Playing the Long Game
Hey. Hey. This is Bootstrapped Web. We are back for another episode today. And you know what?
Brian Casel:We're gonna try something new. And we kinda mentioned this on last week's episode, but, you know, Jordan and I have been talking about mixing things up here on Bootstrap Web and inviting, you know, a bunch of our friends into the show and maybe have some recurring guests over the next couple of weeks and just try to open it up today. So today for the our our first of these guests is Ian Landsman. You know, Ian, good to have you on the show.
Speaker 2:Hey. Thanks for having me on. This is great to be the guinea pig here on this slightly modified format.
Jordan Gal:Definitely modified. It's our first psychedelic adventure into the unknown.
Brian Casel:That's right. And we've had guests on before, but I think those were probably geared more as like interviews. That's really, you know, not necessarily what we're going for here. You know, we're just gonna kinda do conversations like we always do, but just bring in some of our friends so that it's not just me and Jordan rambling on every single week. Yes.
Speaker 2:And and I was I was on this show pre pre Jordan. Pre j. Oh, that's right. Yeah. I was the internet.
Speaker 2:I was the interview interviewer.
Brian Casel:I would call
Jordan Gal:it I would call it BJ, but that doesn't that doesn't seem right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thank you, PG.
Jordan Gal:Nice. Well, Brian had a good suggestion so that we're not wandering aimlessly in the desert. So we're at least pointed toward an oasis in said desert. And that's to have an overall theme to just start off as a as a start off point.
Speaker 2:I like it.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Brian, what what are we talking about here? Where are we starting things?
Brian Casel:So what I put down for today was just the long game and what whatever that means, whether whether it's just building a business for for the long term rather than just a short term play, making decisions and and we'll just kinda bat that around like how how we're all thinking about the long game. And and I guess the reason why this idea came up when I when I saw that that you signed up for today's episode Ian, I you know, I was thinking about you and your business for those who who aren't familiar, you know, you you run Userscape. I mean, why don't you not to make this a total interview thing, but why why don't you give people a quick intro?
Speaker 2:Come on. Everybody who listens to my podcast listens to your Right. Podcast. But Probably. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So the Nickel version is I run a company called Userscape. Our main product's called Helpspot, which you're might be more likely to have heard of. It's a help desk app, and we started in I guess, like, I kinda started coding it in 2004, but we launched in, like, late two thousand five. So it's been about eleven years we've been selling it. And yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's a good topic because I started out I did not start out with any long game. I started out as, like, replacing my salary, and that was the only thing I considered. And this was, you know, 2005, 2004. It's way before they have to document Did
Brian Casel:they have the Internet back then?
Speaker 2:Right. Know. It's like, it feels like that sometimes. And all the well, especially the tech and stuff and all the cool stuff the kids play with these days. But but, yeah, I know.
Speaker 2:It was it was crazy. Like, you couldn't get money. Like, there's no money to be had anywhere or anything. So it was it was just, like, how am I gonna make, you know, $55,000 a year? Like, that's what I need to do.
Jordan Gal:Worth the gold.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. So that's what we did and saved up money and and gave it a shot. And that was back in was hard to work on the side on it, so we worked on it. Like, I quit my job to build it and just, like, on a hope and a prayer kind of
Jordan Gal:thing. Who who's we?
Speaker 2:Me and my wife. Oh, yeah. My so my wife kept working and she had a good job. And so she kind of sugar daddied us. And and then, yeah, then eventually, was able to leave her job and we both worked on a company.
Speaker 2:But but, yeah, in the beginning, it was just like, oh, yeah. I'll quit my job and see how it goes. I'll get another job, I guess, if this doesn't work out.
Jordan Gal:Anything is possible with a supportive wife.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. That's like I mean, it would have been, like, impossible
Brian Casel:That's very true.
Speaker 2:Without it. It's it's kinda cool because it's like that it's like having a part it's like it's it's kinda like a partnership, like having a partner in the business, which is great. And on the flip side, it's it's also a negative because, like, you she doesn't hold down the fort when I go on vacation. Like, we're both going on vacation together. And so You guys
Jordan Gal:still together doing it?
Speaker 2:We're still together doing it. Yep. Awesome. Yeah. That's a that could be a whole episode right there.
Speaker 2:It's But a lot to yeah. No. She still works in the business and that's great. It'd be impossible still without her.
Jordan Gal:So How many how many times have you rewritten your code base?
Speaker 2:You know, like, none. Really? Yeah. So that's what actually just doing that now. So, like, year 11, we're, like in the last big release, we started to get into that a little bit.
Speaker 2:And this next major release, it's gonna be a much larger chunk of it that's rewritten. But yeah. I know we've been since so small, and it's like, do I build features or do I rewrite this thing and make it cleaner and better? And it's like, I'm building features because that's like what sells software. So now, you know, it's painful when you get to a certain point.
Speaker 2:So it's the only time to spend a little more time and now we're a little bit bigger. It's a little easier to spend a little more time on it. But, yeah, it's it's always a tough call there.
Brian Casel:Nice. Interesting. You know, just thinking about like, you know, thinking long term about bootstrapping a business, right? I mean, obviously eleven years ago, you were just trying to replace your income going from a job to starting this thing. So like going into this without knowing what the future holds, were you thinking like this is something that I'll try or this this product is one of a few different ideas that I'll throw at the wall and see where it goes and like, did you have any expectation that you'd be spending at least the next ten, eleven years on it?
Speaker 2:No. I don't think I ever thought that far out about it because I've also again, in that like, day and age, there wasn't really a lot of examples to go on. Like, the Internet before that was, like, Netscape and, you know, those kind of companies. And so there wasn't this idea of, like, you're a person. I mean, it was just starting to form, right?
Speaker 2:Like, this idea that you are one person and you're gonna build some software that sells around the world, and it's gonna be like a real business. Like, so we didn't have it quite that long out. And we also, yeah, I had put our I had thought of a million ideas and half built things along the way or whatever, but this was the one where we were like, it seems like the right idea. But we were all in on this idea. Like, if it didn't work, there wasn't gonna be time to, like, build the second idea.
Speaker 2:Like, this was the idea, and it's either gonna sink or swim, and and that's it.
Jordan Gal:Where where did it start? Where where did the idea come from? Like, a real life need or just sample out there in the wild or
Brian Casel:what?
Speaker 2:Oh, real life. So, like actually, Brian just asked about it kind of. So I was working at this college and they still use the mainframe and they use Linux on mainframe, whatever. And then this help desk app that that was running in a terminal window. So you couldn't copy paste into it.
Speaker 2:You couldn't didn't accept email. Like, it doesn't it wasn't modern anyway. And so I'm like, wow, this is a big organization that's over a thousand people using this help desk app that's like totally insane. And so I'm like, if they're using it, like, must be other organizations that are in this insane situation. And so that was kinda impetus, and I was managing people using this app, so I had kinda support management background, and I just kinda went from there.
Speaker 2:So it was definitely definitely a need, which I think is always a good spot for the bootstrapper. If you have a need yourself, it's it helps a lot.
Brian Casel:Yeah. You you really understand the problem. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:I like it. It's a little dangerous though. It's a little dangerous.
Speaker 2:It is dangerous.
Jordan Gal:Because we don't we don't get the big
Speaker 2:bucks. Right.
Jordan Gal:So we yeah. Ideally, you're solving problems for people with big bucks.
Speaker 2:That's your wall.
Jordan Gal:If you're always looking at your problems, you know, you get you get sucked into the the just a different model. Right. Where it's a different level of value, different level of expense, all that.
