Episode 22
· 46:08
On the show today is one of the best bootstrappers in the business. Paul Farnell of litmus.com joins me and shares some of his great stories. Stay tuned. If you have a web development team or a product team, you probably want to know where you're wasting time and how you can be more efficient. This is exactly what my friends at Sprintly do.
Speaker 1:They help surface the things that are slowing down development so you can focus on shipping more stuff faster. You and your team can try Sprintly for free by going to www.sprint.ly. Be sure to thank them on Twitter Sprintly. Also, tuned for some shout outs at the end of this episode. Let's get to our interview with Paul Farnell.
Speaker 2:Hi, I'm Justin and this is Product People, the podcast focused on great products and the people who make them. Today Kyle is away, but I'm happy to have a great guest. Paul Farnell from Litmus is here on the program. Hey Paul, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Hi Justin, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Well it's great to have you. I've been a customer of Litmus for a long time, so it's fun to finally get to talk to you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, you too, Justin. Yeah, I mean, we go back quite a number of years now, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So let's start by quickly describing your product. What is Litmus and what does it do?
Speaker 3:Sure. Yeah. So, Litmus is a tool for email marketers. And what we do is we help people, preview their email messages before they send them out. So that is to say, that you make sure that your emails are going to look great across, you know, on an iPhone, on Gmail, on Outlook, on Hotmail, all the different places that somebody might read that message, and design wise, make sure that looks great.
Speaker 3:And then the follow on part to that is tracking how successful the campaign is. So we have an analytics tool, which will let you see, you know, long people have read a message for, did they forward it on or they just delete it, you know, how successful was, this campaign after you sent it out. But everything we do is around helping people, design and send better, more effective campaigns, basically.
Speaker 2:Perfect. And we're to circle back to the product in a second. But let's start with your story. Where did you grow up? When did you get into computers?
Speaker 2:What were you doing before Litmus?
Speaker 3:Yeah, okay. So, as you can probably tell, I'm British. I grew up in a town called Milton Keynes, just North of London, about half an hour outside of London. And I suppose my first experience with computers was through my dad who, who was started his own publishing company when I was fairly young, and so he was publishing a magazine. And, and so it was, I guess through him that I was well, I first got an Amiga.
Speaker 3:That was my first machine of my own.
Speaker 2:Wow. What a great machine to have as your first computer.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was great. Yeah. Well, parents were I mean, think this is kind of interesting. My parents were very keen. Like a lot of my friends got games consoles.
Speaker 3:My parents didn't want me to have games because they wanted something that I could actually, kind of create things on. Guess the idea. And I very much did. You know, I I suppose, you know, it's maybe it sounds silly, but I'm definitely inspired by my dad publishing this magazine. I used to I I started publishing a magazine myself and selling it at my at my middle school, magazine where we did music reviews and stuff like this.
Speaker 3:No way. And started selling annual subscriptions to that as well.
Speaker 2:You're kidding me. Annual
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's kind of fun.
Speaker 2:Annual subscriptions to your friends in middle school?
Speaker 3:Yes. Yeah. Friends and teachers, because teachers have more money, course, sir.
Speaker 2:Oh, yes.
Speaker 3:Better sales prospects. But, so that was fun. So that was my I guess my sort of first introduction was that, and I've seen my dad lay out a magazine on Adobe Page Maker, or Oldest, it was called at the time, think. Wow. Anyway, that was fun.
Speaker 2:Do remember how much what was an annual subscription for your magazine?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think we did. I think it was a pound. I think it I think it cost a pound because I think each issue is 10 p. And so, a year was a pound, and we tried to do one a month.
Speaker 3:But if you but but if you subscribe for a year, you also got a cassette tape that we had made. That was me and a friend of mine. You got this cassette tape that was only available to annual subscribers. You couldn't get this if you just bought it on a monthly basis. Wow.
Speaker 3:But you got this, this cassette tape, which was, you know, special edition, you know, somehow exclusive, just to these these annual subscribers.
Speaker 2:Now how how did you have a sense to do all this? Was this you watching your dad and just kind of replicating the business model you saw him pursuing?
