Episode 79
· 01:01:53
Hey, folks. Welcome back to the Product People Show. Justin Jackson here, and it's good to be back. We're in the kind of final countdown. It's June 21 when I'm recording this, and my kids are already counting down the days until summer vacation.
Speaker 1:The days are getting warmer. The days are long, and it's a good time to you know, you're out for a walk. You're out mowing the lawn, figured you folks needed something to listen to. So it's time to release this interview I did with Josh Pigford. Josh is the guy behind BearMetrics, which is basically SaaS analytics on top of Stripe.
Speaker 1:And he's just been really good, especially if you follow him on Twitter. He he's been doing these tweet storms where he's super transparent about, you know, how he's feeling about how much revenue his company's making. You know, he got these this email from a well known VC who is maybe chiding him a little bit, saying he wasn't earning enough monthly recurring revenue. And we get into all of that, the feelings behind that. It's a really great interview, and I'm including the whole thing all in one shot.
Speaker 1:I know sometimes I break these into two parts. Not today. As for me, I'm working on a new book. If you've ever been stuck for marketing ideas for your product and you wanna try something new, you wanna try something that will get you above the noise, that will get you noticed, the new book is called Jolt, and it's a series of case studies on different companies that have done surprising marketing tactics that have worked. And in each chapter, you'll get a tactic that you can try and an example of a big company that's used that tactic and a small bootstrapped company that's used that tactic.
Speaker 1:If you want more info, go to justinjackson.ca/jolt. Now let's get into this episode with Josh Pigford. I'm here with Josh Pigford. How you how you doing, Josh?
Speaker 2:I'm doing good, Justin. How about you?
Speaker 1:I'm doing well. I I've been listening to this podcast called sleep with me lately. And I it sounds it sounds a lot more
Speaker 2:Risque?
Speaker 1:Risque than it really is. I have an awful time getting to sleep, and this podcast is basically this talk this guy telling boring stories. And Until you fall asleep? Until you fall asleep. It's brilliant, and so I recommend that.
Speaker 1:But the problem is I I must have fallen asleep so quick last night that I got a crick in my neck or my back or something. There's Bummer. There's some there's some secondary effects here. I like Josh a lot. He's been working on barometrics, and before that, he was working on some other little software projects.
Speaker 1:We're gonna talk about those. We're gonna talk a bit about open openness and transparency. Josh, why don't we start by saying, you know, how did you get started making products? What was kind of the beginning for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I I started making things in general, I mean, as a kid. And I would say I was kind of an entrepreneurial kid. I was the guy who, in my neighborhood, with a marker on a poster board, tapped into my front yard like we'll mow lawns kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I guess I always kind of looked at things that way. Not necessarily how can I make money off of this, but how can I make something that other people want?
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:But then that sort of translated itself
Speaker 1:Did you up in a neighborhood with a bunch of people? What was the response to that stuff when you were doing that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, was super small scale. You know, like I might be mowing. I I had a small neighborhood. It was an it was like a little subdivision, but it was a small subdivision.
Speaker 2:So it wasn't like there were like a thousand houses or anything. I would always get some sort of response. I don't know if it was like a pity response. Oh, that poor kid. I'll pay him $10 to mow my yard once.
Speaker 2:But I think that's sort of translating into more, I guess, translating into stuff that would actually pan out, like I could actually make some real money off of that early in college. So in high school, so this would have been like the late 90s in high school, Was when I started really getting into just like the Internet and really kind of computers and stuff in general, like
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Building computers and super nerdy things like that.
Speaker 1:How did you get into that? What was what was the thing that kinda led you down that path?
Speaker 2:It was also like a making thing. Like even in on the Internet, like GeoCities and Angel Fire and stuff like that where, you know, it's just like nobody this is still early enough. Like, none of my friends have a clue how to do this stuff. Yeah. And and really the web as a whole, like, there's not a lot of stuff about how to do that stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I enjoyed just in general figuring things out. And
Speaker 1:Can you share one one what was one of your early GeoCities or Angel Fire sites about?
Speaker 2:So it would always be it was usually around music stuff, like fan sites for bands. I would upload WAV files that I had ripped from the CDs of bands that I was listening to, which was 100 illegal. But nobody cared.
Speaker 1:Nobody cared back then.
Speaker 2:Right. Yeah. And it would take like five hours to upload one song. You know, they were talking about dial up. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So like that kind of stuff. And I mean, I would even build forums were a huge deal then. So I was big into V Bulletin and I enjoyed the setup of forums. I think at that point in time, if I could've gotten paid to, like, set up V Bulletin forums
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I don't know. I just enjoyed, like, putting things together. And and that, like, kind of continued. And and I never it was always, in this sort of unofficial like I never went into anything thinking like, this is it. I've found what I'm gonna do until I retire.
Speaker 2:Was just always like, let's just see what happens. And worst case, I learned how to do something new, useless or not. Yeah. But really in college is when it really took off because I felt like I had I didn't necessarily have more time, but it was like college was this good opportunity for me to like I had a lot more freedom because I was out of the house.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But at the same time, didn't have so many responsibilities that kept me from doing anything.
Speaker 1:That's right. And what were you taking at college?
Speaker 2:So I was I didn't really figure out what I was gonna major in until the second half of my junior year.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I was a bunch of different stuff. Mean, started off in communications. I was business major for a month. Okay. But eventually, as per the communications degree, I had to take like a graphic intro to graphic design class.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And something clicked. And the professor that was teaching was like, man, look, you should do this. And I did. And I, and I, like it works really well.
