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Building an online boutique business with Becky Beach

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Guest: Becky Beach

Episode Transcript (Click to expand)

00:03

Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to one more episode of the agile entrepreneur podcast. This is your host Ramesh Dontha. Today we'll be talking to an entrepreneur who has weathered through tough times before she made a very successful business by herself. Her name is Becky Beach, and by the way, I love the name Becky Beach, Becky Beach is a mompreneur who was in debt up to $150,000 before she started her online boutique. She was actually living from month to month and was barely making ends meet before her business. After the online boutique though she was debt free. So Becky nowadays helps other moms start their own businesses, save money, and live from home through her blog www.mombeach.com That's another interesting name there. So Becky, welcome.

00:59

Becky: Oh, thank you. I'm really excited to be here.

01:03

Ramesh: Fantastic. So Becky, so let's get straight to it. What were you, what was the work that you were doing when you were in that much of a debt around $150,000 if you could explain how you, not necessarily how you got into it, but essentially what were you doing? And what was the transformation?

01:23

Becky: Well, I was working for a small pain and injury clinic as a web developer. Like that's what I was doing, and they weren't paying very much. Like I was probably making like $20 an hour or less, you know, those weren't paying that much, you know, so I was like scraping by and I’ll work like 60-hour week. Sometimes it was just a lot of stress. Then I got pregnant with my little child, you know, when I just couldn't, it just was really so much stress, you know, and hard to deal with, you know. They just weren't paying very much at all, you know.

01:51

Ramesh: So then what happens? You are in debt and then the work, you're not enjoying it. It's stressful. Then how did that switch come on that Hey, no, I need to start something else. I need to do something else.

02:04

Becky: Well, I got pregnant with like, we had a child, my husband, and I just said, I just can't go back to work. I don't think I could work 60-hour days you know in this condition, you know, when I was, I had a little child that I was taking a daycare. It was after three months he has already gone to daycare, you know, that's just too short, you know, and I was just worried about him all day. I couldn't focus on my work, you know, because I just had a little baby that I wanted to be with. So I said, cause I got to do something. So like one day I went in, I was watching YouTube and I was like saying, oh gosh, I heard this, trying to unwind. And then this video came on for how to drop ship. And it was really interesting. So then I started watching it and I was like, you know what, I could do that, you know, there's no money up front, because I had no money, you know. Yeah. So I thought I could do this, you know, and it seems pretty easy.

02:56

Ramesh: And then what happened? Did you take any training course or how did you start your business? If you could just go through a step by step.

03:05

Becky: Oh, sure. The gentleman advertising was Kevin David and he had a course, so I decided to buy the course. It was like $997 and I used a credit card and it was probably almost maxed out. So I decided to go through his course, and I learned all I could, you know, he had so many videos. Like nowadays he talks mostly about how to make money other ways, but back then he was like all about drop shipping. So I got really

into his videos and other influencers on YouTube. They were talking about drop shipping as well. And I learned all I could. And then I started my own drop shipping website on Shopify.

03:43

Ramesh: So Becky, if I could ask you, how long ago was this? Which year was this?

03:47

Becky: Oh, this was like back in 2015 when my son was born.

03:52

Ramesh: Okay. So 2015 a drop shipping I think is still popular, a lot of people are doing. And then so your first business was drop shipping. And then how did that go? So within a month, were you able to make money? So if you could tell us a timeline of after you build your website and how did it go?

04:12

Becky: Well, after a month I was making like a $1,000. I was like really excited and you know, I said this is great. And then like a couple months later, I was making more than I was making at that job, you know. So I was thinking, you know, I think I'm going to resign, you know, because I just can't work at this job anymore. It was hurting my mental health, you know, and my physical health, I just couldn't stand working there anymore. I was just really toxic, toxic environment. The guy that ran the company, he was the child of the owner of the company. So he was just, got a big power trip, you know, and he's wasn't fun to work with. And so, you know, I stopped putting my resignation and then I just started doing it full time. And that's when I skyrocketed my income. I just started getting so much every month doing it, you know, and I was able to start paying off debt, you know, and it was just amazing. It was so simple to do. Like anybody could do this, you know.

05:03

Ramesh: Yeah so this is an online boutique and then you are like, what kind of products were you selling?

05:10

Becky: I was selling women's handbags. And that's the perfect product. Cause I did lots of research and I barely get any returns because like women just love handbags and they don't return them that often. You know, because they just have so many. So they're not like clothes because you know, if it doesn't fit right, they'll return it and shoes are even worse. So this was like a perfect product. And I love handbags myself. Like I know what women like, you know, what kind of handbags they are interested in and these are low costs. Cause women want trendy handbags. You know, like the designers make but low cost. So these resemble the trendy ones that are like costing like hundreds or hundreds of dollars like, and they're all under like 50 bucks, you know.

05:50

Becky: Okay. So Becky for people who don't know what drop shipping business is. If you could explain what is it?

05:56

Becky: Oh sure. It's when you, you paid this $29 a month with Shopify and then you go on AliExpress or another drop shipping company and you just go there and import the product using this free up called Oberlo and it's all, you don't have to pay for any inventory up front. You just put the products in your store and then you start selling them. You don't have to have the inventory. You're selling somebody else's inventory.

06:23

Ramesh: So Becky, then I could start a drop shipping business. You could start and then 10 other people start. So then why would people

come to Becky beaches drop shipping shop as opposed to Ramesh Dontha somebody else's shop. How are you able to attract customers?

06:40

Becky: Well, I have like very good customer service. You know, I just go above and beyond for my customers. And plus I have a graphic design background. You know, I make my store very user friendly and I’ve also been certified to UX design. So I know how to convert customers better, you know, where to put the buttons, you know, and how to move them through the shopping process, you know, so they're easily converted in what colors to use. You know, I use like blues and greens, that's a very soothing colors that for shoppers.

07:11

Ramesh: So that's great. So Becky, so what you did was you really first figured out what you're good at, which is your graphic design and I know the UX user design, so how people, you know, surf the website and those kinds of things. And then you build on your strengths and then again, so it's women's handbags, you know quite well about the product and then you match and then you put a Shopify. So it's a fantastic way to start a business by the way. Because first you want to figure out what you're good at.

07:42

Becky: Yeah. You're right. Yeah.

07:44

Ramesh: So, and then let's say had you not had the skills of the graphic design, probably you would have relied on somebody else to do that for you?

07:53

Becky: Oh yes. Like I was able to make my own logo and my own store graphics because I have the design background. Like I spent like five

years in school, you know, getting a BFA. So I knew all about how to do it, you know. But somebody could easily hire someone on Upwork or Fiverr to do it for them, you know, and it doesn't cost very much to get your logo made or a graphics made. You don't need to have graphic design experience.

08:17

Ramesh: So Becky that's fine. So then how did you price the products? Between, let's say probably the cost to you is already there, but did you have to make decisions on pricing? How much margin you want to get?

08:31

Becky: Oh yes. Like the persons I was selling were like 10 bucks. That's how much the product was. But I was selling them for $47. That was the sweet spot because it was still under 50 bucks, you know and a woman would go into a department store and they're like 70 or a hundred dollars for handbags like that, or even more, a hundreds of dollars. And it's the same look, but it's an under 50 bucks, you know, that's a sweet spot, you know, at 47 and plus people like seven in numbers.

08:57

Ramesh: But how did you come up with the $47?

09:00

Becky: I did lots of research. I did lots of testing. Like at first, I tested, you know, like I got $49, you know, like just that. So it's under like nine. But then I kept going lower as I was getting like, like less people were buying it. So I was like, I got to make this cheaper. So if I only did it for $47, it blew up, I was like, wow, people are buying this even more. So I'm sticking with 47, you know.

09:24

Ramesh: So basically you are testing, you're iterating.

09:26

Becky: Yes. It's all about testing.

09:27

Ramesh: And entrepreneurship is, which is you test, and you tweak and then you... So then how about promotions and marketing? So how did you figure that out?

09:38

Becky: Well, I also have some digital marketing experience. I've always been interested in digital marketing. Like I love Neil Patel, he's like a genius. So I was always following his websites and also, he did a summit and I paid for it, you know, for lifetime access. And you know, all these professionals come on, you know about marketing. I was just really interested, so I just learned all I could. So I'm like a self-taught marketer. I've no marketing degree or anything. So that's how I learned marketing. And also like social media. Like I go on Pinterest, that's how I promote my store mostly.

10:11

Ramesh: Okay. So you use social media primarily.

10:14

Becky: Yeah. Social media like Facebook. But Pinterest is a huge driver of customers for me.

10:20

Ramesh: For your business. Okay. I mean this is good. So we talked about pricing, we talked about promotions and marketing. And then the other thing that you talk extensively is email marketing. Can you talk about how you build your email marketing, the mechanics of it if you don't mind?

10:38

Becky: Oh sure. On my store I have a signup, you know, and I say you get like a discount, like a 10% off. So I get so many people subscribing it and I got like 20,000 people on my list right now. And I send out promotions regularly, you know, like maybe twice a week, you know, have more like savings, like 5%. I'd just stick with 5 and 10 cause I'm a drop shipper. I can't have, I don't have any inventory in stock, so I have to just see what my margins are, you know of the company selling the item and if they lowered their price that I could lower my price, you know.

11:13

Ramesh: I see. So then Becky which mail marketing do you use?

11:19

Becky: I use Mailerlite and its very low cost. You know, I recommend that, never use MailChimp like that one just terrible. I got my account closed, you know, and they never responded back to me. They have terrible customer service.

11:32

Ramesh: So Mailerlite you use, and then you build your email marketing list through promotions and those kinds of things. I see. So then what's your website? Is it www.mombeach.com or something else?

11:47

Becky: Oh yes. Like now I'm trying to help other moms, you know, start their own businesses and my blogs called mom beach and I have lots of free tutorials on how to start your own store.

12:00

Ramesh: I see. Now, let's get into that in a second. So we talked about your online boutique that helps significantly. And then we talked through the step by step. That's phenomenal. You know, in terms of the email marketing promotions and pricing piece of it and how you're

getting a product, which you don't have to carry an inventory.

12:15

Becky: Yeah. It's awesome, because I don't have enough space, you know.

12:19

Ramesh: That's great. Let's talk about the www.mombeach.com which is, now you said, Hey, I’ve been successful. I've done well to other moms, so when did this start?

12:31

Becky: Well I was like maybe two years ago I was like, gosh, I'm doing so well, you know, and I started telling other people that I know, I’ve got my friend Michelle, and she was really interested in what I was doing. So I told her about it, and she didn't know what to do. So I decided to write a post, you know on a blog. Cause I had a blog for many years, but I wasn't really using it. It was called mom beach, you know, and I was never using it. So I decided to write a post to educate her on how to drop ship on the post and I sent it to her.

12:58

Ramesh: Okay. And then what happened? How did that grow?

13:01

Becky: Well then I started seeing more and more views on that, so she must've been sharing it to other people and I saw like maybe a hundred views on it in like a day one time and like, and she was passing around social media or somebody was, and I was getting so many hits, I was like, Hey, you know, this could be something like people are interested in this, you know, so maybe I should, you know, like branch out and write more articles about this, you know, and try to help other moms.

13:24

Ramesh: Okay. So then how many, I mean, do you have a Facebook group for that or how do you grow the www.mombeach.com blog on that business?

13:34

Becky: Oh, yes. I have a 5,000 people on my Instagram right now. And I have like a hundred people in my Facebook group. And they all like want to learn how to drop ship, you know, and start their own store.

13:47

Ramesh: So do you have a course for them?

13:49

Becky: Oh yeah. I just started a course. It's in beta right now, so it's a perfect time to join in. I'm going to increase the price to $500, you know, probably next month. Right now it's only $200, like $197 you know, the sevens.

14:02

Ramesh: So you love the sevens.

14:03

Becky: Yeah. So I'm all about the sevens, you know.

14:06

Ramesh: I’ll remember that actually when I have my course, I’ll put a seven next to it.

14:09

Becky: It really helps, you know, it's like a psychological number or something people like it, you know.

14:16

Ramesh: Yeah. I see. So and then this course will teach people how to do a drop shipping business or any kind of online business?

14:21

Becky: Well, drop shipping and wholesale, because I also do whole wholesale. I've been, because I’ve been so successful at drop shipping, I have a wholesale dog business where I sell dog stuff like dog products. I keep their small things like bows and cobblers. So I keep them in the garage, you know, like for my inventory.

14:40

Ramesh: Fantastic. So then so Becky, so you're doing multiple things. So how do you manage it? Let's get into your life, work life balance and things like that. So how are you managing the time between building the business, growing the businesses and then other stuff? Because that's one of the issues that a lot of entrepreneur’s face.

15:01

Becky: Oh yes. Like I mostly get up really early every morning if I can or I stay up late or when my son is asleep, I'm able to work, you know, and so it's very hard to balance it. Cause I'm a mother and plus I'm doing these businesses so it can get stressful, you know, but I'm just doing it, when everybody's asleep mostly, you know, it's quiet or I’ll go to Starbucks and work.

15:23

Ramesh: Okay. So Becky, during this journey, it looks like it's about five years approximately. Was there a time you thought, this is not for me, it's not working out, it's not doing well. I'll go back to work or do something else. Were there times like that?

15:39

Becky: Well, I had a problem customer post, a negative review on Trustpilot. It's some website, you know, where you can post reviews. And it was very scathing.

15:54

Ramesh: When was this?

15:55

Becky: It was probably like one-year in. I was like, this is terrible. Now when someone searches my business, they're going to see this nasty review. And I was really scared, you know, because I thought that I wouldn't get any more business.

16:08

Ramesh: But that was one review, right?

16:11

Becky: Oh yes. But that can make or break cause what if someone, a customer is trying to search for my store to see if there's anybody talking about it, you know.

16:17

Ramesh: Okay. So let me ask you another question, Becky, in that case then how about if somebody will look on your business or whatever, are there testimonials on your website or where does this whole review thing, how does it help? And then how do you focus on getting more reviews for your business? Because a lot of people are interested in that aspect as well.

16:40

Becky: Oh yeah. You should sign up with a Google business account, so you can get like started getting Google reviews. And I had some of my friends and family grab me positive reviews, you know, cause like, nobody ever writes reviews that are positive. There's more negative reviews.

16:53

Ramesh: That is very true. I think supposedly less than 2% of people actually use the product really do reviews. And then the reason I got interested in reviews is after I published my book. So the main thing

was when people go, and the reviews. So then you want to hustle a little bit asking people for reviews, which is that, you know, if they like it, they like the book or whatever, but you know, can you please go on Amazon if you liked it, give an honest review. I'm not asking you. So I think that is very important for your business. Okay. All right. So then, it seems like an overall, other than the review things have gone well. Is that a good assessment?

17:37

Becky: Oh yeah. Pretty much, it's just sometimes I’ll get emails from customers that are upset that their items are taken too long, that's something I can't control. As a dropshipper I can't control the shipping because I don't have the products with me. Somebody else is in charge of it, when it's shipped and the tracking. So sometimes, you know, it's difficult for me to know when it's going to come to the customer. So I say, well, you know just give it a few more days. You know, kind of like that and I’ve had some people wanting, you know, refunds because it's taken so long and finally that item comes and they're like, Oh, I got my item, you know, do you want the money back? Like somebody said that, that was really nice. So it just varies. But you should always be very nice to these people, you know, cause they're your customer. You don't never want to be rude or ignore them, you know.

18:22

Ramesh: So, great Becky. So were there any mentors or books that helped you along the way on your journey?

18:29

Becky: Oh yeah. I had paid for a $3,000 mentorship with this guy named Jim Fortan. He's a business coach and he's coached, you know, super achievers all around the world, you know, like just several different famous people. He's coached, you know, and he had a group coaching and he charged like $3,000. So I went in on it, it's called the transformational coaching. And it just changed my whole business

mindset. You know, I'm like, he says that money you know, comes from the universe. You know, it doesn’t come from hard work. That made me think cause that's true, you know, because you could set up passive income streams and get money that way. And that's what I’ve been doing with my store. I just set up the item and then I get the money passively it comes to me. I don't have to work like hours. I'm not paid for my time, you know. Like hourly, like somebody working a nine to five, you know.

19:21

Ramesh: Correct. And then so that's great. So then any books that you can recommend?

19:27

Becky: Well I love this book called start with why, by Simon Sinek. That's an amazing book. And there's also a book called the One Thing, that's a very good book. It tells you to focus on one thing at a time and there's this other one called, you know, because you are a badass at making money. Like that's a really good, forget the author. But that was like, I really liked listening to that. I Listen to books on audible in the car mostly.

19:51

Ramesh: Okay. So fantastic. So Becky's based on your experience, any tips that you could share with the listeners? And then the viewers?

20:01

Becky: Oh sure. You should always be patient. Don't think of yourself as losing money when you start running ads. If you make a store and you start running ads and you're losing money, don't think of that. Think of it as a learning experience because you do good enough, you could make the money back at 10 folds, you know, just think of it as learning because you make a mistake. That's a learning experience. So don't give up just because you made a mistake and you didn't sell anything, you

should just keep going. Cause there's some people I know that it took them like a couple months before they started making anything. You know, when they weren't, they were just getting one thing at a time, like one sale, but then they spent too much on ads. I didn't get a good ROAS, you know, I mean a return on investment, you know, ROI and return on ad spend, that's what that ROAS means. I just weren't getting a good enough return, you know. So they decided to quit, but then they kept going and that's when they become profitable because you're learning.

21:00

Ramesh: So Becky, you talked a little bit about the advertisements, so let me get into that. Do you use a paid advertising for your business?

21:12

Becky: Oh yeah, I use promoted pins on Pinterest and also Facebook ads with the Facebook ad manager.

21:18

Ramesh: Okay. And have they been profitable for you?

21:20

Becky B: Oh yes. That's how I drive traffic to my store but also drive organic Pinterest traffic and I go into how to do that in my course. Like how to use Pinterest to get free traffic.

21:33 Ramesh: Very good. So then so we talked about anything that you think you could have done better on your business journey.

21:44

Becky: Well, when I should have done from the get-go is like test, you know, test more when I was running Facebook ads, I would just put up one creative and one ad copy. But now I learned from a Facebook coach, like she's a Facebook ad coach to do like at least three different creatives and three different copies. And then you just started at $5 a day. And then you scale up the which one's performing the highest. That way you're not wasting money on something that's not working. You

don't put like $20 behind just one ad in one copy, you know.

22:16

Ramesh: Excellent. So fantastic Becky. So any last-minute advice, tips, things that we have not talked about?

22:23

Becky: Well, I would just say, you know just throw the mindset out the window, you know, because the mindsets don't work. You have to use habits. That's what Jim Fortin teaches is use habits. You know, to grow your business. You know, you look at habits of successful people and you don't say, well, I'm just going to have a good mindset. You know, like that's not going to help you. You can't just say you're going to do something; you are actually going to do. You got to act. You know, you have to start successful habits, like maybe getting up early to work on your business. You know, ever if you want to exercise, if to exercise, want to lose weight, you know, you got to actually make habits to do that. You know.

22:59

Ramesh: Fantastic. Becky it’s a very fascinating discussion. I personally have learned a lot from this session, so wish you the very best, any websites or things that you want to talk about?

23:12

Becky: Oh yes. Like if you're interested in drop shipping, definitely check out my website, www.mombeach.com and then go to start a store. It's at the very top of the navigation and then there's a free drop shipping tutorial. And there's also information on my course if you're interested in that. It's a very good resource to learn about how to start other businesses too, like blogging for instance, you know, and also how to start a cleaning business and just different kinds of businesses.

23:36

Ramesh: That's great. So I'm going to check it out myself. So here is Becky Beech for you guys, just to wrap up the whole discussion, she was in debt $150,000 or so. She was working hard, very stressful life. She had a life changing, you know, with a kid. And then she decided to do something different and she started drop shipping business and she started making money thousand dollars very first month. That is unusual Becky, by the way.

24:03

Becky: Yes. When you think about it, a purse is like 50 bucks’ purse. You have to sell many of them to get to $1,000, you know?

24:11

Ramesh: Excellent. And then afterwards she branched out to coaching, helping other moms become mompreneurs. And so fascinating discussion, www.mombeach.com and we went through the pricing, promotions and Facebook. So lots of stuff there. So Becky, thank you very much for coming on the show.

24:29

Becky: Oh, sure. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

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The post Building an online boutique business with Becky Beach appeared first on RameshDontha.com.

Helping small businesses build and scale with Erin Shea

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Guest: Erin Shea

Episode Transcript (Click to expand)

00:00

Ramesh: Excited about you know, talking to Vistaprinting and of course you.

00:04

Erin: You too, I think it'll be great.

00:06

Ramesh: Yeah. So I think Adam and Erin, I would like to introduce Vistaprint as a leading online provider of marketing products and services to small businesses. Is that fine or is there anything else you want me to do?

00:20

Erin: No, I think that's appropriate.

00:22

Ramesh: And then Erin, I think you as a marketing director for North America for Vistaprint.

00:28

Erin: Correct.

00:29

Ramesh: Okay. So good. All right, so we'll get started and then pretty much we will get into you know, the areas that you know, you really drive, which is the marketing for small businesses. And then we'll get into some of the study findings as well. And we want to take, you're welcome too. And [00:50 inaudible] you want to mention, okay. Thank you. Alright.

00:59

Hello everyone. Welcome to one more episode of the agile entrepreneur video cast and podcast. And this is your host Ramesh Dontha. Today, I am especially excited to talk to Erin Shea, who is the North America marketing director for Vistaprint. For I think almost all of you know about Vistaprint. Vistaprint is the leading online provider of marketing products and services to small businesses. And in full disclosure, I am a customer of Vistaprint. Every time I do my business cards routinely, I go there and then, so without thinking, so they gave me so much flexibility. So that's what I do. And then that's where I start as a customer and

then I go into some other areas as well. Erin, welcome.

