it out and wait for the right buyer to come along? And fortunately, David was there. I think I also talked to you about it. And everyone said, “Look, you don’t need to concede at all at this point. Just wait.” And that turned out being the right decision. But I think not being a savvy trained negotiator myself, it’s hard to think of like, “I’m going to just completely walk away from $103,000.”
Rob [21:14]: Right. Yeah. It’s definitely shocking the first time you see that and think, “Wow! That’s going to be wired to me in a few weeks if this all goes through.” But I totally remember you were in such a good negotiating position because the app looked gorgeous, it was solid, it was well built. You had your reputation of quality from Drip. I don’t want to say “overshadowing”, but kind of that Codetree benefited from, because Drip is just a really respected product, easy to use, and looks good. There was just so much going for it that Codetree was, in my mind, a premium product and a nice – it was a low priced product in the sense of we see a lot of SaaS apps that come through and they’re $800,000 or whatever. And it’s like, “Really?”, you either have to have a lot of cash or take out a big loan to do it. But to find an app of this quality in let’s say the low six-figure range, it’s pretty uncommon. And so, my gut was that, yeah, you were going to get a full price or close to that offer.
Derrick [22:07]: Yeah. It was fascinating to read the third part of the blog post series that the Codetree buyers put out, where they kind of go in detail about negotiation from their side. And they kind of outline, “At this point in the deal, here was our negotiating position, and here was the seller’s.” And kind of talk about how I think as a seller I was probably in the better position on this deal. So it’s really fascinating to see their thought process and how it aligned with what I was thinking at the time.
Rob [22:31]: Yeah. There is just a dearth of solid SaaS apps for sale, period. And especially at this price range. And I have several friends who have been trying to acquire things along this line for 12 to 18 months, and it’s just not happening. It’s definitely a seller’s market today, in terms of if you have a decent quality SaaS app you can get a good multiple for it. Cool. And so, you guys went through negotiations, you eventually settle on the price – as we said it was $128,000 – and after closing, did you get the bank wire right away? The same day that it closed?
Derrick [23:04]: No, so okay. If you’re ever selling a SaaS app don’t chose non-wire transfer methods.
Rob [23:13]: You went with the three day ACH -?
Derrick [23:15]: I went with the ACH. And so that was, yeah.
Rob [23:18]: But why did you go with the ACH, Derrick? Tell everyone.
Derrick [23:21]: Because there was a $20 fee for the wire transfer.
Rob [23:23]: There was a $20 fee! That killed me. I loved it.
Derrick [23:27]: When I made the decision, this was like weeks before it was ever going to close, I’m like, “You know, yeah I’ll save $20,” but totally not worth it.
Rob [23:35]: And then you got there and it closes. And there is some stress, or some anxiety, through it, and you get there and you’re like, “Finally, it closed today. Such great news.” And you’re like, “I cannot wait to see that wire in my bank account.” That is the true culmination, and the big dopamine rush, when you see it, and you had to wait three days for it. That’s terrible. I was like, “Oh, no!” And I think I was like, “Can you change that? I’ll throw the $20 in.” You’re like, “I totally want to do it.”
Derrick [24:00]: I tried. I tried.
Rob [24:01]: But it was too late, because it was Escrow.com or something, is that right?
Derrick [24:03]: Yeah.
Rob [24:04]: It was already locked in. So that was funny.
Derrick [24:05]: Yeah.
Rob [24:06]: And so, if I recall the next week you showed up in a Tesla, right? Is that what you did with all the money?
Derrick [24:14]: Oh man. I wish. No, I stuck it in a high yield savings account.
Rob [24:17]: Very good. Nice play, sir. Well, yeah, I think we’ve pretty much covered it. Is there anything else that you feel like you maybe left out of the story?
Derrick [24:24]: No, I think that covers it pretty well. I think probably my take-aways from this – if someone out there in the audience is looking to sell their product – one of the biggest things is don’t underestimate the amount of effort that due diligence is. And there’s things you can do to make your life easier, like keeping everything separated. I had a dedicated bank account for Codetree. I had a dedicated Stripe account for Codetree. All my other different SaaS things that helped power Codetree were all siloed in their own accounts, and that made the handoff a lot easier. It made it a lot easier to narrow down the exact costs that were involved, and where revenue was coming from. And I could produce a bank statement without having to filter out other non-relevant transactions. And so that made my life a lot easier. But there was still weirdness with like, when a Stripe charge comes in on one month do you count it in the month when it happened or do you count it in the month where the cash hit the bank? And you’ll see in the write-ups from the buyers that one of their big issues during due diligence was this supposed discrepancy in revenue reporting. So, some of these little things that don’t seem big in the grand scheme can potentially hold up the deal.
Rob [25:29]: Yeah, you were really well organized. And that’s kind of your nature and I think it helped make this a less stressful process. When I sold HitTail, which was November – it was almost a year ago now – it was so enmeshed with other things because the Numa Group had all these products at one point, that it was much more of a headache for me. Even to just suss out the numbers- the expenses mostly – because they were all comingled with things on the same credit card, and then the transfer over it was actually in the AWS account that Drip was in at the time. It wound up being a big mess during the actual transfer process. But yeah, I think that’s a really good piece of advice for folks who are listening.
Derrick [26:05]: Yeah.
Rob [26:06]: Sounds good. Well if folks want to keep up with you online where would they do that?
Derrick [26:10]: You can keep up with me on Twitter. I’m @DerrickReimer. And I also have my website at scalingsaas.com where I blog occasionally and publish other content.
Rob [26:19]: Sounds great. And you’ve been cohosting the Giant Robots podcast for a few weeks, right? I think you’re on maybe a hiatus right now?
Derrick [26:25]: Yeah. So, yeah, Giant Robots is in its third iteration, and Ben is bringing on cohosts to cycle in and out. And so, I’ve had an eight-episode stint there and it’s been a great time. We kind of delve into the behind the scenes of building out SaaS apps, so we talk a bit about behind the scenes of Drip, and also some technical things too.
Rob [26:44]: Sounds cool. So if you’re listening and you want to hear more from Derrick you could actually check out certainly Giant Robots, the last eight episodes. I’ve listened to them all. They’re very, very good. And there is more about Drip and other stuff in there, too. And then, actually episode 274 of ‘Startups for the Rest of Us,’ you came on and we talked about how to mentally and technically prepare for your launch, and we talked through the launch of workflows that happened earlier this year.
Derrick [27:03]: Yeah, it was a good one.
Rob [27:04]: Sounds great, man. Well, thanks for coming on the show.
Derrick [27:07]: Cool. Thanks for having me.
Rob [27:08]: If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from ‘We’re Outta Control’ by MoOt. It’s used under creative comments. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for ‘Startups’ and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode.
Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 310 | Indie.vc and a More Realistic Approach to Funding
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob interviews Bryce Roberts of Indie.vc about their unique approach to funding startups and their terms. Rob shares his opinions on raising funding and angel investments.
Items mentioned in this episode:
- Indie.vc
- Current terms in Github
- Bryce’s Medium post on his learnings and adjustments to their approach
- Ycombinator thread about Indie.vc
Transcript
Rob [00:00:00]: In this week’s episode of “Startups for the Rest of Us,” I interview Bryce Roberts from Indie.vc. This is “Startups for the Rest of Us,” episode 310.
Rob [00:00:18]: Welcome to “Startups for the Rest of Us,” the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching and growing software products whether you’ve built your first product, or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob, and I’ve given Mike the week off this week. I have a very special guest joining me on the show today. His name is Bryce Roberts, from Indie.vc. If you haven’t heard about Indie.vc, they’re taking a really interesting approach to funding companies, and it’s much more around this “fundstrapping” approach that I’ve talked about before. If you recall, fundstrapping, which – Colin from Customer.iO is the first person I ever heard use that term. The idea is to raise a single round of funding to get to profitability, or to help you grow faster, but not to have this implicit series A that you need to raise, as Bryce says during our interview. To be honest, I’ve never been anti-funding. I’ve always been anti people thinking the only way to grow a software business is through funding and then to raise that funding and have it require you to sacrifice your lifestyle, to relocate somewhere, to need to commit to growing a $100 million company with 200 people on the payroll, just all this stuff that never made sense. I always wondered why can’t you just raise a couple hundred thousand dollars to get to that seven-figure revenue mark faster, or get their more efficiently, and then just pay investors back like a normal business does; like when you start a carwash, or a restaurant, or a drycleaner, and you borrow money. You’re not looking for an IPO.
[00:01:33] That’s the approach that I’ve started to take with my angel investments. Last three, I think, have been into companies that I believe will all be seven- or eight-figure SaaS companies; and they’re not planning to raise a round from institutional investors, ever. That’s the premise. They needed some cash to get to growth and to go beyond that. Indie.vc is doing a similar thing. We talked in detail about their exact terms. Of course, they have their terms published on GitHub, which is super cool, because you can look through the docs that I think you’d sign if you were to take money from them. Just a fascinating conversation here with Bryce, who’s really going against the grain of traditional venture capital. I think it’s a good interview. I hope you enjoy it. Thanks so much for joining me today on the show, Bryce.
Bryce [00:02:15]: You bet. Super happy to be here.
Rob [00:02:17]: As I said in the interim, folks just heard you run Indie.vc. I first heard about Indie.vc probably close to two years ago, and it was on Hacker News. There was a big discussion of – at the time, you had a long-form letter at Indie.vc – that’s your URL – and it was basically explaining this new premise, or a new investing ideology. It was about not having to have this $100 million or billion-dollar exit to make money, but that you wanted to fund businesses that could achieve profitability and didn’t need to be a unicorn in order to be profitable for investors. This was really groundbreaking, and at the time, I think it was anonymous. Is that right, the way you published it?
Bryce [00:02:59]: It was anonymous unless you clicked the one – there were two links on that original letter. One of them was to sign up for a slack channel that we’d set up to answer questions. If you clicked on that, it would go to my inbox, so you would see that I was at OATV. Otherwise, there was no messaging, or branding, or anything else like that on it. So, yeah, that created a stir in that Hacker News thread as well.
Rob [00:03:21]: What was your thought process behind doing that anonymously?
Bryce [00:03:24]: Thought process was, just as we laid out in the original letter, that it was an experiment. So, if for any reason that just was a failure, we didn’t get anyone interested in it, no one wanted to apply, that we could have it set up completely separate from OATV. If it didn’t work out, we’d just take the site down, and we’d move on and go back to our day jobs. Wanted a little bit of that abstraction, but also I think it’s a little bit a part of our brand and marketing anyway, which is not intentional. It just is – it feels like you ought to have to do a little bit of work to get to know us and to get to know what we’re trying to do. I think it creates a little bit of scarcity, a little bit of intrigue and that, as a result, it drew people a little more closely in.
Rob [00:04:15]: I remember feeling when I read the letter, because if I recall, it was in Courier font and stuff. It gave me the hacker ethos. It made me feel like the DIY ethic of, “This is really cool. It’s grassroots.” It was just a neat feeling. You’ve mentioned OATV a couple times. For folks who aren’t familiar with that, could you let them know what that is?
Bryce [00:04:32]: To be clear, the DIY is really important to us, that kind of really raw, bare bones. Everything you saw in that first iteration and most of what you see now is still – that’s just me writing, posting. That’s something that’s important to us and always has been. In terms of OATV, OATV is a venture fund that I helped co-found back in 2005 with two partners. One is my partner Mark Jacobsen, and the other is someone who’s pretty well known in technology, my partner Tim O’Reilly. “OATV” stands for “O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.” It was a seed fund that Tim and I and Mark started in 2005, when seed investing really didn’t have a name. It wasn’t necessarily a category yet; but we were probably one of the first, I would say, handful – maybe five – institutionalized seed funds that got going back then.