Speaker 2:I that's that was like I was never like an artsy kid, but like UI design really struck a chord with me.
Speaker 1:Gotcha. Gotcha.
Speaker 2:So that's what I ended up with with to like finish my degree in.
Speaker 1:Gotcha. So you're in college. You're figuring out some stuff about yourself. Now you've got some entrepreneurial stuff going on too?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So like some of the first stuff I ever the the first time I ever really started making money on the Internet was this would have been like 02/2001, 02/2002, where you can make a freaking crap ton of money off of ads. And so I think the very first site that I ever built where I like I made some sum of money from ads was reallydumbstuff.com. It was a site that I had. And it was just like a stupid directory of like links to dumb stuff.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:I'm sad that there's nothing there right now.
Speaker 2:I have no idea what's there now. It could be it's dangerous to visit any of this stuff at this point. I don't own that domain at all. Yeah. Then I followed that up with the even more profitable really funarcade.com.
Speaker 1:And what what was on really fun arcade?
Speaker 2:Man, just it was like mini do you remember miniclip? Yeah. Miniclip.com.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they had all these just flash arcade games that you could embed on your website. Yeah. And I would just and they weren't the only place I did that. So I would just found all the places. And again, like, it's this directory of all these different online games that you could play.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I was making At that point, I was probably making, as a sophomore in college, maybe $500 a month off ads or something like that. Wow. And then I ended up selling that thing for like a few thousand dollars or something like that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But then there was man, I had a I don't know what it was with directory sites and add this chunk and add on. There's site called Tutorial Outpost that I had.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:It was even bigger. Like, this link links to things that like Photoshop tutorials and Yeah. Illustrator stuff. And I was
Speaker 1:Tutorial outpost is still Photoshop tutorial.
Speaker 2:But I think it's like a blog now or something like that, and it haven't been updated in long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was at one point before I sold that thing off, I was making like, I think close to $5,000 a month off ads. Wow. And it's just insane. Like, the heck, I'm not doing anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm making thousands. I'm making like really good money, especially for doing nothing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you're like 21 right now or
Speaker 2:At this point, at the time that it was doing its best, I was that was probably 2,005. I mean, had it for a few years. And now I was probably 21.
Speaker 1:21. Okay. See, stories like this piss me off piss
Speaker 2:me off.
Speaker 1:Because I was, I'm 35. You know, I was on the Internet right when Mosaic came out. By the way, is
Speaker 2:there an
Speaker 1:echo on your side?
Speaker 2:No. Am I echoing?
Speaker 1:I'm echoing, but it's okay. This always I was on the Internet. I was doing stuff, but then there's guys like you that figured out I could do this and make and put on ads. I could do this. And so how did you figure that out?
Speaker 1:Did you just get lucky? Did you see someone else doing it? What was it that like, I was building websites, but Yeah. I I was and I had a a website where I was reviewing music and bands would send me music to review. Yep.
Speaker 1:But I wasn't I never clued into things like ad revenue and things like that. So how what how did you figure that out?
Speaker 2:I think I mean so some of those things like okay. So you think about music reviews. I too had a music review site and and bands would send me stuff, but I never could figure out how to make money off of it. Yeah. And like, I think those other sites, really fun arcade and really dumb stuff and tutorial outposts, I wasn't passionate about any of that at all.
Speaker 2:But it was sort of a like, I was teaching myself how to program one. But then on top of that, was like, I might as well try to make some money off this. How would one make money off of these? And I think certain things just lend themselves to being more profitable. A music review site is a bunch of I mean, bands who have no money, like, followed by fans who have no money.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, so this wasn't like a good way to like, you could make money off ads off that. And ads was like a super easy copy and paste way to start making money.
Speaker 1:But what was driving you? Like, because you were driven to make money. Right. What was that where was that drive coming from?
Speaker 2:I think that was just that's just like part of me. Not in like, I'm not like a like a money hungry guy, but like, get to me, like money is a validator to some extent. And so I probably craved the validation of that. Like, that was like a success metric for me. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know that I would have like, could have called it that at the time, but like, that was like this positive feedback loop of like, do a thing, get more money from it. Yeah. So that, okay, I'll keep doing that. And like, so just the the reward for that was really quick.
Speaker 1:What's interesting is that you've you use that metric later on as well with some of your other projects. Like Sure. Like it seemed like you learned this lesson early. Like I could I have a music review site that makes no money. I have these other sites that make a lot of money, and I'm gonna, you know, focus on these, and that's going to be what validates kinda where I put my time.
Speaker 1:Is that correct?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Absolutely. That's absolutely right. I mean, you know, I think like I mentioned this handful of sites, I mean, in reality, like, were probably a 100 plus like random stupid ideas, that I could not make any money off of. Some of those stuff But other things they took off and led to other things, and they weren't just stupid, let's plaster ads on it.
Speaker 2:I did try to get, I found, I mean, each step that I took, I was leveling up to some extent, at least from my point of view in terms of, oh, don't know, classiness. A directory of dumb stuff is like on the low end. I mean, it's not at the bottom of the pile as far as lack of class, but it's nowhere near the top. So I felt like each time I took a step, I was like, you know what, let's take the things I've learned and let's try to do something maybe more meaningful or useful. Maybe that doesn't translate to more profitable, but at least I'll sleep better at night and enjoy myself.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. You broke up a little bit there. Maybe just check, make sure you don't got Dropbox running. You're fine now, but I just wanna make sure, you know, we'll we'll we'll stop for one intermission here.