01:42

Erin: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

01:44

Ramesh: I know I introduced Vistaprint, but in your own words what is Vistaprint do and then especially what you do for Vistaprint?

01:53

Erin: Sure. Vistaprint is a company that's been around for over 20 years now and we are so proud to say that we've helped over 17 million small businesses really live their small business dreams. We started out as a startup, a small business of our own, and then have kind of grown to an international company. But small businesses have always and will always be our full passion. And it's why we kind of come into workday in and day out. We did start with sort of business cards as our core product. And then as small businesses have evolved, and the customers' needs have evolved we have expanded our assortment into a number of different printed marketing materials. So everything from so, your flyers and your brochures, your signage, and then of course, into digital. So websites, search engine marketing, and then of course design services.

02:50

Ramesh: Oh, excellent Erin. So how long have you been with Vistaprint?

02:54

Erin: I have been with Vistaprint for a wonderful 10 years. And I find that you know, I'm so passionate about partnering with small businesses day in and day out.

03:08

Ramesh: So in the 10 years, I mean, I can't imagine, but you must have talked to so many small businesses. So if I could start off with one question in the small business marketing, what are the things as small business like a successful small businesses do versus a small business that don't do too well? so what different it makes.

03:31

Erin: Sure. So I am a big proponent of really focusing in on where the value is for your small business. And so I think we see this, we find this tendency to juggle all the balls in the air and to do a ton of different things. And what I think is really the difference between success and sort of feeling daunted around your small business is really kind of choosing those top two or three things that you think are most valuable for your business. And that could be anything. I think that could be from expanding your assortment. It could be from you know, reaching a larger network. I think you really have to define what those things are and then do fewer and do them better. And I find that really drives success.

04:20

Ramesh: Oh, okay. So fantastic. Actually, I mean, I like that I myself, I'm a small business owner. While getting started, that was the biggest struggle that I had because I felt that I had to do so many different things and then, and not doing anything well. So you have seen that or the successful business owners, they focus on few things and then they do them well.

04:40

Erin: Yes, absolutely. And I find that if you start with what you are most passionate about, the answer of what will drive the value becomes so much easier to define. So I think a lot of times with small businesses, and I see this every day, you have started your small business for a reason, and you really want to make sure that your customers and the people that you're getting in front of understand what that reason is.

05:07

Ramesh: So Erin, let me just segue a little bit into the small business, how they get started. So I did mine as a side hustle. I was working full time for a company. In your experience, have you seen people start this small businesses just as a full-time business or more and more people are doing this in a hobby as a side business? Can you talk a little bit about how this is working?

05:34

Erin: Absolutely. So Vistaprint, at Vistaprint we did a recent study of 2000 full time employed people and we found that you know, just over about 25% of people currently have a side hustle business or and then those that don't over more than half of them feel like in the future they want to do that. And so the side hustle or the part time business is really something, of course it's been

around for a while, but we are seeing this trend emerge more and more over time. And the interesting thing that I think is that we are really seeing it be very prevalent in sort of these younger generations. And so your gen Z and your millennials they are very excited to kind of start with these side hustles.

06:26

Ramesh: That is actually, it's an astounding number. You're talking about 25% started a side hustle and 55% or so want to do it. So I'm looking at seven out of 10 or eight out of 10 people really want to get into this space.

06:41

Erin: Yes, absolutely. And I think we found that that was for a number of different reasons. So you know, one reason of course is from a monetary perspective. And so one of the things we found is that the average side hustle does make about $15,000 a year. And so that's additive income to your full-time employment. And so that's really one of the drivers that we're seeing. I think additional ones are back to that passion, that hobby that people have. And so they want to start to think about how I could turn this hobby into, you know, a business for myself. They want to make it part of more of their day to day life and bring that to others as well.

07:23

Ramesh: So Erin, I'm very fascinated now with looking at the numbers. So, but of the 25% who started this as a side hustle, do they tend to keep this as a side business or at some point they become comfortable with the business that they will completely switch over?

07:41

Erin: Yeah, I think you're hitting on one of the most, you know, interesting things there, which is a side hustle is a really you know, a bit of a lower risk way to start into this small business arena. And so what that allows people to do is to kind of put one foot in and say, can I make this into something bigger? And so we do find that, you know, there's a huge array. Some people want to keep their business as a side hustle, but there is a huge portion of people who want to grow this over time. And so starting out as a side hustle allows them to figure out how they want to grow their company in the future.

08:24

Ramesh: So actually I had a chance to look at your study. And another number that caught my attention is that some sizable number of people who start the side hustle are making more than what people make as a minimum wage. It's like other minimum salary or the household income. So I think, I don't remember exactly, but it's at 25,000 or whatever. That's a pretty decent number.

08:49

Erin: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that we in the Vistaprint study we were, you know, really surprise and happy to see that as well. I think, again, it just speaks to the importance of side hustles and starting this journey.

09:04

Ramesh: Okay. So Erin in your job then do you, when you try to market to the small businesses, are you in the distinction, how do I market to people who have the business, small business and are completely, versus people who have this business as a side, like, do you have different marketing strategies that you implement to reach the solopreneurs or a mompreneurs and that kind of force versus people who have the business as their full time business?

09:35

Erin: Sure. It's a great question. I think what we find is that there are many types of businesses, so as you mentioned, side hustlers, full time, mompreneurs, etc. But there's a common thread there that they all have. And even if it's a small portion of their day as a side hustle may be, we suggest that you really try to treat that as a full-time business. And what I mean by that is again, it goes back to what are those things that are going to drive the most value. And so at this department, we're certainly partnering with all sorts of businesses at all times, but we find that that core need and the core partnership that we're able to provide is very consistent to that passion across all businesses.

10:20

Ramesh: Yeah. So one of the things I always admired about Vistaprint is their marketing, right. So I mean because the reason, there are lots of other options of our business cards or whatever, but I can't tell you exactly, but whether I'm surfing or whatever, I come across Vistaprint for my small business needs. So I mean, what are the channels that you use to reach the entrepreneurs?

10:44

Erin: Sure. We want to be where our customers are. So we want to make it easy for small businesses to reach out to Vistaprint and to shop Vistaprint. And so we use an array of different channels from both offline and online. You know, when you search, we want to be available for you. We want that findability piece there. Certainly on more of like TV and radio and also social. So we do believe that, you know, people these days they are on their phones. And they are constantly you know, looking for inspiration. And so Vistaprint definitely wants to be available to our customers in that arena. And the other thing I would say is, you know, that is also advice we would give small businesses as well. So you definitely want to be where your customers are. I think social is a really great place where again, there are so many eyeballs on it and there's just a huge opportunity for small businesses there. It's also tends to a bit more of a cheaper channel. So depending on what your marketing budget is, I think social is a great Avenue.

12:00

Ramesh: That's great Erin. So another segment where I'm always fascinated by people's, you know, their lives, their careers. If you don't mind, if you could talk a little bit about you, many times for many people that aren't comfortable. I hope you are a little bit, so what has been your career progression? Like have you switched around in different roles. If you could say a bit about Erin Shea, how did she come to where she is right now?

12:28

Erin: Sure, absolutely. So I have always been in marketing. I started out kind of doing a bit more on an internal marketing perspective for businesses and kind of really involved into more of what we do today, which is working with small businesses. I grew up with a mother who was a small business owner and a really strong female entrepreneur. And so I'm really passionate about you know, making sure that that feeds into my day to day. And so when I'm thinking about marketing for Vistaprint, I'm thinking about what the customer needs, what small business needs are out there and how can we sort of help and partner with small businesses.

13:13

Ramesh: I see. Have you always been in this niche, in this area of a marketing to small businesses? Have your switch around industries now switched around functions since you graduated from college?

13:25

Erin: Yeah, so I have switched around a little bit. I used to kind of be in more of a sports, in the more of the support’s arena. But for a long time I've been in the small business arena and that's really where I'm passionate. Again, I think that, that it's so close to home for me. Just having been, you know, helping seen, you know, my mother as she started her business and how important it was to really create, you know, a forum or create marketing collateral where her business vision could come to light.

14:02

Ramesh: If you don't mind me asking, what kind of a business did she have?

14:07

Erin: Sure. She was an interior designer. So she worked on the commercial spaces and also personal home spaces. And again if you think about that type of work. She had such a vision for the spaces and for her clients. And she also had a vision for her small business. And so she spent a lot of time kind of hemming and hawing about you know, what was the right name for her business, what was the right logo? And I do think about, you know, back in the day when she first started, Vistaprint was not around. And I think about how much time and effort she had to spend trying to translate that into her brand. And I think about, you know, had Vistaprint been around that partnership could have been such an, it's so helpful for her from a timesaver and also from you know, from a value perspective. I think that that's another thing that Vista primp brings to the table.

15:10

Ramesh: Wow Erin you're lucky. You had a first experience without having started a business, but an experience of, you know, somebody who in the household who started the business. So you could go through the ins and outs and then you had a bird's eye view of the problems and opportunities. That's a very good.

15:27

Erin: Yeah, and it's wonderful too because I have just such distinct memories. I can recall, you know, the first time that she got her business cards and it was such a moment for us, again, like I think she had really spent the time and effort to figure out what that should look like and how she wanted to present herself to her prospective clients. And so when we got that, it was a celebratory thing. We

all felt like she was on the cusp of something really exciting.

15:55

Ramesh: Wow. So I'm in like, you could really connect entrepreneurs. I mean, I could see the enthusiasm, the passion that the excitement that you saw. So I mean you really know what an entrepreneur is feeling and thinking when you are actually marketing to them.

16:09

Erin: Yes. Because not only did I grow up with it, but here at Vistaprint, we're constantly talking to our customers. We want to know what the new trends are, we want to know what they need, and we want to kind of solve that need for them. And so it's part of our day to day here.

16:23

Ramesh: Great. So Erin, so this is the last segment. I would like to talk a little bit about entrepreneurs themselves. What kind of advice would you give based on your experience of dealing with so many entrepreneurs? So let's take two different classes of entrepreneurs. One is somebody in your study also said about 30%, didn't know where to start, right? So if I'm a person always wants to earn some money or do something and I don't know where to start, is there any advice that you could give?

16:55

Erin: Absolutely. I think, you know, the passion there is so important. And so I think you need to think about what you are trying to accomplish. Is it, you know, what is your business and what do you want to stand for? And once you figure it out that, I would say really invest in trying to figure out how do you communicate that to your prospective clients. And so spending time at the very beginning and saying, what is my vision? How do I, how do I want to bring this to life is so important. And I think you can do that at the very beginning with little to no money. I think you just have to sit there and think, what do I want this to become? And then from there I would say you really want to invest in your brand identity.

17:44

Erin: And so the look and feel, your logo. It's so important to have something that really speaks to your business. And so you can kind of weave that into your

marketing collateral. So examples of that could be, if you are a new bakery starting, you know, you want to make sure that your marketing, if I'm looking at a brochure that you have at your business, I'm looking at that and I want to try that cupcake. I want to try that donut. So it should really speak for you. And again, that's half the battle. I think the second part of that of course is I think we would remiss if we don't mention financials. So really, I think you need to step back and say what is your comfort level in terms of investment here. And so again, this kind of leads back to the side hustle story where we can say, you know, if it's a small investment that you're willing to start with at first, start with the side hustle. There's nothing wrong with that. I think that's really exciting. You can kind of get your feet wet, you can see what you know, what customers you're willing to drive and what that looks like and then grow it over time.

18:57

Ramesh: Excellent. So now the second class of entrepreneurs. So I'm somebody who started, and I believe that the first year is probably the most critical, crucial year. And also the first initial customers are the most important customers. So what are the things, me as an entrepreneur now I have an idea. I know what I want to do. So I've invested something, I got it off the ground. What are the things that I should be focusing on during the first year?

19:25

Erin: Use your network. There's so much power in who you know and other small businesses around you. And so I would say focus on, you know who those people are and really trying to turn them into an engaged customer base for you. And again, I would say after that, really focused on keeping them coming back for more. And so to your point, you mentioned that those first customers are so important. I completely agree. How do you get them to keep coming back to your business I think is really important?

19:57

Ramesh: Yeah. So referrals and those kinds of things. Testimonials keep building and keep thinking about them from right off the bat. And then the third phase is where now you got your feet on the ground. I mean many people say it's difficult to get the start, within three years a number of businesses fail or whatever. I'd say just survive first three years and you're good to go. So beyond the customer pipeline, financials you already talked about, are there any things that as a

business owner should think about for the long-term growth?

20:36

Erin: I think as a, you know, in general your business should be an umbrella. And so hopefully again it goes back to that original conversation around really establishing your brand. And so when we find that when you start out, you might start out with one particular product or one product line, but your brand, your small business should be an umbrella in the sense that once you know your customer really well, how do you sort of expand what your offering is. And so that could be another product line. It could be a new location or space. I think there's a lot of opportunity if you kind of think through the longer-term vision of what that could be from the very beginning.

21:19

Ramesh: So basically what you're saying is, Hey, don't be complacent just because something is working, thinking that it will continue to work, you know, maybe or maybe not. But start thinking about diversifying the clientele, diversifying your products and those are the areas that you're talking about.

21:35 Erin: Absolutely. we find that small business owners are so passionate, keep that going. Just because you're three years in that is the lifeblood. Like that is what should drive your day to day. And again once you do that, I think things start to fall into place. You can diversify your portfolio, your customer base, etc.

21:57

Ramesh: Excellent. So Erin, I can't believe that we covered so much ground already, talked about different classify entrepreneurs, your advice to them and then what they should be thinking about. So are there any areas that we have not covered but you think are important for anybody who's thinking of business?

22:14

Erin: I think again, I would just say think through what is most important to your business. And we touched a little bit about this but this changes, it evolves. And like we mentioned just before, you know, your business is going to change, the market is going to change, the needs of your customers is going to change. And so really well equip yourself to be able to be flexible and modify as needed.

22:45

Ramesh: Yeah. Actually I 100% agree with you and I call that an agile way of doing a business because you know, you start with something and then I spoke to hundreds of entrepreneurs as part of the podcast and almost 95% of them said where they are now is not where they started.

23:03

Erin: Absolutely. And where they are now is not where they're going to be in the future. And I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind.

23:09

Ramesh: So that knowing that, so don't try to be perfect in what you're trying to do now. Just get something out there, do something, learn from the experience and then continue doing what's working and then what's not working, then not focus it, but keep evolving, keep iterating. And then just don't stand on your feet thinking that it's going to be like this forever.

23:31

Erin: Absolutely. Absolutely.

23:34

Ramesh: Thank you very much for your time. I'm very excited again to talk to you and talk to Vistaprint as a company. So thank you very much.

23:44

Erin: Thank you so much for having me.

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Building an online timesheet & invoice software business

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Guest: William Roberts & John Holmes

Episode Transcript (Click to expand)

00:04

Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to one more episode of the agile entrepreneur video cast and podcast. And this is your host, Ramesh Dontha. Today, with the very first time I'm going to talk to two co-founders, John Holmes and Will Roberts. Both of them are co-founders and executive partners at www.weworked.com. It's an online timesheet software company. They have bootstrapped it built into a company that serves customers in what, 120 countries. That is phenomenal. All right guys, John and Will welcome.

00:41

Will: Thank you.

00:41

Ramesh: So, John, can you introduce the company please?

00:46

John: Sure. I'm a little bit about weworked, we started, weworked about nine years ago. My time may be off a year or so. It goes back pretty fast, but not years ago. When I started, weworked we both worked for small companies and weworked basically as a time sheet invoicing payroll/ leave tracking software that we developed with the focus of small business clients. And it's kind of morphed into something much bigger. But from the beginning, that was the initial focus.

01:27

Ramesh: Okay, great. So Will how about you, if you could introduce yourself and then the side of the business that you focus on as well?

01:35

Will: I am Will Roberts; I am a cofounder here at www.weworked.com. I've primarily focused on the technical support team, database architecture, database management and some marketing.

01:53

Ramesh: Fantastic. So all right guys, so welcome. And so let's talk about the nine years ago before, right. So that's when you guys started. And how did you decide to start a company? What were you guys doing before that? So let me start with Will. So what were you doing before you guys started www.weworked.com?

02:14 Will: I actually was, I had started my own consulting firm, I think back in maybe

2005. And I was, you know, pretty much serving as a contractor to the federal government.

02:32

Ramesh: I see. So John, how about you? What were you doing before that?

02:36

John: I was a software programmer for small businesses. And I did some government contracting work as well.

02:47

Ramesh: Okay. So then how did you guys meet up and then how did the thought of starting a company come, who started and then who followed up?

02:57

Will: Well, firstly we met on the job.

03:02

John: Yes, we both met probably back in 2000, 2001 we were both working for a smaller tech company that created software for the government on the department of transportation. And Will and I kicked it off right away from beginning. So years later after Will started his business and I was probably two jobs moved from where we met. I had reached out to Will regarding weworked. So its kind of, I kind of had the initial brainchild of it. I was out of work for a few months and sat around thinking about what I could do to kind of change the projection of you know, my future with respect to jobs and businesses. So having worked for small businesses most of the time, one thing that I noticed was none of the small businesses had in house Time sheet software. And it was a struggle for a lot of them back in the early two thousands, because a lot of the software was developed for large enterprises. So started working on it, developed a good starting point. And then realized I needed a lot of help to pull this thing off and went through my mental Rolodex who I could call upon and Will was the first guy. And that's how, that was in short. That's how it kicked off.

04:50

Ramesh: Fantastic. Okay. So let me ask you this guys. Whenever a software company like this gets formed and you have an idea for a product, the challenge is always you know, we build it, they will come, you know, they may not come. So that's an issue. So when you had this idea of this online time sheet, did you have a customer in mind that somebody you know was going to use it? Or you guys are

okay, we'll build it and later on we'll market. How did that go about?

05:21

John: Yes, that's an interesting question. I had a little bit of experience working with Google ads prior to starting weworked, and I had a good experience with using it. So I kind of felt like if I build a product, knowing what I know about small businesses, that if I could leverage the internet where it was going around the early two thousands, that was actually very scary area, timeframe. That we would be able to find a customer. We did not have a particular customer that once we built it, we could say, Hey, we have it. We would like for you to start using it. Primarily because the customer that we focused on was what I call strangely small business. So at the time the initial focus was for companies with fewer than 10, maybe 20 employees max. So we already knew we weren't going to get a lot of money out of them just due to their size. So there was really no value we felt initially with going out what I call the old school way and soliciting work. So we had to try to figure out a way to leverage and scale our marketing in a way that we could request a small fee but still be able to make some money.

06:57

Ramesh: Okay, great. So then how long did you guys take to build the product or maybe a prototype or proof of concept? I'm assuming that you did not build the entire thing in one go, you must have done some prototyping or proof of concept. Can you talk about the timelines and what were the things that you worked on during that time?

07:17

John: Well, I would say initially it was about six months. A lot of the work was done in the evenings after work, you know, so after I got off my nine to five, a lot of the programming was done then. Looking at where we are now, I would say we probably had a prototype for the first two years in my opinion, just looking back at it, you know. So I would say probably a good six months to the point where we were ready for people to use it.

08:00

Will: I'd also like to add at the point when I jumped aboard, I was already running a small business, so I served as a use case as well. So I was able to say, okay, maybe we should do it this way. So I was able to add that the perspective that we needed for a customer that we've been trying to go after.

08:21

Ramesh: Hey, that is a very good point you're making Will there, because especially when you have a partner, right, partners, the main thing is first you want to have a complimentary skills. Otherwise then each of you will go into each other's space, which was not the case here. That's good. And then secondly, you want some kind of a beta customer, somebody who's giving you a feedback and looks like Will, you were the person who was able to give a use case and the actual user perspective into the development.

08:49

Will: Absolutely. I was on the front line. I was using it, I mean, at the same time I was using, we're building it, I'm using it, seeing what works and what doesn't work. So yes, absolutely.

08:59

Ramesh: Okay, so good. Now let's talk about your first paying customer. So six months or so, you'd build some product that you guys thought was useful and usable and then what happened afterwards?

09:11

John: Well, we didn't get the initial traffic that we had hoped, which I assure is pretty common. And we got a few customers, but one of the first thing when I say customers, we got people interested, so they would contact us, they would call us. But what we realized was the early adopters were not in the US. So that really changed our mindset. So the first few, actually, our very first customer was in Europe, I believe it was a tire company in Europe. Some part of Michelin, some part of Michelin tires. And we had built the system not knowing just sort of, you know, focused on the US not thinking global about time zones, currencies, different things like that. So we had people reach out and say, Hey, we're interested. We love the software, but in where we are, this is how we do business, you know, so can you accommodate that? So Will and I immediately realized, we actually were thinking too small, you know, so we adjusted everything to be more generic and able to be picked up regardless of where you're located. So once we did that, I would say once we get that first customer who was willing to work with us, because we made these changes pretty quickly, the first customer willing to work with us to actually pay us, because we did have it online for free for probably about a year. Because we had a lot, we made a lot of assumptions as to how people would use the software and we realized half of them were wrong. So we wanted people who was more important for us to have people use it than for us to actually start trying to turn some money out of it.

11:24

Ramesh: Excellent. This is good. So you took six months and afterwards then you played around and you were not getting enough traction. But you've got traction finally from a European customer that got you going. So how long ago, I mean, how long after that you guys felt comfortable and made this a full-time business? Because one of the concepts that I’ve been digging into is like how long people stay in the side hustle kind of stuff before they do it. So how long have you been operating this as a side business?