Speaker 2:For me, it worked out because I was in this bigger organization. So I knew that an organization with substantial resources had this problem. Right? And then I researched it and went through all that kind of stuff and, you know, saw that there was this need and all the help desks had existed, but they were very much like client server and like kinda old school. They weren't really internet enabled yet at that point for the most part.
Speaker 2:So this is all like pre everything you think of now, like Zendesk or desk.com and the big SaaS players. So
Brian Casel:But I think it it is interesting because you you basically leveraged your unique position. Like, already had this like, you were in that world and in that intel you you had that intelligence that, like, most other people can't just say, like, oh, look at these big organizations. They're using mainframes and, like, they they wouldn't be aware of that stuff, you know. So
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think Pete, something people could do at their job. Like, I mean, if you have a job now, like, a lot of people we interact with lot on, like, Twitter and stuff now, or, like, they're freelancers or and those things are maybe a little bit harder. But if you have a regular job at a corporation, I mean, there's shit messed up all over the place in there, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. The the leave and have your ex employer be your first customer, tried and true path.
Speaker 2:Right. And I didn't even get that. We they didn't buy my product, but it was it was still the the impetus for it. But yeah. I know.
Speaker 2:But it's funny because it's so different now. I'm kind of on the long term thing. It's like, so I don't have the long term vision in the beginning, and that's really like, in some ways, it's stymie dust, definitely. Like, I look at you guys, especially in the organization, and Brian was, like, totally insane organizations and incredible. Like, I'm totally envious of that because I'm nowhere near that.
Speaker 2:And it's like when you start as, like, that just you, it's just for me, and I literally only consider it as being this personal thing for me, that impacts the company, like, for so far into the future because, the code's your baby, the app's your baby. Then you it's hard to give some of that stuff away, and you're not even thinking in terms of processes and things like that for bringing people on board. So, like, we didn't hire fast enough. We, even now, are not really as organized as I like to be in different areas. So it does.
Speaker 2:It's kinda like in the DNA of the company right from the beginning. And so I do think, like, that getting having that idea that it could be bigger than you someday early on and having processes for things and everything is really valuable.
Brian Casel:Yeah. You know, I I think there's this like weird balance or imbalance where it's like whenever we any any of us entrepreneurs have like a new idea that we wanna maybe launch as a as a product. Like, it's the the idea stage is like you have this vision that's like this thing could be huge or or or like this like grand vision of like, you know, whatever it's gonna grow into and then and then it can iterate into this and this and this. And then so so there's that. Like, always have that like, you start something new and this could be the next five, ten years.
Speaker 2:Right.
Brian Casel:But if I look back on my on my last ten years, you know, pre restaurant engine, even even that didn't last very long in the grand scheme of things. But the before that, like every year, I would just look at like the the year as a whole, it's like, wow, I launched this, this and this, and then those kind of fizzled out and that fizzled out. It's like these things last so it's such a short period of time when you when you look back on them. I don't know I don't know if what I'm saying actually makes sense here, but
Jordan Gal:It depends. It depends on which ones. It's also dangerous in the ones that stick because then you're in it for five plus years. And if you knew that going in, you may not have said, I'm I'm gonna be servicing restaurant owners for the next five years and that's gonna make me happy as opposed to, you know, think this is a good opportunity to service them. I think it's tough to say in hindsight, it always looks good.
Jordan Gal:It sounds good in hindsight to say, you have to evaluate for the long term and you have to think, do I really want to be in this industry and talking and dealing with these people? But it's really hard to do that when you're in the moment.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But like there there was a time when I thought I was gonna build up a web design agency and that lasted like less than a year. And then I there was a time when I thought I was gonna do a big WordPress themes company that didn't last very or that became just a side project that I forgot about for many years. And then and then there was restaurant engine which was like, this could this could evolve into something for the restaurant industry and then into another niche and then do another niche and just grow the company that way and then that three, four years later that things have changed. So it's just interesting like how the game plan changes over the years.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I'll tell you to add something different to this part of the conversation is the, I did the same thing with a bunch of different ideas and I stuck with some things longer and some things shorter, but everything changed the day I took other people's money. That was like, all right, not going anywhere, not focusing anything else, not trying anything else. You know, it's just 100% forced focus. And I think in many ways that it was good and healthy for me that way to not have an out and not say, oh, it's not growing fast enough, so I should just really move on to something else.
Jordan Gal:They'd like took that off the table.
Brian Casel:Do you mean Cardhook or or Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think that there's a lot to that in the sense of like having something that forces your handle. But I think with now, it's so easy to build things. Right? Like, here, can drop this framework in it.
Speaker 2:And like, if I started with like the Laravel framework, which is what we use, if I started that with that today to build HubSpot version one, I would've been done in like two weeks. Instead, it took me six months of like continuous, like fourteen hour days to build where I could be in two weeks now, because so much is done for you. And that is great, but it also could be a negative because it's like, well, I'll do this thing. Okay. And then, oh, I'm kinda bored with that.
Speaker 2:I'll I'll do this other thing. And then and you know you don't have that, like, startup cost. Like, there's not Yeah. But you're It is like, never get to the
Jordan Gal:never get to the epiphany.
Speaker 2:Right. Like, if we had the forced commitment, it wasn't a technical one. It was partially technical because it took so long, and it was also financial. It was like, we didn't have investors, but we had we were our investors. Right?
Speaker 2:And we were like, this is the money we got to try this, and this is the six months I'm gonna give it or whatever, and see how it goes. But so there is something to that. Yeah. I don't know. It's kinda weird for me because I didn't have like, I had a bunch of ideas that I half started, but they were just, like, things I coded, like, at night, and I didn't never launched any of the stuff.
Speaker 2:So the first thing I ever really tried and launched was Helpspot, and that's just been with me the whole time. So, you know, we did have another product, Snappy, that I I would call it a failure, even though it's, like, still around and everything. But but even that, it's, like, with eight years into the business or seven years into the business, so it's kind of a little bit different than than your first thing. But
Brian Casel:Wasn't was Snappy sold?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I still own a little piece of it, but, yeah, it's Nice. With other people now. But we lost a lot of money on it.
Brian Casel:So it's, like,
Speaker 2:it's sold, but not in a good way. Like Yeah. You know, it's got a new home and people who are gonna take care of it. It's not gonna distract us from what we have to do with Helpspot, but it's it's not it was definitely a money loser in terms of the amount we spent on building it and everything.
Brian Casel:But it's interesting, you know, like Jordan, you said that taking investors help help you stay committed and focused to making that work. I mean, I think it's similar to Ian's story early on. I mean, quitting your job is like Right. Kind of the same kind of pressure. It's like you can't afford to just jump around in that first year.
Brian Casel:I mean, sometimes I wish that I had that sort of pressure and looking back in my history, because what I did was what I think a lot of freelancers and consultants do, which is like just gradually slowly phase down the consulting work as the product phases up. And I mean, that was like a two to three year transition of like, after the first year, thought I was like completely done with consulting and then things slowed down and then I had to take on more consulting and then I had to phase it out again. And it was like, it's just a really draining, maybe too long of a process where sometimes I wish that I had kind of a steady part time job that I could just go to for X hours a week for a company that I don't own. I could just get a paycheck for a while while I build something up and then and then either decide to like quit and and and commit full time. Know, I I wish I would have had something more like that.
Jordan Gal:And now you have it in the form of clients and and employees.
Speaker 2:Well, was gonna say that that's your like commitment. You're in. You're in like you
Jordan Gal:can't just like, I'm just gonna drop it. Like that's that causes this huge outward category.
