Episode 774 | How a Non-Technical Founder Bootstrapped to Millions in Revenue

Rob Walling:
You’re listening to startups with the rest of us. I’m your host, Rob Walling, and in this episode, I talk with Noah Tucker, the founder of Social Snowball, about how he, as a nontechnical founder, has bootstrapped Social Snowball to millions in ARR. And in the episode, he says they’re between five and 10 million in ARR and growing about 30k of MRR per month. It’s an incredible story about overcoming the challenges of not knowing how to hire good engineers and having a code base that’s falling apart and eventually finding very strong product market fit, moving up market, and now he’s in a spot where he has an incredible engineering org in place, but none of it fell into his lap. And it’s really a story of a lot of hard work, grinding to learn new skills, as well as some luck as there always is. Before we dive in to my conversation with Noah, I want to remind you that if you are doing seven or eight figures in ARR and you’re thinking that you might want to sell your SaaS business, let’s say between one and a half and $20 million of ARR discretion capital is the place that I recommend people go. You can reach out to my tiny seed co-founder, who is the founder and the principal of Discretion Capital. Head to discretion capital.com. Or email AR at Discretion Capital if you want to learn more about how they can help you as a bootstrap, or mostly bootstrapped, SaaS founder looking to sell their company. Also, I want to invite you to microconf remote on May 21, it’s all about early-stage SaaS sales, and it runs from 10 am to 1pm Eastern Time. It’s just three hours. We’re gonna have three presentations, amazing talks by Steven steers, Nick debto and Anastasia Kubro, as well as founder by founder, which is like an online version of our famous microconf hallway track. Again, that’s on May 21 and even if you can’t make it, if you get your ticket now, you’ll get all the recordings you can buy your ticket at microconf.com/remote. I’ll be emceeing it, and I hope to see you there. And with that, let’s dive into my conversation with Noah.
Noah Tucker, thanks for joining me on the show.

Noah Tucker:
Thank you for having me.

Rob Walling:
It’s great to have you here, man. You’re the founder of Social snowball@socialsnowball.io. Your H one is scale your affiliate revenue with creators and ambassadors, and then H two is build and grow all of your word of mouth marketing programs from one place. Now, what that doesn’t communicate is that you focus on E-com.

Noah Tucker:
Yes. Yep. Exclusively Shopify brands.

Rob Walling:
And so this is the amazing thing to me about the Shopify ecosystem is you are a SaaS app that is focused on affiliates with creators and ambassadors, and so that’s a niche and then your niche down only to Shopify, and yet that is still a big enough niche to build an incredible business. Do you want to give folks an idea of where you stand today?

Noah Tucker:
Yeah, I mean the Shopify ecosystem is pretty big, but we have about 2,700 customers a bit more. So those are Shopify brands using the platform. We’re a full-time team of 24 and we are between five and 10 million of a RR.

Rob Walling:
Good for you, man. And did you raise any funding?

Noah Tucker:
No, I mean technically it’s very, very small Angel round, which is just friends and family. It was nothing significant. We burnt it all on Upwork developers in three weeks,

Rob Walling:
So you’re pretty much bootstrapped and we’ll get into our in 2021 around social snowballing. We’ll get into that a little bit, but hell of a business man, five to 10 million. When you started it, so you started it between, it kind of evolved, it sounds between 2017 and 2019. As you graduated from high school, you got into e-commerce and you said that you had your own, you had a brand or two that you built yourself and you ran into this problem, right? What was it?

Noah Tucker:
Yeah, essentially, especially I was young, I wanted to grow these businesses, so these are just random products I was trying to sell on Shopify, it’s supplements, electronics, all this. So one of the growth channels I wanted to explore was influencers on Instagram. And the only thing I cared about at the time was driving revenue with those influencers. So I wanted those influencers to create content post on Instagram and I wanted to be able to incentivize them to do that and track their sales. And believe it or not, there was no tool that was perfectly focused on just that. There was affiliate platforms that were more built for publisher relationships, so not Instagram creators. And then there were influencer management tools, but those didn’t really have a lot of affiliate tracking, so there was nothing to really incentivize them to drive revenue. It was more just about incentivizing them to create a post but not track any of the actual performance of the posts. And for me, bootstrapped, I was 17, 18, 19, I was trying to drive revenue, I needed to drive revenue. There’s nothing else that really mattered. There was just nothing that existed that was an affiliate platform for creators and influencers. And that’s essentially how the idea started.

