[69] Liam Martin on Building a Distributed Team and Lessons Learned Scaling
This is Boot Wrap Web Episode 69. It's the podcast for you, the founder who learns by doing as you bootstrap your business online. Today we're talking to Liam Martin. He's the founder of timedoctor.com. All about his journey in the the last three years of launching and building Time Doctor into a very large company in in just a short span.
Brian Casel:That was just a fascinating journey to hear some of his big wins along the way, but also some pretty hard challenges at at the different stages of that business and also some of the backstory and some we we got kinda deep into some philosophical discussions as as tends to happen here on booz trapped web. Jordan and I had a really great conversation with Liam and we'll get to that in in just a moment. I'm just gonna give a quick update today and unfortunately this is some sad news. I did break the news to my newsletter a couple of days ago. My friend and collaborator, advisor and previous guest on this show, Clint Warren, unfortunately, passed away earlier this year.
Brian Casel:It happened about two months ago. Just, you know, passed away under a really heartbreaking sad circumstances, came as a complete shock to me and everyone who knew him. It's just been heartbreaking to see someone with so much potential and someone who was truly inspirational and had such a positive impact on so many people around him, whether they knew him in person here in Connecticut or connected with him online in in the many places that he was getting his message out through his blog at clintwarren.com. He was doing a lot of writing there. He was also doing a ton of speaking, which we actually spoke about here on on the podcast.
Brian Casel:We had him on to talk about how he's like a networking machine. That was a really, really great episode. I encourage you to go back to it. We're gonna link it up in the show notes. He was actually on two previous episodes here.
Brian Casel:Anyway, I was I was actually on the Zen founder podcast this week. Sherry Walling was nice enough to invite me on there to talk all about Clint and also discuss, you know, the topic of of suicide among founders and in entrepreneurship, which I am far from qualified to talk about that topic, but it did provide a a good opportunity for me to kinda talk about the experience that I've had being friends with Clint and his passing. So we'll link that up in the show notes. I encourage you to check that out. I think it was a good conversation.
Brian Casel:But with that, we're going to move on and get right into the interview right after these words. Today's episode is sponsored by LES Accounting. So I caught up with the co founder of LES, Allen Branch. Take a listen. Alright.
Brian Casel:I'm here with Allen Branch. Allen, thanks for joining me here. Thanks for having me. Cool. So, LESS Accounting.
Brian Casel:You know, I'm curious. Why did you call the company LESS? What does that mean?
Speaker 2:Everyone wants to get back to work, And accounting and bookkeeping are one of those things that everyone dreads doing and no one has the time for. And we want we don't wanna build software that takes up time. So obviously, features, spending less time in the application, get back to work, back to billing clients, making money. That was our goal.
Brian Casel:Yeah, totally. And I've used less accounting before and I've used other accounting software before and that's what always frustrated me so much about about these other guys is is like there's so many features and buttons and forms and pages that you have to, like, sift through. And but, you know, what I really liked about about your product was the way that you write copy within the product and how, like, you describe things in totally, like, nontechnical terms, you know, kinda like speaking my language.
Speaker 2:Sure. So I think, you know, we write our copy the way we speak to our friends. We didn't invent that concept either. Can't really claim that. But, bookkeeping sucks, and every piece of accounting software is terrible, including ours.
Speaker 2:We can't get rid of how bad doing back reconciliations is and and categorizing expenses. We can't get rid of that. But what we can do is speak friendly to our customers within the app and try our just our damnedest to be friendly and kind and jovial within the bookkeeping task and the speak instead of trying to make things less or or more pleasant as opposed to as opposed to terrible.
Nathan Barry:Yep. So, you know,
Brian Casel:you guys have, like, thousands of customers now. Who are your customers? Who did you design Less Accounting for? How would you describe like your, you know, your most common customer for Less Accounting?
Speaker 2:I would describe them as handsome and smart.
Brennan Dunn:Well, we know that.
Speaker 2:Yes. They're the smartest people in the world, and they're the most successful business owners in the world as well. No. You know, we built less account. We started building it in 2006 or 2007 or late six, early seven, something like that.
Speaker 2:And we built it for ourselves. At the time, we were freelancers. My business partner and I were freelancers. We needed to send a few invoices, send a proposal or two, track some expenses, and then get back to work. We built it for ourselves.
Speaker 2:And we continued to add little features here and there, fighting back the major accounting features that QuickBooks has or other other accountants or CPAs want, and kind of just staying focused on what the core business owner needs to make sort of, spending decisions and hiring decisions.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Very cool. So what is this autopilot thing I heard about? Sounds interesting.
Speaker 2:So as much as, you know, being a software guy, I think software is, you know, the answer to every question. It's what should we do? Build software. But there are things that we cannot automate with software. You know, bank reconciliations and some expense calculation just has to happen by a human.
Speaker 2:And as your business progresses and you become busier and busier as a business owner or freelancer, you know, you start shifting your focus into sales or marketing and out of bookkeeping. So we've added basically a service layer on top of less accounting. You can still do your books and less accounting yourself DIY, and it's a great piece of software. But now we actually have bookkeepers that will help you on a reoccurring basis doing expense categorization and bank reconciliations. We're not touching people's invoices.
Speaker 2:That's sort of what I think is at least the fun part of running a business is collecting your invoices. And so we're not doing invoice collection for people, but we're handling all the other tasks that they dread.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So you're just handling like the boring stuff, like the monthly reconciliations and that kind of stuff?
Speaker 2:And then we package it up all beautifully and we either send it off to your CPA for him to smile and thank you for, or we introduce you to a CPA that we think is a kick ass and they'll help you file your taxes.
Brian Casel:I love it, man. That's awesome. So, Alan, thank you so much. I know our listeners will get a lot out of Lessa Accounting for sure.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Thank you.
Brian Casel:Alright. So head over to lessaccounting.com and if you're interested in their new autopilot bookkeeping service, go to lessaccounting.com/autopilot. Be sure to use the coupon code Bootstrapped Web and that will give you your first month of bookkeeping service for free or that'll get you two months free of the LESS accounting software. So thank you Alan and the guys over at LESS. All right so we are here with Liam Martin founder of timedoctor.com.
Brian Casel:Liam welcome to the show.
Speaker 5:Thanks for having me guys. I really appreciate being on the show. I've actually listened to quite a few episodes more than I want to care to admit
Speaker 6:during work hours. So it's exciting to finally be on.
Brian Casel:Cool. Well, you know, I think I I told you before, like, I use Time Doctor. I've been using it for for a while with for myself and my team, and it's been absolutely fantastic. You know, great I wanna say little tool, but it's actually very central to our whole, you know, the way that we track time and and and pay our employees and all that. But, you know, we were just talking before this episode about, you know, kinda like the highlights of your journey.
Brian Casel:I mean, Time Doctor is actually a very big company today. And, of course, it wasn't always that way. So today, I think we're gonna try to get a little bit of the of the touch points along that journey and the things that you've learned, some of the challenges that you faced early on. But then also, you know, just because you guys are a big thriving company today doesn't mean that it's without its its challenges today for by any means. So let's let's kinda dig into it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Let's start
Speaker 7:off with with what what you guys do, just for people who aren't familiar with it.
Speaker 5:Right. So Time Doctor is a time analytics tool primarily designed for remote teams, but people can use it in their office or outside of their office. But we we really focused on building a tool that could empower people to work wherever they want, whenever they want. And that's something that has really been at the core of me and Rob's like philosophy. Rob traveled the world for over I think it was almost over ten years.