Brian Casel:That's true. With audience ops now and I've had teammates before like in restaurant engine, but they were it was a much smaller team on restaurant engine and they were all still completely contractors. And in audience ops, we have a couple of full time employees. Ian, I know you have a team of some full timers. And we
Jordan Gal:still have
Brian Casel:a mix of of contractors and full time, but it the team is so large now. Like, I just ran payroll this morning, and it's like that is a lot of pressure.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah.
Jordan Gal:How many how many people do you are you working with, Ian?
Speaker 2:We have right now so it's me and Jamie and then four full time people. Wow. And we don't really use a lot of contractors. I mean, we contract out to, like, agencies a little bit for, like, design occasionally and stuff. But I've always had, like, extremely horrible luck with contractors.
Speaker 2:But I don't know. I think it could be, like, the, like, the they'll have the procedures and things part. Right? Like, I don't know I don't know if it's that. I don't know if it's me or if it's them.
Speaker 2:I mean, a lot of people just, like, I've hired and they literally haven't even shown up to do anything. Yeah.
Brian Casel:So I don't know. No. It's all over the map. I mean, it's it's very very hit and miss.
Speaker 2:I've So I've always been like, I'm just hiring full time. I don't care. Like, it's more money. It's more there's a lot of things that I'm we spend a lot of money on just like accounting and dealing with different states and all this stuff. Of course.
Speaker 2:But at the same time, it's like, I don't care. Because I can't deal with the contractors. Like, it's too in and out.
Jordan Gal:What do they do? Are they all on the tech side? No.
Speaker 2:The two developers and one person in sales and one in support.
Brian Casel:This is kind of a tangent into like hiring, I guess. But the I think the difference maybe, correct me if I'm wrong, Ian, but the difference I think between hiring only full time versus hiring contractors and then making some of them full time, the way that I see it is, if you're only hiring full time employees, you must spend a pretty heavy amount of time vetting them and doing interviews, probably multiple interviews before they come on board, right? Like for me, maybe it's just a weakness on my part, but I hate that process.
Speaker 2:Right.
Brian Casel:I just can't stand the recruiting and hiring and application process. So I just try to get through that as fast as I possibly can. And I do I do spend enough time to really vet like who who's coming on board and who do I put on a shortlist and then But the idea is like, I'm only hiring them as a freelance contractor to start. And it's like sink or swim from there. And then maybe a couple months down the road, ramp up to the point where they're full time and they're already, like they're proven.
Speaker 2:So, I mean, I think for me, there's like a couple parts to that. One is I've hired a lot of people, a number of people who worked at Userscape are people I approached. And so I think that, like, I kinda have I actually had this article, like, half written. I plan to get out this summer about, like, keeping a list of people. Like, as I come across people, I note them and say, this person's really good, and when I'm ready for that, like, I'm gonna go to them first.
Speaker 2:And so that's part of being out, like like, we're involved in Laravel, so we know a lot of developers. And, you know, so I've been able to meet people and and have some people I know who are are talented. But then even when we hire you, I think it's a little bit also the world's kinda changed in the past ten years. Because like ten years ago, I was very much, and I still, I guess, kind of am, but I think it has changed that, like, all the good people have jobs. Like, no there's not a lot of people who are really good who don't have a job.
Speaker 2:And so, like, the freelancers in, like, 2005, it's like, I don't know if those are, like, the people that I wanna employ, you know? And I think now that there's so much more opportunity for people to be freelancers and make a living just doing that, especially on, like, the tech end and some of these other areas, or even even in, like, the writing. Because now, I mean, ten years ago, you couldn't do that because there's no, like, market. But now there's all these markets and all that kind of stuff. So I think that it's different now where that's a more viable approach because you can hire three or four people, and they're contractors, and a couple of them are gonna be really good, and then you can go that that next step.
Speaker 2:I mean and business wise, it totally makes a lot of sense. It's like, it's more affordable. You could you could test drive and just see if, you know, they culturally fit and obviously the work if it's there.
Brian Casel:But still still it like never ceases to amaze me how unpredictable it is. I mean Yeah. A total I've I've been wrong almost every single time where where it comes down to like a like top three candidates for a position. Right. And in my mind, there's one that I'm kinda leaning towards like, they're probably gonna be the rock star out of this group.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And it's never that person. Like that that's the person who doesn't doesn't show up and it's the other person who's who's like the total rock It's just like you you can't predict it until they're actually in the business. You know.
Speaker 2:So if you like, do you let them go often when they're not working out or is it kinda work itself out or do you end up like firing a lot of them or how does that go?
Brian Casel:Unfortunately, I've had to let go about two people. Three. Three three freelancers after probably within the first month of them working in audience ops.
Jordan Gal:At least you've been able to do it quickly.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Exactly. Well, I I'd say one to two months because like one time there was just kind of a quality of work issue, but the other two times it was just like you're not meeting deadlines. And we don't have a crazy deadline schedule. Like we give them probably more time than what most clients give.
Brian Casel:But we do have a production process and like, we just can't Like first time you're late, then it's like, okay, just letting you know this is really important that you've gotta hit deadlines and the second time it's like, alright, this you haven't fixed it. Yeah. You know, so those things happen.
Speaker 2:So I have a question for you actually. For Brian, I think I understand where Jordan would be on this, but Jordan definitely, obviously, you can answer with your your end of it too if I may interview you guys back. But so I think this fits in good with the long term. Because one of the questions I have about audience ops. So audience ops, it's like blown up.
Speaker 2:It's huge. It's amazing story. But I always wonder where, like, the the plugins and, like, I know I think on the last episode, you were talking about, like, a consulting service. And every time I'm, like, yelling at the podcast, I'm like, don't do that, Brian. Just get rid of all that crap and just do audience ops.
Speaker 2:But so I'm, like, curious on, like, the strategy. Like, five years from now, it's like, is it really, like, a software business that sells plug ins? Is it or is it just you know what I mean? Like, where is that going?
Brian Casel:So that's a good question. So the way that I think about the long term vision of what audience should be when it's, I don't know, quote unquote complete, would be it's not just the done for you service. It's the done for you service is probably like one third of it. The next thing that I plan to roll out this year is a training product. Really like exhaustive training product that founders can buy and then implement in into their business.
Brian Casel:Like basically training you on how to build your own in house content marketing team, like giving you all the systems and process that we use, how to hire writers, how to get them into an editorial calendar, assistance and all that. So that's the next piece is to have like an educational arm of audience ops selling like educational products. And then the third piece would be software, which you know, the plugins that we do are we're kind of like dabbling in that kinda and we use the plugins like for our customer, for our clients, but then other customers just buy them as standalone.
Speaker 2:It's like an offshoot of the main business or whatever.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like we had to build them for our in order to implement the stuff that we wanted to do for our clients. And we're continuing to build those out. I think that long term, the plugins, I think maybe in the next year to two years or so, we'll maybe convert those over to some sort of SaaS or just build some kind of new SaaS. But the way that I see the SaaS evolving is, starting with the training product.
Brian Casel:Like that's the next product that we're gonna build. And then out of the training product, we're gonna build tools to help you implement the stuff that we're teaching in the training product. You know, if you think about like what Brennan Dunn built with I know he doesn't own Planscope anymore, but but if you think about it, all of his products really fit well together. So he's got for a while there he was teaching, I mean, still does this. He teaches consultants on how to build an agency, a highly efficient agency.
Brian Casel:And then he had PlanScope, which was a SaaS, like specifically designed to run your agency in the way in like the method that Brennan teaches. Yeah. So that's that like right now, that's kind of the concept of of what audience apps will be. It'll be like essentially the way that I would explain it is, we are a content marketing company and we we and we're aimed at at helping founders do content marketing in a in a effective way. And we do that by either doing it completely for you, that's like the highest price option.
Speaker 2:Right.
