Episode 84
· 01:24:30
Hey, product people. Welcome back to the show. Today, contrarian bootstrapper, Ian Landsman, someone I've wanted to, chat with for a long time, and we had the opportunity to talk about how he built helpspot.com, like, twelve years ago. That's a long time in, in this industry. So he gives us his kind of keys to success, how he was able to do that.
Speaker 1:And he talks about his new project, thermostat.io. Before we get into the show, I wanna tell you about Indi, stories, lessons, and inspiration for, well, for people like you. If you're listening to the show, I think you'll like it a lot. It's a weekly newsletter. It has case studies with real revenue numbers, real launch stats, all sorts of great lessons from people who've done it before.
Speaker 1:Justinjackson.ca/indie. Go and sign up right now, and then come back and listen to this interview.
Speaker 2:Hey, boss.
Speaker 1:Hey. How's it going, dude?
Speaker 2:Good.
Speaker 1:Where do you live, man?
Speaker 2:Poughkeepsie, New York.
Speaker 1:Poughkeepsie?
Speaker 2:Poughkeepsie. Have you heard of
Speaker 1:it? No.
Speaker 2:It's like an hour and a half north of New York. Okay. So it's kind of in the commuter zone of New York City.
Speaker 1:And why why are you in Poughkeepsie?
Speaker 2:That's just where I was born. Born, raised.
Speaker 1:Really?
Speaker 2:Whole deal.
Speaker 1:Yep. You've stayed your whole life in the same town?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Much to my wife's chagrin and my chagrin mostly as well.
Speaker 1:Is is your wife from Poughkeepsie?
Speaker 2:Yep. Well, yeah. The media area. Yep.
Speaker 1:So your wife would like to go. Yep. But you like to stay?
Speaker 2:No. I'd like to go too. But, like, the kids are at school, and it's just like we're just you know, we had a reason we would move. Like if somebody was like bought Userscape tomorrow, was like, alright, like, here's millions of dollars but we needed to live in California for two years. Like, bam, we'd be gone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But the like, like, selling everything. I don't know. If we had the external impetus, I we'd do it, I think.
Speaker 1:But Yeah.
Speaker 2:On our own, it's like, oh, I don't know. Pulling the kids out, leaving all their friends. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 1:That that does make a big difference for sure. That yeah, and it's funny, like because moving is the worst.
Speaker 2:We lost you too. We moved a bunch and we built this house. Oh, So we, you know, we it's like all of our stuff. It's all exactly how we wanted things. Not that it's all perfect because now that you have more kids, it's like, oh, shit.
Speaker 2:I wish we did this thing differently or whatever. But Yeah. It's a lot to give up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Once you've built you're screwed, man. You're never moving. Once you've built the house.
Speaker 2:Everywhere else we look at, like, the places we'd wanna live are even more expensive than here, and here is e pretty expensive. So it's like, you know, if we were gonna go live in Nebraska or something, it's like fine. Yeah. You know, now now I'm like make three times more money basically by moving to Nebraska. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But to like move to California, you're gonna move to Austin or something, or you're gonna move to Seattle, like, are all places more expensive than where we live. So that's that kinda doesn't feel right either.
Speaker 1:And is that where you'd wanna go? Somewhere on the West Coast?
Speaker 2:I think so. I don't know. We'd wanna get I'm really East Coast kinda guy, but I think we would want that sort of change if we moved. I mean, it's a pain that the fly to see everybody, but we wouldn't wanna go south of here really. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And North. I mean, Massachusetts, sorry. I guess I'd live in Massachusetts, but it's not doesn't like, I don't have any special appeal to it either. So Yeah. We were gonna go through all the hassle.
Speaker 2:I'd wanna have, like, nice weather and all that kind of stuff, I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. Now explain to me what does it mean to be an East Coast guy.
Speaker 2:I don't know. It's just a mindset. It's a it's a certain attitude. I I don't know if I can describe it, but it's you know another one when you when you meet them. And, like, then there's some who are too much like that, and they're, like, jerks, but you gotta have just the right amount of
Speaker 1:because I would say I I'm a West Coast guy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I agree.
Speaker 1:And it's be a lot of it has to do with, well, just liking the Pacific Northwest in particular. But I think part of it is I just haven't been spent much time on the East Coast. And so, like, flying anywhere past mountain standard, time zone is like, no. I don't wanna do that. So I've been to the East Coast.
Speaker 1:Do you remember Future of Web Apps? Yep. Yeah. So I've went to Miami for that, going to New York for the first time this summer. I've been to the Toronto Airport.
Speaker 1:I've spent a couple nights in Montreal, and that's about it. Like That's it.
Speaker 2:You're West Coast. You see, you you, to me, strike me as, like, you're always smiling and you're optimistic. Right? And you're you're happy. Like, if you're East Coast, like, those those are not things you wear on your sleeve.
Speaker 2:Like, you might be those things, but you're not open about them. Right? And so that to me is a distinction. Like, you just you know, you got the nice hairdo. You're smiling.
Speaker 2:You're happy. Know, You you gotta be you're almost salty if you're an East Coast company.
Speaker 1:Gotcha. Now this is what I wanna know about you. I'm recording, by the way, already. We're we're we're already into this.
Speaker 2:We're live. I I was just about to ask you that. I was wondering. Okay.
Speaker 1:But, you know, you've been doing help spot for twelve years. Yeah. So what's the story? Is that like, how did you get how did you get into this racket? Is that the first thing you built?
Speaker 1:Like, what what what's kind of the backstory in in terms of how you even got into this in the first place?
Speaker 2:It's it's it's a brutal story. So it's basically it's, like, 02/2003. Right? I go back in time.
Speaker 1:So I'm 23 in 02/2003. How old are you?
Speaker 2:Okay. So what is that? Fourteen years ago? So I'm 26.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And so yeah. I wanted to do my own thing for a while. I worked at this one, you would maybe call it a startup, I guess, little company, and that's where I learned to program.
Speaker 1:Is this in Poughkeepsie?
Speaker 2:This is outside of yeah. Another even smaller dumpier town outside of Poughkeepsie.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And They they recruited you?
Speaker 1:They they're like, we need a a programmer or
Speaker 2:No. No. So I was an accounting major in college. And then I worked in like retail out of college. And then I worked at this little startup company.
Speaker 2:This is actually before 2000 This is from like 2000 to 02/2002. K. I learned to program at this company. Just a guy took me under his wing, kinda taught me the ropes. I read a bunch of books.
Speaker 2:This was before there was Laracast and all this online video stuff, you know, all these million places to learn how to program that. Right? Like, there's no place to learn how to program. I just sat with the JavaScript bible on my lap, learning JavaScript and stuff like that. So
Speaker 1:Did you want to?
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. I was super into it. So accounting and programming are very, similar in their mindset in a lot of ways. Like Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Like with accounting, you don't really need to know the answer. You kinda just need to know how to apply the rules and the sort of overarching concepts, and that's kinda the same thing with programming. Like, you can look up how to do anything, but you kinda have to know what's possible at all Mhmm. And those sort of things. So I think it's a very similar mindset.
Speaker 1:And you're kind of always reconciling things in both. Right. Interesting. Okay. So Yep.
Speaker 1:So you saw you saw programming. Were you a geeky kid? Like, had you been into computers before, or you were just
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I was a pro I never really other than going way back now to where you get, like, Computer World magazine and there'd be, like, basic programs written in there, and then I type them into the computer and stuff like that. That's as far as I ever went with it. And but I was into video games, building my own computers. So I I was definitely
Speaker 1:Interesting. So you weren't like, you you had the opportunity to do programming when you were a kid, but you never did.
Speaker 2:Yep. And then in in, even in college, I I I experimented with it for a minute because I took, like the first, you know, CS one zero one or whatever it was. And you know, it was just like C. And I think for me, that's not like, I couldn't get from this what the hell am I gonna do with this? Do know what mean?
Speaker 2:Like I could send some stuff to the screen, great, but I I can't get into it, you know. I I can't build anything useful with this because I wasn't this wasn't all the way there, and so the web, right, like, you know, as soon as on the web you can just, oh, two seconds, I built an HTML page and now it's up there and then people can see it. And then I could figure out some of the little, you know, back server side programming language and in another couple hours, I'm saving stuff into a database and I'm displaying on the screen. And it just was so much quicker to see how you might use it and all that. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:Kinda
Speaker 1:stuff. Okay. So the this guy takes you under his wing, and he's teaching you did you say Java or JavaScript?