11:54

John: Will, let me answer this one Will, because Will already is, was an entrepreneur prior when I reached out to him, he already had his own business and was doing his own thing. I was still doing the nine to five. I recently in the last two and a half years, came out of the nine to five. And just focus strictly on weworked. So that probably took, so I would probably be the real use case for that. And I would probably say it's probably about seven years for me to feel comfortable enough even though we were making money. But for me to feel comfortable enough to say I will, you know, get out of the nine to five and try to go full state, which is a very hard decision to make.

12:43

Will: Especially when you have a family.

12:43

John: Yes, If I was 20 something with no kids, it'd be a little different.

12:49

Will: Totally different.

12:52

Ramesh: This is good. I really like the way the discussion is going. So now let's get into pricing a little bit. So you started getting the initial adopters, early adopters who are testing it out, and finally you're getting big customers, but how did you know, how did you figure it out what it should be priced at?

13:14

Will: I am going to let you go ahead. I am drawing a blank.

13:18

John: It's been a lot. We started for free. Because one thing we did have was, we had competitors, which I think helped us because we had something to look at with respect to our pricing model and where we really wanted to be. So there were probably at the time, three solid, I would say three solid competitors that had their pricing range. I'd just say it could be from $10 a month on up two $30 a month. So it was a big range. And then we had their features set to compare to ours. So I remember we looked at the features and I remember having a conversation Will say, Hey, there are several features we do not have. We hope to have them. But as a result, I think we should have our price point more aggressive to attract people to give us the opportunity, you know, give us a chance cause we're a small business. We're new just to give us the opportunity and then we can build upon that. So what we set our prices to initially did not change for probably six, seven years.

14:45

Ramesh: Wow. That is fascinating.

14:47

John: Yes, it never changed. And I would say that was just for me lack of experience. And just not really wanting to rock the boat. So scared you're going to lose some customers. When in reality each year we probably, as we added features, we should have been slowly increasing our price. So right now we feel like in the last 18 months we had our first price increase. So, you know, we had to reach out to all our customers that don't know, Hey, we have not raised our prices in about seven years. We're glad that you guys have been with this, but in order to keep providing any features and moving forward, we have to increase our prices.

15:33

Ramesh: Excellent. Very good. So we talked about pricing and initially you gave it out as a free product and then, but you also mentioned you've been using some paid advertising kind of stuff, the Google ads. So right now, let's say last 18 months or so, how were you attracting customers? What are the different marketing strategies were you guys using?

15:55

John: Primarily SEO. We have a love hate relationship with Google ads. Because they changed the algorithm.

16:11

Ramesh: Who doesn't by the way.

16:12

John: I know, right. I mean there is, one year will be heavy Google ads heavy Bing ads, Yahoo at the time. And then it just did not make financial sense for us to do it. We had to figure out other ways to attract customers. And my primary focus was SEO. We need to get to the top of Google search. So that's what we focused on. And luckily, I think it was probably the timing. We were number one if you search for us with Time sheet software, just a very generic time sheet software, we were number one on the Google results.

16:59

Ramesh: That's a lot.

16:59

Will: Organically as well.

17:03

John: Just organic at the top. But things changed, you know, Google started adding four ads at the top and pushed you down even more below the fold and things like that. So recently this year we really aren't making a much stronger push with Google ads and we're spending way more than we ever have. Just because we think they've streamlined the software in a way that we can really get our conversions the way we want them, where they make sense. But there was a time we would pay, when we first started, I think we've paid a dollar a click, maybe even less than that early on. And then it got very competitive. It was up 12, $15 a click, which we just couldn't, we just cannot afford it. So now they have, you know, a lot more features where you could just only pay for conversions and things like that. So we've implemented a lot of those, so combination right now, SEO and Google ads. And we even considered podcasts to do more marketing and stuff like that. We're still kind of researching that to kind of see what the return would be.

18:12

Will: Also streaming services. Also that we entertain the thought of advertising on streaming services, like title, Spotify.

18:23

Ramesh: Okay. This question, given that your marketing to businesses, did you consider LinkedIn as one of the channels?

18:31

John: Yeah, we actually...

18:35

Will: Yeah, we had, we have done some marketing on LinkedIn. It just, it just didn't appear to be fruitful for us. I don't know.

18:44

John: Yeah. We did Facebook, we've done Facebook, we've done Twitter, we've done LinkedIn, we've started marketing on LinkedIn early on when they first rolled out their ad system. And I didn't really like the results, like the analytics of it. Not a knock against LinkedIn. I just think it was early on and I just, the numbers didn't really make sense to me. The clicks, they say we were getting and stuff like that. We're not seeing it on our side. So we paused it. We might, you know, we might look back into it. I'm sure it's evolved a lot since we started marketing on it.

19:27

Ramesh: Okay. So excellent. So that's a very, very, a lot of insight there. So we talked about pricing, we talked about promotions, we talked about how you bootstrapped it. Have you ever taken any outside financing? Or are you completely bootstrapped even till now you guys are the only owners, is that how it is?

19:44

Will: That's correct. We are the only owners. No outside money whatsoever.

19:49

Ramesh: Were there any need for outside financing? Did you go through the discussion amongst yourself or were you comfortable throughout the journey that you never had to resort to outside financing?

19:59

Will: I don't think we ever considered it. From our business model we pretty much support it and were able to sustain ourselves. It was all pretty much all hard work, so that was the only investment that was required up until getting us to the point where we were really making money. So I don't think we ever, I mean you can correct me if I'm wrong, John. I don't think we ever considered outside financing.

20:27

John: No, I think we may, we've probably had a very loose discussion on if we were able to fine tune our Google ads and our marketing campaigns in a way that

only funding was keeping us from scaling tremendous. We may be, you know, is that there's something that like that where it was like, Hey, all we have to do is double win, quadruple down on this, and then, you know, it'll just blow up. Then I think at that point we would at least have the discussion. I mean people do reach out to us pretty frequently about acquisitions and things like that. Will and I agree that we don’t even have the talk right now.

21:17

Will: Yeah. Unless we get that number.

21:24

Ramesh: So during the journey I know there are ups and downs. So can you talk a little bit about things that did not go well for you, but you were able to recover from them? Any aspects of any part of the business?

21:36

Will: Just dealing with the growth has presented its share of challenges. Of course with the unexpected interest from international firms being able to pivot and introduce new features at the drop of a hat. That's actually, it's been a challenge, but it's been fun for us, been rewarding for us as well.

22:07

Ramesh: Yeah. It's a pleasant surprise that you're getting international customers when you didn't expect. That's great. You guys what are the, what kind of advice would you give to other entrepreneurs and having come from, definitely you are a minority owned business and then probably that experience is there as well. And you are definitely catering to small businesses and you are catering to international. So considering all that, I'm sure they have lot to offers, what kinds of advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs and other business people?

22:44

John: Definitely get in the game. You got to get started and what you think people want, you would not know for sure until people started using it. And I think probably our top feature beyond something that people use is that contact us page. The contact us page has served us so well because people feel, I mean if they liked the software and they're invested in it, they would want you to keep adding things and evolving the software. They don't want you to stop and go out of business or sell it. So every day we get feature requests, feature requests.

23:38

Will: Even more so they don't want to go anywhere. They don't want to have to leave. They want to stay with you for the most part.

23:43

John: Absolutely. So one of the first things beyond, I'd say equally as important as the sign-up email is the contact us. I know you want people to sign up, but I would argue however, they're reaching out to you whether it's on that first page where it's like, Hey, sign up or they're reaching out to you on that contact us page. It's still a lead. Lead is a lead and you know you can take it from there.

24:12

Ramesh: Correct. So Will anything from your side?

24:16

Will: I would say one of the things, I often preach this to my children. You don't necessarily, your idea doesn't have to recreate. It doesn't have to be the latest and greatest thing. It doesn't have to shake up the world. It can be something that already exists and you putting your own unique spin and signature on it and you're going to be very successful at it.

24:44

Ramesh: Yeah, it does. That may extend that probably makes sense right. You know it's established, there's a pain point associated with something. It's already there. And then you want to somehow differentiate by offering. When you guys did an international differentiation, you guys did a small, very small business and then you gave it away for free. So lots of things that you played with to get to where you are.

25:04

Ramesh: So guys, this has been very, very good discussion. Any last-minute thoughts both from you, Will let me start with you. Any last-minute pots that'd be have not discussed.

25:15

Will: I just wanted to speak on to one of the unique qualities of our support model is that we don't offer, we offer 24 seven support, but it's email chat only. We don't take phone calls unless absolutely necessary. We've just recently published a phone number after about nine years. We only use that if absolutely, absolutely necessary.

25:45 Ramesh: That is phenomenal that you've been able to service your customer satisfactorily, you know, without that, that's great.

25:51

Will: We, have those at the kick and scream that would try to get it to change, but we try to stick to it if all possible.

25:59

Ramesh: So John, anything from your side?

26:01

John: No, I think I really enjoyed the talk. I appreciate you giving us this opportunity. And definitely give me a copy of that 60 minutes start up.

26:12

Will: Absolutely.

26:13

Ramesh: Yeah. So www.weworked.com John Holmes and Will Roberts, so two guys who have bootstrapped, and then John especially started as a side hustler and then built into a company that serves, I'm still trying to figure it out guys, 120 countries and then without a phone number. So you guys...

26:31

Will: If you think about it, it will be kind of difficult if we actually had a phone number because we wouldn't be able to speak all the languages.

26:37

John: We do use Google translate very often.

26:44

Ramesh: So massive growth. Very impressive startup, and I am delighted to have talked to you and then, so probably we'll do it some other time.

26:52

Will: Absolutely. We look forward to it. 

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The post Building an online timesheet & invoice software business appeared first on RameshDontha.com.

Building a hyperspeed Bluetooth-enabled mobile dating app with Lori Cheek

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Guest: Lori Cheek

Episode Transcript (Click to expand)

00:15

Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to one more episode of the agile entrepreneur podcast and video cast. And this is your host Ramesh Dontha. Today I have an exciting guest. Her name is Lori Cheek. She's a New York city based architect turned entrepreneur and she's the CEO and founder of Cheeked. It's a hyper speed Bluetooth enabled mobile dating app. I know what you guys are thinking and I'm also very, very curious to know more about Cheekd and Lori Cheek. Lori, welcome.

00:50

Lori: Hi.

00:52

Ramesh: All right, so now you picked our curiosity. So what is Cheekd hyper speed Bluetooth enabled mobile dating app. Can you please go over what Cheekd is?

01:05

Lori: Well, yes, we are an app that helps people connect in the real world. So we are leveraging technology to try to get people off their phones. So if you walk into a crowded bar, a gym, a cafe, and anyone else with the Cheekd app and their Bluetooth turned on, you'll get an immediate notification that that person is single and potentially ready to mingle in that moment. So you can either walk up to them and say hello, which is what people used to do back in the olden days and it seemed to work. Instead of swiping through strangers from the comfort of your home online, so you can spark a conversation face to face and hopefully take it from there.

01:50 Ramesh: I see. And do these people need, both of them need to be on the Cheekd app for them to.

01:56

Lori: Yes. I mean, I'd love if there was a way to connect with people that weren't on the app, but that starts to get a tiny bit creepy.

02:06

Ramesh: Let's see how we could you know not get creepy, so and then people registered on Cheekd and then you'll find, it seems pretty, pretty exciting. So, Lori, let's say go through how could you, I mean, when did you think about this app?

And so let's talk about the journey.

02:27

Lori: I mean, it's been a pretty long journey and Cheekd has been through several different iterations, but I was an architect in New York for 16 years. Just walking around thinking, how do you find love in a city of 8 million people? I mean, everybody in New York is like crossing each other's paths, but no one really speaks to each other. Like it was just so difficult for me to understand what was missing here. And one night I was out to dinner with a colleague and he slipped his business card to a woman and he'd written on the back of it, want to have dinner and he left with a date and I left with this idea of sort of handing notes to people. So I started this business soon after called Cheekd and it was dating cards and they had a code on them. And a funny pickup line and the recipient of that card could go to our website and type in the code and find that person's profile. So we called it online dating and reverse. So you actually saw the person and then you connected online. That's how it started.

03:26

Ramesh: Okay. So then, I mean how did you actually launch it? How did people come to know about it? You had a website and all that stuff. But then what happened?

03:35

Lori: Yeah. So I mean, I came up with that idea one night and I could not stop thinking about it, you know, just still running around the streets of New York city. I thought, I want these cards. You know, I realized it was something I was missing and really wished I'd had. So I just went around talking to everybody I could possibly talk to about it. I mean hundreds and hundreds of people and then, you know, weeks later some of these people were like, that's a great idea. There was some woman on the subway, I wish I'd had one of your cards that you told me about. So I decided there's one shot in life and I’ve always wanted to start my own business. So I took the leap and I found a couple of guys that help startups get started. You know, I did not have a business degree, no technology background at all. I was a designer and got two partners on board one day and we sat down like a week after we met and started building what I own to this day of which is 12 years later.

04:39 Ramesh: Okay. So then very quickly by reading your bio, so you incorporated, so can you just go through that process of, you know, how did you get into the actual business piece of its ones you had the idea and then you found the partners.

04:56

Lori: So, you know, I didn't know. I didn't even know I needed to incorporate, I mean, of course you eventually have to do that, but I knew absolutely nothing. Like I just thought, you know, I'm going to build this business. I'm going to have a website and everybody in the world's going to want my product, but it doesn't work like that. Then I realized I had an invention that needed to be patented. So with those guys, they were both had business backgrounds and they had started businesses before. So they sort of guided me on the journey. But yes, we immediately applied for an incorporation. We did a C Corp to start out and applied for the patent, which ultimately took over four years to receive the patent. So that took forever. But we did right out of the gate, sort of apply for the patent. Got the URL, changed it a couple of times. I mean, coming up with a business name was sort of challenging. But in the end, I realized that I had a cheeky last name. So Cheek became the name of my business. You've been cheeked. Yeah so that was sort of the out of the gate movements that we made to start the business. And it took forever to sort of get a proper website up and working with this code base process. And we had a physical product too, which was the cards. So we had all these, we hired people from all over the world. You know, we didn't just go to New York city developers because it was so expensive. So we had a UX designer in Bolivia. Our web developer was in Belgium. We had somebody working on it in London. So we'd have these conference calls just at the craziest hours of the day. And I don't know, people all over the world were trying to put the pieces together to bring my business to life. It took a year, but we launched in May of 2010.

06:47

Ramesh: Fantastic. So now, no tech background, you are able to find the partners and then incorporated trademark, patented. You learned everything about the business and then you got going. And then when you, something happened in the publicity in terms of a lot of people started calling you to come on the TV show. So can you talk a little bit about that.

07:10

Lori: Well, you know, one thing I did do right starting out was I was very creative. As an artist and an architect my brain just thought really creatively. So thinking about marketing, my first marketing tool was to put one of those cheeks cards in a blank envelope and I mailed them to 20 of the top editors that I thought might be interested in my new product. And one of them was this great journalist from the New York times. And seems like a couple months after we launched, we were on the cover of the style section of the New York times and it said www.moveovermatch.com this is the next generation of online dating. I mean I

couldn't believe my little card idea was on the cover of the South section in the New York times and that crashed our website. So you know, there were enough people that had read that article that my website just disappeared off the face of the internet for, I thought it was just gone. We had to get more servers ramped up.

08:09

Ramesh: Yeah. So then there was, was there Oprah as well somewhere in the picture?

08:14

Lori: So the few days after the New York times article, one of Oprah Winfrey's producers called, emailed me and wanted a phone call interview, wanted a deck of these cards. I mean that's like the hugest thing you can ever get cause the Oprah effect just takes off and you're golden. So I had that interview but never ended up on the show. But not everybody gets that phone call from Orpah’s studio. But that was pretty cool.

08:39

Ramesh: Okay, so good. I mean, you had an almost a dream launch of your business, but things did not go as well as the launch went. So can you talk about the journey since then?

08:51

Lori: Yeah, so I mean, I was already designing my jet after the New York times, you know, I thought I was going to become a billionaire within the next year. That was it. That was exciting for the one week that I thought that was going to happen. But I don't know, we ended up this, the press went viral. We ended up all over the world. So, you know, I rode that wave for I guess six months, maybe two a year. Like news channels were flying from all over the world, coming to New York to video me talking about this business. It was pretty cool. But then, yeah, our website kept breaking, I don't even know what was going wrong with it, but you know, these people all over the world were working on my website. I wasn't there in front of them seeing what was happening. I didn't know the first thing about web development in the first place. So I don't know, I just kept feeding money into fixing this website over and over and over again. And then I ran out of money. And I woke up one day and I thought, I'm not going to be able to pay my rent. So I rented out my apartment on Airbnb. I started couch surfing while these people were coming to stay in my apartment. I mean, I was like borderline homeless. I was just living anywhere I could possibly find to sleep, but still I had my eye on the prize, didn't want to give up and I was going to do anything to keep this business alive. And then a friend of mine sent me a link to apply for ABC shark

tank and I'm like, sure, I pop open my laptop one day, fill out this application and closed my computer. Pretty much forgot I'd done it. And then a few months later I get the phone call from LA and they were interested in me and my business. I couldn't even believe it. But then you know, you keep going through these phone calls month after month after month and you're getting into the final stages. I mean, 60,000 people I think applied for that show to like, get on the show. I think there were 86 that get phone out there to film the thing. And I think maybe less than that actually even air. So there's a very slim chance you get on that show. But about a year later I was walking down the scariest hallway I’ve ever walked down in my life and to ABC shark tank.

11:08

Ramesh: Wow. I mean you are very creative in marketing all this stuff. This is the dream exposure that people just can only dream of you have. But on the business side of the things you are having troubles, whether the website or the technology and all that stuff. And then so you went through this trough of the business then how did it pick back up?

11:33

Lori: Well, I didn't do too well on the show and in fact, I mean I refer to it as a brutal bloodbath. They all pretty much told me to quit what I was doing and go back and get my job in architecture. And I just remember thinking these millionaire investors don't know what it's like to be single and don't know the challenges of the single person running around the streets of New York city. I wasn't a millionaire and they're a lot older. Times were different when they were single and dating. I just don't think they understood what they were missing out on with my product. And plus I'm super stubborn so I wasn't going to give up, but soon after the shark tank, someone I had worked with previously ended up buying out my original business partners, came on board and finance the new technology behind Cheeks. So within a month after the shark tank, he and I were on to the next thing, which was developing this Bluetooth version of Cheekd, so I call it like an ecofriendly version of the Cheekd cards. We got rid of the paper and now it's all Bluetooth.

12:40

Ramesh: Wow. It's a very fascinating journey that we're walking through. And then how about the funding piece of it? So of course you're doing Airbnb and all that stuff, and you said you almost exhausted your savings, but you still kept your eye on the prize. How did you meet this other new partner who bought the old ones and then basically brought back? So is that person, a technology person or what is?

13:11

Lori: He is a serial entrepreneur. And he's my CTO, so he's very tech savvy, great businessperson. I mean sort of like a dream come true partner. And he had all the missing things that I didn't have, you know, this tech background and some money to help finance the new technology behind the new Cheekd. And that was pretty amazing. But he had done some web development for me back in the day when my website was breaking. So it's funny how this all comes full circle and he's been, I call him an angel in more than one way. Like he's the kind with the halo and also helped fund and finance our new version of Cheekd.

14:02

Ramesh: Okay. So now let's talk a little bit about how you get paid. So this app is there and then people download and start using, but I mean where the finance is coming from?

14:14

Lori: Who cares about money?

14:17

Ramesh: That is right, who cares about money? By the way, how is the money coming into the business?

14:25

Lori: Well, it's a free app, so you can't really compete with a lot of these other free dating apps when you're charging. So right now we're just trying to get enough users to get on board and then we can do some premium upgrades and do advertising on the app.

14:44

Ramesh: I see. Okay. So basically, you're doing the, what's called a freemium, kind of a business model. You'd give the app free and then afterwards upgrades in the app and then some premium features and all that stuff. Okay. So excellent. So it's a very fascinating journey. We talked about how you got incorporated and how you, I mean, resurfaced with this a Bluetooth enabled thing. So let's talk a little bit about you as a person, as a stubborn entrepreneur, as you want to call. So I mean, you worked as an architect in architecture as an architect and designer artists and all that stuff. Did you have, I mean, were you thinking about business entrepreneur like at when you came out of college or like how was your entrepreneurial journey as a person like from you? Like how it started?

15:35

Lori: I think I’ve always had the itch to take the leap. And even when I was in college as a side job, I started a jewelry company, so I was making hair accessories and jewelry and selling them to local gift shops. So that was sort of my first business that I think I started when I was about 17. I didn't incorporate that. I was just doing that as like a side thing. But yeah, I think that gave me a vision into the possibilities. And I kept coming up with ideas over and over and over again. But none of them were as passionate as this one that I finally left my 15, 16-year career to build. So I just, it was something I couldn't stop thinking about and I absolutely just thought, I’ve got one shot and I'm going to take it.

16:25

Ramesh: Okay. So during this tough times like were there mentors who are supporting you as a family member. Like how you dealt with the, you know, I would call them the depressing downtimes. So where you really want to give up and, but somehow you find the courage to keep going.

16:45

Lori: You know, I think you've got to be a little crazy to be a successful entrepreneur because even one of my best friends, I’ll never forget her saying, when I was having one of these downtimes when are you going to pull the plug on this thing? And I mean, I was just so confused. I was like, do you even know who I am? Yeah, I didn't take the sleep and to entrepreneurship to just go halfway off the mountain. You know, I wanted to go all the way and I’ve done everything in my life I can to keep this thing alive. So for me, I look at it like my first born, I mean I don't have any kids. This is like my child. It's like my 10-year-old. And just because your 10-year-old is sick doesn't mean you just throw it out into the street. That's how much I love this thing.