Rob Walling:
That’s interesting. So it sounds like a Venn diagram where one circle is affiliate management, and I’m familiar with a ton of those. I’ve had founders of ’em on the show. And then the side that I’m still familiar with, not as familiar with is the influencer relationship side. We’ve had several applied to TinySeed, so I’ve talked to ’em, but I haven’t been as intimately involved in those. So would you describe social snowball as kind of the intersection of those two?

Noah Tucker:
Yes, very much

Rob Walling:
So. Tell me this then. What was missing from the traditional affiliate management packages that social snowball does that they couldn’t,

Noah Tucker:
I mean there’s a lot of product specific things which I’m happy to share, but more big picture, just the entire user experience was not as simple as creators needed to be. Creators are like consumers. Think of consumer SaaS, everything has to be frictionless and easy and intuitive, and those are not our customers, so we don’t have to deal with that. We sell to the brands, but everything onboarding, it’s just signing up, generating link and code, receiving a payout. Everything was just very, very clunky, very outdated. But for a professional like PR or publisher affiliate, they’re used to that. That’s their job. They’re fine with dealing with those platforms and it was built for them. For a creator on Instagram that’s never used a platform that’s more confusing than Instagram, it was just unrealistic.

Rob Walling:
So a big piece of it was influencer ux.

Noah Tucker:
You’re

Rob Walling:
Saying these, your experience. Fascinating. So just to paint the picture, you’re like 19 or 20 years old, right? You don’t know how to code and you’ve run into this problem. What the hell made you think that you should go build this? That’s super ambitious.

Noah Tucker:
I think it was just my naiveness. I didn’t know what to expect, and I was maybe running off the high of thinking, oh, well, I built a few e-commerce stores, how different is a software business? And I really did think that. And looking back, I just laugh at myself, but I genuinely thought that, okay, I know how to run a business. You have a product and then you run ads. And I was like, okay, well, for software, I need to hire an engineer to build a product, and then I’ll just run ads and that’ll be the whole business. I’ll build it once it’ll exist. No one will ever have to log into GitHub again, and then I’ll run ads and be rich forever. And that

Rob Walling:
Was it.

Noah Tucker:
That’s what I thought. Yeah, obviously I learned that wasn’t the case pretty fast.

Rob Walling:
I think that should be so when you’re rich and famous or you kind of are becoming that already, maybe this is going to be your course that you sell on X, Twitter and LinkedIn of just profit, build it once, never log into GitHub again, man. So thinking back, are you just like, ooh, cringe knowing now what you didn’t know? Should you still have done it?

Noah Tucker:
Well, I’m glad I did, but if I knew what I knew now, I don’t even know. It would’ve just been a totally different approach because that is what I tried to do. That wasn’t just my idea. I hired an agency and even though we were going to build an MVP, which turned into a complete disaster, but I had an MVP and then I literally started running ads to it, and then I very quickly realized that this is just not how a software business works, but I really went ahead and executed that idea. I saw that through before I realized that this is not how a software business works.

Rob Walling:
And did you do, aside from you needing this product, did you do any type of validation or have any conversations with anybody to maybe be like, yeah, at least there’s five other people that need it?

Noah Tucker:
A little bit. Honestly, at this point, I had been in this e-commerce community for a few years, so I had just friends that were running similar businesses and I would ask them, Hey, have you tried any of the affiliate apps and the Shopify app store? And they were like, yeah, all of them suck. And they shared similar pain points that I shared. So I didn’t do proper market research validation, but I was really confident in it just from my own pain and just the few friends that I reached out to.

Rob Walling:
And so as you said, you hired an agency to build an MVP, which is, yeah, that’s tough. You can get lucky, obviously. And we see, I see MicroConf, TinySeed podcast listener, founders do this, and I don’t know what the number is. I could make something up. It’s probably 70 or 80% of the time. It’s a complete show.

Noah Tucker:
I would say like 95,

Rob Walling:
It might be. It’s a really high number. I didn’t want to overstate it, but you obviously fell in that bucket as well. So when you say it was a show, what do you mean? Can you give us some numbers, timelines, what exactly happened?