Speaker 2:This is actually ColdFusion.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:Which is I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it was a language that was popular back around then. And then he also got into PHP a little after that, with the same sort of mentor I had. And, so yeah. So ColdFusion, PHP, then like all the, you know, CSS, HTML Yeah. Early JavaScript JavaScript before there was jQuery and Vue and React and all these things we have now, just JavaScript on its own, trying to make it all work between IE and and Netscape Navigator.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 2:Cool. Old days.
Speaker 1:So you're, like, getting it getting into this, and this guy took you under his wing. What happened after that? You you went and worked for another start up, you said?
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. So after I actually worked for this college in town, and I was, like, the assistant director of academic learning and something else, an IT. Don't even remember the whole title. That was a huge title.
Speaker 2:Wow. But I was assistant director. Yeah. It was fine. It was alright.
Speaker 2:But it was not anything special. And I wasn't doing much programming there, but on the side, I was always programming stuff. And I mean, built like I don't even know. Twenty, thirty different apps, halfway built them. Okay.
Speaker 2:Nothing got finished, but I started a bunch of different things.
Speaker 1:What what was the motivation behind that? Were you just doing it because you're interested in it? Or by this point, were you thinking you wanted to be a business person?
Speaker 2:I think it was I I don't like the idea of running my own business and that was part of it. I I was still like learning how to program, you know, just getting better at it. So part of it was just I want something to build that has some sort of purpose. So I was exploring ideas with that. I think it was early projects.
Speaker 2:I didn't think about the business end of them enough and so that was part of the reason they just never got done and because then you kinda get halfway through it and you're like, well how am actually gonna sell this? I have no idea. Yeah. So then, alright. Forget it.
Speaker 2:Move on to the next thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's inter I didn't know about that college thing because that kinda plays in like, isn't part of HelpSpot's market with colleges and universities, or is that not true?
Speaker 2:No. Yeah. Like, mean, HealthSpot's sold to all kinds of businesses and organizations, but I would say the college market and education in general is one of our big big markets where we have good fit.
Speaker 1:That's so interesting because, like, a lot of times you wonder how did people get into that market. And you might think, well, maybe they just chose it or whatever. But you actually had some real, like, raw like, experiences in that market. You knew what was kinda going on there.
Speaker 2:Well, I always think about that. There there's a couple parts to that. One is the idea in where I got the idea from for HubSpot was that we had to use this help desk at the college and it was a mainframe application. And you'd go into like a terminal emulator in your PC and have to write support tickets in this mainframe terminal. And so, you know, it didn't deal with email at all.
Speaker 2:You couldn't copy paste into it. You got exactly three lines to write the entire summary of what was wrong. Interesting. You know, you had to tab between a million little fields to like, yes, no, them, and things like that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So so part of me was like, you know, if this big organization is using this insane tool that there must be other organizations that are using, you know, inferior tools and maybe we could do kind of a browser based thing to replace these kinda older help desk tools that were client server or mainframe terminal or things like that that would deal with email and, all that kind of stuff. So
Speaker 1:And what year is this? What year are you starting to think about, hey. You know, maybe I could build something on the web that would replace this this thing here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that was, like, 02/2003, 02/2004.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Right. And I really started building it. Probably, Helpspots in particular was, like, 02/2004. And I think it was towards the, yeah, 2004 is when I was like, this is the idea. Like I wrote up like a kind of a user persona thing.
Speaker 2:Just a quick like two page word document of who I thought would use it and how they'd use it. Which I'm not even really big on those kind of things. And that wasn't even a thing back then, so I didn't know where I got this idea. But I just kinda just kinda did it and ran it over it with my wife, and we talked about it and thought, okay. So you're you're married at
Speaker 1:this point too. You're 26, 27.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:You're married in Poughkeepsie. Right. Working for a college in Poughkeepsie.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And now you're thinking about building this thing on the side and okay. And what what part did you go over with your wife? Sorry.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So just a whole idea. Because she actually worked at me with the startup, and so she's, fairly technical. And so we talked and she understands the Internet and how people use the Internet in businesses and all that kind of stuff. So we, you know, collaborated on the whole thing really.
Speaker 2:And especially in the early days, she was heavily involved, with just deciding what we should do. So she thought it was a good idea. So then started getting more serious about just how you build it. I didn't know I still didn't I hadn't run like a big website on my own or anything at that point. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So there was a that was just two around 02/2004, right, is when Basecamp came out. Mhmm. And I was like, boy, should this be SaaS? You know?
Speaker 1:How did you hear about Basecamp?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I think just like even back then I was, you know, like the business software forums, if anybody's familiar with that. It's a thing Joel Spolsky used to run. Yeah. And that's like a online forum where a lot of people, whereas I kinda like documented the process of building HubSpot and it was kinda community of people just tour starting software companies.
Speaker 2:Kinda like what you do with your community and what now is everywhere with like Slack and
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:A million other places. Right? But back then, this was like the little hive of what we called micro ISVs, which were sort of boot what we call now bootstrappers. And
Speaker 1:What did ISV stand for?
Speaker 2:Well, because that came from the Microsoft world. So Spolsky and this other guy who ran this forum, Eric Sink, who runs another very kinda big software company, he called Source Gear. They they both lived in the Microsoft kinda world. Yeah. And Microsoft calls ISVs are independent software vendors.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So they're basically smaller partner software companies to Microsoft essentially. Yeah. And so this was so they kinda coined the term of micro ISV where you're not even like a real software company quote unquote. You're just because for back then, was kinda crazy. It was just, no, you're just one person or maybe two people Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you're starting a software company, which, know, this is right after the .com. So people were still in the mindset of you needed millions of dollars to build software and you have to have all these people and servers and all, you know, all the stuff you need. Yeah. And that it wasn't it was just kinda the dawning of the idea that no, like one person with a credit card could maybe, you know, build something that was realistic and usable by by businesses and things like that.
Speaker 1:I think this point in your life will be interesting to a lot of listeners because, you know, there's a lot of people that are probably in the same place you are. You they've built a bunch of things on the side, have never really fully executed on anything. And, you know, the keeping and they're working a day job. So keeping you know, having like, what did it take to push you to actually go all the way and overcome all those obstacles and actually get something out the door? And we're talking I mean, this is 02/2004, 02/2005, so it's still pretty hard to, like, get a server and
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Configure it and do all that stuff. Yep. Like, so what what did it take? What what was different this time that made you actually do it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think that's why I'm always so torn on this because you have all the different models of how you should come up with ideas and all those things. But, I mean, for me, I thought it was I think looking back, it was good I half built all those projects because I was getting better at the programming side of it. And it was making me think through the sort of business processes a bit and the marketing and just how how to do these things. Now there's more information out there nowadays, so maybe maybe it's less important now, but that there's just something about being in there that I think is useful like in the sort of designing of the software, and I don't mean the aesthetic design, right, but just the actual UX of it and understanding that and thinking about how you actually build software and just having built a lot of it is a useful thing to have done on even if even if that stuff never shipped.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think that that's useful. Yep. Which is why I'm always a little bit pessimistic on this, like, you know, fake building things that don't actually exist at all, and then just having a page that looks like it exists Yeah. And seeing if people and I know that that maybe on maybe on the marketing end, that's fine.
Speaker 2:Like, you're seeing if there's demand, but I think you're you're like missing a lot of the stuff that's important for your own growth in that. Because if you just get if you're not ready to take it if you're not experienced enough in some of these more subtler things, I think you're still gonna fail on the other side of that. Yeah. But I don't know.
Speaker 1:I think there's something to that, actually, that on one hand, I'm I'm super on the side of, like, validate an idea first through however you can, figure out if there's actual business demand for that
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:For that thing. But on the other side, part of the challenge is that if you've never done it before and you've never seen it done and you've never been kind of in the thick of it, so you don't have any kind of domain knowledge or any skills or anything this is the mistake I made when I opened a couple snowboard shops is that I thought, well, well, I've been snowboarding forever.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And I've always wanted to own a shop, and it seems so amazing. I have this really kinda romantic view of what that would look like. But until you start doing it, man, you have no idea. And, yeah. So I think there's something to yours what you're saying.