Brian Casel:We we can teach you how to do it yourself. That would be kind of like the middle option and and we sell software tools to help you do it. Like that's that's the end game basically.
Speaker 2:Got it.
Brian Casel:Like to the question of like, I've plenty of other people ask me the same question about like, like forget all that stuff. Why like, audience ops, the service is working, it's profitable, it is scaling up, like, why don't you just keep doing that? I was actually just on the Zero to Scale podcast this week with Justin and Greg talking about and we kind of debated back and forth, is it actually scalable?
Jordan Gal:Right. What is scalable? What does that mean?
Brian Casel:And it's a it it really is a valid question. I think it's think the answer is yes, it is scalable and we are scaling up. We have a team of 20 plus people, we've got more than that in terms of clients and has remained profitable and same level of profitability as we go up. But obviously, the more clients we bring on, the larger the team grows and it's really just a matter of preference. I think Justin was asking the question like, okay, so what does this business look like once a $5,000,000 business?
Speaker 2:Right.
Brian Casel:And that's gonna look like a team of hundreds probably.
Speaker 2:And
Brian Casel:like it's a question of like, do I wanna scale to that point and probably not. So that's why I wanna make the long term game be, okay, let's launch these more scalable products.
Speaker 2:But do you think
Jordan Gal:The definition of scalable that that's Well, I just think that word.
Brian Casel:I guess I mean more profitable products.
Jordan Gal:Right. So it sounded to me like Justin was looking at it from a software point of view and saying scalable is increasing efficiency, right? As you grow, you can service more and therefore make more. There's not a direct relationship between what you need in terms of resources inside the company, how much revenue you can make. Where in a software company, 10 people can make a million dollars a month and 20 people can make $20,000,000 a month.
Jordan Gal:So it's really, really efficient. I think that's what he that's what he kept referring to as scale, whereas the the word scale means nothing without context. It's like, how do you how do you grow a a profitable business is really the only question we're asking.
Brian Casel:The way that I think about it may I don't know if others would agree or not, but the way I think that it's the ability or not to actually grow the business, like scale it up. Like if I What does that mean? Well, just like A
Jordan Gal:$100
Brian Casel:a month? Because what I was a few years ago as a freelance solo freelance web designer, like that was not scalable. Right. Right. I was because I would run out of hours
Jordan Gal:ability of to achieve fuck you money.
Brian Casel:No. I mean that like, I could not unless I started hiring people, but many freelancers don't take that step. You're just selling your hours in the day and there's a limit to that. And at some point, like, you couldn't you can't scale up even if you want to. Like, that's that's how I think of scaling up.
Speaker 2:I was wondering so what I was thinking about with Audience if I can armchair quarterback your business for moment.
Brian Casel:If I
Speaker 2:can just take take over your podcast here. It's like, instead of those software products underneath or like the training stuff as like the, like, tier up to, like, Audience Ops as it currently is, is, the top tier. I was kinda thinking Audience Ops, I envisioned it when I think about Audience Ops as, like, what you do now is the bottom tier. And, like, you're gonna go up from that. You're gonna have a thing that, like, when you deal with Merck and Merck comes to you and says, write content for us, like, that's a million dollars a year for you to have specialists in pharmaceuticals who write content for Merck.
Speaker 2:And then you have something in between for you know, it's like right now, it's more like smaller SaaS companies and whatever. I don't know all your customers, but it's that level. It's like a couple thousand bucks a month. That's like a no brainer. Great.
Speaker 2:And then like it scales up to like more niche, bigger organizations that
Brian Casel:you might scale it up to to like higher priced contracts for Right. Essentially the same well, it might be different work for for like an enterprise kinda
Speaker 2:Right. Like, might they're gonna want different things from you. Like, they're gonna need specialists probably or whatever. But if you charge a million dollars a year, great. You're gonna go find four writers who know all kinds of stuff about pharmaceuticals, and you're gonna write them articles about drugs or whatever.
Speaker 2:And, like, that's gonna be, like, the high end But I I see clientele.
Jordan Gal:That sounds like just a price issue. It's the same service.
Speaker 2:Right. It's a very similar service. Probably been more probably like a dedicated project. I mean, that they the upper upper tier, right? There's more more people involved, but it's also much bigger price tags.
Brian Casel:I think it's a valid point, but I think the reason why I I'm not as attracted to that plan is is I think two reasons. Number one, it sounds more like an agency and I do differentiate between like having an agency and a productized service.
Speaker 2:Sure, how?
Brian Casel:An agency basically does all this different custom work for different requirements, which is harder to scale, harder to streamline when you're doing all this custom variations. What we do now is very standardized across all of our clients.
Jordan Gal:That's number number agency that does a product or service. I mean, the word agency is.
Brian Casel:I mean, it's semantics, but I just think that like a digital agency, I used to work at some web design agencies where it's like 20 different clients want 20 different things and the profitability goes down the toilet because you're just adding all these extra hours and just managing these variables. And then you gotta hire these like specialists just to serve like one or two clients and like, that's not the most efficient thing. But really the I think the bigger reason is from a marketing perspective, I'd rather continue to just hammer on, really just grow this one audience, are b to b software companies, SaaS founders, small to medium growing businesses rather than have a fragmented audience to sell to. If we have this one core audience of software business owners and we can sell them a whole product line to and just keep growing that one audience. I see that as more of a more of an efficient way to to grow.
Speaker 2:I mean, you could still do the same thing even within that audience. Right? Like, I mean, just to take a way out there example, like like Salesforce could be a client. Right? And they could they could you could be doing a whole bunch of content for Salesforce, which would still be b to b, SaaS, and all that, but it would obviously be on a whole different scale.
Speaker 2:I I assume I'm sure, especially in b to b SaaS, you will hit people who wanna do it themselves or whatever, obviously. But I don't know. I think there's gonna be a lot of people I could see a lot of people who don't want to do it themselves too, you know. Like, I I think that's
Brian Casel:There definitely are. That's right. There are clients, you know.
Speaker 2:Even in big companies. Like, lot of times in big companies, they don't they don't wanna hire a whole team of people. Like, they wanna just spend a half million dollars, and they know they should be doing this thing. And it's much easier to spend a half million dollars than to hire, like, three people and Yeah. Learn how to do it, and all that stuff.
Speaker 2:Well,
Brian Casel:that's even where
Speaker 2:staying very nichey, like, don't do whatever. You're not building their website. You're not doing anything. You're just writing content, but it's for them and it's at a bigger scale maybe or higher Yeah.
Brian Casel:Well, I I think and not to make this whole episode about me and audience ops, but It's
Speaker 2:your podcast.
Brian Casel:Well, you know, the the thing with the the training product is kinda aimed at two things. One, if your business is like a highly niche specialized industry where it's just so technical or so specialized that it just doesn't make sense for our team to write for that.
Speaker 2:Or you're not ready for it yet.
Brian Casel:Well, I mean
Speaker 2:Like you don't wanna go that far with it yet.
Brian Casel:Yeah, I mean, and we have certain processes now to dig into the more people who are more on that niche side of things and kind of bring them more into the process of like researching topics and things like that. But the idea with the training is like, if it just makes more sense for your business to do it in house and have someone embedded in your team doing content, here's the process to do it effectively in a strategy, the automation workflows, the back end funnels and all that. So I think it's a combination of like, if your company has grown to a point where it doesn't make sense to outsource it, you wanna do it in house or your company is like bootstrapping and you can't necessarily afford outsourcing, and the done for you will price will increase once we have these other products. That would make sense.