Speaker 2:I'll I'll close some random stuff and see what happens.
Speaker 1:So you're in college. You're working on these things. You're making some money. What happens next? You're 25 at this point at the height of your of your Internet ad career.
Speaker 1:Right. Right. What But at some point
Speaker 2:What happens crashing.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, I mean, I mentioned at the peak of ad income, I'm making like 5,000 a month. This is up until that stuff starts hitting the fan. Yeah. And there comes a point where you It's very hard to make money. But, so in this timeframe, I had a site that I'd start in college called the Apple blog, which I didn't at the time consider myself a writer.
Speaker 2:I didn't enjoy writing. I didn't enjoy reviewing products or anything. But I had just switched from PC to Mac. And at the time, especially in college, what I would do is like, oh, let's make a website about it. And so I started this blog and convinced lots of people to write for me for free.
Speaker 2:Okay. Then that just grew and grew and grew. And same thing, at that point, could still put ads on things. And so at that point, I was doing other stuff too, like doing design and dev consulting. So that was a big chunk of my income that also allowed me to sort of experiment with things.
Speaker 2:So like the Apple blog at the time, I wasn't making personally much money from it, but there became a time when it started making money where I started paying all my writers.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:So it's like this was turning into its own little business. And maybe it's not profitable for me at the time, but it was able to I could keep the business running because I had lots of other things going to.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so you graduated from school. You started doing dev and design consulting. Yep. And and one thing I've kinda gathered is, because you mentioned graphic design and UI design, but in the somewhere in the midst of this, you also taught yourself some programming.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And you've all obviously always had a little bit of a business bug. So you really have your hand in a bunch of things. When when you introduced yourself, did you say I'm a designer, I'm a developer, I'm just doing a bunch of Internet stuff? What would you say?
Speaker 2:That I mean so I've been I've been doing this for, I don't know, if we include college, fifteen years. And I that's, like, a thing I still don't really know what to say. Yeah. Like, people are like, what do you do? Like, I mean, now I'm like, oh, I run a business software.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Like that. Mean, something's still kind of vague. But prior to that, when I just was building a dozen different things and doing design and dev consulting, I think I would lot of times just default to like, I'm a web designer.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which which threw me into the pile as like uncle Johnny's nephew who makes websites.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know? But like
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was easier Yeah. To say that.
Speaker 1:So you you were doing you were doing this blog getting some ad revenue. At at some point, you started making products. When when did that come around?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the very first if you think it's like like a software product. So in 02/2005, my wife and I had just gotten married, and something I started doing in college was collecting, they're called urban vinyl toys.
Speaker 2:So you think of art toys, these graffiti artists would design toys and stuff. Okay. It was kind of this cool thing that I enjoyed. And so I was like, hey, I wanna I I would love to dabble in ecommerce, and this connects to software, I promise. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so I decided, hey, let's let's start an ecommerce site selling what's called urban vinyl collectibles.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And so that's what I did. And, well, I mean, this is like my wife and I in our apartment had toys stacked to the ceiling in our apartment, like How did she our bedroom.
Speaker 1:How did she feel about this?
Speaker 2:She's well, so that's what like, she was that part of her job was, like, shipping out orders. So, like, it was fun work. Like, we enjoy working together. Yeah. And but this one is, the smell of vinyl.
Speaker 2:Like, that's what I went to sleep to and woke up to.
Speaker 1:It's just off gassing all the time.
Speaker 2:It's just we're like totally high all the time. And so was sort of this e commerce site. And when you have product like that, a lot of it comes from China and just distributors in general, but we were ordering lots of product. And so it's coming from lots of different places and I needed a place to track when all that stuff's coming, where it's coming from, when it's gonna be here. And so I built this little package tracking thing.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Little internal tool. And then I was like, hey, you know what? I bet there's other people who would find this useful. Let's Let's throw it out there and see if other people want to track lots of Amazon packages and whatever else they order. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So started this thing called Track the Pack. And so that was my first little things. And so it was free at first. Yeah. And I learned a ton about programming from that, and eventually I tried to do this, commercial aspect of it where, like, ecommerce stores could embed tracking info on their websites.
Speaker 2:Then there was, a personal side where you could pay $25 a year to get I don't even remember what. Something that I'm sure was totally worth $25 to get. And so that's what kinda like got my feet wet with building software that people would pay for.
Speaker 1:And what was the response to that?
Speaker 2:So, I mean, I think when I by the time I end up shutting it down, I don't know, 2013, 2014.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And at that time, I mean, I think we had tracked like a few million packages, had like 30,000 users. We had an iPhone app that had been downloaded, I don't know, 10,000 times or something.
Speaker 1:Wow. This is a lot of people.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, for a little thing, yeah, it was kinda cool. But that was my first taste of software that could make money.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And clearly, you're interested in making money with technology. Like, you've been interested in this a long time. Yep. And the other threat like, a threat in your life is you were doing all sorts of stuff to try things out.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Like, some people could look at you and say, you started Barometrics and not realize it sounds like hundreds, maybe even thousands of projects that you that you worked on before you ever even got to Parametrics.
Speaker 2:Sure. And I mean, that includes there's design and dev consulting stuff in the middle of this, which is like me, like, learning how to be a better software creator, I guess. Yeah. And learning also from client work that, man, that guy, that's the dumbest thing that guy has ever thought of. Whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Paying me for it. You could Yeah. So I've got some business sense for that too.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You could see the the trajectory of ideas. I think also, like, the trajectory of you know, a lot of us go through a bunch of testing stages. Like, we're like, oh, let's see how hard it is to make money with ads. They test that.