Rob [00:05:27]: Very cool. Could you talk people through the premise? I guess you had the experiment that went out a couple years ago in terms of the letter and vetting people. I know you started with a cohort approach, and I think you’re no longer doing that. I think you had a fixed amount you invested up front, and now you’re more flexible, based on the business. Could you tell people about where you’re at today, just so they have an idea of what is Indie.vc? How is it different than just a traditional venture fund in terms of from the entrepreneur’s perspective?
Bryce [00:05:55]: The history is 2005, we set up a seed fund to introduce a new kind of optionality for entrepreneurs, not necessarily just bridge between seed and VC, but actually create some options for folks looking to run cash efficiently. As you can appreciate, part of the whole premise and the whole opportunity around seed was that the cost for getting these businesses online, up and going was dropping significantly. So, whether it was open-source software, hosted infrastructure – you name it – all of those things were starting to drive costs down and making it more accessible to entrepreneurs, which is kind of conventional wisdom right now, but back then it was just some wild, wild thinking.
[00:06:35] So, part of what Indie.vc was a response to was ten years into running OATV, it had become clear that some of those options that we had hoped seed investing would introduce to folks had kind of fallen by the wayside. Those options, as we saw them, were you could take a small amount of seed funding and then go raise from traditional VCs. That was one option. The other two we thought were just as important for founders were you could raise a little bit of money, make a tremendous amount of progress, and without having to raise more money, without having to take on more of that dilution and oversight from VCs. You could sell relatively early for a smaller acquisition, say, sub-$100 million type of acquisition; and it would still be a meaningful return – likely a life-changing outcome for the founder, but a meaningful return to a small fund, which is what we got started with.
[00:07:29] The third was, given how little capital these types of businesses take to get going, and given how strong and just wide the potential for profit margins are, given how efficient these things are, there ought to be a path where you just raise a little bit of money and then you just run that business as long as you want to, based on your profits and revenue. So, ten years into OATV and this whole seed investing experiment, we were looking back and just saying, “Okay. Part of that promise we’ve delivered on,” and that was filling the gap between angel investors and VCs, but those two other options seemed to have fallen by the wayside as fundraising has become the business model for so many of these companies that are getting started right now. When we started, a seed round was 250k, $500,000. A seed round now can be up to $5 million, whether you include their pre-seed or their post-seed, or their A2, or whatever these things are, right? Fundraising was intended to be a pain reliever, but the way we’ve looked at it is that it’s now become this gateway drug to this larger, unicorn culture that’s been built up around startups. So, Indie.vc in some ways is a response to that to try to capture some of that optionality again.
[00:08:46] I think part of your question was how we get our returns. As you can appreciate, we are still a venture fund. We raise a pool of capital. We put that to work. Our investors expect a return on that investment, and I think the one dimension that was pretty unique to Indie.vc-style investing is that not only can we make a return in the event that a company goes public, or gets bought in an acquisition; we can also make a return if founder decides they want to run that business indefinitely and profitably. We can take our return out in something that we call “distribution.” So, if a founder wants to keep running that business, wants to be paying themselves, really reaping the benefits of running a large, profitable, growing business, we just take our return out in cash as that business continues to grow. That’s kind of – plain vanilla as that sounds, that was at the time, and continues to be, a fairly radical concept, given that the venture-funded model suggests that any dollar you take in you’re reinvesting in growth. The idea that founders would be taking money out to put into their own pockets seems to run counter to so much of what’s already happening in that venture-funded world.
Rob [00:10:04]: Yeah, for sure, and that’s what I liked initially about the Indie.vc model and what you’re still doing today. In a second, I’ll run through your terms, which are published on GitHub. You have the exact terms that you give everyone. I was having a number of conversations right as I started doing a couple angel investments a few years back, and my interest has never been in the unicorns. I would much rather have a smaller business that has a much, much higher chance of success. Typically, right now it’s going to be B-to-B SaaS, because that’s what I know. I want to be able to put a small amount of money to work. You know, “small amount”: 5, 10, 20, 25 grand – whatever gets money in – and not have to swing for the fences and not have to swing for an acquisition. I kept looking for models to do this, and the only one that I stumbled upon was the way that carwashes and brick-and-mortars are funded. Then when I saw that you guys were doing this, my head exploded, like, “Yes! Someone is trying to apply this to startups and software companies.” We know that, if they’re smaller, they can just throw off a ton of cash, you know?
Bryce [00:11:05]: Yeah. It’s interesting, because despite the original letter that was posted – it was actually posted January 1, 2015. That’s when that Indie.vc site went live, but the buildup to that was really probably five or six years of conversations. I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine who’d invested in a couple of restaurants, and I was wrestling with a lot of these ideas and asked how they structured that. Given a local restaurant isn’t likely to IPO, and it’s not likely to be their ambition to IPO or even get bought, I was asking how they structured their return. In having that conversation and a bunch subsequently with other types of businesses, I thought, “Man! The margins in a restaurant business are just so paper-thin, in general. Why couldn’t we be trying this with tech businesses?” where your margins are oftentimes 60, 70, 80 – I’ve even seen 90, 95 percent in the investments that we’ve been looking at.
[00:12:02] It feels like a real opportunity to pursue that model for returns; and, yet, it just runs so counter to the business model of VC investing at this time, that very, very few people would really consider executing that, at least at a fund level, like you said. There are some people who are trying to find those for angel investments, but from a fund level, it hasn’t been necessarily as attractive or as accepted, just because the model hasn’t been proven out just yet.
Rob [00:12:35]: Right. As listeners know, my startup Drip was acquired a few months ago by Lead Pages; and we had hit a point a few months before that where we were really having internal conversations about the possibility of raising a small round, because our growth was being hampered or dampened by the lack of cash. It was the first business I’d ever run where that was the case. All the other ones, I always had ample cash to grow them, because they were smaller businesses. But we were really talking about that, and there was no chance I was going to go down the traditional VC route. It just was not – I never saw Drip – even though it had the market potential to be large, it wasn’t in my interest to be the CEO of some –
Bryce [00:13:12]: Why is that? Why didn’t you think the venture path was the path for you?
Rob [00:13:16]: Because I honestly value my lifestyle a little too much. I didn’t want to have to relocate. I didn’t want – I have my wife and kids, and we have a pretty good life. I didn’t want to feel the constant pressure of, “Get to $1 million.” “You should be hiring more.” “Hire, hire, hire.” My friends who’ve raised VC, that seems to be the thing: you need to get head count up. The idea of running even a 30 – well, 30 was reasonable, but when I started thinking about a 50-person team, it was just not appealing. I think that – I know you don’t necessarily lose control with your first round, but I looked down the line and thought, “Boy, you raise a series A and then a B. If that’s the path, then eventually are you still running your company?” Have you pushed into the center of the table and said, “I need to get to $100 million, or I go bust”?
Bryce [00:14:06]: Well, it’s interesting, because that’s actually a conversation I had recently with a good friend of mine who we spun up our seed funds at roughly the same time. We were talking about this model, and he was expressing frustration around what he termed the “implicit A,” right? Even at a seed round – like you said, you want to believe that that first round of funding really isn’t going to alter your course all that much, but the reality is there’s an implicit A as soon as you take that seed round these days. Most of the advice and most of the effort and most of the incentives around that seed round of funding end up pushing you towards another round of funding and another round of funding. So, as harmless as it may feel like it is, it’s really become, like I said, this implicit A at the tail end of any round of funding; and that’s something we wanted to be a counter to. We wanted to, hopefully, present a different set of options for a founder.
[00:15:02] And it’s something we’re seeing now. That same situation you found yourself in at Drip, we’re finding there’s a large number of companies who have grown. They could really unlock a lot of value in their business with an extra $250k, or $500k, or whatever it is. There’s a couple of hires they can’t make out of cash flow; or, there’s a new line of business they can’t fund out of cash flow; or, there’s a new product that’s additive to what they’re already doing that they want, but they can’t fund it out of cash flow. It’s within that group of founders we really found a lot of resonance and, for us, a lot of potential investment opportunities. I think what we can offer to them is – it’s funny. We just had one of our quarterly retreats in Chicago this last weekend, and one of the founders who’s a part of the Indie.vc group of companies said something along the lines of, “This is just enough VC b.s.” It’s like we haven’t bought all of it, but there’s still a level of accountability. You still have a partner in the business that isn’t with you day to day. There’s still a much broader network for folks who maybe aren’t in the Bay Area that we can provide to them, that they can access.
[00:16:10] That’s really what we’re trying to provide: just enough of that VC oversight without necessarily the levers that so many VCs have, which are voting rights. They become shareholders, but they become shareholders of a preferred class of stock. There’s a lot of layers of control that you give up and also optionality that you take off the table when you go that route. Hopefully, what we’ve tried to do in structuring the terms of Indie.vc is address those in a hard-coded way, where everybody’s playing all their cards face-up so that we can offer to an entrepreneur a certain level of service and a certain level of capital, and they can play their cards up in terms of what it is they’re trying to build. As your audience my appreciate, when you go out to pitch that round of funding to investors, even – you’d mentioned you really value your lifestyle. You mentioned that you may not be the right CEO to be running a 50+ person team. If you walk into an office of an investor and make that presentation, you can’t honestly tell them that, right? You have to tell them about how this is going to become a multi-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars business.
[00:17:24] We think that’s a real opportunity for us, and we think that the more founders are empowered to build the business they’re best suited to build, and that we can support in doing that, we think that those returns for us will still be every bit as compelling as the returns we’d be seeing in the traditional seed investments that we’ve been making.
Rob [00:17:43]: Yeah, that makes sense. That’s the key, is something you just touched on, which is there’re a lot of businesses that are really great businesses that I think raise funding and get run into the ground because they would be great 5, 10, 15, $20 million ARR businesses, but highly profitable; and they just go for the $100 million thing, and then they implode because they just can’t get there for whatever reason.
Bryce [00:18:05]: There was a fascinating post written – I think it was last week – by a VC, saying, “Here’s how you end up in a bad position with your board.” The scenario he gave was a founder who’d raised two or three rounds of funding. Their business was doing about $5 million a month. The founder couldn’t raise any more money. The founder couldn’t sell the business. Now they’re locked horns with their VCs. I think most people who aren’t in that unicorn echo chamber would say, “Wow. If I had the opportunity to run a $5 million-a-month software business? Sign me up for that!” right? But it’s that type of misalignment with the kinds of companies some founders are best suited to build and the things that oftentimes – I think the other disconnect, too, is just timelines, right? There may be a timeline in which that entrepreneur, if given that opportunity, could grow from $5 million a month and become that massive outcome, but not on the timeline that a VC really needs it to happen in, which is typically five years. So, they would much rather see that founder crash and burn and sell that business for parts, because for every month or quarter that goes by that they have to sit on that board and that business is consuming its time, it’s time that’s taken away from the potential unicorns that are already in their portfolio – if that makes sense.
Rob [00:19:23]: It does, yeah. I want to switch it up just a little bit here and dig deeper into the specifics of how you guys work. I’m on GitHub right now, and I’m going to link your website. You have a [medium?] post, and you have the GitHub repo, where you have all your docs. My understanding is that you invest typically between $100,000 and $500,000 into each startup, and you don’t actually take equity in the business up front. It’s only upon an acquisition that that would happen. Then the repayment – and this is where you’re based more on cash flow than on exit or liquidity [event?]. The repayment is 80 percent of distributions until you’re paid back two times your investment. Then it flips to – what does it flip to after that? Does it flip 20-80?
Bryce [00:20:08]: Yeah, 20-80. That’s right.