Speaker 5:He never spent more than three months in a country at a time. Really sort of the digital nomad type of guy and he had built one or two companies and had sold them and that allowed him to be able to work basically remotely and then found out that that was actually cheaper than you know setting up in a particular area. Right now he's in Sydney and he just bought a house and it's like his costs are so much higher than you know when he was living in Bali, as an example. He's doing a lot of moving, he's actually catching a little bit more of the bug. Same thing with me, like I felt like building remote businesses is I'll never work out of an office ever again.
Speaker 5:Like it's just I can't deal with it psychologically. So that's that's why we built it. We built it for our own need, like right now I'm doing podcast interview, I've been doing it for six minutes. I'm tracking all of my metrics throughout my workday and then we're sharing all that data within the organization to be able to say like what are you doing with your time? How productive are you with your time?
Speaker 5:Are you spending your time on the right things? How can we optimize to make sure that you're spending time on things that are moving the company forward? We have what we call the Sisyphus task. Every week you have you heard of the Greek Greek sort of what's it called? Story of Sisyphus?
Speaker 7:Can't say I'm not familiar with it. Okay.
Speaker 5:So Sisyphus is in the underworld, he rolls this rock up a hill every single day and at the end of that day it rolls back down the hill. Right? So you're always rolling the rock up the hill. So for us the Sisyphus task is like, what's one thing that you can do this week that moves the business forward? And that's actually what our entire every single employee has that task that they say regardless of what else, whatever else you do during your workday, email, customer service, writing code, whatever it is, get this one thing done.
Speaker 5:And that's actually been huge for our business. It's probably one of the things that I want to talk about which is just getting that single thing done that moves you forward. And Time Doctor is a great tool to be able to manage that and say like, okay, I've got four more days left and I've spent all of three hours and twenty eight minutes on my rock task, my Sisyphus task. How am I gonna actually complete that task? What do I have to abandon right now today?
Speaker 5:Like I have to I haven't looked at my email today. Right? And it's like I have to get the Sisyphus task done because it's due on Monday. Yeah. And that's it.
Speaker 5:That's where I'm at right now you know from a from a business perspective which I think is like a lot of people get lost in the weeds, and we focus on like making sure that we get to that goal and Time Doctor really helps us do it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I think I've heard you describe Time Doctor before as like the Google Analytics for for your team, right? So you know, I I wanna kinda hop back and get a little bit of the story of of of the early days of Time Doctor. I think before this call you mentioned today you guys are a team of 67.
Speaker 5:Yeah. High sixties. I I don't know exactly how many people we've got right now, but it's in the high sixties.
Brian Casel:That's probably about 65 more people than than most of us have on our teams here. I I kinda wanna know what year was it that you guys actually launched Time Doctor started, and then like what did that early those early days look like? Was it just you and your co founder?
Speaker 5:No. So we had a small team, so the the difference between us and we are bootstrapped, we've never taken a dollar of venture funding. We actually don't believe in it. Even though, well, maybe that's a strong word. I would take it for the right reasons, to accelerate growth, but I wouldn't take it to figure out an idea.
Speaker 5:It's so cheap right now to figure out an idea that you can just sort of execute on it. We started Time Doctor on a very small budget. I think at the beginning, me and Rob were not paying ourselves salaries, but I think we were spending maybe 10 to $15,000 a month on developing OutTime Doctor and that was a development team of I think five or six people at that point. Yeah so we were we had developers in Eastern Europe and then we also had a few developers in The Philippines and that to us was actually the big secret that no one really knows is that Eastern European developers, you can get a guy for like $2,500 a month that's as good as a Silicon Valley guy. And people kind of balk their eyes in there.
Speaker 5:They balk at that and they say oh you can't really get guys like that. Yes, you can get guys like that. Maybe they're not tied into like the startup culture as much so they don't know the most up to date technology and all that kind of stuff but the fundamentals. Like you know we have guys that have like two PhDs in like math and physics, know from some old Eastern Bloc University and they're just they're amazing at pumping out code And it's good stuff. And we recognize now that like that's how we will build companies.
Brian Casel:And so at that point like in that first year when you guys were just getting started building out this kind of a small team of overseas developers, what was your background and your co founder's background and what were you doing before Time Doctor? Like how did you give yourself a runway for that first year to get started?
Speaker 5:So and this is also somewhat disingenuous as well because we had starting capital. I had sold one of my old previous companies and actually sold two of them, a consulting firm and then a company that was teaching students how to or sorry, was tutoring students through Skype. So we literally like, I put together this website. It was actually due to grad school. So I dropped out of grad school.
Speaker 5:I taught a class, I co taught a class, you know, like 300 students. This is what I was gonna do with my life. Like I was gonna be a professor and I was so stoked to teach this class. So I show up in front of the class and, you know, first class usually you just sort of hand out a syllabus and say okay, see you next week. I thought no, I'm gonna grab them in that first week.
Speaker 5:And they hated it. And by the end of the year, I think, or end of the semester, about half the students were left in the class. Went up to my supervisor and I said, I don't think I'm very good at this. And he's like, you're not. And I'm just like, maybe I shouldn't do this.
Speaker 5:And he's like, you should look at that. So I remember I was like, Well can I get a master's? And he's like, Can you write 150 pages on something? And I'm like, Yeah. So two weeks later, three weeks later, flung a master's thesis under the door then I was off to my own devices.
Speaker 5:Now what I actually found out is I was getting paid $2,600 to teach that class but I made more from tutoring students in that class. So I actually recognize I'm like, woah there's something there. I really like teaching people, I don't really like organized education. So what we did is or what I did was I set up a website, you know, it took me like four weeks to learn like you know CSS and like I built the website myself. It's an absolute piece of crap.
Speaker 5:It doesn't exist anymore but I built it and it's actually one of the I think I still have the files actually somewhere. So I put it together and then you know started doing SEO because I had no money. Started doing content marketing, started getting customers and within about two, three years we had almost a 100 tutors throughout Europe and The United North America.
Brian Casel:Was this focused on a on a particular topic, subject?
Speaker 5:Yes. So anybody wants to make money in the tutoring space, here's the secret. If you just wanna do I don't know if it's it'll still work because I've been out of it for so long. But this is what Med courses, Bio one two, Chem one two, Math one two. They have to get A's on all of those courses for their applications for medical school.
Speaker 5:Okay? And their parents will pay like we had students that paid $510,000 just to have a tutor that would tutor them two to three hours over Skype. Because what we did is we said we're the only people that can tutor these students are grad students. So it's like you're getting a guaranteed grad student usually from an Ivy League school. And I knew that because I was in that position, was teaching at McGill University, they were paying me $2,600 a semester per course, that's crap, right?
Speaker 5:And I was like I can make you $2,600 in a week. So everyone was really excited to be able to work on this and I said you can work from your computer, right? You can work from Skype. You have a webcam, you're ready to go. So we built that and that actually went quite well and then I did consulting actually on how to build large scale remote teams.
Speaker 5:And it all came to a head when I was I was speaking on a panel at SXSW and met Rob. And I actually had sold the one of my companies like two weeks before that and I bought a really big couch and a very very nice TV set. And I watched television for about two weeks and then went to South by Southwest and then partnered up with Rob. Which is also I think the connected I think that's how you know you're really sort of you are an entrepreneur and you can't do anything else. I just, you know, I tried to be lazy and it didn't work.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Unfortunately. You're you're right. Like just the whole idea of like, oh, like taking some time off to to relax and clear your mind, it I I haven't seen it myself. I don't know what that looks like.
