Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob talks with Tracy Osborn about things she would of done differently during the 9 years she ran WeddingLovely.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, a 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 today with Tracy Osborn, we’re going to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made.
Welcome to this week’s episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. On the show, we talk about building startups in an organic sustainable fashion and while we are ambitious founders who want to grow our companies, we don’t do it at the expense of our life.
We have many different show formats. Oftentimes, we will talk about tactics and teach things. We answer listener questions. We have some founder hot seats. Today, I’m doing an interview, but it’s more of a conversation with Tracy Osborn, founder of WeddingLovely which she ran from 2010 until late 2018. I believe she actually shut it down technically in early 2019.
Tracy and I now work together at TinySeed. She’s the program manager for the accelerator. We’ve known each other for several years now. She spoke at MicroConf in 2016, and I believe that was the first time we met in person. Obviously, we’ve gotten to know each other much better over the past three or four months as we’ve worked together on TinySeed.
What I like about Tracy’s story is that it really is a story of high highs and low lows, from teaching herself to code to bootstrapping the company in 2010 and then going through two accelerators—although one of them really didn’t put much money in—winding up going through 500 Startups. WeddingLovely was really hitting on all cylinders and then catastrophic stuff happens. It’s fascinating to hear her thought process of some regrets, things she would have done differently, and other things that didn’t turn out, but she made the best decision she could at the time.
I really appreciated Tracy’s honesty and transparency in the interview today. It makes for an interesting story, like several of the guests we’ve had on recently who were able to dig into decisions they made, things they might have done differently, as well as things that they did do right, and the learnings that they took away from running a startup.
As a quick background, WeddingLovely was a blog and a wedding marketplace that matched up wedding vendors with couples who were going to be married—the engaged couples. With that bit of background, we’ll take you right into the story. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoy this interview, I’d really appreciate it if you’d reach out on Twitter. I’m @robwalling and Tracy is @tracymakes. Let’s dive in.
Tracy, thanks so much for joining me on the show this week.
Tracy: Thanks for having me.
Rob: Listeners already have some context about WeddingLovely and how you started it. I want to start by looking at the decision you made to move from bootstrapped to taking $50,000 in funding from 500 Startups. What led to that happening and how did you make that decision?
Tracy: That was a really tough decision because before 500 Startups happened, I was fully in the bootstrapped camp. This is 2011 so TinySeed didn’t exist. All these other alternate funding or different paths, they didn’t exist. It was like, “Are you going to do a full funding route or are you going to go bootstrapping?” That was it. There was no middle ground.
I was fully in the bootstrap camp. I was already following Patrick McKenzie’s (patio11) writings about this at the time. I joined the Designer Fund in San Francisco, which is totally different than how they are now, but at the time, it was a small accelerator-ish thing where we got a really small chunk of money and we just worked together for three months meeting up every week just to work on our projects together.
One of the Designer Fund founders was a mentor at 500 and he decided to set up interviews with 500 just in case for everyone who was in Designer Fund. For me, I was like, “Okay, this is a good practice. This is great for me to go in and practice pitching and whatnot.”
It was a really interesting experience because I met with Dave McClure and Paul Singh, who I don’t think is involved with 500 anymore, but I met with Paul first. Paul was like, “I’ve seen your articles. I’ve seen you talk about WeddingLovely and why you’re building. I think you’re awesome.” He called me a cockroach which I thought was awesome. He’s like, “You’ll never die, you’re persistent, you’re in there. You’re in.” I was like, “Wow, that was easy.”
Then I sat down with Dave McClure and I gave my presentation. He said, “All right, we’ll get back to you soon.” I was like, “Oh, Paul already said I’m in,” and that totally threw Dave McClure off because I didn’t talk about this. I totally threw everything off for Dave McClure and probably what they were planning.
At that time, I wasn’t sure I was going to take it yet, but it was a thing where it’s like, “Okay, cool. I have this opportunity to go through 500.” My husband had just gone through YC. I knew I was really into bootstrapping beforehand, but it was like, “Okay, I have this offer on the table. Let’s see what happens.” That was the thought process about it.
Not everyone gets this offer, this chunk of money. I wasn’t ready. Hindsight being 20/20, that’s where I hesitate right now because I look back at the decision and be like, “I should have thought more about this. I should know more about what goes into a funded company, the growth that’s required when you’re a funded company, when you have investors, what’s involved with raising a full series A,” that kind of stuff. But it was, “Okay, this is going to be a learning experience. I have this opportunity here. I watched my husband go through YC. Let’s do it.”
Rob: Yeah, the hard part that I see with the 500 Startups investment was that they only gave you $50,000, but it came with the expectation of, “Now, you’re on venture track.” It’s not enough money to act like a funded startup in my opinion, but it sounds like you wanted to, or felt the pressure to start acting like a funded startup.
Tracy: Yeah, for sure. There are so many other complicating factors. My time in 500 was I did not utilize it as well as I should have. I’m taking a lot of stuff I’ve learned, actually, from being in 500 to what we’re building at TinySeed. Some of it was, I was a solo founder and complicating factors, I funded another wedding company the same time in my batch. They also required you to get desks at their space and they’ve set us across from each other and we were not friends. I want to be friends with them, but the other people were very aggressive. That’s like a stereotypical startup, that bad stereotype you might think of a start-up founder. That’s how they were.
Rob: Something from HBO show Silicon Valley or something.
Tracy: Exactly. We are not friends. I just felt so awkward being there with a competitor and they actually pivoted more into my space during the batch. I didn’t show up to any of the networking stuff. I didn’t do anything like the evening stuff. I didn’t really connect with the other founders. I just decided to stay in my own little world, heads down, work on things, hired someone at that time, brought her on.
This is a time that I found a co-founder, which we can talk about later, but in terms of 500, I didn’t really involve myself in the program. I didn’t really utilize the mentors that were there. I didn’t use any of the help that 500 gave me and I look back at that time being like, “Wow, I wish I could redo that,” because my social anxiety just came into play there and I didn’t use it as well as I should have.
Rob: Right, because as we’ve heard from so many people in the TinySeed batch, the community and the mentorship is at least as valuable, if not more valuable than the money they invest. It sounds like you feel you squandered that opportunity a bit.
Tracy: Absolutely. That working is so important to one’s career and the connections I could’ve made during that time. Who knows where I could be right now? Maybe the same, but if I use those connections… There are some people in my batch that have gone up on to really big startups, really amazing things. Those are the kind of connections that would have been really awesome if I was trying to find a job somewhere, but I’ve completely lost contact with them. I wasn’t friends with them during the batch. Who knows what would have happened? I look back at that time. If I could have redone the accelerator program, absolutely being involved in using the opportunities that are available, it’s something I didn’t do and I regret that.
Rob: Do you regret the decision to take the funding?
Tracy: I would say no. We can do a whole podcast on how insane the wedding industry is. I talked to a lot of people who are jumping into the wedding industry because they look at it as this industry where a lot of people are spending a lot of money and therefore is going to be really easy for someone to build a startup and just take some of that money. If you’re spending $30,000 on a wedding, of course, they’ll pay $10 for an app. It gets way more complicated than that.
With wedding history, because there’s so much competition, there are so many startups, so many people are trying to compete for people’s attention, and you have a 100% churn after a year because all these people are dropping all of your platforms, it means that advertising is a really big thing. Advertising is really expensive and that chunk of money did help. I could apply it to things to help boost the business as absolutely necessary in the wedding industry if you’re targeting people who are getting married.
That money was used. I also used that to hire someone; that was great. I did learn a lot from being in the program. I look back on it being like, “Okay, that was a really good learning experience and I wish I could redo it, but I don’t wish I did something differently,” I guess is what I would say. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t a perfect experience, but I learned from it. For better or worse, that’s how I got to where I am right now.
Rob: At the end of the program, there’s a demo day and that’s where folks essentially raise their seed round or preseed round these days, I guess. You decided not to raise a round. I believe you had a co-founder by that point. Do you want to talk a little bit about the co-founder and then a decision you made to pause funding right as demo day approached?
Tracy: The roller coaster of WeddingLovely; this is the peak. I was in 500. Again, I wasn’t using the program as much as I could have, but at the time, I was like, “Cool, I’m doing everything right.” There’s this absolutely amazing awesome person, Julia Grace. I believe she’s the Director of Infrastructure at Slack now. She reached out to me asking me if she can become a co-founder. I was like, “This person is amazing. She’s an amazing engineer. She would be a great CTO,” I was like, “Absolutely, come join WeddingLovely.”
Julia joined, I was in 500, and at the time, I was traveling in New York and Kellan Elliott-McCrea was the CTO of Etsy and he invited me to come into Etsy for lunch. I was again, cloud nine. I’m kicking ass, everything’s going awesomely, CTOs of Etsy are inviting me to lunch. I go over to Etsy for lunch and he drops the bomb on me saying, “Hey, let’s talk about acquiring WeddingLovely,” and I was just like, again, cloud nine, “Oh, my God, I’m doing everything right.”
The demo day was right around the corner and Julia and I decided not to really pursue it because we wanted to focus on being acquired by Etsy because I loved Etsy. Etsy would be a great fit for WeddingLovely. What they were doing at the time were switching some focus into wedding so it would have been a really awesome fit for both of us.
I did do demo day through 500 and I got to say, I bombed the first two ones. I’m much better at presenting now, but I look back on my first two pitches at demo day. They gave us two minutes to be on stage. It’s really stressful, there’s an audience of people, and I did not do well for the first two. By the third one that we did in New York, I finally got my stride. But I was like, “Oh, it doesn’t matter because I’m going to get acquired by Etsy.” Long story short, that didn’t fall. That fell through, we can explore that in a second.
Rob: I was going to ask, you didn’t do well because you weren’t preparing, you weren’t focused on it because you were counting on Etsy acquiring you, is that right?
Tracy: Yeah.
Rob: Do you have a regret around that of just knowing most acquisitions fall through? But it doesn’t feel like that when you’re in conversations with them. It feels like it’s going to happen. Do you feel like your judgment was clouded there or do you feel like you made the right call?
Tracy: Again, hindsight being 20/20, definitely judgment is clouded. I’m just not as good as a public speaker as I am now and I know that I didn’t prepare enough. It’s a silly thing to think about, but I was like, “Oh, just roll up,” and I just gave my little two-minute presentation.
Speaking of, two-minute presentations are the hardest thing in the world. It’s really hard to give a proper presentation in such a small amount of time. It’s really hard to hit all your marks and stress about making sure you remember every single moment in that presentation because you have such a small amount of time. There’s a lot of regrets for that.
Again, that’s also an opportunity. If I kicked it out of the park, even though I didn’t decide to raise money then, but the connections I could have made in that audience, of the VCs who were there, the people I could have met, the people I could have connected with is another thing that I regret not doing. I’m a huge fan of networking and meeting as many people as possible and becoming friends with as many people as possible because those are the things that are going to transform one’s career down the line.
A lot of the things that where I am right now is just because of connections I made beforehand. Like this TinySeed thing is probably because I met you at MicroConf and I spoke at MicroConf. Who knows what’s going to happen down the line? I regret not trying to pay attention during those demo days, making those friends, making those connections, and just being consumed by anxiety, making my presentation, and then running out.
Rob: I’ve done very similar things, especially early on. This is probably 10 years ago, but I would go to conferences. I’m an introvert and I don’t like meeting new people. I get stressed about it, I wouldn’t meet the other speakers, and I was anxious to go talk to people. I know how that feels.
I learned from that pretty quickly because I saw other people having those relationships and I saw what they did both for their sanity and well-being, but also for their businesses and just the opportunities that it affords. Saying yes to things that scare the […] out of you often will lead to things years down the line, as you’re saying, that you never could have predicted but that they changed the game for you.
I literally look back at my history. Not to go off on a tangent here, but I had a very similar experience where I had never met Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror. He and I blogged, we used to email back and forth, and we’d link to each other’s blog post. This was 2005–2007. I never met him in person.
He was running an event and I was super terrified, but I went up and I was just like, “Hey, man. I’m Rob Walling.” He’s like, “Hey, I love your blog,” and we were talking and he’s like, “You go into business of software?” I was like, “No, I’m not really good. It’s not my thing.” He’s like, “You should go. Let me just link you over to Joel Spolsky.” Just that step moving forward, these are the things of overcoming fears and taking risks is really what this is about, even though it’s hard.
Tracy: I have something similar. If we’re going to go even farther back in time, I feel like my career directly leads from my university graduation. I was graduating with an art degree, I was really into web design. All my classmates were into product design or physical mediums. Our keynote speaker at our commencement was a designer from Apple, came in and speak. I was like, “Whoa, a web person,” she’s talking about web and stuff. I talked to her afterwards—this was 2007—and she said, “If you want to get into the web industry, you need to go South by Southwest,” and again, I have so much anxiety. I could tell in our podcasts about how much social anxiety I have.
I did a keynote at DjangoCon US about it and it was the most terrifying thing. I took her advice and I booked myself a hotel room. I went to South by Southwest alone, didn’t know anyone there, and it’s so overwhelming. Most of the parties, I just walked in, panicked, and walked out, but on the flight back, I happened to be sitting near some attendees. Those people became my friends in the Bay Area, that introduced me to more people that I went to conferences with, and that’s a direct line to where I am right now.
Rob: There’s a concept that Jason Roberts on TekZing talks about what’s called your Luck Surface Area, increasing your luck surface area by doing a lot of things. I love the little quote from Thomas Jefferson, “The harder I work, the luckier I get,” but this is different. It’s not necessarily hard work unless you consider just getting over your own fears is hard work, which I guess I probably do, but it’s like taking risks often equates eventually. You take enough of them and it gets you to some “lucky outcomes” but they really aren’t luck.
Tracy: Right. On the anxiety topic, it still rears its head now, but 10 years of actively working on reducing it and making sure that I’m going out there and being open to these opportunities has been hard, but it’s been worth it. I’m glad that I’m a lot better now.
Rob: To resume this story, you were talking to Etsy. You weren’t putting much effort into the fundraising, into preparing for demo day, counting on that Etsy thing working out. They did ultimately make you an offer. What was that like when you received the offer? Was it via email? was it a phone conversation? Talk me through the emotion of that.
Tracy: They stepped back one step. It was funny because I had the final meeting in New York, and again, cloud nine, we’ve got flown into New York, put up in a really fancy hotel. I’d offered a non-fancy hotel and they’re like, “No, we’re going to put you up in a fancy hotel.” We had the whole day’s meetings, met with Chad Dickerson, went out to a fancy dinner afterwards with me and Julia and all the top level team. Again, I’m just like, “I am kicking butt.”
Throughout this time, I’m talking with 500, Dave McClure helped me out, getting me prepped for what happens in an acquisition, how to compose everything, and how to compose myself. I had other advisors in the Bay Area, they’re helping me figure out valuation, didn’t want to give the first number ourselves, but I wanted to have a good range of what a good valuation for my business would be so I don’t make bad decisions. I thought the prep work was great. I did everything right for that.
But it came in a call and it was the financial person. It’s not the CFO. It was actually a financial analyst or someone at Etsy. It was a call, sat down with me and Julia, and they gave us a number. The number was one-fourth of what the lowest valuation all of my advisors said that WeddingLovely was worth, especially considering that Etsy had told me that they were going to keep the website up. So, it wasn’t just going to be an acquire-hire or they were going to use the properties. I was like, “Okay, thank you.” Don’t say anything on the call, hung up. Julie and I are like, “Oh, crap.”
We went back and forth and like, “Okay, it’s a negotiation so we’ll just give another number and see if we can meet somewhere in the middle. We sent them back an email saying, “Thanks, that was not what we’re looking for. Here’s what we actually think the business is worth,” they responded with—completely unexpected; I did not expect this— “Okay, it does not look like a fit. Goodbye,” which is devastating because I expected this whole negotiation process and it was so weird. It’s so weird to me today that’s how it happened and all of my advisers in the Bay Area were like, “What is Etsy doing? This is not how an acquisition process is supposed to go.” We just went through all that effort and it just went away. It wasn’t my counter was outrageous.
So, that was weird and really devastating. Like I said, we didn’t do the full fundraising process when we had the best time for it, which was demo day, we didn’t follow up any of those meetings.
Now, this is two or three months afterwards. Our momentum has stalled. There’s no big 500 Startups demo day anymore. It was like, “Okay, what do we do? Do we launch a new product? At launch of that, do we then raise money?” Then it got really confusing, really weird, very depressing, and very crazy. That was around the time that Julia decided that she wanted to move on to other opportunities. This high that was on before just free-fell. It was horrible. It was the worst part of the business.
Rob: Just a couple months, it just went from the top top to the bottom bottom. Looking back, do you wish you’d taken Etsy’s offer? Have you ever thought about that? Even though it was low, it wouldn’t have made sense at the time. If you had, everyone would have been like, “You’re nuts.” But what if you had? Do you think that would have been a good thing?
Tracy: Oh, I go back and forth on that all the time. I can’t say numbers, it came out to being a hiring bonus essentially. If I’m going to be a proper startup founder, I’m glad I did not take it because that was a ridiculous number. Everyone agreed that was a ridiculous number and I shouldn’t take it. But having that stamp of approval, that, “Oh, I got acquired by Etsy,” on my resume, what doors would that have opened? Because people just look at those titles, that achievement, and then assume you’re so much more awesome than you actually are, which I wish I had that. I wish I had an acquisition on my record.
Working at Etsy probably would have been really great fun. I would have avoided that devastating drop of what happened afterwards with Julia leaving, I had to layoff someone. That’s when I switched the business back to bootstrapping because there was no way I was going to be fundraising at that point. I just gave up on it.
The way that WeddingLovely was built, I could just put it on autopilot. It’s at that point I was just like, “Okay, business, go do your thing and I’m just going to go over here in a corner, curl up, and be really sad.”
Rob: You’re at the highest point and within a couple of months, you have lost this acquisition offer that you really thought was going to come through. Etsy essentially walked away from the table which is surprising. In different acquisition talks that I’ve had, companies have walked away from the table, but they’ll come back a couple of weeks later. Did you expect them to do that or when they said they were gone, you were like, “This thing’s done”?
Tracy: It was a while ago. I’m trying to member exactly what happened, but I know that the feeling was this thing is done. We had an advocate at the company and we reached out to the advocate. He was like, “This is weird. I’ll get back to you.”
What happened in the end is it sounds like there was some weird miscommunication. Something happened on Etsy’s side that I am not privy to, but something happened on Etsy side where they’re like, “Wait, this is a bad decision. We’re not going to do it,” and it wasn’t how you do with WeddingLovely. Something with financials or something, but it’s just like, “No, we can’t do this right now.”
Rob: Wow. That falls apart and then Julia leaves shortly thereafter. What is that like? When Julia calls, or emails, or however that happened, how does that make you feel? Obviously, there’s got to be some despair and stress, but were you at that point thinking like, “This isn’t going to work, I should just shut this down, everything’s falling apart”?
Tracy: The day Julia sent me an email and saying, “I’m going to come to your house to work.” We didn’t have an office. We had an office for a little bit in Mountain View, but at the time, we shut it down also because everything was free-falling and she asked to come over to my house.
We sat down at my house and she was like, “Okay, I’m just going to open up with this.” I figured the exact words she said, but essentially it was like, “This has been a really interesting experience, but I’m going to move on to something else.” I was […] back, I did not expect that, and I think, “Okay, maybe you should go home now. I need time to process this. Thanks for driving all the way down to my house.” She left and I walked around the neighborhood with my dog just dying, just like, “Oh, my God, what just happened? I can’t believe this happened.”
I was really bad at Julia for a long time and I’m not mad at her now. But at the time, it felt very personal. It was very much she didn’t believe in me. A lot of it, a lot of the business, a lot of WeddingLovely, a lot of it’s my personal mistakes I’ve made as being the founder, the person who started as “CEO,” and that was never my title, which is weird. There’s a lot of mistakes I made, but I took it so personally and I did not like her, I was so mad at her for so long, but we’re friends now.