Noah Tucker:
Yeah, so I think they charged me something like 20 5K, and this is just, I didn’t have a lot of money saved. This is almost all the money I had saved up from my previous e-commerce ventures. So they quoted me like 20 5K, and they said it would take about three months for them to get the MVP that I wanted live and approved in the Shopify app store. And I kid you not that it took 15 months before I terminated the contract early with them because we still couldn’t get a working product. It was the textbook agency disaster textbook textbook. And at that point then I hired a freelancer on Upwork who was decent enough to get it approved into the app store, and I thought he would stay on full-time, but he didn’t want to join full-time. He had a lot of other commitments. And then I ended up kind of going back into the wild trying to find developers.

Rob Walling:
And I mean, you’ve heard me say on this podcast that this with single non-technical founders or founding teams that don’t have a technical founder. This is the biggest headwind consistently. And we see it with TinySeed founders as well. It’s like, I don’t want it to be the biggest headwind, but it is the product. SaaS products are complicated. They’re more complicated than I wish they were, to be honest. And so I guess, how did you dig yourself out of this? So you’re in the Shopify app store now, but the quote, quality can’t be good. So you probably have a bunch of bugs. It’s probably hard to add features, a bunch of cruft and legacy, this and that. Did you get, I guess to kind of piggyback on that, it’s like did you get customers early when you were in a Shopify app store? And then how did you deal with this basic technical debt from the start?

Noah Tucker:
So we did get customers. I think the one thing that was my strong suit and still is just marketing and growth. And so at first we just partnered with a bunch of influencers that post YouTube videos and Instagram and whatever about e-commerce. And we actually got to 10 KMRR in the first three months. So we had decent growth. And with that 10 KA month, I was like, okay, I can find some developers to work with. That being said, I still didn’t know how to find a good developer because as someone who looks at code and just sees gibberish, you can’t tell a good developer from a bad developer. So I went back to Upwork, which is another mistake again, and I hired more freelancers and I mean, I’m kind of fast forwarding a year at this point because it really was a year of just hiring and firing, hiring and firing these Upwork developers, everything breaking nonstop, customers getting pissed, hiring again, firing again, just like it was a treadmill of that until I found someone who was pretty good and he told me he wanted to be my CTO.
And to me, this was exactly what I needed because I didn’t have anyone that I really trusted as a leader in the engineering side, this guy proved to be probably the best engineer I’ve worked with so far, and he wants to be my CTO. He said he’d take a huge pay cut in exchange for some equity, and I was like, okay, this is actually exactly what I needed. This is the stars aligning. And so this dude was based in Romania, and I told him, look, I’m going to fly to Romania. I want to meet you in person. Let’s sign the papers in person and do a toast and then kick off this partnership. So that’s exactly what I did. I was already in Barcelona with my girlfriend for New Year, so we just hopped from Barcelona to Romania, met with him, spent time, great vibes, signed the papers, and then I flew back to the US and two weeks later, he doesn’t show up for work one day and I’m just like, Hey, are you okay?
What’s going on? And then he’s like, Hey, can we jump on a call? I got to tell you something. I was like, okay. And we get on a call and he tells me that he has been applying to become a priest and he just got accepted and that he’s going to move to a monastery now and he could only work a few hours a week. Is that okay? Was what he said. And I didn’t say this, but I was thinking, no, that’s actually probably the least okay thing you could have possibly came to me with. You just told me you wanted to be my CTO. I thought we’re going all in on this thing, grinding late night together, getting things done. And he’s like, yeah, this is going to be a side project for me now I’m going to become a priest. So at that moment, I started another search for engineers and I waited until the day before his equity vested to let him go, and I let him go. And then I just had no engineers, just zero developers. I couldn’t even log into GitHub on my own and we just had nothing, just me and one customer support person. And that was probably the hardest part of it all.

Rob Walling:
That was one of the low points it sounds like. Oh my gosh. So you’ve spent a year trying to find an engineer. You finally find someone who wants to be your CTO, and the dude basically pulls a, it’s not a full on ghosting, but it’s kind of just drop the mic and exit. What the fuck was he thinking?

Noah Tucker:
Do

Rob Walling:
Still? Who would do that? It’s just such a weird thing to do to someone.