Brian Casel:I I'm always working on something.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Even if you're just sitting somewhere, you're always running. Right? You're always thinking, oh, yeah. I could turn that into a business.
Speaker 5:Oh, yeah. That's an interesting business right there. Actually, just talked to a guy yesterday who buys really expensive rare watches, plays with them for about six months and then sells them on eBay for more than he actually initially bought them for by like a two x margin. And I was like, are you kidding? Like you're buying $20,000 watches and you're flipping them for 40,000 and you get to wear them for six months?
Speaker 5:And he's like yeah, always get the best watch. I'm just like I think to myself like woah, there could be something a lot bigger there. You know that that kind of stuff always jumps out at me as ideas. I think if that if you're listening to this right now and you're that type of person, seriously look at entrepreneurship as a career choice, not necessarily as a thing that you'll try because I've found myself that another big factor is I've quit or been fired from pretty much every job I've ever done. Quit in the sense that like, I'm just frustrated with the way the organization is run, so I'm quitting.
Speaker 5:Like I'm pissed off and I'm quitting, not because I'm moving on to something else. And my answer for entrepreneurship was, I can't do anything else. Like, I just can't I'll be homeless if I don't start making my own money.
Brian Casel:I I couldn't agree more. I I think I think a lot of us definitely relate to that. I I know that I do. That the whole idea of just, you know, autonomy, I guess you can call it. It's just like I I have to be working on my own thing and collaborating with others.
Brian Casel:Yes. But building something and in making decisions that impact my own destiny, you know, not I think that's that's what drives so many of us. Let's let's get back into the story of Doctor. So you kinda transitioned from from selling those businesses into the first first year of Time Doctor. What were like the big turning points or like how did you guys begin to gain traction and what were the biggest challenges that you had in that first year?
Brian Casel:And I guess part of that question would be like, were there any points during that first year when you when you weren't sure if this was actually gonna work?
Speaker 6:Yeah. A lot of those. So we launched March 2013 as a paid product, and I think we had been building I didn't
Brian Casel:realize it was that recent.
Nathan Barry:Thought it
Speaker 5:was Yeah, it was so we had one year of development and then we launched as a paid product that next year after that. So we had started March 2013, we had probably at that point I mean my big metric is I focus on hours tracked. So we have a compass metric within the company, which every single employee we have a dashboard and, you know, all that kind of stuff to be able to figure out that compass metric. And we actually found out that we shouldn't use revenue because revenue doesn't show you the true adoption rate of the company. So what we use instead is hours tracked.
Speaker 5:That's our big metric. How many hours are people using the software for? Because if that's not happening, then it doesn't even matter like going to, as an example, a webinar with somebody who maybe the conversion rate will be huge and you'll convert it like 60% for a webinar as an example, but no one actually uses the product, they're going to churn out. Right? They're gonna they're gonna churn and they're gonna leave you and you need to be able to figure out not only, hey, I can close the sale, but the customer is incredibly excited and happy with the product and is gonna tell their friends.
Speaker 5:So
Brian Casel:Yeah. And the product is like in their workflow. It's it's their their business.
Speaker 5:So I think first year we did about a 100,000 per month of March 2013. I have the data for the other two years. March 2014 was 419,000 and then March 2015, our three year anniversary, we cracked one 1,032,000.
Brian Casel:I can I can see the the questions popping up in in Jordan's head right now? Like, are we is this profitable? Is this
Speaker 7:Yeah. So I just find it interesting. It's a different it's a different metric in each each application. The there's a there's a most important metric. It's not all it's not universal.
Speaker 7:But for Time Doctor, it sounds like it is genuinely how much it gets used as opposed to we have x number of customers paying x amount and that equals this much revenue. It's
Speaker 5:Yeah. So they're tied together. We had a huge debate about this and on our internal dashboard we give you know, for our employees, we give them some of the revenue data as well and we give them you know trials per day, leads per day, all that kind of stuff. But we actually figured out that get rid of all of that other stuff and just focus on the one thing and if that number it keeps going up every month, then we're doing well. We also looked at that as a metric for us to say we're also primarily even though I'm sure most of the people listening to this podcast are probably going to be on the employer side.
Speaker 5:Our product is fundamentally built for the employee. So we wanted to build a product that said okay, you can have this app and you can work wherever you want, whenever you want and you can also get paid through that app. So our payroll feature allows you to pay people and you're not going to get charged any margin. So a lot of the other platforms right now they'll get charged you know like well the classic ones are like Elance and odesk and Freelancer and all of these companies they charge between 10 to 15% for the employee salary. So the employee has you know 10 to 15% pulled off their salary and we just didn't really like that because we are like we're that employee fundamentally.
Speaker 5:So we also built the system to be able to say okay, we want to build it from an employee focus, and one of those employee focuses is the employer pays for the software, and then the employee is the one that actually like uses the tool and fundamentally interacts with the tool. And the employer is just able to get this extra level of productivity or sorry, management and monitoring and productivity out of it. So from that perspective, it also reinforces the one million hours because it actually doesn't really matter how many people are paying for it as long as they're using the crap out
Speaker 6:of it.
Brian Casel:You know what? I'm also kind of wondering, like, how did you actually get get it out in the in the hands of all these business owners in during that first year? Like, what were the first traction channels that
Speaker 8:Right.
Speaker 7:Was was your willingness to spend money on marketing matched to your willingness to spend money on development? Right? You spent a year outsourced. You didn't wanna build it yourself and make it something minimal. You really committed to having something good be built.
Speaker 7:When you launched it, did you put the same type of resources behind it to to get it out there?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think we achieved operational profitability on month nine of Time Doctor. Now, the other thing I really do have to put a lot of semicolons next to what I'm saying because I was we're not the classic bootstrapper. We did bootstrap the company but Rob is know was able to put money in, I was able to put money into the business, I was able to basically work for free for three years, right? So I was able to well actually no longer than that.
Speaker 5:I'm paying myself a salary now but like I was able to just not have to pay myself on the business and work a 100% on it. And we actually had a contractual agreement between the two of us saying we have to work a certain amount of hours per week or our shares would be damaged. Which track doctor.
Brennan Dunn:Which you track using time doctor.
Speaker 7:Of course.
Speaker 5:Right. So we had so we said okay, you know, and that's why I wanna just say like my experience is going to be different from everyone else's. We had a little bit of extra cash. I think cumulatively into Time Doctor probably I want to say like a 150,000. I'd have to check the P and Ls to really know for sure but like we had that type of cash to be able to inject into the business initially and And
Speaker 7:not take a salary which costs money
Speaker 5:every month. And not take a salary which costs a ton of money every month. So I
Speaker 7:just wanna I hate to interrupt you here, but I think it's an unbelievably important point that we're kinda circling around. And I know, like, you almost feel apologetic about it, like we're not legit bootstrap, meaning we weren't broke. But I think it's really important for people, for our audience, for all of us individually to to hear something like this. And and I know a lot of people listening default too well. That's why he's successful or that's why the business got off the ground because, oh, that oh, of course, it's so easy because he can do this.
Speaker 7:It's the same trap people fall into. They look at a VC backed company and they're like, of course, you have a team of eight. No wonder you're cranking out this amazing content. The bottom line is that nobody gives a shit about your disadvantages. And Right.