Speaker 1:Like, on the flip side, you should have some sort of domain knowledge, whether it's, you know, going and working for someone for a bit, like another software company, and doing something with them so that you have an idea. Right. At least have an idea of what you're doing. Like, do you even wanna do this? Do you have a full understanding of what this looks like?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's really like and coming having done some help desk stuff for HubSpot, it was like having that background, not just having to research it, but having personal experience with it. Like, if you can do something with personal experience, I think that's a huge advantage just because you're just gonna be so much better at that than, you know, the and people do do it through research and there's a lot of software that people build that people don't directly use. Mhmm. So it's not to totally dismiss that, but I especially think for the Bootstrapper, if you're just one person, if you're relying on a bunch of research on top of building the software, on top of everything else, like that's it's possible but it's harder, you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And in terms of validation, mean, well, this was one of the things I came up with way back then and one of the reasons why I really like the help desk. This is one of the really core things, bring it back to that is Yeah. And I still believe this that really bootstrappers and people who are not doing it with the kind of VC money, if you're trying to replace your job, you should basically never be building something that you don't already know the market wants. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Like there was no risk in the help desk in the sense of there were help desk organizations. There were help desk organizations buying software for their help desk. Yeah. Like there was millions and millions of them spending billions and billions of dollars. So I don't have to worry about is this even a thing that should exist, that can exist, that is there a market for this?
Speaker 2:Like, I think that when you go down that road Mhmm. Of, well, here's this crazy new idea that nobody's ever done before. Like that, you need to go get somebody else's money for that. Like that's where I'm like, go get the VC money. Right?
Speaker 2:Like that's, you're not gonna be able to do that by yourself. And I mean, we call labels of examples of where there's exceptions. But for the most part, if you're trying to build something that doesn't already exist in some fashion that people are already looking for and already paying money for Yeah. I think that's a really, really difficult spot for the small software company because you just don't have the ability to make a market and especially b to b. B to c, like, maybe you catch lightning in a bottle and whatever.
Speaker 2:It goes viral and all that kind of stuff. But b to b, that doesn't really happen, the kind of viral stuff. And so on that level, same as like as like on the consumer side. So Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Like, I I like to take that out of it. So that then it's just a matter of, alright. This is a market where people are known to have a problem and known to pay money for it. This is the basic kinda software that they always use to solve this problem. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now can I do it in a different way? Can I do it is there a pricing problem I can take advantage of since I I have like no costs and maybe I can be do something there? Is there a niche that's not served well? So yeah, like 80% of help desks are all the same and all of them can use any help desk product. But 20% of them do weird shit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And can I serve those 20 or so? So then you can start to slice and dice that stuff. Yeah. But you're not trying to come up with the idea of, is there even people with this problem?
Speaker 2:Because I think that's that's a hard spot to
Speaker 1:be in. Yeah. Well and on this topic, and this is something I think we've talked about before, is I think the question for a lot of people starting out now is, is it harder now, than it was? And taking into consideration that some things are definitely easier. There's more information.
Speaker 1:There's Lyricast. There's there's, you know, Amazon Web Services.
Speaker 2:Cheaper. Right.
Speaker 1:Cheaper. But on the flip side, I mean, you you had the opportunity to kinda jump on a a big paradigm shift, which was people were using these, you know, these these clients that that and terminals and stuff that went to, you know, bigger machines elsewhere. And the web was just kinda, you know, kinda getting its next big breath, and it made sense to, you know, build something at that point. Even like like Basecamp, you know, like project management software, it just feels like that would be such a hard niche to get into now. But back when they got into it, it was like Microsoft Project and, you know, maybe a few other ones.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:What's your kinda take on that? What's what's your current kind of assessment of where things are at now?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, I mean, to to go back to when I started and then bring it forward is like, one of the things that was harder is I what I did when I started the business was I sold my car, I quit my job, and I did nothing but code for twelve hours a day for six months. Yeah. Because there was no frameworks, there's no PHP frameworks, there's no JavaScript frameworks. A help desk app's a pretty big complicated thing.
Speaker 2:And so to build version one of HubSpot today would take me like two months of eight hours a day. Instead it took me, you know, six months of twelve hours a day and like practically killing myself to do it. So you have these huge advantages now where especially because you could do something on the side. Like you could take six months outside your day job and work on something
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And get it to be reasonably good, whereas that was basically impossible. Like I could it would've taken me years to do that. So it was not like not a realistic timeframe. So I'm like, alright, I'm gonna try it. I'm gonna quit.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna take all that risk. Like if you couldn't afford to do that, it would just be impossible. Yeah. So now it's nice that you can you can do more with that. But absolutely, there's so much more competition.
Speaker 2:So I mean, I think the paradigm shifts are kinda interesting because if you don't have a business right now, you're always in a good spot in that way because that's one of the things you should be looking for. Right? Like what's changing that you can hop on because the existing business doesn't see those things nearly as well because you have all your customers that you're focused on. They're asking you for stuff. They want new features.
Speaker 2:There's bugs. There's problems. All these companies of every size and software have that same issue, and that's why these startups do come up and change how things are done because they can ride the front of that wave a lot easier because they're just gonna build their thing from day one to take advantage of mobile first or what, you know, whatever it is versus the existing companies. Like, even if you got more money, you still have to change a lot of stuff about how you work, which is difficult. And your customers don't want that change.
Speaker 2:That's the other thing. Yeah. In theory, right, now they might really want that change in reality, but they're not normally gonna tell you that. They're gonna say, no, no, no. Like we want you to do another new version that's exactly the same as the current version and keep everything as it is, but fix this and add that.
Speaker 2:Right? But they're not gonna think in terms of, no. Actually, there's a whole new way to do this and that's what you should be working on. So Yeah. That's always the opportunity.
Speaker 1:And I wonder if I mean, I I think the other the other question is, if you always need to pursue something that's difficult at the time so, like, again, if you go back to the 02/2004, 02/2005, it was a lot more difficult to create a web application. And now it's easier. So now maybe the bar has moved.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:But there's always counterexamples, of course. Like, I'm thinking about Stripe
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:As a it's not bootstrapped. But, like, Stripe tackles a really complicated problem that's not easy. Like, they have to deal with so much garbage with the banks and, like, you know, communicating with banks using whatever system the banks are still using. And Right. Like, that's a really messy problem that's not just as simple as, you know, creating a bunch of forms and having a, you know, a basic crud app.
Speaker 2:And Yeah. Where are you gonna add value? You know, you gotta figure that out. Like, can you just be on the leading edge of something, and so just existing will be enough to propel you? Which I I like that model for the Bootstrapper because you don't have a lot of time and resources.
Speaker 2:So if you can catch that, whether it's in a new type of software or that's part of the theory of what we're doing with thermostat, which is a new tool we're building, right, is like there's not a lot of stuff in that space yet, but there's enough that we know it's a it's a thing that's known and a lot of companies use it, but there's not a million options. So can you do that? Or can you do the new paradigm, or can you do the niche that's ignored, and you're you're gonna be the one who focuses entirely on that niche of some group or whatever who has a special case. Because definitely, you know, in general, the day of the sort of crud app that makes millions of dollars, like everybody can build a crud app, you know Yeah. In an hour.
Speaker 2:And so you're not gonna you're not adding a lot of value there unless you have some kind of marketing. You know, if you have an audience, sometimes that's enough. Like, my cred app might be the exact same thing as your cred app, but I have 10,000 people who know and like me in this space that buys this type of cred app. Well, that's gonna be enough because you can have a $5,000,000 a year business with that just because you have that audience or some marketing advantage. So there's a lot of different ways you can have an advantage, especially when you're talking about our size numbers.
Speaker 2:Like if you wanna get to a billion dollars, that's not gonna cut it. Right? So Yeah. But if you're talking about getting to a million dollars, then you don't need a huge advantage. Like, you only need a little advantage, and you just gotta find where you have that advantage.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think that's what's interesting is that not all of these white spaces are they're not all made equal. Like, for sure, if you're gonna build, like, a marketing automation tool like Drip, you're there's gonna be a lot more sophistication in that product and that opportunity than, you know, maybe than what Ruben had to build with BidSketch.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And it's almost like there's it it seems like the only hard and fast rule is exactly what you said, which is there has to be an opportunity where you can add value, where
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Someone's not being served right now, and you come in and you go, I can really serve you guys better than the way you're being served right now. I can give you meaningful progress. But that's that is tricky. You know? Like, the maybe tell me about thermostat because I'm not familiar with that.
Speaker 1:What kind of process did you guys go through to decide to to do that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So with that, so we built a couple other thing. Every like two or three years, we kinda end up building another app just because, I don't know. But partially because I get bored sometimes and partially because I have so many ideas that it's like every once in a while one of them bubbles up enough to the surface to be worth worth doing. But yeah.