Rob [00:20:10]: Okay, perfect. So, that’s 80-20 to your fund until you get 2X back. Then it goes 20-80 to your fund versus the founders, and that’s up until 5X your investment. Then it stops. Is that correct?
Bryce [00:20:22]: That’s correct.
Rob [00:20:23]: Okay. So, the idea is if someone – there’s a bunch of Hacker News threads if folks search it, but there’s a conversation where you actually address specifically – someone says, “What if a founder comes on, and then they just raise their salary up to a bazillion dollars or whatever instead of taking out dividends?” Because it’s when the dividends are distributed when the 80-20 stuff kicks in. You have clauses that help with that, right? They can only raise their salary up to a certain amount, or by a certain percentage, based on from when you guys invest.
Bryce [00:20:47]: That’s right. There’s a bunch of different models that people have tried out around how to trigger these types of distributions. Several of those have been – they’ll tie it to profitability. They’ll tie it to revenue. There’s a whole industry that’s forming now around revenue-based financing, where they immediately start to take a percentage of the revenue that comes in every month, and they get paid back up to a certain return as well. What we tried to do was tie it to incentives, right? So, as you mentioned, when we make an investment, we aren’t a shareholder in your business. It’s structured essentially as a loan with no maturity date, so there isn’t an interest accruing, and there isn’t a date at which that note will be called back. The unique element to the one we’ve structured, as you touch on, our repayment is really tied to the incentives of the founder. If the founder wants to start taking a significant amount of cash out of the business, we share in that. We tie it to total compensation. If a founder’s total comp – let’s say it’s $100,000 when we make the investment. We allow them to continue, we want them to continue to grow and to pay themselves and be able to reap the rewards of growing their business. So, we say up to 150 percent of that initial baseline that we set, that’s yours. Once you start to pay yourself above and beyond that, that’s what we consider a distribution. That’s when the splitting, the 80-20 and then flipping to 20-80 occurs, is once they’ve decided that maybe they do want more of a cash-flow lifestyle business. We are fully in line or aligned with them around them being able to grow and run that kind of business. We just want to be able to share as that cash flow starts coming out of the business.
[00:22:26] In the case where we do become a shareholder, there’s really only two scenarios where that happens. One, the founder decides to raise a more traditional round of VC funding. If someone is running the business profitably for years, but they decide to end up going and raising an additional – bringing on VCs to really scale up because they now see their outsized opportunity, we just convert in as part of that round at a pre agreed-upon percentage of whatever that is. Then if they sell anywhere in there, we convert into common shares and go through as part of that acquisition.
Rob [00:23:00]: Very cool. There’s a comment on Hacker News from someone who is obviously an Indie.vc portfolio company, and he says – there’s a whole discussion of it, but he says, “This is why I enjoyed being part of Indie.vc: zero emphasis on pitching or raising the next round, no demo day. All the focus was on growing a real business.”
Bryce [00:23:19]: It’s like I said. We just did a meet-up in Chicago this last week. What we’re doing now is – we did our first cohort last year, where we invested $100,000 into eight companies, and each quarter we would get together with those eight companies and not work on their pitches, but actually work on their business. We would bring in subject matter experts for things that they were wanting to build expertise around. At the end of that year, we said, “We can continue to do this or not.” It was unanimous within the group that they’d like to continue to have these meet-ups, so this was our first opportunity to start folding in new members, new investments that we’d been making since the beginning of the year. The response from a lot of the new folks was really positive. They were really taken back by what it meant to just focus on revenue and growth and profitability.
[00:24:09] One comment I remember from the weekend was someone lead off their answer to a question by saying, “Back when I used to think raising money was cool, I did X,” right? At its most basic, part of what we wanted to really see is this idea that you become who you hang around, right? So, you have a group of companies now who all are focused on fundraising, and you plug into that group, guess what you’re going to start focusing on? You’re going to start focusing on fundraising. You’re going to start solving your problems with going and raising another round. What we’re seeing now within the group – and, knock on wood, a year and-a-half in, all of those eight companies are all still in business. Some of those have gone from standing starts to profitable. We’re seeing that there’s real value in having a group of like-minded founders who want to build their company in the same way that you’re trying to build yours, so that’s support in that network. So, we think that’s a pretty – it seems subtle, but as the Hacker News commenter mentioned, it’s actually a pretty powerful undertone to create within a group. In fact, we’ve now done five of these, and I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve ever even talked about investor presentations, or talking to VCs.
Rob [00:25:21]: That’s super cool. It does become an amazing sight now when I go to – I grew up in the Bay Area. I grew up in the East Bay, so the Silicon Valley culture was very much part of me, growing up. But when I go back now – I haven’t lived there for 20 years, almost. When I go back now, when I go to a conference or whatever, I’m struck by just the one-track mind. Everyone is just talking about the pitching and talking about the raising and talking about raising money. I keep thinking, “People are focusing on building slide decks rather than building businesses.” That’s kind of been my quote.
Bryce [00:25:54]: No, exactly. Like I said, fundraising is the business model of this new, unicorn-obsessed, startup cohort. I think there’s a real opportunity for us. We have some investments in the Bay Area, but I tried living in the Bay Area, and I know live in Salt Lake City, Utah. We aren’t geographically focused. We don’t just invest in the Bay Area. We don’t make people move to the Bay Area to be a part of what it is we’re doing. I think a line that really resonated in that original piece that I wrote at Indy.vc was, “Bloom where you’re planted.” We try to embody that both in the support we provide for our companies, but like I mentioned, we did our last retreat in Chicago. We try to expose our companies – one, visit the companies in their local markets and support them there – we have a couple companies that are in Chicago – but also give exposure to people who aren’t from Chicago to the way local founders, [the] local start-up community there works so they can see that it’s different from their home states, but it’s also different from how the Valley works as well.
Rob [00:26:55]: Yeah, yeah. I like the idea from your perspective as someone running a fund that you then have diversification across geographies, right? All of your eggs are not in the Bay Area basket and all not pulling from the same talent pool and all not getting in the same group thing. I think there’s advantage to the diversity you have there.
Bryce [00:27:13]: It’s been great, and it was fun because one of the folks who came to a dinner we hosted while we were in Chicago tweeted out after they’d left – this is a person who’d done the VC-funded startup thing. They’re a pretty well-known name in the startup community, and they’re just totally burned out after their last venture-fueled startup experience. They tweeted out after the dinner how energized they were, that it was so refreshing to be around these kinds of founders who’re actually building real businesses and how that reinvigorated them to be thinking and working towards their next company. I think there really is something to that. I think there’s a group of people who really want to have an impact, who want to build something that doesn’t necessarily rely on getting permission from an investor to be able to have it exist and have it to impact people in the world in a meaningful way. So, I love that that person at the dinner picked up on the energy, and we hope that there’s a lot more of that energy we can help unlock through Indie.vc.
Rob [00:28:13]: Sounds great. Well, thanks again, Bryce, for coming on the show. I really want to be mindful of your time today. If folks want to learn more about Indie.vc, they can obviously go to www.indie.vc. If folks want to keep up with you, is it maybe Twitter? What’s the best place?
Bryce [00:28:28]: Yeah, indie.vc is the best place. It’s kind of a jumping-off point, and you’ll also see a unicorn that’s burning, and so you might enjoy seeing that. For me, I’m @Bryce on Twitter. You can add-reply me. We also have a Twitter account that’s pretty active for Indie.vc @Indievc – one word – on Twitter. I’m not great at email, but if you want to email me, I will definitely see it. If it’s interesting, there’s a high likelihood I will reply to it. I’m just Bryce, B-R-Y-C-E, @OATV.com.
Rob [00:29:01]: Sounds great. Thanks again for coming on the show.
Bryce [00:29:03]: Thank you, Rob.
Rob [00:29:04]: If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 888.801.9690; or, email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt. It’s used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for “startups” and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 309 | Updates on Bluetick.io & Drip
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike give some updates on Bluetick and Drip. Mike gives some details of overcoming technical challenges and how he plans to shift his focus to a marketing. Rob talks about some of the changes to Drip since the acquisition as well as ways his role has changed.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Mike [00:00]: In this episode of ‘Startups for the Rest of Us,’ Rob and I are going to be giving updates on Bluetick and Drip. This is ‘Startups for the Rest of Us’ episode 309.
Welcome to ‘Startups for the Rest of Us,’ the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching and growing software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob [00:26]: And I’m Rob.
Mike [00:26]: And we’re here to share experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week Rob?
Rob [00:30]: Well, yes, more than this week. I think we’re talking about stuff that’s been going on for the past few months, right? Because we haven’t done and updates episode in a long time. We used to try to do these once a month or so and then there were certain extents of time where so much was going on that I couldn’t talk about. And I think stuff slowed down for you for a while. And I think it’s really time to get back here and get back at it and give folks an update.
And it would be nice to do these a little more often. I don’t know if we’ll do them monthly. But I always find it fun and interesting to talk about what we’re doing. And the feedback that I’ve heard in general is that folks really like to hear more about what we’re up to.
Mike [01:02]: Cool. So let’s dive right in.
Rob [01:04]: Yes. So for me, you know, I look back. It’s been just over three months since Drip was acquired. For those who haven’t been listening I had a startup called Drip. I co-founded it. It’s email software and it was acquired by Leadpages back in July. And so now I work for Leadpages. I’ve moved with my family to Minneapolis. And it has been quite an adventure.
I think the hardest part of the transition was definitely — well, aside from the acquisition itself — it was very stressful. Once that was done, the hardest part has been the move and the impact it’s had on the family. Moves are always stressful and I think that it’s a bummer when you move and your kids are all disjointed and don’t know what to do. And they’re homesick and then they go to school and they don’t have any friends and then — It’s a transition to a new place.
We’ve tried to fill it with adventure and make it exciting. And now that we have been in Minneapolis just over two months and everybody’s over it. And now it feels like home. And nobody talks about how they liked the Fresno house more or about how rough school is because they’re having fun. So that was a big transition and I feel like we’re past it. It feels really good to be past it and I don’t think I want to move any time soon again.
You’ve done some moves in your time, huh?
Mike [02:09]: I haven’t moved for at least 10 years. And there are good reasons why.
Rob [02:13]: Yes, because you remember how hard it was. We hired movers. Everything was paid for and so, we hired people to pack and move us and unload us. We didn’t do any of the hard work. The unpacking sucks, of course. But even then it was so much time to do all the logistics and then your stuff gets here and then the unpacking is just days and days of chaos. Yes, it’s stressful. It reminded me how stressful this actually is. But it’s good to be past it.
And on the flip side, the work transition to Leadpages has been way, way easier. I don’t want to say it’s been a breeze because that would probably be glossing over some things. But in general, it’s been a very good transition for me and, I think, for the team. I talk to everybody. I try to keep tabs on even our remote folks and it’s kind of business as usual. But we have a lot more money to do things. We just have more resources so it’s like business as usual but better, I think, is kind of how I’ve been talking about it.
There are obviously things I had to give up that weren’t – you know it wasn’t the easiest to give up all of the marketing, essentially. And I can be as involved as I want but, frankly, I don’t have time given the focus on the product and the hiring of engineers and stuff that I’m doing now.
But that was a tough choice because I’ve always marketed my own products and Leadpages is just so good at it in my opinion. And from the outside and now that I’m inside, they’re one of the best SaaS top of the funnel marketers in the world. It’s just an amazing machine that they’ve built. So it makes total sense that they would do this when they have a team of 20 or 30 people, why would I want to slow them down and be a bottleneck, essentially.
But giving up the marketing website was a tough choice. Not even a choice. I knew it had to happen. It was inevitability. It was just when it was going to happen. Then, of course, they cranked on it and rolled out nice new gorgeous marketing site. It’s at Drip.co. If you go there you’ll see it. And they have videos and they have all types of cool stuff that just would have taken me months and/or years and a bunch of contractors and way more money than I had to produce. And then they spit it out after it was three or four weeks that this whole website was up. So it’s pretty cool.