Speaker 7:Just because someone else had an advantage or was able to put a 100 k in, you can't use that as an excuse. This is like the big bad business world that nobody cares about, you know, how nice you are. This is like reality and I think people need to hear that sort of thing and say, look, someone who's gonna put in a 150 k and is willing to do that, is able to do that, they're gonna have advantages over you, and you're gonna have to deal with it. So I I don't think it it shouldn't be like this apologetic thing, or we're not legit bootstrap. Like, this is the business world.
Speaker 7:There's no bootstrap versus VC. Like, it's just money in
Brian Casel:and out. And and, you know, I think that advantage of of having a runway like that is not what what made the thing a success. I think it was that you guys solved a really painful problem, you know.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think probably the most important thing that anyone can do if they're going to build a product is they have to use it themselves. Like it has to solve a problem but it's so much better if you can solve your problem because you're a lot more passionate about that particular problem. So for us it was like my tutoring company, one of the things that destroyed the tutoring company or you know just was destroying the profit margins of the tutoring company is I'd have Johnny that would say Johnny the student and he would say, You know, you charged me $10 this month for tutoring and I only worked for five hours with my tutor. And then I have to go to the tutor and say, Hey, did you work with Johnny for ten hours?
Speaker 5:And he'd say, Yeah, of course I worked with Johnny for ten hours. But I'd have to refund Johnny for half of that month and then I'd have to pay the tutor for all, you know, for a full ten hours and I was left with nothing. I actually was negative, you know, for that particular month. And it was completely, I mean, it was totally retarding the growth of the company. I get six more students and then all of a sudden you know four basically I'd maybe only make like two students worth of profit due to all of these problems that were happening.
Speaker 5:Time Doctor would have perfectly solved that problem within the business. And when I was looking at it, I was looking at Rob, you know, he had this really crappy alpha that he put together in, like, two months. And I was like, this is perfect. This is exactly what would have solved my problem and why we sold the business. And it's like, I would have been able to grow so much faster had I used that product.
Speaker 5:And that's why I was like, okay. I'm all in. And and the other thing too is, like, the concept of I think everyone's experience is different, and I think that, like, you know, Eric Reiss and the Lean Startup and all of the sort of canon of information that's coming from that space is incredibly powerful. But I know for me, because it was something that I could solve on my I knew that it was a problem that I had experienced, I was all in on it. I was like, okay.
Speaker 5:I'm gonna put everything I have in it. I'm not gonna do anything else except for this. And that was scary. That actually was really scary. And I think that's also another reason why it was successful, which was like I have no plan B.
Speaker 5:This is like I've taken all of my chips that I have accrued over the last four years of building the previous business and I'm putting them back on the table for another round. Thankfully we made it, you know, we're profitable now and we're doing well. But the first three to six months of, you know, paid product, we actually had a lot of, not necessarily infighting, but debates about what we should focus our energy on. So I actually have now gone back and said Rob was right and I was wrong.
Speaker 7:Yeah. You define that in a more practical level? Like what what did you do and what would you do if you can go back? Like to acquire customers, to price properly, to you know, all Almost these types of
Speaker 5:all of our budget up until right now has been on product. Almost all of our budget. Every dollar that we would have would go back into development, designers
Speaker 7:As opposed to a sales team and marketing and content and partnerships Exactly. And
Speaker 5:So I was But there
Brian Casel:but I
Speaker 5:mean, know,
Brian Casel:how does the name Time Doctor get out there? I mean, I I knew Time Doctor, I think back in 2013, you know. Yeah. I think it was probably like press mentions and whatnot. Right?
Speaker 5:Yes and no. So what we did is we focused on really low lying fruit. I've actually done a lot of like we've done a lot of these PR mentions and you know press pushes and all that kind of stuff. And we've actually found that they don't really work. They drive a lot of traffic but they don't actually get you customers.
Speaker 5:So as an example, I would much rather do a blog post for a really good outsourcing blog that maybe gets 20,000 uniques than TechCrunch. Like you give me those two options, I'm gonna choose the outsourcing blog every single time. And here's the beauty of it, it's so much easier to talk to the outsourcing blog. It's like, yeah, Time Doctor. Yeah, I'm gonna give you a free copy of Time Doctor.
Speaker 5:You can play with it and, you know, play with it for a year and let's totally you know do something. Let's figure out what we can do together. That was really a marketing team that was on a shoestring budget. I think the budget was like $2,500 a month when we started. Was ridiculously small.
Speaker 7:So that essentially equates to, dear marketing team, also known as three individual people, whatever you can produce while you're receiving a salary, that's actually what what needs to get us customers. Because the budget is like a little bit of retargeting and it's not go spend this money on advertising. It's you guys have a salary, do stuff, connect with people, write blog posts, bring in traffic.
Speaker 5:Forum posting was huge at that point. It still is actually. Whenever there'd be a press mention for you know what are the top 10 tools for remote teams, you look at any of those blog posts from 02/1432, we'll probably have Time Doctor be like the first, second or third comment down below, right? It's like that's a hard grind. Like that is not a hack at all, right?
Speaker 5:That's like a 'okay I'm gonna write every single day and like I'm gonna pump out these little comments' but then eventually every single one of those little comments that you put out, you might get three to four uniques coming back to your site Mhmm. On a continuous basis.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It
Brian Casel:it it's amazing because I I said early on that that I am a customer of Time Doctor. We use it in in Restaurant Engine. And I think we started using it something like six to I think actually probably close to a year ago we started using it. And I remember that I just knew the name Time Doctor. And I knew that that it was a time tracking utility type of thing.
Brian Casel:I'm just trying to think back, like, how did I discover Time Doctor and how did I actually become a customer? And and I think that that goes back to that ongoing effort of of branding yourselves in forum posts, in in blogs, being mentioned around productivity. And I I just knew the name probably from people mentioning it, you know, here and there, seeing it in these articles about productivity. And then when it came time to okay. I really need a way to for my team to track time.
Brian Casel:It was like Time Doctor was like right at the top of my mind. I I didn't have I didn't click an ad. I didn't, you know, do Google search for time tracking. I went directly to timedoctor.com.
Speaker 5:So that's the other thing that's really frustrating and yet also successful for our brand is about half of the traffic that we get are through referrals. And what I define as a referral is we'll either when they sign up, will say Oh, where did you hear from us? Oh, you know, my friend told me or something like that. Or it is someone just typing in to Google Time Doctor, you know, and it's like that's a referral, right? Because it's like they heard it from somewhere else, I have no idea where they heard it from but that's what's happening.
Speaker 5:And that to me is that's just the result of that long term brand equity that we had built on that very very small budget in the beginning which you know is much bigger now but it's we even at this point and I think this is something that's really important for a lot of bootstrappers to understand that are just starting their businesses. For us, we're only really starting to get the enterprise companies now. It's three years later, we're only starting to get these enterprise companies. And I talk to them and I say like Home Depot signed up as a customer couple months ago. Right?
Speaker 5:Just didn't even talk to us, bought a crapload of seeds. So I emailed them back and I'm like, Hi Home Depot, what's going on? You know,
Speaker 6:do you want to
Brian Casel:buy some more
Speaker 7:seeds for us?