Speaker 3:I mean, yeah, yeah, very much so. Yeah, I mean, definitely, yeah, entirely inspired by him, with that, you know, and his advice. And we would do like a free gift with a magazine that you get a pen or something silly. I mean, it's all obviously on a very, very small scale. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It was kind of fun. You know, we would enlist other people, other friends would offer, like, to photocopy, issues for us and stuff like this, we didn't have to pay as much for printing. We kinda pulled in some favors that way to get it free. But, yeah, I mean, made made a bit of money off it enough to kinda buy some sweets and stuff, you know Yeah. On a very small scale.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm actually really interested in this because I'm a dad and I have kids and I often think about how could I encourage them to be, you know, creative but also to get some experience like that, like to learn some business, to learn how to sell something, to learn how to build something and then put it out there. Was there something, that your dad did specifically to encourage that? Or was this just you watching him and emulating what he was doing?
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's a very good question. I suppose I'm not sure. I mean, there may have been things that my parents did to, to encourage that that I don't kinda remember all that went over my head at the time. Right?
Speaker 3:Because I I maybe didn't notice.
Speaker 2:That's right. But
Speaker 3:I mean, certainly, the I know that it was a very conscious choice to to buy this, Amiga and not a games console. Because I did, I think, originally want a games console. Like, it's even like a Sega Mega Drive or something like that. Yeah. And and, got the Amiga, which obviously could run games on and I play games on there.
Speaker 3:But it the the key part of that for appearance was that it would be had these kind of, you know, painting tools and all this kind of thing that we could, I could do sort of creative things on. Yeah. Which I guess these days, obviously, you know, you have an iPad or something like that as a kid, then you can do way more than than I was able to do then. But
Speaker 2:That's right. So let's fast forward. Did you continue having an interest in computers as you grew up, and is that what you ended up going to school for?
Speaker 3:I did continue having an interest in computers, yeah, And and kind of began programming. And this is probably a really familiar story, messing around with, batch files and DOS and QBasic and stuff like that. And then eventually, Visual Basic after that, and and built some software products that I sold online. And again, I guess, you know, with my dad's guidance on how to sort of package those and how to write the copy for the sites that sold them and how to set up, you know, affiliate relationships with other partners and stuff who would promote these tools, that I was building.
Speaker 2:Okay. This is
Speaker 3:why had this little business that was called Peanut Software. Peanut Software? Two or three different products. Yeah. One was it was called Instant Theme Creator, and this is back in the days when you could when you could build actually, I don't I don't use Windows anymore, so maybe you still can, but build desktop themes, which are like packages of sounds and
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And curses and stuff. Yeah. And so you might get like a Simpsons theme or something, and you could install that, and your wallpaper would be Simpsons, and your cursor would be home or something. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:This tool, allowed you to put together these theme files, which I mean, the scenes is very simple, but, but yeah, so it was a tool, I suppose, for people that were created themselves, you know, wanted to and how
Speaker 2:old were you when you did this, and and what did it Yeah, sell
Speaker 3:this is I would have been like 12, 13, I suppose. 14, that kind of time. What did it sell for? It was $19 for instant theme career. And I think it was always advertised as $29, but it was on sale for 19, permanently, you know.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 2:And did you have a website for this? Did you were you marketing this on bulletin boards? How was it marketed?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. The marketing was kinda interesting. I mean, I did actually spend a lot of time marketing this online, this tool in particular. Yes, there's a website, peanutsoftware.com, which I don't think is still there, but I'm sure it's there on my archive.org.
Speaker 3:And yes, it was the sale through RegNow, which would kind of take the payment for you and give you a license key or something like that. And it was listed on download.com, which at the time was definitely like the place to advertise shareware and stuff.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 3:And also, had a deal with a guy who ran a site called ThemeWorld, which was like kind of the place to get desktop themes. And so people were going there to download free themes, and we struck a deal. I forget what he got, what percentage he got, but he got some percentage of each sale, of Instant Theme Creator. And a lot of the sales I got actually came, via that relationship with, with Theme World.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Yeah. So these are all the building blocks for the future, really. I mean, figuring out marketing, figuring out which channel is converting the best.
Speaker 3:Yeah. No, absolutely. Yeah. It was, was a lot of fun actually. And actually, mean, Instant Theme Creator, and then there was a couple other versions of it after that.
Speaker 3:You know, actually made a reasonable amount of money, at least at the time, you know, making a few $100 a month or something like that, which, you know, when you're 12, 13, was quite a bit to have. Yeah. So I never had, like, a lot of friends of mine, you know, would do, I'm trying to think what we would have done as jobs back then, maybe helped in a shop on a weekend or done a paper round or something like that, you know? Yeah. It was my first job as it was selling this software online.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Was there any other notable products from that time that you can remember releasing?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, there was another version or a couple other versions of of Theme Creator, after that. And there was another one called Instant News Group Creator, or maybe just News Group Creator. I forget. Obviously, news group's still around.
