Episode 97
· 32:09
Hello, friends. Welcome back to the Product People Show. This is part one of my conversation with Jason Cohen. Now let me give you a little bit of background on this. Back, how long ago is this now?
Speaker 1:November 30, I was skiing with my family. And as often happens, I'm out in the mountains. I'm on the chairlift. I'm away from technology and do some of my best thinking when I'm on the chairlift. There's it's I'm free of distractions.
Speaker 1:So as I'm heading up the chairlift, this thought pops into my head. You know, the founders of Mailchimp waited six years before going full time on their SaaS. And in the meantime, they were consulting, allowing app revenue to grow on the side. And I also realized this was true for other bootstrappers I admired, like Todoist, WildBit, Basecamp. And if you've been following my story in the last year, you know that John Buddha and I are building and trying to grow transistor.fm, the podcasting platform that is hosting this very show.
Speaker 1:And I thought instead of heaping, you know, expectations on our new startups, what if we just gave them time to grow? You know, like mail Mailchimp. Instead of hustling for immediate growth, should we just focus on slow, steady gains? Anyway, so I went back to the hotel for lunch, and I tweeted this tweet that I'll include in the show notes that was said Mailchimp was a side project for six years. Todoist was a side project for four years.
Speaker 1:Basecamp took two years before it was paying their salaries. Maybe the rest of us shouldn't be in such a hurry. And it blew up. I think it's has, like, 9,000, 10,000 likes right now and thousands of retweets. And, you know, lots of people replied to it, kind of with affirmation saying, you know, this is how long it took me to grow my start up, six years.
Speaker 1:One fellow, Rob Belcher, said that he'd done a survey of 950 b two b SaaS and showed that the median time to $1,000,000 in annual recurring revenue is six years. But I got one reply from or a series of replies from Jason Cohen, and, he was kind of being a little bit, you know, counter to the flow, which is very Jason. And he said it's, you know, difficult to find successful companies where the founders didn't work really hard, long hours. And, you know, saying that it should take three years is wrong. It's hard to find companies that live and took that long.
Speaker 1:All of this, by the way, is in a blog post I published, justinjackson.casideproject. Anyway, so there was a little bit of a Twitter kerfuffle, and I thought, well, the best way to actually understand someone's perspective is to reach out to them and have a conversation. And so that's what I did, with Jason, and it was awesome. We did it as a livestream, and this is part one of that conversation. Now before we get into it, two announcements.
Speaker 1:Number one, Mega Maker Club, my community, my private community for Bootstrapters we've been running since 02/2013, is going to be opening up spots again here in December and January. So if you've been wanting to join, go and sign up for the waiting list. Megamaker.co. We'll get you there, or megamaker.co/club if you wanna go right to the sign up page. And I'll be sending out invites shortly in batches.
Speaker 1:Second announcement is that John and I are considering doing a podcast in 2019 program. And so you can find out more about that podcast February, If especially if you are employed and your employer wants a podcast, this will be a great fit. All of the details are right there. Alright. That's a really long intro.
Speaker 1:Sorry about that. Let's get into part one of my conversation with Jason. So I'm here with Jason Cohen. Hi, Jason.
Speaker 2:Hey. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Jason is the founder of WP Engine, And, it's been a while since the last time I saw you was quite a few years ago at MicroConf, I believe. Last time you spoke.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I haven't had a chance, but congrats on the the funding. You guys just raised 250,000,000 at WP In
Speaker 2:January. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that was based on, I think, a $100,000,000 of revenue from Mhmm. Thousand I thought it'd be interesting to start because I'm I've never worked for a company bigger than a 100 people. How how big is WP Engine now?
Speaker 2:A little over 600.