It was hard not to take it personally. It’s hard not to take the company failing personally. That’s a lot of the reason why I didn’t shut it down because I was clinging to this idea that I’m not a failure. If I shut down the business right now, then it’s me admitting that I’m a failure, that everything fell apart, and it’s all my fault. By keeping the business up, it was just like, “No, I’ll keep growing. I’ll keep building the business.” It’s still going on and it’s still making me money. I’m glad I built it in a way that I don’t have to continually spend marketing money on it because it was a marketplace. The marketplace part was pretty active at that point, so I had these businesses working with me. It was just me just trying to prove to the world that I can still make WeddingLovely a success.
Rob: I guess the question that comes to mind is, Julia was with you for eight months and she was a co-founder who came on two years after you started the company, It’s all hindsight again because you thought it would work out, but do you regret that decision of bringing a co-founder on? Not Julia. I mean, you’re friends with Julia, she’s a rock star so not for her in particular, but do you think this would have been better, easier, different if you had just not evaluated the idea of taking a co-founder on?
Tracy: Hindsight being 20/20, I wish that I was like, “Okay, I’m going to stay the founder, but you can be the CTO,” because that would have switched something in my brain. A lot of my being so offended about her quitting was like, “But you’re a founder. This is supposed to be your baby,” but no.
Because she started so late, it’s not her baby. It’s my baby. I built the first version of all the websites. I built everything from scratch myself. Of course, it’s my baby and she came in and she updated some things, she built some things herself, but she didn’t have that personal feeling like I did.
It was a disservice to everyone to call her a co-founder when it’s CTO or some of these other titles would have been a better fit. Then when she left, mentally, just like a weird logic thing, it would have felt a little better, I don’t know. That’s how I feel about it. You can’t bring a co-founder a couple years in. They’re no longer a “founder.”
Rob: I agree with that. The title is the issue here and I don’t think bringing Julia on was a mistake at all, especially at the time, it was a good move and even in retrospect, you made the best decision you could at the time. But it rings true to me that that title maybe wasn’t right because a co-founder wouldn’t have left. I shouldn’t say wouldn’t have, but there would have been more conversation and more consideration, because you’re right, having only been there eight months, she was less tied to it than you.
Tracy: Yeah. We didn’t have a lot of good conversations back and forth. I didn’t actually treat her like a co-founder and that’s my fault. I was running all the administration of the business. I was running all the vision for the business like where we’re going, what we’re doing, whatnot. I wasn’t really involving her in those conversations, which is absolutely a huge mistake because I wasn’t allowing her also to make it her baby as well.
When she left, I remember being gobsmacked. I had no idea she was unhappy, or that she wanted to leave, or if she was looking for other things. I had wished that she had told me that she was out there looking for another job because she told me she had another job lined up.
Years later, I looked back in that being like, I wasn’t involving her either and we should have had that personal connection if we’re going to be founders together of talking to each other, talking about things are going right or what’s wrong, involving her in how the business is going, and letting her be part of that planning. In those processes, I probably would’ve found out from her earlier on that she was unhappy, but I didn’t know that and that was a big failure on my part as being a founder of WeddingLovely.
Rob: You mentioned earlier that after Julia left, you went back to bootstrapping. Was that the point where you put it on autopilot? I have a blog post from you in 2016 where you talked about putting it on autopilot, but what was the timeline like there?
Tracy: This is where things get a little bit wavy. It was 2016 to now. There are points where I was like, “Okay, WeddingLovely’s running itself. I’m just going to spend a little bit of time on it.” I started working on my book business around then. It wasn’t really a business, it was like on my side, I’m going to start writing a book because I need something to bring me joy in my life and right now, WeddingLovely is not it.
Rob: This was 2016 or this was 2012?
Tracy: It’s been so long that some of these dates get mixed up, but after Julia left, I just started ignoring the business for a little bit, not really working on it. I don’t remember what I was doing, I spent a lot of time just in a depressed state.
Rob: How did that manifest itself with you? Were you just sitting at your computer, responding to email, and not actually working, but feeling like you were trying to work? Or were you just avoiding work altogether?
Tracy: I did the bare minimum to feel like, “Oh, I’m still running WeddingLovely.” I was still responding to support emails. I was still running the blog. That was a big part of WeddingLovely is that there was a weddings blog. A lot of WeddingLovely’s income came through that because we had affiliate revenue. I was so dedicated to at least doing a daily post everyday because one of my things I did well with WeddingLovely was by having this big group of businesses that WeddingLovely is representing and I tied them into our blogs. We got free content from them by sharing what the businesses were doing. It would be like photo post from our photographers, real wedding posts from our planners, or looking at invitation designs from our designers.
This allowed me to work with the companies that were on WeddingLovely and give them something of value and also encourage them to move to paid accounts by running this weddings blog. That was probably the largest piece of involvement I had was I continued to run this blog, grabbing the content from these people. I had a contractor I was working with so I didn’t actually have to move things to WordPress. I just took what the email said to her, she put onto WordPress for me, and then I came back in and set up on social media, set up the scheduled posts and stuff.
I ran all of that and it was like, “Oh, I’m still running a business.” I still told myself I was running a business, but I wasn’t looking at the numbers. I wasn’t looking at how many businesses were joining over time, was that number going up or down? What was my traffic like? It was complicated because I had 11 different properties I was running so looking at traffic for all 11 properties was terrible. That’s why I never looked at my analytics and I didn’t pay attention to any of the data that’s going on. I just ran the blog and accepted the money that came in that went straight to my bank account.
Rob: Ran it almost as a side business or like a true lifestyle business, that definition of it, it literally just is a salary and you weren’t more ambitious with it, it sounds like. At that point, you have a blog post from 2016 and I’ll quote yourself back to you, but you say, “The planning and marketplace sides of WeddingLovely would probably grow faster with dedicated marketing and sales work, but will grow naturally, slowly, but surely on their own. 2016 is already shaping up to be the biggest year yet even though I haven’t had much time to work on WeddingLovely. I’m not going to shut WeddingLovely down even though I’m looking for a full-time job since it does largely run and grow by itself. Ideally, I’ll be able to keep feature growth as well by eventually hiring a remote developer, that’s my baby WeddingLovely.” How does it feel to hear that?
Tracy: Oh, my God. I haven’t read those in a long time. I really should reread them because I have almost no memory of that. It’s so funny. Who is that person? WeddingLovely had this little peak. The marketplace was growing, like I said. It was growing and that was great because I didn’t have to worry about it.
Then the affiliate sales on the other side was growing pretty steadily. It’s one of those things I knew that would go away, but Google’s magic SEO turned in our favor and one of our blog posts got to the top of the results for a very big listing, and therefore there’s tons of money was coming in through affiliate revenue. At that time, I was like, “Oh, wow, I’m doing this lifestyle business right. Our income has doubled overnight. I can use this income.”
Around this time is when I decided to hire someone full-time to run everything for me, like a marketing person, but she also helped do emails. Ideally, it was supposed to be like she was going to help do vision and run the company and that ended up not happening which is fine. But I hired someone in Florida. I had a contractor, the same person doing WordPress, but she grew into more social media stuff in Washington, I also hired a full-time virtual assistant in the Philippines and she did all the nitty-gritty stuff. I was able to train her to help out with the social media stuff and do all the support emails and release me from doing a lot of those day-to-day things. So then I was only doing salary, taxes, bookkeeping, that kind of stuff.
That was like going back into, “Hey, I’m doing this right.” I’m doing it like a different way than when I was doing the whole Etsy stuff, but I was like, “Cool, I’m doing this lifestyle business the right way. I have people employed, the business is growing, I can start paying myself again at some point.” At that time I started paying myself, a $1000 a month was just peanuts, but it was cool to be able to employ all these people and pay myself.
Rob: Was that the right call?
Tracy: It was fun. I don’t know if it’s the right call. It’s so hard looking back on that, because…
Rob: You don’t know what’s going to happen, right?
Tracy: Yeah, but in terms of what I’ve learned in that time of having employees and running a remote business, I brought me so much joy, honestly, to have these employees and be able to, especially, Jenny, my marketing person, I reveled in being a good boss. I did everything correctly. She was engaged, she was working on things, I was hands-off, I directed her, I was able to pay for online classes to help improve what she was working on, and hopefully, now I hope she takes it to her current jobs. It was really fun.
I loved being like, “Okay, cool, I’m working on this book business that’s bringing enough money to run myself,” so I’m happy taking majority of the income of WeddingLovely and putting it towards these other people and giving them an okay lifestyle. They seem to be pretty happy. It was fun.
Rob: What happened between then and 2018? Because in October 2018, you wound up shutting it down.
Tracy: This whole time, for the last five or so years, it could be like, “I’d like to sell this business someday.” I’m just waiting for the right moment and that ended up not ever panning out and 2018 is when that Google magicalness just reversed itself. I knew that was going to happen. Google giveth, Google taketh away. One day you’re the number one on search results and then one day you’re not. I rescued this post a few times already by switching things around and returning the SEO juice back to where it was and this time, I wasn’t able to do it.
I knew that to fix the post or fix the affiliate income that was coming in, I would have to spend a lot of time on it, write a new post, or do something because instead of our income increasing by half overnight, it drops by two-thirds overnight and I was like the big panic moment. It was that moment where I was like, “Finally, I have to make a decision about this, because now it’s just not easy money anymore.”
Rob: It forced your hand. Was the majority of the income of the business coming from this one post?
Tracy: I leaned into it and that might be a regret. Because it started happening and I was like, “This is going really well. I’m going to start more posts. I’m going to do more things for affiliate revenue,” and that helped buffer everything and maybe worried less about the income that was coming on the business side, worried less about income that’s coming from other sources. When it dropped, I was not bad, I was just like, “Oh, look, it happened.” I was expecting this to happen someday.
If I wanted to continue working on WeddingLovely, at that point I could be like, “Okay, cool. Let’s switch our focus really quickly back over the business side,” because our metrics on the business was not great. The people we had almost 9000 businesses and maybe 100 paying customers—this is embarrassing to say—but I wasn’t really worried about it because I had those income coming from those sources and I wasn’t really looking for 10% month-over-month growth, I was just looking for just enough to keep things running and so when it drops, it’s like, “Okay, I can go back and spend time and work on the other side of this business or I can finally face the music and be like this is the time that it needs to go away.”
Rob: This is something that I hear people talk about and I don’t think that they totally understand how hard it is to “autopilot” a website, or a software company, or a start-up. I’ve heard people talk about a SaaS app should just be built to be profitable just like a dry cleaner or a car wash. The thing is, is (a) most dry cleaners and car washes don’t last 10, 20, 30 years, they do go out of business, and (b) it’s way more volatile with these types of businesses because as you said, Google can change overnight, another competitor can spring up.
Just the online marketing stuff changes so fast that truly having a business that is profitable and lasts for 10 years online without quite a bit of concerted effort every 12–18 months to just fight the fires, I’ve done it. I’ve owned at least 15 different software products and another probably 10–15 different websites that made money from every conceivable thing, from ecommerce to content, to Adwords, to selling software one time, to selling multiple software or subscription software, to info products. I’ve done them all and in the end, putting something on autopilot is so, so hard to actually last anything more than one, two, or three years.
That is why the multiples on a lot of these companies are so low. You’ll see a content site sell for two years of its net profit, it’s like, “That’s preposterous, that’s just crazy, that’s such a deal,” but then you get into it and you realize, “Oh, Google smacks it around every six months,” and you experience that in full force. It sounds like if you had been focused on WeddingLovely, you probably would have diversified the revenue streams, you would have had used the SEO because getting money from SEO is great from affiliate stuff. It’s a great way to do it, but to rely on it as a core focus and to build most of the company on it, it obviously isn’t going to last forever.
Tracy: Yeah, and ike I said, I was not mad when I went away. I knew that day was going to happen. It happened earlier than I thought it would. It’s funny listening to this time because I just like, “Ah, that was a lot of effort.” It was never like you said, it never was completely hands-off. My brain power, even when I hire people, I was playing so much brain power on it. After I shut it down, it was this whole process of laying off people I hired and shutting it down. After I shut down, any hackers article that I wrote at the peak which was great at the time, but now it’s like, “Oh, no,” because it’s talking about how amazing things are, like that blog post, it talked about how amazing things are and people are like, “Why don’t you just keep running it? Why don’t you just keep it off the background? Why don’t you put it back to its autopilot?”
I get this email pretty often and it’s because the brain power required just to even have something there and knowing it’s there, getting even a few emails every day or every week about it, having the deal when something changes in your server and you have to upgrade the server because everything broke or something like that, it takes a lot of time. It’s really hard to focus on doing something else appropriately when you’re split focus like that.
Rob: Yeah, focus. It’s such a huge thing and it’s undervalued in our space. In a blog post that you published in, I believe it was October 2018, about shutting it down, you look back and you talk about your decision to put it on autopilot and you said, “My passion has largely moved elsewhere to Hello Web Books, it’s been my focus for the last couple of years, but WeddingLovely largely ran itself and is making a good amount of revenue through affiliate and subscription accounts so I hired a team to keep it running a few years ago and stayed on as an advisor. It was the lazy way out. The business wasn’t evolving significantly, no new features were being launched, but the businesses and engaged couples that used our services seemed happy. I was able to employ a few folks who seemed happy as well so why not continue with it?”
It sounds like you still feel that putting it on autopilot probably wasn’t the best idea, but it was working for people. People were using it, you were employing people, and it was just the decision you made at the time.
Tracy: Yeah. The theme of this episode is always hindsight is 20/20, now that I’m working at TinySeed or just having a job. At the time, I was so hesitant to shut things down because I knew that I’d have to go in the process of actually finding something else. The book stuff wasn’t supporting me full-time and I had this decision whether I wanted to launch a new book, turn my book thing into a publishing platform, go all in on this other project that I was working on, or find an actual job. I was so scared of finding a job after working largely for myself for the last 10 years. The only other two places I’ve been employed were terrible, terrible experiences. I was dedicated working for myself because I thought that I could not have a boss.
Now that I have a job that I really enjoy, it could’ve been four years ago when I just run this business and I had employed people and it wasn’t really something I was interested in, but I was working on these other things. What if I made a decision four years ago to shut it down? Where would I be now? I don’t know what the answer is. I’m really happy again with the path that I had taken, but it is interesting to look back on that with the knowledge I have now and looking at my previous decisions and being like, “Oh, interesting.” It’s funny having those blog posts because I could see my thought process back then for better or for worse.
Rob: That’s the hard part. You said you had two jobs, you didn’t like them and therefore in your head jobs are bad. You’ll hear the same thing. You’ll hear people talk about venture capital, “Oh, I read two TechCrunch articles of a founder getting screwed by his VC, therefore venture capital is bad.” Or you’ll hear “Oh, a business built their revenue on organic search SEO and then Google smacked them around and now they went out of business.” It’s a common story. “I’ve had entire products just go under because of Google. Therefore, I’m never going to do organic search.” But no, these conclusions are too broad and they can shift, they frame your mindset in a way that you don’t even realize.
Often times, if you found the right job, then it would be good. If you find the right money under the right terms, it would be good. If you use Google for the right purposes, which is to get you enough money so that you can hire people to have other revenue streams so you’re diversified, then it’s a good thing. But it’s thinking about it in that way.
We’re all guilty of this and it’s not something that’s easy to do, but I think about some roles that I’ve hired for where I remember thinking there’s no way I can find someone to do this. We just can’t hire for this role, so I’m going to have to do it. Even program manager of TinySeed, it’s like, “This is my accelerator. Einar and I started this. Who can possibly run it in a way that it will work?”
I remember I kept telling myself, “But if we find the right person, then it’ll work.” That was what I had to tell myself to take that risk and of course, we found you and you’re the right person. It makes sense and I’m so glad that you have taken over so much of the role that I would be just bogged down with day-to-day and not able to do the other things that I need to do.
Tracy: Yeah. It’s funny about momentum, or maybe not momentum, but it’s just feeling I come on a certain path and it’s so hard to change that path. It’s so hard to consider the other paths that are available when you’re currently in a rut. I was in that rut for a really long time and it’s really hard for me to see over the edges of that rut to see what else was out there or to conceive of the work that would be required to jump out of the path I was on.
I just kept pushing it year over year over year and telling myself, “Okay, it’s great that I’m only making $30,000 or $40,000 a year because of this place that I’m working for myself. I got to travel a lot. I’ve got to work abroad for a long time. I got to do a lot of really great things. It allowed me to launch this book thing which also led to a whole other interesting set of experiences and learnings. But a lot of it is just I got into this rut and it was so hard to move myself out of it.
Now that I’m out of it, it’s interesting to look back on this experience. I’m glad I had that experience. I learned so much from it, I’ve done so much with it, but I wish that I shut down sooner. I wish I looked at the metrics. I wish I looked at how things were going. I wish that I considered that there are other things out there that could fulfill me the same way it would. I know that I’ll take those learnings to whatever I’m doing in the future. It’s all a really great learning experience. I learned so much from it. I wish I did some things differently, but I’m glad that I did it.
Rob: Final question as we wrap up. WeddingLovely could have worked. As an idea, it provided value and it could have provided you with a full-time income and employed people. Why didn’t it work?
Tracy: Wedding industry. I could talk for ages about this; I’ll try to keep it short. I actually don’t like the wedding industry myself, which is funny running a startup on the wedding industry, but I jumped into the wedding industry because I wanted to switch how it was done. I didn’t really like this focus on consumerism in the weddings and I wanted to have a place where instead of worrying about building this event where you have a to-do list of 500 to-dos long, what if you had a website that was more like a friend helping through the process, telling you the big things you have done like getting a photographer, why should you get a photographer, and what’s going on. I thought that was a good idea. I want to lead into this even better ideas.
In the wedding industry, I wish there was a place with an all-in-one booking platform like Airbnb. How great would it be if you’re getting married and you had this one platform to find people, read reviews, talk with them, do some messaging, and then do the payments and have everything under one area rather than juggling all these different vendors? That’s one of the reasons why weddings are really crazy. There’s such an opportunity here for that, but because it’s such an insanely high churn business where if you’re going to work with people who are getting married and these people are going to leave the platform in a year, you have to find a whole new set of customers that kills anyone jumping into this industry.
I did the best I could by working on the business side of things, but combining the fact that the wedding industry is really hard, it’s really hard to have repeat customers, it’s really hard to build a sustainable business on it, and then the fact that I am not interested in going to wedding fairs. I eloped in Vegas. I was not even going to touch a full wedding myself. It’s not something I’m really passionate about. I’m passionate about changing it and I always able to use that passion in that way. But a lot of that also went into why it was not good for me to run WeddingLovely as long as I did and also why WeddingLovely itself didn’t work.
Rob: Tough business, tough industry, and a little lack of product founder fit, it sounds like.
Tracy: Exactly. Again, fun process. I taught myself how to program. By building WeddingLovely, my design skills improved. I learned how to do all is crazy back-end stuff, build this crazy marketplace. I learned marketing and sales to an extent. It was a huge learning process and it was fun working in the industry. I made many amazing connections.
Would I ever do a wedding startup again? No. I liked advising wedding startups and telling them all the terrible stories I have. I won’t ever tell someone to change, but I try to tell all the problems that happens in the wedding industry when you’re building an app and why it’s not as easy as you might think. A lot of people I find think it’s easy, but I tried to be the person who is very clear about the problems I’ve had so other people can learn from it.
Rob: Thanks so much for coming on the show, Tracy. If folks want to keep up with you online, where would they do that?
Tracy: Personal website is tracyosborn.com. I’m also on Twitter as @tracymakes, Instagram, and other social media.
Rob: Sounds great. Thanks again.
Tracy: Thank you.
Rob: I want to thank Tracy again for coming on the show. I like her story because it’s not very often that someone runs a startup for nine years, puts it on autopilot, hires a team to run it, and just has these ups and downs. The experience she did and her willingness to relive that with me today is much appreciated.
That wraps us up for today. 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. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 454 | Overcoming Fear (Throwback Episode)
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob does a throwback episode. Almost 9 years to the day Rob and Mike published episode 14 about overcoming fear and taking risks which is a message that is still applicable today.
We like to value freedom, purpose, and relationships on the show. You’ll notice that, while my co-host, Mike Taber, is on hiatus, I’ve been experimenting and dabbling in a few different show formats. If you’ve enjoyed the change-up and the focus on improving the podcast quality, including the recent interviews with Laura Roeder and Jeff Epstein, the Q&A sessions I’ve had with Tracy Osborn, Jordan Gal, as well as the hot seat with Matt Wensing, let me know. Reach out questions@startupsfortherestofus.com or you can tweet it out. I appreciate any feedback you can provide. Of course, if you’re able to give a five-star rating in any of the podcast apps you use, it’s much appreciated.