Speaker 3:And in I I don't know if this is still the case. It probably is. But there was, a process you had to go through to create an alt news group, and for it to be kinda picked up by a different news service stuff.
Speaker 2:You're talking about Usenet groups?
Speaker 3:Sorry. Usenet groups. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And and so if you wanted to create your own, it was a little bit of a convoluted process.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 3:This, piece of software would take you through like, okay, you need to send this format of email to this address and fill out. Kind of it took you through I mean, it was really just a series of forms. But, know, fill out these details about your group and what it's going be about and all this kind of thing. And then it would submit that to the right place in the right format, and then you would get a response, then you would do the next page. I figured exactly how it worked, but, that was much less popular.
Speaker 3:I mean, definitely sold some copies. Yeah. So I don't know if there was really anything else that did that, but I think probably the people that were creating their own Usenet groups didn't necessarily need to buy a piece of shareware to form an email, you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:To revel in that process.
Speaker 2:But that's still interesting. You know what's interesting about that Paul, is like a lot of us, mean, Usenet groups in this kind of whole world, there's a certain generation of our listeners that might not remember that. But I think what we can all identify with is, you know, as we were growing up and got into computers, a lot of us would figure out how to do things. So we'd figure out how to hack out a theme for Windows. We'd figure out how to you know, the steps we needed to do to walk through creating a Usenet news group, right?
Speaker 2:But the step that I didn't take when I was a kid is what you did, which was you said, I could actually make this easier for someone else and sell this as a product. So where did that come from? Like did you just always just have that sense of, Man, making an alt using that group is a pain in the butt. I should create something that makes it easier for other people to do that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know really, I suppose I did, yeah. Yeah, I think I always I really liked that validation somebody paying for something. I found that very valid, or I still do. You know, I made something worthwhile if somebody else finds it useful enough to pay for it.
Speaker 3:You know, whether that's, you know, a magazine, in middle school, whether that's a piece of shareware or now, you know, a monthly subscription to something like Litmus. For me, there was just it was such an important step. I didn't just want to make a magazine and distribute it around school. That would have been, you know, less than half as satisfying as, making a magazine that was good enough that people would actually pay to read, or even, you know, pay for a year up front to read because they thought one issue was good enough. You know what I mean?
Speaker 3:And so that's, I think, a very big important point for me was that, that validation through people. Yeah. You know, spending money on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is really interesting to me. Because I wonder, like my experience growing up was that I would figure out how to hack around things, but instead of creating products, I would be, I was the 12 year old kid that got hired to network a whole computer lab or something like that. A very different experience. I wonder how much of, know, maybe just because your dad was kind of building a product, which was a magazine, and then having to sell subscriptions, you had a model there where you could see that you can do things that people will pay for, especially if they're good, and, instead of just trading hours for dollars.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, I wonder if I hadn't had that kind of role model of somebody selling a product and instead had, yeah, had been a consultant of some kind, yeah, maybe I would have thought more about it in terms of, you know, doing freelance work.
Speaker 2:And maybe the encouragement for us now is because I think like a lot of things, a lot of this is about practice and having that mindset. And so a lot of times let's go back to the Usenet group example. Like I said, I created an alt Usenet group when I was a kid. And I never thought, this could be valuable for me sell this as something that someone else could make it a product and make it easier to do this. And even now I wonder if there's a lot of things that technical people like the people listening to the there's so many things that they do on a daily basis or there's things that they've learned or there's of hacks that they've done that could probably be turned into great products.
Speaker 2:But they have to think about it that way. In a lot of ways litmus is like that. Know like you could have we'll talk about litmus a little later but you could have just put a bunch of old computers in your room and done the testing for consulting work to test all the clients. Then you went one step further and said, You know, if this is valuable for me, it might be valuable for someone else.
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah. No, absolutely. I think that's very true. Yes. And there's that yes, that scalability of I I think that's what's exciting about web based products, isn't it?
Speaker 3:Is that it's in comparison to, say, consulting and having done both, You know, the exciting part of a web product is that scalability and that, you know, the marginal cost of another customer being so small.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. Well, let's get back to your story. Was there any other kind of notable products that you'd built as you were growing up?