Jordan Gal:I think the reason that strategy or that whole vision works is because you're taking one problem and you are, the whole company is aimed at solving that problem. That's There are different ways to solve it. And if you have different entry points for people to use your methodology and your point of view on how to solve the problem, it's just, I think it's great to start off with the product or service part.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I've written about that a lot is like, that's the way to self fund and launch the company, but not just from the funding point of view, like obviously with product or service, you can grow revenue pretty quickly, but you can also establish yourself, like plant your flag, like we are a content marketing company or we are a lead generation company or we like, and then you start to grow an audience around that and start to gain credibility around that. And then a year or two years later, when you're ready to launch a training product or a SaaS, you've got this list, you've got this credibility in this space, like it's much easier
Jordan Gal:to An experience in
Brian Casel:the market. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's that's the the big thing. You don't know every detail of what the market wants until you really start interacting.
Speaker 2:Don't you think it's funny that every single freelancer consultant is dying to have their own SaaS? Like, they don't want their own SaaS.
Jordan Gal:They're wrong. They're totally
Speaker 2:I know. I tell them all they're wrong all the time. And, like, I don't know. I just feel like like, they're all, like, we're making so much money. It's even like Brian.
Speaker 2:We're making so much money. We're super successful. But we have to have a SaaS. And I'm like, why do you have to have a SaaS? You don't have to have a SaaS.
Speaker 2:Like, you're making a lot of money. Be happy. It's not bad. It's not necessarily better on this side. I can tell you there's a lot of times where, like, it's, like, July 4, and somebody's thing goes and starts freaking out and like, they're calling you and people are flipping out on you and you wanna be like at a barbecue instead you're working on a server or
Brian Casel:whatever. And the other thing that I see a lot, even within the productized service world is, there's everybody wants recurring revenue. And we all know how great recurring revenue is in theory and it's ongoing revenue. I think it downplays some of the value of having a one time purchase or selling a one time purchase. I mean, number one, it gets so much easier to sell a one time purchase than a recurring, even if the recurring is only $50 a month.
Speaker 2:Definitely.
Jordan Gal:Hard to find a
Brian Casel:few 100 people. Actually easier to sell a $500 one time thing than a $50 a month thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like a human psychology thing going on there.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And like if you're sell a one time purchase, you get all the lifetime value upfront. Whereas a SaaS, like every SaaS deals with churn. Every sort of recurring revenue business deals with some sort of churn.
Speaker 2:That's why I feel like they miss the idea that like, there's such a line, the SaaS creates such alignment between the customer and the business that that it's much harder you because don't have to just convince them one time. Every month, you're convincing them that that stay with you. Stay with you. Stay with you. Stay with you.
Speaker 2:So, like, there's a tremendous support, you know, burden there and ongoing, like, work The competition is ridiculous. I mean, there's also a ridiculous competition.
Jordan Gal:They're amazing, amazing companies. And when you have someone come into your space and raise $8,000,000, like, they're going to beat you on a lot of things. Yeah. They're gonna have better stuff. Like, out of the list of 10 things, you're not gonna be able to win on on all 10 of them.
Jordan Gal:You're have to deal with it. And and a lot of times, like, I think about rare.io, this amazing email software. They sell it for, like, $29 a month. Like, are you doing? What are you guys doing?
Jordan Gal:You know? And it blows other software out of the water and it's like, what are you guys what are you trying to do? You're trying to get a 100,000 customers? Like, that's not gonna work. But they're funded.
Jordan Gal:So you don't have to worry about profitability for three years. And you got to deal with that. You got to deal with people saying, so it sounds like you do a lot of what rare.io does, but their template builder is better and they have like four people on support. Right. And you're three times as expensive.
Jordan Gal:It's like, Yeah. I know. I I I know all of that.
Speaker 2:Well, don't think bootstrappers, especially like, there is this whole thing now where you have to really think so carefully about your niche and like what your unique proposition is because you can't really go head to head with with them. You know, with the big funded players, it's really hard. Like, they're gonna outspend you everywhere. They're gonna have more features. The features are gonna be better features.
Speaker 2:Like, they're gonna be more polished. So I think you have to, like, pick really carefully.
Brian Casel:Yeah. You've got to position yours or you've got to find ways to position yourself differently. I mean, you look at, like, Drip and ConvertKit up against the Mailchimp and the InfusionSize and, you know
Speaker 2:And even then, they've they've positioned themselves well because Mailchimp doesn't really do what those guys do. You know what I mean? Like, now, they could. And if they do, I think that's gonna be bad for them. Although, I think maybe they're both big enough now that, like, they're not gonna go out of business if that happens.
Speaker 2:But but yeah, like find that niche like the who Mailchimp didn't think it was worth going into like that level of like automation or to make it so simple like ConvertKit does or whatever. Like there's those
Jordan Gal:I I
Brian Casel:do think there's something like going looking inward to see like, what am I personally most like best positioned to do? And I think looking at both of your stories, Ian, like you were talking about earlier, you worked in an enterprise setting where they needed a help desk solution. Jordan, you built and launched and sold an ecommerce business and now you do a product for ecommerce companies. That was something that I think I was probably missing in restaurant engine. It was like, I had no personal connection to the restaurant industry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's hard,
Jordan Gal:no advantage.
Brian Casel:That's what led me to kinda just make finally come to the decision like this is not the long term play for me. Audience Ops is, at least that's how I think of it right now, because it's for this audience that I can actually connect with. Like people that I talked to at MicroConf and other software business owners. This one is much more about thinking long term. Like I could easily spend five plus years on this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, like, being just aware of, like, your surroundings is so important, and it's so hard when you're, like, deep in it, you know. But, like, for us, one of the things that's happened is, like, we launched Helpspot, and our thing was kinda like your help desk in your browser. Even though you it was only on premise, so you had to download it and install it, but you didn't have, like, a special client or whatever, like, you just use your browser. Great.
Speaker 2:Okay. So that was new. Everybody liked that. Great. You know, all big name companies are using us, all that cool stuff.
Speaker 2:Then, like, you know, the big SaaS players coming in in like 02/1989, and all that. And now now, obviously, that's not new. Like, being in your browser, like, that's just like table stakes. Everybody gets that. Right?
Speaker 2:Like But now, an interesting thing is there's no new help desk competitors that allow you to be on premise. So now, like, we've got that niche, like, in a sense because we still let you download it and install it, and for a lot of companies that's an important thing. Like, they have regulations or they just have a big IT department and they want to justify it. Right? And so That's interesting.
Speaker 2:So they don't want to use Zendesk or whatever. And or they can't. They actually can't use it. And so, now we have that little niche that we've been working more on playing up, where that used to be a thing we had to overcome. Like, yeah, you have to install it.
Speaker 2:I know you don't want to, but it's better in these ways. That's great. Now, that's like a plus for a lot of people like, hey, you can install it yourself on your own servers and manage it and back it up, and like, isn't that awesome? So, and have a SaaS version now, and we got a lot of customers who use that, but, you know, there's still a fair chunk that, you know, more than half who's are on premise. So and that's an area where nobody's gonna build Zendesk isn't gonna build on premise Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's not gonna happen.
Brian Casel:And again, the SaaS companies don't wanna build a non SaaS version of their
Speaker 2:Right. So can you do stuff as the little guy that somebody else just doesn't wanna do because it sucks and it's crappy and you have to fix people's IIS and you have to fix their exchange connection. Blah. All this horrible support stuff we have to do that we wouldn't do if we were SaaS, but on the flip side, like, that's the value. Like, nobody else will even do that at all for them.
Speaker 2:So, you know, it's it's interesting.
Brian Casel:So Jordan, Jordan, where are you at on this with CartHook? Because I I know that we we've touched on it a little bit, but I I still I'm kinda unclear. Like, what what are you thinking in terms of, the long game? Because so you started with cart abandonment and and now you you recently launched the the Shopify checkout product.