Speaker 5:And I I found out, you know, they had just been they had basically gone through the same experience that you did. You know, they had done a whole bunch of research. They had this fantastic excel sheet of like all these different products and they had decided to go with us. And we wouldn't have even been on that list had it not been for the brand equity that we had built. Because there are so many competitors in this space, we do monitor how many competitors that are direct competitors and then sometimes in the same generalized space of time tracking and there are hundreds of different apps that have popped up, know hundreds of different apps.
Speaker 5:Yeah. The majority of them are I mean you know, maybe they're making a thousand bucks a month, $2,000 a month, something like that. Which isn't necessarily nothing to gawk at but like I think the reason why we've been able to succeed is because of our focus on product, our insane focus on product, making sure like everything that we do, every dollar that you know 80% of well yeah actually at this point I'll give away that information. So 80% of every dollar that we make goes right back into development. And that is and that's not even including customer service, is probably the other 10%.
Speaker 5:Probably under 10% is really on direct marketing.
Speaker 7:Less than 10% of your budget is on sales and marketing?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Less than 10% at this point.
Speaker 7:That's that's amazing.
Speaker 5:I mean, it's one of those things that
Speaker 7:I Was it always that was it always that low or are you easing back
Speaker 5:It's always been that low. Yeah. Balls Always been that low. I tell everybody that's just starting out, the most important tool that you have at your disposal as an entrepreneur is your phone. Because you can call, if you've run out of things to do, you can call 50 people a day and just be like, how's Time Doctor going?
Speaker 5:Or hey you run a company, do you want some time tracking? You know and it's like even if they yell at you and say never call me again I'm like oh shit that sucks. Good thing I didn't tell them what the company was before I talked to them about it. Know that type of a thing like you can always call people, get them up on the phone and the first this is our other product so we have another product right now that we've built called staff.com which is also coming together.
Speaker 7:Separate product not just a different brand?
Speaker 5:It's actually a different brand, and it's also it's basically implementing the HR component to it. So actually finding the people. Okay? But it's relatively new, and the way that I had made the first 5,000 MRR on that product was all through the telephone. I just called people.
Speaker 5:Hey Is that a higher
Speaker 7:price point?
Speaker 5:No. It's approximately around the same price point. It's actually structured a little bit differently so we charge as a SaaS product. So basically you pay $50 for your first employee per month and then it's $10 per user after that. So you're paying an extra 40 per month but you get an HR team that can actually go in and get those candidates to you so they can basically produce those short lists for you.
Speaker 5:There's a couple other features connected to it as well but that's fundamentally the difference which is no margin, you can go in there and you can just hire whoever you want without paying a margin. So the first $5 MRR was literally for me calling up people that I knew that needed people and I was like Do you want me to find you a virtual assistant? Do you want me to find you a developer? You know, this kind of stuff. And like if you can do that, if you can get on the phone and you can produce $5,000 in profit in your pocket, we weren't profitable with scoff.com at that point but like $5 revenue per month in your pocket, you know you've got something.
Speaker 5:Also really monitor your friends to make sure because if they're personal acquaintances with you, sometimes they'll do it almost as like a pity type of thing. They'll be like oh yeah, you know, I'll send you some business. Monitor the crap out of them and make sure that they're actually using it. If they're not using it, then just go to them and say like, listen. Are you using this?
Speaker 5:Why aren't you using it? You know? Yeah. You're paying me some money for it so either we should stop the subscription or you should tell me what how to fix it. That kind
Speaker 6:of thing.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I'm I'm curious. When did staff.com actually come about? And when did you start that initiative to get into staff.com? And how did you make how did you break off from, okay, we're focused on growing Time Doctor into, okay, let's start a second second brand, a second product?
Speaker 5:So there's three fundamental problems to outsourcing right now or remote work, know, building a distributed team, Which is tracking people, you need to be able to like track exactly what they're doing, manage what they're doing. And tools like us, like Slack, HipChat, you know, they're all under that veil of 'Okay, we need to be able to figure out Basecamp', they're all under this veil of like what the heck is everybody doing and let's figure out how we can make sure that everyone does it better. The second big problem is paying people. This is actually something that we spent the last year working on Time Doctor and on on staff and we've put together a product right now that I'm quite happy with. This is actually growing quite fast as a feature within Time Doctor and Staff, which is our payroll feature and that's a mesh network of a whole bunch of different payment processors.
Speaker 5:So we've got PayPal in there, we've got a great company out of The Philippines called Co card, we've got Payoneer, we've got TransferWise and we can basically move money anywhere on the planet for 1%. And that's you wouldn't think of that as like a big problem, but it's actually a huge problem because everyone thinks that PayPal moves money everywhere and it doesn't. Like try getting money into Ukraine without using, you know, our type of solution. It's really difficult. You have to figure out, you have to basically like set up a Ukrainian bank account, transfer $20,000 in a somewhat illegitimate way and then you know move that money back and forth if you don't want to pay 10 to 12% in fees.
Speaker 5:Which is a lot of money when you think about it. Right? If you have a $100,000 in payroll per year, there's $12 gone just off of moving that money. And it's also
Brian Casel:well, like the feature in Time Doctor is it's also like auto automatic based on the hours logged. Right? So as the founder you don't have to like manually like the timesheet and okay pay the invoice, it's just paid.
Speaker 5:Just boom. Yeah. It just happens. So we worked a really long time on that and that is the second fundamental problem. The third fundamental problem is finding people and that's a problem that's in remote work but then also not in remote work.
Speaker 5:That's a fundamental like, you know, people in San Francisco are saying, Hey, how can I find an employee that's probably about $250,000 a year but like how can I find this $250,000 employee is just as much of a job as how can I find this $25,000 employee that is in India or is in Ukraine or Russia or The Philippines or wherever it might be? So we've really focused on that and well that's that's basically staff.com is it solving that third tripod problem. And we're trying to figure out how to do it without charging the employee any fees. So we're trying to basically make it one of the big fundamental problems staffing right now or at least remote staffing and no, brick and mortar staffing too is poaching. So you'll have somebody that will come in and say, Yeah, I definitely want to hire you but you know, why don't we work directly after we've had the initial interview?
Speaker 5:And that happens all the time.
Speaker 7:Guilty.
Speaker 5:Totally. Right?
Speaker 7:And Yeah. And it's like logical. How could you not do it? It's like all the incentives are aligned to do it.
Speaker 5:Yeah so we thought to ourselves it's like, we don't really want to do that. And we are you know, we haven't done that actually but we felt like I think we had hired somebody on Odesk and we hired them like back in 2013 and we actually paid the there's a fee that you pay to release them from Odesk, I think it was
Speaker 6:like $2,500 or something like that. So we had looked at that and said to ourselves like how many people are actually paying this $2,500 versus just saying, hey. You know, I'll
Speaker 5:just pay you through PayPal. Right? Probably 99.8%.
Speaker 7:Right. Of course, the the honest Canadians eat the 2,500 because they couldn't live with themselves.
Speaker 5:It was the it was the honest Australian. I I told Rob, I was like, listen. This is bullshit. 2,500. Like, do you know how many blog posts I could write for $2,500?
Brian Casel:I well, I I am curious about like, because, you know, before this call, we were talking about, the challenges that you're that that you're facing today as a large organization. You know, you're growing this organization. You're still the entrepreneur driving this this growth, but, you know, what are like the new challenges that you're facing today that that maybe weren't there two, three years ago?