Speaker 3:That's a good question. I mean, honestly, from after the Theme Creator stuff, I I worked on a I don't wanna take credit here where I where I don't deserve it, but I did work a bit on, oh yeah, yeah, makes sense, on a product that was called, Simple Image Editor. And it was actually my current co founder's product, Simple Image Editor, or him that coded it. But it was built, out of a need that one of my clients had, because was doing some like freelance web design work at the time, and and I built this little kind of CMS, I expect most of the people listening to this may have built some kind of CMS for a client one point or another. One of the things that they had to do is, okay, all your images on this, you know, listing here need to be 50 pixels wide or whatever.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:So, and they didn't have Photoshop and stuff. So, they had a need to edit images. So we'd given them the CMS, and, and this was a pain point for them. And kind of born out of that was with Matt, building this simple image editor, which he went on to sell that we sold as part of the CMS to the client, but also then he went on to sell, you know, as shareware to other people as well. You know, kind of made it a little bit more generic so you could do any size images or whatever.
Speaker 3:So that was something that I didn't build myself, but kind of worked on, worked on kind of specking out. But I think following on from that, I mean, by this point, I went to college not for computer science but for business. Okay. In Manchester, I went to Manchester Met.
Speaker 2:And why did you choose business?
Speaker 3:I suppose that was just where my interest was. I think I'd always thought I would do business and not, and not computer science. I mean, I don't know if I'd have got into a computer science course. None of the things that I built were particularly well built. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, the copy on the site was really well written, I think, and they sold well. But behind the scenes, like the actual visual base of the Delphi code in there was not that great at all. Whereas, by contrast, of my co founders, Matt, did take computer science and just has this natural aptitude for that kind of thing. So I don't know, think I felt business was just a better fit for my skills really or where my interest was. I didn't feel like I was ever going to be like an amazing computer programmer.
Speaker 3:But I felt like I'd had some success on the kind of business side of things.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Did you enjoy business school? Like, you enjoy the courses? Was that something that kind of you felt like was a good investment of time?
Speaker 3:No. Nope. I I don't know if I should say that, but no, I I didn't. But I think what you said there is is two different questions. So, the first is, did did I enjoy the course and the course content?
Speaker 3:On the whole, no, not particularly. I didn't find it very applicable. It was kind of, I mean this is I suppose my fault for picking a bad course, but it was sort of setting you up to be like a consultant, or something like that, you know, not a big company or going into big companies and like fixing their system stuff. Don't know, it was yeah, the kind of management stuff and all this kind of thing was just not, it didn't feel applicable at all to, to what I wanted to be doing. However, was it a good use of time?
Speaker 3:Yes, think it definitely was. Because what was nice, I didn't go to a particularly great business school so I didn't actually find it very difficult, really. I didn't end up doing amazingly well, but I got through it without having to spend an inordinate amount of time actually studying. And so the kind of freedom that that gave me to and that's when we built Litmus, was the second year of college. And the freedom to do that and to do freelance web design work as well.
Speaker 3:I was doing tons and tons of spending way, way more time on either client work or building litmus than I ever did on university studies. But, and so although I didn't particularly like it and I don't have any particular I don't look back and love my, you know, college or want to donate loads of money or anything like that, I do think it was a really important time to, you know, just to have had that freedom where, you know, my housing costs were paid for, or as part of the loans and everything, you know, like I had money to live and buy food and all that stuff was kind of taken care of. And so there was really no risk to kind of start a business at that point. Yeah. I was very fortunate to be in that position.
Speaker 1:Well, know, this is
Speaker 2:interesting, because I went to business school as well, I would actually echo your experience. Think business education in general is actually in trouble just universally. Think especially in our space, people that want to start small businesses that want to build their own products. I think that business education for people that want to at the higher levels that want to go in and be CEOs things like that are I don't have any experience with that. But one thing that is interesting that you felt like going to school kind of gave you that freedom to pursue this other stuff.
Speaker 2:And now that I think back to my experience, I went through my first year of college and then I realized I'm basically, like my cost of living is very low. And so I ended up quitting my part time job That's when I launched my first company, it was my second year of college.
Speaker 3:I love bacon, yeah.