Speaker 1:600 people. Not all in Austin, though.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So when you get to that scale, I'm thinking you're making a 100,000,000 a year. That's a lot of cash flow. Why raise money? At that scale, what's the benefit of raising money when you're already making, you know, that much cash?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, well, the question is why would you ever raise money? Yeah. I mean, even if you even if you are one person, right, but who needs someone else telling you what to do ever? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And who needs anybody asking questions? I thought the point of being an entrepreneur is you get to decide things
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Without without consensus, or at least only consensus with other people you've chosen. So, yeah, I mean, why do it at all? So, I mean, in general, the answer is actually really obvious for anyone's with any business, which is there's always more crap you wanna do than you have money for.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And maybe that starts running out if you're Google or Microsoft and actually have quite literally a $100,000,000,000 in the bank and making money, and and you you really can't spend it fast enough on things that would that that matter to you or that are strategic to you at that point
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Then I guess it changes. But WP Engine started as a bootstrap company. I bootstrapped it for two years before raising any money. And, of course, the company before that, SmartBear, was bootstrapped. The company before that, IT Watchdogs, was bootstrapped.
Speaker 2:In other words, all the companies I've made are bootstraps. Although now we're obviously in a very different trajectory, you know, my twenty year career has always been in bootstrapping companies until WP Engine, any and even including at the beginning. So, you know, to me, that's that's my mentality is who needs other people's opinions? But then again, it would be nice to have some money. Because it's hard to find a business where you can't say, look, if you had an extra $100,100 grand or $500, do you know what you'd do with it?
Speaker 2:Usually, the answer is yes. And in general, that answer remains yes, but the the the size of the money scales with the business. Like, at this moment, no. There's nothing we could do with an extra 100 k. We can't even hire one person for extra 100 k.
Speaker 2:So, no, that's not helpful at all. But it's always true that there's some initiative that where the size of the initiative, it's bigger when you have more revenue and and therefore more aspirations for what you want initiatives to do. Mhmm. Where it's useful to have money ahead of the money coming in from the customer. Of course, that's also why you should charge annual because that's another way to get money faster than you'd otherwise get, for example.
Speaker 2:So there's there's several ways to do that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:It's interesting thinking about things at different scales. You have this very famous, MicroConf talk called I think it was how to bootstrap, what was it? It was basically how to bootstrap the write
Speaker 2:To build a a cache machine.
Speaker 1:Yes. How to build a cache And Ben Ornstein wanted to know, is this has anything changed since you've given that talk? Would you change your mind on anything? No. Okay.
Speaker 1:So the principles, maybe just for the folks that are watching, could you go through the principles that you talked about in that video? I remember some of them, but there's a few things you hit on And, yeah, one of them was annual renewals, but it felt like there was a few principles there.
Speaker 2:Well, jeez, it's like five years later or something, so I'll have to think too. Basically, the the way the high level way I think about it is it's very hard to make any business work. Mhmm. It's very hard to take in more money than it costs to run it, especially if you're being honest about your cost per hour, your opportunity costs. You know?
Speaker 2:I made $300 this month. Well, if your time is free, then no. You didn't. Right? That's not true.
Speaker 2:So when you're really being honest about what what opportunity costs and everything, it's really hard for any business to not lose money. That's it's difficult. So so so coming at it from that standpoint and also from the view of, like and also you don't have extra cash because, again, the whole point of bootstrapping is do not raise money. So so you have to it has to be self fulfilling. So given these constraints and this problem, how do you make it easier?
Speaker 2:Like, let's it's already almost impossible. Let's not add more difficult things on top of those things. Yeah. Now now I'm just now you're just being crushed. It's too difficult.
Speaker 2:So that's kind of where I came from with that is, like, so so what are the things that make it at least a little bit easier because we need all the help we can get when we're bootstrapping a new company? So for example, WP Engine's a bad company to bootstrap in retrospect. Be but I did say this in the talk because we have to be on twenty four seven. If anything hiccups in the middle of the night, we have to be on it. That's what the service is because we host websites.