Speaker 1:I wonder how much money I can make drop shipping stuff or actually doing ecommerce. And you try that. And you you were able to test out a lot about a lot of those things, plus do consulting for other people, and just see the trajectory of how most of these ideas ended up. Right. So there's a little bit of pattern recognition in there too, probably.
Speaker 2:I would say so. I I figured I could see from other people's mistakes whether it was the idea or just like execution. Figure out what was a bad idea.
Speaker 1:So what after Track the Pack, which is a great name, what you what was it about that experience that made you feel like doing it again? Doing
Speaker 2:So more that led to other things. So Track the Pack ultimately led to a consulting gig with a guy named David Hauser, who was the co founder of a site called a business called Grasshopper.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah. So
Speaker 2:that started he was he's like a serial entrepreneur who's done tons of different stuff. And he was getting this other business up and running where that was revolved around package tracking, but specifically FedEx and UPS will have these basically service level agreements where if a package is late by x amount of time, then the shipper can, like, request refunds of a certain amount, whatever. This is, like, super enterprise y kind of stuff. Yeah. But I was, the package tracking guy.
Speaker 2:Like You bumped your name
Speaker 1:as the guy that yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:So so that's how he found me. And I was like, hey. Can you build this for us? So, anyway, build that thing for him. That went fine.
Speaker 2:But then they were starting up a new him and his Grasshopper cofounder were starting up this new survey platform thing where he had an idea for it and needed somebody to build it out. And so I knew David from this previous project. So that went on to be a thing called PopSurvey, which I started as like like the engineer guy building it out. And then all said and done, really long story there, but I've, like, basically became the CEO and majority owner of that.
Speaker 1:And this is when I first became aware of you is pop Yeah.
Speaker 2:So this I start going to, like, MicroConf and stuff around this time. Yeah. Yep. And so that's that's where that started. Like so it's a you know, like an online survey platform, and that's straight up like a SaaS product.
Speaker 2:And learned a ton there. We built a side product called Tempur that was still underneath that sort of same business. And those were what I ultimately built BearMetrix for. Like, that those prompted my own, like, itch of needing the metrics.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and maybe for people who have never had to who have never worked for a SaaS company or have never had to calculate those metrics, explain why that's a pain point. What were you noticing for yourself or with other people that made you think, this is this is a pain in the ass?
Speaker 2:Right. So to get things like so some, like, key metrics for a subscription business are monthly recurring revenue, the lifetime value of a customer churn. Those are kind of the big ones. And to calculate all those, there's I mean, there's lots of different ways to do it and ways to go about it, but most people end up doing it in a big hairy spreadsheet. Or they'll build something internal that doesn't really take into account failed payments and annual charges improperly, just accounting for all these edge case scenarios.
Speaker 1:And so
Speaker 2:I had been doing that stuff in spreadsheets or trying to use a Kissmetrics or some sort of generic analytics platform and was just bombing it all. It was so difficult, always behind. Yeah. I was like, Stripe's got all the data here. Why not I just I'll just build a little internal tool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's one of those things. If you've never had to do it, I've had to do it for my clients, and it's one of those things that when you're calculating those, it is it sounds simple at the beginning Yep. Because everyone calculates SaaS metrics. But when you actually have to sit down and do it yourself, you it it be very quickly becomes one of those jobs that you're like, I wish someone would just do this for me.
Speaker 2:It's like bookkeeping. It's like
Speaker 1:Yeah. But worse because it it it it's one of those things where it cognitively, I love software that attacks these problems because it's one of those things that cognitively things keep getting added. Like, you'll start calculating it and then you're like, okay, but how does annual recurring revenue factor into this? Oh, shoot. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I gotta go Google. And then there's three different opinions. And then, you know, how does expansion revenue, how does contraction, how does reactivation, how do all these things factor into this one number I have And to it is when you're on a team and you're like, you know, as a consultant, I was giving these numbers to the CEO. I wanted to make sure they're correct. And so you're you're instantly thinking, how can I get this off my plate?
Speaker 1:Because if I mess this up, you know, I don't wanna get in trouble, basically. Right?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:It it it is definitely one of those hairy problems that if you've experienced it, you can you feel it. Like, you feel that idea of like, I wish I could just hire somebody to do this.
Speaker 2:Sure. I mean and it's one of those things where if I had known how complicated it was would be to build the software that does it, I I in hindsight, I would not have done it. Really? I would well, I mean, like, knowing what the opportunity is now, then okay. Sure.
Speaker 2:I would have done it. But, like, if I had known at the start of my building it, like, how the just the insane things people do with their data and and how difficult it is to do it correctly across thousands of businesses, man, it's it is just a nightmare. And but that's how I got into it was I was scratching my own itch.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Now, let's just stay in this nightmare zone for a second because it seems to me, and now you have to give us advice on this. It seems to me that those kinds of things that are nightmares can be great businesses. Like Stripe Yep. Solved the problem of credit cards.
Speaker 1:That was a nightmare. You had to fill out paperwork. You had to fax it to people. You had to get credit checks. Yep.
Speaker 1:They solved that nightmare. And everyone I talked to at Stripe, you probably have better insight on this. But there's a sounds like a lot of background, like, just manual labor they're doing to keep that system running. Yep. It sounds like a nightmare.
Speaker 1:But the advantage is that someone like us can now go to Stripe and start accepting credit cards in thirty seconds.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So knowing what you know now, would you advise people to go find nightmares or would you say, no, there's better ways to make money?