Mike [04:08]: What was the reason behind the domain name transition? It used to be GetDrip.com and now it’s Drip.co.
Rob [04:13]: Yes, it was to get away from people calling the app GetDrip. People on podcasts and all the time, “Hey, how’s your app GetDrip doing?” Well it’s not called GetDrip, it’s called Drip. And so for a long time I wanted, obviously Drip.com, which I think there was a squatter on it and he wanted six figures. And that wasn’t going to happen. But, yes, Leadpages was able to get Drip.co on the secondary market. And it probably – at the price, I don’t know I would have put the money towards it bootstrapped, but it made total sense to do it given the resources they have. So, that was the idea. It’s a four letter domain – six letters including the extension – so it’s nice and short, memorable. And it’s just nice to not be called GetDrip anymore.
Mike [04:51]: Back when you could actually get four letter domains.
Rob [04:54]: Yes, I know.
Mike [04:55]: It’s a thing of the past.
Rob [04:55]: I know. Well, Clay sought it out and bought it on the secondary market.
Mike [04:58]: Very cool. Couple of quick personal updates. My brother’s getting married this weekend so the whole family is leaving tomorrow morning so we’re recording on a Thursday.
Rob [05:05]: Wait. You have a brother?
Mike [05:07]: Yes. You didn’t know that?
Rob [05:08]: How long have you and I known each other?
Mike [05:10]: I don’t know. Like 10 years.
Rob [05:11]: 10 or 11 years. You have a brother? Do you have any – how many brothers do you have?
Mike [05:13]: He’s technically a half-brother. He’s 16 years younger than me so yes.
Rob [05:17]: Got it. Okay. You just don’t ever talk about him.
Mike [05:20]: I almost never see him, you know.
Rob [05:21]: Do you have a sister too?
Mike [05:22]: I do.
Rob [05:23]: You are kidding me. What?
Mike [05:24]: I have a sister.
Rob [05:26]: I just figured you were an only child. You never talk about your siblings. Do you know I have siblings? I talk about them, right, every now and then?
Mike [05:33]: I do know that you have them, I don’t know how many. I think you have a brother but I don’t think you have a sister.
Rob [05:37]: Yes, I do. I’m the youngest of four kids.
Mike [05:39]: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Rob [05:40]: With a sister and two brothers. Dude, how many siblings do you have?
Mike [05:43]: Well, it’s complicated.
Rob [05:46]: Two of mine are half as well, to be honest. I have two siblings and then one full.
Mike [05:51]: Yes, my parents, they got divorced when I was much younger and then they both remarried. And on one side I’ve got a stepsister and three stepbrothers and then there’s also a half-brother there. And then on the other side I’ve got, I think five or six … I think five stepsiblings in some way, shape or form. I think that there’s two boys and three girls. I don’t ever talk to them because I’m just never around.
Rob [06:15]: Right.
Mike [06:15]: But, yes, it’s kind of crazy. So there’s like 10.
Rob [06:18]: Got it. Alright. So you’re going to a wedding.
Mike [06:20]: Yes, so we’re going to a wedding this weekend. We’re leaving tomorrow morning. It’ll be Friday morning. The wedding is on Saturday. We come back on Sunday and then next weeks’ Columbus Day.
And then the other thing is I have to go off on a little bit of a rant here. It’s about Amazon and big data. I went on Amazon and I’m very particular when it comes to notebooks. And I’m sure people have their quirks about that sort of thing. But there’s a very specific type of engineering paper that I like for my notepads. So I went on Amazon and I bought one and next thing I know they’re trying to cram calculus and physics books down my throat. I’m like, dear God, please make it stop.
Rob [06:56]: Yes, that’s brutal.
Mike [06:57]: It’s just the entire line of recommendations from Amazon was nothing but college textbooks and I’m just like, no, I don’t want a $300 calculus book.
Rob [07:06]: It’s such a bummer. Yes. I wish there was a button you could click to be like dismiss these. Because that happens to me. My kids get on and shop. Or Sherry will get on and buy psychology books and it’s like, stop recommending that stuff to me.
Mike [07:16]: Yes. And it even happens if you borrow stuff from Amazon’s library. They’ll say, “Oh, well, you downloaded this thing about Barney the dinosaur. You might be interested in this too.” I’m like please stop.
Rob [07:26]: Yes, no doubt.
Mike [07:28]: But aside from that – and I’ve been talking about this for a while – but I finally finished migrating all the backend mailbox data inside of Bluetick. So everything’s over on a completely new storage mechanism. It’s not even a different storage system. It’s just everything is all indexed now and stored in a different way than it was before which makes it easier to get at the data and then make sure that everything’s synchronized. And I’ve got manual indexes that are built around a bunch of stuff so that I can – given any email address, for example, I can very quickly show you exactly who has emailed you from that email address or all the emails that you’ve sent to that email address. Which you can do inside of Gmail or most email clients. But it’s a lot more difficult when you’re trying to synchronize those things yourself. And the other thing that I’m able to do is I’m actually able to tie multiple email addresses to a single person. So that’s an interesting side effect of doing all this myself is that I can create those additional tie-ins that would probably be very difficult to do outside of something like Gmail or Outlook.
So then I can show you all the different communications that you’ve had with somebody. And the idea down the road is to be able to take that stuff and present it inside of the application so that you can see all of the activity related to somebody regardless of what email address was used to send to them or receive from them. So if you have a team, you’ll be able to see all the emails that have been received by your team from that person. And then you’ll be able to mark things as like, “Hey, this particular email was a private one. I don’t want that shared with the whole team.” And you can set preferences around that stuff.
The other thing it allows us to do is download the contents of those messages and display those as well. So, it’s kind of a first step down that path. It’s all looking good. Several million emails later and a huge WTF moment in the mill where I found that somebody had an email that was 65,000 characters long in the subject line.
Rob [09:14]: Wow. Okay. So, you’re truncating, right? You’re going to truncate it to 56 –
Mike [09:18]: Oh, yes, we’re going to truncate it back but I was not expecting it to go above – I was like maybe I could see somebody putting a few hundred characters in there. But the application just choked on it and it took me the longest time to figure it out. And it’s just like, “Oh. Whoops.” I mean that’s a no-brainer decision to truncate that but that’s what the spec says that there’s rules against it.
Rob [09:40]: Yes. It broke something. I was actually talking with a group of people a couple weeks ago and they started asking me about Bluetick and about the progress you’re making and about the technical issues that you’ve been mired in for the past 30 days, 60 days. And they were asking, “What’s going on with Bluetick? Is Mike going to launch? Is this another AuditShark?” They started peppering me with the questions and I was like, “I don’t know.” People don’t realize you and I don’t talk often. This is our conversation every week, right? We maybe talk about MicroConf but we don’t dig into each other’s apps and progress and that kind of stuff.
So, I think this is an interesting thing to dig into here because if I were to recount what I’ve seen over the past – so it’s October – so, if I thought back about the last six months since MicroConf, I feel like you’ve been working on a bunch of technical stuff, mired in technical detail. And I know you’ve worked with some early access folks and most of them came through, as far as I know, and they’re using the app. But it does feel like it’s been really slow going.
Mike [10:34]: Yes, it has. I don’t discount those thoughts. I’ve had kind of the same thoughts and reservations myself about the fact that certain things are just taking an extraordinary amount of time. And some of it’s the volume of data that I run into. So you do a migration and you’re targeting two million email messages and then it was like a million and a half through it where something went wrong. And I’m like, okay, now I have to figure out not only where exactly did this happen because it’s not always easy to pinpoint that stuff either. And doing a partial migration is a little bit challenging. So, the volume of some of those things is – just in terms of the prototyping. Because I’ve had to go through a lot of issues with trying to figure out how long is it going to take to query this particular thing. And you don’t think about those things when there’s only a 100 or 1000 items. But when you’ve got 150,000, 250,000 of them it makes a big difference about whether it takes a half second to query it or three minutes. Then sometimes it does take a long time. And one of the things I’ve found out is mail servers will time out on you if you don’t issue a command within a second, for example. And it’s like that’s not really going to work if all this stuff on the back end doesn’t respond a lot faster.
It sucks to be mired in those technical details but, at the same time, I feel like a lot of them are kind of past me at this point. So I’m really starting to shift my focus from the engineering side of things into marketing. Which I’m thankful for because it means that I don’t have to deal with a lot of those [?]. I think they’ll still come up but I don’t feel like the rest of the stuff that’s going on or that needs to be done is so critical that I have to not move forward with the app and I have to pay attention to it. I think that they’re little things. They’re little tweaks and little changes here and there as opposed to like, this needs to be fundamentally redesigned in order to make this work. Does that make sense?
Rob [12:22]: It does. It does. Given the conversations we’ve had over the past five years on this podcast about you building AuditShark and then now about Bluetick, you do have a tendency to get stuck in technical stuff. And to spend more time than probably is good for you before you get more people using it. And I’m wondering how can it be different this time?
Mike [12:47]: I think part of it is just making sure that people are using the app. I think early on I made the mistake of trying to go in the opposite direction, where I hired several developers to come on and help build the app and while they were building the app I basically was very hands off. I haven’t really talked about this before but I hired three developers back in January. They built the app, got it to launch or at least got it to the point where it was minimally usable. And then we ran into various UX issues with the front end of the app. Then there was a bunch of stuff that needed to be redesigned on the back end.
As I started digging into it – as I said I tried to do the opposite of what I did with AuditShark. I’m like I won’t touch any of the technical stuff. But then once we got to the point where I started putting it in front of people, we were like this needs to be changed mainly because it just doesn’t do what the customer needed it to do. And we went in to make some of those changes and the structure of many of the things was just fundamentally flawed. So, for example, permissions were all screwed up, the API was a total mess. A lot of the stuff that connected the back end to the front end, the interfacing was terrible. It made it very difficult to make changes. And there was a lot of heavy dependencies between those things.
So if you changed one thing it was very easy to break a bunch of other things. And because we tried to move quickly, we didn’t write very many unit tests. We still don’t have nearly as many tests as I would like which makes it painful and it makes me very hesitant to push that deploy button because I know that don’t exactly have a great strategy for rolling things back if something goes wrong. I’m working with a lot of production data and if something goes wrong I need to be able to have time to fix it and be reasonably confident that I’m not going to just destroy a whole bunch of data that I’m going to have to go back and somehow try to rebuild.
Rob [14:30]: The lack of unit tests, that’s brutal. I mean that’s like a classic mistake people still continue to make. But now you’re kind of hamstrung by it, right, because you -?
Mike [14:40]: Yes.
Rob [14:41]: It’s not good. We see this happen with certain software companies that aren’t built by software developers. They’re heavy marketers and they outsource the development and then they find out six to 12 months in, they’re like, “Oh, we have no unit tests and our code base is terrible. And, although we have customers, we can’t build new features.” Your velocity just completely comes to a halt.
Mike [15:01]: Right.
Rob [15:02]: And it sounds like you hit that already.
Mike [15:04]: I did. Yes. And, like I said, part of it was because the app was not designed with the levels of scale that need to be taken into account when you’re dealing with mailboxes. Like I said, it’s a fundamentally different story when you’re dealing with the expectation there’s going to be 100 items in here. Also, let me give you a very specific example. When you first connect your mailbox to the application, there’s a back end process that goes in and it looks at your emails and says let me find people that you may have emailed within the last X time period. I’m going to show you when the first contact that you ever made with them was; when the last contact was; who made it in each direction. That way you can very quickly and easily go in there and, once you’ve hooked up your mailbox, it will show you a list. You can just sort it and say who have I sent an email to in the last three months that never replied to me; or only replied once or twice; or I’m still waiting for a reply. Those are things that you can query in there. At very low volumes that works fine but when you scale it up and there’s people who have 1000’s and 1000’s of contacts, people that they’ve either sent emails to or received emails from and you go from 100 to 10,000 and suddenly lots of things break. And it’s not like it’s an isolated incident either. Several people have this problem.