Speaker 5:Yeah. We had just been talking about this, and I think that it's really important to to discuss this because it's something that I it totally sideswiped me as a problem and it's actually significant. Which is I am now turning into an executive as opposed to an entrepreneur. And it's very entrepreneur are like, they get stuff done and executive tells people to do stuff. That's the difference.
Speaker 5:Almost all of my day is spent on either delegating tasks or solving my employees' problems. So I'll give you an example right before we jumped on this call, I had a conversation with somebody who wants to quit. And I asked this person why they wanted to quit and we had a good heart to heart. It's not because he doesn't like the work, it's not because the pay is low, it was a was basically a bureaucratic issue, an internal issue between different employees. And the entrepreneur in me is like, I do not have one second of my time to apply to this problem.
Speaker 5:Like just go and figure it out on your own. But that's like throwing a grenade into that, you know, into it's not gonna solve anybody's problems. So what I have to do
Speaker 7:That'll come back.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And actually, since I have Time Doctor, I'm able to monitor because I've been dealing with this issue all week. I've spent about six and a half hours on this issue. Think about that. That's one full workday dealing with one employee's issue, you know, connected to hey, do I really feel like this position is the place for me?
Speaker 5:What could I do with that time if I was just had my head into like Google Analytics for the whole day? Probably I'd make a lot well no, I probably wouldn't make the company more money. Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn't. I haven't actually figured it So I think you can understand sort of the way that I'm talking about this. Like I haven't figured it out, it's actually a big problem to the business and I'm trying to figure out how I can solve it.
Speaker 5:But right now the bureaucracy of the process is really starting to stop me from executing on what I need to execute on.
Brian Casel:Is it kind of just a matter of management levels? Like I I know to go from like 10 to whatever, like, like, 30, you know, you have to add a layer of of management. And then, you know, 30 to 60, there's probably another layer of, you know, groupings. But, like, are you coming up against, like, the edge of of the next layer of like maybe like more strategic executives under you or something
Speaker 5:like I think you're probably we're probably looking at the point now where the employee that was talking to me has a manager. That manager so here's here's how my week went connected to this issue. This guy wants to quit. Actually no, more importantly, he just doesn't show up to work. And I'm like, what's going on?
Speaker 5:Where is this guy? Or sorry, actually the manager said like, where is this guy? And then I pinged this guy and you know we're trying to get in touch with him. We think is he sick, is something happening, he hasn't checked in, he hasn't emailed us, he hasn't texted us. So then we find out that he doesn't want to do it anymore, and then he talks to Rob and he sends Rob a message.
Speaker 5:Well, Rob is the CEO company, I'm the CMO of the company. So it's almost like he went to the very tippy top of the organization, which doesn't really matter because he hasn't spoken to that guy in months. Right? But they had this initial connection when because Rob and me were the first guy that first people that hired him. So he was going to talk to Rob and then oh I shouldn't even say who the name was.
Speaker 7:No names.
Speaker 5:Bleep bleep, whoever that person was comes to me and says, hey this is the problem that we have. We have this, you know, we have somebody else in the team that's not feeling very good about this issue and that issue, so then I have to speak directly to this employee that's affected and find out listen, is it your manager? Is the is the manager, you know, pissing you off? Is it this issue? Is it another employee?
Speaker 5:You can see how this is just sort of like, I have no training in this whatsoever. Like none. Zero. And I And
Brian Casel:I'm guessing you're also pretty far removed from these like day to day interactions of, you know, so it's like
Speaker 5:I meet I I do not meet with this employee. I may talk to this employee once a month. Right? But it's like
Speaker 7:That's very different from, you know, from four or five people on a team. It's just a different app.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And it's just like super tight knit. And the other thing too, like my my training's in sociology. So the bigger an organization gets, the more sieves you have, you know, in the the pan. Like you're gonna have you're gonna have a lot of loss to miscommunication to, you know someone doing the work twice as an example.
Speaker 5:That's something that happens in our organization. We're actually now really solving that where someone will code out a feature. We have a whole bunch of new procedures that we're implementing to do this. But it's like the majority of my day is implementing procedures on how to make the team more efficient, not necessarily on hey, slack.com has a great referral engine and I want to implement it. Can can we get two developers here and can we hack this together in the next two weeks?
Speaker 5:That type like that's something that's on my list of like things that I want to do I think will actually move the business forward faster but unfortunately the bureaucracy of the organization keeps me in the details of that organization as opposed to actually executing on the business itself. So, very interesting point that I'm at right now. I'm trying to learn as much as I can on it, actually there's a couple books that are quite good, Effective Executive is probably the best one. If you just want a direct like intro on how to to become more effective as an executive. But it's a constant challenge and it's also made more complicated because it is a remote working relationship as opposed to an in office one.
Speaker 5:And really there has there's no book that's been written on you know remote organizational structures or there's very little written on it. So we're kind of a new territory.
Speaker 7:Yeah. In my head, I like assumed and was picturing an office with people who sit next to each other and then all of sudden you said remote and often that creates a whole new set of unfamiliar questions and issues.
Speaker 5:The reason why like I had to jump on I couldn't answer your first call when you called me was because I know that this person in his time zone, it's like 11:00 at night. And if I don't address it with him right now, I won't be able to address it with him till Monday. So, it's kind of this like it's a super interesting situation where you add the time ratio to it and it's like man, I have to get up at you know, 08:00 in the morning to be able to have this type of conversation during their regular office hours. I'd rather have them just execute on their own. But unfortunately and that's the other thing that I just didn't really recognize and I've become a lot more mindful of it right now and it might be on probably not actually on how we're hiring because we're actually hiring people that are really passionate about what they're doing.
Speaker 5:But no one will work harder on the business than you by probably a multiple of like two, I would say. Like your best employee will work half as hard as you, And that's kinda screwy when you think about it. Right?
Speaker 7:It's like Yeah. The the part that's depressing about that is you have to make so much margin in order to profitably hire people.
Speaker 5:Right.
Speaker 7:And and you never get the margins to a point where you can say, oh, now I can comfortably hire someone. You always have to hire them before you're actually in a comfortable place. You know, that's that's one of the biggest reasons I sold my ecommerce business. It's like we had a choice. We could either grow and destroy our margins and then have to grow by five x to make up for
Speaker 5:it Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Or just freaking get out and and just sell off based off the margin that you have currently. At least with software, you have the opportunity that it's efficient enough that you can grow the margin to a a place that you can you can add team members. You know, it's at least it's more scalable in that way. And you can hire them remotely, so it's better than than some other businesses. But it's not easy.
Speaker 5:I think that SaaS is probably I mean this is Time Doctor was the first ever real SaaS quote unquote business because before I really had like a service based business where you physically like tutors got on and tutor students through Skype. But this was like software as a service and it is like printing money. It's pretty fantastic because the margins are ridiculous. You if we wanted to reduce I could probably run the business on probably a tenth of what our current burn rate is right now and still run like customer service, right? I'd have one guy running the servers, I'd have one guy making sure that nothing a developer making sure that nothing really exploded and then the customer service team.
Speaker 5:And we could we'd stay exactly where we are, we wouldn't develop any new features but like I'd probably be able to squeeze blood out of that stone for two or three years.
Speaker 7:Right. Wouldn't you make a lot more money doing that?
Speaker 5:Tons of money. Right? Because it's just sort like
Speaker 7:So what's the logic? Bring us through you know, you didn't you're not an idiot. Because You're not doing it because you don't realize that. You do realize that. So what's the the reasoning and the logic?