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. I so yes. I do think like that's where I think there's maybe It depends on how you look at risk or what you qualify as risk. To me, nightmare What's a nightmare for a company?
Speaker 2:Is a potential for high reward, low risk scenario. At the same time, it could be high risk in the sense that it's not really a solvable problem. Doesn't change that it's a nightmare, but it's like there might be a reason that it's a nightmare. At this point in time, there's no really great business wise way to solve it. But that really comes down to a time thing.
Speaker 2:It's a low risk endeavor when it's mainly just your time that you're potentially wasting, which is not to discount that. But I mean, there I think when there's a nightmare scenario, there's a potential for a much higher reward than something that, like, everybody else is already doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. If so you mean if you can be first? If you're if you're first in the nightmare.
Speaker 2:First or, like, one of the first few. I mean, like so since BearMatrix has launched, I mean, like, we've got, I don't know, maybe two, I would say, legit competitors and then about three dozen competitors who just are a 100% irrelevant, who who are me too businesses that are like, yeah, cool. Like I was like I can see their dashboard. That's what they're making money if I made if I could just make 10,000, that would be great. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so then they there's just so much of these copycats that I don't lose any sleep about.
Speaker 1:And Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I think that's if you can be one of those first handfuls that are doing something well, then yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. So let's step back a little bit. You you had realized there was an opportunity or could be an opportunity. You you didn't realize how deep and complex and nightmarish the whole rabbit hole was gonna be, but you're like, okay.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna go down this rabbit hole. You built something internally first. Is that how it worked?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was I was initially just going to be an internal tool because like I just needed it for myself and I could build it. So okay. But then I had mentioned it to a couple of buddies who were like, Yep, man, we would love something like that. And I'm like, Okay, well why not?
Speaker 2:I had always, if you go back for the past ten, fifteen years, a big part of, I don't know if you'd call it my business strategy, that sounds so official, it's just that was not how I was thinking. But I diversified a bunch, so there was like, you know, there was the design stuff, there was development stuff, consulting, and then there's like all these random different products. There's e commerce and just like multiple sources of income. Yeah. And so my thinking when I had like POPSurvey and Temper and was doing those along with we're still having to do some design development because a consultant was like, okay, well, let me throw bare metrics out there and that'll just be another source.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And I remember telling Ashley, my wife, that thinking that in a year, there's, of course, Stripe would just acquire this or build this or something like that. This is part of the timeline. We'll have this for a year or two and then we'll move on because somebody surely will build this at Stripe. But I found that that's not really the case or that's not even really a risk.
Speaker 2:So yeah. So it just took off after that.
Speaker 1:And what can you tell tell us which two buddies did you reach out to?
Speaker 2:Who did I talk to? I cannot even remember off the top of my head.
Speaker 1:At one point, I got an email from you with you asking if I'd like to try it. And I was I had a reoccurring membership. Well, I still do. But I couldn't use it at the time. But at what stage did you start doing that kind of outreach?
Speaker 1:Were you emailing people that you thought, you know what? These these people might be able to use this.
Speaker 2:Right. So I so the very first thing I did was like I had started writing started posting on Twitter just like, Hey, I'm building this thing. I was sort of tweeting it as I was building it. That on its own Well, okay. So prior to that, I asked maybe two or three people that I was in a chat room with other entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2:And I think that's where I found the first couple. I don't even remember who they were. But then after it was like, Yeah, this could be useful to other people, I started tweeting about it like, Okay, I'm gonna turn this into a thing, like an actual product with a name and a logo. And so at that point, I was getting people saying, Hey, I want to use that. I wasn't even asking for people.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So but then after I launched, I started I probably I don't know. Within two or three months of launching, I started, like, manually reaching out to people via email who were who I I could tell had Stripe embedded. Like, it was just like a JavaScript thing.
Speaker 1:Gotcha. You you you were able to go and view source and see what's going on.
Speaker 2:Right. Right. So I did that for a little while. Wasn't super effective, but tried it.
Speaker 1:And how did you know that you had something that was worth pursuing? At what point were you like, okay. Because you were still building it, like that early validation was coming in, but you're still building it. What point did you were you like, okay. I'm really gonna invest in this.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, day one, my fur our like, the very first BearMetrix customer was a $250 a month customer. Like, that was my first sign up. Wow. So I was like, hoo hoo. Like, in that chart, like, I just threw the $2.49 a month on there for, kicks.
Speaker 2:Like, okay, we'll put this on here, like, a price anchoring thing. So the rest of them look really cheap. Yeah. And and that guy signs up, I'm like, yes. Like, this could work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and I think I had we had a couple thousand dollars in MRR within the first, I don't know, month or two.
Speaker 1:Okay. So let's just pause let's pause here because using your your traditional Josh Pigford metric, which is partly, it sounds like, you're you evaluate projects based on monetary traction.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So what was it about that? Because you got 250 the first day, but then it was like a month or two until you got to, you know, a couple thousand or a thousand, you said?
Speaker 2:It was probably a couple thousand. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So how are you feeling about that? You felt like this is enough. Because, I mean, compared to consulting, that's nothing.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:What was it? Were you comparing it to platforms and temper? Like, what was it about this that was making you dance around and, tell your wife, we got $250 and Right. Right. Excited.