Jordan Gal:Where Yeah.
Brian Casel:What where are things going from here?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I don't I don't mind talking about it now. Things are more out in the open finally. Freaking Right. Stealth is the worst thing ever.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So so there's two two things to this. I don't think about the big picture long term as just Cardhook. I think about like what where's Cardhook fit into what I'm actually trying to do. But to start off with the long term vision of Cardhook, think it's a lot like Ian says, know, you're in a market and then you just pay attention and you follow your gut on where you should go.
Jordan Gal:So a few months ago when we were faced with that decision of should we stick with card abandonment or expand to a new product, I just saw the writing on the wall where card abandonment is, it's a great place to be because it makes people money in a quantifiable way. So they keep paying you because they're happy because you're making the money. So it's a good product. The nature of it is good. At the same time, so much competition has come in and everyone's undercutting each other on price.
Jordan Gal:And so that helped make the decision of, hey, I see this other opportunity in this other product on in terms of the checkout. So thinking down the road, one, two, three years, it made sense to get into another product. Now we're in another product. The funny thing is that we're actually building the product we're building now isn't just the checkout, it's going to turn into a funnel builder and Shopify will be one of our integrations. It's not going be a Shopify product, it's just Shopify is the right place to start.
Jordan Gal:So we have the checkout page replacement and then along with that, we're going to have a landing page builder and so people will be able to create a landing page, checkout page, upsell and downsell pages, and then a thank you page. So it'll be a standalone platform for e commerce. It's a funnel like ClickFunnels for e commerce basically, And then it'll connect with platforms like Shopify. So it'll put the order data into those platforms so people can still work in those platforms and kind of treat the orders like any other order. We see that as lowering the barrier.
Jordan Gal:Instead of saying, you're currently selling on BigCommerce, come off of BigCommerce onto our platform, that's a big ask. We want to kind of lure them in by saying BigCommerce Shopify limits you in the marketing strategy that you want to implement, and our platform is marketing first. So all this funnel strategy, all these landing pages where you want to send your paid traffic, that's what we want to do. Then the longer term vision is, well, I make all my money on CartHook's platform and I'm just using BigCommerce as the backend. Once CartHook starts to build in these cart features like shipping, inventory, all these other things, people will be able to start coming onto us as standalone platform itself.
Jordan Gal:So that's kind of where things are headed.
Brian Casel:Nice. Actually, I hadn't thought of it that way where that's the long term play to actually build it into some sort of standalone ecommerce platform. And obviously, that's like too huge of a thing to do Exactly. From day one and maybe now it's still too a little bit too premature for that, but I like what you're doing where where you're kind of evolving like the initial product that was kind of like a plug in and those are turning it now they're turning more into like features a larger product and then those that larger product is eventually gonna be like like by by the time you have all these features in place, Cardhook will have been around long enough that you've built up a strong enough customer base and audience and footprint in this industry that launching or announcing that you're now a standalone platform is not as huge of a hurdle as it would be from day one.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, and we kind of don't, we don't even need to announce that we're a standalone platform. It just kinda sneaks its way into, well, you know, why should I keep using this when this this is already doing the job? But that's going to take time. I could go down to San Francisco and start begging for $3,000,000 or we could do this incremental thing where it's, okay, card abandonment brings in revenue. Good.
Jordan Gal:That covers a lot of the expenses. Now the checkout product will hopefully get us past profitability. And then the next thing and the next thing and so we just have this stable I
Brian Casel:feel like this is, I think the smarter way to go about People love to talk about the VC versus bootstrapping or fund strapping. And it's not just black and white where like, if you take millions of dollars in VC, you can get to the same result, but faster. Like, no, not necessarily. I think that route, just talking about what we're just talking about here, it skips the process of building up a footprint and an audience and a customer base. And that and like, no matter what, that's gonna take time.
Brian Casel:So if you if you know going in, like, you you have to spend x number of years in order to to reach that level of notoriety. Like, VC money money doesn't guarantee that you'll get there that fast.
Jordan Gal:No. But it does accelerate things. Like, we could really use four developers right now. Instead, we have one who's
Speaker 2:But there is something that hunger does to you, though. Like, it does help guide you potentially.
Jordan Gal:The focus is the end result. The end result isn't how to get to a $100 a month in your business. The end result is how does all that money end up in my bank account? The reason to to go or not go down to Silicon Valley and ask for VC money isn't about will you get to the same place in terms of the business? Because there's no question if I had a million bucks in the bank account right now in the business and we'd hire, we would go a lot faster and the revenue would grow a lot faster.
Brian Casel:Well, in terms of the product, yes. But the marketing wouldn't scale at the same rate.
Jordan Gal:I don't care about the marketing. I care about my bank account. And if you take on $2,000,000 at evaluation of whatever, 6 or 8,000,000, you can't make a lot of money unless you sell the company for 30 or $40,000,000 in not going that route, if somebody comes along and offers you $10,000,000 for the company, a whole bunch of that's gonna end up in my bank account. So $5,000,000 after tax in my bank account, if that's the actual goal, going down to Silicon Valley and ask them for $2,000,000, that actually pushes the goal way off. It makes it much harder to achieve because you need to sell for $30.40, $50,000,000 in order to make the return.
Jordan Gal:So I only see it as as a game
Brian Casel:I I just maybe I'm just looking at, like, more of a simplistic too too simplistic of a view on this, but the the VC route, I feel like adds much higher risk of the whole thing flopping and going down to zero than the slow multi year bootstrapping or or fund strapping approach because you're because you putting that time in, you're you're just naturally going to stick around, which means sticking around in the minds of customers in this market. Whereas all the how many v what what, like 90 plus percent of VC backed companies nobody has ever heard of and they go in and out within six months. Know?
Speaker 2:But you're gonna make decisions based on revenue versus making decisions based on yeah. Getting to $50,000,000
Brian Casel:valuation. Yeah. And you can buy engineers and buy a product, like buy the building of a product very quickly with with a with a VC backed company, but you can't just, yeah, you could spend millions on ads, but that's not just gonna instantly grow your successfully grow your audience, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. But but there's no we can't pretend that it doesn't help a lot. I I think what it does, it doesn't
Brian Casel:Yeah, but it it doesn't
Jordan Gal:It's part of the decision making process in many ways.
Brian Casel:It doesn't get people talking about you, like authentically.
Speaker 2:But I also think, I mean It's
Jordan Gal:different way.
Speaker 2:It could be tricky like, yeah, like, where you've already kind of pivoted successfully here a little bit. You're not totally off of Carhook. It doesn't sound like right, but you're kind of doing both. Like, that would be harder if you had a bunch of money probably in some ways. Do know what I mean?
Speaker 2:Like, you would have been really doubled down on Carhook, and you might not have even been able to take that opportunity. And you'd have to justify it to people too. Right? Like, you'd have to be like, I'm making this huge change in our business. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think it's the right change.
Jordan Gal:We have investors.
Speaker 2:It's not VC. I know you have I know you have a little bit of, right, Angel? Like, your friends Right. And family kind of
Jordan Gal:Even even that, there was a hurdle to explain this stuff. Are you are you telling me you're building a new product now? So so that that was a hurdle.
Speaker 2:But even, like, when you're this new vision, I mean, I think I really like the idea of just, like, the landing page part. I mean, landing page for ecommerce, that seems like a great idea. Like, forget even the whole being the whole store. Like, I think there's like I mean, it's like Leadpages or any of these guys. I know that do more now, but, I mean, they were multimillion dollar businesses when they were just, here's a landing page.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Right now, all these pages are thought of in the context of marketing. And picking up email addresses. And everyone right now is spending money on Facebook and Google AdWords in their e commerce business to sell physical products, and they're sending them into the product page inside the site. Right.