Speaker 5:So we fundamentally have made the decision like if we could we could restructure this business to just make a lot of profit. But if we want to build the business to empower people to work wherever they want, whenever they want, my like the reason why I want to acquire more users is yes, obviously we want to grow the business but then also two, we want to just make this as an option for people. Like working in a cubicle sucks. I just I hate it. Not only that, working for a dollar a day somewhere in Africa when you could be working for realistically a dollar an hour, you know, doing data entry, is a completely different environment.
Speaker 5:It like, think about that. It's like 10 x ing your salary.
Brian Casel:That's So you you're really thinking about the the the larger problem that you're solving. You're like, yes, you're you're solving like a surface level pain point of being able to track and pay a team, but you're now you're thinking on a on a much higher, broader level of, like, how do we change work as we know it or solve a a big problem in in work. You know?
Speaker 5:If I could, right now, if someone came in today and Google said, listen. We're going to take Time Doctor, and we're gonna turn it into a free service that every single employee on
Speaker 6:the face of the planet will be able
Speaker 5:to get access to. But you get nothing. Me and Rob have made the decision, we would take that deal. Right?
Speaker 6:Come Like that on.
Speaker 5:And here's why we would take that deal. Number one, it achieves our goal. Number two, we can build something else very very quickly.
Speaker 7:And number three, you already have some money in the bank.
Speaker 5:Sure.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Otherwise that option wouldn't most likely be on the table.
Speaker 5:Right. I think that people like us at this point, we really are the I'll I'll give you another example not to this is not to sort of
Speaker 7:I was gonna say this is gonna be good. All that hesitation is gonna be good.
Speaker 5:It's it's not to show off. But one month, I had had an issue with our business account and I had to do a deal that moved money into another merchant account that was connected to my personal account. And all of a sudden like $500,000 shows up in our bank account, my bank account, right? And it's like holy shit, this thing the bank flipped out. Actually the CRA also flipped out, the Canadian Revenue Agency, the came to the IRS.
Speaker 5:What are you doing? How are you equating for this income? You know like all these different it was a huge problem.
Brian Casel:These alarms started going Right
Speaker 5:and it's like I really do know at this point that if I wanted to, I could start something else and make more than enough money. I'll give you a perfect example. I'm sitting in my girlfriend's house right now. Okay? She just started a mermaid business.
Speaker 7:Come again.
Speaker 5:Sorry. Mermaid business. So she teaches she teaches people how to swim like a mermaid. And you put up a mermaid tail.
Brian Casel:If the listeners could see Jordan's face right now.
Speaker 7:I'm just trying to wrap I'm trying to wrap my mind around this because I I mean, I know how to swim like a mermaid. It is fun to do, but I don't understand the business function.
Speaker 5:So basically think about it in this context. It's a subscription service. It's like going to a yoga studio. You pay, you know, $75 a month or you pay $60 for a single session. Right.
Speaker 5:Well, I'm trying
Speaker 7:trying not to laugh here.
Speaker 5:She started February 3. It's now see. Two months.
Speaker 7:Two months.
Speaker 5:Two months in. Two months later, she's doing I think she's done 46,000 in sales.
Speaker 7:Bravo baby, there's a market.
Speaker 5:There's a market and it's like you're just you know, it's like you can do it. It just you gotta just so there are a couple things that came into her particular situation. She left her job, she basically said I'm gonna do this or you know bust. I'm gonna figure out the business case. I know that this is something that people want, we're gonna try it out.
Speaker 5:She did a crapload of PR. I actually have a blog post coming out on how we got her about 60,000 uniques and
Speaker 7:Is this this is this is web based?
Speaker 5:No. It's a it's a physical like
Speaker 7:Right. Like like a yoga thing. Okay.
Speaker 5:But it was all through PR hacking that we initially built the business. Great book for that, trust me I'm lying by Ryan Holiday. Probably the best book to read on this particular subject. I'll leave I mean you guys just gotta if anyone has not read that book and they're thinking about getting into PR, read that book. It's actually probably the first book that you should start with because it is a book that shows you the fundamental differences between PR in the past and PR today, which is very interesting stuff.
Speaker 5:Anyways, we do this we do this hack and you know now she's got a business where she's got six employees, she's continue, you know, she's starting to build it and all this kind of stuff, but it's also fundamentally profitable as a business. So I just know deep in my bones that I could start something new and it would work. And I think that the moment that that happened for me was when I think I built my second business. And I really knew it was like, woah, the first one wasn't a fluke. Right.
Speaker 5:And everybody's probably in that headspace right now where they're like, oh I've got this you know, this SaaS product and it's making like $5 a month and that's kind of cool and it's like I can pay myself and that's awesome and all this kind of stuff but then they think to themselves, man, is this a fluke? This, you know, is this the only thing or can I do it again?
Speaker 7:Yeah. But that that kind of confidence only comes with doing it, you know, once and then doing it again. And it's like practice. I remember going to, like, a talk with Jason Fried from thirty seven signals, and I asked him a question afterward. And I was like, you know, I don't know.
Speaker 7:I was basically like, how are you such a cocky dick? In so many in so many words. And he was like, well, I have been practicing making money a lot longer than you and so I'm better at it than you are. I was like, okay. Fine.
Speaker 7:So you Here's
Brian Casel:a here's a great piece about that, I think, in Inc.
Speaker 7:Right.
Speaker 5:That's So
Speaker 7:it was the same same thing. Mean, basically, article is basically all based off of my question. I won't take all the credit for it, but that's where it was started.
Speaker 6:I think they're probably I think he's probably right, and I wouldn't say it in the same dickish way. I would say it in a motivational way to say, like,
Speaker 5:I'm on not necessarily the other side, but I'm like, I've had enough wins in my pocket that I know now that I could start something else out and it could work. Now I'll give you like this mermaid business. Spending probably about an hour and a half, two hours a day coaching her. And she's absolutely amazing at execution. I'll just be like, go do this, this, this.
Speaker 5:She goes and she does it. And the business is really starting to scale now where you know she's bringing on new cities and all these types of things. But it's if there's a market there, you can do it. And I think that just to understand that, to say to yourself, okay yeah, I've got this business that's making $5 a month. You will get to 10.
Speaker 5:Time and pressure. You will get to 10. Don't worry about it. And I would also say too, if this is your first startup, this is probably something else that's going be counterintuitive as well. Sell it for a lot of money if you can.
Speaker 5:Like if someone offers you 1 and a half million dollars for the business, sell it immediately. Put it in your pocket. Get that 1 and a half million in your pocket, and then everything else outside of that, you have options. You can do whatever you want. There was a great
Speaker 7:Which is really important that you said that I feel like you and I are better friends now because you said that. Because that it's it takes that type of relief of the day to day pressure combined with the confidence of having done it once that you're like, fuck it. I know what I'm doing, and and now the money isn't the most important thing.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I'm just
Speaker 7:I just like building businesses, and that's what I do. And if somebody came along and helped me achieve my ultimate goal, even if that wasn't the most financially rewarding thing for me, I would still be okay with it because then I'm gonna start another business.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And I think that what I would love to do is inject that mindset into someone's head, but I know they can only figure it out after they've sold a couple businesses or they're you know, they're okay quote unquote. They're okay. There was a great entrepreneur Dan Martell who runs these businesses or sorry these dinners and he gave me this quote. I don't know if he he quote if it was his quote or somebody else's but he said, you know, sell the first business you know, you build for somebody else and the second business you build for yourself.