Speaker 2:I think because the other the the products I had, like PopSurvey and Temper were like I had spent like a couple of years on those at that point. And I think grand, between the two of them, was making maybe, at their best, I think it was probably $7,000.8000 dollars a month. So, like not much and I was like within, you know, say a month at like 2,000 of that. Yeah. Whereas like, those I had spent, it took me a long time to get $2.00 with those.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so that's when I was like, I should spend some more time on this. Yeah. And so by February, so I launched the first version of AirMetrics in November.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And by February, so that three months later? I think I was at, I don't know, maybe 4,000 a month or something like that, 3,000 or 4,000. And I think at that point, the growth was, I was doing, don't know, 30% month over month growth or something like that. Yeah. Which took a ton when you're making small amounts of money, but it was still super encouraging that was not just these huge spikes and then things would drop.
Speaker 2:And it was steadily growing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so at that point was when I was like, yeah. I need to focus on this.
Speaker 1:Yep. And
Speaker 2:so that was when I made that decision.
Speaker 1:And why did you switch from going what made you feel like you could switch from going, this is just gonna be a part of my overall revenue pie because there's too much risk. Someone's gonna build it. What made you think, okay. I'm gonna actually double down on this?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that, conversation's one with Stripe. Like, just talking through what their roadmap was and, like, their commitment to BearMetrix and, like, making their ecosystem grow and not not wanting to, like, just crush everything that was built on Stripe. Mhmm. And I was taking a little bit of a leap there, taking them at their word.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But kind of took that forward and said like, okay, we'll stop. Let me stop doing consulting stuff. And let me stop, I'll sort of pause, pop serving, and temper, and look at selling those, and then just focus on barometrics. So, I mean, it was a bit of a risk.
Speaker 2:That was probably one of the riskiest moves I took. Mhmm. Or I've taken it all in, like, sort of career wise, was saying, I'm not gonna diversify. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. If we have time, I'd like to get back to that. Sure. The at one point, it seemed like a significant event was getting buffer as a customer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So we're in February now. At what point did that come along?
Speaker 2:So that was so MicroConf that year was in April, I think maybe early April. So that was 2014. And spoke at MicroComp that year. And was just So we had the public dashboard. I had already made our stuff public.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:In February year. And so I started talking with Heaton Shaw, who at the time was still doing Kissmetrics. And so he's an advisor to Buffer. And Buffer was at this time also super known for the They're already known for their transparency stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So he's like, Hey, man. You should get them to make their stuff public through BearMetrix. I'm like, hey. You can hook that up.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Let's do it. So sure enough, like, after Micronaut was over, like, day or two later, he does an email intro to Joel and Leo, and they were a 100% on board with it, and we did it. And so by by the April, they were on board and had their, you know, buffer.biometrics.com.
Speaker 1:Gotcha. So this happened pretty quick. Let me see if I can get the timeline right. You launched November 2013. By February, you're doing $4,000 in MRR.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And April, you speak at MicroConf, and then April buffers online.
Speaker 2:Right. Yeah. And I think by the end of by the April, we were like, this is even pre buffer. We were already at, like, I don't know, 7 or $8,000 in MRR. I mean, like, we were still growing at a solid clip.
Speaker 2:I wanna say we. I mean, at that point, it was still just me.
Speaker 1:It was still you. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But then Buffer came on board and they have a ton of data. And so they're largely like a b to c company. I mean, not super consumer, but I mean, that's they've just lots of tons of low paying customers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Lots of prosumers.
Speaker 2:Right. And so there's just from a purely date like pure data standpoint, they had a freaking crap ton of data. Yeah. And I was not prepared for that. Like, I've done a bunch of dev consulting, but I would like, not unlike with, like, high, like, large amounts of data.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Were they on the $250 plan?
Speaker 2:Well, so we I mean, the deal there was, like, they were a free customer.
Speaker 1:Free customer. So you're taking a risk here.
Speaker 2:I'm taking risks from a marketing standpoint. Yeah. And
Speaker 1:And it sounds like it sounds like from a like a DevOps standpoint too, though.
Speaker 2:Oh, sure. No. At that point, everything starts hitting the fan on the server side of things. And that's when I brought I mean, he started off as a consultant for me, but he was our first my first hire, period. And he's still here.
Speaker 2:So, oh man, that was like April, May, June 2014 was a whirlwind of like me trying to put out fires. And that's also an ultimately Stripe approached us about putting money in, and that took off more hiring. I mean, there's just a whole bunch of stuff Yeah. Which were happening a few months after Microsoft.
Speaker 1:So Stripe in that period invested. Mhmm. Now one thing we're gonna talk about, and maybe now is a good time to at least bring it up is there was I I remember you launching BearMetrix and it just felt like a bunch of us were not only like cheering for you, but also like you for a while, it was like, Barometrics is like a bootstrapping unicorn. Like this is the company. Josh has been launching little projects forever.
Speaker 1:Nothing really took off. All of a sudden he's seeing this thing that's taking off and there was a bunch of us that were watching it going, this is amazing. Like this is the guy that's living the dream that everyone wants to live. Right. And you're doing it in a very transparent way.
Speaker 1:And then you also were one of the first, especially in the boot shopping community, to introduce this idea of I'm gonna bring on some investment. Mhmm. There wasn't a lot of other people that had done that. So maybe just talk about at this phase, how are you dealing with the attention? Now there's probably some copycats coming around.
Speaker 1:What what's your feeling at that point when everyone is like paying attention to you? Everyone kind of you are kind of the the representation of you know thousands and millions of people's dreams, you know they they wanna do what you're doing. What's the feeling when you're in that situation?