So, going back and trying to re-engineer those things so that they actually work has been just very difficult. And, you’re right. I ran into these things much earlier than I anticipated. And the point I was getting at before – as I said, I haven’t really talked about this – I hired the three developers I would say shortly after I got it to the point where I was minimally usable. I ended up letting one of them go because I looked at the stuff he was doing and, as I said, I tried to stay hands-off, I tried to stay out of it. And then I go back and look at it. I left him in charge and I said, “You’re responsible for this.” And then I go back and look at it and it’s just way off base. It was very clear in retrospect this guy probably didn’t know really what he was doing. And I left him in charge of huge pieces of the infrastructure.
Then over the next couple of months, one of my other developers, he was very good at a lot of the front end stuff. But he ended up getting married and moving out of the country and, basically, wasn’t able to do any more work for me. And then then third one, there was a lot of micromanagement that was involved. So, I went from three developers to zero. And now I’m back up to one and it’s more of a senior developer. He’s very good, I’m very pleased with the work so far. He’s been able to get in there and be productive. But that’s only happened within the last month or so. And his time, at the moment, is very limited. I’m trying to transition things over but it’s been a long hard road for the past three or four months.
Rob [17:42]: So you had three hiring mistakes then?
Mike [17:44]: One of them was definitely not a mistake. The other one, she probably would have worked out had I been able to spend more time but I didn’t have the time to sit there and give direction. So, basically, I had to be very specific about everything almost to the point of micromanaging. It wasn’t a good fit ultimately. So, two out of three I would say. The third one, like I said, his life circumstances changed so there’s really not much you can foresee about that.
Rob [18:08]: Yes. It’s a lot of setbacks though. That’s a lot of things to happen in a short period of time.
Mike [18:15]: Yes. But I am very conscious of the fact that I don’t want this to turn into another AuditShark story because that’s certainly not the direction I want to go. At the moment what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to transition myself out of doing more of the coding work and more over into the marketing side of things. Next up for me is to, essentially, start looking at getting the sign up page in place and carving out some more of the onboarding emails. Potentially looking at an onboarding wizard because I think that there’s got to be something there to help onboard people into the app. But whether that’s a combination of videos or tutorials or individually onboarding people with onboarding sessions – I’m okay with that too. It’s a matter of getting people to the point that they’re able to be productive with the app as soon as possible.
Rob [18:55]: Yes. And that’s a big deal. I think you need to start building some momentum here because it feels like you’ve been stalled for a while. And just looking at that shortest line between you and getting more customers using it, that’s what I’d be looking to do right now. I don’t have necessarily advice just because I don’t know all of what needs to be done; what has been done; what your path is. But I think if there’s one piece of advice I could offer it’s figure out how to get more people using it and paying you for it as quickly as possible and then do that. And that may be building a website and that may not be. Maybe just continuing to manually onboard people for the foreseeable future.
Mike [19:33]: Yes, I agree with that. It’s an interesting thought experiment, I think, to consider do I even need to rebuild the website because right now it’s just a one-page site. It really does not do anything. There’s nothing that you can do aside from signup for the email list. And then from there I have an email course that I send people. It’s about 5000 words or so over the course of five emails. And that does pretty well at getting people to take that next step. But it’s also heavily slanted more towards this is a beta, contact to us if you’re interested. It’s not so much a push-the-product and let people know what it can do for them. It’s more of a showing them how to do things as opposed to here’s how the product can really help make things better for you. And part of that is just a result of the fact that when it was written, it was written before the product was launched or even available. So, I’ve got to go back and rework a lot of that – not a lot of the copy, but at least some of the calls to action in the emails.
Rob [20:28]: One thing you could think about – and again, I don’t know your road map, your plan or anything. But just hearing where you’re at and what you’re doing, one thing you could consider is either during that email course or instead of the email course, actually, on the one page just swap that out with a ‘Request a Demo’ button. And the ‘Request a Demo’ could lead directly to your Calendly page where people can just book themselves with a demo, it could lead to a Google form that asks for more information first and then you get back in touch. And the Google form – or type form or whatever – might be better because then you can get more info from them. And you can tell how much they might be paying you. Because I’m assuming your pricing tiers up based on seats or something like that. So, you can ask how many seats they expect; what they expect the product to do. That could be really interesting and it would be super fast.
Then if you just improved that single-page marketing site and didn’t really build everything out, that could save you some time and get you to the point of where you’re just driving people. Because I still think at this point, having automatic signup – no-touch signup – I don’t know that you’re there yet. I don’t know quite where the product is, but my guess is you still have more to build and you still need to figure out exactly what to build next in order to get it to the point where you could just send 100s of new trials, so to speak, through the frontal and actually have them stick. And, so, I feel like doing demos and driving more in-person conversations, that’s probably what I would lean towards at this point.
Mike [21:47]: That’s probably true. I kind of put it in my head these are the things that are on the list of things to do and I naturally surfaced like the website really needs some love and care. So I naturally surfaced that to the front of my brain. But I think you’re right. It’s probably not really, necessarily, the best place to be spending my time right now.
Rob [22:04]: Yes. You take your one-page landing page. It’s a Bluetick.io – by the way, for the listeners out there – and maybe improve the copy a bit just rewrite it based on what you know now. And not even rewrite the whole thing. Just add some bits here and there and then have a big ‘Request a Demo’ button and just gate it for now. And people who are interested in a demo, then at least you can have a conversation with them. You could see what kind of volume you’re getting. And you can have conversations with them both because it’s easier to sell things that way and you’ll be able to figure out how best to explain it. You can split test your message really quick. And then you can start taking notes on what your message is and then use that for when you revamp the page.
And then they’ll also just give you a ton of feedback about someone who comes in and is like, “Oh, there’s another tool I use and it does exactly this.” Or, “If you added this one feature I would use it.” Those conversations are just so valuable in this early stage.
Mike [22:47]: Yes, I agree. I had a demo that I did last Friday, I think, and I took notes before the demo and then I made it a point to take notes right afterwards about specifically what the objections that they had were. And wrote those down so that I could come up with answers that were significantly better than what I had so that I had something that was already written, already concrete as opposed to trying to think something up off the top of my head. I’ve done that before and it works really well when you consciously do it. But it’s very easy to just kind of overlook that.
The other thing I did was I had a VA go out and capture all of the marketing messages from, I think it was a list of about 30 different competitors that I put together. So, I’ve got all their primary calls to action and primary marketing headlines that they’re using. And then all the secondary headlines and then if they had any sort of bulleted lists about topics or pieces of information that they were trying to convey on some of the different pages, I had her capture those as well. And then I also had her build a feature comparison breakdown, which is more for me than for general consumption, but it will help give me an idea of when I get the question about, “I see competitor XYZ does this. How does Bluetick do that? Or how does Bluetick relate to competitor XYZ? What do you do better and what do you do worse?” I’ve been asked that question before and I haven’t been able to answer it for specific competitors. So, I got that information so that I could help answer those questions better.
Rob [24:10]: Whenever anyone says, “Can you compare Drip to XYZ competitor?” I always say, “Yes, we’re better.” People don’t find it very funny. For some reason those questions, they kind of infuriate me because it’s like we in particular have I think it’s like 400 or more email marketing apps. So people just name some app of the top of their head that no one’s ever heard of except for this person. There’s like 10 users. And it’s like I don’t know how we’re different. Major competitors we would say we’re easier to use, we’re easier to get onboarded with, we’re less expensive, we’re more powerful than most of our competitors. But to actually do a feature by feature comparison is really kind of a bit of work there.
Mike [24:41]: It wasn’t so much that I wanted to be able to provide a matrix to somebody but I really wanted to know what specific areas of the space that they operated in. So, are they more geared towards cold outbound emails; or are they more about sales funnel flow; or are they more about a CRM package? There’s very different ways to look at the sales process and different pieces of it that different competitors do better or worse.
For example, if somebody asks, “What’s the difference between this and Highrise?” I’m like well, “Highrise is a CRM. It’s not a mechanism for actually doing anything.” I hate to gloss over some of the difficulties or all the engineering behind something like Highrise but, at the end of the day, a CRM is basically a database. It’s a database of contacts and it doesn’t usually do anything for you, whereas with Bluetick, it’s more about automating a process of moving somebody from one step of your sales funnel to the next and making that visible to everybody. Now you can argue that, OK, that’s a CRM, that’s exactly what that does. But most CRMs don’t necessarily have built in functionality that does a lot more than that. They don’t do a lot of that automation right inside the app. They rely on a lot of external processes, external API’s, webhooks, that kind of stuff. And Bluetick has some of that stuff built right into it.
Rob [25:58]: I think this still points to you probably needing to find out exactly how to describe Bluetick. And before you were saying it was sales automation software and I actually like that. But now I’m realizing it may need to even be more specific and it’s like sales email automation software. Or email based sales automation software. Something like that because that’s really what it does, right? You could say sales automation and someone might think, “Is it going to do cold calls for me?” That could mean a lot of things but you’re really specifically focusing on using email to move people through a funnel. And so I think still seeking that description is something that you should probably do in the next few weeks and months.
Mike [26:31]: Yes and no. The email piece of it is like the v1. It’s just like the version one piece of it. So, I’ve had conversations with people about automating text messages, for example. They get a list of customers that they’ve done business with and they have high volume; and they want to be able to turn around and send text messages to their customers; and hook it up through Twilio, for example, so that they can have those replies go directly into Bluetick. Well, that’s kind of like a secondary – I don’t want to say secondary action – but it’s an additional mechanism for interacting with the customer. You could have email; you could have phone call in theory. That could initially just be like you plug something in and write down what you talked about but I think that Close.io actually goes an extra step beyond that and even records the calls and allows you to make calls through Close.io.
Rob [27:18]: Right.
Mike [27:19]: I’m not saying I want to do that but –
Rob: [27:21]: Yes, but I think you’re getting ahead of yourself.
Mike [27:22]: Oh, I agree.
Rob [27:22]: I think if you called yourself email sales automation at this point and then later on you drop it – You think about Drip we were like epic autoresponders early on. And it was all about the promise of raising conversion rates with the email capture widget. Then it was like now we’re automation software, email automation. And then it’s like now we’re marketing automation. We evolved over time. So don’t feel like because you call it email sales automation and I’m not saying that’s the term to use but if you picked on that had the word email in it you could change that later when you add SMS.
Mike [27:49]: Yes.
Rob [27:49]: You adding SMS, I’m guessing, is six months out so that gives you plenty of time. And maybe more, maybe six to 12 months. I think there’s still a lot of progress to be made with just the email front.
Mike [27:58]: Yes. There’s a boat load of stuff that could be done. It’s more a matter of prioritizing it. And I had a brief discussion with my developer this morning and we were talking about even just like a data import. And we kind of scaled it really far back in terms of what the initial plans were because it was just like we could do everything that we want to do but it’s probably going to take at least a month and it’s really just not worth the time investment at this point. So, we scaled it back. It will probably take a couple of days to do it instead of a month which obviously frees up time to do a lot of other things. But now that the, I’ll say that the bulk of the cleanup work is done, and I really do feel that way. A lot of the technical debt that we assumed early on to get something out the door as quick as possible, a lot of that stuff has gone away at this point and it’s a lot easier to make changes now. And there’s more documentation; everything’s more standardized; the code itself has not got three different standards that the code is adhering to. It’s just a lot more manageable. So hopefully at this point we can move considerably faster than we were before.