Speaker 5:And I'm at business basically three at this point. So it's definitely something that I'm building for my self. It solved my own itch. I'm not allergic to money, I love money, right? Like let's not anyone that says that I'm this crunchy granola guy that's just sort of like, you know, let's just make the want to make the world a better place.
Speaker 5:I totally want to change the world but I also want to get paid doing it, right? And it's like you should get paid doing it. Never do something unless you're going to get some type of reward for it, whether that's monetary or will lead to a monetary reward.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I think a huge value is as I think you've been alluding to in in all of this is the value of experience and the lessons that you've learned that that now you can go and have that that confidence to say, I can start anything at any time. It's gonna be fine. You know? I mean, that's the value of going from one business to to the next and and doing it a second and third time is is, you know, just take taking the lessons apply that you learned from the second one and applying them to to the number three.
Speaker 7:Yeah. What what that brought to my mind was when you hear about these very, very successful and wealthy people that lose everything, and then within, like, two years, they're back to a billion dollars, it's because of that experience and that confidence that they're just gonna do it again. Because once you know how to do it, it's usually not a fluke. And even if it is a fluke, you can extract enough lessons from it. So you see people who go from rich to broke to rich to broke.
Speaker 7:You hear the stories about the billionaires who lose everything, and then within, you know, eighteen months, they're back to a billion dollar company. It's the networks, it's the experience, it's the lessons, it's the confidence.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I think you're right. It's I'm I'm thinking about this right now for you know my girlfriend's business which is super like I would love to be able to get inside the head of a guy that builds billion dollar businesses and say okay how are you gonna make the next one And have that type of confidence in my head because as you had alluded to before, bootstrappers never really think, oh, okay. I'm at, you know, 5,000, 10,000, 20,000. I'm very happy with my 20,000 MRR, and I'm going to continue to build the business, you know, and be quite wealthy off that 20,000 MRR.
Speaker 5:But no, that's bullshit. My mindset is how do you scale to 500,000 MRR as quickly as humanly possible? And then how do you scale to a million dollars MRR? Like how is that process, what is it what is happening, how are you going to be able to do it? And that is the core entrepreneurial journey for me.
Speaker 5:It's like those numbers, never be happy. Never be happy with, you know. And that will also just mean that you're just never happy as a person.
Speaker 7:Welcome welcome to life.
Speaker 5:Welcome to life. There you go. But you know until you sell it, like your focus should be a 100% steam ahead and this is maybe coming from the marketing person, know, like Rob is the CEO, the technical guy and I'm the marketing person salesperson which is like full steam ahead. How do we keep doubling every single year? How do we keep building the business?
Speaker 5:Never stop. Never stop building it. And then if you, you know, if you get to that point where you're starting to become comfortable maybe you should do a deep look inside yourself and say to yourself maybe I should sell this thing, you know, maybe I should do something else, maybe I should assign a new CEO, maybe I should you know, whatever it might be. This is also connected to a lot of the inner thoughts that I've had on myself which is and we had talked about this before the show, I'm the CMO of the company but I actually think a lot of the things that I do as the CMO of the company are more delegated, you know, responsibilities and that may not be the best place for me. So maybe we could hire a really good CMO that knew how to get the business to the next level that's built, you know, a $100,000,000 business as an example and say, okay, what's our two year plan for getting there?
Speaker 5:We're gonna sign you as the CMO and you know Liam you're going to be one of the guys that works on website optimization or works on promotion like doing you know podcasts or something like that full time, you know, that type of a thing like Yeah.
Speaker 7:Or go start a different business and have a much bigger impact in a team of 10 people as opposed to a 100 people.
Speaker 5:Right. And I think that a lot of people get stuck up in the concept of saying, well no, I'm the guy who started this company. Of course, I should be the one that runs it. Not always. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:You know, and I'm
Nathan Barry:because it's a it's a
Brian Casel:very different job at at this at this stage than it than it was in year one.
Speaker 5:What I what I the reason why I was useful to this company in year one and year two is no longer the reason why I'm useful to the company in year three and year four. And that and I have to build a different set of skill sets to be able to do that. I've known entrepreneurs that have gone through this process and I've chatted with them at length about this and I'm trying to learn that because I'd like to be able to, just from my own personal ego, get to the ride where I'm saying like, hey, this is a $100,000,000 company. Bam. You know, that's a $100,000,000 company right there.
Speaker 5:Thank you very much. Right now, as I stand today, I do not have the skill sets to be able to get to that point. So I have to apply myself to building those skill sets out, and they are not the same skill sets that I had that that, you know, that the average growth hacker or bootstrapper has, which is not applicable for, you know, listeners right now, but probably is applicable for listeners in the next three, four years.
Brian Casel:Well, you know, Liam, I I feel like we've we've really spanned the almost the entire journey of of, you know, from start up to, you know, to scale. And and, you know, just from hearing your story over the last three years and and beyond, I mean, this has been awesome. You know, thank you so much for for taking the time and and talking with us today. I know that there was a ton of value in here that it it was awesome. So, Liam, thank you.
Brian Casel:Thank you so much.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I'm sorry. I got a little too existential on you guys.
Speaker 5:Oh, come
Speaker 7:on. I feel like
Speaker 6:you're going
Speaker 7:great. Thought we could go on forever like this.
Brian Casel:Totally. No.
Speaker 6:It's all, like, you know, metrics based stuff. We'll talk about the different the 67 different split tests that we've done on Time Doctor and all that kind of stuff. But for right now, it's like that was kinda just what was in my head.
Brian Casel:We we will have to get you back on here and talk about all that stuff. I mean, I know how how really, like, how data driven you are about every aspect of of growing this thing, and and it's been, you know, really fascinating. But I I I think all the remote stuff is interesting as well. So, yeah, let let's let's do that another time, but, you know
Speaker 6:Yeah. I'll leave you with this this last point, which is I had a very influential entrepreneur at least in my life, someone I would define as a mentor, and he had about 200 employees and I was asking him like, you know, how are the things how's everything going and you know, how are you looking to grow and how many more people are you gonna hire in the next year? And he said, you know what, I'm trying to figure out how to fire everybody and just run the business by myself. And that kind of that actual that conversation two months ago has come to a head at this point where it's like, wait a minute. That's actually the ultimate business right there.
Speaker 6:And you and most people probably that are listening to this right now are much closer to that side of inspection than the 300 employee guy. So I'd almost kind of enjoy this point and say, this is probably gonna be the least not necessarily. It's very stressful right now what you're going through, but it's probably the most simple straightforward aspect of the business, timeline of the business.
Brian Casel:Liam, thanks again. Of course, everyone should check out timedoctor.com. Fantastic product, fantastic business and story. So, yeah, Liam, we'll talk soon.
Speaker 7:Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 6:Thanks.
Brian Casel:Alright. So that wraps it up. This was a long one today, but I hope you got a lot out of it. This episode today was sponsored by Less Accounting. You can check out their new autopilot service by going to lessaccounting.com/autopilot and use coupon code bootstrappedweb to get a free month of bookkeeping service or get two months free of the Less Accounting software.
Brian Casel:And as always, to dig into the backlog of episodes, head on over to bootstrappedweb.com. And please if you're enjoying the show do head over to iTunes leave us a five star review we'd we'd really appreciate it. Next week Jordan and I are both going to micro comp and next week's episode we will likely do a micro comp recap So look forward to that. Talk to you guys next week.
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