Speaker 2:I don't know that I I mean, I think I was still knee deep in like putting out fires. So like, I didn't notice it a bunch or like, I probably didn't think much about it. I think until the prospect of us taking on some money, that was one of the hardest things actually, was making the transition from purely bootstrapped and having that whole community sort of being a strong advocate for biometrics, and then consciously making the decision to mean, to take on So we took on $500,000 in that summer, twenty fourteen. So that's not an inconsequential amount of money. I mean, it's not like a kind of thing.
Speaker 2:That's a decent chunk of change. Yeah. And that changes stuff about the business. I mean, we still Terms of that were really good, and we didn't At this point, still have 100% ownership of BearMatrix. I mean, it was a it was the right decision for us.
Speaker 2:And a lot of private conversations I had because I I was super concerned about this. Like, what would the reception be from like this bootstruck community that I've been a part of for years? And
Speaker 1:The religion the religion is any sort of investment is bad. Right.
Speaker 2:And yeah. And and, like, I was concerned because I had seen, like, the dogmatic side of it, the negatively dogmatic side of people, like, taking sides and just constantly bashing any sort of investment. And it's knowing that I had been part of this bootstrapping community and I was now not. I felt like I was probably gonna kinda get kicked out of it to some extent, maybe by default because I'm no longer bootstrapped in that in the literal sense. But I mean, I had conversations with a lot of people that privately with big bootstrapping people that everybody in the bootstrapping community would know, and the support from them was solid, and I felt 100% good on that decision.
Speaker 2:And I don't think I would change it, but I mean it changed the dynamic as far as the community that I was involved in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. I mean there's a bunch of ways we could go here. One, just a sidebar, is that a lot of people don't realize that there's a lot of these privately owned companies. No one knows how much their grandma lent them. No one knows how much line of credit they have.
Speaker 1:No one knows you know, there's a bunch of things people don't know because they're privately owned. And so I think you always have to be careful about the religion of anything. And I mean, I've definitely, my buddy Kyle Fox and I always get into debates about this. I've definitely been more on the side of not taking investment. But the the whenever something gets kinda dogmatically, you know, religious and people taking sides, there's probably a lot more of gray than people than
Speaker 2:people Right. And I well but I and I think like the problem is the people that usually chime in are people who haven't experienced the the alternative of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:At all. Like, I mean, I I haven't taken on like $20,000,000 in VC funding or anything. I can't relate to that, but I've experienced both sides of that coin. I could tell you what the downsides are of taking on someone else's money. I can tell you what the downsides are of just purely bootstrapping it.
Speaker 2:But I mean, all comes down to what you kind of want to do with the thing.
Speaker 1:So in retrospect, because you said it did change the trajectory of the company. How do you feel about it now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, so the inherent sort of downside with VC money is that Or it depends on when you take it on and what the terms are and all that stuff. But a lot of times what you typically see in the news that of gets the headlines are these huge companies that end up having to shut down after they took on 10,000,000 VC funding. Then it was like grow at all costs, which grow meaning higher. So you hire lots of people and then burn rates too high, you literally just burn all your money. So that's of biometrics on a smaller scale.
Speaker 2:We've experienced that in the sense that so we hired people, and now we're operating at a loss because that's ultimately what the money's for. And so then you have to work hard to make the growth revenue wise to catch up so you're not just running in the negative. So that's just a different I don't know that would change anything. It's a different way to run a business. And I don't love operating that way.
Speaker 2:Our goal for this year is to be profitable because I hate not being profitable. There's a level of stress that comes with that. Mhmm. And having to spend time managing your burn rate and stuff like this is not a ton of fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Does probability look for like for you guys? Like, do you guys have a number that you need to hit or, like,
Speaker 2:revenue number now? Think we would need to be doing around like I mean, fluctuates a little based on but like around 75,000 a month. Okay. And you're at
Speaker 1:you're at about 50 right now?
Speaker 2:We're 50 right now. But yeah, I don't know that I would do anything different in hindsight because it's like it let us do things I thoroughly enjoy having a team working on something. I do feel like it's helped us grow the business itself faster than just me by myself could have done. So I don't have any regrets. Don't know that I would Every business is different and it's hard to say like what I would do next time or not.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's really hard to even transpose any experience over to someone else because it's hard to know.
Speaker 2:Or even the next thing that I'd like after biometrics, whenever that is, I I couldn't even tell you what I would do with that if I would do the same thing or not. It's just every scenario is completely different.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, while we're in these weeds here, let's let's talk about this recent tweet storm you did and blog post you did, which basically starts with you saying, I recently received email kinda out of the blue from a VC, and it kind of, you know, bluntly says, are you only at $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue? Implying what's going on? You know, I thought you were way more than that. Yep.
Speaker 1:Almost a lot there's a lot of shame kind of in that being you know, there's a feeling of shame, like he's almost trying to shame you or so maybe talk us through that email and your response to it and because the blog post is amazing. I'm not sure what the response has been to it, but I know a lot of people that I've shared it with have said, man, this is quite encouraging for them that you were so open and honest and vulnerable about it. So maybe just take us through that in your own words.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think I think I was on the on the flight to our team. We were having a barometrics team retreat in Austin in April, and I'm sitting on the flight and got that email. And so it was sort of this was a downer when I got it. But yeah, was just like a single line email that said I think it was like, Is Bear Metrics only doing 45,000 a month?
Speaker 2:I think it was 42,000. I can't remember exactly what it said, what the number was at the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which he knows because the viral public dashboard like because everybody knows what our revenue is. Yeah. But so, I mean, it was, yeah, it was a shot in the gut then. But at the same time, it was like, I felt like it was ultimately net positive. I mean, the feedback that I got from writing the article was super good.