Speaker 2:So with thermostat, which is a new guy, it's a NPS survey tool, which if people aren't familiar with that, it's a net promoter score. It's basically a way to ask a simple question to your customers and generate a score, and you can track that score on a daily basis just to see or weekly or monthly or quarterly or whatever you wanna do, Just to kinda see how your business is doing. And I'm sure most people in the audience have gotten one of these. It's a zero to 10 survey. So you know, rate us zero to 10.
Speaker 2:It's got a special form of of the question they ask, but whatever. I'm not gonna get into all that. Yeah. You know, basically it's a it's a tool that what I liked about it so I've been thinking about building this for like almost two years, and because this is that this has been out there, this concept, for like fifteen years I guess, something like that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you know, what it was, it was primarily enterprise tool. And so enterprise, big, huge enterprises would use it to track the customer satisfaction in their organizations with their customers. Also, they would do enterprise kind of stuff. For example, they would commission a survey company to do a survey of their competitors' customers and get make NPS scores for them. So if I'm American Airlines, can compare myself against these other airlines because I'm gonna actually commission surveys of those other airlines' customers, things like that.
Speaker 2:Things that, you know, we're not gonna do. It's a tiny tiny company. But but this is a tool that a lot of enterprise companies use and they like it and people's bonuses are based on it and people's jobs are based on it and it's, you know, pretty well vetted and well ingrained, entrenched in enterprise.
Speaker 1:How did you know that?
Speaker 2:I just like came across it and then just started researching it a bit and doing that background work and discovered that it's a thing that's, you know, very commonly used in in big orgs. Okay. So then so right there, I like that because that's like, alright, people are spending money on this thing. It seems to be effective. And there's people who say it's not as effective as the people who invented it claim, yada yada yada.
Speaker 2:But it's it's generally, if you're using it in like a broad strokes, are we kind are we doing okay? Are we not doing okay? You know, it's it's very solid in that. And which for me that's what I mean, for my own business, it's like you get down in these metrics things. Right?
Speaker 2:It's like, well, we got a mixed panel. We gotta track every button click everywhere and figure out what this person like, you know, and I've gone down every once in while, I get down to that, and then I'm like, you know what? This is stupid. I don't ever do anything with any of this data. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I just want to, like, kinda know if I'm going the right direction or not. Like, that is as much metricing as I can handle. Yeah. And so so when I saw this, it struck me in that regard too is because like, okay, like, I can handle doing these surveys. It's not burdensome for the customers.
Speaker 2:It gives me the kind of general outlook I'm looking for. Alright. Yeah. So so yeah. So once I saw the enterprise was using it, I started looking around more, are there other apps?
Speaker 2:And so there's kind of enterprise survey tools that have it, you know, in their thousands of dollars a month, all that kind of thing. And then there are, you know, there were a couple years ago, a couple big kind of more bootstrapper ish level, like not they're still pretty expensive, but, you know, more in the like plan starting at $99, you know, going up from there sort of vibe. Yeah. So but there's not a ton of them. So you could see it was starting to come down, like it's trickling down Yeah.
Speaker 2:Into smaller organizations. So that is pretty much the the sort of idea from a business perspective. I was like, alright, I like that. It's like something people are willing to pay for. People are paying for it.
Speaker 2:I don't have to explain like why you'd wanna know your customer satisfaction to anybody. People are out there looking because they have no idea if their customers are happy or not. Yeah. So this is all problems people have. We could charge like a reasonable amount for it once we get like, we're doing it a little bit different than the other tools because Thermostat's gonna be free, but there will be paid tiers eventually for some kind of edge cases, but it'll be mostly free.
Speaker 2:Okay. And why are
Speaker 1:why are you doing it free? What's the what's the endgame there?
Speaker 2:Yep. So the free part is so, you know, even though we have the successful application, we still you know, we don't have big piles of money lying around to market and advertise and things like that. So I'm always looking for what's what's the advantage that we have there. And so I like the idea of so freemium will sometimes give you an advantage if you can if your tool lends itself to being leveraged by freemium. So like if you have the kinda app that when a business uses it, the people using it are all internal, like that doesn't the freemium doesn't really help you so much there because somebody still has to find you.
Speaker 2:And then you still have the question of how do they find you. Yeah. And that's a hard question. But with the surveying, I like it because it's inherently has some virality to it because I'm a company, I'm going to send this survey to all my customers. All those people are gonna see it.
Speaker 2:Some subgroup of them are gonna be business people and wonder, hey, I wish I knew how my customers were feeling. Yeah. And they're gonna see our little badge there, right? And you know, the power I mean, there's nothing I'm not inventing anything. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you know, Powered By and all that stuff. So you got the Powered By links, you got inherent virality because they're always sending it outside the organization to other organizations. And so then the kinda epiphany I had so this has been on the on the docket for a couple years now because I kept getting muddled down in the what should we price it at, how much it's gonna cost, all all pricing stuff that just can drain you like the different tiers. What should I do?
Speaker 2:Blah blah. Yeah. And when I was like, you know what? Like, let me look at how much it's gonna actually cost to run this thing. And these surveys are not complicated by their nature, and so the storage and server requirement, all that stuff is, I mean, it's cheap now anyway compared to the old days.
Speaker 2:And it's for this, it's quite cheap because it's one row in a database. When somebody takes a survey, it's one tiny row. Yeah. Not even like a lot of data. It's a little bit of data in one row in a database.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's like, okay, well, I mean, we do have some money, so if this costs a few $100 a month to run or whatever, that's fine. If we have some customer support and stuff, that's fine. We have to watch That's probably the most risky part of this is, you know, you end up with a customer support sort of overload or something like that. So you gotta watch that.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. Basically, it's not gonna cost a lot. So, okay. Let's let's just do it free. We'll put in early on when there's no paid option at all, there's just gonna be ad in there for Helpspot.
Speaker 2:Because if you're surveying your customers, well, you're probably a business, and you probably do customer support. So the least the sort of baseline scenario here is it's an engineering as marketing initiative. Yeah. And if we can cross sell some people on paying for HubSpot, that's awesome. And then from there, you know, we'll see how it goes.
Speaker 2:So it could just end up being that. And if we get just a few sales of HubSpot a month or something like that or even one, it's gonna pay for itself and it'll just be what it is. But I also think there's the opportunity to do things like if you want us to email the surveys to for you, like that actually costs more money then because you have to send all those emails, you're using SendGrid or whatever. Yeah. We use Mailgun.
Speaker 2:And so that's gonna cost us a lot more money than just the hosting. So okay. So that's a paid plan and that's $49 or $79 or whatever. Don't know what it is yet. And so there'll be a few things like that where I think there'll be really big customers who are like, hey, you know, can it show us crazy report x?
Speaker 2:And so maybe crazy report x is, you know, a paid tier. There'll probably be some kinda upper limit, like you can't send a million surveys a month to it or or so. You know, a thousand or a couple thousand or something like that a month if you need to if you need to get more responses than that. I mean, if you're getting more than a thousand responses a month, you are a pretty big business. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So because that means you sent it to 10,000 people or, you know, 5,000 people, and and you're not sending it to every customer every month, so you probably have twenty, thirty thousand customers. So, you know, again, if we're charging you $39 or something, you're not gonna that's not not an issue for you. Yeah. So Yeah. That's the idea.
Speaker 2:Like, I don't like the I don't like I like things that market themselves. Like, I'm not good at doing the marketing. I don't like to do marketing, so I'm always looking for a way that something can market itself to some degree, at least.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's interesting is, in this case, you were looking kind of upstream at the enterprise market and saying, this is a thing that already exists there.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And then you started to see it trickle down, and that's it seems where you got interested was you're like, okay. I'm aware of this thing, but it costs thousands of dollars a month. And now oh, now some people are trying it. And it sounds like you're going like, part of your approach is to even is to go cheaper. Right?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Like so you're like, I can definitely be cheaper than enterprise, but I can probably also be cheaper than this $99 a month starting point.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Is that, and it it was similar with HelpSpot initially. Right? Like, initially, help software was really expensive, and you made it cheaper. Is that enough? Like, can you just can you just create something that's cheaper and get ahold of them you know, get a foothold in a market?
Speaker 1:And then what does it take after that if if that's where you start?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think, you know, I think that's always I always view a purchase a customer purchasing as like a check sheet. And they're looking around at different options, and every option they're looking at, you know, they're checking items off their list. And so I like to get as many checks as I can. So, you know, being less expensive is almost always a win for you.
Speaker 2:I know like there's sort of this idea that, like, people don't wanna buy the cheaper one. Right? They're just gonna buy the more expensive one just because. And especially when people talk about businesses, they feel like that's the default. That hasn't been my experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That that's you know, there are absolutely cases where that's true. But I don't it's not enough of them. That wouldn't be enough to dissuade me from wanting to be cheaper. Like Yeah.