Speaker 2:Websites always have to be up. That's bad if you're bootstrapping because it's expensive to do crap twenty four seven. Yeah. Is someone always awake or someone's being paged? Just trying to get a team who can answer questions twenty four seven is a lot more expensive than it sounds.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Because you say, well, I'll need a couple of people because otherwise, can't go to the bathroom. So I need maybe three people. But what about the weekends? Okay.
Speaker 2:So I'm gonna need some more people. And there's three shifts. So that's three even like, I'm trying to get the minimum team. Minimum team will be three people, three shifts is nine, but that's just the weekdays. Any weekends, and there's only two days of the weekends.
Speaker 2:You probably need overlap. So already, we're up to, like, 12 or 13 people. What about managers? Yeah. We need at least, I don't know, one per shift or something.
Speaker 2:So wait a minute. Now we're up to, like, 18 or something like this. What about holidays? What And if someone gets sick? Like, you're a team of, like, 15 to 20.
Speaker 2:Easy if you're actually, honestly, and and and or in an organized way, have twenty four seven support. That's ridiculous. Like, nothing I just said is right for a boojerk company. Right? Nothing.
Speaker 2:No. No. Not at all. I'm just I'm just making the point of, like, these little decisions, like, whatever the product is, it shouldn't be so important that you need to you need someone up in the middle of the night. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Let it be a tool people use, and if it's down for a day, it's it's not ideal, but it's okay. Or it's not even a SaaS thing in the first place, so it's there's no such thing as being down. Or that people don't need tech support instantly. It's okay if you provide support instantly, and in fact, usually, the smaller the company is, the more instant the tech support is. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Ironically, support is amazingly good at small companies, mostly because there's not that much of it. And it's fun because you're talking to customers. It's really half product development, half half customer service when it's small. This is all a good thing, by way. I'm not this is a good thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's when you get bigger, it's like, okay. We actually need a function to do this, and that's harder, and now we have to organize it. And all of sudden, it it gets much more expensive and difficult. So so but still so you probably will give more or less instant support, but it needs to be not to because you're asleep and they're in another country, or they're around the world, or because you just need a break, or you need or you have a day job and so you can't answer the phone in the middle of the day, at least you're not supposed to.
Speaker 2:And it's good to bootstrap while you have a day job. We were talking about this on Twitter. That's a good thing. But it also means you kinda need you you need to pick a thing where you don't need to do tech support at two eight at 2PM your your local time. You can wait till the evening where you where it's okay to do it.
Speaker 2:That has to be okay. Now, again, you can do it anyway. These aren't hard and fast rules that can never be broken. Not no rules are. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it just makes it easier because you've selected something that is more easy for that. So how are you doing how are you interacting with customers? That's that's that comes down to. Do you have to do sales or not? In what way do you have to do sales?
Speaker 2:Does that have to be in person? That makes it even harder, for example. You could say, certainly pricing. Pricing too low just makes it impossible. So if you charge $10 a month, you just need too many.
Speaker 2:You need at least a thousand customers just to get to, like, a basic run rate that means you could quit your day job. Mhmm. And a thousand customers is very hard to get to. It took at least two and a years for WP Engine to get to a thousand customers. We now have 90,000 customers, but it takes a long time to get started.
Speaker 2:Every one of our competitors, every one took more than two years to get a thousand competitors. Not like it got easier. Once we trailblaze the market, maybe it got easier. Nope. Still hard.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. At SmartBear, it took it's a little different because our price point was higher, but it it took a long time to get there. Other companies you've heard of, like like well, like, a lot of lot of the typical things, Patrick McKenzie's companies, even FreshBooks. These companies took a long time to get to something like a thousand customers. Therefore, you can't charge just $10.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It takes freaking long to get the thing going with enough revenue. Yeah. So you also can't charge well, actually, you could charge a thousand dollars and sell a few. That's a really interesting way to go. More likely is something like a $50, a $100 price point.