Noah Tucker:
It’s just one of those things that you would never prepare for your CTO having to become a priest. You just never think of that

Rob Walling:
Or bailing on you at all saying, I’m going to be your CTO. We sign papers and then being like whatever the reason to suddenly only be like, I can work five hours a week, this just makes no sense. It’s like, then why did you waste my time? Oh my gosh,

Noah Tucker:
Dude. Okay,

Rob Walling:
So for a couple months then you have no engineers, you in support. The product has to be a rickshaw with good duct tape and bailing wire where you just bleeding customers. Is everyone pissed off?

Noah Tucker:
So believe it or not, we didn’t lose too many customers because myself and the customer support guy, we were just grinding nonstop to keep people happy and just making promises that it’ll get better soon. Honestly, this was one of the hardest periods of my life. I just remember thinking I was just gloomy. I was just down. I was spending all my time trying to deal with these fires at the same time, find another engineer, and at this point I’d already hired 20 engineers and only one of them was decent, so I didn’t even really know what to do. Everyone I would talk to, I’d be like, is this just going to be the same thing over again? So I just didn’t really know what to look for. And then some of our integration partners were reaching out saying, Hey, your API is sending us thousands of requests.
We’re going to turn off the integration if this doesn’t go off today. And I’m like, I don’t know how to turn that off. It was just bad. And so what I did at the time is I just reached out to one of our previous freelancers that was also pretty good at different one, but also couldn’t join full time. That happened a couple of times and I was like, dude, I will do anything. If you could just spend weekends or nights or whenever you have free time fixing these bugs, you don’t have to build anything else. The codebase you’ve worked with us before, just please fix these bugs. And he agreed to it. And so that kind of got us in a slightly more stable place. And then I was just basically begging him to join full time and he wouldn’t because he had a really high paying job that he was at and we couldn’t beat that. But he told me that his cousin was interested in a full-time job and that his cousin is also a great developer and I just took his word for it. And his cousin joined and his cousin is still with us today, and that was employee number one at social snowball.

Rob Walling:
Wow. First.

Noah Tucker:
Yeah.

Rob Walling:
And that was three plus years ago, right?

Noah Tucker:
Yeah. Yep.

Rob Walling:
Yeah. You know how I often say it’s hard work luck and skill. You kind of finally got lucky because you went through 20 devs and one of ’em was eventually good. Is that a little bit of what happened there? I mean, that’s crazy. The odds of that, of his cousin being around with you that long after churning through so many,
I want to step back a second because I think we glossed over something that some listeners will hear and be like, wait, what? You said, I partnered with some influencers, got to 10 KMRR in three months. Now no one does that. So here’s what I want to do is what do you mean partnered with influencers? Did you know already have a network of influencers? Could someone replicate this or was this only something you could do? And it was like 2019, right? It was like six years ago. I just want to dig in a little bit on that so someone might understand how you got, because even getting to 10 K in three months is something, and even with a crappy product, at least you have some money to pay someone to do something at that point versus if you are at one K after three months, maybe you’d have just punted on this whole thing after grinding for a year. So let’s double click on that.

Noah Tucker:
I would say, well, to answer your first question, it’s absolutely something you could replicate today. I talked to another founder just a couple days ago who is also selling a Shopify app and partnered with influencers and did really well with that, so I know it’s something you could replicate. I definitely had a bit of an unfair advantage because I did know some of the e-commerce influencers that would be super relevant to talk about social snowball, and that was the first few influencers. And then from there, I was just doing cold outreach, reaching out, getting people’s emails from YouTube and just reaching out. But yeah, I just asked, there’s plenty of people on YouTube that talk about e-commerce strategy and marketing, and I just asked the ones that I know and then a few others to make a video about social snowball and to try the app and make a case study with it. Just very simple things like that. And it was mostly YouTube videos. I think some people would post on Instagram eventually TikTok, I think this was before TikTok though. And so yeah, that first 10 KMRR just came strictly from those influencers.

Rob Walling:
Got it. And so tell us how, I mean, obviously I can go to your site and look at your pricing, but when you have 10 KMRR, that is brands that are paying you money, are they paying you a monthly fee plus affiliate commissions? I’ll put in quotes. Is that how your revenue works?