17:33

Ramesh: Wow. It's a good analogy. I like what you're saying. It's basically growing child. So probably not completely healthy right now, but yeah. And then from, your journey itself is inspiring. I think already we talked about some of the things that you could have done if maybe you had a technology partner in the beginning. Some of these problems would have been fixed, like anything that you think you could have done as you thought of this business.

18:03

Lori: Yeah. You know, I think one of the biggest mistakes I made was getting these two partners on board out of the gate because they were both business guys and I gave them both equity. So why did I need two of the same skillsets? That was just the most ridiculous thing. But when I had this idea, I was just excited that there

were two guys that wanted to get on board with me that believed in its enough to work for equity. So I was just like, come on board, let's make this thing happen. So I learned a lot from that. I learned another lesson from hiring these people scattered all over the world trying to build one thing together. I mean I think that's a lot easier to do now just because of the changes in technology, like the way you can communicate. It just wasn't working that well back 12 years ago. So I don't know, I guess those were two of the biggest lessons. And now having a CTO on board, it made me realize what I should've done many, many years ago.

19:01

Ramesh: Okay. So, I mean that is actually basically what you're saying is trying to look for people with complimentary skills. If your side then get technical side, if you are the technology side get a business partner. That makes sense.

19:12

Lori: Yeah, no brainer. But I’ve made that mistake.

19:15

Ramesh: Enthusiastic, you know, the idea itself. If somebody believes in you or you want to really, you know, work with them. I think, I don't know if I want to call that a mistake, but that is something, you know, we are naturally inclined to do. So that's fine Lori. So what's next for Cheekd? I mean, you're trying to improve or, increase your subscriber base. Are there any things that you're focusing on?

19:38

Lori: Well, my partner and I did do a spinoff of Cheekd, it's called networkd with another gentleman too. So it's like a Bluetooth networking app. It's so, it's a little bit like LinkedIn live. And I have another idea for a dating app that I'd like to build, and it's called a wing mom. So your mother's can actually swipe for you. I mean there's so many people that don't want to get on the apps, don't have time to get on the apps. And I just let my mom swipe through some dating apps for me one night and I just thought it was so cute. Like mothers know best. Maybe she'd actually swipe on somebody that makes more sense than me swiping on somebody.

20:18

Ramesh: Oh, I see. Basically. So they are, it's essentially a matchmaking site, but for the parents, for the kids, is that what it is.

20:26

Lori: Yes.

20:29

Ramesh: That's very fascinating and interesting. And then so you have this spinoffs that are happening and then, because from a basic idea, what is the competition like people saying that the dating, you know, this industry is the only few companies dominate. What have you discovered about the competition?

20:50

Lori: I mean, I wouldn't even know how many dating apps are out there. There's a dating app for everything right now. But I feel like they're all sort of focusing on getting people on technology. And I just, you know, in a bar in New York city, I’ll see people sitting at the bar swiping on Tinder when they could be talking to the person right next to them. The love of their life could be sitting across the table from them and they're not even looking up, paying attention to what's in the real world. So I still think this is that niche that I'm trying to bang down the door on. So I still think there's room for improvement on all of these apps. There's just a fatigue with dating online.

21:32

Ramesh: So Lori, I think you've got a lot of accolades and you are called what? Digital disruptor.

21:40 Lori: The digital dating disruptor.

21:44 Ramesh: And what is it like, all this fame without the fortune, It's not the fame and fortune, first fame, but the fortune was not coming. I think this is a classic, I don't know if it's a mistake I want people focused on, Hey, how many more likes I can get on Facebook? Or, you know, how many people are watching my video or how many people are coming to the website, but all of them do not translate into business. Can you talk a little bit about the dichotomy that goes on between the fame and then does not translate into fortune and then anything that you've learned that you could share?

22:24

Lori: Well, you know, I feel like I had been through every single struggle and obstacle imaginable in the world of entrepreneurship. I mean, I can't even imagine what else can happen to me. But you know, in the end I realized I don't have that billion dollars, but this 12-year journey I’ve been on has been the most magical ride I would have ever dreamt in my life. Like I absolutely have zero regrets. You know, those moments where I'm without an apartment, again, like I had my eye on

the prize and I’ve built something that people all over the world know about. I don't know, there's something about this journey for me that's been really more important than the money. And I know those sharks, if they heard me saying this right now, five years after the shark tank, they'd still be like that girl, I don't know what's wrong with her, but you know, again, we got one shot and I’ve loved every minute of it.

23:21

Ramesh: Exactly. I mean, I know exactly what you are talking about. My journey has been ups and downs, but somehow, it's your passion. The way I want to think about it is, if I die tomorrow, I’ll be dying happily because I have done what I wanted to do.

23:37

Lori: Exactly. I say this is like living a lifestyle and not living a job.

23:43

Ramesh: Yeah, fantastic. So Lori anything else that you would like to share with the audience, any of the topics?

23:53

Lori: I would just say if you believe in your idea enough to give up doubts, give up excuses and surround yourself by some positive and pelleted people, bulldoze forward and don't look back because it could be the journey of a lifetime.

24:09

Ramesh: Fantastic. I strongly believe in your business. And that actually more than that, I strongly believe in you and your resilience and your grit that you're showing here. And unfortunately, I'm not in the dating, happily married so I'm not really there. But if I were to be there, I think this seems a fantastic application.

24:31

Lori: Well, maybe one day your wife can be swiping for your kids on the new app wing mom.

24:37

Ramesh: Hey, that is so that's fantastic. That's actually, so that way you're crossing generations, which is really good thing though. Yeah, it's really good. So very nice talking to you, Lori. Thank you very much for coming on the show.

24:52

Lori: Thank you for having me.

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Building a Career Hub business for engineers with Vartika Manasvi

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Guest: Vartika Manasvi

Episode Transcript (Click to expand)

00:04

Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to one more episode of the agile entrepreneur podcast and of course the video cast. And this is your host Ramesh Dontha. So today we will talk about career. We're going to talk to a women entrepreneur with a fantastic background and her name is Vartika Manasvi and Vartika is the second time founder of a company called stack raft as a career hub company. And she's the first woman entrepreneur from the South Asia to be granted a startup visa in Canada and right. So she took a one-way ticket to Canada and to start a company in Canada. So let's find more about Vartikas' journey. So Vartika welcome.

00:44

Vartika: Thank you. Thank you, Ramesh, for having me.

00:47

Ramesh: Vartika let's start with your company stack raft. So what is it?

00:52

Vartika: So Stack Raft is you know, a shorter version of that is like LinkedIn for engineers and, but we're not LinkedIn where people spamming each other. We are what recruiters and stuff like that. So it's like a career accelerator for software engineers around the globe. Who are looking for meaningful jobs and better opportunities? So the problem that we found was that the talent is everywhere. There are so many talented people around the world. But getting that job you know, it takes on which country you are in, what time zone are you in. How do you look, how do you speak? So these are the things that comes in between of your skills and talents and that is a problem that we are solving.

01:36

Ramesh: So how do you solve? Is it a marketplace where the software engineers put their resumes up and the skills something like a guru or up work kind of stuff? Or is it different?

01:45

Vartika: No, it's not like a Upwork or a career guru kind of a thing. Yes, it's a marketplace where software engineers create a profile. They put their skills, their personality indicators, like what's important to them and who they are like, what’s their career intent. What as for them they want to be and what kind of stuff they want to build. Now based on that deeply challenges on our platform. And these are skill-based challenges and they get connected to senior mentors and senior developers, we call them as talent coaches, who give them concrete feedback on these challenges so that these engineers can be better engineers. I mean, even if

they do not get a job or they do not get selected, they're getting concrete feedback. Now imagine for one job, like 250 people apply for that particular job. For one seat, right? And 20 people get a call, 10 get invited, and then finally one person is hired and rest of them get a standard emails. Sorry, we couldn't select your profile. That's a standard email. But it doesn't give a reason why. I mean, okay, do not select, but tell me why. So that I can at least improve myself. So this is where we come in, where we give concrete feedback to every single person which helps them self-learn and grow. There's so much content and information out there on the internet. Our objective is to give them a little guidance and give them a little back towards to how to think about certain things.

03:19

Ramesh: Okay. So this is primarily intended to improve you know, to help improve the software engineers with respect to how they can get a job. So then where is the money coming from?

03:33

Vartika: Well, the money comes in from the companies and you know, so my background is building social networks and communities and I really know how scores the attention of a user is in today's times. So you know, and recruitment, look, we are in the business of like three decades old problem. And we are completely flipping the whole business model. We are not a dev shop. You're not a recruitment agency. We're not a consultant or an advisory firm. We are a pure play tech company where companies come, they put in their jobs and you know, we've pay them $100 for their attention, for adding a job on our platform. And then, yes, yes, exactly. I mean, and then you know, as they get more value on the platform, say we make a recommendation of top developers from our list and they find value in it. They pay $20 for that value. They want more people to select from, they pay for more. So more value they get on the platform, the more they pay on the platform. So this is how this works.

04:40

Ramesh: Okay. So now I'm beginning to understand essentially, you're giving startup incentive to for the recruiters of the companies basically, let's not call them recruiters. So the companies who need talent to come work for them, right? And then because of that money and then so they will list their company and then they are actually looking at the software engineers, how they're working, the talents and skills and interest in all that stuff, right?

05:06

Vartika: Yeah, exactly. So it's kind of reversing the whole job board right. Before, like you used to put up a job ad and people come and apply. So then you put up the job post, these from that job post we make an upfront recommendation, like a zero day value that you know, why waste you will announce they apply, here's an active list, go, apply for them, send them an interview request.

05:30

Ramesh: Excellent. So, okay. So now I understand the company and then so let me ask you a question. Why Canada?

05:36

Vartika: Why Canada? Okay. So that's like a little long story. I don't know. Yeah. So, you know, my initial plan in 2018 when I was validating my product and so I built many products in the past, but I realized that there was something to do with the market and what really people want. And I think I'm from India and I think, you know, users in India, their needs are different, the culture is totally different. And the kind of product and the ideas that I have won't really work here at least now. Because the fabric of India is totally different, and their needs and requirements are completely different. So my plan was to be in the Bay area, right. And to figure it out. And that's where everyone goes. But then I was like, okay, everyone is doing that. And if I was to do that, I’ll be just one more entrepreneur you know, around that. It doesn't work. And so I said, okay, that was a lot of good noise coming in from Toronto and you know, a lot of people talking about the ecosystem there and how companies are moving. Let me just take a leap of faith and flying to Toronto and see and figure what works, and I have no friends and no family in Canada. I was like, okay, let me just go. And I was like. Day one all by myself.

07:03

Ramesh: Wow. So it's a fascinating story. So you applied for the startup visa and then you've been granted, and you don't know anybody in Canada.

07:12

Vartika: No, I didn't even know about the startup visa thing. I didn't even know that something like that exists and I just, I was like you know, I had six months of money left and I was like, okay, I'm investing in myself, I'm going to Canada. And I would figure out stuff. I want to figure it out if my products will work or not because if I'm failing at entrepreneurship, I better fail fast and get away with it and move on. So I went on a visitor visa, like just to meet people and understand the market because I had no clue what Canada is like. I had literally no clue. Like I’ve been to Silicon Valley, I’ve been to the US many times, but I had no idea how

Canada is like, so I was in a visitor visa and that's how I figured stuff and then applied for a startup visa. We got granted, our startup visa, me and my co-founder, both of us. So my co-founder is the youngest entrepreneur to get one. And you know, by December 2018 we got acceptance. So yeah, it has been pretty fast. I got lucky there.

08:26

Ramesh: Okay, fantastic. Hey, it's a great story. So Vartika, let's continue with this one. And then you got the startup visa and then you had an idea that you wanted to build the company and then when did you actually start working on the product or the company itself.

08:42

Vartika: Well, so when I was in Toronto in 2018 this time around, I didn't even want to incorporate the company. I didn't even want to write a single line of code. My whole idea was validated and see what people want. So when we found our first customer and he was willing to write us a check and take you know, just go with the kind of product that we have and use that for their own selection mechanism to hire better and select the right candidates rather than having pure keyword based bias. And you know, they were willing to write us a check the next day I incorporated the company and that's how those show started.

09:25

Ramesh: Okay. So then what did you tell? So I'm assuming this first customer is a company looking. How was your pitch?

09:35

Vartika: Well It was not a pitch. It was not really a pitch. You know, I got introduced to them while we were queuing up for an event in Waterloo. I think it was true north or something. And we just got introduced and I was just talking, you know, by being myself, I'm telling what we are building and how I'm here, what we're doing. And these guys were like, Hey, this is the exact same problem. I'm like, yeah, sure, let's explore it. And that's how I got a chance to go deeper into the problem. I found someone who was genuinely interested in this kind of a solution and I was able to understand on first-time terms on what is their exact need and then also evaluate that from a larger market perspective. How many similar people have a similar need and what does that one hook you know, on which we have to build our own thing. That time we had no, you know, we have no UI, UX, there was no product. Like I think we had a very bad website also. So it was just like an API. It was an API product. And we signed on numbers.

10:52

Ramesh: Like, so that people know, what do you mean by API product?

10:55

Vartika: So, like an API product is more like you know, using stuff for tools on the backend. So, just like now anyone can come, and they can create a job post and get a filtered list of candidates. We applied that same technology on a list of resumes that were given to us and they said, okay, give me like a shortlist of top hundred out of this whole list. You know, so that was like working on the back end because this was one customer who needed that. And you know, the demand was not that high. So we were able to even validate and see how we can assess resumes and their digital footprints in a better way. So then we can make better predictions that who is better than the entire lot.

11:42

Ramesh: Okay. So tell me something. So now, basically the customer bought into your idea, and then you went and incorporated the company. So what was the next thing that you guys did? Did you put a wire frame up or did you put a UX design of the application or did you have a PowerPoint? What was the next step in the journey?

12:03

Vartika: Well, the next step was to you know, simplify the problem further. Because we as entrepreneurs and as product people, we tend to over think a lot of problem statement and try to come up with our own ideas with our own gut feeling and intuition. So my co-founder played a huge role there to simplify everything to ground zero. And nail down to one pain specific thing which people want. So we put out a landing page specifying very simply that this is what we do. And based on that we start talking to more and more people, more customers and you know, more software engineers trying to get more data and facts that you know, is that a problem which is real or not? Or was that one customer just based out of luck, you know, so collect like more and more data, do surveys. So, and at that time, even you know, I started building this community on Slack. So I have a community on Slack, which is for software engineers, which is currently still very active. So, you know, we build with our users because the world is moving so fast and you do not know what the changes are taking place and how people are evolving and so on. So we build together with them. Like before even building a feature, we go and validate with our own community, Hey, do you think this is interesting? Do you think this will help you? Because it saves so much of our time on coding stuff. And then going back to the drawing board and figuring if this is right or not

13:32

Ramesh: Fantastic. So basically, so this is brilliant, right. So you guys did not have a product, but you didn't want to build a product and then hoping people will come. Every step of the way you are trying to validate and the first one you had a landing page, you know, just messages and then do that resonate, right? And then they're resonating. Now the community building aspect and then you didn't want to build a community right off the bat. So you had used existing off the shelf product, something like a Slack, which is refocused. And then you said, okay, I'm committed in Slack. So every step you're, you know, you're validating, you're taking the people along. And then by, at what stage did you actually have something to deliver to the original customer who signed up?

14:20

Vartika: So when they sign up the contract it was like a, I think two months, kind of a contract where the job was to give them selected a shop list Engineers. And so we delivered it right away and we delivered it on an Excel sheet to be honest. Because we didn't have a product, we didn't have anything to show. We just had like a bunch of, you know, lines of codes on which we did all that thing. So I think that worked out well, but then of course to get more people and get more customers, we needed to have something to show, to tell our story. So both the landing page and all of that, I think within 30 days we had our first basic and simple MVP ready which was actually now the product has pivoted and changed like talking 2018.

15:19 Ramesh: Actually, yeah, sorry. So let's now talk about the current stage, right. So you're saying you are now taking a year, more than a year. What do you have right now? What stage of the company is the company at?

15:33

Vartika: So right now it works completely well for both sides of the marketplace. For a software engineer and for a company, they can come create profile, get a list of candidates, instantly send them interview request, schedule interviews. Completely works end to end, it completely works. But I think a lot of founders get this incorrectly about the product market fit. Like you know so we had a stage where if we putt a marketing dollars and we advertise it more. We get more users and we'll acquire more people using it and so on. So we can like literally to be on a stage where we can fake growth. But I think differently. We're still a very small team, we are two and a half people only. And so you know, I think about product market fit way differently, which is, it has to get to a stage wherein people are telling their friends, that this is a great product and you can find value here. So our

thing is, our fundamental KPIs as a company is that we want people to find jobs.

16:42

Ramesh: For the Acronym used, I want to elaborate. So you said KPI, key performance indicator. Is that what you mean? How you measure your success is what you're talking about, which is a KPI. What is the key performance indicator for your business?

16:56

Vartika: So it is people landing jobs. But then we discovered that we may not be someone who is able to help every single person get a job, at least in the beginning of our own startup. So we said that even if we're not able to get them job, but we should be able to give them enough context and enough guidance and enough mentorship, enough outcomes so that they are able to get the jobs, any which way, not on our platform right. But going forward are fundamental like the large KPI, big KPIs, how many people got jobs on our platform. So it's not about number of jobs, it's not about how many users we have. It's not about how many people have profiles, they spend time, blah, blah, blah. How many people got the job?

17:49 Ramesh: Excellent. Hey, Vartika this is a fantastic discussion. So we talked a lot about the proof of concept that helped you grow on the validation in every step. All right, so Vartika now let's talk a little bit about you. So are you a programmer or a coder? What's your background?

18:07

Vartika: I'm an MBA. I started my career writing resumes, but that was a fun job. I mean, I'm not even an HR person. So like when I think of it now, I think I’ve always been an entrepreneur all my life, like as a 20-year-old always built communities from you know, people. So my first product that I built was www.Indiapetfinder.com, which was you know, people can adopt stray dogs and cats and you know, people can just upload a picture on a platform. So it was a fun product. Like I have built many fun products like that, but when I look back now, right, I mean, I think my resume writing experience is, what's coming back because I had a lot of fun writing resumes and helping people land interviews and all, you know, that was like a high point. I wrote your resume, got an interview call, look at what kind of magic I can do. And now I tell people, Oh, do you even need a resume? Please do not send a resume. So I'm like, almost on the verge of killing resumes and making it more objectified. So yeah, I think about it a lot. I think about it a lot, but I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life and thanks to the people that I work with and the peer group that I’ve always had. You know, all my companies,

everyone has been super supportive. My family has been super supportive. So I think that has been the key reason why I had so much courage to do what I did.

19:44

Ramesh: Excellent. Hey, it was so great. So you come from a business background and then, but you built a technology company. So how did you do it? Did you have a cofounder or other partners on the technology side? So yeah. So talk a little bit about that.

19:59

Vartika: So I mean I come from a non tech background and I’ve done a lot of non tech stuff and there was a point in my career where, and I said, you know, there's so much happening on the internet, there's so much technology. Why I am wasting time with such companies. And this was how I decided that I want to move to a tech company. I cannot work with companies like such because they do not understand my language. And they do not understand the kind of value add that I can make with the power of internet. So that's how I transitioned and started working with tech companies. So I started building products and so on. And then I had the idea of building my own first company. And of course I knew that I cannot try code and it will be not that I cannot write, I can learn in a way, but then it will be a big learning curve and I will end up wasting more time. And that's not smart. So I need a cofounder, I need a tech co-founder. And at that point I was working with a bunch of engineers and developers and I was like product manager in that role. So it's like how to find a tech co-founder, I have no clue how to go about it. And because I come from a business side background, I understand the value of relationships and working with people and so on. So I was like, okay, this is so, so difficult. So I left my job and I joined NASSCOM and I started doing 10,000 startups. So at that time....

21:42

Ramesh: Well, who are not familiar with the NASSCOM, it's an Indian association. Talk one sentence about NASSCOM explaining what it does.

21:50

Vartika: Well, it's a not-for-profit idea association body of India that lobbies between the government and the startups, the IT industry to facilitate you know, funding or just a collaborative ecosystem and partnerships and things of that nature. So it's like a go to body that brings the whole community together from the IT and tech point of view.

22:15

Ramesh: Got it. Okay. Now let's keep going.

22:17

Vartika: So, yeah, I mean, and NASSCOM was a, you know, NASSCOM was always like for large companies and for sales Wipro and so on. And then they started this new thing with Google 10,000 startups. And this was back in 2013 and 10,000 startups, the mission was to how to create 10,000 startups in India and bring fame to them, funding, acceleration, mentorship and enterprise support. So, and this model, I can save this model and you know, got a bunch of investors together, accelerators together, but my deep indent of joining NASSCOM and working with NASSCOM, and I'm saying this for the first time was, I want to find a cofounder, I want to find a tech co-founder. Because this job and all of this is not happening to me and I want to meet the right person and I want to bring the right ecosystem to be able to have enough confidence that, okay, now I can go and do it. So, and that's how I decided to work with NASSCOM. And you know, I did find a co-founder and you know, I mean, it's not a very investor friendly story. We met on Twitter.

23:36

Ramesh: Hey, you have a lot of serendipity. One-way ticket. You find a co-founded on Twitter.

23:49

Vartika: That's me.