Today on the show, I’m doing a different intro because I’m trying something I don’t know we’ve ever done before. It’s to do a throwback episode. What I did is I went back through the archive and I picked out one of the all-time most popular episodes of this podcast. It’s episode 14. It was published July 13th, 2010. It’s almost to the day. It was nine years ago. What’s also interesting is that when this episode went live, my second son was five days old. That’s just an interesting coincidence.
Now and again, I go back and listen to old shows. Typically, I don’t go back prior to where they are […] just because it’s so hard to do, but this episode sparked a lot of conversation when it happened and it’s one of those where the content itself holds up pretty well even nine years later.
Some funny things I’ve noticed relistening to this episode is we just sound so young and so naive. It’s so impressionable. The intro’s slightly different. I’m going to play the whole episode. There’s a Q&A section at the end. We did a whole episode of content and then two questions that I find are not that interesting, so I’m going to cut those out, but the intro and the outro is slightly different, which I think is funny.
The audio quality is not great, but for a 14th episode, for it being 2010, and for use just figuring this out, it’s not so bad, but it’s definitely a lot fuzzier than it is today. As well as the editing. You can hear the editing is really choppy because we didn’t really know what we were doing back then. Now we have a professional editor. And it’s hilarious. My book launch. I talk about my book about to come out. I think I threw out a URL, but this is pre-Start Small Stay Small.
Again, I wouldn’t go back to an episode if I didn’t really think the content is still so applicable. This is one of those evergreen timeless episodes that I listen to and still get something out of, and I think that you will, too, because this is about overcoming fear in your own head, whether it’s to launch that first blog post, launch that first podcast episode, launch an app, take a risk, and it just always applies. I find that the conversation is as applicable today as it was then. Even the examples we used are still strong even here in 2019. So, I hope you enjoy revisiting this topic, especially if you weren’t a listener back nine years ago.
This is Startups for the Rest of Us episode 14. Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, a podcast that helps developers be awesome at launching software products, whether you built your first product or just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
Mike: And I’m Mike.
Rob: And we’re here to share our experience to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s new this week, Mike?
Mike: I am having tons of fun getting a development box set up for a website. For those of you who don’t know, Rob and I run the Micropreneur Academy. It’s more or less to help developers learn how to do sales and marketing for their products. We’ve got tons and tons of content out there, but the problem that we have whenever we’re doing changes to the site, because it’s all built in WordPress, it’s very difficult.
One of the problems we have is being able to do development work on that box without bringing it down or crashing it because we’re making some changes and trying to see if they work. What I’ve been doing lately is we’re using a product called JumpBox to essentially bring up a development server very quickly so that I could dump all the content onto that JumpBox.
Essentially, what it is is if you go to jumpbox.com, they’ve got a couple of different pricing plans, but the one that I’m using is basically a LAMP stack. It allows you to download a virtual machine and it’s pre-configured with an OS and everything you need to just run a LAMP stack. All you do is you fire it up, it grabs an IP address, you specify a password for it, you can just log in, and you’re up and running in literally three minutes after you’ve downloaded this JumpBox. It’s really, really cool.
Rob: That’s awesome. How much time did you spend getting that going?
Mike: It probably took me more time to download it than anything else. The download really wasn’t very large. It was like 100–150 megs, something like that for the JumpBox itself that I downloaded. Like I said, they’ve got a couple of different pricing plans. The first one’s free, but then they’ve got a pro version and a business version. You can get a 15-day trial for free. It’s pretty cool.
Rob: It’s nice to have a dev environment. I know that’s something we’ve talked about for a long time. Good. Anything else?
Mike: No. That’s about it. What about you?
Rob: The hell I have been doing. Good grief.
Mike: Nothing. You slacker.
Rob: Yeah. I’ve been amazed at how much extra time this book has taken. The book’s done, the final proof arrived, I ordered copies, go to the printer, that whole thing. But like starting a company, you think that writing the actual code is going to be the bulk of that work? That’s 50%–60% tops.
The same thing with the book. I thought that putting together all the material and writing everything would be the bulk, but I had such a number of tasks to take care of, like building the website, getting the emails out to the list, and a number of other things. Getting an ISBN number and working with formatting. Of course, I’m not a designer, so it takes me a long time to do that stuff. It’s not as easy to outsource as, say, HTML work, or maybe it is. I just don’t have the right contacts. I’m out of my element with it. I chewed up a lot of time over the past week.
I actually made, what I consider in retrospect, an error in judgment. I basically had a four hour estimate to create the sales website, which is just a one-page thing—click here to buy the PDF, click here to buy the paperback. By the time I integrated with two payment processors, it took me 16 hours, which was just painful, and the integration is not an integration. It’s just a click an Amazon button and click a Google Pay button. That’s not even some fancy form that does it all. I was amazed at how long it took, so disappointed with it.
I wasn’t going to outsource it just because I literally thought it would take me two, I had estimated four just to be on the high side, and by the time I got everything the way I wanted, it was way high. In retrospect, definitely should have outsourced that.
Mike: I can think of two other mistakes off the top of my head that you have made. The first is, I don’t think we actually talked about the fact that you were writing a book on this podcast.
Rob: No, we did on episode 11.
Mike: Did we? All right.
Rob: Yeah. I edited it today.
Mike: My bad. All right. We’ll score that a point for you today, then. The other one, though, is that if you just asked me, my wife used to do print layout for a magazine.
Rob: That’s right. You’ve told me that like 10 times. How did I not do that. Yeah, it’s not going to look nearly as good if she give it 30 seconds of look, I’m sure. Well, that’s been my week. If you’re interested in the book, if you’re listening to this, startupbook.net. It will definitely be out and available in PDF and paperback format by the time this podcast goes live.
The other thing I wanted to mention this week is, I was talking to someone about a week ago and they listened to the podcast. I was like, “Yeah, you can stay up and tune in to what Mike and I do in our blogs.” He’s like, “Oh, you guys blog?” and I was like, “That’s it. We were doing this podcast for two months and we’ve been blogging for five years each.” I was like, “Oh, I thought the blog was our deal.”
Anyway, I realized we never mentioned our blog URLs, or maybe in passing we have, but if people are interested in hearing more about this type of micropreneur stuff, my blog is softwarebyrob.com and Mike’s blog is singlefounder.com. This is where we actually write original articles and new posts on starting a software company, launching products, being a micropreneur and such.
Mike: What are we discussing today? I think we actually had a listener comment from somebody on the startupsfortherestofus.com website, right?
Rob: That’s right. At startupsfortherestofus.com, that’s where you can download and listen to all of these episodes. In episode one, a guy named Scott Herbert made a text comment at the bottom and he said, “First, thanks for a podcast that doesn’t think I have $10 million of VC funding and want to tell me how to spend it. Secondly, I’d love to hear a cast on fear. Someone has offered to review my application for their blog—I’m scared by this—I said yes, of course, but does it get any easier?” That’s what we are going to be talking about today.
Mike: Cool. The short answer to that is you did the right thing and yes, it does get easier. The key to making it easier faster is to do it more often. We’ll obviously talk about that a little bit more. I think when it comes to fear, there are a couple of different options that you have and I boiled it down to four basic options.
When you’re faced with fear, these are your choices. You can either cave, which basically you give up. You can struggle with it and challenge it head on. Number three is you can accept it and do nothing about it, but you’ve accept it. You’re fearful of that and there’s just nothing you can do. The fourth one is you can try and work around the fear, try to avoid it. If you’re afraid of heights, you just never go into tall buildings or something like that. Some of those wok better than others, but obviously challenging your fear head on is going to help you get over those fears a lot quicker.
Rob, why don’t you talk a little bit about what sort of things people are typically afraid of? I think this pertains specifically to business. We could talk about arachnophobia and fear of all sorts of weird other things like short people, but I think this question relates more specifically to building your own business.
Rob: The things that I most commonly see software developers and people starting startups dealing with are thoughts like what if nobody likes my software? What if nobody buys my software? What if I fail and I invest all this time and it’s just wasted time? What if I can’t get any traffic to my site? What if I don’t get this right the first time? And what would other people think of me? Even if this does or doesn’t work out, what will people think of me while this is going on?
I think that’s a big part of fear is dealing with how other people view you. It almost takes me back to junior high in high school. I think it takes all of us back. Someone’s going to laugh at us or make fun of us or point something out publicly that is just going to really embarrass us. Those are the most common fears. I think everything stems from the fear of failure and the fear of other people seeing you fail.
Mike: I think that’s the biggest thing is people seem to think that whatever they do or say, people think of that as a reflection of themselves, especially when they’re writing software and they want to put it out there. I see people pushing off their software releases because they’re afraid of what people are going to think of their software. They always say, “I want to get it right. I want it to be perfect.” You know what? It’s not going to be perfect. You have to get over that.
Honestly, some people probably have a fear of launching a product. “What do I do when those support calls come in? What do I do when a customer’s irritated that this bug crashed and they lost all this data?” You know what? Those things can happen. Nobody’s perfect. That stuff is going to happen sooner or later and the only thing you can do is deal with it head on, accept that you made a mistake and move on.
If you sit there and try and live in the past or in the future, you’re not going to get anywhere. You can’t sit there and just worry all the time about, “What happens if this?” You know what? Why are you thinking about that now? Why don’t you continue living your life, moving on, doing your development, get past your launch? Then if that happens, then you worry about it.
I think maybe there’s a difference between doing that versus if you have critical bugs in your software that you know is going to cause somebody’s machine to crash and burn, yeah, you have to fix those before launch, but you can’t just let the fear of having bugs in your code or the fear of people running into problems with your code take that as a reflection upon you because it’s not a reflection on you.
Everybody is human, everybody makes mistakes, and when you create bugs in your software, those are mistakes and they’ve got to be fixed. Getting over those fears is just a matter of accepting that that’s going to happen and you can fix those bugs, you can move on, and version 2.0 is going to be better than version 1.0.
Rob: The two things that I think about when encountering fear like this is that the first time you do anything, you’re going to be scared. The first time you publish a single blog post, you’re going to be scared. The first time I did it, the first time I published an essay, a bunch of people read it, and people started ragging on it, I had anxiety about this. This is just natural. The first time you record a podcast, you’re going to have anxiety. The first time you speak at a user group, the first time you speak at a conference, anytime you do something publicly, you’re going to have some type of fear.
There’s some natural inclination in all of us that we feel like we’re going to be judged by everyone, and whether it’s realistic or not, knowing that the first time you do something, you are going to feel this anxiety and this fear, is really helpful because then you can identify very quickly and say, “Oh, this is that feeling again. It’s that same old thing that comes very naturally. I shouldn’t be scared of it and I shouldn’t let it talk me out of doing this thing.”
I’ve actually started following that fear, just a little bit like Seth Godin with a linchpin where he kept saying, “The lizard brain has its negative talk. If go towards the lizard brain, when the lizard brain talks to you and says, ‘Don’t do this thing,’ you typically stretching yourself and you’re actually doing something good. You’re actually moving in a direction that will grow who you are.”
The second thing is that as software developers, most of us have this natural anxiety of wanting to be perfectionists. I was talking to a developer today and he said, “I want my software to be perfect. I know it’s not going to be, but what if I launch it and there’s a bunch of bugs in it?”
There are two different types of people. There are the people who don’t care enough and those people don’t tend to be really good software developers they don’t tend to want to launch a software product. The ones who are doing this tend to be more of the perfectionists, tend to be more of the people who are stressing out about it, and that’s us. We have this anxiety that actually provides productivity.
If you’ve ever heard about Yerkes-Dodson curve, it’s a psychology theory that anxiety helps you—to a point—be productive. If you’re not anxious at all about a deadline, it’s very likely you’re going to miss that deadline and that you’re not going to be productive. Anxiety which translates into fear is actually a good thing to a certain extent and it actually will make you perform better and do more work quicker, to be more productive.
Mike: I know what you’re saying about being able to have a healthy dose of anxiety because I remember back in college, I used to feed off of deadlines. It was my job, it kind of just was. The fact is, if I had a deadline for a paper coming up or a project or something like that, as that deadline got closer and closer, I would just use it to energize myself and really focus in on what it was that I had to do and what I had to get done. Somehow it just helps me to meet a lot of the deadlines.
Don’t get me wrong. There was a certain amount of procrastination in there, but I’ve also seen studies where if you take three groups of people and you give one a deadline at the end of the quarter or semester, then you give another group of people regular deadlines throughout that time period, and then you tell the third group of people they can create any deadlines they want, people will tend to procrastinate until the end. I would just feed off that natural energy for those deadlines.
For me, the anxiety helped a little bit, but you also have to be a little bit realistic about in keeping in your head, “Am I actually going to meet this deadline or is it just a completely lost cause?”
Rob: That’s the thing with fear. I’m kind of equating fear with anxiety because when you say fear, you think a lion is attacking us. An anxiety is more of a realistic explanation or a realistic description of what we really feel when you’re going to go up and speak in front of people or we’re going to release a software product and maybe have someone say something bad about it or something. I think anxiety might be a better word for it.
There was a study—I wish I could quote it—done at UC Berkeley. It compared the anxiety levels, the stress levels of cops who were working in East Oakland versus students during finals week. The anxiety levels were actually higher in the students during finals week. What that shows is that anxiety, a lot of it if not all of it, is in your head. Some of it can be a chemical as well, it can be prone to be an anxious person, but a lot of it is in your head.
Ever since then, I have really learned to focus in on my anxiety and realize when it’s coming, identify it, then do something more productive with it, and allow it to motivate me rather than cause me to cave.
Mike: You bring up an interesting point about the difference in fear and anxiety, though. Personally, I have my own fears and my fears tend to be more long-term things that I’m afraid of happening. There are certain anxieties that I’ll go through. I’m a pretty good public speaker, but I think everybody gets at least a little bit nervous when they’re about to go up and do some big presentation.
In terms of fears and stuff, one of my own fears is, as the sole breadwinner of my family—my wife stays home with the kids so that I can go out and work—what if my income stream comes crashing to a halt and I’m not able to support my family? What if I’m on the road and something happens to me? Will my family be taken care of? How will that happen? How are they going to deal with that?
Honestly, I generally don’t worry about myself in terms of my health, but it doesn’t mean that I didn’t go out and buy a life insurance policy just to make sure that that sort of thing is taken cared of.
In terms of my income streams, I know that if it came down to it, I would do whatever needed to be done in order to make ends meet. If I had to go to Barnes & Noble and get a job stacking books or something like that, so be it. I’ll do what it takes to take care of my family. That’s one of the long-term fears that I have. I don’t really get anxious about those. I think about them, but I also think about how to deal with them and how to alleviate those things as concerns.
What about you?
Rob: The long-term fear that I have is the same thing. Being that we’re both self-employed, it’s a reality that our income could be majorly impacted very quickly. In fact, these last few months I talked about it, due to the recession there are several different income streams that I have that have substantially decreased 50% or more. I’ve been staring at it in the face, realizing if it continues like this, there’s going to be some issues down the line over the next few months. So, this is all happening. I’m about to have my second child. So, absolutely, any entrepreneur, the fear of just making ends meet and continuing to have a solvent business is a valid fear. It is for me as well.
Mike: That’s one of the things I’ve heard from people as well and I get to ask that question, “Aren’t you afraid of going out of business or this or that?” The way I see it, being self-employed actually gives me a certain amount of control over it because I am in control of my own destiny. I get to make the decisions that ultimately affect how I do in life. If I were working for some corporate employer someplace, they could decide to let everybody go on any given day and there’s literally nothing you can do about it.
You think about it in terms of job security, most people think of it that way, but you can also think of it in terms of financial security. You go to work for somebody, you’re complete at their mercy in terms of your income. Sure, they let you go and then you can go find another job, but right now, it’s hard to find jobs for most people. There’s tons of people out of work and the unemployment rate is really high.
I look at that and say, “Well, you know what? I could either work for somebody else where I’m completely at their mercy or I can work for myself where I’m at the mercy of my own bad decisions, so to speak.” Honestly, to make the choice between those two, I’d rather work for myself any day of the week. Now, granted that you have to be making money in order to be able to do that sort of thing, but it’s certainly an interesting way to look at it.
Rob: You make a good point there. No matter which avenue you choose, whether you work for an employer or start your own company, you’re going to have fear about something. You should have some fear that maybe you’ll get laid off, maybe the company will go out of business. You should have fear if you’re an entrepreneur that maybe you won’t make ends meet.
It’s not like you can escape it by choosing one route over the other. People can talk themselves into not having fear if they work for an employer. I think you’re kidding yourself by saying, “Oh, I’m not going to get laid off. This company’s never going out of business,” those kinds of things. There are fears in really any choice that you make. There’s no way to escape the realities of what might happen.
Mike: Right. One of the quotes that I keep, and it’s actually related to fear, this quote I keep actually on a Post-It note right next to my monitor and it reads, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.” It was actually in a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode from Patrick Stewart. It was in reference to Data was playing this game against somebody else and he ended up losing to this other person. He couldn’t figure it out how it was that he lost. That’s what Captain Picard told him. It’s like, “It’s possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.”
That true in life as well. You can do all the right things and still come out at the end of the pack. There are times when there’s absolutely nothing you can do and you’re going to lose. That’s just a fact.
I don’t want people to think that you’re going to lose every time, but there’s always a chance that you could lose and there’s always a chance that you could fail at whatever it is that you’re doing. But if you’re in control, you’re making those decisions.
Most people generally think they’re smart people. They’re going to make reasonably decent decisions and you have to keep that in mind when you’re going through those motions. You’re going to make the right decision with the information that you have at the time. If at the end of the day, you came out at the end of the pack, you have to accept that, move on, and say, “Okay, well that was a learning experience.” Take that forward and go on with the next task. You can’t let those things bother you.
I know people who let things bother them for years. I can think of one person in particular who let things bother him for years and years and years. And you know what? He’s never going to make it past it. It hasn’t happened yet. You can either let it get in your way of life or you can put it behind you and keep going.
Rob: The other thing I like about that quote is that it’s a good reminder that you have to take risks in order to do something worthwhile. You have to take risks in order to start a company or even to have a child or buy a house. Any of these things that I personally hold dear and that other people may as well. You can’t just stay in your safe zone all the time.
That’s what I really take away from that quote is you can make no mistakes and never do anything and still fail. If you decide, “Oh, I’ll never going to get married because I might get hurt, never going to have a child because it’s too hard, never going to buy a house because I don’t want to take on the risk, and never going to start a company.” In my life and my goals, I would consider myself that I would not have succeeded if I hadn’t done these things.
What I take away from that quote is that taking risks is a necessity if you are an ambitious person and if you have goals. You’re going to have to risk something to achieve those goals. And if you sit back and don’t do it, that I would consider that failure, not taking the risks.
Mike: And taking the risks doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed failure or success. It just means that you’re taking those risks. You’re gambling either way, but honestly, it’s not like the odds are in Vegas. I mean, your odds are a lot better when you’re putting that faith in yourself and your own decision-making powers as opposed to the dice or the roulette table in Vegas. It’s a completely different type of gambling, I’ll say. Calculated risk is what I’ll call it.
With that, why don’t we talk about six steps to dealing with that fear or anxiety?
Rob: Step number one is to take small steps. If you try to leap out too far, if you try to start a huge company or try to start two companies at once, it can be just too much and it can overwhelm you pretty easily. If you’re the type of person that fear tends to hold you back, take a small step.
Maybe instead of putting up a bunch of money or putting in a bunch of time in order to start a company, try to either start a smaller version of that or just do a little baby step of it, try to get that minimum viable product out, do some traffic testing, and see what’s going to happen. It’s a much smaller step but it can still help move you in the direction of, say, starting a company.
Mike: The other thing you can do is if you’re trying to get into, for example, product marketing. You don’t necessarily have a product yet. You can sign up for any number of affiliate programs. amazon.com’s got one where you can become an affiliate to sell their books and by referring traffic back to them, if those people buy things from Amazon, you get credits for those.
That’s a very small thing and I’ll be perfectly honest to say that I don’t think that you’re going to make a lot of money from it, but you will probably learn quite a bit from it. You can use that to help yourself as a baby step to become a better marketer, for example.