Rob [28:59]: Some other things from my side as I was reflecting on the past three months after the acquisition. I talked about a few of these things but a lot has gone on in terms of Drip. We launched a $1 plan, we doubled our affiliate commissions, which is nice to do, up to 30% recurring. We’ve hired three engineers which has been extremely time consuming. I forget how much time it is to start from nothing and to write a job description and to post it, take the incoming clients. The nice part is Leadpages has a recruiter and so she actually goes out and emails people prospects, essentially, which I was doing in the old days. It’s just some much stuff that I used to do that I’m able to hand off to other people. But even then all the interviews. You have the phone interviews and then the in-person interviews and then the decision and then the salary negotiation and just all that stuff. Even though I’m not handling all of it, it still does require a lot of time and energy.
Hired three engineers which has been mostly the bulk of my job, bulk of my time in a week doing that. And then I’m hiring one more new employee here in the next couple weeks. Interviewing people right now. I hope to slow down hiring. I don’t really expect to keep growing at this pace. I’m a big believer in small teams and being super efficient and scrappy and agile. And I think that growing the team too large too quickly is really a mistake that some startups make. And then you see them slow down because if it gets bigger you have to involve process and then the process slows down. I just don’t think that that’s the place we want to go to. Doesn’t sound like a fun way to go to grow the team that quickly. So hoping to slow that down and give myself some time to look at other stuff.
Mike [30:34]: Well, I think that as you grow the team people need to become comfortable – not just with each other but with the things that they’re working on and how they work together. And if you grow too quickly – I saw this at Pedestal Software to some extent because we grew from I think I was the fourth engineer that was hired and within probably a year we were up to 10 or 15 or something like that. And when you have that many people added to a team that quickly, it’s difficult to – get on the same schedule is not quite the right way to phrase it, but get in the same mental mode of working together. Get on the same page in terms of how you’re doing stuff. You know what I mean?
Rob [31:12]: Yes, totally. There’s just an adjustment period when you’re working with a new group of people on a new app.
Mike [31:17]: Yes, that’s it. It’s that adjustment period. It’s hard to do that and scale it up very quickly without having things go sideways very quickly as well.
Rob [31:26]: Yes. And so, other transitional stuff that’s happened that’s been really nice. I’ve been able to basically hand over support. Leadpages has, I don’t even know, 20 people or something. 25 people on their support team and we had one. And so to have trials go up as high as they did as quickly they did, which is where the bulk of support’s going to come, we just never would have been able to hire that quickly. And certainly didn’t have the budget to do it. I’ve handed over the reins of that to their very capable team at HR. Obviously all HR stuff. There was no reason for me to be managing payroll and employee onboarding and insurance plans and just all that stuff. So that was good to hand over to them. Legal, affiliate management.
Mike [32:03]: All the crappy parts of running a business.
Rob [32:04]: Isn’t it funny? Yes. Everything I’m naming is like we are product people. We want to build product and there’s all this other stuff that you have to do to have a company. And it’s really nice when there’s someone else there to do it. So my job has actually been filled with less as Anders called it in his question. You said the crap work. And for me this is crap work for me personally because of how I’m wired and because of my focus and what I’m good at. But it’s actually someone else’s sphere of genius. You know what I’m saying? The HR person, it’s her sphere of genius so she should be doing it. And the legal and the affiliate management, this is what they do fulltime. And so me having it as one of 50 things that I’m managing it’s just not going to be done anywhere near as well.
To be honest, I feel right now we’re getting to the point where we’re starting to ship pretty quickly again. The first 30 to 60 days after the acquisition was like, oh man, we need to add servers; we need to scale; some things are starting to get slow. We had people come in trying to send spam. There’s just all this stuff you’re fighting. And then we got enough code written that we’re out well ahead of that now. And that’s given us a chance to really get back in and dig into features.
And so, we’ve shipped some pretty cool things in the past couple weeks. And there’s some fun changes I won’t talk about yet but that are going to be coming here in the next month or two.
Mike [33:21]: Awesome. Well, I think we’re kind of running out of time here. But I guess to wrap things up a little bit, one of the things you’d asked me earlier was how to make sure that things are moving forward in the way that they need to; and how I’m going to move the app ahead; and put more people into; and actually scale up the customer side of things as opposed to digging in, as you said, and focusing too much on things that are not going to be as important. Or just simply aren’t as important. And I think for that, for me it’s really a matter of putting together some goals. And I think that early on, when I was first doing the customer development for it, I had some very concrete goals and I was highly focused on making sure that I was achieving a certain number of calls per week and having conversations and converting people into the preorders. And I think I need to get back to that. I think I need to pick maybe one or two different KPIs that I’m going to go after and use those as benchmarks moving forward for at least the next month or two. I don’t know off the top of my head what they are. I have some ideas but I think I may need to sit down and first thing is determine exactly what those are and then track those moving forward.
Rob [34:24]: Yes, totally. That sounds like a good thing. I feel like your number one focus right now should be getting more people on and getting them to pay you. And figuring out if there are sticking points between them paying you, what those are. Getting them hammered out moving as quickly as possible.
For me, to wrap up, over the next few weeks I’m going to be going to the Converted conference which is the one Leadpages puts on. I think I’ll have some stage time. I don’t think I’m doing my own talk there but talking about Drip and some other stuff. I’ve been spending a lot of time recruiting speakers for the two MicroConfs we’re putting on in six months. Which is a bit of an effort.
And then on more of a personal note. It’s a trip, I’ve been getting back more into investing. I kind of put that on the back burner a decade ago as I dove headlong into entrepreneurship, but it’s always been an interest of mine since I was a kid. I bought my first share of stock when I was like 14 or 15. I had to do it through my dad’s account because, obviously, you have to be 18 or something to do it. Read a lot of books when I was younger and I thought that was a way to make money. And as I learned it’s like investing is a way to grow money slowly and stay ahead of inflation but almost no one gets rich or makes their millions purely from investing starting with nothing. There’s like two exceptions in the history of mankind or something. But now that I have a little bit of a nest egg from the Drip acquisition, it just makes a lot more sense to be more deliberate about it because with a larger sum of money, it’s like just knowing more and doing 1% or 2% more per year, being a little more deliberate about it, it really is worth a substantial sum. And so that’s actually been a lot of fun. I’ve been listening to audiobooks. Actually, maybe at some point we could do a whole episode on it because that’s what I’m doing what my spare time is really thinking and looking about that and educating myself again and updating my skillset there. So, I have a lot of thoughts on the topic.
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Episode 308 | Work-work Balance, Living A Process-Based Life, and More Listener Questions
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike discuss work-work balance, living a processed based life, angel investing, and answer more listener questions. Mike also gives an in depth update on his progress with BlueTick, and Rob helps define angel investing and shares some ways to make a possible return on your investment.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Rob [00:00]: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I discuss work/work balance, living a process-based life, [angel?] investing, and more listener questions. This is Startups for the Rest of Us, episode #308. [THEME MUSIC] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products. Whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
Mike [00:28]: And I’m Mike.
Rob [00:29]: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes that we made. Wait a minute, was that the right thing? I wasn’t reading it.
Mike [00:36]: I don’t know. You tell me. I wasn’t listening [laughter].
Rob [00:38]: Yeah, I think – what is going on this week, sir?
Mike [00:42]: Well, I started rolling out the latest updates at Blue Tick, and this is kind of a massive release that I’ve been working on for a while now. But the core functionality of it is that it allows the application to download the actual contents of mail messages from somebody’s mailbox. The difficult thing behind it was actually that, depending on which type of mail server you use, there could be a lot of duplication in the mail messages that are behind it. So whenever you move a message from one folder to another on a mail server, it doesn’t move references around. It actually copies all of the data as well. So I basically had to run through this process of downloading the messages, and trying to find out if they’re unique or not, and storing them. It was kind of a mess. I don’t think I’ve ever written so much test code in my life for one specific function. Or for one feature, to be honest. Because there’s just so much involved in it.
Rob [01:35]: Yeah, it sounds like it. Why is this important for Blue Tick to have as a feature?
Mike [01:39]: People have been asking me to basically be able to surface just the content of the emails inside of the application, because they want to be able to log in, and when they’re sending emails through Blue Tick, they want to be able to see the replies, and what previous messages have been sent to the person. The only way to get that is to download them from their mailbox. So it makes it difficult to be able to surface that. I can show pretty easily the emails that I have sent, because I keep copies of those, but I don’t have any other way to show them emails that have been sent prior to them signing up for Blue Tick, unless I go into their mailbox and download them.
Rob [02:15]: Alright.
Mike [02:16]: So it basically provides them with a better history of all the different conversations. It gets more important in a team situation, because if you have multiple people who are on a team and User One sends an email to Sally, and then User Two sends a different email to Sally, you’ll be able to see those things in aggregate, so you can see what the team communication is with a particular person as opposed to just your own personal communication with that person.
Rob [02:39]: True. The bummer is that you had to build it yourself from scratch. I have to imagine that there’s not as much – well I guess with .net there isn’t as much open source stuff out there to do this. I know that when we tried to do stuff like this – we haven’t done this exact task, but when we have done stuff like this, like parsing RSS feeds, or just stuff that’s semi-standard but it’s a little [cloogy?]. There’s bits of [Ruby Jam?] written to do that and that we were able to use. Were there no components out there that did take care of this?
Mike [03:07]: Well, there’s components out there that allow you to interact with a mail server and download the stuff, but there’s nothing that says “Okay here’s this back-end storage system, and it’s a very generic thing, we’re just going to treat it like a database or something like that.” And you can wire up those pieces, but there’s nothing out there that directly translates a copy of the contents of a mail server into some generic back-end storage system. Because the back-end storage footwork can be pretty much anything. It can be a database, it can be a [nosequel?], it can be a file system. It can be a variety of different things. And all of the components that I used to get the messages are all of the shelf, but the back-end storage of it – depending on how you index things and how you want to surface the data, and what specific pieces you want to actually store, those are the pieces that I had to build. Anywhere where there’s questions about how do you search it, or index it, or anything like that? Those are the things that I had to also build. And then making sure that there’s tools in place that we can verify, “Okay, yes. We got this message, and we were able to get the contents. We built all the [indices?] and everything else.” And later on, my message might get deleted. So if a message gets deleted, then all that stuff needs to be updated. And then we had to build tools to make sure that everything got deleted. There’s no orphan data laying around, etcetera. It gets ugly very, very fast.
Rob [04:27]: This does not sound like fun at all.
Mike [04:29]: It is not. It was not.
Rob [04:32]: So, on my side, I wanted to call out a forthcoming e-book from MicroConf’s very own Kristoff Englehardt. And his e-book is SassEmailMarketing.Net and he’s obviously writing it for Sass Companies. He’s teaching about email marketing. And he did a video interview with me today. I’m assuming that he’ll include it as a bonus or something like that. So if you’re interested in that topic, SassEmailMarketing.Net, on another note, did you notice that our last two episodes went live almost two weeks late?
Mike [05:01]: That’s not technically true. [Crosstalk] They were out there.
Rob [05:06]: Right. That’s true. That is technically true. I got on Downcast, which is what I use on my iPhone a couple weeks ago on a Tuesday, and the episode didn’t come out. I thought, “that’s weird.” So I went to the website and, sure enough, it was live on the website. Well, I was thinking that maybe iTunes and Downcast got out of sync. Because Downcast – I think it must scrape iTunes or something like that. It wasn’t showing up. So it was several days later and you and I finally dug into Feed Burner, which is something we’ve used to for subscriber counts. Feed Burner got acquired by Google four or five years ago and they have just let it languish. So sure enough, something in there just snapped. Nobody cares, or was willing to fix it. I posted to their forums, I tried to email them, but there’s no help email address at all, support bounced, support@ bounced back to me. So I posted on their forums and it was like crickets. So we had to go nuclear on it and just switch everything over to a bare WordPress feed. The redirect is going, so hopefully everyone who is hearing this episode, it came up properly in your pod-catcher. But if someone is experiencing issues, feel free to get in contact and we’ll see if there’s any edge-cases that we’ve missed.