Noah Tucker:
Sort of. So I mean, our pricing has changed a lot. We’ve iterated it probably four or five times since. But yes, high level brands always pay us a monthly fee. And then we used to have more plans that do this. Now we only have one starter plan that does this where we, it’s not that we’re charging the affiliate commission up to the brand. I mean we have the software to do it, but the brand pays the affiliate commission directly through social snowball. We on the starter plan only take a percentage of affiliate revenue. 3%. Yeah.

Rob Walling:
Okay. And you’ve also mentioned to me that you’ve listened to this podcast for many years. Do you remember when you started?

Noah Tucker:
Yes. It was actually in the very, very beginning. Dude. Very, very beginning. One of the freelancers that I worked with that things didn’t work out with said, you should check out startups For the Rest Of Us. And I checked it out, and I kid you not from then until now. I maybe have missed one to three weeks ever. And I’ve listened to every week, and I’m not just saying this, I’ve told this to a lot of people, I say this behind your back, this podcast has helped me as a resource more than any other resource in the world, period. It really has. So yeah, so this is an exciting moment for me too.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, thanks, man. That’s a really big deal. It’s super meaningful to me because you know why I do this podcast now and I could just not, it’s to help people and if I can help you, and maybe someday you buy a book or you become a TinySeed founder or you invest in TinySeed or whatever, great. And you know what? If I had just able to help you, that’s cool too. And so, yeah, no, that’s super meaningful to hear, especially given the success you’ve had. So that’s awesome. Speaking of success in TinySeed, I can’t ignore this. So in 2021, you applied to TinySeed, we interviewed you. I remember talking to you.

Noah Tucker:
You did,

Rob Walling:
And we rejected

Noah Tucker:
You,

Rob Walling:
And this is one of, I’ve told you this in the past, but venture capitalists have what they call their anti-portfolio. So if you say no, if Google pitched you and you said no to them and Facebook Zuckerberg pitched you and you say, no, you said that’s my anti-portfolio, it’s the portfolio. I wish that I’d funded with TinySeed. We really don’t have an anti-portfolio. I think there’s a couple companies that have come along that have gotten quite large that I’ve been like, damn, we should have invested. But usually the signals at that point were not. They weren’t great. And it was like, I don’t regret saying no. Right? But you are definitely at the top, one of the top of the list here in the anti portfolio because doing five to 10 million and growing as fast as you are is just super, super impressive. But my memory was that your churn, I think you said you applied, you were around 20 KMRR, which is

Noah Tucker:
Something like that

Rob Walling:
Great sweet spot for us. That’s why we talked to you, and I’m sure you were growing, you were hustling, but I remember your churn being really high and we were trying to, there’s an influencer thing where it’s like, Ooh, is influencer space going to keep going? Is it really a thing? Again, this is four or five years ago, but also I think the churn was a big blocker. Do you have memories of all that going down?

Noah Tucker:
For sure. I remember talking to you and I was super starstruck, and then you told me to calculate my churn and I was like, oh, no, you asked me what my churn is. And I said, I have no idea where would I even look to find that? Especially because we don’t build through Stripe, we build through Shopify’s billing API, which at the time nothing integrated with. Now there’s a platform called Mantle, which is great, but at the time there was literally nothing. So I remember I spent, I think it was, I’m not even exaggerating, two or three hours going through every single transaction and all we had was this raw transaction history of everything that’s ever happened, and I was using a pen and paper and adding things up. I don’t even remember how I did it, but I figured out how to calculate churn literally by manually adding and subtracting or whatever, every single transaction. And then I got a number and it was something super high back then, like 10% or something. So it makes sense that you rejected me. Honestly, that is really high.

Rob Walling:
It’s a bummer. I do remember, I know when I ask in interviews about churn, and if someone doesn’t know their churn, that’s a weird signal to me as a SaaS founder, it is just like, wait. That is probably the number one number I look at. I looked at as a founder as my MRR, because I just want to see it up under the right, and probably my number two number was churn, and so I knew it by heart all the time, and then I think it was higher than 10. I bet I could go back. I think it was probably 15 or higher, and I remember really? Oh, really? Yeah, and I remember being like, uhoh, this could be an issue, but hey man, water under the bridge

Noah Tucker:
Would’ve probably said the same thing. That’s really high. That is really high.