Step number two is to get some concrete motivation in the right direction. What this really means is that if you’re trying to do something, find somebody else who’s done that and pick their brain. Get some help from them. Ask them how they did it. Ask them how they dealt with their fear or their anxiety about it.
For example, public speaking, you can go talk to somebody who does public speaking for a living or join Toastmasters or something along those lines. You really need to find somebody else who can talk to you about it or you can talk to them about it, ask them questions, really get down to the bottom of what it is that you’re afraid of, and have them help motivate you in the right direction.
Rob: Step three is to look at failure and rejection in a new light. What we mean by that is instead of taking failure and rejection as a negative thing, realize that it does tend to be a valuable learning experience.
Mike and I already talked in a previous episode about whether failure is a learning experience or not, or you should only have successes, the whole discussion of that. Both of us believe pretty firmly that you will learn from your failures and that rejections will ultimately teach you to overcome these hurdles that you’re facing. I know that every time I faced rejection, it’s impacted me, but the more that I faced, the less each of them impact me.
Becoming aware of that, failure and rejection, are going to be inevitable as you do anything that has risk in it, but becoming aware of that is a big part of it because once it comes, you’re much less surprised by it.
Mike: And there’s obviously different levels of that failure and rejection. Rob and I have also talked about when we first started getting into AdWords and we blew an excess of $1000 apiece in the first month of doing our AdWords campaigns. Don’t get me wrong, $1000 is not pocket money or anything to be blowing out on AdWords, but I’ve made some much, much greater financial mistakes on that in the past. You just take them with a grain of salt and say, “Look. You know what? I understand what happened and it’s not something I would repeat,” but you learn from those things.
Number four is to not get too caught up in the past or in the future. You really need to keep your mind working in the here and now. What I mean by that is, if you’ve made mistakes in the past, don’t dwell on them because it’s certainly not going to help you. It’s just going to drag you down, it’s going to drag your morale down, and you’re going to be constantly thinking about them.
What that will do as a byproduct is basically distract you from the things that you have going on today. While you’re doing that, your basically dividing your mind with half of it saying, “Oh, my God. I can’t believe that thing that I did last Thursday or three years ago and it still haunts me to this day.” Everybody makes mistakes and how you deal with them is just as important as the things that you take from them.
Similarly, you can’t worry too much about what’s going on in the future. I’ll go back to the one I mentioned before. I travel a fair amount for my job. What happens if I’m on a flight and the plane goes down? Now, granted the chances of that happening is pretty slim to none, but it could happen. What do I do? I went out and I got a hefty life insurance policy. If something does happen to me, at least I know that my family is going to be taken care of. It’s all about mitigating those risks so that you can take your mind off of those fears, put them together, and focus on what it is that you’re doing today.
Rob: Step five is that things don’t happen overnight and that you need to keep working on it. The bottom line is that fear goes away the more times you do something. If you have a fear of public speaking, the more times you do it, it’s going to get better. If you have a fear of publishing a blog post, if it takes you 10 hours and 20 edits to get a 500-word post out, you need to do it more. You’ll get a little better at it, but you’ll get over the fear that it has to be perfect.
The bottom line is it’s not very complex. you’re going to be scared the first time you do something and you need to do it over and over if it’s worth it to you to actually get good at something.
Mike: And the sixth step to dealing with fear is to get a sanity check from someone else. Whenever you’re working on something, whether it’s software, a blog post, a piece of marketing collateral, or a press release, anything along those lines, anything related to your business, or even in your personal life, just get a sanity check from someone else. That can be a close friend, that can be someone who barely knows you.
I had somebody contact me who said, “Hey, I’d like to get your input on something because I don’t talk to you very much and you don’t know anybody that I know. It would be great to hear from you about what you think of this.” That’s a perfect scenario where you can get that sanity check from someone else with virtually no fear of anyone else being informed about what your fears are.
One of the things that Rob and I actually used to do probably 5–6 years ago, something like that, when we were first getting our blogs started, we actually started sending some of our blog post back and forth just to get a sanity check on it, to say, “Hey, what do you think of this article? What do you think of the wording of this? Does this strike a chord or is it just too bland?” et cetera.
We did that for—what was it—six months or something like that and we just went our separate ways. By that time, we have gotten over our fears about doing any sort of blog post and publicly voicin what our thoughts and opinions were.
Rob: I think we did it for a closer to a year, actually. It was certainly helpful for me. It improved the work that both of us produced as well as—at least from my perspective—reduced the anxiety I had when I went to publish something because I knew that someone had already looked at it pretty critically. If I sent over a new… kind of said, “No, this is not very good,” or there’s a big flaw in this logic, then I would rewrite that piece and then when I posted it, I knew that it essentially had a sanity check done to it and it really reduce the fear that I was going to get slammed online.
To recap, the six steps when dealing with fear are: (1) take small steps, (2) get some concrete motivation in the right direction, (3) see failure and rejection in a new light, (4) don’t get caught up in the past of the future; work in the here and now, (5) keep working at it; things don’t happen overnight, and (6) get a sanity check from someone else.
Mike: Thanks to both Jonna and Trey. If you have a question or comment, please call it in to our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email an MP3 or text format to questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider writing a review in iTunes by searching for startups. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt of We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. A full transcript to this podcast is available at our website at startupsfortherestofus.com. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 453 | How a Non-Technical Founder Built and Sold a Multi-million Dollar SaaS Startup with Jeff Epstein
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob interviews Jeff Epstein, Founder of Ambassador, about building and selling his multi-million dollar startup as a non-technical founder. They dive deep into the details of the acquisition and the toll it took on him.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, a podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products, whether you’ve built your first one or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob, and today with Jeff Epstein, we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made.
Welcome back to Startups for the Rest of Us. On this show, we talk about building startups in an organic, sustainable fashion that allows you to focus on your personal freedom, purpose, and relationships. We have different show formats and this week, I sit down with an accomplished, impressive founder named Jeff Epstein. I’ve known Jeff for around eight years and watched in awe as he built Ambassador—it’s at getambassador.com—into a $5–$10 million ARR SaaS company, and all the trials, the tribulations, the struggles of what he went through to get there. He exited about seven or eight months ago.
What I like about Jeff is that at heart, he’s a bootstrapper. He bootstrapped Ambassador—which was, at the time called Zferral—for a year and he had to pay a developer essentially out of his own pocket. Then he raised a very, very small round between $25,000 and $50,000 just to basically keep the product moving forward. He’s a scrappy founder. He was doing sales calls constantly in the early days, really, a founder who was ambitious.
One of the interesting things we dig into today is how he has a kind of what a bootstrapper mindset had to raise funding to keep the company growing and we talked through his decision to do that. We also talked about the toll that the company took on him over the course of this time. He said he didn’t sleep very well, he did feel stress, he put on a lot of weight that this company took a toll on him, and we walk through any regrets he has. It’s really a fascinating story.
The latter half of the interview focuses on the acquisition because I find that level setting people’s mindsets of what a real acquisition looks like. The fact that Instagram was supposedly sold in a weekend for a billion dollars is like, (a) we don’t even know if that’s really true or if that’s just kind of a myth and the story around it, and (b) even if it is true, that’s like a once-in-five-year thing or once a year, once a decade, whatever, very, very, very rare.
The other thousands and thousands and thousands of companies and startups that are acquired happen much more like what you’ll hear Jeff talk about today. Again, the latter half of the interview focuses on that. Then it’s fun to talk through with Jeff to hear what he’s been doing for the seven months since he was able to leave the company. I always enjoy sitting down talking with Jeff, really enjoyed the conversation and digging into his victories, his struggles, his failures, and everything that came along with it.
Oh, and one side note before we dig in, it was an absolute comedy of errors trying to get this recorded so I’m actually impressed that we’re even able to ship it. I was in a Starbucks—which I normally don’t work from coffee shops—I especially don’t record interviews from coffee shops but due to extenuating circumstances, that’s where I was. Fire alarm started going off an hour before the interview then stopped, then went back on, then went off, then went back on.
Eventually, I went out to get my car and take off and fire trucks had blocked the driveway so I literally could not leave so I sat in my car, I hooked up my hotspot to my phone and this entire interview was recorded using that USB headset plugged into just a laptop sitting on the passenger seat so it was a funny moment. I couldn’t cancel the interview because the episode wouldn’t have gone live on time. But the show must go on, we ship every Tuesday morning. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jeff Epstein.
Thanks so much for joining me on the show this week, Jeff.
Jeff: Yeah, great to be here, Rob. Thanks. I appreciate it.
Rob: We go way back. We were in a mastermind with Ruben Gomez for a couple years, if I recall back, when I was doing HitTail, 2011–2012 timeframe.
Jeff: Yeah. It seems like a long time ago but it was a lot of fun and I know, at least for myself, it was a really valuable time to chat with folks. Also, there wasn’t a huge community and we’re all in interesting areas where there weren’t startup communities and it was really important back then and, obviously, so today. It’s cool that we remained friends for so long.
Rob: I agree. I see you at MicroConf every so often. You made it this year. It is cool that we ran across each other. I remember you and I originally met. I came and spoke, I believe it was in Grand Rapids and you live in Detroit, Ruben was in Florida, and I was in Fresno, California so we were all in these places where there wasn’t a huge startup community around us and we found each other through these channels.
Today, I want to walk people through your story because, as I was saying right before I hit record, your story of growing Ambassador as a non-technical founder is so compelling, it almost writes itself. We just cover the points and it’s like, “Oh, man, that was amazing.” “Oh, man, that was brutal. How did you get over that?” These are the best kinds of stories where there’s a lot of adversity and struggle and it was probably pretty painful at the time, the different things that happened with co-founders and whatever, fundraising, and working 24/7 for a few years, but I do think the folks are in for a pretty good ride today so thanks again for sharing your story.
Jeff: My pleasure and I’m excited to tell it. It is interesting and there’s certainly a bunch of highs and lows, so hopefully I can help some people avoid some of the stresses and struggles that I had but definitely interesting for sure.
Rob: To summarize, so we don’t have to spend 10 minutes going through details, you started Ambassador in 2010, you exited, sold the company in 2018 to a company called West Corporation. Ambassador was originally called Zferral and you did raise a few rounds of funding, I believe. You started working on Zferral/Ambassador in 2010 and you raised a small angel round between $25,000 and $50,000 in 2011. You’ve been self-funding it since then.
You mentioned to me that your wife was making money and you were pumping the money out the back door into the app. What was the impetus to raise the angel round? Because I think of you more as a bootstrapper. You just have that capital-efficient, you’re not the Silicon Valley go-big-or-go-home billion dollar valuation, you’re ambitious, but you don’t fit the mold of, “I’m going to topple Salesforce and become the next Dropbox, Facebook, and Airbnb.” What was the impetus for taking outside money in 2011?
Jeff: Good question. For me, it was really in a sense kind of bad, but it was almost desperation mode. I didn’t act like that—I don’t think—at the time, but for me, I had done pretty well, I guess, for being an adult without having an actual job, I was investing in real estate, I was doing some odd things, I had just come out of law school, and I had sold a small business that helped me pay off my loans. I didn’t have that much money saved up or capital, and again, it was coming off of the 2008 financial situation, so there weren’t a lot of jobs.
I basically self-funded Zferral and it was maybe $4000 or $5000 a month to pay for developers to build the product. A couple of things led to me raising money. One was there wasn’t this playbook that exists today in terms of how to bootstrap even. Bootstrapping at the time, was just grinding it out and getting money wherever you could. I kind of exhausted all avenues. The problem for me—I mentioned this earlier to you—was I couldn’t stay up late and get the app done. I wasn’t able to just do the work because I couldn’t write code. I had to basically pay for it.
At the end of the day, I had an opportunity to raise $25,000 and I took it because I got married in 2010. So, right before this money came in 2011, I had to think about my wife in terms of, “Hey, it’s not just my money I’m risking now. It’s our partnership.” She was kind enough, she believed in me, and allowed me to do it but it was at a certain point, literally, the money was coming in and it was going right out. She wasn’t making, even maybe me, even more than what I was paying out. Our household was a net deficit, which is pretty tough to do when you’re just getting married and just bought a house.
She’s used to always joke, “I thought I was marrying an attorney and this isn’t what I signed up for.” She was a good sport. She’s joking about it, but I don’t know if she knew that was what she was getting into. It was a big relief at the time and $25,000 was probably six months of expenses. I was fine not getting paid, but money going out was tough when I wasn’t making anything.
Rob: And at that point, you had maybe a couple of grand in MRR, you think?
Jeff: Right. The other thing is, at that point, we probably just started getting customers. I don’t think the customers could fund the development and sustain the business. As that started happening, again, I probably didn’t take a salary until maybe after Techstars are around Techstars which was 2012, but again, just not losing money. I remember that was a big turning point in my family. It was like, “Alright, we’re not losing money anymore.” We’re just not making any money, but we’re not losing money. That was pretty big.
Rob: Getting back to break-even. It’s tough, man, in an early, I won’t say new relationship because you guys have known each other, but a new marriage and then trying to scramble and start a startup like that. Do you have any regrets around that, either raising the money initially or not learning to code at some point? Anything you would do differently? Or do you feel like no, you came to play, you showed up, and you made it happen?
Jeff: I don’t have any regrets about it. I do think it would have been smart for me to learn how to code. That would have saved a ton of stress and heartache. As you know, I’m willing to do the work so being able to do the work would have been hugely valuable for me instead of having to rely on somebody else. Even just being a control freak, which you think a lot of founders are, it would have been better if I could do it myself.
That being said, I think the value and what I was so lucky was that my wife was supportive and understanding about it, so as hard as it should have been, it wasn’t nearly as hard as it probably sounds. But overall, no regrets.
Rob: That makes sense, you look back today and you’ve had this successful exit. Everything worked out, but at the time, when you’re grinding it out for a year and you’re at $1000 or $2000 MRR, you just started taking customers, and you’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars, I’ll assume it’s hard. That’s not an easy place to be in, I can imagine.
Jeff: Absolutely. It was super tough. It was a perfect storm of being naive and young enough where it would be a lot harder for me to do that where I am in my life today in terms of age and expectations. Fortunately for me, I was willing to do it. It is hard and looking back, you’re like, “Wow, I can’t believe I did that.” But you also don’t know any better. That’s part of the beauty of it.
Rob: I know you’re under NDA for the acquisition terms, but I’ll ask it in a more vague way that I feel like people have asked me on the record about the Drip acquisition as well. You sold the company last year. Did you make enough money that you don’t have to work again if you don’t want to?
Jeff: Yeah. For the most part, we definitely can live a comfortable life based on how things went. We could survive and be pretty well-off. The reality is we both want to continue working. My goal is really just to focus on things that I’m passionate about and just have the cab of more fun. That’s a big change going forward and has been already.
Rob: That makes a lot of sense. I’ve done the same thing. The passion is like TinySeed’s what I’m excited about and it’s nice to have the luxury of basically not getting a paycheck for a year or two, or three or five. Einar and I got our first paycheck from TinySeed last month and it was like, “Yay,” but I couldn’t have done that 10 years ago. You can’t just not take a check for a long time, so it is nice to have the luxury.
I know how much of a hustler you are and when you find that next thing, while I hope you don’t go as all-in as you did on Ambassador—because you’re right, and I walked through a year or two of it with you when I saw the toll it was taken on you—I do think that you’ll find that spark again and you’ll go mostly in on something that you’ll be working on.
Jeff: Yeah, it’s funny you say that. It’s something that I’ve even talked to my wife about is that I’m concerned that I won’t be able to do 80% or whatever the number is. That’s a healthy amount of all in this because I always tell people, “I’m not all-or-nothing kind of guy.” I’m not good at, “Oh, yeah, I’ll just work for X hours a week.” Even if it’s 20, or 40, or whatever it’s supposed to be, or 60, if I say it’s that, I’m not realistically going to stop unless I feel like I did everything I could. It gets harder and you just get worn down. For me, it definitely had that happened.
I’m getting close to 40 years old so it’s like, “All right, I need to start reevaluating my life and looking at it a little bit differently than feeling like you’re a college kid,” which is what I felt like for the last 10 years, probably.
Rob: It seems like one of your goals with the next one should be to control your work, to work 35-hour weeks, or 40, or some reasonable amount.
Just to wrap up the intro story so that we can dig into some of the points, you mentioned you went through Techstars in Austin, that was mid 2011, that was back when Techstars wrote really small checks, so it was like $18,000. It was just a stipend. Then I think the next year, they started giving $100,000 notes which probably sucked for you to not get that. I’m imagining you could have used that money at the time.
Jeff: Definitely, and we were in New York so it was even more expensive to live. But yeah, it was during the class, they announced the $100,000 note and it was super big bummer for us because we were one of the few B2B companies, and at the time, 2011, that also meant we were completely unattractive to investors especially in New York. We had a really hard time raising money while all of our cohort, basically all the B2C apps, all the mobile apps, they easily raised money. I don’t think any of them are around now, but they had a much, much, much easier time raising money than we did. It was really tough.
Rob: Then you raised a couple of hundred grand in a note in 2012 and then you did raise a Series A in 2015. So total over the course of several years—that’s almost five years—you brought to about $2.75 million. I know you mentioned earlier, you needed that early money to fund development because you couldn’t write the code itself. In 2015, when you raised $2.4 million, what was the thought there? Was it that you’d hit product-market fit, you’re growing super fast, and you need money for bodies? Talk me through the logic.
Jeff: Yeah. It’s funny thinking about this. Someone asked me the other day and thinking about my thought process, I didn’t run a process, which is a little bit different than most people. It was an opportunistic fundraise. I had—and you probably know this personally—at the time, fundraising wasn’t on my radar.
We were mildly cash flow positive. I would say five figures cash flow positive and then maybe the team was 10 or 11 people. There were certainly people there. It was a ragtag group of folks. I would say most people weren’t experienced startup or tech people, it was like you’re hiring people that would be willing to work with you even though you could offer them almost nothing in terms of benefits or comps. That’s always tough.
One of the reasons why we raised money and one of the goals that I had before I even started Ambassador was I really wanted to help build the community in Michigan, I wanted to create an environment where these companies survived and thrived, and where people wanted to go to work every day. That was what I wanted to build. I realized that incrementally adding one person at a time and being really, really lean, I mean, I was super lean. I was paying myself $40,000 a year. Our office was all IKEA furniture. It was just really hard to create that environment with such a lack of resources.
When Arthur Ventures came along and pitched me on a partnership where they said, “We’re not going to make you step out of your comfort zone and try to grow at all costs. We do respect the way that you’ve built the company and that,” I think the director said, “you wouldn’t die. You should have died, but you didn’t because you were willing to just fight.” I just saw this alignment there and I said, “You know what? This could be really good.” We had great people and we got lucky that the people that we hired early all ended up being amazing and grew into amazing pieces and teammates. Even more awesome to begin with, but being able to spend ahead of where we were, it was a big accelerant for us that we needed. It allowed us, again, to give people benefits, to up comp, and do some of the things that I wanted to do. There was no money to be had before that, so really that was why I raised money.
Rob: It sounds like you found money on terms that made a lot of sense for you to raise and didn’t come, perhaps, with a lot of the strings attached that maybe a lot of the Silicon Valley money would come with. Whether it still does today, it’s still evolving, it’s becoming more founder-friendly. But is that accurate? You found someone willing to give you a couple of a million bucks in a way that made sense for how you wanted to grow the company and didn’t negatively impact your optionality down the line.
Jeff: Yeah. I have a ton of respect for Arthur Ventures and Pat. They were awesome and it was a really great fit. Did we want to build a $100 million company? The answer is yes. The expectation was we were going to try our hardest to do that, but what I always said to him is I don’t want to leverage the business to be successful. I don’t want to get to $100 million or die. I think that’s something that many VC’s, if they hear that answer, they’d be like, “This isn’t the person for me,” which is fair and in some cases, they want you to take that swing and if you miss, they’re okay with it and they can go to bed at night. I didn’t want to sleep at night and saying, “Everyone could have had a really great career and a really great experience,” but I selfishly went for it and we all went home and that was it.