Speaker 2:In other words, something where you don't have to do something herculean in terms of sales or features in order to justify the price. Yeah. But you can get two or 300 customers and quit your day job, not a thousand. That there's a big difference. Another reason there's a difference between the 200 and a thousand customers is to get a 100 customers, maybe 200, you can kind of just force it with crawling clawing, scratching, getting calling people on LinkedIn doing guest posts, doing podcasts like this.
Speaker 2:Just, like, work just really working hard. You can maybe eke it out if it's a product people really want. You can maybe eke into a 100 customers, 200 customers. So it's great if that's enough to, like, be able to do it full time. That's great.
Speaker 2:A thousand customers, you can't just do that and get to you it's gonna be more systematic.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:AdWords has to work okay. Or maybe it's Pinterest ads. Or maybe you've been writing for a while until you actually an audience, or maybe it's an email list that you build up over time, and then finally that starts yielding. Obviously, there's a million ways that it can go, but you're not gonna just scratch and claw and just kinda force it to get to a thousand. Not gonna happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, again, so that because the dynamics are different and how that works, therefore so that kind of tells you the price point of something like 50, I think, is is an ideal, like, area. Mhmm. For a lot of booster again, this is not rules. This is the rules of thumb, not rules.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It helps. It's just, again, like, are all things that help help help something that's that's difficult to do anyway. So there's there's more. Like you said, charge charge annually because then you get the money now, and if you get the money now, you can spend it now or or quit your day job, and that makes all the difference.
Speaker 2:So annuals are huge.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I didn't wanna interrupt you there because you were going on a roll, but maybe to bring us back because the the way you started WP Engine is a little bit of a legend. And this is the way I tell the legend. Let me know if it's correct.
Speaker 2:Cool. Okay.
Speaker 1:So the way I tell the legend is that you had a blog called A Smart Bear. And this was quite a popular blog. And every time you would put it on Hacker News, it would go down.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And this is as you talked to your friends, you noticed that this was a common thing. If you had a popular blog and then got a bunch of traffic, it would go down.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And then there was also the other issues that everyone faces with faces like malware somehow finds its way on your site. And then you have to, you know, go in and it's, it's really awful removing it from the site once it's on. And so you had this idea and you decided to validate it by asking people if this was a problem, but you didn't stop there. If they said like, you were talking to me and you said, Hey, Justin. You have a blog.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. Does it go down on Hacker News? Yes. Do you have problems with malware?
Speaker 1:Yes. You said, Well, I'm gonna start this. What do you think? And I would say, oh, that sounds really nice, like everyone does. And then you asked
Speaker 2:Okay. Right.
Speaker 1:For a check. Okay. Yeah. Will you give me a check
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:For $49 Now, is that true?
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you don't ask for the money, everyone says it's good idea because they wanna be nice, and also because your idea is probably pretty good. In other words, there's a reason why you think you're you're excited about your own idea, because there's probably some good stuff about it Mhmm. Legitimately. And other people will see that and say, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a pretty good idea. It's a very but the problem is you're not validating the business when you do that. Yeah. You're validating whether the idea is it resonates at all, which is something, because maybe it doesn't, so that is something. But it's not nearly enough to know whether the business will succeed, because for business to succeed, not only does the identity make sense, but also, will you be able to get to them and talk to them in their language, like using words that they understand?
Speaker 2:Will you be able to capture them in three seconds on the homepage, because they'll bounce off if they don't understand this is for them? Will they stay once they're there if it's a recurring revenue business? There's a lot of companies that are like, we're growing really fast, and you fit you find out, oh, yeah, they add 500 customers a month. They also lose 200 customers a month. This is a terrible business.
Speaker 2:Right? So there's that. Do they really want it? Do they really stay? So there's lots of there's lots of pieces to whether the business is actually good.
Speaker 2:So you can't stop at is my idea good? You have to go to the money.
Speaker 1:Yes. Now that's the part of the story I know. The part is, you know, you got now how many checks did you get? Like, five or 10 or?