Speaker 2:I want I would prefer to be the less expensive option in most cases. Now you you have to be careful. Right? Because I'm not gonna go down to $5 a user a month because you just can't even make a business unless you have some, you know, whatever. If I have a million person audience, then I actually can make an awesome business of $5 a month if I can get 10% of them to subscribe to something of mine.
Speaker 2:Right? So Yeah. It's very dependent. But for most people, you still have to have eventually some way to make some reasonable amount of money. But all things being equal, I'd rather be less expensive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think that modern software, that's where people are being trained into that. Right? Like, well, I don't pay for apps. Apps are free.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, I don't pay for my email. Email's free. Gmail gives me email. Or and even business wise, I pay $5 a month per user at Userscape for our business email and all our document management.
Speaker 2:And, you know, all the backup everything to do with our business, I pay Google $5 a person a month for. So we pay them, you know, $50 or whatever.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, you know
Speaker 1:It's so funny. Like, you almost can't fight that. I have two thoughts here. One, I'll get back to you. But even on that Google for business thing, I was on their their beta free plan forever.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And I just had to upgrade now. And I think I ended up having I think I've got, I don't know, five to eight paid emails I have to pay for just because I'd created so many in the past. It's just me. I'm a company of one. But I've got all these email addresses.
Speaker 1:I was like, I don't wanna get rid of them or anything. So I'm just gonna pay for them. So I'm paying $5 a month. So that's, like, whatever, $40.50 bucks, $60, $80. I don't know what it is.
Speaker 1:And I'm grumpy about it because I was pay I was paying nothing, and now I have to pay $80 a month or whatever it is. Yeah. And but at the end of the day, I make a lot of my money based on email and sending spreadsheets and sending, you know, Google Docs. Like, these are all things that help me run my business. But because it was free before, and now I have to pay, I'm grumpy about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But on the other hand what's a good example? WP Engine, I pay I pay them, like, a $150 a month. Right. And that's an important part of my business too, but I'm not nearly as grumpy about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I I I think, what gets missed sometimes is that people have certain mindsets in certain contexts, like certain mindsets about money in certain contexts. And, you know, in your personal life, you might bulk at paying, you know, anything over a $100 a month for a subscription. That's because that's your personal context. You're like, ah.
Speaker 1:Right. Like, anything else is too expensive. But then there's also these other contexts that have been created either by the market or whatever. And basically, it means, like, some people aren't willing to pay more than whatever it is, you know, five bucks per month per email address for something that they're gonna use every single day and get a ton of value out of. You know what I Like
Speaker 2:It's weird. And I mean, something like email there's also these differences where, like, email's, like, borderline a commodity at this point. Right? There's tons of free providers. There's tons of really cheap providers.
Speaker 2:Then you have other things like hosting. Like, there you have a lot of pain. Even though you can definitely get cheap hosting Yeah. But you know if you're running WordPress that you might be the person who have to deal with it when it goes south. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you've probably been that person before.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You don't wanna be that person again. So that pain that you've suffered before, boy, that's I I'm willing to pay that a $100 because when inevitably the hackers come or something gets messed up with a deploy or whatever, like, WP Engine fixes all that for me, and I don't ever have to think about it. Yeah. Which is what what I'm paying for there. And that's where like being honest about the kinda app you have.
Speaker 2:Like with Helpspot, we're closer to the WP Engine of that. Like, you know, the help desk is so incredibly critical. All everybody's in there. If people can't use it, then they they can't support their customers and people are freaking the heck out over it, right? So they're a little less price sensitive than in other contexts.
Speaker 2:Well, I still think price is a big factor, and I still wanna win that check sheet item, but there it's a little bit more flexibility there. Yeah. But then when I was thinking about that that continuum with like thermostat, it's like, well, I couldn't like send my NPS surveys today. Like, you know Yeah. That's important and I need I I if it goes down forever, I'm gonna be upset and go to a provider or whatever.
Speaker 2:But ultimately, like, if I'm looking at different options and they seem basically the same and one of them is cheaper, like, I there's no pain there. Right? Like, there's no the differences between them, unless there's some feature I have to have, there's all that kind of stuff. But all things being equal, I don't know if that's going to be the kind of market where, hey, I'm just gonna pay more just because. Like, hey, I'm just gonna pay more just because this one is more, so I'm gonna pay more.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or you know what I mean? Like, or I'm gonna position myself as ultra premium one question survey provider. Like, don't know if you know what I mean? Like, there there will be somebody in that part of the market, but overall, it's gonna be hard to position yourself as or harder, especially for a boost driver, to say we are the premium way to send this one question survey. Like Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I think it's gonna be easier to say we're the least expensive way to send your one question survey, and look at all this value. We're creating tremendous value for your business for little or no money, and you should talk wonderful about us, and so on and so forth. Yeah. Versus, you know, we're charging you an arm and leg and we're creating value, but we're also kinda easily repacable and there isn't actually the whole organization dependent on us every day. And, you know, so it's it's a different kind of product.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you have to, like, think about your products that way and where where they are and what the market for them is.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think that was the second thing I wanted to talk about is I think there is a lot of folklore in this, I don't know, this industry or this community around pricing. Just because we've heard stories, like anecdotal stories, like, you know, like the one that everyone always says is like, you know, I went in with this price and the purchasing agent's like, no. Scratch that price out, and I'll pay double.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And those anecdotes, I think one of the dangers of that is that you really never know until you've actually tried it yourself with your product. And so even some of these kind of, simplistic truisms that people throw around, like double your rates or charge more or whatever, they're they're just too blunt of, the the advice is too blunt to really apply Right. Too general to really apply to any situation until you've tested it. So for sure, you know, maybe you have a product and you need to double your price and test it. But I've also heard from a lot of people who have tried doubling their price and it ended up being really
Speaker 2:bad for their business. That's why I'd rather start cheaper, you know, and then experiment with hiking it up. Still the very best pricing advice I've ever gotten was Eric Sink who I've mentioned before and he ran this kind of forum. Yeah. You know, and he had great he has a great software company and he sold part of his software company at Microsoft at one point.
Speaker 2:This guy really he's not kind of out there as much as he used to be. Yeah. So most, like, younger bootstrappers here haven't haven't heard of him.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've never heard of him, actually.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So he's got some books from back in the day about software development and stuff, but he's a he's really great and a help spot customer, which big thumbs up there. But his his advice was that if nobody's complaining, your price isn't high enough. So that's a good kind of like just sanity check. Like, I'm gonna keep upping it, start kind of lower, and then up it until people are complaining.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, you know, not just one person, but if you're getting a number of complaints, then you're probably too high. Because there's a lot of people who are complaining. If they're they're not gonna complain. Right?
Speaker 2:They're gonna see the price and say, I'm out of here. So just as a sort of because it's always hard to find that out until you wait for your sales to like drop off the cliff or like you're trying to figure out like, can I raise it? Of course, wanna raise it as much as you can without going over. Yeah. So I always thought that was a good just sort of rule of thumb to keep in mind is have we not gotten any complaints in a long time?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Then but that's what with the with the support in Helpspot, because it's not it's now a SaaS app optionally, although it can be on premise. And it is subscription now, it wasn't subscription up until like a year and a half ago. Mhmm. So before it was subscription, there was support fees you paid every year.
Speaker 2:And for that and the licenses, like that was always my rule of thumb. I like, boy, it's been like a year since anybody like really was mad about our support fees. Like Yeah. We should probably up the price and we upped the price. And a couple of people would complain, but then it would be fine and people would pay the support and it would be great.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. Yeah. It's all, you know, it's all relative. Like even before I launched help spa, I doubled the price before I launched over what I was gonna put it at. So I raised the price, but it was still less than many other options.
Speaker 2:So in terms of competition, it was less, but in terms of my own scared thinking, I I I charged more because I was gonna be like, I was gonna charge nothing, basically. And I was like, boy, let me let me let me increase it because that's like I mean, I have to sell a lot of these at that nothing amount. So we doubled it before we launched, but it was still less than much of the competition. Not all of it, but much of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think the other thing people forget is when you're building trust and you're starting out, if you're if you're gonna call me up and say, hey, Justin. I know your WP Engine bill is a $150 a month, and I think I can do it for, you know, 49.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Well, you've got my interest because I would love to save that money every month. I I every time I see that bill, it's one of the bills that I think, man, that's that's getting up there. Right. And so I part of me is primed. I I think the other thing is that this idea that people, even in big organizations, are never thinking about what things cost.