Speaker 2:Because your cost of living is so low, you do start to feel like I have a lot of freedom here. And I wonder because I think about that question all the time when you talk to young people that might be interested in building products or starting their own business if they should go to school. What do you think you would say in retrospect?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean I suppose I would say that it's, well, certainly not a requirement. But it did give me, yeah, that kind of freedom and space to, yeah, with, as you say, with very little risk, to try things out, which I otherwise wouldn't have had the time to do. I think it's a little bit different, in terms of the advice I would give. Like if you're talking about like a private college in America, you know, probably five to 10 times more expensive than my British college costs. And so I mean, I think you need to kind of factor that into, you know, these days at least.
Speaker 3:And college costs have gone up in Britain as well recently. So, I mean, that's a factor, I suppose. I mean, honestly, also, did not go to a great school. So maybe that experience would have been different at, you know, I went to a better business school. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Me kind of round off this part just by asking you, if some eager 18 or 19 year old approached you and said, Paul, I have a choice. I can either go to college right now or I can try to find a company that will take me under their wing and let me intern there, Is that something you think you would do as an entrepreneur? Let a young person come and intern and kind of learn, like, with hands on experience?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. I think, yeah, certainly it would be. Yeah, definitely. Because
Speaker 2:that might be something that, you know, maybe that is an alternative, is if you've got, you know, four years of your life and, you know, some money saved up, you could try to find some great companies that might be able to teach you something.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think, I mean, it depends where you're based as well, doesn't it? It feels like having moved, so I now live in Boston in America, and, but here there seems to be a lot more support for those kinds of things. Like that here would feel like quite a realistic option.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Where I grew up, that would be quite hard to find, you know, a company that would be kind of willing to do something like that, I think would have been tougher to find. But here, I think that would be an easier option to do, and great one to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. Well, let's talk about the genesis behind Litmus. How did it start? How did this happen?
Speaker 2:You're in college. What's the story?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I was doing freelance web design, And we I suppose there's an interesting perhaps an interesting aside there, is that I was doing freelance web design for years and years and years. I mean, you remember I mentioned, you know, building that custom CMS stuff? I've been doing that for years and was doing okay, was gradually putting up my day rate, over the years. But actually, where I found by far the most success was when I tried to kind of package up and I guess productize that web design process.
Speaker 3:So what I and at the time it seemed like a huge leap of faith and looking back it's really insignificant maybe, but I stopped advertising myself as a web designer, and said that all I do is blog design. And this was kind of at the height, suppose, of people using blogging for business. That's kind of the new thing to do. And so, and so I had a fixed price for that, which I did increase. I forget, I think it may have started out at a thousand dollars, or $9.90 or whatever.
Speaker 3:And, and for that I would build you like a custom, a completely custom blog. And that like really took off just in terms of freelance work. That made a huge difference, you know, because there's web designers, I guess in general, are 10 a penny, you know, it's very hard to discern the difference between people, especially in the kind of middle of the market. And so I was getting a reasonable amount of work, but it was just on a referral basis. It was okay, but the projects are sort of all over the place, all different types of stuff.
Speaker 3:And I did really enjoy the blog design work that I had done as part of that. So yeah, that idea of just completely changing the website, all the pitch for myself and my work to be just fixed price blog design was much more successful. Anyway
Speaker 2:And so just how much was the fixed price? So what was the product?
Speaker 3:Yes, believe it started out at $990 a blog design. And there were certain kind of restrictions on that, like two or three sections revisions or something like and then, and I'm pretty sure it went up a bit after that. Interesting. Maybe up to as high as like 2,000 or 2 and a half thousand, by the end. Yeah, once I had a bit more, a few more examples to show and that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:So now you're doing, this, you're doing kind of this blog design idea, how does Litmus come out of that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, great question. So, one of the things that I had to do, as, before, you know, delivering the the blog design templates and stuff to the client, was to make sure that they worked across different browsers. And again, I'm sure a lot of people listening to this have run into that issue and the frustration there across browser testing. And at the time, there were relatively few tools out there that helped to automate that process and make that easier. So there was a tool out there and Justin, maybe you're familiar with this.
Speaker 3:It was called BrowserCam. Yeah. Come across that. Yeah. And it was it was alright.
Speaker 3:It was decent enough, but it looked terrible, right? It worked fairly well, but it looked awful. Yeah. And it was relatively expensive, guess, you know, it's like $50 a month or something like that. And really I just thought, as I was using it, because I was a customer of theirs, for a brief time, I think I could do a better job than this.