Mike [06:16]: Well, the problem is that if they’re hearing this episode then, obviously, they’re past the issue.
Rob [06:21]: Perhaps.
Mike [06:22]: [laughter] So it almost doesn’t matter.
Rob [06:22]: Although, a bunch of people were saying that they didn’t notice because they listened to the episodes on the website. Can you believe that?
Mike [06:28]: Oh, that’s interesting.
Rob [06:29]: I know. I would never have thought to do that. It just doesn’t – I mean, they’re on the website but it’s more for posterity, right? I guess the main consumption driver is really a pod-catcher. And I think 80% maybe of our downloads – because that was the cool thing. Feed Burner would tell you what percentage came from iTunes versus the Google downloads. It just had all these different divisions of your downloads. It was like 10-20% web and everything else was podcast apps. And of that, I think it was 80% or 90% iTunes. It was a huge consumption. Although, wait. That’s not true because Google had at least – they had the Android thing and it was like 20-some%. Anyways, I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it was nice to know. And we’re basically not going to have any of that data now. I mean, we do still use Blueberry I think it’s called. It gives us download data per episode, but the metrics in there are not very good. I guess we’ll just continue to fly blind.
Mike [07:20]: Yeah, that’s one of the downsides for podcasts in general. The statistics behind them that allow you to see kind of what’s going on, and what your listenership levels are. It’s atrocious. I’ve looked around a little bit, and talked to Craig Hewitt a little bit about it – he’s from Podcast Motor. And they’ve looked into potentially developing a product around providing statistics. I don’t know if they ever went anywhere with that, but the problem is that in order to get anywhere with those statistics you really need to kind of know – or at least be hooked into whatever the application or the platform is that the people are playing the podcast through. Because there’s a difference between a download and a play. You know, it could be thousands – it’s just like RSS feeds. There could be thousands of hits to the RSS feed, but is anyone actually reading it? And you really just don’t have any good way of knowing. That’s a very hard problem to solve, I think.
Rob [08:09]: Yeah, that’s kind of left out. I mean, since podcasting was bolted on RSS, and RSS by itself doesn’t have any type of analytics built into it, right? It just simply passes you a URL of a file. In this case, typically an MP3 file. And so what you’re saying is that when someone hits your RSS feed and then goes and downloads the MP3 file, your web server has no idea where that came from. It doesn’t know that it came from iTunes, it doesn’t know that it came from a pod-catcher or if it was played on the web and was just accessing it. So the cat’s out of the bag on that one and there’s not really much we can do to put it back in. But I guess that’s just the state of things. We can deal with it.
Mike [08:46]: The other funny part about this is that Feed Burner has kind of been on autopilot for Google since I think 2011 or 2012. So here it is like four years later and we finally decided to switch off of it.
Rob [08:57]: I know. Well, you know if things aren’t broken, you’re not going to spend the time and risk losing subscribers and risk potentially breaking anything. Any time I mess with this stuff I always feel like DNS propagation. You know that it’s probably going to work, but you’re not really 100% sure until it does. And there’s really nothing you can do to test it. You just have to do it. You just have to click the button and hope that everything redirects. And if it doesn’t and things start breaking it can kind of suck. So we have some listener questions that we’re going to run through today. I think that this cleans out – I don’t think we have any more listener questions in the queue, which kind of makes me feel good. We’ve had some of these listener questions in here since 2014. I’m sorry about that. It also makes me feel a little bad because people aren’t asking us questions. I feel like we should get these conferences filled again. So if you have a question for us that you’d like us to answer on the air, please send your questions to StartupsForTheRestOfUs.Com. So our first couple of questions are from Anders. Anders Peterson, who comes to many MicroConfs, you’ve heard us mention him on here before, said “One question I have is, do you have anyone in your life that continually asks you the hard business questions? Those questions you don’t want to hear but probably need to. If you do, how do you find those people?”
Mike [10:03]: I would say that I probably use my mastermind group for this kind of thing. When I have questions or problems I will bring them to them. But I also feel like in a mastermind group you have to be a little bit cognizant that over time you become good friends with people, so it can more difficult for them to essentially challenge you on the things that you’re doing, and really put your feet to the fire and say, “Look, you’re going in the wrong direction here. You haven’t made progress on this in a very long time, what’s going on?” They tend to be more intimately involved in the things that you’re doing, so they’re not as objective. That’s not to say there’s no value in having made a mastermind group, because I think there’s a ton of value. But I also think that because they are much closer to the situation – obviously you’re that kind of first tier where you’re very close to it and it can be very difficult for you to see the forest through the trees, so to speak. In addition to that, your mastermind group tends to be people who are also only one step removed. And then if you have a business coach or something like that, they’reprobably a little more removed from that, or even if you have just people that you meet at a meet-up or entrepreneurs that you meet a conference. Those people are even another step removed. I think as you get further removed, it’s probably easier to be more objective about things. And the conversation you’ll have, you’ll probably focus in on a few key issues versus the people who you are very familiar with who you’ve been talking about, they won’t necessarily question come of the assumptions because they’ve been there with you while you were making some of the decisions about those assumptions.
Rob [11:28]: I think for me it’s the same story. The mastermind people are going to be the people you feel comfortable enough with, or they feel comfortable enough with you to be willing to do this. Because if you don’t know someone very well and they ask you those hard questions, it kind of pisses you off. It’s like, “Who are you to ask me those questions?” But if you know that someone has your best interest at hand and they’re not trolling you on Twitter with a hard business question, but they’re actually asking it to help you maybe face up to some shortcomings or to face up to a decision you’re having or to call out bad decisions that you’re making or thoughts that aren’t valid. I think that’s helpful. So it has to be someone that you have a good relationship with. That you trust that they have your best interest at hand and that they’re not going to be a jerk and always ask the hard questions. Because if that’s all someone does, it’s going to get irritating to. You have to have a relationship beyond that. So I would say, yes, mastermind group. The other one is my wife. Sherri may not be inside the business and be able to ask the detailed business questions, but she does ask, as she’s hearing me talk about the same thing over and over over the course of a month or two months, she says “How are you going to fix that one? Why aren’t you fixing it? What can you do?” And starts prodding in there. And of course we have the relationship where we’re able to do that. The question of how you find those people, we’ve talked about finding folks for a mastermind. You’ve got to build those relationships slowly, build them over time, meet them at MicroConf, that kind of stuff. This is a good question. I think more people need to think about this topic. Who is it that is asking these hard questions, who has your best interest at mind and who knows enough about your business to know that it’s the right question to ask you? Thanks for sending that question along, Anders. Anders had a couple questions, actually. He said, “I’d like to hear more about how you handle work/work balance. I’ve talked a little bit with Rob last MicroConf Europe about how much time he spends on fun work and how much time he spends on crap work. What do you do to notice when the balance is off and how do you rectify it?”
Mike [13:19]: I like the phrase “work/work.”
Rob [13:22]: Work/work balance is cool.
Mike [13:23]: Yeah.
Rob [13:23]: I really like that idea of – it’s basically saying that not everything you do is going to be awesome every day, or fun every day. It’s like fun work versus crap work balance. Work/work balance is a clever way to say that.
Mike [13:34]: Yeah, but I can also see it coming from a large enterprise 500 company where they’re like, “Oh, there’s work that you do for us that you do here, at your desk, and then there’s work that you do at home while you’re not at your desk for us.” I guess for this type of thing I would say that if you look at the things that you’re doing and you’re finding yourself easily distracted from them and procrastinating them, then those are things that you probably need to figure out how to address. Is it something that you just need to power through? Is it a short term thing? Or is it something that you need to basically give to somebody else because it’s frustrating to you, you don’t understand it, or you don’t have the experience and expertise in order to do it? And I think that just being cognizant of what those things are and how you’re feeling about the work that you’re doing is important. It’s one thing to just say, “be more aware of it.” I don’t think that that’s the answer because it’s very difficult to become aware of it if you’re not already setting aside time to review those things. What I find is helpful is setting aside specific times at either the end of the day or the end of each week, depending on what you think the appropriate cycle is, to review what you’ve been doing and where you’ve been spending your time, and try and figure out if that’s the best use of your time. So it depends on what type of iteration cycle that you’re interested in achieving. If you’re trying to avoid those things where you’re stuck doing the same thing for several days on end, you might want to do a daily review. Even if it’s just five minutes set aside, a scheduled time, put a reminder in your calendar or do some journaling or something like that. If you’re okay with longer time periods where it might be a couple of days or a week or two, then you can space it out and say, “I’m going to do a review once a week, Friday at 3:00 P.M. or 4:00 or something like that.” When your week is especially winding down, put something in your calendar that says, “Let me come back and review what I’ve done over the past week.” So again, it depends on what that iteration cycle is, but the really important piece is making sure you set aside time to consciously review that as opposed to letting it be something that creeps in and then is a problem for days, weeks, or months on end and then suddenly you realize, “I need to do something about this.”
Rob [15:44]: I think that’s a really nice way to attack it – is to just review daily or weekly. Personally, I notice because I start losing motivation and I start not liking my job. I mean, that’s what it is. I’m the co-founder of the company and when I stop liking my job for weeks on end I realize I’m doing too much crap work and I need to figure out what it is. Then I start keeping notes at work. What did I do today that sucked? And I’ll do it as I’m going through. I don’t do it reflectively. I’ll realize as I’m sitting here in my inbox for five hours, okay, I need to figure that out. I mentioned this in several year-end reviews that I need to do less emails. That was something that was always there. Legal and administrative stuff and H.R. – there was a bunch of things that I was noticing would creep up as we were growing DRIP. So it’s work that had to get done, but it was work that I didn’t enjoy. Typically I’ll pick up on it because I’ll notice that I’m not enjoying stuff and then instantly the way I try to rectify it is I’ll identify, make a list, and then I’ll say, “Who can I hire to do this instead?” Like a specialist who is really good with administrative or really good with H.R. Because most of the things that you consider crap work is a job for someone else and it’s a thing that they enjoy. It’s just about finding the right person to do that for you.
Mike [16:56]: One thing that you mentioned in there that I think is probably not inherently obvious to everyone is that when you’re building your own business and you’re running it, you’d think that it would be like “this is going to be great, I have a job that I love because I built this job in order for me to enjoy it.” But the reality is that there are going to be aspects of running a business that you don’t enjoy. I think it’s just important to keep that in mind. Not everything about the business is going to be something that you enjoy. There are some thing you’ll just have to power through and there are other things where you’re going to want find someone else to do them.
Rob [17:26]: And then Anders’ last question was, “Have you ever noticed how most ‘normal’ people” – and actually, I like that phrase, “normals versus technologists” is a phrase that I’ve heard, but he says, “Have you ever noticed how most ‘normal’ people live an event based life? When I when the lotto, then I will become happy. When I get a new car, then I will be happy. Whereas it feels like most successful entrepreneurs live a process based life. I work on my business because it makes me happy, and because long term it will pay off. What is your take on this and where are you?”