I think there was an agreement there. I know for a fact we weren’t the best outcome for Arthur’s. I definitely do feel bad about that and I know that I tried my best to be both smart enough and calculated to maximize the outcome without killing the business. We got pretty low, to be honest, in cash multiple times, way lower than we agreed to get because we were trying everything we could to continue to grow as fast as possible to get to the next stage. But yeah, it was definitely founder-investor fit for sure and we have nothing but great things to say about Arthur and Pat who’s awesome. When they offered, we negotiated a little bit and that was what we did.
Rob: That makes a lot of sense. Something that I want to dig into is the fact that you said you got pretty low on cash multiple times. You and I both mentioned that you were all-in and you were basically working 24/7 for several years. This all sounds like not fun. That sounds very stressful. Was it that in the moment? When you were doing it, were you thinking to yourself, “Oh, my gosh this is brutal”? I would have been stressed, let me put it that way. There are people who just absorb that and they just don’t feel the stress about this stuff. Talk me through. It’s an eight-year period, so it’s hard to nail anything, but I’m just curious. Were there moments when you were like, “I don’t think I can keep doing this. I’m going to explode”?
Jeff: To be honest, not really. I like stress for the most part. I used to always tell people—maybe this is a bad advice—I would say if you care about something, there’ll be a level of stress. To me, that shows that you care. There was, looking back, more stress than I would have liked, but I’m also the kind of person who loves to dive in and obsess over something. When it doesn’t go exactly as you want, then it becomes what I would consider to be stress. Whether that, at one point in my life, was playing poker, or another time in my life, it was wondering to play sports or whatever, those things were, at a certain point, super stressful to me but in a way that it didn’t bother me that much.
To me, it manifested in things like gaining a lot of weight, not just being exhausted, not working out or not being able to sleep, things that I reasonably should have been able to do but I just couldn’t focus or prioritize for those things because I was so concerned about doing everything I could for the business.
There were very few times where I’m like, “Oh, my God I need a vacation.” I always thought like, “Man, I’m really stressed,” but day-to-day, I really enjoyed it, especially post-Series A when we had a little bit of money in the bank and I was surrounded by more people that felt like peers. Some of the early employees became good friends, so it’s not that but people that had experience.
For a long time I felt like I was doing everything myself. Of course, my CTO and co-founder, Chase, was an amazing help, but when we added a couple of more folks and we had a leadership team, so to speak, that took a lot of burden off of me. The problems became different problems. It never got less stressful, but it became a little bit more fun for me and allowed me to keep going despite some of those other challenges.
Rob: I know you applied to Techstars one year and you didn’t have a co-founder. You had an agency or was it an offshore developer and you got rejected. One of the things they said was, “We don’t really want a non-technical single-founder type of thing.” So, you came back the next year and you applied with a technical co-founder but he was almost like employee number one, is that right?
Jeff: Yeah. The next year I had applied to Techstars. I had done some networking in between the two applications. I had a reasonable feeling that I might be able to get in the next time in New York. I had known some people that were in the prior class and they’re like, “You need to have a technical person show up with you,” so I hired somebody who, again, technically we’d called him a co-founder and certainly he deserves that title, but he was basically hired a couple months before TechStars New York, to just basically help rewrite that code base from the original Zferral one, which was what I applied with into Ambassador, which we ended up leaving with, so to speak. So, we had rewritten the code base.
Rob: That was your first to rewrite of the code base. Didn’t you rewrite it again in 2012–2013?
Jeff: Yeah. We rewrote it again. Soon after when Chase joined—he’s still part of the team and actually onto bigger and better things at West now—one of his first projects was really to undertake start migrating the code base to something a bit more scalable and in a more modern technology. We were previously PHP and then we moved it over to Python and Angular, which became React eventually. It was a big undertaking. We probably started that 2013 and it may have taken a year or so, but we did it in a compartmentalized way. We didn’t really slow down the site too much, but there’s a lot of extra work probably to do it that way.
Rob: And the reason that you wound up leaving the mastermind is you, Ruben, and I were like, I had HitTail and maybe was just starting Drip, no employees, Ruben had two contractors or three—I don’t know—two employees, and you were hiring your 20th employee. You were putting out culture and vision documents, trying to get everybody on the same page. We’re like, “Look, we like each other, we’re all ambitious,” but you’re just at a different place. That’s what wound up happening.
But during that time, I remember, that rewrite was not super fun. You just had a team of developers trying to rewrite it and then you had folks trying to add more features. You were basically building the parachute after you jumped out of the plane. I don’t know what there is to say about that, but do you remember that as being super painful? Because that was my memory of it. Or do you remember it as, “No, we handled it and we got it done”? I guess the fact that you rewrote it twice was the real brutal thing.
I remember when we talked about it, I was like, “Gosh, do not rewrite this code base.” Coming from a developer, my own perspective whenever I come into a new code base, I’m always like, “Oh, this is a whole piece of crap. I’m going to rewrite this whole thing,” and then I eventually resist the urge and I push the business forward instead. But you made a very, very hard decision to do that.
Jeff: Yeah, it’s funny you say that. I remember even when Chase joined, when he was thinking about joining, and he had done some diligence, we agreed like, “Hey, let’s not rewrite it.” I think even you said something like, “The first thing he’s going to want to do is rewrite it.” So, one of the things we talked about was, “Okay, let’s try to keep it as is and we’ll go with PHP.” I remember we hired a PHP dev and we hired someone else who was competent in PHP but also knew Django and Python as well. After a couple of months he’s like, “Dude, we got to rewrite this. I’m sorry. There’s too many issues with it.” Like you said, it was building the parachute on the way down or he used to say it was like changing the tires on the highway while you’re going 70 miles an hour.
At that time we had $20,000 a month maybe in customers, so we made $250,000 ARR maybe. Your customers don’t care if you’re rewriting it until it’s done. At the time, we might have had even T-Mobile or we were getting a customer like T-Mobile, so it was super stressful. Knowing that you’re building something that’s going to get ripped out eventually was way more stressful for them than it was for me.
As you know, anything technical always takes a lot longer than you hope and that probably happened, but what went well and what I learned from Chase—I knew even then—was he was super money when he recommended we do something. It always seemed like it was the right move. It was one of those things where he was like, “We have to do it,” and I said, “Okay, let’s do it.” It wasn’t what I wanted to do because obviously, it doesn’t feel like you’re moving forward.
We were rewriting it this year, too. We rewrote a lot of the front end, we rewrote some of the back end in terms of scalability, going from a few hundred thousand or a few thousand people on your site to millions of people on your site, the growth in terms of requests was insane. They were 10X-ing the site every year just to maintain it. It was pretty insane.
Rob: Yeah. I’ve been a part of one of those. Insane is the right way to describe it. So, you grew it. I remember in the early days you had a lot of focus on sales. You were doing a lot of one-on-one demos and that’s how you’ve landed, or one of the ways you’ve landed to customers like T-Mobile and these big enterprise deals. I was super impressed with that.
At a certain point, you and I lost touch for a year or two. I was doing Drip and you were really digging into growing Ambassador. When you sold the company in 2018, how big were you, guys? I don’t think you’ve been public with revenues so I won’t ask that, but employee count or some other indication?
Jeff: I’ll tell you a couple things. We were between $5 million and $10 million in revenue and about 40 some-odd employees, give or take.
Rob: What was the acquisition process like? Were you getting approached by people who wanted to buy you? Did you have to go out looking for interest? How long did it take? Talk me through. There are folks listening to this who don’t get to hear a lot of inside stories about these because a lot of them are so opaque. “It’s a TechCrunch post of X company sold for Y million dollars.” “Wow, isn’t that great?” and you feel like it happened in three days. The Drip acquisition from first email to close was 13 months, and 6 of that was me working 20 hours a week on it. It was incredibly stressful for me, so I loved if you can walk me through bits of it so people can hear what it’s like on the inside of something like this.
Jeff: Sure. It was definitely intense and it was probably close to, like you said, a year of planning total at least. For me, because we were funded, because we had a board, the first part of the process really came about through board discussions of, again, when you have a board, you always have to look at multiple years out. One of the things that we were doing was trying to figure out how can we get to where we want to be and what are the strategic options, and that includes either fundraising or essentially selling or buying somebody.
Once you raise money, you’re on the clock. So, the worst thing you can do is grow slowly or decelerate. Not say that it was happening, but I think it was a concern. We were kind of in-between a Series B, it was possible we could raise to B and that was one option. Then all the factors you have to think about if you raise a B between dilution, and lots of times people want new leadership teams. That was one path potentially and another path was, of course, selling. Another path was going to stay in the course, but having to figure out a way to accelerate growth instead of decelerating, which happens to most companies that usually don’t grow faster the year after.
We came up with the idea that we’d kick the tires and see if it made sense to explore strategic partnership which really usually means a sale, but it could have been different kinds of investments, too. We’re pretty open and we’d also looked at other types of alternative financing. So, we were looking at all options.
As I mentioned, money was getting lower than we had planned. Again, we were with 40, 50 people, we weren’t burning a lot, and some years, we were cash flow positive, but the swings with 40 people, payroll was several hundred thousand dollars a month. So, the swings are pretty big. You need to have enough cash-on-hand and again, relying on checks from companies and things like that.
That was going to begin the process. We didn’t end up hiring a banker, which basically was much more work from my perspective, for me personally, to get ready for working with a banker than working for fundraising. It was like putting a whole fundraising deck together but then including everything, even things that you would normally maybe not tell or you wouldn’t want to advertise, but you need to be really open about and just get everything together so that you can share everything, and that they know everything so that things go well and they give you an accurate idea of the value of the business.
When working with a banker, one of the things is the process. First, of course, they speak directly with the companies, companies are interested. Then they reach out to the team and they have what’s called a management meeting. We probably had a couple of dozen management meetings which are basically calls with the entire management team, giving them an overview of the business. It’s extremely stressful. For us, we had to do them and keep them private.
I like the idea that we were talking to potential acquirers, couldn’t be that obvious to the company. It was really stressful and we did probably a dozen or more of those. Some companies were some of the biggest companies that everyone’s heard of, some of them were known, private equity companies, and range across the gamut. We did that for several months and then eventually you get IOIs and LOIs. Eventually, once the LOI is signed, there’s a lot of work to do, you actually meet with all the folks, and try to really talk about get down to brass tacks in terms of integration and real items.
It was incredibly stressful. For me, I played a point person on most of the stuff. Obviously, the banker did a lot, I did a lot, it’s a lot more stressful than I anticipated, and it’s a lot harder, like a few times investors be like, “Why don’t just wait like two years and just sell?” I was like, “Man, it’s not as easy as it sounds,” but people always say that.
Rob: But you’re eight years in it at this point and it’s like, “This is eight years and it’s been really hard.” I imagine you might have been feeling some burnout. There’s a certain point where I feel like you start to hear that there’s an opportunity to not have to continue doing what you’re doing. I don’t get the feeling that you hated what you were doing. I think you were still into it, but at a certain point, you start to think about the next phase as well as, “When is this going to pay off? All this hard work, my whole life’s work, and my net worth is tied up in this company.”
Jeff: Yeah. That was one of the things where I felt bad because truly, my investors, some of them would have been excited if we would have kept going. The business was in a good spot. It wasn’t the best deal ever. We did well and generally, everyone was pretty happy, but it also wasn’t a no-brainer. You always hope for a no-brainer and everyone’s on the same page. The reality is, investors are smart. If something’s going well or something’s going good enough, they want to keep going. They’re only making so many bets or investments per year and if it’s working and there’s a pretty clear path to the next milestone, they don’t want to sell, which makes sense.
We got mixed feedback. Lots of people were happy. No one was mad, but people were like, “Hey, have you considered continuing on and going?” Like you said, Rob, I got to the point where it was so close, you could taste it, you see the outcome, and a lot of us have worked hard for it. They knew a year before that we were going to try to do this. It was one of those conversations that I had with them was like, “Guys, I know we’ve been working hard, but I need you to work twice as hard this year. Hopefully, they’re going to pay off and here’s all the incentives and reasons why we should do that.” I think everyone was pretty burnt. I think we were fried. As what we used to say, “We were totally fried. It was tough.” From that perspective, it was really hard to just walk away.
Knowing that, it obviously makes it a little bit more stressful because at any point in my time in Ambassador, I always felt like I had a lot of optionality where I didn’t need a specific outcome. This was one of those situations where I was like, “Alright, if we don’t sell here, we’re going to have to start looking to replace people because I don’t know if they’re going to be able to handle it.” That’s my analysis of it and, of course, we never got to that point. I’m really good friends with everybody, so if I would have also said, “We need you,” they would have stayed, but I just felt I would have been doing everyone a disservice by pushing. We pushed really hard for a long time.
Rob: I know the deal closed last October of 2018. When did you tell your employees and how did they react?
Jeff: We told them that day that we signed the deal. We had done all the diligence up into that point and had not told them. The reason for it was, based on everything that I heard, you really don’t want to tell people. I know that with big companies, with really big transactions or public companies, as soon as the LOI is signed, they tell the companies.
For us, we had the LOI signed a lot earlier. It wasn’t 100% that it was going to get done. That was just like in bigger companies, there’s a lot of shareholder pressure and things, like when you make the announcement, the expectation is that you’re going to close the deal. We had a lot of deal points that were not ironed out yet. Actually, multiple times during that period, I thought we might not close.
We told the team early October. I would say 95% of the people were super pumped. A lot of them were way more pumped when they heard what they would get out of it. I like to say that I prided myself on really trying to build a great culture, especially over the last couple years. Really, that was my main focus.
I think a few people were sad that, that might be happening and the uncertainty with an acquisition is scary for a lot of people. We were super transparent and we immediately had like a town hall Q&A. Everyone felt good after, but there were some things that we couldn’t control.
Right after closing that, I think West didn’t do very well and that got everybody unsettled again. Luckily, things went as smooth as they could have been. Behind the scenes, it was a lot of scratching, clawing, and tough conversations. I’m really proud for the leadership team and for what we did to hopefully make things work out as well as they did, but I think I’m very happy with how things turned out.
Rob: I know you’re someone who takes a lot of personal ownership over things, obviously, over your company but over the culture and over the well-being of your employees and such. The deal closes, you’re obviously relieved, probably pretty happy that went through. It’s a life-changing moment for you, but I know, as you just mentioned, over the next several weeks or whatever, a month or two, West maybe fumbled the ball a little bit and you weren’t in charge anymore. These weren’t things that you could fix. How did that impact you? Was it really hard to see it? Was it something that you knew would iron itself out so it didn’t stress you out that much?
Jeff: It was really hard actually. There were multiple times after the fact where I was like, “I wish we wouldn’t have done this, wouldn’t have sold.” A couple deal points weren’t fully fleshed out because West Corporate wasn’t able to disclose the particulars because they were still fluid. We agreed, “Okay, we won’t agree to this in terms of we won’t specifically memorialize it in the agreement,” and that ended up being a big mistake for me. I don’t want to say anything harmful, but what we got in that particular agreement was a lot worse than what we expected and it was again, to me, directly affecting the people and culture, and it really was a gut punch.
I did a couple of things that cemented my place with West probably and wrote some really aggressive emails and took some pretty aggressive stands that I hope paid off and set the tone for my team. Luckily, only a few people ever saw or heard it, but I felt good that I took a stand. I felt it was the right thing to do. Luckily, I know the folks who were going to stay there after me, I needed them to see that we need to stand up for the folks. Everyone was in agreement that we did.
Rob: Yeah, that comes back to that ownership piece, that’s what I was pointing at. That’s your personality. I figured you would do something like that. You mentioned that during that post-acquisition, you were struggling with it and that there were days where you regretted selling.
I guess I was lucky or whatever, I never woke up a single day after the Drip acquisition and thought, “I wish that we hadn’t done that.” It just worked out. There were some hard days, but it never made me think, “Oh, I would go back on this.” That tells me a lot. That tells me that it was hard, that it was really hard knowing you and knowing your psyche and ability to take stress and deal with it.
You were with West for about a month or two after the acquisition, really the first of the year, you were able to move on. It’s been seven-ish months, seven and a half months. Have you had any regrets since that point about selling?
Jeff: No, definitely not. A couple of things have changed those, I should add, the team, I would say, has worked really well with West. West just recently has put Ambassador in a position to be successful and that took a lot longer than we hoped it would, but even just as recent as last week, I still talked to a bunch of folks there, everyone’s doing well, I actually played in the softball team yesterday so it’s a lot of fun and everyone’s really excited, which is really great and that’s what we wanted to do.
West has really done a great job of correcting course and working with Chase, specifically, but other folks at Ambassador to try to continue to allow it to flourish and be successful. From what I’ve heard, things are going really well and people are happy.
Rob: That’s great to hear, man. It’s easy to have no regrets when it did work out in the end for your team. It worked out financially for you and several folks on your team, and then obviously life is substantially better for you at this point. I’m happy to hear that things are a lot better.
I think that leads us to our final question. Do you know what’s next for yourself yet or is that just something that you’ll wait and see? Because there’s no rush. That’s what I would tell you. Jeff, don’t rush into the next thing. There is no need to rush into the next thing.
Jeff: Yeah, I know. It’s funny. I’ve even told my wife, “Let’s be super intentional about what we do going forward,” because we’re fortunate enough to have that flexibility. I’ve tried to be really intentional. I’ve spent a good amount of time just advising, not formally, but I wrote a couple blog posts and just said, “Hey, if you’re in the area or you want to chat, I’m happy to talk.”
Rob: You’re a TinySeed mentor, thanks for that.
Jeff: Yeah, hopefully I can even do more but I’m excited to be on the Slack group, answer some questions, and be available for when it’s my turn to […] folks. I’m staying busy a little bit, looking to maybe do some lightweight consulting where I’m still keeping a lot of flexibility. I’ll be honest, I’ve talked to a couple of business brokers, just looked at what’s available, and tried to see what piques my interest.
I’ve floated out a couple of offers for companies that were maybe not the best offer for the founder. No one’s accepted anything yet, but I’m kicking the tires on a few things. But as we talked about earlier, my biggest concern is can I do it in a way that’s not all in and that allows me to be flexible? If I were to do something, I would really focus on that work-life integration or balance or whatever you want to call it where it’s much more flexible than the traditional company. I think that’s the future.
Rob: Thanks again, man, for coming on the show. I really appreciate you taking the time.
Jeff: Absolutely. It was great catching up again, Rob, and always good to chat.
Rob: If folks want to keep up with you online, where’s the best place to do that?
Jeff: Best place is probably Twitter, it’s @jeff_epstein. I’m on Medium also, but Twitter, I’m pretty active. If you tweet at me or DM me or something, I’m sure to see it and I can follow-up and chat from there.
Rob: Sounds great. Thanks again, man.
Jeff: Of course. Yeah, my pleasure.
Rob: Thanks so much for listening. As you can tell, I’ve been changing up the format over the past four or five episodes. Mike is on a temporary hiatus and an update on him, he took some time completely off. He was on vacation and he’s interested in coming on the show in the next few weeks to talk about his thoughts and his progress. So, we’ll hear from Mike soon.
In the meantime, if you have a question for me or one of my guest hosts, call our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email them to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Thank you for listening.
If you haven’t left a five-star review, would really appreciate it. If you liked the change-up in the format and the fresh voices, fresh perspective, even just the fresh show format, I’d really appreciate if you could lend a five-star review, even tweet out particular episodes that you’ve been impacted by. It really does help to show me that what I’m doing here matters.
I’m spending a lot more time on the show. I’m dedicating time to trying to raise the bar. If it doesn’t make a difference and I don’t hear anyone talking about it—I’ve heard two or three people compliment me on, that was super appreciated—if it doesn’t move the needle, then obviously, I have to invest my time in places where it really moves them forward. So, I would appreciate hearing your thoughts, sentiments on Twitter. You can email us directly, obviously, questions@startupsfortherestofus.com or five-star review always helps as well. I appreciate it and I’ll talk to you next time.
Episode 452 | LinkedIn Outreach, New Features vs. Fixing Bugs and More Listener Questions with Jordan Gal
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Jordan Gal answer a number of listener questions on topics including LinkedIn outreach, building features versus fixing bugs and more.
Items mentioned in this episode:
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 today with Jordan, we’re going to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we made.
Welcome to this show. Each week, we talk about building startups in an organic, sustainable fashion that allows you to build yourself a better lifestyle, maintain freedom, purpose, and healthy relationships. Some weeks we talk through tactics, other weeks we do interviews, we have founder hot seats, and some weeks we answer your questions. This week, I was very pleased to be able to sit down with Jordan Gal and answer some listener questions. I hope you enjoy this episode.