Speaker 2:I thought total fouls.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You alluded to this too. And I and I've just never been in a organization that didn't care care
Speaker 2:about the cost. So go oh, it's under thousands of dollars. Go spend it. No. Like Yeah.
Speaker 2:They still somebody still has to answer for it. Even if they have the ability to buy, they still have to answer to somebody for why they spent that So they're always worried to some degree about justifying that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, I mean, there's certain things like today on Twitter, I asked I said, I think I spent $1,800 on domain names this past three years. Yes. And and people were like, what what are you what where are you host where where who's your registrar? And I said, well, I'm with Hover, and I know name cheap is cheaper.
Speaker 1:But I've just it it's not enough of a price difference for me to care. It's like Hover's just always been good. I I'm sure I could go and find domains more expensive somewhere. I'm sure somewhere else
Speaker 2:that's Right. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:But Hover's just in a sweet spot for me. They it's it's not so expensive that I really care, and it's you know, and the experience is great. So I'm not willing to risk it to to switch.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And there's a high switching cost, which is the same as WP Engine. Like, switching is a pain in the butt. Like, these domains, switching moving into registrar is actually a huge pain, and it's for something that costs $15. So the pain versus price, even though that $15 is screwing you out of $5 over the $10 that name cheap, that's still a 50% there's not enough money there for the pain of days of authorization codes and link clicking and seeing if it transferred right and updating your DNS and all the stuff that you're gonna have to do, which is just not worth doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So
Speaker 1:And I think the other thing people miss is that sometimes, cost can be a real trigger for people, even rich CEOs. Like, I I worked for a I worked for a guy who, like he was a CEO, and he once spent, like, a whole day trying to minimize our, our cost with this one vendor. And he ended up saving, like, $35 a month or something like that.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And he's got so many other things to do. Like, was such a bad use of his time, but I think people miss out on the emotional
Speaker 2:Yeah. Piece of it. A bad deal.
Speaker 1:No one likes a bad deal. And a lot of even in big organizations, a lot of these, people, even if they have a lot of money, are cheap. Yeah. And so if if there is an opportunity to go in and and say, you know, this this is a lower cost than what you're paying, and it if you're gonna get me to switch, you're right. There's gonna be some check boxes.
Speaker 1:And one of them is, okay. If you're brand new and you're more expensive, why would I switch? Like, that doesn't make any sense. In the same way that you wouldn't accept a job if they were like, hey. We'd like you to come work for us, and we're gonna pay you less money.
Speaker 1:You'd be like, well, I think you're gonna have to like, your your other items on gonna get. Well, yeah, the other items on that checklist have better be pretty damn good
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:If I'm gonna go that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's even a good an interesting case study with the hover because, you know, you have to know what you're good at and what you wanna do and what interests you. Like, I'm not interested in having I like this making of the software and the selling of the software. I'm not so much personally interested in like a large organization, let's say, of like a lot of people and that kind of thing. And so so Hover, for example.
Speaker 2:So Hover charges more, but one of the things they do is that they'll move your domains for you. Like, they will have a person physically do it, and they'll call the other registrar, deal with the authorization. Like, they'll do a lot of stuff for you. So that's a way that they could charge more and justify it. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, we know it's a huge pain for you. Mhmm. And we know you're unhappy with your current registrar for whatever reason. And yes, we're a little bit more, but guess what? You can just tell us to go do this, and we will go do it.
Speaker 2:You don't have to think about it again. So there you go. So so okay. So if you're gonna have like a service component or something like that, like you might be able to come up with ways to justify being more expensive. And I think that you should do that if you can do that, and if you want to do that, is always the part everybody else always leaves out also is like, maybe you just don't want to do that.
Speaker 2:Like Yeah. It's like the other advice that's always around like, you know, write an ebook first and then do the next thing and phase it up. That's great. Except I don't wanna freaking write an ebook. Like I wanna run a software company and I don't wanna write an ebook.
Speaker 2:Now you could say I'm being a baby and that I need to learn those skills first by writing this ebook and blah blah. Build an audience. I get all I know all the things. Right? But ultimately, I'm gonna write a shitty ebook because I don't wanna do it, and I'm not interested in it.
Speaker 2:So, you know, so is my time better spent a year thinking about what ebook to write, writing it, and then making $10,000 on an okay ebook launch? Mhmm. Or maybe in that year, I would've built out the software the way I see it, worked on coming up with the right market fit, you know, gotten on the right podcast guesting to like make some awareness, figured out the right hook and the right niche to approach at the right Facebook group or whatever. You know, getting into the actual selling of the actual software I actually wanna make instead of the tangential path, which has absolutely worked for some people. But Mhmm.
Speaker 2:You know, you're not all in on that and you're not gonna do a good job with it, like, that's you're not that's not gonna work.
Speaker 1:So This is why I like talking to you because I I because I'm definitely the guy saying start small. Start with Right. I know. Start with start with teaching. Start with and, the but on the other hand, I can completely understand that if so much of this advice is based on what you're good at or what you like to do or you know?
Speaker 1:And so if if so for example, I'm I will never be able to build software by myself, and so I don't focus on that stuff. I I just focus on on the on the other things, and Yep. That's that that's always been my way of of kinda getting in.
Speaker 2:And I think it depends so much, like, your personality. Right? You are like, bam. I can have five things going at once. I I'm gonna do one thing.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna finish. I'm gonna go on the next thing. I'm gonna on next thing. I can I'm good at that idea of switching over over to something new or or cutting loose something that maybe didn't work or had its run and now it's done. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, so you're you're cut that baby loose and you're on to the next thing you're doing. Yeah. Which is not those are like all skills that lend themselves to what you're doing which is why it's working for you. But if you don't have some of those skills, then it's you know, if you can't crank out something that's high quality fairly quickly and instead it takes you eight months to do this thing and you build up, you know, a thousand people in this audience and you make $10,000, but ultimately, you wanna build you decide to build a software product that doesn't really perfectly match with that audience you built Mhmm. That is all worth like, those people aren't gonna help you at all.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So, you know, it all winds up perfect, that's great. Like, you you write the book, you do a same video series or something, and and it perfectly matches the next phase where those people are obvious buyers for your software, then that's great. Mhmm. But, you know, like, I mean, even you see a lot like Brennan Dunne there.
Speaker 2:Like, he has all these freelancers, and he was had software for freelancers, and he got rid of the software for freelancers Yeah. Because it didn't it couldn't sell the software to the freelancers, and he's got thousands and thousands of freelancers who follow him. And so
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think it made some money. It wasn't like a total bust, but it was not worth doing. Yeah. So even if you had the huge audience and that should be perfectly aligned, you know, it's still hard to make that leap. And software, it takes you know, it's quick to build the software now but it's still years to perfect it and iterate on it and figure out all those little features you need that are the difference between somebody buying and not buying.
Speaker 2:Figure out your onboarding and make it perfect. Figure getting your documentation right. Getting your support system right. Like, all these things still take a long time even though you can kinda get rolling a lot faster. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a lot though.
Speaker 1:It feels like there's two risks, and this is something my wife reminds me of all the time is like, on one hand, everyone is always going to kind of trumpet what worked for them.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And and the danger in that, of course, is that what worked for me is likely not gonna work for you.
Speaker 2:Right. Right.
Speaker 1:There's also, like, varying like, so on one hand, you know, like, I'm hoping to do $200,000 in revenue this year. That's that's, like, my goal for my little one person company. Yep. And for some people, that is incredible. But for other people, that would be not
Speaker 2:Not worth doing.
Speaker 1:Not worth doing at all. And so there's so much but they're they'd be willing to build a team and move to New York and all these things that I don't wanna do. Right. I I think the other thing, though, is that, what's what and so this is kind of flipping it around, is what's been successful for me up till now, now I'm trying to give myself advice, has produced all sorts of blind spots. Like, you know, just because so here's here's one thing I've noticed, is every launch I do, I have a better launch.
Speaker 1:But that launch, when I survey those folks with NPS, by the way Oh, there we go. When the the most interesting thing about NPS is the the comments. So why did you choose that answer?