Rob Walling:
It is. And here’s the thing, our signals, none of us are a hundred percent. You just can’t be got to be right. I talk about this all the time as a founder, do a bunch of shit and be right enough of the time that those ones win and that’s what it is. Just because we said no to you doesn’t mean TinySeed doesn’t work, and it also doesn’t mean we make bad decisions. It means sometimes we’re not correct. Sometimes we can’t see the future or sometimes the information presented doesn’t match the filter that we have. I’m curious now you built an incredible business. So you applied to TinySeed, you got rejected. Was that discouraging to you or were you just like, Hey, I’m going to do this anyways, whether they want to be on board or not?

Noah Tucker:
Yeah, I mean I definitely was a bit disappointed for sure, but I was just like, I mean, it is what it is. I can eat rejection all day. Rejection’s not going to slow me down. So I was just like, all right on where we go. So I mean it was definitely a bit disappointing. It was a big listener of the podcast, but it wasn’t going to stop me,

Rob Walling:
Didn’t change the trajectory. And that’s the best founders is when you’re not waiting for permission, you’re not waiting for someone to anoint you that like, oh, you’re going to succeed that me investing in you means you’re going to succeed and me not means you’re not going to. That’s just not true as evidenced by your story. So flashing forward, then finally have a developer full-time, first full-time employee and you start to pivot up market. Why?

Noah Tucker:
Honestly, it was just maybe partially from your podcast, just resources I was listening to in general just really made that sound like an appealing move. Also, the small segment of users that were a bit more upmarket for us were the best customers, obviously highest paying, lowest churn, easiest to deal with, just the basic stuff that you would expect. I’ve heard

Rob Walling:
That before.

Noah Tucker:
Yeah. So yeah, it was kind of a realization I had at some point and at the I was like, okay, there’s probably a lot of things I need to do to make this a reality. And it was really a pivot of the entire business that honestly took about a year from me realizing that and deciding this is where we’re going to go until I felt like, okay, we’re actually in a place where we can work with these bigger brands more consistently. So it’s a combination of product. The app had to have the features that these bigger brands expected, so that was just a slow building, a certain set of features. It was the pricing. We wanted to start pricing higher, but that was actually the last thing we did because we were like, let’s build all the pieces of this and then increase pricing. So product, customer success strategy, I hired someone to be full-time just onboarding.
I want someone hands-on talking to these brands, really building a relationship and helping answer their questions, not just reactive chat support, but proactive onboarding. And that was a big thing for us. Marketing as well. We were kind of relying on ads and influencers and the Shopify apps were before, and that’s how the smaller brands were shopping for software. We needed to find where the bigger brands were shopping for software, and now we’ve really cracked that code and we could get deeper into this, but it’s a combination of partnerships, events in person and online, content marketing, and then just brand and community stuff. What’s worked really well for us, and that was a big learning curve as well, and sales. I started taking more sales calls and actually talking to brands before they would install. So all of those pieces had to slowly be changed that none of these are overnight changes. Then once I felt like, okay, we’re in a good place, switch pricing, we made the starting plan at a hundred a month at the time, it’s higher now, but it was a hundred month at the time, and growth took off much faster at that point. That was a pivotal moment for social snowball.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I want to call out something you said that I think some folks could miss is there’s a difference between raising your prices and going up market. Those are two different things. They can be the same, but a lot of times you are just underpriced for the market. You charge on 29, you can charge 49 to the exact same customer base, same positioning, same product. That’s not what you did. Going up market usually means a whole new customer set or subset that you have to, as you said, build features for build a customer success org for which in your case was one person, build a sales force and then raise prices. It’s complicated and it can take a long time. In season one of TinySeed Tails Gather did this, and it took them, I think it was like 12 months, it may have even been 18 to get there. It was somewhere between 12 and 18 months and they thought it was going to be six, which of course you do. And then they get to the 12 month mark and they’re like, we still don’t have all the features the big brands needed. How did you have the conviction to do that? Because to spend that much time and presumably that much money of your profit, you had to feel very convinced that was the right move.