Speaker 2:I had I had I had so I talked to 50 people, five zero. Yeah. I had 40 people tell me that they would pay me. Yeah. I had 30 actually pay before launch, and thus I launched with the 30 customers.
Speaker 1:Gotcha. And so once you had that information Yeah. What happened next?
Speaker 2:I made it. You yourself?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Nobody else? Just you?
Speaker 2:Well, I made the software, and then I did have there was a there was a guy who helped get some of the initial customers on board. I I mean, I hesitate to say sales because he because he did more than that. It was more like sales and kind of marketing. You know, in the early days, you don't really even have a title. You're just trying to, as I like to say, either making it or getting rid of it.
Speaker 2:Those are the two jobs. Yeah. So like, is the marketing sales, getting rid of it, you know, and and that's what he was doing. So he wasn't there on very day one, but but pretty early, helping to helping to do that. And started we going to things like WordCamps.
Speaker 2:By then, there was a couple of people at the company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm I'm quite interested in timelines because there is the one thing I've realized is it feels like even if you have a good idea that people are willing to pay you for, your biggest thing is just lasting. Right? Like making it to another day. And how long will that runway continue?
Speaker 1:When did you start actually like, you had these prepayments. When did you actually start, like, delivering the product to customers?
Speaker 2:It was about, four months because I did all that stuff in the first quarter roughly of 02/2010, and I was starting to talk about it at South by Southwest, which was in March, so hence the first quarter.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then we launched in May, like late May. Okay. So depending on how you wanna count between two and five months, you know, from five months from, like, the first phone call and and maybe two months from the last phone call. So the competition was, like, everything's screwed. Anything's better than this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I didn't have to have all kinds of fancy I you know, amazing intellectual property, super fancy algorithm, everything. If I just set up WordPress pretty well, set up the server pretty well, tweak the sys control values, tweak how Apache or NGINX is working. Use NGINX at all just to serve the static content. Cache anything in any sort of fashion.
Speaker 2:Make sure that all the text is g zipped. You know, just the the kind of actually really basic stuff if if you've made websites. If I just did those things, I'm already, like, way ahead of where most people are. Yeah. And the fact that I'm gonna monitor it, and when things go haywire, I'm just gonna sort of figure it out, That also is like heaven to most people.
Speaker 2:I mean, most people who have websites obviously are not engineers, and so none of it makes any sense to them, and they don't know how to pick good consultants, of course, just like I don't know how to pick a pancreatic surgeon. Yeah. You can't you can't interview for a a technical field that you're not in. You just have to go with whatever you feel or recommendation. So, again, it's not because anyone's dumb.
Speaker 2:It's because it's a specialization. I can't pick doctors either, so whatever. Yeah. And so so if I just did a pretty good job, I didn't need a whole lot of magic in order for that to be pretty interesting. And so, of course, we did build unique, special things, lots of rules about security and speed and handling certain plugins and all kinds of stuff, and then later actual products, like brand new products that are not in WordPress that we layered on top.
Speaker 2:So eventually, became something that was unique and special over the course of a couple years. But at the very beginning, it was like, just don't do this poorly. That's already worth $50 a month, which by which was the first price point. 50, 99, and $2.49 were the three tiers when we launched.
Speaker 1:Okay. So you launch, and you're just hustling. You're doing this yourself, but it still takes some time before you're making, and you've alluded to this, that that magical 10 k a month. Yeah. Which is when most people say, okay, I could probably, do this full time.
Speaker 1:Now, you you you had already had an exit at this point, so you weren't working another job. You were working full time on WP Engine.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Okay. And so working full time on WP Engine, you launch after two to five months. You've got paying customers. How long did it take to get to that point where you're it could support you full time and maybe this other person that you were hiring?
Speaker 2:Well, see, I cheated since, like you said, I had an exit already, so I didn't have to support me.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So that means I got to hire a little earlier than otherwise. Right?
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I recognize that. I'm saying that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's the difference.