23:49

Ramesh: Standing in line and talking to them. So everything is happening. It's like the universe is giving you.

23:57

Vartika: Yeah. And also, I'm working very hard for it. You know, I have no control over my time zones. I have no control over my gadgets. You know, I'm working super hard for it.

24:11

Ramesh: Excellent. Hey so let's bring it home here Vartika. So then so based on your journey, it's pretty early in your life. I mean, you're just getting started. I know you are in a second company already can't believe it. So what have you learned and then what others can learn from your experience?

24:30

Vartika: So I have learned a lot of things. I think the number one thing that I’ve learned is that it's about assumptions. I think we sometimes Anna making a lot of assumptions about how things should work or how we see the world or why that exists, why this doesn't exist. And it's important to always go back into little history and talk to people rather than being very you know, very confident over your own hypothesis. So I think that's the number one thing that I’ve learned. So it's very important to validate before doing any single thing, any single thing. Because, you know, like, you know, I’ve always gone with a lot of leap of faith that, okay, I’ll figure it. Okay, I’ll figure it. But I think if I look back in my own journey while I did that, I had innate optimism on my own capability, and I was super self-aware. But now, I mean, I would sort of pick a balanced and a calculated decision. So essentially what I learned is right in one sentence, if I say entrepreneurship is not about taking risks, it's about mitigating risks and yet being successful.

25:56

Ramesh: Fantastic. So Vartika, it's great. Good luck to you. It's amazing in terms of the progress that you've made already with all of those things. And so very creative ideas and I'm glad I was able to talk to you and meet you. And then, so I'm sure we'll bring you back onto the show at some other point of time. So any last-minute comments that you want to share?

26:22

Vartika: So yeah, I think I would want to give more power to the entrepreneurs around the world, do not get demotivated by the fact that everything is happening in the Silicon Valley. You know, if you have it in you go make it happen, no one's stopping you.

26:38

Ramesh: Fantastic. That's great. That's a fantastic way to wrap it up. Vartika Manasvi for you. The co-founder of stack raft, one-way ticket to Canada. That's all I remember here. You can make it happen.

26:54 Vartika: Thank you so much Ramesh. Thank you.

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The post Building a Career Hub business for engineers with Vartika Manasvi appeared first on RameshDontha.com.

Building a rental property management software with Nathan Miller

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Guest: Nathan Miller

Episode Transcript (Click to expand)

00:08

Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to one more episode of the agile entrepreneur podcast and video cast. So today I'm going to talk to a gentleman who is in the real estate industry. Both from a technology side as well as the investor in developer side. So Nathan Miller is the president and CEO of Rentec direct, a popular property management software that helps property managers and landlords with their day to day tasks. Nathan is also a real estate investor and developer and proud husband and father. So I'm very eager to meet Nate. Hey Nathan, do you go by Nate or Nathan?

00:53

Nathan: Nathan is great. Thank you.

00:55

Ramesh: Fantastic. Nathan, welcome to the agile entrepreneurial podcast.

00:59

Nathan: Thanks for having me.

01:01

Ramesh: Great. So I introduce you and Nathan, but if you could tell in your own words what is when tech direct and what do you do with that?

01:10

Nathan: Yeah, well Rentec direct is a, it's a project that I started as a more or less a hobby because I was a and still am a landlord and needed technology to help me be more efficient. As I started gaining properties and managing properties on my own, I realized there's a, there's a lot of stuff that goes into it. You have a lot of things to keep track of. Not just, you know, accounting records or taxes, but you got maintenance and you got, you know, who's late and you have tenant communication and all this stuff. Once I had five or six rentals, I was managing became a little, a little excessive, but it took a lot of brain power and the time to think about and to maintain. And I also had a full-time job. So part of my background is I'm a software developer and I'm self-taught and I understand how technology can help people be more efficient. So I went out on a journey to make my landlord activities more efficient through software and created an application to help me with all those tasks, anything that could be automated, I automate it. And that was the beginning of Rentec direct. It was not necessarily intended to be a business or what it turned into today, but what that ended up morphing into is a

software application that now helps about 15,000 property managers and landlords. And we've added a lot of stuff in the last 10 years to make the life of property managers easy and kind of cool. Because you know, being a property manager isn't sound a that glamorous but we can provide them tools that make things better for their tenants and so your tenants can pay online so they can select the best tenants. So anyways, in a nutshell we provide software to property managers. It's you can kind of think of it like a we are the QuickBooks for the property management industry, but we add in all the various special stuff that property managers need in order to Excel in their market.

03:28

Ramesh: Excellent. Nathan. So now that we have a very good background about your company, so let's trace the journey of your company. So you were a landlord first, and then at what point did you actually take the first steps to write the application?

03:47

Nathan: This is, we're probably about 2007 when I did this and let's see I had, I believe about five of units I was managing and that's where it became too much work to do it on the side without help. So I had to at that point make a decision, you know, do I focus less on this or focus more on it? And it was right at that point where I decided that, you know what, I'm going to, I was actually very excited about the prospect of creating an application and I decided, you know, I'm just going to set my alarm early and I'm going to wake up early and I'm going to work on this before work. And I got so excited about the prospects of what this could become and how much it could help me in a few other landlords. I didn't need the alarm anymore. My mind was racing it, you know, three or four in the morning, I'd wake up wide eyed and would be racing because I was so excited to go do it.

04:42

Ramesh: Yeah. So then you are building the application in the morning then in the evenings, how long did it take for you to feel comfortable with application?

04:50

Nathan: I initially was just building it with myself in mind and so I didn't have very high expectations of, like what it's going to look like or how well it's going to function because I just, you know, I had these, I had a few things that I wanted it to do and so I was really focused on those and my initial idea wasn't to create a company out of it. But I did want to make the software available to any other landlord that was like me that could also use the help. And my plan was just give it

away. Like anyone, anyone can use it. It's going to take me, you know, a few months to make this and I'm just going to give it away. Let anyone else use it. Just to help. So anyways, let's see, I think I forgot your question. Where we started with that.

05:34

Ramesh: How long did it take for you to actually start using the application?

05:38

Nathan: Okay, so probably six months before I got a true value out of it and was able to put my properties into it.

05:47

Ramesh: And then, so you are your first customer even though not paying. So then once you got it, then you were wanting to give it away. And then did you give away to other property managers?

06:02

Nathan: Well just landlords at first. So it started out as an application specifically for private landlords. And I did. You know, I bought the domain www.Rentecdirect.com. And I went and found a template. I think it was like a template from some German template creator, which I thought looked neat. In retrospect it was hideous, but I liked it. So I just like to use this template and put a little bit of information about the program up there and created a form so anyone else could sign up and use it right away. They didn't have to contact me or anything. They can just sign up and use it and get the same value out of it that I did.

06:38

Ramesh: So is this a web application or is it something that they need to download onto the computer?

06:44

Nathan: It's a fully web based. So cloud hosted service.

06:47

Ramesh: Okay. So now you gave it away. At what point did it become like did you turn that into getting paying customers?

06:57

Nathan: Okay. So I gave it away and for probably almost two years and yeah, and I kept improving it because you know, I needed more stuff and I also was supporting it via email only at that point. You know, and it would have to have to be at night because I had a day job. So and I would take the feedback that I would get from folks that were using it. And if it made sense, it would have, where it helped me and it would help everyone else, you know, using the software. And if I had the time to develop it, then I would go ahead and do it and write it in there. So it was about two years of that time just supporting at, via email, adding little stuff.

07:37

Ramesh: Nathan, if I can ask you a question, how many people are you talking about in the two years’ timeframe? Is it five? 10? Because it's work supporting these people.

07:48

Nathan: It is, and that's partly why we ended up creating a company out of it, but in that two-year period we probably had about 300 or 400 people using the software.

07:56

Ramesh: No kidding.

07:57

Nathan: I know, blew me away.

08:00

Ramesh: And then you were not even charging for them. Wow. Good. Please keep going.

08:04

Nathan: Well, so that's what actually ended up creating a company is that, you know, we had a few hundred people using the software. They were using it completely free and they were wanting support. So even though, you know, you go use the application on the internet, you find people still have questions they need, you know, they want to get training and they want new features maybe that you don't have in it. And these are, you know, some of these features might've been things that would do me or anyone else, you know, no good. So not something I could just jump on and do for free. So at that point, with the demand for support and the demand for additional features decided, Hey, we've got a lot of people using the software. Let's go ahead, let's go ahead and incorporate it. Let's make,

make a company out of this and I'm going to hire my first person because I still have a full-time job and I need someone to be able to the phone. So it was at that point, it was around 2009 that we hired our first employee. She's still here today. She's awesome. And then it was, that got the ball rolling. Now we are an official corporation and we started charging a very small nominal amount for the software at that point.

09:12

Ramesh: Okay. So now we talked about incorporating the business. I mean, you took a long time to incorporate your business. Unlike the other entrepreneurs I talk to all the time. So then how did you come up with the pricing?

09:26

Nathan: You know, I looked at what we needed to pay our employees and to add some additional development and then looked at what the market would bear and you know, what other software applications were out there that might be similar to ours and priced it accordingly. I would say we've generally remained, however, probably remain 20% to 30% less than most other comparable software’s out there though.

09:51

Ramesh: Okay. So then afterwards did it organically grow or were you putting some marketing efforts advertising and sales to really get new customers.

10:02

Nathan: I feel like we started off in the beginning with a lot of word of mouth. It was landlord telling landlord and a buddy telling buddy like, Hey, I'm using the software. It's helped me out a lot. Go check it out. And at the beginning it was free. And then later on, you know, I mean I feel like we are charging like 20 or 30 cents a unit at the beginning. So really it was, it cost hardly nothing for a landlord with, you know, 10 or 20 units to use the software. So tons of word of mouth. And then we actually branched into servicing property managers and that's, its similar, property manager is very similar to a landlord with the exception that they're managing properties on behalf of others. So there's the whole trust accounting aspect and it's a little more complex as far as the accounting stuff. But we kept getting asked by property managers saying, Hey, you have this cool software that, you know, this owner I just signed is using and does it work for us? And for, you know, a while we, you know, we said, no, sorry, we don't have trust account in there, but you know, we've got enough of those requests that we decided, Hey, let's

add on these features the property managers need and then we branched into adding property management support in there.

11:10

Ramesh: Okay. So 2009 onwards started you know, you became a business. So if you could explain the growth, how did it grow? Like 2000, how many more customers you're getting and was there like a hockey stick growth that happened at some point of time?

11:26

Nathan: We've actually had very steady growth. If I look at our charts, we look at having about 30%. It's a very steady line. It looks almost exactly like that 30% year over year over year. Now, of course, each year that 30% gets a little bit harder cause you're building on the previous year. So we do more and more every year to keep maintaining that 30%, but we're 11 years in continuing to do that same 30%. And I feel like we don't have that hockey stick that you see in some corporations because we didn't have that point where you're cruising along growing organically and then you get, you know, $10 million to like to throw it into a big giant marketing campaign. We never excepted investors or anything. So we based on our organic growth, I feel like it's been a much more steady incline for us.

12:14

Ramesh: Excellent. So now you brought up another topic that I wanted to get into the investors, right. So let's talk about the cost piece of it. So first two years, I mean, it's your time, effort, and then your anyway, you are a landlord. So you're using it for your purpose, so you're getting benefit out of it. And then, but afterwards you got the employee on the price stand up so that there is some amount of profit for you. Did the cost keep going up as you kept building the business? Or you always had, if you could talk a little bit on the cost side?

12:43

Nathan: Yeah, so with a, we're a software as a service. It's a SAAS business and our cost, our initial cost of goods was servers. You've got you know, first we provided our own. We quickly grew out of that and started using like Amazon and Google servers. But as we scale the number of clients that we have, the number of servers and the amount of resources we use up their scale however it's, that's really easy. It's been very easy for us to maintain that because if we get a hundred new clients, you know, we have to add maybe 10% more capacity and it's very easy to follow that. And the tools that are available through those services these days make it really easy to either even do it automatically these days. So aside from that,

we've, you know, we had to scale with employees and our cost of our employees have gone up. And as we've added new products like tenant screening products and stuff, we have a true cost of goods with every one of those that we sell. So those I'd say all those expenses have risen. You know, while our entire growth is 30%, all those are rising, you know, 10% to 20% on their own.

13:50

Ramesh: I see. So did it ever happen where you thought you needed an outside investment or whatever?

13:58

Nathan: I’ve never thought so. And you know, not that we haven't had offers. I, you know, delete probably three to 10 emails a day, you know, from various VCs that, you know, wanting to get involved in the business. It's just not, it's something I’ve never really been interested in for this business. I feel like we've had a very, very sustainable organic growth pattern and I'm really happy with that. And I'm also happy with the amount of market that's available to us and I feel like we can continue approach in that in a very steady method without funding.

14:40

Ramesh: Oh, excellent. So this is a very interesting story Nathan, that you'll have here with respect to how you grew your business. You almost, I mean, never of getting into business, you're just using it for your own purposes and then you saw the success of it and then you made a business off it. What are the next steps for the business?

15:04

Nathan: You know, I'd like to say we're going to we're going to keep doing what we're doing. And you know what I mean by that is we're going to continue servicing our market really, really well. There's a, you know, if you look a nationwide, which is our, you know, the United States as our primary market we've got about 300,000 potential clients out there. We have 15,000 of them right now. So they're, I mean, the sky's the limit. We could, you know, go crazy and help as many of those as we can. We also have fairly limited competition in the market. There's not, most of our competitors are larger, big funded companies and they're going after the big fish and we're going after, you know, what they would call the small fish, which would be a landlord or a property manager with less than a thousand units. You know, they waive those off and we're like, Oh, yes, we love you. You know, we would love to help you. So we have a giant market to go after.

And we're going to, I'd say we're going to stay laser focused on improving that market and making those property managers have the same cool technology, maybe even better cooler technology than the big guys out there so they can Excel and grow.

16:18

Ramesh: Okay, great. Nathan. That's good. So again, one of the things that I suppose you know, very passionately is something going to agile entrepreneurship, which is, you know, don't wait for the perfection, you know, start doing it right away and you know, keep doing something every day. And then if things fail, you learn from it and then not pick up from what you've learned and then keep building the business. Right. So from that concept or anything that comes and all across from your business concepts of agile entrepreneurship that you might have implemented?

16:53

Nathan: Well, you know, I would say we take things day by day no matter what. We don't have a anyone behind us telling us, you know, here's the path that you have to take. So we get to make those decisions. And you know, some of the things we've done over the years just to keep things lively around here and growing is a lot of stuff for our employees. And so this was you know a quick decision, you know, was made years and years ago, but we decided, you know, that this environment, people spend eight hours a day here. And we want everybody to enjoy coming here because I want to enjoy coming to work. And I want all of our employees to enjoy coming to work. So what we've done with that is we've created an enjoyable environment for people to come to, involves lots of games, lots of coffee, lots of fun and lots of camaraderie I would say. Aside from that, we take a lot of feature requests in from our clients. There are, you know, every day we probably get 50, you know, like, Hey, can you make the software do this, can you make the software do that? And we keep track of every single one. Our clients may not recognize we do that cause it's so many and sometimes seems like things can get lost, but we do pay attention to every single one. And when something amazing, you know, when something that sounds like it's going to help a lot of people comes through, we do. And we've got the flexibility to jump right on it. And like an example of that in the property management industry is property managers need to know how much their tenants make to make sure that they can afford the property they're renting. So when we were presented by a company up in Seattle to automate that process and be able to instantly confirm the income of a tenant, we saw that as very valuable to our clients and it was less than two weeks after seeing that, that we're able to deliver that to our clients. So that's pretty agile.

18:51

Ramesh: That's very agile. So Nathan, if I could get into a little bit in this segment, the final segment, the operations of your business and share what you can and things that you can’t share that's confidential, I am perfectly okay. So some of the things in the software development side of the world is project management. You said you keep taking lots of feature requests and 50 a day and things like that. So are there any tools that were very beneficial to you in this operational aspects with respect to project management and tracking of the bugs, the tracking of the features and things like that.

19:30

Nathan: Well we love a program called GitHub. It's a version management system and they also have some project capabilities in it and bug tracking and issue reporting capabilities. We use the heck out of that program, and it keeps getting better all the time. So if you're, no matter what.

19:49

Ramesh: GitHub is the one that's bought by Microsoft.

19:51

Nathan: Did they, I think I remember hearing that. Yeah, they did. Yeah, it wasn't too long ago, right? Yes. So it's a terrific tool for any development language. We used to use subversion prior to that. And subversion has, you know, this many features and GitHub has this many features. So we're really happy with that move. And then the other thing that I think has been, it's a very analog method of keeping track of features. But one thing we do is everyone on our team, whether they're in our customer service department or our sales department, if they hear something more than five times, they need to report it. And that's the trigger. If you hear the same thing five times, get it in the system. So, and then we keep track of it. So once it's on someone's mind five times then we keep track specifically how many times it's been requested and once we hit a certain threshold, that's when we go to work and start working on it.

20:43

Ramesh: Hey, Nathan, I heard of this other tools called Asana, Trello or Slack, some of those things that I'm hearing a lot more. Do you use any of them in your enterprise?

20:54

Nathan: I’ve looked at a couple of those project management tools, and I find that they can be useful, but we haven't executed on any of those. We do use Slack, doesn't everybody nowadays? But we use that for office communication, and it integrates with GitHub and a few other tools we use as well.

21:12

Ramesh: Okay. So, fantastic. So the last segment so Nathan, if you could talk a little bit about yourself, what kind of a person are you? I mean, you're definitely an investor. You really want to create a good environment and I think you are proud to say you're a proud husband and a father. So is your personality come across from what you already talked about a little bit, if you could say who you are and what drives you.

21:37

Nathan: Thanks. Well, yeah, like you said I am a proud husband. I'm a father of two boys, a 10-year-old and a six-month-old. They're amazing. I love getting home to them. That's why we do all this is to create a wonderful life for them. Let's see aside from that, I really enjoy developing. And I joke with my wife about or actually she jokes with me more often. Like, what are you inventing today? And you know, cause it's like, you know, it's, you know, just like in the old days, you'd invent, you know, a Spyglass or you know, a telescope or something. These days, a lot of inventions happen in code. And so I kind of like thinking about it that way. I get to be a little inventor when I get to work on a project. So and then you know, I love what I do. I'm well I’ve been doing this for 12 years. Everyone else around you hear about 10. And I still enjoy coming in and doing it. So I enjoy being an entrepreneur. I enjoy being an inventor and I enjoy being a father and a husband.

22:36

Ramesh: Okay. So is this your full time now?

22:38

Nathan: It is, yes. Yeah.

22:40

Ramesh: Okay. So finally, at one point did you quit?

22:42

Nathan: So I was involved in another business. It was an internet service and I slowly transitioned out of that kind of went to part time and then zero time after about four years.

22:56

Ramesh: Okay. So 2011, something like that.

22:59

Nathan: It was right. Yeah, it was probably right in there.

23:00

Ramesh: Okay, good. So the final segment. So Nathan, based on your experience for aspiring entrepreneurs, what advice would you give and things that you wish you could have done differently in a combination of all of that in this final question.

23:15

Nathan: Well, for aspiring entrepreneurs I would say if you are going to create a company, be excited about it. You have to love what you're doing. If you're creating something that sounds boring or monotonous, you're probably not going to be as successful as if you're creating something that you're passionate about. So look for that. And then what I like to remind people of that are interested in not, you know, and moving from their day job to a company of their own is all these companies, be it Rentec direct, be it Google, be it you know, Microsoft, all these companies, those giant ones and the small ones, they all came from an idea. An idea that someone had to create something that didn't exist or create, improve something that does exist. And as much as we like to think today, like, well, everything that's has been invented, you know, everything's been invented, there's nothing left. Not true. There's tons of things. There's new ideas floating around all the time. So if you see something that doesn't exist that would benefit you, very likely it's going to benefit other people, you might be able to create a company out of it.

24:18

Ramesh: Fantastic Nathan. Www.Rentecdirect.com. Nathan Miller is the CEO and founder, so fantastic journey. It's a very unusual journey to be an entrepreneur in terms of, so you started giving away and then that's how you got a lot out of it. Still mind boggling to me that you had 300, 400 customers and before you actually started charging. So great story Nathan, thank you very much for coming on board today.

24:45

Nathan: I appreciate you having me. Thank you

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The post Building a rental property management software with Nathan Miller appeared first on RameshDontha.com.

The 60 Minute Tech Startup is now available

When I read stories of companies like Uber, FaceBook, AirBnB getting started in a dorm room or someone's garage, it seemed like fantasy and unreal. But when I talked to dozens of entrepreneurs for my second book 'The 60 Minute Tech Startup", it is all so real as many of them have done just that.

The 60 Minute Tech Startup is now available. Grab your copy at https://lnkd.in/dRHGmp9.

Here are the featured entrepreneurs:

Lori Cheek, Nathan Miller, Will Roberts, John Holmes II, Sukhi Jutla, Kunal Jain, Scott Swedberg, @Rebecca Beach, Will Hankinson, Brian Meert, Gundi G., Jill Dyché, Kyle Isaacson, Vartika Manasvi, Cory Minton

All of these people have inspiring stories. Some like Gundi had successful careers before starting their own ventures. Others like Vartika still working their way up. Someone like Kunal has built a powerhouse like @Analytics Vidhya from scratch. Sukhi works on cutting edge technologies like blockchain.

So proud and honored to have interviewed them for my book. As the book is free until Sept 2, you have nothing to lose to download and give it a glance.

https://lnkd.in/dRHGmp9

By the way, my interviews with all these are entrepreneurs are at https://RameshDontha.Com/podcast.