Speaker 3:Think we could build something better. And I suppose it was mainly that design aspect that maybe that sounds kind of shallow, but as web designer caring deeply about, you know, the design of these sites that I was working on, Then having to use this tool, it's just looked terrible, in order to test those, just seemed really frustrating. So the idea of building something really beautiful. This is also around the time of 37 signals, having base camp and, you know, using that myself to manage the client projects and being so impressed with the the design and the usability and the cleanliness of that interface. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:You know, so very much inspired by that and thinking about what if you could build a, you know, a browser testing tool that had the kind of design sensibility of, of something that was built by FirstEncignals. Mhmm. And so, so I built it. I built the first version of it in a weekend. The first prototype, I suppose I should say.
Speaker 3:At the time, it was it had a different name. It was called SITEVISTA.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:One word, which I don't think is a particularly good name. Obviously, why we why we changed it later on. But Yeah. But, yeah, SITEVISTA was was the first product at sitevista.com. And, yeah, and had this prototype up, realized that it was very much kind of hacked together, and it was running on a couple of old desktop machines that I had running since at college.
Speaker 3:So I'm running it off university network, which was incredibly fast and totally free. Yeah. So it's a hosting on there. And, yeah, I mean, was the that was the very first version. Quickly, it became clear that, kind of getting it to run smoothly, like server wise and that kind of thing.
Speaker 3:I was a bit out of my depth. But I had a good friend, David, who was actually also at college, but doing his like year in industry as an IT administrator at this travel company. And so I said, Dave, you know, could you could you help me, you know, figure out how to, you know, host this properly and know, get all these virtual machines that we were using for the different browsers and stuff, get all that stuff, scale it up a bit and running better. He said, yes. And I said, well, you know, I want to charge people for this.
Speaker 3:And here's, you know, x percent of the company in order to get all this stuff working for me. Yeah. And so that was the first kind of co founder, the very, very early stages with Dave. And so we launched at, we launched this is still called SightVista at the time when we launched at a conference in Copenhagen, which sadly is no longer running anymore, called Reboot. And basically, I just printed off a whole stack of cards that gave you some kind of it was like a trial and then a discounted monthly subscription after that.
Speaker 3:And just went around the conference, you know, talking to all these web people and pitching them the product and handing out these cars like crazy. And that was kind of how we launched. Is that combined with pushing out to the people who were on these lists of, you know, like web designers, in especially in The UK, who I would talk to online on these mailing lists and getting that their feedback and getting them to trial it and sign up. Yeah. And so that was the was the very first version, and that's how we kind of initially got started.
Speaker 2:So tell me about that launch. What happened after the conference? You handed out a bunch of business cards at the Reboot conference, you connected with people over listservs. What happened? What happened after you launched?
Speaker 2:How many people signed up?
Speaker 3:Yes, that's a good question. Well, it was very, very exciting. Of course, people could take a trial first so they didn't, they didn't have to pay right away. But I mean, we probably saw, like, probably like 100 people in that kind of region, in that first month or so, either that we've met at a conference or that got access to it online. And it was incredibly exciting to see them actually using the product.
Speaker 3:And I suppose in a funny way, because, there were these computers that ran under my desk, you know, even even a couple of months in
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You would actually see when I say you see people using the product, you literally saw them using it because the websites they were testing would pop up on the screen of like the little, you know, Bondi blue iMac that I had under the desk and the these couple old PCs, the other monitors would come. You would actually see the the web pages loading, being screenshotted, and then, like, you know, sent off to them. So actually, the other times people were testing.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. I I'm smiling right now. I'm just imagining that. Like, you're a college student, and you've got these people signed up, and then you can actually see them using it. That that must have been so fun.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That was great. It would it did cause some problems because I my girlfriend at the time, would would stay in my room Mhmm. And and all these machines would be out of the desk, and, and she was a much lighter sleeper than I was. And she would get woken up because the iMac and all these machines, like when they were used for testing in the middle of the night, like the fan would come on, and the screen would light up.
Speaker 3:And it was a very, very small room. It's like a little studio. And she didn't like the fact that I was running all this under the desk because she would get woken up. If people were, you know, in a different part of the world were doing the test overnight.
Speaker 2:Oh, man. I love that story. So there there were some trade offs here. You're you're bootstrapping this, but you know, this is in your college dorm and it's affecting Yes.