Jordan Gal:That's like sending it to your features page on your SaaS business. You don't want to do that.
Speaker 2:You want
Jordan Gal:to send it to a dedicated landing page where there's a decision or no decision. I
Speaker 2:love that idea. Mean, I think that right there is the only thing I'd be thinking about. The rest of it, if it happens, whatever, who cares? Getting there with Gotta get
Jordan Gal:to with one developer
Speaker 2:That's true.
Jordan Gal:Means you can't you can you can you can say, you know what? We're we're not gonna put anything into the market for three months. Or we can say, let's get the checkout page. And then let's add upsells after it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Right. So right now we have the checkout page and then we're adding upsells after it and then we're gonna come out and say, a minute, totally now it's like for real. Now it's like
Brian Casel:I think the sequence of what you're doing makes a lot of sense because it it was cart hook, cart abandonment. It's all about the shopping cart. Now it's the checkout page, which is still very interconnected with the the checkout experience. So like you're you're you're going Optimization. Essentially where the transaction is.
Brian Casel:Know, it's it's the most critical part.
Speaker 2:Selling off like the cart hook part or something like that? It's I know it's hard to sell like a when it's not,
Jordan Gal:you know Well, it's crossed our minds, but but right now it's the savior.
Speaker 2:Right.
Jordan Gal:Right now, it it brings in money and it and it and it keeps growing and so that kinda allows everything else to happen. Yeah. And the truth is we, that's a differentiator now because we include our card abandonment software in our checkout page. So now you can get rid of your other one that you pay 50 or $100 a month for because you get to put it. And I just did a webinar last week and one of the bonuses was a full year of card abandonment for free.
Jordan Gal:And people pay us, you know, a 100 to $1,500 a month for that. And so that helped make the sale for the other. So it's all kind of altogether. But here's the thing that, so what we just talked about is the long term for the company, but the long term for personally, and I think this is maybe why I argued so much about the VC and the advantages of money, is because my hope, my intention is that CartHook either kicks off enough money or gets acquired for enough money so that I can come in and compete with companies like CartHook and Helpspot and blow them out of the water with money. But do the same thing that they're doing and beat them because of resources because I think all of us right now are, we're vulnerable.
Jordan Gal:We're all vulnerable. We're all making somewhere between $10.50 grand a month, somewhere in there, which is just, that's not enough to compete when you're paying salaries and all that. So a company that identifies something like Cardhook and says, I'm going to deploy even something like $500,000 hire a few people and blow them out of the water in six months. I I wanna be able to do that with the money that Cardhook kicks off or or creates.
Brian Casel:The way I think about it is I think you probably spend more time thinking about this than I do. The the long, long, long game. Right? The but the I just think about it in chapters of the career or of life or whatever. Like right now, we're I think we're all like entrepreneurs focused on mainly one business at a time.
Brian Casel:The next chapter, year years down the line, after you've had some successful things under your belt, things have sold, now you have money in the bank, then it becomes like the the next chapter is like empire, where you're just like allocating you've got you've got all these different businesses that, or maybe you go into investing, but
Jordan Gal:Okay. Here's a funny analogy though. What we're talking about right now is being in the bootstrap SaaS market and keeping our eyes open, right Ian? And looking around at what's happening and where the opportunity is. And the opportunity that I see, and this is incredibly cynical and I feel like a dick when I think about it and I say it, but whatever, it's the truth.
Jordan Gal:The opportunity right now is a lot of these bootstrap SaaS businesses are the people running them are so talented and so awesome. But there's the gap between where they are and the VC world that ignores them because it's not going to be a $100,000,000 business. There's a gap in between those two and that's where the opportunity is. The opportunity is to say, HelpSpot HelpSpot is a bad example because it's been around for a while, but we see these new businesses that come out and within six months they get to like 10 ks in MRR and it's one founder and that guy's freaking awesome. But if you came into the same market with $500 in the tank, that person has now identified that there's a market there and there's a need and there's a starting point.
Jordan Gal:To effectively copy what they're doing and then innovate and then push money into that, I see that that's the opportunity. It's all these pioneers in bootstrap SaaS playing in markets that the VCs ignore, but there's still a lot of money. But the fact that, you know, that we don't have money behind us to push in the grand scheme of things, $500 in the business world is not much. To an individual, it's a lot.
Speaker 2:But do you think that that's I wonder if that's a real opportunity in the sense of, like because if it's if it's a really big opportunity and you have 500,000 to put in, then there's somebody with 2,000,000 to put in. Do know what I mean? Like, there's somebody else with more money. There's always gonna be somebody else with more money. So I wonder if that's like
Jordan Gal:the money's ignoring it because because people don't look at a lot of the businesses that people like us are running, and they don't see them being able to get. You you can't you can't put in $2,000,000 into a business unless you think it can sell for at least 20,000,000.
Speaker 2:Right. But so that I wonder if some of these things are, like, niches. So, like, let's say, like like, you're not gonna build you're not gonna put a million dollars into a on premise help desk app. Right? That would be a hard thing to do.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's possible and somebody could try, but I think it's unlikely that somebody would do that. Or, like, building up 30 people the right content. Like, some of these things are just hard and not sexy and not the upside is not a billion dollar business. And so I do think that gets tricky when you're investing to, like, be to make money in that in between zone is actually really hard, which is part of the reason why I think nobody's there. That does exist.
Speaker 2:It's yeah. It's hard because, like, if I only put 500,000, it's probably not enough. Once I start to get more than that, now I yeah. Now I need to get $3,050,000,000 out because otherwise, like, we we're gonna lose money as investors.
Brian Casel:And, you know, look looking at that that middle zone of, like, these successful SaaS quote unquote successful SaaS companies. Right? I I think all of them originated, like we've been talking about from some sort of like like leveraging a personal insight from from a previous experience.
Speaker 2:Like, kind a unique advantage.
Brian Casel:I mean, I'm doing audience ops now. It's content marketing because in my previous company, we used almost exclusively content marketing to grow that. And that's what led into the idea and the the ability for me to even think about this to do for this company. Restaurant engine, I was using WordPress pretty heavily before that for client stuff. And that's what led into doing that as a business.
Brian Casel:And like, you know, with ecommerce experience. So like and and I think obviously there's a market for angel investors and VCs to just invest in in these small businesses. But I I don't know about the idea of of just I I don't know if this is where you're going with it, but like CEO ing 10 different businesses. Like,
Jordan Gal:I think incubating would would be Well,
Speaker 2:you know, it's an interesting idea that I I know I know two people who I know who are doing this, which kind of gets out what you're talking about Jordan, which is rather than, alright, you identify this company that's at 10,000 MRR and building a competing company. Right? What they're doing is they're just buying that company.
Jordan Gal:Because the SaaS founders Is that JD?
Speaker 2:Yeah. JD. I know that. I just do. JD's So just buy a bunch of these little company.
Speaker 2:Like, you know, you're in in three years and you're at $10,000 a month, you're like, I'm done with this. Like, it's never going anywhere. Like and if you have the bankroll, right, then you could just buy it and be like, hey. I'm earning the, essentially, interest on this investment, and I just keep it running. Like, I think that that's what I would do if had $5,000,000.
Speaker 2:I'd be like, I'm buying a bunch of these little Sasses.
Jordan Gal:I'm not I'm not interested.
Speaker 2:Let them roll. Like, let them keep going.
Jordan Gal:You know?
Speaker 2:That's Great idea.