 

The post The 60 Minute Tech Startup is now available appeared first on RameshDontha.com.

Building a Data Science Training business with Kunal Jain

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Guest: ​​​​​Kunal Jain

​Episode Transcript (Click to expand)

 
00:06  

Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to one more episode of the agile entrepreneur podcast and video cast. And this is your host Ramesh Dontha. And today I'm very, very excited to introduce a guest who I’ve been meaning to talk for quite some time. His name is Kunal Jain. Kunal is the founder and CEO of Analytics Vidhya. Analytics Vidhya is one of the largest data science community across the globe and Analytics Vidhya helps millions of people every month in the data science learning and helps its community members find the dream jobs, focuses on education and training and then jobs. And before starting Analytics Vidhya Kunal graduated from the India's prestigious Indian Institute of technology in Bombay studying aerospace engineering and joined capital one as a business analyst in UK in 2006 and later on he decided to start Analytics Vidhya. So let's talk to Kunal on his journey, why he did what he did. Kunal Welcome. 
 

01:11  

Kunal: Thanks. Thanks, Ramesh, for that lovely introduction and really excited and happy to be here on the show. I've been wanting to talk for a long time. But thanks for inviting me and looking forward to the session. 

 
01:30  

Ramesh: Definitely no worries at all. So Kunal let's take it from the beginning. So right now you are the CEO of Analytics Vidhya. So tell the audience and tell me about what is Analytics Vidhya and even though I introduced it in your own words, what does it do? 

 

01:49  

Kunal: Sure. The vision behind Analytics Vidhya is to create a platform where every data science professional can come and get their knowledge and career needs addressed in form of the platform in the community, which is there on the platform. So you know, if you think about the career needs data scientists, there are broadly for different needs which they have. So that is learning on a day to day basis. So that happens through various blogs, which we publish a lot of education material along with some free courses and paid courses. Recently we also started a boot camp, so maybe I’ll explain that a bit more, but this is like a physical nine-month program with people in  there. Engagement happens through a whole lot of community activities starting from meetups, webinars, podcasts and you know, the biggest run which we do is a conference in India called Data hacks Ramesh. That happens in November every year. Then there is competition. So we organize you know, very short duration competitions or two-day competitions to 15-day competitions where companies give their data sets and problems to our community and the community solves them. So from a community perspective, you get the best data scientists to compete on the problem you want to solve. From a data scientist perspective, you get a whole variety of problems to work upon instead of just being siloed on the industry you are working on. And then finally, the job spirit. So while people are interacting in all these areas. We essentially collect information about them, so we understand what their skills are, what and then use that information to match them with the right job. So in some sense we are actually applying data science to data scientists. 
 

03:55  

Ramesh: Okay. That is fantastic. That's a very good way to describe. So just to get a sense of where Analytics Vidhya is right now Kunal. If you can give us a stats about the number of visits or number of members or whatever you think is relevant to give the scale. 

 

04:12  

Kunal: Yeah, so we get about two and half million visits month on month and we have close to half a million registered users on the board. So a registered user would be someone who's participated in any of the activities. So a lot of users come and read the resources, but if they have to, for example, participate in a competition, or attend any of the meetups they'll have to register on the portal. So that's about half a million. And it's still, you know, growing all organically. So word of mouth and organic search ways in which people know about Analytics Vidhya. So we're growing about 20 to 30 year on year all organically. 

 

05:03  

Ramesh: Fantastic. So I introduced Analytics Vidhya as a global organization. Give a scale of, I mean, I truly believe that you guys have done tremendous job, but I want to hear from you. What is the scale in global presence?  

 

05:18  

Kunal: Oh, so we actually get in terms of traffic US and India are almost similar and these are the two biggest markets. So combined they contribute to about 65% of their traffic. And then the remaining is from other countries UK being the biggest one. And then Australia, Southeast Asia, Europe, European countries. So yeah, so in that sense, in fact whatever we have done except for the conference, which we do in November, is global in nature. And the journeys are very similar. So people, when they're doing searches about data science or when they're talking to their data science you know, peers, they come to know about Analytics Vidhya and then that's how they come and discover us. So you know, there is no differentiation between advantage which people in India have versus people outside and hence the traffic is global.  

 

06:22  

Ramesh: Fantastic. So now let's talk a little bit on the business side Kunal. So it obviously you're not doing it for charity. So there's a business aspect. I believe you guys are a limited organization. That means you're not publicly listed. So whatever information can give with respect to profitability and the funding side of the world. What is Analytics Vidhya’s business situation. 

 

06:49  

Kunal: Sure. So, I personally believe that, you know we are very uniquely designed in that sense. So a few things that to just set the context. So first of all, we are, you know, bootstrapped organization, so the only finding which I took was from friends and family when I was starting. So we don't have an institutional investor and we were very clear from day one that we wanted this to be a community first business. So whatever we have done in last six years community has always been at the heart of it, and that's how it still remains. So you know, if it means as to delay profits or delay revenue streams, just to make sure that the community gets the right exposure and the right knowledge, we'll do that. So in terms of you know revenue. So we were burning money for the first three years. Now we are profitable sustainable business. In terms of growth this year we would end up 2X the revenue of last years, we are broadly doubling our revenue year on year. With so for example, on the cost side, we have about 25% increase in cost. So because you know, community as a business you have to seed it first, you have to let people build that trust. And once that happens, then the scale changed very drastically. So that's what has happened in our journey. So the initial years were very difficult. To be very honest, I didn't have clear revenue streams when I started. All I knew was I was seeding this community and in the last two and half, three years, we have now started putting these revenue streams where we know what are the needs of the community members. And we are providing products which help them do that in a better manner. And that's truly the, you know, driving the revenue products right now. 

 

08:54  

Ramesh: Fantastic. So that's now we have a very good picture of what Analytics Vidhya is about and its aspect of as well. So now let's switch gears and talk about Kunal Jain's journey, right on Analytics Vidhya. So you graduated in 2006, so Kunal, if you could walk us through what happened afterwards. 

 

09:13  

Kunal: Sure. So 2006 so I was, I studied aerospace engineering during my bachelor's and master’s. My specialization was in computational fluid dynamics. So that was the first time when I started using algorithms to solve problems and get solutions. So, and it was really fascinating, that] in one of the most prestigious aerospace journal as well. But that was what you know, kind of gave that first excitement that you could solve these problems using mathematical models and equations. So when I was graduating capital one came to our campus and the role looked very similar to what I written my master's dissertation that I would be using data and statistical and mathematical models to solve some of the problems which the bank was facing. So that looked exciting. So I joined capital one in 2006 and over a period of 4 years in capital one, I worked in a whole variety of roles starting from risk management to customer management and finally customer acquisition and marketing. But what I really loved about capital one was the ecosystem which it provided. So, you know there were like 2000 analysts as we used to call them. But in today's world we would call them data scientists sitting in a single organization and you know, everyone was really smart and knew what they were working on. So I was used to having this community of data scientists around me. If I had any question, I could go and have those discussions with them. And you know, there was so much learning which happened because of this ecosystem. Then what happened was in 2010, I decided to come back to India because I wanted to be in India long term, and I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I just wanted that very early on. I said, this looks like a very good opportunity in terms of shipping back at the same time, getting some entrepreneurial experience in setting up a team from scratch. So 2010, I joined Aviva life insurance the team which we started grew to a 20-member team over a period of four years. But what happened was I missed this community aspect when I came back. So while I was you know, I was solving a lot of business problems I was applying what I learned, but that peer-based learning and the community-based learning stopped when I came back to that India. Because that ecosystem in India didn’t exist. Also the setup was different. I mean, capital one is known for using analytics and data science. Aviva was starting that journey. So that time I would rely all on my batchmates or previous colleagues at Aviva, I would ask them questions. I am facing this particular problem. Have you solved anything like this? So for about three years that happened. And in this period, you know this team which I started when I was spending a lot of time initially solving business problems, grew to a 20-member team. So my role also transitioned from being a hands-on data science person to a manager who was spending a lot of time in meetings, compliances to, you know, making sure that the team has marked attendance so that they don't miss their salaries. So I you know stopped enjoying that part of my role. So in 2013 I said that, you know while this problem of having this ecosystem has come back again and again to let me start a blog where I can share my learnings with the larger world inform of a blog. So that's how Analytics Vidhya started. It was a personal blog to start with. So April 2013 I booked the domain and the first blog went out within seven days of that. 28th April 2013 we published our first blog. And for the first, you know, nine months, it was basically I am publishing the blog along with my job and trying to circulate it in my community.. So it was a purely just, you know, to share my knowledge. After I think five, six months, I could see recognition building. I could see people coming back. Some of the articles did really good discussions on LinkedIn. So, but so I did my job along with Analytics Vidhya for about nine months and then I could see a much bigger impact coming from what I was doing. So I knew that it was making a difference. And even at that time we didn't have any, you know revenue streams. I didn't have clear idea that how would I make money out of this. But I could see an impact building, so then April 2014, I started doing this full time and that's when started doing Analytics Vidhya full time.  
 

14:53  

Ramesh: In 2014, when you actually transitioned to Analytics Vidhya, was it making money? 

 

14:58  

Kunal: No, no. So as I said, so the first you know revenue came from Analytics Vidhya five months after I started doing it full time. So I had my own savings which I put aside. And in fact the promise I made to my wife at that time was that I had savings setup for sustaining our lifestyle for two years. And you know, if we're not able to build revenue streams for next one and half years, I’ll just start looking back for a job. So that is what I had done. Thankfully we were able to build a revenue stream. So I never had to go back to look for another job. So we didn't have those revenue streams. It was mostly, you know this feeling that what I'm doing is helping a lot of people based on the questions they were asking, the kind of discussions that are happening, which essentially led me to pursue it full time. 

 

15:59  

Ramesh: Fantastic. So five months or so after you completely quit and started it. Then you saw some revenue. How long take afterwards, you said three years it was still a loss-making entity, but not a lot of income even if it's lost making. How much time did it take from the first day when you started receiving some money and what form? Kunal what I was saying is five months after you started with Analytics Vidhya, you started getting some money, how long it take for you afterwards to get what you call a significant amount of money, a decent amount of money. And then how was the money coming in, in what form is subscriptions or is it as a sponsorship or what was it? 

 

16:58  

Kunal: Sure. So two questions that from my personal perspective, so I was very clear that I'm not drawing any salary till the time, you know, the business starts getting steady revenue. So I started withdrawing salary about two and a half years after I started Analytics Vidhya. But that was, you know, very very kind of nominal to cover up some of the expenses I was having. I think it was good four and a half years after I'd started Analytics Vidhya that I started drawing meaningful salary. This became as the first source, kind of my earning. Now in terms of where the money came from. So the first few years we've actually relying a lot on advertising. Because we had a lot of traffic. But we were not you know, ready or we would not wanting to offer product straight away because we wanted to build a community and have discussions around. So the first few years it was a lot of advertising, which brought us revenue. And then 2015. So mid-2015, we started hosting competition and hackathon's on Analytics Vidhya. So for about a year we did it with various communities and sponsorships through communities, but the first truly sponsored hackathon or hiring hackathon came in 2016 so that was the second revenue stream which we build. So we were charging organizations to do these hackathons and whenever they would find someone through our community, we get paid. So that was the, you know, second revenue stream which came up. 2017 we started doing conferences. So till that time we were doing a lot of meetups. So there we were able to, you know, do community partnerships to kind of build the revenue stream. But the conference was the first time where we got a significant revenue from doing any community activity. And then in 2018, we launched our own courses and trainings. So today there are broadly three revenue streams that we have. The first one is the trainings and the courses. The second one is hackathons and hiring, the third is the community activity. Those are the three streams of revenues we have. 

 

19:34  

Ramesh: Excellent. A very good overview of the journey Kunal. So I want to touch upon a couple of more areas in this journey before we switch to another topic. So at you know, the entrepreneurial journey is ups and downs. Good days and there are bad days. So while 2014 to 2016 when maybe you started feeling comfortable, was there any time you said, this is not for me and it's not working out, were there indications for you that it's in the right track, so you never had that moment of forget it, I want to quit.  

 

20:12  

Kunal: So I would definitely say that there was no moment where I said, you know, forget it you know, I’ll quit, so that thought never came. It doesn’t even come even today. But there were definitely some nervous moments. So for example July 2015, so May 2015 to about, you know, August, September 2015 traffic stalled. So it then reached about you know, at that time it was about 50,000 to 60,000 visits a month. And it just stayed there. And till that time we were used to get 10% to 15% growth month on month. So it was looking like, you know, this is probably the plateau where the traffic would stop, and you would need to think about some revenue. So that was one nervous period where I was questioning that you know, how to grow this further. So there were these periods. Because typically what happens is Google does its own algorithm updates. So you know an initial part of this traffic was the metric we were measuring ourselves by. So whenever there was a plateau, I would start questioning that, you know, what is happening. The other thing which I remember clearly was you know, initially as I said we were a very advertising driven business. Which also meant that there was a risk of relying on the advertisers. So advertisers have their own preferences. So for example, one of the companies which used to advertise very significantly, they were the highest paying customer for you know about 12 months. They decided to pull off advertising. And that was this because they had internal change of preferences. They were trying to figure out some things, and they just said that you know right now, we will not advertise anything. And we will do some more thinking and say what would be our next engagement. So you know so immediately after that we had to take some cost cutting measures. You know, some of us decided that we will not take salaries. So you know, I don't know entrepreneurship journey could be without ups and downs. But thankfully, you know, because we have always been impacting driven and community driven that thought that, you know that I’ll quit has never be in my mind thankfully. I think now in a way, we are in a very different state. So yeah, that's how it worked. But yeah, definitely there were days where you would question that, you know is this the right direction. I think that still happens. Best direction for the company. 

 

23:35  

Ramesh: I mean, you've built into a very impressive organizations. I've been watching it for the last three years for sure. And since 2016 or so, and then I think more recently I would say, I don't know when that switch happened Analytics Vidhya has become an influencer, right? Where you're attracting other influencers in the data science space in your conferences and things like that. And you're also attracting the big, like the tier one companies for sponsorship and all this stuff. I've been noticing that. So, exactly you know, at what point did the switch happen? I mean, if you can say, and then what made the switch happen where you became an influencer and where other influencers are looking to you to join your journey? 

 

24:22  

Kunal: Sure. So I think to be very honest, it's a process that's going to only happen over time, you know being an influencer, it is not something which happens overnight or within a 15-day span. And then it happens with some people, but definitely not in most of the community. So you know, a lot of efforts are been starting from 2015, 2016. They built this, you know, recurring recall. But when they see it second time, third time or when they see it on Google searches and if they come and read it, see the quality of articles which are out there so that, you know, adds up cumulatively over time. So that's what was happening at the backend, that while we are putting in this effort to make sure that the quality of articles are high and be continuing to do our work, there was this recognition, which was building. But I think some of that around 2016 and 2017, I could see that shift happening that you know, a lot of people started kind of approaching me for previous things. In fact this was 2017 I think June when we you know on boarded a set of volunteers to help us with our community events. And what started happening was if in any post I would tag a volunteer and they would get a lot of visits on their profile. They would come back and say that, you know that the number of profiles used that got in last six months, they got it in a single month. So on the influence of friends, I think it built over time. 2017 start that recognition started coming that I am able to, you know, I would call myself in the category of an influencer. I think in this process.... 

 

26:45  

Ramesh: I said, fantastic. That's good. Yeah, keep going. 

 

26:48  

Kunal: And in this process itself, you know there were a lot of people I was interacting with who also became influencers and who used to tag each other. So for example, you know Kirsten, Arcade. So all of us kind of, you know connect once in a while, discuss what’s happening. You know, I mean, each of us had, you know, kind of building this community in our own circles. So then we started kind of engaging each other talking to each other. So that each other again, if you are an influencer, it's always beneficial to get more views and perspective and, you know, just ending with other influencers that gives a lot of recognition. You know, so this community was built, and it's a very very, you know a solid, fundamentally solid community which we have built. So 2017 we started reaching out to organizations saying that, you know, we have this phenomenal community and, you know, we are doing these community initiatives and where ever we could see a good fit, we would make a case to them that, you know, that you should be looking at our community and see if you can engage. And then we were lucky to you know have some really great sponsors. So 2017, the first conference intel came in as our platinum sponsor, IBM came. And last year American express was the biggest sponsor. So we have been able to get some top-notch sponsor just because of the effort and the community thing, which is happening. So community, the company's value that, companies value the kind of interaction which are happening, you know and our conference for an example, the sponsors stalls in the display, what they are doing, the kind of engagement this feels, just phenomenal. So you know, every full of people wanting to know more about that product, their services or the opportunities. And that can only happen if the, you know, the community is engaging and has been built in the right manner. That's a reflection of the community people at the companies are realizing that. And then we are able to carve out those engagements for them.  

 

29:20  

Ramesh: Yeah, I tracked the conference virtually as well. So pretty impressive. So in the final segment Kunal, let's talk a little bit about know your piece of advice and then reflections on your journey. What you could tell other people. So based on your journey and then based on what you have seen in the entrepreneurial space, if somebody were to, you know, branch out on their, or wanting to branch out on their own, so what kind of advice would you give? 

 

29:48  

Ramesh: So I think first thing is to be clear what is your domain or what is your product and offering and find a market for that. So, you know as I said, for the first nine months, until I was sure that there is an impact coming from what I'm doing. I would have not gone full time into it. So that's the first thing any entrepreneur. That instead of thinking that, you know, you'll build something and people will consume, see where is the market fit, whether people have that need or not, and you know, will they pay or will that make a huge difference in the way. So until unless that ow, that you can do everything else. So that's the first thing which I would say to people that you should do that. The second thing is you know, once you've done that you have to be clear what kind of business you are building. So in our case, as I said, we were a community driven business. So we were very clear that, you know, we can’t get an institutional investor and then change numbers that these are the number of users, these are the number of people want on boarded. But that approach cannot work in case you are in a different market. So, you have to be clear what kind of business you are building, what scale you are going, or is it a lifestyle business, is it truly a groundbreaking business which achieves a defense scale. So being clear about that and, they're going to need funds get some really good investors on board. And I think just the siblings is probably the most important virtue that, you know, there would be days where when things would be difficult. There would be times. So, you know, a lot of people I know have started very different ventures. So one of my close friends started a venture internship space, one of them started you know, mom's space, but whoever was, you know convinced and was ready to put in that effort, I haven't seen that business view. They might  go in a different direction, but they don't fail. So in a lot of ways I think that, you know, when people see that 90% to 95% startups fail, it's mostly because people have not find the, people did not take time to fight or they were not ready to put in the efforts. I mean how can a startup fail without you know, even starting. So in that sense, I only speak that with a pinch of salt. I don't believe so many startups fail. It's more to do with people not doing the right research, not getting the right fill before they start. 

 

33:03  

Ramesh: And so you've got to persevere through the first you know, nine months or one year, whatever. Like you've got to have enough funds and then go through that phase. 

 

33:14  
Kunal: So yeah, Happy to go in more details in any of the areas if you have any questions. 

 

33:22  

Ramesh: Yeah, sure. So definitely I think we have to do a follow-up Kunal at some point of time I want to see the journey. So final question for you. So what's next for Analytics Vidhya? 

 

33:33  

Kunal: So as I say, we'll continue to build a community first business. But over the next 12 months, we would start personalizing our community a lot. So that's something which we are working really harder in the backend. So this all this data point which we have collected about our community members, what kind of tools do they use, whether they program in R or in python. What kind of algorithms do they use? What kind of articles have they been reading? So we are trying to build a platform where as soon as a person comes, based on their past activity, the platform personalizes what they should be reading, how they should be interacting. So that's a big change in the way Analytics Vidhya would evolve. And that's how, you know, mobile app, the change as well. So that's a big change on the platform front. I think on the revenue side we would continue to grow as I said, because the fundamentals are in place. There is a lot of customer demands. So I think at that place we are sorted. And then you know we are looking to do some very high-quality programs. So for example, there is a boot camp which we have started. The idea is to create 30 top-notch, data science professionals from India. So there are only 30 seats in this program. A nine-month program where, you know, you could be a mentoring these people personally, we would be providing them with internships. So, but they are learning in the classroom and they're applying that in an internship together for a period of 9 months. The idea is to get top 30 professionals in India who could build products indecently. So we are now starting to do these very very high impact bets on people. Which are unconventional. I don't know if anyone knows anything like this, but we really believe that these would create a much larger impact in the life of people in the way data science grows in India and across the globe. Those are some of the things that we would be doing in next 12 to 8 months.  

 

35:51  

Ramesh: Sure. Personalization and then bootcamp to produce the top-notch data scientists. I mean, fantastic, very revolutionary ideas. Personalization, I'm seeing all over the world. And I think that seems to be the next phase there, whether it's medicine and whatever. So, I mean, Kunal I myself have seen a tremendous growth of Analytics Vidhya over the last, you know, three to four years. So congratulations to you. So I, I’m, I'm so glad to be talking to you. So, and then I definitely will bring you back again on one other episode in the future. And so great to talk to you. 

 

36:39  

Ramesh: Yeah. So if you want to say any final thing, then we'll record it and we'll let it.  

 

36:43  

Kunal: Sure. So, thanks for inviting me on the podcast and you know, I think the work which you're doing on you know  entrepreneurs doing some of these you know learnings, which  to put it out there is phenomenon. So looking forward to your next book and let me know if I can be of any help. 

 

37:10  

Ramesh: Fantastic. Thank you very much Kunal. 

  

  

 

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The post Building a Data Science Training business with Kunal Jain appeared first on RameshDontha.com.