Speaker 3:Yes. Relationship wise, yes. Yeah. But it was, it was fun. And that feeling of the first people converting from that trial to actually paying and they got a deal.
Speaker 3:So it was really cheap at this point, was $19 a month, originally. And yeah, and actually beginning to pay was just kind of, just kind of amazing. Really, really, you know, really, really exciting to see. And I suppose so what happened next is we so we're still doing freelance work at this point alongside SightVista. And we keep that up for a while.
Speaker 3:I'm just going to make sure I get everything in the right order here. But it but it became apparent that we or that so Dave's doing kind of the server kind of administration, like infrastructure stuff Mhmm. And trying to keep things running smoothly in that sense. I'm still doing the the actual programming of the of the app. We did it in VB script.
Speaker 3:And think yeah. And MySQL stuff. It was it was a bit patchy.
Speaker 2:Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so and I had another friend, Matt, who I mentioned earlier who I'd worked with on the the Simple Image Editor, and some freelance work, in between. And and he was the guy who was taking computer science, and so knew this stuff just way better than me. And so it was around this time that Matt came on board, as a co founder, to, basically to write something that was a bit more solid than I had done. And so that's what he did. So we ended up throwing out, you know, basically everything that I've built, in those early days and, and building something much more solid and quicker and more reliable and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And we moved the hosting away from being under my desk and data centers and stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And when you at the point where you threw everything away, how many how many, users did you have at that point?
Speaker 3:That's a really good question. I I don't know off the top of my head. It would have been under 100, definitely. So when I mentioned 100 before, that was around the number that we managed to get signed up just to test out, on that trial basis. Of course, not all of those converted to actual paying customers.
Speaker 3:So we would have definitely still been, say, under 100 paying customers at this point when we rebuilt things. And then, of course, we redesigned the site. At the same time, we rebranded it as Litmus instead of as Slightlyster. And it looks I mean, the logo and everything is the same as it is today. Mean, the site's changed a fair bit.
Speaker 3:But there are still parts of the application today, and this is five or six years later, that are still left over that version that we rebuilt. Wow. And sorry, just I think an important thing to mention too Mhmm. Was that I mentioned that we got started doing cross browser testing. But when you asked me to describe Litmus at the start of the call, I said we're a company, you know, building tools for email marketers.
Speaker 3:That's right. So it was at this point as well that we introduced email testing as well as browser testing. Uh-huh. So the email testing piece was built entirely by that. And that was a big big kind of turning point for us, I suppose, is the expansion from having just one tool to basically having two, and honestly, vastly underestimating the complexity of running an email testing service.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Because there's so many more moving parts than there are, doing browser testing. But that's kind of an important thing to know, I suppose, is that the introduction of that because that's now become our core product, whereas we started out, you know, on the browser side.
Speaker 2:That's right. And and what was how did you guys know that that was something that people needed?
Speaker 3:Yeah, good question. I mean, certainly, we had done a little bit of email stuff ourselves, so we kind of knew that HTML email was sort of a pain. But it was largely through people asking us and telling us that, hey, you know what? We, you know, browser testing is hard, but email testing is even more difficult. It would be great if you guys could do something similar for email.
Speaker 3:And I suppose after we'd heard that like a dozen times and had some limited experience with that ourselves, we thought, hey, well, actually, was Matt was very gung ho about it, thinking that it would be, pretty much as easy to build that as it would be the browser testing part, as I say. It turned out to be quite a bit more difficult, but certainly very much worth it. You know, and further down the know, we still do web page testing. Mhmm. But it's very much a secondary thing these days.
Speaker 3:And, and honestly sold alongside the email testing in terms of test your emails with us, and then test the landing pages that you're linking to from those emails across different browsers as well, as opposed to trying to yeah. There's there's honestly, these days, there's much better standalone browser testing tools, things like BrowserStack, are great. And they have a stronger product than ours because we really haven't put a lot of time into interactive testing for web page or anything like that. And so yeah, we kinda keep that as a as a tool, but it's very much secondary to the to the email piece.
Speaker 1:And a big thanks to Paul for joining us on Product People. Paul will be back next week for part two where you can hear specific tactics on how to build a bootstrap SaaS company. Now it's time for the shout outs. This is a chance for you to advertise your project to our audience of product people, entrepreneurs, developers, and designers. First, I'd like to give a shout out to Kyle Fox who's written a great blog post called Multitasking is the Heart of Product Management.
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