Speaker 2:So we I hired two people in 2011 in January.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So in other words, one year in, two people. So you would you'd really call that is you know, if if I if I didn't have that to go on, it would be me and somebody else. Right? So I got to be a little bit ahead. Yeah.
Speaker 2:See, it counts. It's great to have one extra hand, doesn't it? Yeah. This is why getting extra money helps. So it didn't take that long before so so yeah.
Speaker 2:So it took about a year from concept. Like, again, concept is I'm still calling people to find out, like, wait, is this an idea? Mhmm. One year between that and okay. We have two people here that we can pay
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:That the business supports. That's not that's actually pretty good in my experience with bootstrapping. Yeah. Yeah. Again, having a thousand customers and I mean, like, SmartBear, my previous company that bootstrapped, I was there for seven years.
Speaker 2:I sold it in 02/2007. Mhmm. It's still alive, by the way. So it's almost twenty year tech company now still alive, and it just, it just got sold resold again for $450,000,000. I don't have any part of that now, but point is it's still going strong, which is really nice just to know that things continue.
Speaker 2:It's a good it's a good thing. There was a value real lasting value there, and that's nice. Right? Yeah. Anyway, so so, at SmartBear, it took me, I think, two and a half years before I could hire my first person, but that's because, again, I had to pay myself.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Right? And and so yeah. Like, it's typical.
Speaker 1:So how long with SmartBear, because maybe that's a better comparison, before you could when you started it to the point where you could pay yourself full time?
Speaker 2:It was it was about it's hard to remember because that's 2,003.
Speaker 1:Yes. I'm guessing we
Speaker 2:can go really far back. I wanna say it was a year.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Maybe maybe a little less.
Speaker 1:Okay. And for you at the time, this is the other problem context means so much. What did full time mean $10,000 a month, or did full time mean something lower?
Speaker 2:Full time meant we drew my wife and I drew a line on the bank account and said, if it goes below this, I'm just shutting it down.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:You're So rather than rather than a something like 10 k per month, it was more like, it's gonna do this, and it just can never hit below this or else we shut it down. Otherwise, you can keep trying.
Speaker 1:Okay. Now this is the business bank account?
Speaker 2:No. Personal bank account. Your personal bank account. Okay. So your personal bank Which which which is linked.
Speaker 2:I mean, not linked. It's separate account, but, you know, it's it's a
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Where else is the money coming from?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. I mean, part of it is just, Jason, it's just good hearing that because that kind of color is helpful. Because I think a lot of entrepreneurs can identify with that. Know, I've I've I've one, many of us have significant others.
Speaker 1:Two, we know that, you know, the business starts making money and then you're like, oh, well, I could keep the money in the business and do more with it, or I could withdraw it as a shareholder something, you know, and then make a little have a little bit of money to pay my mortgage. So you were you were dealing with that back then. Right?
Speaker 2:Right. Mhmm. Sure.
Speaker 1:And Yeah. It's all normal. Yeah. Everyone does this. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so and so, again, so you said it took you about a year to get to the point where things were still fluctuating in your personal account. You're going, okay. Well, hopefully, this works.
Speaker 2:Well, the other thing about SmartBear is this is before the before SaaS.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And it's before and it's before cloud, which makes SaaS that's why it's before SaaS because it's really hard to do that without a cloud. It's very intensive, and and capacity planning's hard.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a lot of cash. It's also not recurring. It sort of is because I had 20% maintenance, which is a typical way that you do enterprise software, but not recurring in the sense that you get it again. You get 20% again. So it's okay, but it's not it's not like a real recurring revenue business the way we would define it today.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what happened but also, it was a high price point. So what happened was it was very lumpy. Yeah. I could easily have, like, a 30 month followed by a one k month.
Speaker 2:Okay. So hence hence the, like that, like, saying 10,000 a month, do think like, that's what I always say is $10,000 a month per founder is actually what I say.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And I do think that's that's great. But with a lumpy business, you just have to work out what you think that means. Mhmm. Is it an average? No.