Jordan Gal:It's the same concept. JD is my hero. JD, I listened to the interview. We're talking about JD Grafham, who, I don't know, is somewhere out in the South and he was running he's still running the Navy, I believe.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And he he's been acquiring small SaaS companies that what's his criteria? Don't require heavy upkeep and the founder is leaving for good reasons.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Right? And he's, I don't know how many, he's got a bunch now. He most recently bought Get Flow from MetaLab.
Speaker 2:And he was at BaconBiz and people are freaking out on him, and I was like defending him. Because I was like, listen, this is, I know everybody wants to like have the vision and like-
Jordan Gal:Freaking out on them what? Like negatively? Yeah,
Speaker 2:kind of negatively. But I was like, you know, I think it's awesome. Don't know. It's on a panel.
Jordan Gal:That's insane.
Speaker 2:I was like, I was defending him. I'm like, I don't know. I think it's pretty I think it's I think they view it as like taking advantage of the founder, but I know for me, like, I mean, heck, there's been times along the way here. I've been like, where's somebody with a checkbook? Like, get me the hell out of here.
Speaker 2:Like, this is stressful. So, I mean, I think that as long as it's a fair, you know, I think he's paying a fair amount and, you know.
Brian Casel:I don't know his backstory, but and, you know, this is running long. Maybe we'll wrap it up right after this, but
Jordan Gal:the Oh, we're in the freaking good stuff now, Brian.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I told
Speaker 2:you we'd get to an
Brian Casel:hour. That's right. So, you know, think about like that next chapter, the the long game. I I would think that, you know, like this guy, like, why not just buy buy up these these businesses? Like, do we want to be the entrepreneur again?
Brian Casel:Like, do we wanna start something from the ground up again and again and again? Or does it just get I think having that money makes it easier to just invest or buy out put people in place to do it for you.
Jordan Gal:Look, some people wanna be the founder because that's their favorite thing in the world. But I think that the test is, somebody came along right now and wrote you a check for $5,000,000 to walk away from your business. Would you start the next business the same way you started this one? I'm gonna say unlikely.
Speaker 2:I always wonder though if that would be bet you know what I mean? It's like if you have the money I mean, a lot of founders fail in their second business and I think there's like a reason for that, you know, because like you don't have that. I'm not gonna work fourteen hour days anymore, you know, and I'm not gonna and I I don't need to. But then, you know what I mean?
Brian Casel:They don't have that hunger.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You don't have that hunger. I don't know. And I do think the investing I mean, I've done like three small angel investments. Okay?
Speaker 2:And two of them, I've already lost all my money. And the other one is buffer, which is okay, but it's not like and I wasn't in the first round, so I'm not, like, gonna be filthy rich or anything. Yeah. But but even that, I mean, it's profitable, but it's not, like, a guaranteed thing. So I think it is tricky.
Speaker 2:Like, once you just even doing that, because I had the same idea. Was like, alright. When I'm out of this someday, like being an investor, and I'm like, boy, that this is pretty hard. Like, picking picking winners is tricky. So I don't know.
Speaker 2:This is nice too.
Jordan Gal:The passive version of angel investing guarantees low likelihood of of success. It's just in its nature. What what JD is doing is removing lot of that risk. A lot of that risk. But it's the same money.
Brian Casel:Why what I'm not familiar with him. Like, what what is his strategy that
Jordan Gal:His strategy is, Jordan, you've been running Cardhook for four years. You're doing 50 k in MRR. You did great. If you have any interest in selling, I'll write you a check for a million bucks. You can walk away and you know, great.
Jordan Gal:Nice job. I will take that business into my portfolio. That 100 that million dollars that I bought it from. I will use my existing cash flow to get leverage and I'll only put down 200 ks in cash and I'll finance the other 800 ks and I just bought your business that makes 50 ks a month for $200,000 cash plus interest. It's making 50 ks a month.
Jordan Gal:I'm going to let my team that's already in house run it. We're going to put it through our little marketing process. We're going to grow it and maintain it and I'm going to make my money back in eighteen months and after that I'm going to make a lot off of the investment.
Speaker 2:Well, he's able to look at it, yeah, as a pure, like a like almost an annuity. Right? It's fine. So it's not yeah. It's not like he's like, I'm at 50.
Speaker 2:Like, I wanna hire more staff. I wanna get to 150 so I can hire these more people. And, like, he's just, like, 50. Great. I don't care if it doesn't really grow from there.
Speaker 2:I he wants it to grow. Right? But even if it stays at 50, that's great. And he's gonna be, like, three years out. It's all profit, and it's $50,000.
Speaker 2:He's cashing a check, and he's already got the team that pretty much manages them all. So not necessarily getting some of them are getting work here and you know, but it's not like where you're on it full time every day. It's getting new features every day, all the time. Yeah.
Brian Casel:You've got you've got manager you've got managers in place for
Speaker 2:Right. So he's got people running it and doing support and whatever, but it's not that same, like, must have growth that a smaller bootstrapper might feel because you need to survive. It's just a it's all on a spreadsheet. Right? Like, this is the customers are happy.
Speaker 2:They're paying me every month.
Jordan Gal:Right. So here's here's the thing about the thing about JD Spot is the same thing that I was alluding to, although less clearly was this opportunity in, in the bootstrap market and that opportunity is going to grow. So JD's pie of potential acquisitions is just going to expand and expand and expand and expand. It's a it's a very healthy
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's a lot of SaaS apps that are never gonna because they're competing in tough markets, and they're just gonna hit a ceiling because they don't have anything particularly special, and they'll get their niche, they'll make their 20 or 30,000 a month, and that's all they're ever gonna be because they are competing with Mailchimp or ConvertKit or what you know, they're at a spot where they're not gonna be able to differentiate enough or whatever.
Jordan Gal:And the founder gets tired, and here and there's JD.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Hey, founders get tired all I've been tired.
Brian Casel:To me, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's hard to
Brian Casel:It took me a little while to get to the point was like, is selling this actually an option? Like, I think most founders at 10 k, some may be thinking this, but it wasn't totally apparent to me that it was like, cause I thought that I would just kind of grow to 10 or 20 k and let it run on autopilot and start something new and just and build a portfolio of my own one by one. But without that cash leverage, doesn't
Speaker 2:It's hard to do that.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And and then there's also the the focus aspect of in like which market you're in and Yeah. And it's just like at at a certain point for for many bootstrap founders, it's they just get to a point where it's, you know, it's it's worth more to me sold. Yeah. In terms of the the leverage that I can have coming out of this to to do the next thing.
Speaker 2:And when it's your thing, you know, if you built three apps, you're too invested in those. Do know I mean? It's very different than if I just put money on it, and I'm like, I own this now. It might go down. I'll write that off as a loss.
Speaker 2:I have another three. You know, it's just a different mindset than I killed myself for a year building this thing up, and now, oh, crap. It's going down. I gotta I gotta, like, pay attention to that. Like, you know, whereas if it's just a loss, it's, like, it's a loss.
Jordan Gal:People are forgiven negatively. That's why. Because there's so much involved in it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's a lot of heartache in there in if you're the one who built it, but if, you know, from an investment perspective, you have to be stand back from it or else you're not really being a good investor. So yeah. But I don't know if I don't think any of us have that cash flow yet. So maybe maybe when we all come back in two years, we'll have the
Brian Casel:Yeah. Good stuff. Well, this was cool. I think this was a good good good mix up on on Bootstrap Web. I'm looking forward to future episodes.
Brian Casel:You know, we're definitely gonna be doing this for the next couple weeks. So at least
Speaker 2:Nice. I'm looking forward
Brian Casel:to coming back. Yeah. Ian, you'll you'll be back and
Speaker 2:I'll be back.
Brian Casel:Good stuff.
Speaker 2:Alright. Alright. Thanks a lot guys for having me on.