Speaker 2:And I think it ultimately kind of gave me a little more confidence in this, I don't actually care what the guy thinks. It's easy to say that, I think a lot times it's hard to actually think it because it's easy to be self deprecating and negative. Because I think a lot of entrepreneurs operate in their head and almost have to, especially in a CEO role where you've got a team of people working. Mean, they're working for you. You're the boss.
Speaker 2:And so a lot of things have to happen in your head. And so you end up getting stuck in your head a lot. And so writing for me is a way to get that out. And so like, being transparent actually helps with that a lot because I'm able to like verbally process.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And how did you I mean, I think one of the things that we don't talk about very much, there's kind of we're in the tension of two things. On one side, there's this idea of competitiveness, jealousy, comparisons, and this new transparency movement in some ways invites that. Right? So, you know, if people go to barometrics dot com slash open, you can see which companies are growing faster, which companies are growing slower, and it might even it might be unfair to make comparisons to other companies, but we do this all the time.
Speaker 1:We compare ourselves to other people. And on the other side of the extreme, there's this idea of human beings are attracted to people that seem to have success and perceived success. And a lot of startups wanna keep that that image alive, like to the point where sometimes they'll lie about their numbers and say, you know, we're doing a lot better than we really are. How have you processed some of that?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I mean, because we've been so open from the start, there's not a whole lot that we could even, like, fudge to say I mean, I could say that we're doing really well and that we're profitable and money's not tight, but that's not the case. Money's tight, and so we're having to work hard to become profitable. I don't know that I get to meet that there's just nothing to gain in the long term by acting like things are cool when they're not. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I mean, I get why people, there's image of shame. People don't like feeling like I failed or I'm not doing well or like I've thrown this stuff out there and it's just not sticking, like nobody cares about the things I've done. That's hard, but like it's even harder to like act like things are fine. And then when there's literally no denying it, when like you have to shut the thing down Mhmm. Well then at that point, like, you've gained nothing by faking it.
Speaker 1:How do you deal with the or do you even have the urge to compare yourself to other groups? Because in some sense, that has motivated you. You compared this project to your other projects and you were like, yes, I'm going with this one because I can see how this is different. But then there's the other kind of comparison where you could compare yourself to another business, another someone else's trajectory. How do you deal with that?
Speaker 2:So to me, comparison is usually only useful when it's like introspective. So I think comparison, and even then it's super, it can be really dangerous. I don't compare myself to other people. I compare myself to myself from a historical standpoint, or like, hey, man, Josh, you've put in a ton of work on this thing in the past, and it didn't pan out. But you've put in a ton of work on this thing, and it is panning out.
Speaker 2:So that's the thing you should probably focus on. I think anything past that, you just never have the right context because most people aren't fully transparent, it's like the whole, it's depressing to go to look at Facebook or Instagram because people are only posting their best moments. You have a tendency to think, Man, that guy's got a perfect laugh. But it's like, No, that guy's not posting when he's sitting in his room depressed. So you don't have context with any other comparisons except for your own experiences.
Speaker 2:And to me, that's a huge benefit to trying so much stuff. I had a talk I gave once about shipping and killing things fast and frequently. And the importance of just trying and trying over and over and over and over because it gives you this baseline of what you might be capable of or what's good for you or how to compare yourself as you've made progress or not made progress. And that's the only time that you've got full context.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. That's a great place to end it, dude. I thanks so much for taking the time to chat today.
Speaker 2:Yeah. For sure. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:And if you folks want to check out there there's I'm the kind of guy that I buy services relationally. I I I like to invest in companies and people that I trust and I think that have an ongoing kind of relationship with their audience. And I think Josh and his team have done a great job at that. You can check out they've got a great blog where they don't just share the great moments, not just their Instagram moments, barometrics.com/blog. And if you wanna track, their progress and cheer them on, bearmetrics.com/open is where you can see all of the open metrics, and bearmetrics is there as well.
Speaker 1:Hey, man. I'm cheering for you guys. All the best.
Speaker 2:Hey. Thanks for having me, Justin.
Speaker 1:Alright. That's it. Thanks for listening, folks. Hope you got something out of that. Thanks again to Josh for doing the show.
Speaker 1:And if you want all the show notes from this episode, productpeople.tv/70nine. You may have noticed that I've switched podcasting hosts, and the website is now new. And to get to any episode, it's just productpeople.tv/ and then the episode number. So slash 79 for this one. You wanna follow me on Twitter or interact on Twitter or ask me a question on Twitter, I'm at m I Justin.
Speaker 1:That's the letter m, the letter I, and Justin. Be sure also to check out my new book. You can download a free chapter of JOLT. Go to justinjackson.ca/jolt,j0lt, and let me know what you think. You can also email me words@nerdnorth.com.
Speaker 1:And if you haven't checked it out, I have another podcast called Mega Maker, megamaker.co. It's basically the story of my journey as a independent product creator. And if you're in that boat or you wanna get into that boat, you might like it. So megamaker.co. I just realized we've been doing this show since 2012 when Kyle Fox and I started it, and I'm hoping to release new episodes every month.
Speaker 1:Not as much as I used to, but you should stay subscribed because there are new episodes coming. I've got some recorded. Also, if you've never left a review on iTunes, that would be amazing if you did. Just go to iTunes, search for slurch? Search for Product People, and click five stars.
Speaker 1:It's as easy as that. You can also leave a written review. Alright. That's a lot of gabbing. See you next time.
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