Noah Tucker:
It was just from the data that we already had. We saw that these bigger brands were doing better. Also, affiliate marketing, sometimes smaller brands, they just don’t have the resources or to get it off the ground. It’s not something that you just turn on necessarily. It takes a bit of work, and the bigger brands had the resources, they had the influencers. It was easier for them to find influencers to work with or if they were running a customer ambassador program than they had more customers to bring into the ambassador program. So everything just worked better for the bigger brands, and that was pretty clear to me. So I think that’s kind of what gave me the conviction, and maybe this is a flaw, but something that I still hold onto today is that we can be the affiliate platform for all kinds of brands. So I never felt like I was letting go of the smaller brand segment.
I just felt like we were also allowing us to play in this bigger league. And so today we run what you would refer to as a dual funnel where we have a self-serve flow for the smaller brands. I mean it starts at 200 a month now, but that’s a smaller brand for us now. And then we have the sales led process for the bigger brands, and maybe if we were to shut off the self-serve, we would do better if we get focused, but I don’t know. I kind of like the idea that we can support any kind of brand.

Rob Walling:
So this next question is interesting. I’m trying to figure out exactly how to ask it, but really at the top level it’s like it sounds like you were right most of the time, aside from the tech developer hiring issues, a lot of other things have gone really well, like the early marketing you got there quick even deciding on the idea, the execution on the idea, the marketing, the sales, then the going up market. There’s a lot of things that went right. How did you do that? How did you learn to do all this? Right? You’re 26 now and you manage a team of 24 people. You’ve never worked a day job where you learned management skill, you know what I mean? Just a broader entrepreneur question, how did you execute on this as well as you did?

Noah Tucker:
I really think there’s no secret to it. I think I just was learning as I went and I was just trying to be a sponge and just absorb as much information as possible. So things like this podcast, other podcasts, I had a couple of advisors that just gave me advice, almost like mentors you could say. And then I would just fail all the time, just like the engineering stuff. We didn’t even talk about what our engineering team is now, which I think we have one of the best engineering teams literally possible. And to think about where we were when I had no engineers, I just got back from Romania, I was depressed. My app was completely falling apart to the fact that we have a nine person, Northern California based killer engineering team today. That is crazy. But that’s only just from aggressive trial error.
Just trying, failing, trying, failing, trying, failing. Okay. I learned a little thing there. Trying, failing, trying, failing. Okay, now we got a little bit closer and I think I just applied that and everything. And same with team building, you’re mentioning managing a team of 24, the first 10 iterations of our team, not just the engineering team, but all teams didn’t work. I hired the wrong people in every department. I had to fire people, people quit. Things didn’t work out. This happened across every part of the business. I think the only thing that I had a good knack for that was relatively smooth was the marketing and go-to-market stuff that was less bumpy, but everything else was failing, failing, failing, failing, and then finally figuring it out,

Rob Walling:
Doing a lot of things quickly and most of them worked out is what it sounds like eventually. Wow. So I do want to hear this story about, you said you have an incredible engineering org now, and I have a note here in 2024, which is last year, hired my dream, CTO is the quote, but how did this come about? It sounds like you’re all locked in Northern California engineering team. Does that fall on your lap or what?

Noah Tucker:
Okay, so I mentioned our first full-time employee, who’s that? Freelancers cousin. He’s still with us today. He’s awesome. But he basically helped us hire an engineering team. So we hired a couple other engineers. We ended up building a functioning engineering team. They weren’t the best engineers in the world, but they were good enough and we were moving along. We were slowly fixing debt. Some things were still breaking the app but still go down sometimes we were building new features, but it wasn’t like a complete disaster At a certain point, I guess last year, probably early last year, I realized this is not what’s going to take us to the next level. And it started to feel like engineering and product became an anchor to the ship again. And while marketing, sales, partnerships, customer success, brand, community, everything else was just sailing us forward. I could feel that anchor just pulling us back.
And so it wasn’t that the engineering team was a disaster, it’s just that it wasn’t the level that I needed to be at the scale and that we were in what my ambitions, what I wanted to accomplish. So I did what I usually do when I want to hire someone out of my league. I just literally went to LinkedIn, went to a lot of our competitors, some of our competitors, the big legacy competitors use our tech stack, and I reached out to a lot of the most senior engineering titles that were either currently or previously at those companies. And maybe I reached out to 20 people, got five that were interested. And then this one guy was literally the most qualified person possible. He was the VP of engineering. The only reason he wasn’t the CTO is because there was a technical founder there. So really the top engineering leader at literally our biggest legacy direct competitor that happens to also use our exec tech stack.
He was the third engineering hire there, and he exited during their series B when they had 200 or 300 engineers. He built the whole org. He knew his stuff, he knew the product, he knew the space, he knew how to build a team, he knew everything, and we got along super well, and he was super excited to join and he joined. And then when he joined, he brought on a lot of the top engineers that he worked with at this competitor as well. And he knew who was really good and they were all based in Sacramento because this company was based in Sacramento, in person. So we just have a bunch of really great engineers in Sacramento led by the CTO, and now I feel like we have a great product and engineering team. I think this is what I’ve been dreaming of for the past five years.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, it sounds like it. And it sounds like you kind of earned it, like you did all the hard knocks to get there. As I hear your story, man, it feels to me, I’m curious what you think about this assessment. I’m going to name two things that I think might be your superpower, is one of them that you just do not give up, and is the other one that you are not afraid of failure or rejection?