Speaker 2:Well, this is just let me jump into that for one second, is that I think one of the keys to me with thermostat is that you have the NPS score and all that, but it's exactly what you said in getting that fee. So for people who don't know, after you click on eight or whatever, you'll usually on most systems get a little box that says, hey, like why'd you choose an eight or it might say something else. Basically it's an open ended feedback box. And so many companies will go years without really ever talking to their customer. Like they talk to them when they're making the sale Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Maybe. And in SaaS apps now, oftentimes not even then. But usually there'll be some at least an email or two to get set up. And then you never talk to these people ever again. Like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Until they have some support issue or till they cancel. And so just that like repetitive, you're actively thinking about reaching out to your customers, they're writing you. These are real people writing you with actual issues in sort of a different context than just purely, hey, I'm canceling or there's a software bug or something. I think that is such a huge part of the value is is having that regular interaction Yeah. With the customers.
Speaker 2:Well, and then
Speaker 1:because it then you can start to notice trends. And so Yeah. One of the trends I've noticed is that there's a big percentage of people buy that buy, just because they're fans of my work. So Right. It might be, like, they've been they've been reading my stuff forever or they like my YouTube channel or they
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And they just wanna be involved in what I'm doing. You know who else has a business like this is Jeff at UggMonk.
Speaker 2:Okay. I don't know him.
Speaker 1:He's so he's he he's a designer, and he just makes really beautiful things. He has a t shirt line. He just launched a Kickstarter today for this desktop organization thing. You're gonna see it for sure today, Ian. People are Okay.
Speaker 1:Lots of people are tweeting about it.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow.
Speaker 1:But he's a kind of guy and this is actually a great point. You don't know about him because you're not a fan. But his fans basically will buy everything he puts out. He'll put out something new, and his fans will go. And so he's very kinda launch centric.
Speaker 1:So that's the trend is that Right. Okay. That's what's happening. But there's a huge blind spot there, which is if I'm gonna build so one of the challenges I got at MicroConf was, Justin, you're working way too hard, and you should really be thinking about how to work less and make more money.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And I traditionally, I haven't been that motivated by money. So both of these are, like, big challenges for me. Like, Justin, what would it take for you to work three hours a day and to make a million dollars a year?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And these are the the the reason these might be blind spots is I you know, I'm just used to doing what's worked for for me. Right? Like, here I go. Here I go again. Here I go again.
Speaker 1:And then, you know, a few people are like, man. Like, Justin, you got sick a few times this year, and that definitely affected every time you get sick, you can't make money, basically.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Right. You completely depend. And one day, you know, I'm 30 I'm turning 37.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And already, like, you know, I'm starting to get, like, RSI in my arm
Speaker 2:and, like, all this Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so you start to think, man. And I got four kids that are getting into braces ages and, college age and, you know, so all of these things are blind spots. Right? Yeah. And so there's the flip side of that, of of, you know, the the person the hero that you have might have all sorts of blind spots that they're not communicating.
Speaker 1:So they're saying, you know, this is what to do because this is what worked for me. But at the same time, like, you know, maybe, this is unfair, but maybe Jason Fried has a really shitty marriage. Or Right. Maybe you know, like, there's all
Speaker 2:these Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Kinda blind spots that that we have as individuals and we also don't see other people having.
Speaker 2:There's also a related thing to this, which I think is something that you really have to work hard to stay aware of these days, which is that people who are following, you know, you or Brennan Don or whatever, any any personalities. Right? And there's a temptation because I'm listening to your podcast every week and I'm watching your videos and all these kind of things to take the advice that works for your business and apply it to my business. And if my business isn't the same as your business, then that's gonna be bad advice. Do know what I mean?
Speaker 2:Like there's so much advice out there right now on content initiatives, whether it's like video or ebooks or whatever. And if you are in a software business, it sounds like that advice should work for you. Mhmm. But a lot of times it doesn't work for you for software businesses very well. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so there's you always have to be a little careful with that too. And there's some things that are universal and you you wanna pick those things out. Right? And then there's other things that aren't universal but feel like they are. And so you get going down that road, and then you're in a bad spot because you're doing a bunch of things that work for an e book, but they don't work for a SaaS app very well.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And but, you know, but I'm listening to these these are the kind of things that are most prominent now in sort of like podcasting and articles online is a lot of, you know, content oriented initiatives. You know, so it's just just something I'm always trying to be aware of myself because I definitely get caught up in, oh my god, it's a great idea, and then I'll spend a week working on it and implementing it, and then I'm like, oh, well, this actually doesn't work for software at all. Like, I don't know why I was doing this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or it didn't work for your software.
Speaker 2:Right? No. It's true too. Absolutely. Because it might just be me.
Speaker 1:And and so much so much so much of this comes like, Intercom has just doubled down on content. Like, they've been creating this beautiful magazine, online magazine, and, you know, they're they're really investing a lot in it. But it part of it works for them because they've got obviously, have people inside of the company Sure. That are really excited about that. So it's a lot easier to wake up every day and write something if you like to write.
Speaker 2:Right. And if you can say, I'm gonna hire 20 writers and write make something awesome, then I'm just the guy hiring 20 writers. You know? Exactly. That's a much easier position than, being the person who has to wake up and write everything.
Speaker 1:So so how do you because this is all this has always been something I've admired about you is that you're not afraid to go against the grain. How do you how do you know like, how did you get to this point where you knew yourself and what you're good at, what you like to do, and maybe even know your company good enough and what it's good at that you're able to say, okay. You know what? That doesn't work for us or that wouldn't work for us. We're gonna focus on this.
Speaker 1:Or or do you do you even feel like you're at that point? Like
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, you know, you not always. Right? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I think it's it's very hard.
Speaker 2:I think you have to keep experimenting. That's a big part of it because it's hard to experiment on the main thing that makes most of your money. Like, it's just a hard it's hard for many reasons. It's hard because it's scary for you because you're like, boy, I might screw this up. It's hard because your customers don't want you to change it often.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So So for you, that's Helpspot. Like, Helpspot still like 90% of your revenue or something?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Yep. And then in the past, we we did another help desk called Snappy, which was gonna be kind of a simpler help desk as compared to Helpspot, which is more kind of enterprise y, not not really too big enterprise, but enterprise y compared to like, who was coming out at that time was things like Helpscout and these other kind of like $10 a month. Yep. Cheaper help desks.
Speaker 2:Yep. And so I was like, well, maybe we should build something to be down at that market and something that, you know, has more scale to it. It's okay. Like, let's build something that's cheap and wide and all that stuff, but it didn't have enough of the attributes to make it wide on its own. It didn't have any virality to it.
Speaker 2:It was still a big it's still hard to get people to switch because it's still moving your help desk. Mhmm. Those other tools were better at content than us and some of those kind of things. So it just didn't work and it failed and I ended up selling it off, but, but I learned a lot from that. I was like, well, if I'm ever gonna do something less expensive again, then I wanna look at like some of the things we talked about earlier Yeah.
Speaker 2:To make sure it can sustain itself at least hopefully. I don't know if it'll work, but there's more probability there with that. Cost wise, like I spent way too much on Snappy. How can I like it's not like thermostat? I built the whole thing myself until the last two weeks or so I've had one of our developers join with working with me on it.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. Like, I'm not spending any money basically. We're gonna have like do a little logo, spend a few bucks on a logo or whatever. But we're keeping the whole thing under probably definitely under 10,000. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Up to launch anyway, and there'll be some more costs after that, but keeping the costs really tight and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, things you learn, and then you also learn from that. Like, we with Snappy was a place where we did do a lot of testing of content marketing and other sort of things like that, and it didn't didn't work for us. Like, I tried hiring somebody to do it, didn't work. I tried that again more recently, again, didn't work.
Speaker 2:And it is partially for us. Partially, it's who we are. Partially, it's like the market we're in. Obviously, if you're in a market like Helpdesk Software has a ton of companies all doing super awesome content marketing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So can I be company number 10 doing super awesome content marketing? Yeah. Like that's hard unless I have some really unique angle, which I don't. Yeah. I mean, startup bootstrapper thing, that's not good customers for HubSpot because it's a bunch of one license sales not really not really moving the needle, and we're kind of too expensive often for them anyway.
Speaker 2:So okay, the boost dropper thing doesn't really fit. You know, we're not like a A great example is is intercom that you brought up. So that's sort of a tool that saw that wave that we're talking about and said, hey, let's build a help desk, and they do other things like they're they're like a weird amalgamation, right? But part of what they do is help desk. In theory, they wouldn't even necessarily call it that, but so part of what they do is customer service, and they said, hey, let's forget about all these businesses out there that HubSpot serves.
Speaker 2:Yep. Basically, we're not serving anybody HubSpot serves. We only care about SaaS apps.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We don't care about schools. We don't care about banks. We don't care about hospitals. All we care about is SaaS apps. And if all we care about SaaS apps, what does that mean?