Building an online career coaching business with Scott Swedberg

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Guest: ​​​​Scott Swedberg

​Episode Transcript (Click to expand)

 
00:05  

Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to the agile entrepreneur podcast and video cast. And this is your host, Ramesh Dontha and today we are going to talk about jobs. The next person I'm going to talk to, will get you a job. His name is Scott Swedberg. Scott is the founder and CEO of job sauce, a career services company focused on the individual. He founded the company while working at LinkedIn and the job sauce has helped 10,000 professionals since 2014. Scott, welcome.  
 

00:39  

Scott: Thanks for having me Ramesh.  
 

00:41  

Ramesh: so right off the bat, I know I introduced you as the founder of the company that focuses on the individual and I think that particular word is very important for you. So can you talk about, you know, what job's sauce is about and why the word individual means so much to you?  
 

00:57  

Scott: Yeah, so something that we recognize at job sauce and I founded it because I experienced personally is so much of your life is tied to the work that you do. It's how a lot of people express their fulfillment in life. That’s how most people make money. So it's really important for an individual to feel fulfilled in their career. And I noticed that most career services type companies, it was either, you know, an individual resume writers say helping people, which is great, but you kind of have to trade your time for money. You can only help so many people or you've got these bigger outplacement companies that focus more on a B2B level. Certain company has to lay off employees and they contract this company to ease the landing, provide them with resume services or what have you. What the job sauce does is we focus on the individual, like individual resume writers career coaches do, except we can do it at scale. And we bring in a lot more resume writers and career coaches to help the individuals who are coming to us, so we can actually impact 10,000 people in the last five or six years as opposed to if I were doing this just myself and didn't have any support, you know, maybe I could have eclipsed a thousand by now if that's all I did. But we're able to reach a lot more people because we're focused on this niche, helping individuals grow in their career as opposed to, and I'm just helping a company ease the landing of their weight off employees. 
 

02:26  

Ramesh: Great. Okay. So just for my own clarification is job sauce a market place where you're connecting people like resume writers and career coaches with the people who are looking for a job or you as a business owner, you will manage all that who to bring in as a resume writer and career coach, but you are the front of the company. How does it work? 
 

02:49  

Scott: And so it's not a marketplace. When someone comes to us, if they're going to work with us, all of our resume writers and career coaches have gone through extensive training and onboarding to be able to work for us. So while a lot of these career coaches and resume writers, they're already very qualified to do what you're doing. We wouldn't hire them if they weren't because they've gone through our protocols and methodology. We know for certain that they're going to be able to make the impact that we promise.  
 

03:14  

Ramesh: Great. So now that we know what jobs sauce is about and what it does, let's start on tracing your entrepreneurial journey. So you started the company in 2014 and can you tell us what was the situation with you at that time and why you decided to start the company and how you decided? So let's take one at a time. 
 

03:33  

Scott: Sure. So I had pretty recently started working at LinkedIn. I had just moved to a new city, had gone through some family health issues and it really rocked my world, completely new transition in life. My mother had just died of cancer. I was kind of questioning everything that had to do with my life, what I was going to do with it. And I thought that I wanted to go work for one of these big tech companies that something like LinkedIn, it really does make a difference for a lot of people. The platform that provides really is exceptional. And when I got there, you know I was pretty good at sales, got on the phone, good at consulting with people. So I thought, okay, I can bust my butt and work hard and do that. And I started doing it and I just felt too disconnected from the impact that I know LinkedIn makes, the individuals who are trying to grow in their career. But fortunately for me, because I had LinkedIn on my LinkedIn profile, a lot of friends from college and some are recent jobs, they started coming to me asking for advice, you know, what do I do in my LinkedIn profile to stand out or you know, help me get a new job. And I wasn't qualified to do it because I worked at LinkedIn. But because I already had that experience, because I was passionate about it, I just started doing it. And in a way, one thing led to another the people I helped start a referring their friends. And before I knew it, people started asking how much you charged? And I realized I liked doing that a lot more than I like doing my actual job. And that's when I started to realize maybe this is something I should really explore. 

 

05:04  

Ramesh: Okay. So now you decided that Hey, you know, there is a basically a purpose or a meaning that you could find to your life, given lots of other things going on. And I'm sorry to hear about your mom. And so you thought about then job sauce then, I mean, out of the blue, you, you started it? You put up a website or can you walk us through the steps that you took to actually start your business? 

 

05:29  

Scott: Yeah, so you know, there's the clean easy version that you can put on a website and then there's the reality as you very well know. Sometimes it's just doing a few things an hour every single day that can really make the difference. And that's the spot that I found myself in. I didn't immediately decide, Oh, I'm going to call it the job sauce and I'm going to do these kinds of services. I just knew I liked helping people in this way and I started doing it. And as I dedicated more and more time to it, it was a matter of, first okay, someone asked me how much I charge, how do I come up with that? I don't know. How do I value my time? How do I know how much time it's really going to take? What am I, what are the program or the packages that I'm going to offer? And it's funny that the price that I charge my very first client, I think I charged him $400 and I helped him get a $40,000 raise.  

 

06:25  

Ramesh: How did you come up with that? It's a very fascinating discussion. I love this piece. So how did it come up with the $400 to start with?  

 

06:34  

Scott: Well, at the time I wasn't expecting him to ask me how much I charged. I distinctly remember I was actually driving in the middle of nowhere, Indiana in a snowstorm. And, you know, call the guy, John and John asked me how much I charge. And I kind of felt a bit of a panic because I had never thought to put a value to my time quite like that before. So I thought, okay, well maybe it'll take, I don’t know, 20 hours’ worth of work on my part, give or take and let's just say $20 an hour sounds fine, I guess. And I just said $400. And he said, that works. And I immediately knew, wow, he's definitely sold on the value I can provide more so than I can. I should've said to charge more, or I should've charged more. But I just picked a number out of the blue. So that was a lesson for me. I should be a lot more intentional about what I charge and why. Otherwise I'm going to find myself, you know, work my butt off for not very much.  

 

07:33  

Ramesh: Okay so then afterwards, how did you learn and how did it evolve the pricing piece of it?  

 

07:39  

Scott: So it at first started as a bit of a, you know, trial by fire. Just try things out and see what sticks. Particularly when I ultimately launched the resume writing side of things. The same kind of resume deliverable you can see charged on the internet anywhere from, you know, realistically $100 to $1,000. And if you look at executive resumes where these people were making half a million dollars a year, they would much rather pay more to make sure that it's done right. There are no errors, they have complete peace of mind and some of those are 2000, $3,000. So it's what I did decided was first, what do I want my target market to be? And I didn't want to stick myself in a position where I wasn't comfortable providing the kind of support that my clients needed. You know, a CEO of a company as least back then when I was 24, 25 years old. I didn't feel too comfortable giving guidance to someone at that level, even though ultimately the strategies remain pretty similar. But I knew I didn't want to work with people who were just out of college because most of them have enough money to pay me anything. So I said, okay, well let's figure out what other people were charging for a mid-level professional for the kinds of people I'm good at supporting. And let me start there. And ultimately, I went to what kind of results am I really helping people get? If I'm helping people pretty reliably get a $10,000 to $40,000 raise, what is that worth to people compared to if they were to do it on their own? That's where I started and ultimately it came down to how good my sales skills were and finding the right clients and trying things out. Ultimately charged well over 10 times what I charged my first customer. 
 

09:38  

Ramesh: Fantastic. That's good. So then now let's get into the business model. So you focused on the individuals and then I see lots of career coaching services, you know, and I know the big guys like a ziprecruiter, all those guys are there as well. But jobs sauce seems to differentiate itself. I mean you got 10,000 people that you helped, so that must be doing something. So what's your business model like? 

 

10:03  
Scott: So the way we approach the business is whatever we're going to do, we want to make sure we add so much value that the client is delighted with the experience and wants to come back to us for more. Because many people, they find us because of one specific thing they need, most often it's something like a resume. They're about to start their new job search journey. They know they haven't updated their resume in a long time, or they don't really know what it takes. Maybe it's been awhile. They don't know how applicant tracking systems work or what's changed. So yeah, they come to us and you know, costs about $150 bucks to get their resume redone. And when we leave them so happy with the experience that they want to know what else we can provide because they just don't know what the job services is going to require from them. That's the foundation of our business model. Making sure they're so happy that whatever they need, they're going to come to us. Or they might essentially ask us what else do you have that would make a difference for me. Everything we do is based on that first and foremost. 
 

11:06  

Ramesh: Fantastic. Okay. So good. So that is how you basically, to some extent, I don't know if you'll want to call it this with sell up or you know, cross selling other services because you provided so much value with the very first service that you are able to deliver. So I mean that seems very reasonable to me because I think most of the time if you have gone through the barrier of getting one customer, the customer may be, you know, getting him or her to buy other services, lesser of a barrier, which makes a lot of sense to me. Then let's talk about the growth of the company, right. So how did it grow over the period? 2014 you started, so you got, well, how many customers in the first month? Can you talk to us about the journey and the initial years? 

 

11:49  

Scott: Yeah. So that very first series of months didn't get a lot of customers, you know I was still feeling out was this something I really wanted to do as a business? Was this the difference I wanted to make for people? I was pretty sure, but it was hard. You know, it's hard to get customers just through referrals alone. So I was feeling out how do I actually get people to find me and ultimately found some useful resources online related to coaching and different high value services that people provide and realized, well, one thing I can do is I can do a bunch of webinars for universities and many of them have alumni career services to try to help their alumni grow in their careers after they've graduated. So I can walk through my methodology for how I help people get jobs and spread that word. And if people want to do it on their own, then great. I helped them and maybe they'll tell other people about the webinar or if they want support, then they'll come to me directly. That's really where I started getting my first higher paying customers and especially beyond referrals, was working with universities to deliver high value content and giving customer, giving viewers the option to have a phone call with me if they wanted additional support and then add a bunch of value there and make it clear to them what kind of services we have available and if it makes sense, pitch them on it and work it out from there. So those were the initial, I probably got to that point within maybe a year of getting started, but the first few months were just feeling my way around. I wish I had something like the 60 minutes start up just to know what I could be doing. Give me a structure for trying things because it was a lot of spinning my wheels initially. 
 

13:41  

Ramesh: Okay. Scott that is, I mean I think you basically told the story of many of the entrepreneurs, you know, this getting started heart of it. But now let's talk about the crossover, right. So you were working, you're making some money and I don't know how long you are with the LinkedIn after you started the company, but at what point of time did you feel comfortable that you're making enough money with job sauce that you want to continue with this business as opposed to, I'm not going to make it this way. I need to go back to the job. Like, so we talked about one year, but do you remember the exact cutoff? 
 

14:15  

Scott: Yeah, so I left before I had replaced my income. I certainly took a risk. But the nice thing about my expertise is I'm very confident in my ability to go get a job. So I know how that process works. So I figured, well, worst case scenario, you know, when I hit X point and I’ve burned through my savings or have struggled to make a certain amount of money for a certain period of time, I know I can go get a new job. I just need to be smarter about what I'm actually doing because you know, the role I had at LinkedIn wasn't a good fit for me. So when I left, I wasn't prepared financially for that and my business was not up and running. But to me, it didn't have integrity to keep doing the job that I was doing because it was such a struggle for me just to do the very basics. And I was pretty good at the actual work and my coworkers with me and I added a lot of value to the team outside of my core responsibilities. But ultimately, I wasn't very good at my actual job, so it didn't make sense for me to keep doing that. And I talked to my boss about it, I told him what I was dealing with and what I was struggling with. And fortunately that he handled it really well and he pretty much told me, Hey, if this isn't a good fit for you, then we absolutely want to support you in leaving. And if you want to stay, we want to do everything we can to make sure you're successful, but now you need to decide whether this is something you want to do. And I took the weekend and fortunately I had enough faith in myself that I would figure it out. And worst-case scenario I go find a new job that I was willing to make the jump. 
 

15:56  

Ramesh: Okay. So Scott, let's talk a little bit about your operations of your business. So there is probably by this time, if you're talking about five years since you started your company, so there is probably a customer pipeline that you're building. So how do you acquire your customers? How are they coming to you? 
 

16:11  

Scott: So many of them are finding us through LinkedIn and we'll use some of the LinkedIn services like LinkedIn Profinder was a really great way that we started our resume service. It's essentially a marketplace for professionals who are seeking certain services to find other professionals who offer those. So that's how we started acquiring a lot of customers. And that formed a group, certain writing really good high value content that will ultimately have people form for whatever. 

 

16:59  

Ramesh: Hey one second. Alright. So Scott so how do you acquire your new customers? 

 

17:10  

Scott: And so initially one of the ways that we acquire customers was through LinkedIn. They have a service called LinkedIn Profinder. That is a marketplace that matches professionals who are seeking certain services to professionals who need certain services. So that formed a useful foundation for us to get our resume service in particular up and running. And since then we've expanded to develop valuable content related to the services that we offer or you know, the pieces of the job search that people need help with. And because we add value there, when people do need support, they trust us as the place to go. So, you know, once they find us through searching for certain kinds of support, then they may schedule a call with us or buy a service straight from the website.  

 

17:57  

Ramesh: Okay. So I got it. So now you've got enough of a pipeline. So it looks like you started a technology company and you started and learned a lot of techniques there and then you, of course, people reached out to you as well. So now if you could give us a profile of the customers, is it mostly technology people who are looking for jobs in technology or they have a widespread, do you have an idea of what's the profile of this people that you're helping with? 

 

18:33  

Scott: Yes. So many of the people that we support do have jobs in tech. But we work with just about any kind of professional who's out there. You know, we've, we've worked with from doctors to dock workers to know to people in the military or transitioning from the military. But the majority of people who come to us are, white collar workers who work for a tech companies in a broad range of positions. You know, while some are more technical and our engineers are software developers, we work with a lot of people who work at those kinds of companies as well in sales and marketing and operations. So pretty much any mid to senior level white collar worker is our typical client. But if you're in a career where you need a resume to go get a new job, then we're a fit for you. 

 

19:32  
Ramesh: Okay. So let me, before I go into the final stretch where I'm going to talk about your journey and ups and downs, let me ask you one question. So what I'm hearing is that one third of you know, the people, the millennials definitely are doing a side job, side gigs. So are you also helping people not find a full-time job but a, you know, maybe part time jobs or you know, people who can do side jobs kind of stuff? 

 

19:58  

Scott: So, many times we do end up doing that. Not necessarily intentionally, but because when people decide they want to go get a new job and they'll, and they'll start working with us through the coaching, we may uncover that it's not that they need a new job or that maybe that's not the best fit for them, but to pursue some type of side hustle or passion to potentially launch their own company one day, that that is ultimately the priority. So while we don't seek that out because so many people decide that that's what they want out of their life and that's how they would be happiest overall, we do end up providing that kind of support. Our focus is helping people go get new jobs, but something that we do intend to pursue at some point is something more aligned with launching one of those side hustles because that tends to be such a fulfilling thing to do in a career. 

 

20:50  

Ramesh: Fantastic. Okay. My next question is, okay, let's take me myself as a prospective client for you. I heard about your company. So what is the next step I would do. 

 

21:05  

Scott: So if you've heard about my company, then the best thing to do is to go to the www.jobsauce.com and probably go into the blog and read some of the content we have. It depends on what you're looking for. If you know that you need a new resume, then it's pretty clear that you can, that you can sign up to learn more about our resume program, book a call with us to see if it's a good fit. You know, same with a few of our other services. But what most commonly happens is some will come to our site, they'll read through some of the blogs and realize they might not be sure exactly what they need next. And then we've got an option for people to book a consultation call where someone like me or one of my colleagues will get on the phone, talk through what they're dealing with and ultimately, whether we have something that would make a difference for them. And if we do, then it shifts more to a sales conversation. And what packages are a good fit. And what the pricing is and that sort of thing. But if you're starting your career journey and you're not sure what to do next, just go into the www.jobsauce.com and going to the blog is a good place to start. 

 

22:10  

Ramesh: Okay. Excellent. So now the final stretch, you've started a journey and then not from a regret perspective, but as an advice to other as entrepreneurs, what are the things that you would've done differently in your business building? 

 

22:35  

Scott: Yeah, early on what I would have done differently is focus on developing more forms of quality content. Okay. I mostly focused on doing webinars and something that was more, I guess immediate gratification or focused on near term sales. And that was, I'm glad I did that, but I wish I had also created written content like the blog that we have now. I wish that I had written those kinds of things and put them out there back when I originally knew that that's something people needed because the value of that over time, the number of people we could have impacted beyond what we have, we've been much higher. And then just from a functional sales standpoint, the longer quality content is out there, the more backlinks you have, the more traffic you end up getting, the more people that are exposed to the job sauces brand. And you know, I wish I had done that earlier. 

 

23:30  

Ramesh: Okay. So, good. And then going forward and what are the plans that you have for building and growing your business? 

 

23:41  

Scott: So continuing to add that high value content and spreading that to anyone who wants to share it. That's definitely a big priority for us. But something that we've started looking at now is how best to partner with the people in the career growth world. You know, individual resume writers all the way through people who own executive search companies. What value can we provide them? And specifically their clients who are trying to go out and get a new job, that there are many recruiters who they only have so much time to vet candidates and send them to open requisitions. If we could add value for the executive search company by having their clients be more prepared. That's something that I'm currently exploring with a few different firms. And that's something I'm really excited about because it gives us more reach to add value wherever we can and make sure people have the best possible career journey that we can offer them. 

 

24:40  

Ramesh: Fantastic. So Scott based on your journey and based on what you have learned what advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs? 

 

24:50  

Scott: The first thing would be to start now. It's really easy to sit back and wait and think that the timing has got to be right at some point, but just doing something, even if it's small, even if it's just a couple times a week or I mean I keep coming back to the name of your book, but just doing 60 minutes a day, it makes such a difference. It puts you into action and being in action is something that's actually going to cause some kind of result. But sitting back and thinking and pondering it's not really going to get you too far. It's a lot easier to go try something than figure out whether it worked or not and just sit back and wonder because we don't know until we try. 

 

25:31  

Ramesh: Fantastic. I call it agile entrepreneurship, be agile, you know, instead of trying to plan and, you know, create this 90-page business plan. No, go do something. You know, I'm very fascinated how you build your business, Scott here, because you're very agile where you said you didn't know about pricing, but you did something, but you learned from it. You kept improving on it. I mean that's the agile framework they use in software, iterative method, right? So you did know what form of content worked and you did something and then later on you learned that the long form really helps a lot of businesses. So it's unique, I'm happy that you were able to build your business over the last you know, five years, 10,000 customers. I mean, good luck going forward for you. So just sum up your journey. You worked at LinkedIn, people were asking you about how do I get job just because you worked at LinkedIn, people in LinkedIn and then you saw an opportunity there. And then of course in the personal side, things were going on for you. And then you wanted to find the purpose and the meaning to your life. And this gave you away. And then you started with one customers, you kept building. And by end of the first, you felt comfortable to continue with this one. And it's a very fascinating how you're built. So in your new endeavors, I really wish you good luck. Scott, thank you very much for coming on the show.  

 

26:56  

Scott: Yeah, thank you so much for having me Ramesh. This is a great podcast and I appreciate your thoughtful questions.  

 
27:02  

Ramesh: Right. To end it, what are the places and the websites or the areas that they can contact with you.  

 

27:09  

Scott: The best place to contact us is to just go to the www.jobsauce.com and you can find us on virtually every form of social media at the job sauce.  

 

27:19  

Ramesh: Fantastic Scott. Scott Swedberg for you. I'm sure all of us at one point or other, we'll be looking for a job and if you are a career coaching or a resume building, you know, www.jobsauce.com. Thank you. 

  

 

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The post Building an online career coaching business with Scott Swedberg appeared first on RameshDontha.com.

Building a Youtube Intro Video making business with Will Hankinson

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Guest: ​​​Will Hankinson

​Episode Transcript (Click to expand)

00:07  

Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the agile entrepreneur podcast. This is your host, Ramesh Dontha. Again, this is both a podcast as well as a video cast. That's what we are trying in 2020. So let's give it a try. And then today I'm very, very excited to introduce you to founder or owner of a company. So his name is Will Hankinson. So Will Hankinson is the owner of www.introcave.com. He is a YouTube intro maker he purchased in 2018. And the Will has a very interesting and diverse background. He's been building websites and video games since 2007. That's 13 years. His expedience ranges from 2% startups to running large Facebook games to working at a digital agency. He has participated in game jams, hackathons, shipped multiple flash and mobiles games, built websites. And believe it or not, he taught as an adjunct professor at Savannah college of arts and design. It's a very popular, a famous college in Georgia and of course in the country as well. And also, he has some investment stake in real estate as well. So as you can see, a very diverse background that it's going to be very interested in conversation. And so Will welcome. 

 

01:28  

Will: Thank you. Thank you, Ramesh. 
 

01:31  

Ramesh: So you're a big-time gamer. 
 

01:31  

Will: Yeah. I mean you can tell from giant gaming headset; apex legends is my current mega league vice. 

 
01:42  

Ramesh: Will what's your pop current game. 
 

01:42  

Will: Apex legends. It's a competitive Fortnite which you've probably heard of. 
 

01:45  

Ramesh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So fantastic. So that's good. All right, so I have a gamer friend. I keep [01:50 inaudible] him like, man, what are doing? Just killing people in the game. So what fun you get out of it. But anyway, I don't know much about it, so I will not get into it. So let's talk about Intro Cave So you are the owner of www.introcave.com, so Will, why don't you introduce yourself in your own words and then about the business that you're running. 
 