Mike [17:53]: I would have to agree with that general assessment that a lot of people do live their lives that way, and they are always working towards these goals, but and they don’t always enjoy the process. They’re looking specifically for achieving that goal, but they don’t really look at anything beyond that. And they will make any number of sacrifices during that process thinking that the “I have arrived” fallacy that you kind of mentioned here on the podcast here before – the question is “what’s next?” What do you do from there? And if you don’t have an answer to that, it becomes very difficult to go on to the next thing, regardless of whether or not you were successful with the previous one or not. So you really have to think of a lot longer term than that. I don’t think that probably matters so much for people who are non-entrepreneurs because they have a 9-5 job, they go into work every day, and at the end of the day they go home and work on their hobbies and spend time with their families and it doesn’t matter. Because no matter what happens, they still have to go back to work the next day. That’s probably less of a problem for those types of people than it is for entrepreneurs in that situation where you could have a life-altering event – which is much more likely to happen, such as selling your business or selling your product, than win the lottery.
Rob [19:03]: Yeah. By its very nature, entrepreneurship is a constant state of forgoing present gains for potential future rewards, right? Your present day gains are things like you go out to Happy Hour, you could hang out and watch a movie, you could spend time with your family. There’s a ton of things you could do that are fun, but instead of that tonight you’re going to spend three or four hours writing code, building your business, doing some marketing. And over the weekend you’re not going to go out of town and go to the beach, you’re going to spend it writing sales copy and thinking through your pricing. That kind of stuff. That’s pretty much a perpetual state of affairs as far as I’m concerned as an entrepreneur. I think, Anders, you’ve made some generalizations here that I think are fairly accurate. I think that people who are drawn to entrepreneurship, they have to know they’re investing for something better in the future. So I do think there is that mix of – I think you can have the arrival fallacy as an entrepreneur because you can say, “Once I quit my job, then I’ll be happy. Once I sell my app, then I’ll be happy.” It’s easy to slip into that, but I do think the healthier and the long term entrepreneurs who make this more of a sustainable lifestyle realize that at a certain point you just have to be in it for the process. You have to find something in it that gives you the dopamine rush, right? And for some people that’s – Derek and I have talked about this – for some people it’s shipping a feature. It’s pushing a feature into production. And that’s the rush you need. And so you’ve got to find that and make that more of a part of your day. For other people it’s doing launches. Then figuring out what you’re going to do. An e-book launch, every other month for marketing? Could I do a video launch? Even if you have a Sass app, if what you really want to do is launch little products, because that’s where you get the rush from, then figure out how to do that. If you really love building a high-performing team, and working with them to solve problems, then figure out how to do that. That’s what it is, I think. Becoming happy and fulfilled by engineering a business rather than going for the end result. The end result – I mean, we talked about this with the Bill Walsh episode, right? Where he basically says to put your best effort in, be the best you can, and the score will take care of itself. That’s how I view this. It’s like the more you can make sure you’re happy and you’re keeping those around you happy, and making this a sustainable lifestyle, I think that good things will come of it eventually. Our next question comes from Kevin from Viper.io and he said, “I just wanted to jump in on a question. I love the show. I’ve been listening religiously and it’s overtaken all of my other podcasts. I have a question for you and hopefully you’ll have a chance to answer it. Rob, you say you do [angel?] investing in these fun startups. How do you make a return on those? I know some investors take a percentage of profits every month or something like that. Is that the structure you work with? Or are you banking on an exit? Have you made a return yet on any of those investments?” The fun strapping is where someone is basically trying to raise a small round. It’s typically between 50k and maybe 200,000/300,000 and it’s to get to profitability. So they’re not looking to raise a series A, B, and a C, they’re really just kind of raising a small round to grow quicker but to get to profitability. Last question is, “Have you made a return on any of these investments?” And the answer is no. I wouldn’t have. My first [angel?] investment was maybe three or four years ago. That was WP Engine and it’s now worth a bazillion dollars. I think their most recent round is public info. The most recent round was over a year ago and I think that they were valued at 120 million. So, certainly, my investments on paper are worth substantially more than when I first invested. That would be the business that’s the furthest along and there’s been no liquidity event or anything like that. Another part of his question is how am I going to make a return on these? Some of the investments are in big startups like WP Engine that are either going to get acquired or they’re going to IPO. I mean, there’s going to be a big liquidity event, as they call it. A chunk of mine – and it’s kind of what I’m focused on now because it just fits more with who I am and the business I believe have a reasonable evaluations are the ones that are going to be profitable businesses. These are not these moon-shot businesses. They’re businesses like Jordan [?]’s Hook and Justin McGill’s Lead Fuse and [?] from Matt and Joel – I’m an [angel?] investors in each of those. These are businesses that, I believe, they all absolutely have the potential to get to seven figures and maybe even eight figures in revenue. They’re going to be businesses that just spit out cash. They’re Sass businesses. And so gross profit on Sass apps can be something between 50% and 80%, and net profit can be between 20% and 70% depending on how you’re running it and how fast you’re growing all this stuff. So there’s a lot of money – a lot of cash – that can come out of these. So the deal typically is structured – and this is the same kind of deal that you’ll see at Indie.VC – is the money goes in and as long as the money is used to take care of the business, nobody takes money out. But as soon as dividends come out, a certain percentage goes to the investors. Some of the deals say that once the investors are paid back 3X, then things revert to a smaller amount that goes back to the investors. Sometimes investors get completely paid off, and are paid out at 5X. I think that’s how Indie.VC works. If they’re paid 5X then they’re own zero of the company anymore. And it’s only if the company were acquired before then that .VC would get it. I think that’s how it works. Don’t quote me on that. But that’s the idea. And each is a little different. I don’t want to speak specifically about the investments because the payment works private. The idea is, yes, while it used for the business nobody is making money. The founders are taking a salary, but there’s no dividends coming out to anyone. And then once they start taking that, a certain percentage which is negotiable – and it’s a different setup on each deal. Sometimes it’s based on how much you actually own. If you own 1% of the company, you get 1% of the dividends. In the others the investors are favored more upfront until they get paid back their initial investment, 1-2X. And then it flips. That’s the basic structure.
Mike [24:33]: I like the Indie.VC model, and I don’t know whether they pioneered that or if they’re responsible for pushing that, or if they were the first or whatever, but I like that idea better than the .VC model just because it’s more in favor of the entrepreneurs who are building it. I don’t think that you need this massive exit in order for it to be work it. I don’t know what your feeling or take on this is, but in many cases it’s not necessarily because you want to have this giant payout, but you want to see somebody be successful. You don’t want it to be a go-big-or-go-home, you want it to be something that somebody can grow into a viable and profitable business.
Rob [25:11]: That’s right. And those are the kind of businesses that I believe in anyway. Those are the businesses that I want to see succeed and that’s why I’ve started doing this model. And Indie.VC, I have seen their investor deck for people who become LP’s in their fund, the people that actually give money to .VC to invest. And they’re doing well with it. There’s definitely returns to be had in this fashion. This is also all modeled after brick-and-mortar businesses. If you want to start a restaurant or a car wash and you went to investors, a typical structure for that is investors do put up the money and you take a salary as you run it. Then as profits are generated and there are dividends, more goes to the investor. It’s often 80/20, 80% goes to the investors until they’re paid back either 1 or 2x, and then 20% goes out to the founders. It flips at a certain point. Sometimes there’s a maximum payout. Again, with Indie.VC 3x or 5x is I think where it maxes out. Where with brick-and-mortars, I’m not sure if it ever maxes out or how that goes. I think it’s more about a business that generates revenue, not this liquidity event. Right? In that sense, it’s funny – an app like Drip who’s long term play is become a profitable business has almost more in common than a dry cleaner or a car wash in terms of the business model, than it does with Facebook or Twitter where they really need to get massive or they’re just going to self-destruct. Our last question of the day comes from Jordie [Coski?] from TapFun.com. He says, “Hey guys, I’m a big fan of the show. I’m wondering how you would structure a salary for a lead developer on a Sass app. Would you build in any kind of performance structure related to revenue and revenue growth of the service?”
Mike [26:49]: I think that when you’re looking at this type of question, there’s two different ways that you can view it, or two different perspectives you can have. The first one is what role does that developer actually have in the development of the product? Are they a W2 employee? Or are they an external, third-party contractor? I think that depending on the answer to that, it’s going to heavily impact how you treat that person in terms of the compensation. So, for a W2 employee, obviously, you’re going to give them a salary. And this is really where the questions come in about giving them additional compensation or performance structure. If they’re an external contractor or third party that you just hired off of UpWork or LinkedIn or something like that, chances are really good that there’s not going to be any performance bonuses or anything like that. You’ve kind of negotiated whatever the contract rate is with them, and that’s what you pay them. It doesn’t really matter what their performance is, that’s what you’re going to pay them. If they’re a W2 employee, chances are this is where those questions will come in. And I think that in the case of developers, the vast majority of developers, there’s not going to be any performance bonuses, because it’s going to be very difficult to map the things that they bring to the table to the growth of the products. It’s very easy to write tens of thousands of lines of code that don’t really contribute to the bottom line in any measurable way. It’s very difficult to map those lines of code back to the performance of the product. You can write tens of thousands of lines of code that have zero to do with the product’s growth. That’s really what sales reps are for, that’s what the compensation record is for, compensation reps, people like that, that’s what they do. It’s to help them promote the product and incentivize them to grow the product. And they will do anything they can in order to do that. But with the developer, those mappings are much more nebulous. It’s very difficult to derive the impact on the product based on what it is that they do. So those are probably my general thoughts on it, in terms of offering equity or a stock plan or anything like that. Those things are all really negotiable. It kind of depends on what your relationship is with the developer and what the company culture is and how much money the app is making. You could do profit sharing or revenue sharing, those types of things. There’s lots of different way to go, but it’s also very situationally dependent. And I don’t think these are things you have to look at or really need to consider on day one when someone comes in. If you have a team or five or ten people, then maybe it’s something to think about. But for your first develop or two, I wouldn’t worry about it at all.
Rob [29:16]: Yeah, I agree. I mean, you have to think about A, motivation, and B, what’s kind of the standard and why has that arisen? And the standard is not to give anybody but sales people a cut of profits. I mean, that’s typically the thing. Even people in marketing, as a rule at startups, they’re not getting a percentage. You know, they may get a bonus at some point or they may get stock options, but they don’t get a cut of the profits. Because you need those profits to grow. Especially at a small Sass app, you really want that money. I think something like stock options, which is really good for retention, because they invest in it over the years, I think that’s cool. Because then everyone feels like they have ownership. Also think about motivation. Are developers motivated by money? I mean, some, yeah, maybe. But developers are much more motivated by having really cool problems to solve, and working in an environment that’s fun, and being able to ship a lot of code quickly. There’s certain things that are just more valuable than a few thousand dollar bonuses that they’re going to receive each quarter or each year. So that’s not something I’ve seen done, and it’s not something I would particularly recommend. Giving people bonuses at some time during the year, or doing profit sharing, or setting up some plan later on down the line I think totally makes sense. You want to take care of your people. If your business is making money, you should share it with them. And giving people stock ownership is cool, there’s lot of different options. But up front, having that be part of the deal, I think is really tough. You could easily give away more than you need to or want to because you just don’t know what the business is going to look like. Get farther down the road, get this thing live, and when things start happening then make that call.
Mike [30:41]: As you mentioned kind of early on in that answer, it also depends on what their motivations are. So, just thinking about giving them equity, some people might not care about equity at all. So you have to understand what their motivations are for that kind of thing. It might not impact their productivity in any way, shape, or form, and you just gave away part of the company. You have to keep those things in mind as well. I think those things take time and it’s not something you will want to necessarily decide on day one. So I think that about wraps us up for the day. If you have a question for us, call it into our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690, or email it to us at Questions@StartUpsForTheRestOfUs.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Out of Control,” by MoOt used under creative commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching startups and selecting StartupsForTheRestOfUs.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.