Noah Tucker:
I would say there’s are traits of mine. I would say my superpower though, with this stuff is getting people on board with my mission. I think I’m a great storyteller. I think I’m great at getting people excited and it’s not like I’m manipulating or being fake. I am genuinely excited about what we’re building and the path forward. And I think I just do a really good job at getting other people on board that mission. And I think that’s how I’ve been able to hire talent that’s definitely punching above our weight.

Rob Walling:
Yeah. How do you do that? Because I’m a storyteller too, whether they’re on this podcast or just to my team or whatever. How do you get someone like that on board with your mission? Is it just that, well, yeah, I’m curious. Do you tell ’em a story? Are you like, this is where we’re going, join us if you can make it, what is in your head when you’re doing that?

Noah Tucker:
There’s no concrete strategy. I literally just get on a call with them and I tell them, this is the problem we’re solving. This is what we’ve done so far, and this is what we can do. This is where we’re going, this is what we’ve achieved so far. And I think it’s just my excitement. I think I just have contagious excitement when I’m convincing someone to join the mission. And I think that’s really it. I don’t think there’s too much actual strategy to it. I think I just, I’m very, very clear on what we’re doing and where we’re going. To me, the vision is crystal, crystal clear. So if they have questions or if they want to just learn about what we’re doing, it’s not like I have to sit and think I know exactly what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, where we’re going, what the future looks like, in my mind at least. And I get really excited when I talk about it because it’s really exciting to me. And I think people just like that energy and they want to be able to build something cool, and this is their opportunity to.

Rob Walling:
And these days, I mean, your growth has accelerated dramatically. Obviously, if you’ve gone from give or take 20 KMRR four years ago and you’re, as you said, approaching between five and 10 million, what’s it like these days in terms of your growth trajectory?

Noah Tucker:
So I mean, recently it’s been really strong. January and Q1 is always a little bit slow for e-comm because there’s just all the sale periods and Black Friday’s over, so there’s always a bit of contraction and churn there. But we’re right back on track after that. And we’re adding something like 30 K-M-R-R-A month on average right now. Geez. Yeah, I think past 30 days it is right around exactly 30 k. And that’s new MRR expansion.

Rob Walling:
Amazing. Congrats man. Hell of a business. I wish TinySeed could have invested, but here we are. Here we are. Noah Tucker, thanks for joining me on the show.

Noah Tucker:
Thank you for having me. This is awesome.

Rob Walling:
If folks want to keep up with you, obviously they can go to social snowball.io to see what you’re working on. Is there a particular social channel that you hang out on? It does not look like you’re super active on X Twitter.

Noah Tucker:
I’m more of a consumer on X. Twitter. I used to post more, but I’m not super active. But yeah, extra Twitter, I do check my dms probably at least once a day, so that would be great. And also LinkedIn. I’m super active on both, so yeah, either would be fine.

Rob Walling:
Awesome, man. Thanks again.

Noah Tucker:
Thanks for having me.

Rob Walling:
Thanks again to Noah for joining me on the show. And I realized that Noah actually is active on X Twitter. He is N-O-A-T-U-C-K, Noah Tuck. I know Noah and Social Snowball have great things ahead, and I appreciate him joining me on the show to share what really is a pretty incredible story. Thanks to you for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 774.