Jordan, thank you so much for joining me on the show today.
Jordan: Thanks very much for having me, Rob. It’s post-4th of July Q&A session. I’m excited.
Rob: I’m stoked to have you. Folks will know you from Bootstrapped Web and you run CartHook. Before we dive into the questions, I’m curious what your take is on where you’ve come from and where you are with CartHook because CartHook is approaching 30 employees. It’s a fast-growing SaaS app. When you look back a few years ago, I think when you and I first started talking—I angel invested in CartHook for those who don’t know—I think you were like 5K MRR.
Jordan: I was going to say way back in the day.
Rob: Yeah. It was really early like what? What is that like? Did you pinch yourself? Is it surreal? Did you dream of one day having a SaaS app with 30 people? I can’t imagine what that feels like.
Jordan: I think it’s the opposite for me that before this, the struggle was like a nightmare, and this is like, “Oh, this is where I was supposed to be.” That’s how it feels to me. This was the plan and I always telegraphed in my mind, like, “This is how it’s going to feel like when it’s the way it’s supposed to be.” Before that was just this annoying nightmare to go through to finally be like, “There we go. This is how it’s supposed to feel.”
Rob: It’s such a trip. As you go through it, it’s these small changes. I remember thinking, “Wow. If I had a team of 10 or whatever, it would just be these huge thing and it would be so bazaar and it would be amazing.” When we got there, it was like this just feels normal now. You didn’t go from 0 to 10. I didn’t go from working alone having 10 people. We just hire them one at a time and you just build the team. Does this feel the same way to get to where you are?
Jordan: Yes. It feels incremental. In hindsight, it was fast. We worked from 4 people to 24 and we’re hiring a few now. That happened over the span of two years, I think that’s pretty fast for a 24 in two years. It was incremental along the way, weeks go by, months go by, new people get added. We have that additional element of having two offices, one inPortland, one in Slovenia. I would feel it in Portland when you hire a new employee. All of a sudden you have someone new in your day-to-day life, but we only have 11 people in Portland. Slovenia, I go back every 4 months. Everytime I go back, I have two new people to meet. That was more abrupt changes on the Slovenian side and the Portland growth felt more natural; it’s one by one.
Rob: Your role as CEO, I know in the early days, you do everything. You do anything that is falling through the cracks, basically. What’s your role like today with that many people? What are your top three high-level priorities over the course of six months or a year?
Jordan: It has changed and I’m happy with the change. I’m not very good at doing things day-to-day. I don’t have amazing work ethic, I don’t have good discipline, I can’t sit down and focus for many hours at a time. I’m just good at thinking and strategizing what should be done and I’m generally not that good at executing it. To have people now in positions where they are far better than I was in those positions feels good and right.
Now, the nature of the role is worrying about what’s going to happen externally, but mostly worrying about internal. Do people have what they need? Do they know what they need to do? Are they happy? Are they going to stick around? Are they happy with their interpersonal relationships inside the company? Does everyone know what we’re trying to accomplish? It’s a lot of like worrying and checking in on that worrying like looking under the hood a little bit to see, “Hey, is this functioning properly?” Every once in a while, something will pop out where it’s evident, “Ooh, this is wrong or broken.” I have to go to action mode for a week or two to fix it. That’s what it feels like.
Rob: I think it’s a venture capitalist that said that with venture-funded startups—which you are not, to be clear, you raised a couple of angel rounds but not taking institutional money—they view a CEO’s priorities as three things. One is hiring the high-level folks, not every individual when you hit the certain scale, but making sure that, basically the right people are getting on the bus, keeping enough money in bank so the company can make payroll.
Jordan: The money, the bank thing, that’s very clear. I used to think that relatively risk-loving in my personality, but what I have found in running this company and speaking to other founders is that I’m actually pretty conservative when it comes to the runway, to the cash on hand. Some people push it. They go 90 days, 60 days of cash and I’m always 12 months. I am very uncomfortable with less than 12 months of money in the bank.
For me, one of the driving forces is the mojo, for lack of a better term, the happiness that’s happening inside the company, how much people love their job, and that would get wrecked by layoffs. Not only do I want to avoid laying someone off because that just sucks all around, especially if it’s your fault, and that they have to pay the repercussions. At the same time, I really, really want to avoid what that would do to the energy in the team. So, I keep it pretty conservative.
Rob: It makes a lot of sense. It’s more like a bootstrapper mentality. That’s how a voice for you do is like a bootstrapper who happened to raise funding because he wanted to grow quickly and wanted to go into a space that was competitive, but still, you’re ethos has always been that. Much of the bootstrapper, that MicroConf ethos.
Jordan: Yes. That’s proving yourself out.
Rob: I remember the third thing the venture capitalist said. The reason I forgot it is because it’s just so fundamental, it almost doesn’t need to be stated, but it’s setting the vision for the company and the direction, the high level stuff. It’s obvious, right?
Jordan: Yes, but it’s surprisingly hard. Everyone tells you, the advice is always repeat yourself a hundred times more than you think. Once you’re sick of hearing yourself, that’s about right, all those things about repetition, but it is true that it is hard to keep everyone aligned on what you’re thinking. As the number of people grow, it becomes more and more challenging.
We, at this point, anyone that gets hired, I talk about that vision in the interview so they know where we want to go and the right fit person gets excited by that vision as opposed to, “Woah. This person is crazy.” Then, when someone joins and I do the first one-on-one with them a few days after they joined, I talked about the vision again and I always offer like, “I’ll go to the whiteboard right now.” It’s pretty much not their choice, I’d set them up in the white board anyway. Once a quarter, we also do it. Once a quarter, we talk about our roadmap, right back to the vision, right back to the core tenets. It’s becoming a lot of repetition and it’s still not enough.
Rob: I want to come back to the comment you made earlier. You said that you aren’t necessarily disciplined or get stuff done day-to-day. I question that reality. Maybe that’s the reality now when you have this big team, but back in the day when you were at 5K a month, I remember you were cold emailing, cold calling, doing sales calls, you were getting […] done. I wonder if it’s just the situation you’re in.
Jordan: You know what it is? It is the situation you’re in and I think I have some advantage in being a little older where I’ve gotten to myself more over time, so I’m able to fool myself or force myself into action. The cold email I would do and then I would outsource as soon as possible. Then, demo appointments would pop up in my calendar and it wouldn’t be my choice whether not to do them. It is just on my calendar. I’m doing it.
Rob: In code, we call that a forcing function. You just force yourself to do it. That’s funny.
Jordan: Yes. A lot of forced habits. Even if I don’t want to do this, I’m just going to commit to it anyway. Kind of like the first time you asked me to talk on stage at MicroConf. I was like, “No.” Just answer yes and then you’ll be forced to do it.
Rob: Then figure it out because, “I can’t back out of it once I told Rob yes.”
Jordan: Exactly.
Rob: That’s funny. Cool man. Thanks again for coming on the show. Are you ready to dive and do some listener questions?
Jordan: Yeah. We’ll see if we can be helpful.
Rob: First question is a voicemail about setting up developers who are taking deferred compensation.
Chris: Hey, Mike and Rob. This is Chris Bowls, I’m calling from Kentucky. Working on a new SaaS concept involving the building industry. I’m early right now, but I’ve got three developers who have agreed to take deferred compensation and stock before we began receiving revenue for their compensation. My question is, for these three developers, they’re all in the US, is it best to set them up as an employee, or as a contractor plus investor, or as an employee who is awarded shares? Do you recommend these developers have Class A or Class B shares with voting rights? I’m currently a solo founder, but one of these developers could transition into a CTO. What do you recommend for that? Thank you.
Rob: Obviously, you and I are not lawyers. We can’t give legal advice. I’m curious if you have a gut feel if your face with this scenario, a gut feel of how you would approach it, or even you would find the right answer to this. It’s not a clear-cut solution, at least from my perspective.
Jordan: It doesn’t sound clear-cut, but I think what happens often with business people like us is we conjure up legal realities that are wrong, then we start making assumptions based on that wrong belief, and then we complicate everything. I think this requires a re-orientation and that is best with a conversation with a real lawyer.
I think a lot of this stuff is a little off-base like voting rights. You don’t need to talk about voting rights. It’s early for voting rights. If you’re the founder, you don’t want to talk about Class A and Class B shares. It’s way too early for a lot of these stuff. I think a lawyer would help orient the person toward just getting things set up easily and cleanly. Same thing with independent contractor versus employee, I think you go independent contractor. You keep everything simple as possible before it has to be complicated. It ends up complicated, so why complicate it off to that.
Rob: Right, why start there? I think that’s my take, too. This one does sound sufficiently complex that I really do think that he should talk to a lawyer because I just think you can easily make a misstep with something like this. And I agree, the Class A, Class B, the voting, it doesn’t seem like it’s relevant yet.
Jordan: In our company, the only time that came up is when investors come on board. That’s still a question of whether or not you want to create a different class. Not all investors will force you to create a separate class. The separate class is the thing to avoid because what that creates is a situation where investors have X voting rights and you have different voting rights. Deferred compensation, not ideal, but you can understand how it happens if the developers are saying, “Yes. I’m willing to work and you don’t have the cash flow yet to pay me, so let’s defer it.” The second you touch employment, you’re talking social security taxes, you’re talking employment taxes, benefits, and so on. An independent contractor would keep that much cleaner.
Rob: As long as they fit the definition. I mean, the IRS has a definition of that. If you’re managing them day-to-day, directing them what to do and when, controlling their schedule, then they’re not independent contractor. You don’t want to mess with that kind of stuff. My guess is when you’re in this early stage, you could just give them a block of work and say, “Here’s the deliverable, here’s the deadline.” They can get it to you.
The fact that you have multiple developers working on it, I feel it might be easy to actually make that reality. I hope that was helpful, Chris. Not sure if it was, but if I were in your shoes and you don’t have a lawyer, I would head to upcounsel.com and just have a 30-minute counsel with someone could be helpful.
Our next question comes from Marcelo Erthal. He says, “Hey guys. I’m a digital entrepreneur and a big fan of your show. I’m in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We have a web app for the B2B market where we need to contact a specific person in the enterprise that we are prospecting.” I assume that means a specific title. “We found LinkedIn a great tool for this kind of job, but the problem is that when one of my sales guy leaves, he leaves with all the contacts and connections in the space, forcing the new person to start over again from scratch. Do you have an opinion on this? Should I have a LinkedIn profile owned by the company?” What do you think about this?
Jordan: I’ve never even considered that, but it sounds like a reasonable problem. My default was, “Oh, just do it under your own account,” but maybe you’re trying to connect with someone, you’re trying to have one of your salespeople to connect to them directly and then have a conversation. It would be pretty awkward to switch in the middle. What do you do about this?
Rob: It’s a tough one. My gut is that the company account is going to just be so impersonal. When you get contacted by a company account, unless there’s a human being attached to it with a headshot, it’s just a logo contacting you gets no response. I don’t feel like that’s really a good answer.
Jordan: I’m going to say, LinkedIn itself, it’s impressive that they’re making it work.
Rob: Yeah. That they’re making sales on LinkedIn.
Jordan: Yes. LinkedIn is tough. Maybe for enterprise, it’s different.
Rob: I can’t help but wonder if you could start the prospecting on LinkedIn, but then basically, bring them into a CRM essentially, or bring them in to somewhere where, when the salesperson leaves, they don’t have all the connections. I think of it like the hub and spoke model of social media where you have your Twitter account, your Instagram, your Pinterest, whatever, but you’re really trying to get them on your email list because your email list is the core thing that you own and everything else you’re just a digital sharecropper. Twitter, Facebook, whatever, they can ban you at anytime, you don’t really own those followers the way you do with email list.
I wonder if he couldn’t approach it in the same way where you are using LinkedIn as a channel but it’s just the spoke, and you’re actually trying to get them into either a conversation with you team or you’re trying to get their email address or you’re getting them into a CRM where you can have data about the interactions and all that. That’s what the big companies do. Even they have people prospecting on LinkedIn or cold calling or whatever, their relationship is documented in a CRM somewhere so that when that salesperson leaves, they don’t take everything with them.
Jordan: Yes. I think the personal connection and conversations that had been had on LinkedIn sounds like you’re going to lose. But if you get them into a CRM, then the company actually has that asset and that value. If you want to do that as early as possible in the LinkedIn process, my guess is a lot of CRM these days have direct integrations with LinkedIn. If you think about something like SalesLoft, they’re deeply integrated with LinkedIn, and that’s how I would approach it. It’s not really a prospect, it’s not really a lead until they’re in your CRM.
Rob: And unless your sales cycles are really long, there shouldn’t be so many hanging relationships at any given time. You have people who have become customers, you have people that you’re reaching out to, and then you have people who I guess didn’t become customers, but then you have that in-between and there’s always so many in that in-between for now. Well, I may buy in the next month or two. I feel like keeping that number small is probably the way to go.
Thanks for the question, Marcelo. I hope that was helpful. Our next question is a voicemail about how to balance time between new features, refactoring, and fixing bugs.
Colin: Hey guys. Thanks very much for the show, really enjoying it just now. I am Colin Gray. I run a podcasting company in Scotland, thepodcasthost.com, so we people start podcast. We also created a SaaS product last year called Alitu which helps people to produce podcasts and there’s a lot of automation for them.
The thing I’ve been struggling with as we’ve been running for a year now, I have a team of four developers, two full-time, two part-time. I’m struggling to figure out how we should be balancing our time between brand new features, fixing bugs, maintenance, refactoring, that type of stuff. I’m really interested to hear what you guys think around how you balance a new development work with the reliability work because we still get bugs, we still get people that get in touch, it’s not very many. We must be in the less than 2% […] by now in terms of reliability, but what do you think is reliability to aim for in terms of support tickets, bugs, that kind of stuff, and how much time should you be spending on that versus new features? Thanks very much.
Rob: I like this question. Thanks for sending that over, Colin. I think it’s a pretty common thing that, as first time founder, you wouldn’t even think about this before starting an app but at a certain point you have to. I’m curious to hear your thoughts, Jordan.
Jordan: This is the ongoing struggle between making progress on the roadmap and how much time it needs sprint to give to fixes and how much should you have a few sprints in a row that are just features and then a sprint entirely devoted to bug fixes. Everyone has a different way of doing these. A lot of it ends up on gut feel on where your customers are and what you need to be doing.
Generally speaking, I have a few thoughts on it. The thing I like to keep in mind is to make sure we never go too long without giving customers new features. Yes, we have all known issues internally and we’re thinking about, but we need to keep the momentum going. Momentum in the product, momentum in sales, momentum in all the different things, and pushing out new features keeps that momentum going.
For some of the detail that Colin talked about their year in, which tells me, yes it’s starting to pile up and you’re starting to deal with things that are popping back up, but it’s still relatively early on. I assume the codebase isn’t a hot mess the way it gets into it after a few years. The other thing he said was that they get a few support tickets here and there. It sounded from the words he was using and the tone of his voice that it’s pretty minimal. I would say that the tolerance for bugs is a big issue. I know our product is a check out product so the tolerance is extremely low if we have bugs that costs people money, so our tolerance is very low.
Depending on the type of bugs and the type of customers, those bugs might be annoying or might be absolute deal breakers. I think that helps guide you on how far to push it, on how hot to let the fire get before you start throwing water on it. I would lean more toward new features even at the discomfort of the shame and embarrassment of people getting in touch with things that are broken. That’s my general take on it. It sounds like he’s in a pretty good spot. It’s an ongoing struggle to figure out, but I would lean toward being a little bit uncomfortable and a little bit embarrassed.
Rob: I think that’s pretty good advice. I categorize these in my head into two buckets where it’s like there’s user-impacting or customer-impacting bugs or cruft, or there’s UI cruft. It may not be a bug, but it’s all the stuff that is maintenance, like bugs plus an old-looking interface, plus a clunky interface you know needs to be revamped, that impacts the users in that they notice it. That’s one bucket.
The other one is the cruft, bugs, and other stuff that users don’t notice but are a pain in the […] for your dev team. It’s stuff that needs to be refactored or it’s that one the alert that dumps too much information once every few weeks. It just floods the Slack channel or floods your error logs with something. It’s one-off things and users don’t know it, but you know it’s getting on the dev nerves.
I agree with you. You are going to want to probably let some of these go longer than you want to, but I would encourage that you let your developers, give them some leeway to fix the things that are bugging them. What we did in the early days when you’re just shooting from the hip all the time and it’s like, “Hey, what’s the next feature we should work on?” We were literally planning one feature out and we were doing that. We had three developers full-time. We were probably doing 50K MRR and we were still doing that approach. It was super agile and we could make decisions very quickly as we respond to customer needs.
At that point, we would often say, “Let’s just look in the stack and if there’s stuff that we think is bothering people or is bothering devs, just pull the next one off, spend the day, fix it,” and then we all felt good about ourselves and like, “Ah. We got that done.” Then went back to features. Another few weeks later, we’ll be like, “You know? We haven’t really attacked something like that in a while,” and we go back to it.
When we started formalizing it, as the team got bigger, by the time we had 8 or 10 developers, that’s when we started saying, “One morning a week,” which winds up being about 10% of your time because it’s about 3 or 4 hours, “everyone would pull one thing out of the queue, whether it was user-facing,” because a lot of the designers would do user-facing stuff and a lot of the devs would do the cruft that they wanted to refactor, you basically have one morning to pick something and fix it.
That became a cool cadence.It sounds like it would be drudgery, but they actually really like it because it makes their lives better and makes their lives easier. I always felt like there’s something between 10% and 20%. 20% was a full day and that felt like too much to give up every week to just fixing these stuff. Codebase would have been immaculate, but as you said, it negatively impacts your feature velocity. I think that’s how we’ve approached it.
Jordan: I like that. It does end up being seen and felt as a little break. We’ve had entire weeks where we go by and it’s almost a break. We’ve been pushing really hard on this ramp. We just went six weeks straight, all out. The end of it was stressful. Everything went to QA at the same time like it shouldn’t and then everything got out the door. A week of refactoring, going back, and polishing things up is almost a little bit of a breather.
The thing that we had to watch out for is that some engineers have a tendency to refactor as they go. They’ll be in the part of the codebase working on a feature, they’ll be touching an adjacent part of the code, and it won’t be up to snuff compared to what they’re building now. It has some logic in it that we thought was right 12 months ago and then the tendency to want to refactor that before coming back to the feature that you’re working on is dangerous. That’s how things start floating and not being on time. We definitely had to figure out the engineer personalities and help guide people away from too much refactoring.
Rob: I agree. Like with anything, it’s good to know the personalities of the people that you’re working with and know if they err on the side of being much more, “Hey, I’m just a hacker. I’m going to throw stuff in,” and then you know that they need heavy code review to bulletproof their code, and then other people take a really long time to build their stuff, but it is super bulletproof. You often have to encourage them to maybe go a little faster, let’s have a little bit of risk in this to get it done 20%–30% faster. I hope that was helpful, Colin.
Our next question is a bit of a long one. It’s from Dragos. He says, “Hey guys. First of all, I want to thank you for doing the podcast and giving your thoughts on so many entrepreneurial things. Writing to you about my startup, it started as a dream and ended as a lack of motivation and a desire to sell it.
More than a year ago, I started working on an idea where I would change the way people build WordPress sites, make it easier and smoother. It began as my problem because everytime I had to create a WordPress site, I had to search for a theme, buy it, do a bunch of other stuff.
Even if I was a developer, I didn’t have the knowledge of the technology required to build the app nor the cash needed to make an MVP so I borrowed money from my sister and I hired a small agency from Eastern Europe. Seven months later, I had a rough MVP…” Wow, seven months. That’s a long time. “A theme builder that allows people to create one page WordPress sites in just a few minutes.
During the development, I tried to create anticipation and manage to build a list of around 200 people. The problem is the post-launch. I only got one customer. Since then, I’ve had a few thousand visitors, but I have not had any new customers. I blame the execution, the fact that I do not know who my customers are, and I don’t know what to do next.