Speaker 2:It's just your life is what it is. Yeah. And you pay your bills. Like, that's what it is. Like, it's not math.
Speaker 2:It's life.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so what what in fact, the reason I hired the first employee there was we got an especially large purchase order from Intuit. And so suddenly, I had a huge amount of cash relative to normal cash flow, like at once, I mean. Yeah. And I thought, what am I gonna do with this?
Speaker 2:And it's just like you said, oh, I could keep it, first of all. Yeah. Because this has been hard so far. Yeah. It's not looking like it's gonna be easy ever, which it never is ever, by the way.
Speaker 2:And so maybe maybe I can I can assuage my pain with some of this money, which is true? And then I thought, but nothing I could do is hire someone because even if I get it wrong and I have to fire them in four months, this will pay for that. Yeah. So maybe I should try that. And so I did I did try that.
Speaker 2:And so that's that's what I did. But, yeah, it was that because it was that kind of business. Now recurring revenue business, the the bad news is you don't get that huge check all of a sudden usually. Mhmm. The good news is you can actually predict what's gonna happen better month by month, which I couldn't do with SmartBear when it was small.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Of course, when it's bigger, there's enough n that maybe you start to be predictable, and that's good. But when it's small, it really isn't. Just it's law of small numbers, and that's what it is. So that but that's the nature of that business then.
Speaker 2:Also, it's a long time ago. Like, I I don't think smart beer I mean, it in a in a lifestyle sense, it's true that smart beer is more relevant to the conversation. That's true. Yeah. But in a but in a, mechanical or operational way, it isn't.
Speaker 1:Of course, like, so much of this is me thinking about my situation. And and this is really what's tricky about all of this advice and even talking about any of this in the comments is that so much of this is colored by our own experience.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And also colored by how we remember things and also colored by the the time, which is, you know, some of it doesn't matter that you did it in 02/2003, but some of it, like you say, really does.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think yeah. There's certain things I think are universal or timeless. For example, working with people. What does it mean to have good a good team, a good culture, performance management, hiring?
Speaker 2:These kinds of things to me don't matter if it's 2002 or 02/2018. Mhmm. Like, a bad culture is a bad culture, a good culture is is amazing. Yeah. End.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or performance management. Like, you have to do it, and it's hard and weird. And it's always been hard and weird, and you've always had to do it. Like, that's that's that's life.
Speaker 2:It's that's so I think there's certain things like that which do translate. Those learnings translate for me. Yeah. And then there's many, many other things, whether it's tech or operational or otherwise that don't. Also, you left out luck, which I think is a big deal too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm certainly lucky as well as as well as applying a lot of effort. I'm also lucky. You left out privilege, which I'm also and so are you. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Although my hair is not as good as yours, but still. And and, my hair wasn't even as good as yours when I did Smart Bears. There you go. You're already a leg up or a head up, I guess.
Speaker 1:I'll just take that to the bank.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Cash it in. Also, think you're absolutely right about memory being bad. I agree. Also, goals.
Speaker 2:In other words, what did I wanna do with SmartBear? The answer is I just wanted, like, to have my own job and no one tells me what to do. Mhmm. That's literally like, I wanted to make as much money as I could Yeah. And also not deal with anybody.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a pretty negative statement. It's also true. That's what that's what the deal was.
Speaker 1:Alright. So that is part one. I'll be publishing part two next week. You can also watch this on YouTube. I've included that link in the show notes, productpeople.
Speaker 1:Tvninety seven. And, yeah. Thanks for listening. If you have comments about the show, be sure to tweet me. You can also tweet, Jason Cohen on Twitter.
Speaker 1:And, be sure if you're interested in joining the Mega Maker bootstrapping community, be sure to go to megamaker.co or megamaker.co/club, and you will get an invite very soon. Alright. Thanks again, folks. I'll see you next week.
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