02:08  

Will: Sure. So I sort of bounced back and forth my whole career from video games and web development. That's kind of where I got started. At the time I was in 2018 when I bought it. I was working at a mobile game studio here in Atlanta and I would sort of work on video games all day and then come home and keep working on either the same game or different games, smaller games. I felt like I needed a little bit more variety. I'm a big reader of like hacker news, in any hackers’ places like that. I'd read a couple of stories of people buying businesses. And that actually kind of just struck a nerve with me. And so I started Effie international is the one that I sort of basically just analyzing deals. So probably for like a, let's say like six months or a year. I was on their newsletter sort of just analyzing deals that came through. 

 

02:55  
Ramesh: Sorry for interrupting. So what you're saying is, it's not that you were thinking about starting a business for quite some time. I mean you're taking this course or that course, but you suddenly happened to see this newsletter called hacker news and then that lit a bulb, is that how it started? 
 

03:12  

Will: I mean I’ve always had side hustles even since I first started my career in 2007, back then it was me, back then I was working on the web and making flash games on the side. So now it's kind of a reversal of that where I was working in games and figured I should maybe work on the web on the side. So I’ve always had side hustles. I'd say that since I have a five-year-old and an eight-year-old, so since having kids, I'd say my time for working on side hustles as has gone down dramatically. So having read about some guys on a blog part post somewhere that they had bought their business, that just seemed like a good way. Like, you know, I don't have but maybe 10 or 20 hours a week to work on the side business. So starting from scratch just seemed a little too daunting. And I had a couple of false starts and you know, I’ve launched a couple things, but nothing really ever got traction. So the idea of just buying something that I could optimize and grow, there was already sort of proof that Hey, this is a business that can make money. Just sort of fit what I was looking for. 
 

04:11  

Ramesh: Okay. So www.introcave.com is what you bought. So what is www.introcave.com? I know it said YouTube intro maker. So for somebody who doesn't know much about it, I mean, what is it about. 
 

04:22  

Will: Yeah, so I mean YouTube is huge and it's continuing to grow. Everybody, you know, I think they've done surveys with high school students and the number one job that everybody wants right now, it's no longer like astronaut. It's like, you know, pro gamer, streamer or youtuber. So there's constantly new people coming onto the platform. You know, if, if you want to brand yourself or brand your business on YouTube you may have a logo or a tag or some sort of like, follow me, subscribe. And if you don't know aftereffects or Apple motion or, I mean there's a couple of software packages that do this and you want to have some sort of like cool particle logo reveal or announcement like title card animation. There's not really like an easy way to do that. The tools are very expensive and there are quite a bit of knowledge to put something like that together. So what intro cave does is, it's got a library of about a hundred templates. Some of them just have a logo, some have like a logo and a subtitle, some just have texts only. And you can go and pick which template you like, upload your logo, change some colors, change some text, and it'll actually fire it off to a render server on a separate, so I have a web server and a render server. It'll fire it off to the render server, render a sort of crappy small preview, 480 by 270. Send that back to you. If you like it, you can pay five bucks for seven, 720P or 10 bucks for 1080P and it'll take about an hour to render it in HD.  
 

05:44  

Ramesh: Okay, so how long is this intro video?  
 

05:48  
Will: Up to, I have some, even up to like 30 seconds that are really more like a micro ad spot, but I'd say the sweet spot is probably in the four to ten second range.  
 

05:56  

Will: Oh, I see. So 4 to 10 seconds range. And it's, I say, so essentially you guys are doing a sell up of the video and that's how you're making money. 
 

06:05  
Will: Correct and it's not liked a perpetual license either. It's like a pay per render. So it's not like, you know, some of my competitors are more like a subscription fee and you pay you know, 10, 20 bucks a month and then you can render as many videos as you want. Mine is just a single transaction Elkhart pay per render. And I think that works pretty well for intro videos because you, you know, once you have a logo reveal, you don't end up needing like, you know, two of them a month. I do about maybe 30% of my business is repeat customers. But for the most part, once you have your intro video, you know, once you're sort of just getting started, one is really all you need. 
 

06:39  

Ramesh: Okay. So that's a very good overview of the business. It's basically YouTube intro videos with, and then your sell up option to do that. And then you also contrast it from a business perspective. How you're differentiating is you're not doing a subscription kind of service. You're doing one at a time. That's how you're differentiating. And then let me ask you a question. How did you come up with a $5 for 720P and $10 for the, you know, HD 1080P, of that kind of pricing? 
 

07:10  
Will: I mean, really, I just inherited it. So when I purchased the business in 2018, it was $4.99 and $9.99. I've since rounded to even flat numbers just because the, you know, it's easier to put on the video or on the marketing site and things like that. I've tested a few more prices. I tried going to 12. I didn't see enough conversions. I actually, like I saw a dip at $12. So I’ve moved it back to $10. Last summer I tried just getting rid of the $5 option entirely. Figuring some, my average purchase price is about, I want to say like in $7.50 to $8 range, so it's pretty evenly split, may maybe slightly skewed towards the $10 videos. So I thought, well, maybe I’ll just get rid of the $5 option entirely and it'll go all the way to $10. Conversion dropped like 40, 50%. And so the increase in revenue was only about, it'd be like a net 25% decrease in revenue. There's probably some sort of like price anchoring going on there where, you know, when people see the $5 and the $10, they're like, Oh, well I’ll take the 10, but when they only see $10, they think, well maybe I don't need a $10 video. 
 

08:17  

Ramesh: Okay. Actually that is very, very, good point. I think in terms of price anchoring that you talked about and having the different prices, how psychology works. So let's take it one step at a time. So Will so you bought the intro Cave and then you agreed on some kind of uprising by looking at the valuation of how much money they're making and all that stuff in 2018 and how was the journey and then what, how much time were you spending after you bought it? And then if you could talk about, let's talk about 2018, I don't know how much time you had in 2018 let's talk about that first. 
 

08:52  

Will: Sure. So I got pretty good at doing sort of financial modeling of these deal prospectuses that were coming through the newsletter I signed up for. So I basically run you know, a 10-year model of like, okay, if I can increase traffic by 1% a year or increase conversion rate by 2%, here's what the business might look like in three to five years. And I was looking for something that was sort of in my technical wheelhouse as well. So my background is in games. So I’ve done a lot of scripting and Photoshop. I've done a lot of similar scripting. So the backend servers are running aftereffects, which has the same scripting language as what you would use to script Photoshop. So this one just ended up being something that was right in my technical wheelhouse. As well as I, you know, doing games and digital media my whole career. You know, I studied animation in college. So this sort of felt like a, Hey, this is like this thing I used to do in the dorm and maybe I’ll pick it back up again and start creating some of these intro videos myself. So sort of like scratch all those numbers. I sort of looked at it as, you know, depending on some of the businesses I was looking at, like if it was a sass and it'd been around for five years, maybe the multiple goes up a couple, I sort of assumed the base starts at around 30 times EBITDA, like monthly EBITDA. So like if it's making, you know, $1,000 a month that you know, sells for roughly $30,000, that kind of thing. So sort of my, in my head where I value things was sort of at somewhere in the 30 to 36 range. And then I would sort of tune that number up or down based on, you know, how long has it been around, how volatile is the traffic. Do they have sort of repeatable acquisition channels? So this one was actually a fairly young site. It had only sort of been earning at that level for about eight to 10 months. Something like that. But so I actually sort of put a little bit lower ish then than what I ultimately paid for. But there were multiple bidders. And so what we ended up doing, the seller actually got enough interest that he was thinking about just holding it for another year and continuing to grow it and then selling it, you know, for double, you know, a year later. Yeah so, we ended up working out a kind of an earnout schedule where, you know, the base price was something I was comfortable with. And then if the earnings grew a ton in the first year I would pay, not quite, you know, double, but you know, pay more for it. So I think my final price multiple ended up being somewhere in the like 30 to 36 X EBITDA range. 
 

11:16  

Ramesh: Okay. So you bought that and then you said you wanted to optimize the business, increase the traffic and increase the conversions and that kind of stuff. So how, did it pan out or were there any ups and downs in your thinking when you bought it and then as you're working on the business? 

 

11:37  

Will: Yeah, for sure. So I bought it in, the deal closed in May. I didn't take it over until June. I was traveling until June. So once I took over the business in June, I was making around, I want to say like $2,500 profit a month. So I had pretty much the whole month of June to work on it and sort of do the onboarding, takeover of the business. And then my day job, I'm currently on a digital agency. I only work four days a week, so I have every Friday off. So I'd probably put in about 16 to 20 hours a week on the business after June. So at first everything went great. So, you know, I took over the business at about $2,500 a month or so. And then I grew that steadily through the end of the year. Just optimizing SEO. I started a newsletter. There wasn't a newsletter before. I revamped a lot of the design and the blog, got rid of some of the really poorly performing templates and grew from $2,500 up to about $5,000 profit in January. So in the first seven months I doubled it. Which is great for me. Not as great for the earnout. So basically, I hit all a hundred percent of the first three quarters of earn-out. And then around March, so February is another big month. January is a big month. So January is sort of cyclical for this business because a lot of people you know, you're a podcast of yourself, I'm sure, so a lot of people, you know, when new year’s hits, they're like, this is the year I'm going to start my podcast. I'm going to start my YouTube channel. So January is a huge spike of like, you know, $5,000 profit or something like that. And then that dropped back down to like $4,000 or so in February, which seemed like a more sort of normal run rate. And then about halfway through March, there was a big Google SEO algorithm update. And basically my main keyword that I rank for just disappeared entirely. So my traffic went from about 2000 people a day to like, you know, 400 or 500 people a day.  
 

13:36  

Ramesh: Okay. So I think we all go through the Google algorithm gods wishes and all that stuff, okay fine. So how did you recover from that?  
 

13:45  

Will: So my plan had actually been since taking over the business is this thing is held together with duct tape and chewing gum. I'm going to rebuild the render servers, make it super stable. It turns out when three quarters of your traffic goes away, it doesn't need to be that performance or stable anymore. So suddenly I had plenty of computing power and, and so the thing that I was working on kind of didn't make sense to work on anymore. So I sort of just completely re shifted my efforts into SEO. Really just learning everything I could about Outreach, SEO. I joined HARO, help a reporter out. So helping a reporter out is like a daily three times a day newsletter where people are just looking for sources. And so I just tried to respond to three to five of those a week. That's how I got onto this podcast even and just sort of start building a word of mouth that way. I started investing in Twitter. So I wrote a couple of bots for Twitter to basically just a scrape the timeline for mentions of subscribe to my channel, new video out, that kind of thing. And then run a little bit of very simple grading of like, okay, this keyword is worth five points, this keyword is worth 10 points. And sort of split that into a couple of lists of sort of prospects of low value, high value prospects, and then I can go and interact with those people and try to drive a little bit of traffic that way. I'd say that's been mostly a miss. And then right around the same time also my, you know, I get about, and this kind of blows people's minds, you know, a thousand to 2000, sometimes 2,500 people on my newsletter every month just signing up for intro cave accounts. So when I took over the business, the newsletter was about 20,000 people, I want to say and starting around, you know, February, March, kind of the same time the traffic blew up, my list was up to about 40,000 - 50,000 people. And me having never really sent a newsletter before. My, you know, strategy for that is like, you know, load 50,000 names in a mail gun and press send. It turns out that once you get above like 10,000 to 15,000, that doesn't work anymore. So I thought about migrating over to MailChimp or something like that, that'll sort of automatically warm up the servers and send them out and you know, get good deliverability. But you know, at my list size, it was, you know, $400 or $500 a month on one of the sort of pro, you know, email platforms. So to me it just didn't, you know, at the time I was only making like a thousand dollars a month in profit. So blowing half of that on a newsletter that drives, you know, maybe $200 of sales a month didn't seem worth it. 
 

16:13  

Ramesh: Hey Will I have a question [16:15 inaudible] heard about in that aspect that there are some services where you could ascend straight from your WordPress or whatever website without having to go to the email marketing solutions like a MailChimp to the world. You get unlimited sense. So did you say that, that did not work out for you because of the deliverability of the emails? Is that what you said? 
 

16:38  

Will: Yeah. So when you, so most of the email service providers, so Gmail, Yahoo, I mean Gmail is the big one. Gmail is like 90% of my emails when they detect a ton of traffic from one IP, that's really, really bursty. So, you know, I send maybe at the time I was sending about 40, 50 emails a day, just sort of normal transactional, thank you for signing up. Here's your password, that kind of emails. So when your traffic goes like 50, 50, 50, 50, 50, 50,000, 50, 50, 50, 50, that kind of spike just doesn't make it through. So you've got to kind of warm it up. So as part of that, I implemented a bunch of transactional emails. So now my daily volume is closer to 400 to 500 emails a day. And then when I send a newsletter, I ramp it up. So instead of going like, you know, 400, 400, 400, 50,000, I’ll do like 400, 1000, 2000, 3000, 10,000, 20,000.  
 

17:29  

Ramesh: Okay. So you're still doing that thing as opposed to relying purely on the email marketing solutions, like a MailChimp for the world? 

 

17:35  

Will: Yeah, yeah. I basically built my own newsletter service at this point. That's pretty much the big engineering effort of this year 2019 last year, I guess now. 
 

17:44  

Ramesh: Okay. Fantastic. So that's good. So you have built it up and then you build up the mail service. That's awesome. And then did it go back to the original at least $2,500 or when, what's happening. 
 

17:58  

Will: It's improving. So I'd say you know, March through September, August, September, it was pretty flat around making it about a thousand profit a month and that sort of like profit from an analytics side I would say that like an EBITDA side. So, you know, I financed the business when I bought it, so I'm still paying, you know, $400 or $500 a month in debt service. So, not a whole lot of profits starting around like September, that outreach started to seem like it would work a little bit. And so the numbers started ticking up. This most recent month there's another algorithm update a couple of days ago. There was one in December. Those have all benefited me, so I'm starting to see traffic for my top keywords again. And so it's looking like this month will probably be closer to 1500 or 2000, and its sort of on an upward trajectory again. 

 

18:50  
Ramesh: Fantastic. Okay. So it's a fascinating story, right? So you bought a business instead of building it and then you went through, the reasons why like you didn't want to spend, you know, enough number of hours just building it. And then you went to the pricing discussion. You went through the ups and downs of building the website to that. So now you started the whole thing as a side hustle, as a side business. Okay. So let's talk about what are your thoughts now, now that you have a business that is at least minimum of $1,000 on the side that's getting you on, you have a full-time job. So are you feeling comfortable that at some point you will quit your job and then focus on your business? 
 

19:32  

Will: I'd say yes but not because of intro cave necessarily. So the plan for it was really you know, we also do, my wife and I do real estate investing, so, you know, we're sort of on the fire financially independent retire early plan. So, you know, we're basically building up a rental portfolio. Then when that's paid off, we'll replace our salary, sort of W2 income. She's on board with that plan. She's not on board with the will wants to start an indie game company and hire artists plan. So if I want to, you know, have some sort of slush fund to like to hire out contractors and artists and grow beyond just what I would work on myself, I need more revenue to support that plan. So my plan with intro cave is actually, to for one, all it's doing now, every dime that comes in from it just goes into paying down the debt of buying it off. So theoretically it's going to pay for itself in you know, with the debt service drag like four to five years unless I grow it significantly. But then after that, every cent that comes into it, it's sort of like Will's fund money that I can just use on whatever I want. So I do have plans for what would it look like if I went full time on it. You know, it's nice, like I didn't sort of waste two years you know, working on a business that could never get big. Like, I sort of hit a high watermark now where I know that in January of last year, I made $5,000 profit in one month and that was at, you know, an average of let's say fourth and fifth in the search rankings on my top keyword. Which for me is intro maker. So when the algorithm change happened, I lost all my traffic for intro maker. But I was still ranking for a lot of other sort of peripheral keywords. So that's where most of the traffic was coming from at that point. When I was analyzing the business and doing due diligence before that, I saw that almost all the traffic was coming in on that one search term. So I sort of hedge my bet against that. So at the same time I was negotiating to purchase intro cave. The domain www.intromaker.com was available. It was, I mean, just a parked domain. It wasn't like freely register. So I reached out to the owner of that and spent like two or three months negotiating to buy that domain. Bought it for, you know, hefty sum. I was going to say it's like nine grand, something like that. Right now it's just parked. It's just not doing anything. It's just says, Hey, maybe someday there'll be something cool here. 
 

22:00  
Ramesh: Probably forwarding it to your, this business anyway. 

 

22:05  

Will: Yeah. Oh, well it's just a landing page right now that says, Hey, go here if you want something, maybe I’ll build something cool here eventually. So I have kind of like two directions I could see going. One is having a background in games. I'm super interested in Realtime rendering, which is that's been used recently in like rogue one. It's been used in the Mandalorian that's basically something that takes aftereffects two hours to render you could do in a Realtime engine in unity or unreal in like, you know, two minutes. So I want to start investing in building a pipeline to build intro videos in unity or unreal that then can render much, much, much faster than aftereffects can render. And my thinking was that it'd be pretty easy to build a sort of like a front-end editor for like sort of like a more of a Wiziwig. So instead of having like prebuilt pre-packaged templates, more of like a true editor and putting that up on inter maker.com that's like sort of the grand huge vision. You know, working on it 16 to 20 hours a week. It's moving pretty slowly. I don't see myself getting there anytime soon, so I may just rebrand intro cave as intro maker and start moving it over to there, that'd be the shorter-term play for that. 
 

23:17  

Ramesh: Okay. So exactly. So now you've started talking about the time management aspect of running a business, which is that you have two kids and then pretty young kids and then so the most you can afford to put on the business at 16 to 20 hours without really compromising the work life quality and all that good stuff. Is that right? 

 

23:35  

Will: Yup. Yup. I'm kind of lucky actually that everyone in my family goes to bed by nine o'clock and I go to bed at two o'clock, so then I can sort of get like five hours every night where I can do whatever I want. Lately that's been apex legends and video games. But you know, sometimes I'm more highly motivated too jam on intro cave in the evenings. 
 

23:54  

Ramesh: Okay. So fantastic. So we covered a lot of ground here. We'll then, if I'm an aspiring entrepreneur, based on your story, what can you tell me? 
 

24:05  

Will: I mean get started young before you have kids is a great piece of advice. 
 

24:09  

Ramesh: I didn't do that, so then what is the next best? 
 

24:13  

Will: I, I'd say like one mistake I’ve made, this is looping around to your question is, I'm currently on a sort of huge gaming laptop and I have three monitors set up and I’ve gotten very comfy in my old age where, you know, I have to be at work in my setup. Probably in the next six months or so, I'm going to buy a new like a razor blade or some sort of like windows equivalent of like a MacBook pro or something like that that actually has a decent battery life. When I was much younger in my career and when I was just dating my wife, my now wife we spent a lot more time together while I was working on my businesses. So, you know, I used to make flash games and websites, but I would do it from a small laptop and so we would sit on the couch together and she'd be watching a show or there'd be a show on and she'd be, you know, browsing reddit or whatever and I could be working on it, you know, while still with her. I feel like right now, I go to my office and I sort of shut out the family. So I mean, I'd say if you can figure out ways to work on your business, at least in proximity of the people around you. 

 

25:15  

Ramesh: Well fantastic. That is what I do as well, where I was sitting in the living room. You know, that way what happens is though, getting the family support is extremely important and then how you get it, I think you gave a very practical tip, not many people talk about it. That's very good. So Will just to wrap up this discussion, just let me summarize. You know, your way of getting into the business is buying it, not building it and for many reasons of course the number of hours that you can put on the business and then the business you went through the valuation X number of times kind of calculation. That's good. And of course went through the natural ups and downs of the business. And I think to, if I could summarize where you came from, you're a techie guy, right? And you bought a business that you could work on if something goes wrong as opposed to a purely entrepreneurial person who just bought this business when the algorithm went down or when the rendering issues that you talked about are not working out, that person could not have worked on the business. Is that the right way to say it? 

 

26:18  

Will: Yeah, I'd say the Intro cave is very tech dependent. So you know, even I keep in contact a little bit with the previous owner. I had a huge outage maybe three months afterwards and he's like, Oh, I'm so glad I sold to an engineer and not like product manager type. Cause they would've just had no idea how to fix it. 

 

26:34  

Ramesh: Exactly. And then you have to spend money on somebody else doing it and then that eats into the profits and all that good stuff. Right. So that's other part of the business because I'm all talking about the different aspects. It's like, you know somebody buys houses for real estate investment, if they depend handyman to do it, it eats into the profits. But as if you can do the work yourself, then of course it's more for you. 

 

26:54  

Will: Yeah, it's funny. The week that I closed on intro cave, so I took last June off. I actually, we also had a tenant move out on one of our rental properties and so I completely redid the floors, the drywall, painted the whole house while I did that during the day, and then was working on intro cave with the seller in the evening. So I was doing both of those at one time. 
 

27:15  

Ramesh: That's fantastic. Okay, so Will this be a fantastic interview. So how can people know more about you and where should they go? And just a wrap up the video cast, podcast with that information please. 

 

27:29  

Will: Yeah. I mean, I can give you my email. Learn your ABCs, which sounded cool in seventh grade when I made it. At the time it was Hotmail, now it's g-mail. So learnyourabcs@gmail.com. I'm Simian logic on all the, you know, Twitter, everything, Xbox live. If you want to play and text with me. I'm at intro cave as well, and Twitter, www.introcave.com is the website. Happy to answer any questions or email me. 

 

27:53  

Ramesh: Fantastic. Hey, will thank you very much. And we'll stay in touch. Again, folks, I mean, it's an entirely different way of building a business. You don't have to build a business from scratch. You can buy the business and work on it. Of course you have to pay for it, and then you have to take other factors into consideration. But I think Will walked us through in a different way of being an entrepreneur. Thank you very much Will.  

 

28:18  

Will: Thank you Ramesh. 

  

 

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