I’m in a position where I don’t have the technical knowledge which is AngularJS to continue the project. I don’t have motivation, I don’t believe in the idea like I did in the beginning, and I’m afraid to invest any other money. It’s easy to quit as I have tons of other ideas but should I persevere on the initial plan? How do I decide when to do that, when to stop, and just consider the startup a failure?” What do you think, sir? This is a tough one.
Jordan: It sounded like it was going to be a tough one, but then when you get to his tone toward the end, you start to realize this is just a failure. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s time to move on. That’s my gut feeling after hearing this. The amount of energy and probably money also to turn this from where it is right now into something that works and turns out to be a success, I don’t think it sounds like it’s worth it. I don’t think he has the motivation and drive to do it. I would just choke it up to a lesson and move on.
Rob: I think I would agree with you. It’s funny when I said this is a tough one. I didn’t mean it with a tough decision but that’s how it sounded but it’s a tough email to read because I’ve been there. We’ve all been there and it’s hard.
Jordan: What makes it tough is that pretty much everybody listens to this, including you and I, have been in this exact same situation. It’s tough when you’re in it, but it is one of those things that people from the outside that have a bit colder approach to it, just look at it and say, “I’ve been there too. There’s no shame in it. It’s just one of those things you should just move from if it didn’t work.”
Rob: Yeah. I think if he had the motivation, that’s the thing from me. When you’re a bootstrapper or doing stuff from the side, you never run out of money. Running out of money is what kills venture-backed startups because they burn through the cash and they shut down. Since he’s not a developer, I guess he has run out of funding that he wants to put into it.
Realistically, if he was super motivated to do it, he could learn Angular himself or he could take some of the money he’s making out of his day job and invest it in. If he had the motivation and really thought it’s going to work, but when you don’t have the motivation or the desire, it doesn’t matter. That’s what kills startups. You just get fed up with it at a certain point, you don’t believe it in anymore, and if you still believed it was going to work, you could totally try to make a verticalized version of this like, “I’m going to make this for pet groomers, or for designers, or for whoever.” Pick a niche and you can try to go after it, but it doesn’t sound like that’s that interesting and he wants to move on to the next thing.
It’s the hard balance. I feel like it does come back to knowing yourself like do you tend to just skip from one thing to the next, to the next? In which case, you should stick with things longer than you normally do. But if you are someone who tends to just grind it out and spend two, three, four years working on things that then fail, well maybe you should move on quicker from things in the future. It sounds like given that it took seven months to get that MVP, which is brutal, and that he has said thousands of visitors, this is a real tough one to turn around.
Jordan: Yes. It’s almost a blessing in disguise that it got so little reception. The really dangerous ones are that get just enough reception to keep you motivated to keep going, but will probably not lead you to where you want to go.
Rob: Yeah. That take years and years to get to 5K MRR, 10K MRR, whatever, right?
Jordan: Yes and then say, “Oh, man. I should just stop it,” and then that sunk cost is even more painful. It’s never seen as a sunk cost. It’s always look back at, “Well, I’m two years in. Should I really stop it at this point or should I keep going?”
Rob: Our last question for the day comes from Robert. He says, “So many products fail, but when does fail early not apply? It’s not like fail early can be a universal practice because almost everything seems to fail anyway. None of the advice that seems reasonable seems to work without getting hung up and never shipping. When is it a good idea to spend extra time getting it right from the get-go? Have you ever seen someone fail because the MVP was shoddy, only to see something similar succeed with a higher quality MVP and a more thorough team? Likewise, have you seen a really thorough product with thorough marketing and industry experienced co-founders fail miserably?” There’s a lot of questions here.
Jordan: Yes but it sounds like he’s searching for what is it that makes things successful and other things fail. That is so intangible. There are so many factors there. That mystery has no solution. Everyone has seen these things. Great team, great product rate, everything total failure, and the opposite of someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing and get lucky or looks like lucky and have spectacular success. I don’t know if you can expect to find that intangible thing that makes something successful while others aren’t. It’s tough to define.
Rob: I agree and some parts of his question, of his letter or his email, he said so many products fail. When this fail early not apply? He’s talking about building an MVP that’s thorough versus not. I think back to last episode where Laura Roeder was talking about launching a competitor to pager duty. That’s where you can’t build a shoddy MVP.
I think another one is like to compete against MailChimp, like what we did with Drip. You’re building an ESP, you can’t have a shoddy MVP and get that done. Now, you can go circuitous and you can build an addon to things and then slowly branch in, but I think what I’m getting to is like a mature market where there’s a lot of competitors who have mature products, that’s where just an early MVP that doesn’t have a huge differentiation is very unlikely to get traction.
I think of Josh with Baremetrics years ago, where he is first to market with this one-click analytics. Even with Peldi with Balsamiq where he was the first one to really build this mockup tool in the way that he did it, you can build a pretty basic version because no else was doing it and that basic version was good enough. People would put up with either bugs or just a lack of features because it was a novel new thing and you really couldn’t get it anywhere else.
Jordan: It’s like it requires practice to get a sense of whether or not something is on the right track. I hear you on the MVP, but I think the MVP is internal facing. We know that this is not quite good enough but we’re just getting it out there. The reaction from the market that external pieces is what tells you whether or not you’re on the right track and should keep going or should stop.
Our check out was an MVP when we launched it and it effectively tortured people and then they would cancel but not before the torture. They went through some torture first. The reaction from the market was so strong that we knew we were on the right track. We couldn’t have a shoddy MVP in a check out product, but we did. The reaction was so strong that we said, “Okay. We’re just going to have to bite the bullet here for six months and re-build this thing again, but we know we’re on the right track.”
MVP is one thing. The market is the other. Beyond that, it takes some practice. I went to see Jason Fried talk in New York a good 10 years ago. Basecamp was the hottest thing ever then. I went to go see him talk and at the end of the conversation, I asked him effectively something to the effect of, “Why are you guys so good at this? Why is this product making money when others aren’t?” His response was that they effectively have more practice making money. The more practice they get, the better they get at it. The sense of whether or not a product is working, or the MVP is good enough, or the market is responding properly, I think that stuff just takes practice.
Rob: Thanks for the question, Robert. I hope that was helpful. I realize ‘it depends’ is not always the answer we want to hear, but some of these are just difficult to answer.
Thanks again for coming on the show today, man.
Jordan: Rob, thank you. I appreciate it.
Rob: It’s great having you. If people want to catch up with you every week or two, they can go to bootstrappedweb.com which is where your podcast lives.
Jordan: Every week or two, that’s very kind of you.
Rob: You like that? You ship two or three episodes a month, right?
Jordan: Yes. It’s the summer that throws us off, with all the travels, Brian’s out there in the world, but we’ve got big plans, come back strong in the fall. I’ve taken real effort into this […] to be more open. It’s turning into the low light podcast and those are my favorite business podcasts these days, the super successful stories. Sure it’s entertaining, but the values of someone like your last episode with Laura Roeder, that’s it right there, man.
Rob: It’s the struggles, right?
Jordan: Struggle especially when you come across someone like Laura where she’s ridiculously good at what she does and you get the sense that everything she does works. You have a podcast episode like that and it helps you identify everyone struggles. It’s always just helpful to hear someone in her shoes be open about it.
Rob: There was one line in my MicroConf talk this year that I keep coming back to and it is there are no Cinderella stories. You can look at any startup, she got to seven figures in a year. That’s crazy, but you know that under the covers, that was probably very hard to manage. The things that we see from the outside, they just look amazing, and it’s like, “I wish my company was doing that.” Maybe you do, maybe you don’t.
Jordan: I think that line in your talk, sparkle a lot of conversations in MicroConf that went somewhere to the effect of, if you’re jealous or envious of some situation, just go ask them about it. As soon as they start talking, you’ll realize, “Oh okay. It’s not that amazing.” It’s nothing that you should be envious about. As soon as you actually get the details, you’ll realize how hard it is.
Rob: The growth might be envious but the challenges are not. If you have a question you would like to hear us answer on the show, call our voicemail at 888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. You can obviously attach an MP3 or a WAV file to that email. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt, used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes or any podcatcher of your choice by searching for Startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 451 | Stellar Growth, Platform Risk, Layoffs and Powering Through Roadblocks with Laura Roeder
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of US, Rob interview Laura Roeder, Founder and CEO of MeetEdgar. They talk about her fast success with growing MeetEdgar, dealing with platform risks, and the humbling experience with her second venture.
Items mentioned in this episode:
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 today with Laura Roeder, I’m here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made.
On this show, we talk about building startups in an organic, sustainable fashion that allows you to build a better life for yourself. Every once in a while, we’ll sit down with an experienced, knowledgeable, founder who has overcome seemingly insurmountable odds, and we learn from that founder. We learn from their experience of growing their startup, of facing the roadblocks and turning them into speedbumps. Today is no exception.
I’ve been a longtime fan of Laura Roeder since she started Edgar several years ago. That’s at meetedgar.com. It’s social media management software. Laura grew Edgar to seven figures of annual revenue within the first 12 months. It was one of the fastest bootstrap SaaS growth trajectories I had ever heard of.
But in 2017, 2018, Facebook and Twitter, some of the underlying platforms that Edgar relies on really started to pull some shenanigans with their APIs. Edgar ran into some pretty intense turbulence. We dig into that. I had not heard her talk about this experience on a podcast before. Frankly, I wanted to hear what it was like in the inside and how that felt. She talks about the ups and downs of it in a very honest, raw, and transparent way. I really appreciate that about the interview today.
The other thing we dig into is she went and started another SaaS app, raised an angel round, and rented some pretty major roadblocks with that early on. It’s fascinating to hear, essentially a third time founder, looking around and realizing, “Wow, this may not work like my other companies did. This may not go as well as my prior startups.” You can hear her thought process in what it was like to experience that in today’s interview. With that, let’s dive in.
Laura, thank you so much for joining me on the show today.
Laura: Thank you. I’m excited to be here even though we’re going to talk about some tough topics. I’m a little nervous.
Rob: I know. We were talking before we got on this call that just like entrepreneurship, is about bumps and bruises; sometimes it’s a speedbump, sometimes it’s a roadblock, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. You’ve certainly had your share with the past few years.
Laura: Yes. I’ve had speedbumps and roadblocks.
Rob: Yeah, that’s tough. I wanted to start by talking a little bit about Edgar, which is frankly, a widely successful app. I remember that when you launched, I believe, you made it to seven figures within 12 months of launch. It was ridiculous in a great way. I don’t know that I had ever seen a bootstrapped SaaS app hit that level of success that quickly. What do you attribute much of that to?
Laura: So much of it is just right place, right time, right brand. When we launched, we were really innovative in the market. Social media, scheduling tools, had been created, but they were literally just like, “Type your tweet in this tool and then hit send.” That was kind of all they did. The innovations that we created within the Edgar when we launched, it was just very noteworthy, like, “Wow, this is a tool that can do a lot more than any of the other tools can.”
Rob: Yup. That makes sense. You had this amazing success early on. You say, “Right place at the right time,” but I remember you also had worked your ass off to build an audience in that space. You would set yourself up for success. You weren’t just blindly going in and doing this. I think there’s a little bit of nature and some nurture in that one. Two factors came in—multiple factors. I think the thing that I want to chat with you today about is over the years that you’ve been running Edgar, there have been just crazy API changes and partner changes—Facebook and Twitter. I don’t know if other APIs have changed as well. I got the impression from the outside that has to be tough on your business. Has it? Talk me through that.
Laura: Yeah, 2018 has been our toughest year at MeetEdgar. We’ve got hit with a lot of changes at once. Some of them were in 2017 as well. The biggest one was Twitter not allowing repeating content. A big angle of what we do differently at Edgar is we allow you to keep a library of your content that gets repurposed. That’s a big reason why a lot of people use Edgar. All of a sudden, Twitter came out with this rule that said, “If you have the exact same tweet, if you sent it out more than once, that is against our terms of service.” There was no nuance to this rule. If you send out something that says, “Good morning.” Then you sent out something else that’s just says, “Good morning,” four years later, that’s technically against their terms of service.
Things like these are especially frustrating when you’re a tool. Obviously, people aren’t getting their accounts shutdown for sending out “Good morning” twice within 10 years. But as a tool, you have to make sure that you are in 100% compliance with the APIs, with the policies, and the terms of service because we’re putting our customers at risk if we’re not following Twitter’s terms. It would really suck for someone to sign up for Edgar, the tool is doing something knowingly against Twitter’s terms and conditions, well, now we’ve put our customers at risk for getting their accounts shut down.
There have been many tools out there that did that especially for Instagram. There used to be a lot of tools that went against Instagram’s terms and they all got shut down. No big surprise there. We did talk about, “How do we want to handle this. Is there anyway that we want to try to fudge this?” We’re like, “No, we can’t put our customers accounts at risk.” We are going to stop repeating content on Twitter. That was the biggest one.
Around the same time, Facebook stopped the ability for third party tools to post to Facebook personal profiles so you can still post to Facebook pages and groups but not personal profiles. We just got our access cutoff to Facebook groups for a while just from bad luck. All the social media tools are doing a lot more invitations and manual approvals, and that kind of thing as opposed to just open API. We just hit some bad luck for we got stuck in the approval queue. They didn’t have any problem with what we’re doing or anything like that, we just got to the bottom of the list somehow. It ended up being two or three months where our customers couldn’t post to their Facebook groups where a lot of our competitors didn’t have any downtime or had a week of downtime for groups.
Rob: Wow. That is brutal. What a tough space. Take me to that moment. Let’s start with the Twitter stuff because that, I imagine, was just like a punch in the stomach when you read that. That moment where you read the email or whatever it is from Twitter—the press release—what were you thinking?
Laura: You know, I’m such an optimist. I actually didn’t even realized how bad it would be. Because I was thinking, okay, the good part about this is that all the tools are in the same boat. We’re not going to be able to repeat content on Twitter, but no one else either. It’s not like they have nowhere to go. It’s not like our customers can leave us and choose a different tool. I’m like, “This is really frustrating, but maybe it won’t be that bad.”
It did help that I understood why Twitter was doing this. Obviously, why Twitter’s doing this is to prevent spam. They don’t want people setting up Twitter bot accounts repeating the same message over and over. It’s just frustrating that they did it in such a way where they made this just extremely broad stroke that in addition to eliminating spam, is also eliminating just some really standard usage of the tool.
Rob: Yeah, the collateral damage of the Google, Facebook, Twitter, when they change their APIs or change policies, I don’t think that they fully understand what they’re about to destroy. Oftentimes, they are doing it, I think, in a way to take out spam or for the better of their platform or for the better of the internet. I think internally they do believe that. It’s kind of like, “Are you questioning that?” Totally. Maybe not. Are they just doing it to grab more market shares? Is that what you think for their clients? That could be, I guess, a negative motivation.
Laura: Yeah. I think in this case, Twitter was, I do think that they were just trying to cut down on spam. They just didn’t think of it much beyond that. That was kind of it. I don’t think they’ve given out much thought since. It wasn’t something that they announced very widely. I find that most small businesses still don’t know about this, which makes it even more frustrating for us because it kind of makes it seem like we’re the ones enforcing this rule because people have never even heard of this Twitter rule. They try to use our tool, we say, “You can’t use it that way on Twitter.” It can be a frustrating experience for the end user.
Rob: Yeah, I’d imagine. You just talked about three kinds of breakages of your built-on platforms, these platforms can make a change and can really have a serious impact on your business. Of those three kind of, I would say, semi-catastrophic events, did you see an increase in churn? Did you see reduction in topline revenue? How did it impact your company?
Laura: Yes. We saw just a certain percentage of our customer base. Here’s what we discovered. I thought, when they made this announcement, some people are going to leave because some people are going to say, “Well, I use you guys for Twitter. I’m repeating on Twitter and I can’t do that anymore.” What I didn’t anticipate was that a certain percentage of our customers were just like, “This was the only thing I used you for.” I didn’t realize that a percentage of our customers were, “I used you guys for repeating on Twitter. You don’t do that anymore. I’m out. I’m not going to another tool. I’m just not going to use Twitter anymore.” That’s actually a big thing that we heard. There are other social platforms out there like, “This doesn’t go with my strategy. Maybe I’ll post to Twitter manually every so often but I’m out.” That was a surprise.
I thought, “We’ll have an announcement. It’ll change then we’ll see who leaves.” The first month we had to make the change, people left, and it feels like, “Okay. You never want customers leaving, but this feels manageable.” The nature of our tool, like I said, you have a library that at some point, if you’re only sending things once, obviously, that library is going to run out similar to the way Buffer is. It’s like a one time queue. When you get to the bottom of the queue, it’s gone. For Twitter, our tool became that way.
The thing is people load a lot of content into our tool. People had sometimes content for a month, three months, or six months, before their Twitter content ran out. The good part was we had an extra four months or whatever it was, obviously, a revenue from them. But that part, it just kept going. We’re like, “Okay. The people who don’t like the Twitter changes left.” Every month, more and more people would figure it out because obviously people don’t read every message that you send. People will just be like, “What happened? I’m not sending out content anymore on Twitter. Is the tool broken? What’s wrong?” We’re like, “Oh, no. You’re not sending out content anymore on Twitter because you used up all your content. You need to create new content now.” They’re like, “That sucks. I’m leaving.”
Rob: Geez. That was such a big selling point of Edgar above other tools. As you said, like Buffer, you create a content, you schedule it, and you post it and such. I can imagine that hit really hard. Churn went up, which obviously means you’re growth either stalls or flatline, whatever that does.
Laura: Declines, yeah. For us, we had a decline in our user base. It ended up with these three changes together. We lost a significant amount of our customer base; maybe we lost a quarter or a third of our customer base.
Rob: Oh my god.
Laura: It was really big. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s only external things. We made mistakes, we could have responded faster and better. The positive thing is that it forced us to innovate. One example of that, now we have a feature we call autovariations where you put in your blog post and we automatically pull five poll quotes from that post to serve as your status updates. That’s just one way to paste it in the URL and get five status updates to Twitter and all the other social networks, but we didn’t have that ready when Twitter shut down. We didn’t introduce that until nine months later, something like that.
You have to roll with the times when these things happen. But yeah, it was a significant loss for us. We had to make some layoffs in our company which we never had to do before, but we did remain profitable and survived through the whole thing which I’m really proud of.
Rob: Yeah. I would be as well. Honestly, it could’ve been business ending to lose 25% or 30%, whatever the number of customers would end a lot of companies. In fact, the interesting thing is, I don’t hear many bootstrapper who have to do layoffs because it tends to be this very slow growth over time. You build up as higher as your revenue. With SaaS, unless you have an odd event like this, almost like a black swan thing that comes and gets you, your growth is just going to keep steady or whatever. I think you’re in a unique situation that you had to deal with. Have you ever had to lay people off before?
Laura: No. I’ve let people go, but I had never had to do layoffs before. I’m very thankful that we had a really great team backing us up especially our head of finance, Tanya Crino. She was very cautious about seeing this coming. Like I said, we saw the initial way, but then we kept having more and more customer loss. If you Google, “How to do layoffs?” The first thing you see is only do one round. Whatever happens only do one round. Tanya and Sara Park—who’s our head of operations at that time and is now the president of the company—they were really looking at, “What do we need to do so that we can only do one round and so that we can offer some kind of severance?” We were able to offer two months severance to every person who was laid off and help them find other positions at companies we were friends with and things like that.
Another thing that was so fascinating from the layoffs is we have full financial transparency within our company. We don’t share individual salaries, but we share everything else. We do financial reviews with the whole company every month. Everyone can look through all of our expenses and income. People saw the writing on the wall, you know what I mean? These are obviously, very intelligent people working at MeetEdgar. You can’t say, “Hey, we might have layoff soon. Don’t worry. We’ll let you know.” You can’t really say that until it’s a done deal. But people are smart. They see us losing customer base. They’re like, “Okay. This is a bootstrap company. It has to remain profitable.” The only way that’s going to happen is lowering expenses. We found that while, of course, it is a terrible, heartbreaking, and incredibly stressful thing to be laid off from a job, we also were able to maintain positive relationships with everyone who was laid off. Everyone understood that it was something that needed to happen for the company to survive.
Rob: Yeah, which is a big deal. It shows that you handled it with care, thought, and deliberate action. It’s impressive. It’s easy to flab that, I think. It’s easy to accidentally screw that up.