Speaker 2:Well, that means like you can have a drop in JavaScript that installs everything magically and can have a chat box and you can automate a bunch of stuff that other tools might have to ask people to manually do because it's, you know, behind some firewall installed at, you know, some hospital or whatever. So they're able to do a lot of things differently than traditional support tools because they've abandoned 95% of the market and said, we're gonna own this five or 10%. And that's a huge and that's a market that's growing. Software as a service and websites, all stuff like we are gonna own that and leave traditional IT help desk and traditional support systems and and organizations. We're gonna forget about them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So like, that's a thing that a decision they made, which is I'll say for now it's paying off for them. I mean, they've gotten a lot bigger. They aren't they aren't profitable. So, you know, we'll see how that all shakes out eventually, but I think they'll probably make it because I think it seems, like, pretty well run and everything.
Speaker 2:But, but yeah.
Speaker 1:It's So and so much of this really is, like, experimenting, trying things on, seeing if they fit for you and your circumstance and everything else. And because it sounds like you were able to learn in your case, you're like, you know what? I gave content marketing a really good run. Like, we really tried that, and I just didn't like it. It didn't work for us.
Speaker 1:And I think eventually, you do kinda have to say, you know what? That didn't work. I'm gonna try something else. And there's there's this, yeah. There's this kinda level of, like, just knowing yourself, and then eventually knowing your team and then eventually knowing your product and then also all along kind of knowing the customers that that you have.
Speaker 1:You know? It feels like you have to be aware of all that stuff.
Speaker 2:Yep. You do. It's hard. And experimenting is so huge because that that's like, even with thermostat. And even the things you think that don't work for you, it's interesting to keep thinking about them, which is why this job's kinda horrible because you're basically working twenty four hours a day, which is a whole separate conversation.
Speaker 2:But is to keep thinking about these things because, like, with with thermostat. So we've done all this content marketing. We've done it where I'm writing about stuff. We've done it. This is not now on Helpspot and Snappy Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Where I paid somebody to write articles. I paid another organization to write articles like and most of that stuff just did it just wasn't good enough is the reality. Right? It just wasn't good enough. And but meanwhile, in the very beginning of HubSpot, content marketing before that was even called that was kind of how we got started because it was just me talking about what the business is and how I'm building it.
Speaker 2:And other people who are interested kinda helped amplify that message a little bit, and it was personal, and that worked. So it's like at different phases, different things will work. And like one of the things I'm doing with thermostat that is working, and I've only done two of these so far, so it's it's very early. But I said, you know what I'm gonna do with the thermostat mailing list? Is I'm just gonna treat it like my personal list.
Speaker 2:Like, it's just gonna be me talking to the people who have signed up to hear more about thermostat for when it's launched. Yeah. And I'm just gonna tell them, here's some stuff about MPS that's like been on my mind. Here's like a development update. It's written in my voice as me.
Speaker 2:It's not on a blog. It's not anywhere. Occasionally, I might take a piece out and put it up on the website or something if it's like, if it works that way. Yeah. Mostly SEO wise, honestly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but otherwise, I'm not gonna just gonna take the whole newsletter and put up there. I'm not gonna write a whole thing and be like, no, this is a blog post that I'm also sending to a newsletter. No. This is me writing it as me to the newsletter like I'm writing a personal email to everybody.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And that actually so far has worked great. Like people are responding back and people have linked to it from that. So that, you know, adding that personal sort of touch to it and it's something at the beginning and people are interested and, like, that's worked. So I'm gonna keep doing that for, you know, a little while and see how that goes.
Speaker 2:But but yeah. So I could've just abandoned the content stuff completely and say, yeah, this is just a list for when we launch and I'll let you know. But I said, no, let me try this and it kinda worked. So, you know, it's like you gotta be revisiting these things and revisit them in different context and having these different experiments like this app itself being kind of an experiment where we can try free. I could try stuff like emailing the list as just me, the guy creating it, instead of, you know, president of the software of the help desk you use, which is kind of a whole different vibe.
Speaker 2:Right? Mhmm. You know, so we could just try different things there and see what works.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So how do you and maybe we'll end with this. If we're if we're thinking about someone out there that's, you know, thinking about building software, and maybe even more generally, like, do you think everyone should be building software? Yeah. Right.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Definitely everyone should not be building software, but I think if you wanna build software, then you should build software is my advice on that. The other thing would be one thing that people have totally dismissed at this point, and I think is a mistake, is SEO. So definitely I think people should be thinking about SEO and not just in the I mean, that's it kinda gets mixed up with the content because it's like, we'll just make a bunch of articles and that'll be our SEO. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But you're much better off having like one or two pages that you really deeply think about the SEO and work on that versus like a million long tail pages that you're yeah. You produced a bunch of stuff but nobody's linking to it. Mhmm. You know, it's all irrelevant. And because Google is gonna push that stuff way down.
Speaker 2:But that's I mean, SEO is still our number one marketing source on Helpspa, and that's a that's an incredibly competitive SEO market with big public companies that we compete against and everything. Mhmm. And it's not as easy as it used to be, but at the same time, in some of these, you know, less established areas, like you you could rank number one still for a lot of useful terms, and there's still nothing better. All the stuff we talk about, podcasts and articles and ebooks and building an audience, all this stuff, there's still nothing as good as somebody sitting at their computer typing in the exact thing you do and then finding you. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That is the best because they are just they're right there. They wanna buy it right now, and then they find you. Yeah. And there's nothing better than that. Like a podcast never gonna be better than that.
Speaker 2:Some article they read on Medium is not gonna be better than that. Nothing is as good as they're in Google in the mindset of our customer service sucks. I need some new help desk software to organize things. And bam, they hit help spot. Like, that's the best.
Speaker 2:That's that's optimal. So I think people get rid of that for these newer things and the newer things are good. Like, you know, Twitter and Facebook and all these things are important nowadays, but I would not abandon SEO. And I think SEO is probably still number one because the other thing is you can you can kind of organize it more as a bootstrapper if you're a small one person or a few people. Like it's a manageable thing that you can work on over a long time that's doesn't require necessarily every week attention, but you're still making progress.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Whereas like the content, like if you're gonna write a big blog and compete on content marketing, like you're gonna have to write articles every week or or more often than that Yeah. Potentially. Or you're gonna have to write huge monster articles. Like here's my once a month 20,000 words on whatever whatever.
Speaker 2:You're gonna be working on that all the time. And the SEO can be more of a thing where, yeah, I I do a push and then I don't even think about it for six months. And I do a push and I mean early on you might not be able to go six months, but it fits into the schedule better and it works really well. So I think that I never hear anybody talk about SEO on any of these kind of bootstrapper ish podcasts and things these days and or on Twitter or anything, and I think that's unfortunate because the SEO is still a useful channel.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's a that's a great takeaway. And I I've been thinking about it a lot lately, actually. This last six months, I've been thinking because that was one of my blind spots was just focused on so much on content marketing And then thinking about, like, searching with intent is such like you said, is
Speaker 2:I mean, it's the golden goose.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be hard to win. I I mean, it's gonna be hard to compete against that. Like, there that's at the end of the day, when someone has, a need and they're you know, let whatever it is, they get angry at your competitor, and they're they're gonna go search for
Speaker 2:Right. The
Speaker 1:same thing
Speaker 2:again. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's really hard to kinda replace that.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Cool, man. Well, this has been awesome. We're gonna have to do it again sometime. People can find help spot at helpspot.com. Can they find thermostat right now?
Speaker 2:Yep. Thermostat.io, and, it's got, you know, some information, landing page, all that kind of stuff. So we'll be launching that next, hopefully, month or so.
Speaker 1:Sweet. And I highly recommend you you follow Ian on Twitter. Ian Landsman is his Twitter handle. Unless you don't want he I mean, like, sometimes Ian goes against the grain. So if you want, if you want soft Twitter, go somewhere else.
Speaker 2:But Yeah.
Speaker 1:If you're if you wanna be angry every once in a while in a in a good way
Speaker 2:Hopefully, in a good way.
Speaker 1:Then, then follow Ian. But yeah.
Speaker 2:Alright. Thanks for having me on, man. It's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great to have you, man. Well, there you go. Big, long conversation with Ian. I was thinking about splitting this up into two parts, and I thought, nah.
Speaker 1:I'll just give you the whole thing all at once. Let me know on Twitter if you like this. I'm the letter m, letter I, Justin, m I Justin. If you are building a solopreneur business, check out my other show, megamaker.co. And, yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1:I'll see you next time I release an episode. Stay subscribed. I've got some good stuff coming. K. Talk to you later.
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