Laura: Yeah, it is. Especially because it’s often something you haven’t done before. We were able to do it in just one go. We didn’t have to do anymore after that. It was hard because the way that you do it in just one go is you have to make deeper cuts than you think you need to. When you first look at this problem, obviously, you’re hoping to just let one or two people go. We had some people that were laid off and then some people, just because it was just a tumultuous time at the company, some people ended up leaving on their own kind of before or after, just along with the tide. I think we had eight people that left. The other, maybe, six layoffs and two people leaving, or something like that.
Rob: Yeah. How big of a morale blow is that to the rest of the team? Do you feel like they recovered quickly or were they pretty devastated?
Laura: It’s interesting because I think it was kind of an emotional rollercoaster for everyone. It’s devastating, and at the same time this means, “Oh, the company’s going to make it.” They have the same numbers. They’re like, “Oh, this is the choice that the company needs to make in order for me to still have a job and the company to still survive.” Obviously, it’s always really hard when that happens, but we were really focused on rebuilding with the team that remained.
Rob: Yeah. I think I’ve been at companies, either worked for them or had colleagues at companies who’ve been laid off, and I think such a big piece of the reaction and the morale comes down to the trust of the leadership. Do they trust the CEO? Do they trust you, Laura, when you’re saying, “This is why. This is what we’ve done. Now, we’re going to move forward and we’re going to survive.” Do they think that somehow you manufactured it? Or made it up? That you haven’t cut deep enough or that you cut too deep or whatever. That’s when there’s this big toxicity comes about. It’s definitely going to be an emotional rollercoaster if they recovered. It shows that you had a good relationship with your team.
Laura: Yeah, I think so. We were able to still have a few people in each department. It didn’t feel like, “And I’m the only engineer now. This is not going to work out.” I think it felt to people like, “Okay, I can see how the company can continue to survive and grow with the team we have left.” Luckily, it wasn’t so dire that it felt ridiculous.
Rob: Yeah. Was that in 2018?
Laura: Yes. In early 2018, yes, that we made the layoffs.
Rob: Okay. You were still acting CEO at that point?
Laura: Yes, although I was actually on maternity leave. Now, I’m remembering the timing. I guess my daughter had just been born when we actually did the actual cut. We have been doing the math and planning up to that. I was actually technically on maternity leave when we had to do the layoffs. I just hopped on and wrote everyone personal emails because the actual conversation happened with our hiring manager anyway. There was only one person who’s a leadership level that we had to layoff, so I had a conversation with them. Weirdly, I didn’t do a lot of the actual conversations.
Rob: Sure. That’s still baller for having a baby and two days later, being involved. It’s tough when the timing works at that way.
Laura: It’s not ideal.
Rob: Yeah, not at all. It’s got to be stressful. Did it take a toll on you personally? Like your psyche and such?
Laura: It was a relief because it made it clear that the company was going to make it. I don’t mean to say that disrespectfully to anyone who’s listening who is working on ur team. It was a very hard decision, but the day that it actually happened, it was a relief to get it over with, get it done, and be like, “Okay. Now, I can move forward.”
Rob: Yeah. Some time after this, you decided to start another company called Ropig. When was that? That was probably mid-2018, I’m guessing.
Laura: I’ve never put the timelines of these things side by side in this way. I think there’s sort of separate compartments in my head, but now that we’re going to put them side by side, that sounds crazy. It’s a lot of tumultuous things happened all in the same year. Ropig launched in March 2018.
Rob: Got it, okay. Launched, meaning, the website went live, product was live, people could use it?
Laura: Launched, meaning the product started taking customers. We’ve actually been working on it for about a year prior to that.
Rob: Okay. You were doing both of these then?
Laura: Yeah.
Rob: You were working on both. Ropig was alert management for dev teams. Is that right?
Laura: Yes, exactly.
Rob: Obviously, the punchline—the jump to it—is that you decided to shut it down pretty quickly after launching. Let’s talk through that a bit. I know that you actually raised funds for this. Was that a first? Had you raised an angel round before?
Laura: That was a first. I had never raised money before Ropig.
Rob: Okay. How did you go about that? Did you have a network of people? Did you have to go to […] road and hit the angle groups?
Laura: We raised money in January of 2018. My daughter was born in June of 2018. I was being visibly pregnant when we were raising money. I was like, “I’m pregnant. I don’t want to travel. I don’t want to do it.” I decided that I’m going to get this done my way. By this point, I’ve been an entrepreneur for, I guess, 11 or 12 years now. I’ve built up a pretty strong network. I felt pretty confident that I can raise a small round with my own network. I’m like, “I’m not going to travel. I’m not going to go to San Francisco. I am just going to ask people that I know if they would like to invest in my company.” I looked up the numbers in preparing for this.
I think I contacted about 300 people. These were all people that I have personal relationships with. Some were just acquaintances, but people that I actually knew, not professional investors, people that are either just entrepreneurs, or people who work in tech, or people that maybe did some investing on the side. 300 people just got emailed or texted or Facebook messaged or whatever by me saying, “Here’s what I’m doing. Do you want to invest?”
Rob: Right. You ended up raising $320,000 on a safe? The audience knows, you emailed me. You and I actually had an email thread about Ropig. The only reason that I didn’t invest was because, well, I guess there were two, one was because your pre revenue. I don’t, in general, tend to invest in pre revenue companies just because there’s so much risk. But the second was that it was such a new space. I have confidence in you as the founder that you’re going to execute on it but my gut said it was going to be this very long, very arduous, very painful journey. You would get there eventually, but you didn’t have an audience in the space. I didn’t feel like you had […]. That’s what you and I talked about it in the email. Was that on your radar? Obviously, I must not have been the only person that mentioned that.
Laura: Yeah. A big advantage that I had in MeetEdgar is it’s a social media tool. I had already been in the social media space for years prior doing courses and consulting. I’d already built an audience in that space. With Ropig, the tool was systems admin, people, and developers. It’s not me. I’m not a developer. I’m not in that space. I’m not in that world. Not only do I have no lists built up but I can’t speak at that conference. I can’t go to those meetups. It’s not my thing, it’s not my langauge.
I do think that a big reason why Ropig didn’t work out is that I underestimated how much value I had and continue to give to Edgar in that way. Because with Ropig, I just thought, “Okay, I know I can’t do that but I can just hire people who can,” which is totally a viable strategy and a lot of people do that, but I didn’t raised enough money to do that. The problem was the strategy that I had in my head was really a much better fit for a company that was going to raise a lot of money. Even though I was raising this $300K—that ended up being $320K—I did not want to raise more money after that. I did not want to do big fundraising, I did not want to do VC, I did not want to do any of it. In retrospect, the game plan that Ropig needed to succeed was just not a match for only having a small amount of fundraising.
Rob: Yeah. You didn’t want to do the Series A, the shuffle, and you kind of just want to do this single seed round. I think call-in from customer.io calls it’s fundstrapping, is raising this single round to hit escape velocity. That makes sense. That actually fits my perspective of who you are as an entrepreneur. You are much more a bootstrapper than someone who raises. But raising that one round, really these days, it’s not against bootstrapping ethos anymore. You know what I mean? In some spaces like this one, the alert management tool. It competed with PagerDuty. Is that a good comparison? It’s a very crowded space with a lot of funding in it. It’s competitive. You’re going to need some superpower to get in there. You were saying that you didn’t raised enough money to hire someone to be an influencer. Is that what you were saying?
Laura: Yeah. That’s part of it. I just didn’t raised enough money for any of it. You mentioned that it’s a very competitive space, but it’s also a really expensive tool to build. My husband Chris is a developer. He’s the cofounder of the tool. He also, for MeetEdgar, built the initial version of the tool. He could not build alone, Ropig. It’s not a tool that you can just sit-down-in-your-free time-in-some-weekends-build. We had already spent, we decided to invest our own money, $500,000 of our own money into this project.
By the time we raised the money, we already had a fulltime team of developers just to get the initial product out. It’s alert management. You can’t be like, “It’ll probably work sometimes. It will get most of your alerts.” It’s just not the type of thing that you can have sort of shoddy, half-baked. Also, a lot of the advice is like, “Just ship people a minimum version.” No one really wants a minimum to manage some of their alerts. It just doesn’t make sense. You can’t really just test out some sort of halfway done thing. Like all the advice, “Pretend you have software, but then just do it yourself behind the scenes.”
Rob: You can’t do that with this. This breaks a lot of those rules. One of the reasons is because it’s so competitive in the market. It’s fair. It’s somewhat mature, I would say. An MVP in this market, very very different than an MVP in whatever—the VR space or something that’s still a nascent market. That makes a lot of sense.
Laura: Yeah. I think, that was another thing I underestimated because when we launched MeetEdgar, we had funded competitors. HootSuite had raised a ton of money. We’ve still been able to be a successful company in spite of that. I think I was kind of, “Oh, funded competitors. I can do that. I’ve done that before.” But MeetEdgar is also something that Chris could build on his own. The first version, he just built on his own in his spare time. If we don’t send out a tweet, it’s okay. No one’s business falls apart. It’s just a very different space.
Basically, what happened is once we raised that $320K, so we raised the money in January, we had our launch in March. The launch was just like a dud. We put it out there. We opened the doors and not a single person paid for it. Some people had free accounts, but not a single human paid for it which is a very bad outcome—in case anyone’s unclear—not what you’re looking for a launch. We’re going to have to make some big changes if this is going to work.
Rob: How does that feel? You’re a successful founder. You’re a serial entrepreneur. You’ve built up wildly successful online training course and business around training folks for social media. Then you launch MeetEdgar to one of the bootstrapping Cinderella stories, in my opinion, of getting some figures in a year, and then you launch this third app. At this point, you know what you’re doing. How did that feel when it just went completely sideways?
Laura: I was just like, “We picked the wrong market.” That was something we had been worried about when we were developing it. Basically, the whole idea with Ropig is that there are a lot of smaller companies like us with MeetEdgar where we were using PagerDuty but it really wasn’t designed for us at all. Then we saw a lot of other smaller companies on our space that just didn’t use an alert management tool and sort of dug through the logs manually when they had time.
If you look at the Ropig website or look, I don’t know if it’ll be up when people are listening to this, but we had a whole page. The whole point with the page, it said on the headline, “Why would I need an alert management tool?” I look at that now and I’m like, “Duh!” The fact that I had to build that page should have been a really bad sign. Why would I need an alert management tool? Why are you looking in this website. You’re clearly not going to find anything.
I think it’s possible. Obviously, there’s companies that have done it to introduce people to a new idea, a new concept. Again, maybe none would fit with bootstrapping. A fit with bootstrapping is, “You’re already using a competitor, let me show you how we do something different that makes us so much better fit for you.” I think this hurdle of, “You don’t think you need an alert management tool, but we’re going to show you why we do.” It was a failed experiment.
Rob: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That’s the thing with mature markets. You know that PagerDuty wants to expand that market, so they’re probably already putting a bunch of time, effort, and money into trying to convert everyone they can away from digging through logs. I’m just imagining, there is only so much blood that you can squeeze out of that turnip. They’ve already done most of that, probably.
Laura: Again. It’s just expensive. PagerDuty is geared more towards enterprise. Maybe there’s a spot in the market here. Maybe if we have spent another year going to every meetup around the world, and tweaking our product to get a better product market fit, maybe it could’ve happened. It was like that small fundraised combined with a dud launch was like, “This is bad.” Because all of our financial projections were like, “We’re going to be at 1 million revenue in the first year because that’s what happened with Edgar. Isn’t that how all businesses go?”
Rob: Yeah, oh man. You launched in March. You basically stopped operations a couple months later. It was a very quick decision that this wasn’t going to work.
Laura: Yeah. In May, we hadn’t told our investors we are shutting down. Basically, what happened is we launched. It kept going badly obviously because no major changes happened. Again, this coincides with my maternity leave because my daughter was born in June. My cofounder was my husband, also a parent to this baby who’s going to be born. It is not a time where we’re like, “We’re going to work 80-hour weeks now to try to make this work by ourselves.” All the factors in this equation do not add up. I’m just going to shut the machine down so that we can take our expenses to zero. Like I said, we had full time developers on the team. Some of them we were able to move back to Edgar.
It’s funny, you asked me if I’ve done layoffs, I was like, “No, but actually I had.” It’s funny because I didn’t even think of that that was a layoff. It was only one person because the other two we could move over to Edgar. Anyway, I actually had done layoff before. We let the development team go. We shutdown the tools. We kicked off our free users so our costs for running the tool would go to zero. I’m just like, “I’m going to take a few months of maternity leave. Then I’m just going to figure out what to do when I come back.” I don’t know what to do with this. I know we need to stop hemorrhaging money for our no customers and no time to work on this. I’m just going to stop it.
Rob: Put the breaks on. 2018 was not a good year for you. It was great because you had a baby but all the other stuff it sounds like, “Oh, good Lord.” Then you go on maternity leave, you must have been thinking about it for solid two months stressing about it, I imagined. Was it pretty stressful?
Laura: It was stressful. This is what’s interesting about the fundraising. If I hadn’t raised money, it would not have been stressful. For me, that was the element that made it stressful because I was so worried about letting other people down. When you raise money, you paint this picture of how successful it’s going to be which obviously, you believe, especially because all of my investors were friends. I had this dream of writing huge checks to my friends. What would be more fun than that?
If I didn’t have investors, I think, I would have been just like, “This sucks. I don’t want to do this. I’m just shutting it down.” After the launch that didn’t go well, I realized that I just did not have the same passion for this product. This product was much more, “Okay, we see a problem and we think we have the solution for that problem. Maybe there could be a business here.” Our audience with MeetEdgar, “I love entrepreneurs. I love entrepreneurs. That is my world. I love listening to podcasts like this one. I talk about entrepreneurs. I love reading books about it.” That’s our customers that we support at MeetEdgar, so I can live in that world. I have no interest in living in systems administration world. It’s just really not interesting to me at all. If I didn’t have the investors I think I would’ve just been like, “Yeah, this is really not for me.” But because I had the investors, I felt this pressure, “How can I make this work? I need to make this work?”
Rob: Yeah, I totally get that. Had you burned through all of the investor money by that point? Or there’s just some left?
Laura: No.
Rob: Okay.
Laura: That was the good news. We had not burned through much of it at all. The launch, we didn’t do paid advertising or anything. The only cost that we had incurred was just paying the developers for that few more months. When we put the breaks on everything, we had the 75% of the investors’ money still in the bank.
Rob: Yeah, okay. That’s a good thing then. How did you finally make the decision? Obviously, you shut it down. I’m assuming you returned the money to investors. How did you come to that? Was it really just like, “It’s going to take too long. I’m not interested in this space.” Talking to system administrators don’t have the influence, was it just all those factors that eventually led to that?
Laura: Yes. I was thinking, “What’s going to happen with this? How can I make it work?” Any path to make it work clearly involved raising more money—a lot more money. At this point, you can’t just keep hitting people up for another $200K or $300K. I would really need to do institutional fundraising. I had got a glimpse of institutional fundraising doing my friends and family fundraising. By the way, not family in my case, just friends. I don’t have any family with money. Friends and friends fundraising. There’s no rich uncle, unfortunately. I wish.
I had met with some institutional people in Austin and San Francisco, had phone calls. I think as bootstrappers, we have this really negative view of institutional money. It was all true with the conversations that I had. Every horrible stereotype I had about traditional VC was just 100% confirmed. They would ask me how big the business was going to be. They were not interested unless it was an ubersize situation. They were not interested in anything less than like, “I’m going to keep raising money, as much money as I possibly can, as fast as I possibly can.” That was the path that they wanted to see. They’re not interested in profitability, just interested in growth. Because I have seen that little glimpse, I was like, “No, this is not for me. No way.”
The thing that finally convinced me to make the decision, I was talking to a friend of mine, and I’m like, “I really think it’s going to be really hard. I don’t know what to do, but I have this duty to my investors.” He said, “You have a fiduciary responsibility to your investors, to return as much of their money as possible. Knowing everything that you know, if you were an investor, would you ask to just get your money back and get out? Or would you want to continue?” I said, “If I were an investor and I knew everything that I know from the inside, I would want to get out.” I would say, “Thanks, give me my money back. I don’t think this is going to work. I’m out.'” That conversation just absolved me of all of my guilt and stress because it made me see that shutting down was being responsible to my investors.
Rob: Yeah. It’s crazy how a conversation or a single question can get your whole mindset to shift and make a decision. It sounds like you knew the right answer too, but you’re burdened by this other piece, and it was the fact that you felt an obligation to your investors. Suddenly it was, “Wait, the obligation actually goes better.” You actually serve them better if you make the decision you already know you want to make.
Laura: Right.
Rob: That’s fascinating. That’s a good friend. He’s a good friend to keep around. He’s a keeper.
Laura: He is. It was November—I looked up the timeline—it was November 9th that I sent the email to investors saying, “I decided to shutdown and here’s why. You will be getting 75% of your money back.” That felt really good too.
Rob: How did the investors react? Were they supportive? These are folks that you knew, they were at least acquaintances or friends, was there any negative reaction to it or was it mostly like, “Sorry, this sucks. Thanks for the money,” type of thing?
Laura: It was very positive. People said, “It’s very unusual to be able to make this call and return the money. I really respect you doing that instead of just trying to burden through every last dollar.” People were very kind and very supportive which I’m very grateful for.
Rob: Yeah, that’s cool. I’ve found that with angels—angels are investing their own money—they just tend to be more relaxed. I’ve done about dozens of angel investments. I’m nowhere near the VC level institutional money manager in terms of how they view these stuff. I think it’s an interesting callback because you were saying the VC stuff you heard about is true, like the stereotypes you’ve heard are true. That’s why I believe that this world needs funds like Indie.vc and TinySeed to be that in between where we can write checks.
Now, maybe we could’ve written a check as much as you needed. You really did need a legit Series A to compete in the space, but there is an option for people to take money where it doesn’t come with that same stereotypical stigma of, “No, you have to be $100 million. How are you going to get there in three years or less? How are you going to hire 20 people a month?” All this stuff. You and I both know that we can build businesses and help those eyerollable constraints that venture capitalists are going to put on it.
Laura: Yeah. All the investors knew what they were in for. I hadn’t tricked anyone into thinking this was a get-rich-quick scheme. Anyone can afford to lose the money. It was just one of those lessons of always how important it is to be in integrity. I felt like I’ve been in integrity throughout the whole process. I’m still in integrity when I ended the process.
Rob: Yeah, for sure. Laura, we’ve covered quite a bit in this interview. I really appreciate you taking this walkdown bad memory lane of 2018. The positive end of the story is Edgar is doing really well after all the tumult that you went through with it.
Laura: Yeah. We are growing again. We’ve had growth every month in 2019 which has felt amazing. It’s just so good for the team after having such a hard time for such a longtime. I mentioned that it has forced us to be more innovative. I feel like it’s made me a new entrepreneur because I had never been through anything really hard before as an entrepreneur in retrospect. I thought I had, I had little ups and downs, but I had never had, “Okay, we have to do layoffs. We’ve lost a huge amount of our customer base. I’m shutting down this other company,” all happening at the same time.
It’s true that it makes you a lot smarter because you no longer have these false assumption that everything would always go up. You know that if you’re in this for the long haul, you’ll have ups and downs, and that’s okay. It’s not a disaster when something goes wrong. It doesn’t mean that nothing will ever get better and that your company is over forever. I’m really glad that I’ve had this experience of proving that to myself.
Rob: You took several things that looked like absolute roadblocks and turn them into speedbumps that you drove over and to come out to the other side of that successful with the company that’s continuing to grow after all these years. It’s quite a testament to your chops as a founder.
Laura: Thank you.
Rob: Well, we’re going to wrap up today. If folks want to catch up with you, I see your website at lauraroeder.com. Obviously, if folks are looking to manage their social media, they can go to meetedgar.com to see what you’re up to there.
Laura: Yes. I’ll do a MeetEdgar plug. They can enter the coupon code PODCAST and get a free month of Edgar.
Rob: That sounds great. Thanks again, Laura. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Laura: Thank you.
Rob: I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Laura Roeder. I was truly impressed and impacted by her ability to turn roadblocks into speedbumps, and just her fortitude and perseverance in getting through hard things. These are hard things that we face as founders. She really stepped up, made it happened, kept her company alive, and made hard decisions about the next companies. Really impressive.
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