How I Make $60k/Month in My SaaS Business – Christopher Gimmer

0:00Um, so when I was preparing for this talk, I came across this article on Medium and the title was why you should ignore every founder's story about how they started their company. And I thought this was kind of funny because I was preparing a talk on how I started my company. Um, but as I read through the article, the the message really resonated with me. And essentially the point he was trying to make is that um when people talk about how they start their company, they tend to leave out a lot of the boring details and a lot of the stuff that happened behind the scenes which contributed to the growth

0:34of their startup. And so when we look at um Snappa uh we launched it at the end of 2015. Uh currently we're doing uh 62K in MR. Um, and based on our metrics, we're we're on pace to hit about a million in ARR by the end of the year. And so on the surface level, it seems that, you know, we launched this thing and and and it's done pretty well. Um, but if we go back two years before that, we had another website called Bootstrap A that we launched in 2014. Um, and then early in 2015, we had uh we launched something called Stocknap. And as you're

1:11going to see in this talk, there's absolutely no way we could have got Snappa off the ground had it not been for these other two projects. If I go even further back, um we launched something called Classmate Catch, which I'll talk about shortly, which ultimately failed. And so, you know, my journey really began in 2012. Uh it certainly didn't begin at the end of 2015. And if you talk to pretty much any other founder who had some success, um if you if you dig a bit further, um I guarantee you'll find something similar to this where you know it took them a long time uh to to kind of get there. So

1:52today what I want to do is uh talk through my journey um share as much helpful and actionable things uh as I can and hopefully we can we can all learn from it. So, uh, let's dig into part one. So, I'm, uh, working in the, uh, government at this time. Uh, this is 2012. And I meet, uh, Mark, who who's now my co-founder at Snappa. And we clicked right away and became really good friends. And I found out that he he

2:22knew how to code. He was a programmer. I'm I'm not a a technical guy. And so, we decided, let's start a business together. And for some reason, the first thing we came up with was a student dating website. Um, pretty sweet looking site if I if I may say so myself. Um, and so the way it worked was similar to to Facebook in the early days where you needed a uh, you know, a school email to sign up for the website. Um, we basically didn't know what the hell we were doing uh, when we launched this site. And so, um, when when it came time

2:58to do marketing, this was our strategy. Um, we basically posted these, you know, don't be forever alone posters, uh, across campus. And believe it or not, we ended up getting about a thousand signups within our local city. Um, but there was a problem. Uh, in order to market to Toronto, which was, by the way, I'm from Ottawa, Canada. So, to to drive to Toronto was like a 4 and a half hour drive. Um, and that just wasn't like something that we can do. And uh, you know, it it wasn't a scalable kind of marketing strategy. And so, you know, we just weren't able to get any traction

3:37outside of our own city. So, this is how much money we made off Classmate Catch over the span of about a year. Uh, $3234. Not that great. So eventually we we decided to uh to shut it down and kind of uh re-evaluate what we were doing. So some takeaways from from this part of our journey. Um something that's really important is having a plan for acquiring users before launching. Um if anyone hasn't, I highly highly recommend the book Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Maris. And what it'll do is it'll kind of provide an overview of, you know, the 19 or however many marketing channels that are

4:19available and give you a framework for how to go about evaluating them, testing them, um, and then picking one to launch with. And you should be doing this before and while you're building your product, uh, not after you've launched. And, uh, this is a mistake that we made and, you know, we we made sure not to do it again. If you're bootstrapping, which I'm assuming everyone in this room is, charge money. We we had a business model that um basically relied on having an incred incredible amount of scale, and there's no way that we were going to reach that scale as a bootstrap company, which is why we only made $323

4:59um from that business. And the third thing is um I've made plenty of mistakes. Every one of you are going to make a lot of mistakes, but the most important thing is that you learn from them and try not to make the same ones twice. So, um, at this point, we we kind of realized like we didn't really know what the hell we were doing, launching a business. Um, so I kind of went through this period of consuming a ton of blog posts and listening to podcasts, um, reading a lot of books and try to figure out this online marketing stuff. And I got really drawn to SEO. Um, and uh, you

5:37know, I I loved it because you could, it was essentially a free marketing channel, right? And and and as a bootstrapper, like we we didn't have any money to to put into our startups. So, we were basically looking for a product um, whether it be a digital or or a physical product that that we can sell online. And what we did was we we started validating this through keyword research. So my my co-founder Mark um ended up finding that Bootstrap themes and Bootstrap templates had quite a bit of search volume. And if there's any non-developers in the room, this is Bootstrap is basically a front-end design framework. So it was it's

6:17essentially similar to selling a WordPress theme or or a WordPress template. So we thought, okay, this is really interesting. Um so then the next thing we did was we started plugging that into Google trends and we realized that wow this is uh this is interesting like there's more and more search volume for uh these keywords and then the last thing we did was we sized up the competition. So there was only one major player at the time and it was a site called Rat Bootstrap and we severely underestimated the network effects that this marketplace has. um we thought well it site doesn't look that great and uh

6:56he was kind of notoriously bad for for uh for his support. So we thought let's just start our own marketplace for Bootstrap templates and so a couple months later we ended up launching uh Bootstrap Bay. So as you can imagine with uh any marketplace you have that typical chicken and egg problem. Um and we we had the same thing. And so in order um to seed the initial marketplace, we actually created the first batch of themes that were on this marketplace, but we wanted to make it look as though it was somewhat busy. So we actually posted all the themes under different author names to make it look

7:33as though people were actually creating themes on the site. And then from there, we pretty much cold email every single theme author that we can find on the internet to try to get as much supply on the marketplace as possible. Um and eventually we were able to get uh I think around like 15 or 20 different themes. Now learning from my mistake with classmate catch um we thought about how we were going to get traction while we were we we were building this marketplace and we realized that there was a big opportunity with content marketing because all of the uh other websites that were either um selling or

8:10giving away free templates, none of them were focused on content. And what I discovered that the um official Bootstrap website was an absolute gold mine for keyword ideas. So if you look on the sidebar um they basically had documentation for the framework um and all the different sections of of the of the website. So what I did was I started plugging all of these keywords into the hrefs explorer and then I started prioritizing. So I started looking at or so I tried to find the keywords that had the highest search volume with the lowest keyword difficulty and writing

8:47content uh around those those subjects. So uh some of the posts that we had written were like how to customize Bootstrap. We had a Bootstrap carousel tutorial um we had a Bootstrap contact form tutorial and we were able to rank number one for a lot of these keywords. So our marketing strategy basically became write SEOdriven content related to Bootstrap, link back to the marketplace, increase our overall domain authority. And that was and then that was helping us rank for our money keywords which were Bootstrap themes, Bootstrap templates, and uh the different categories of templates that we were selling. And so you can see that we basically went from no traffic at all

9:32uh to getting some you know meaning levels of traffic over the uh course of the first couple months once we started getting this content to rank and that basically you know corresponded to to our sales. So we launched in April 2014. First couple months we're basically making no money. Um and then eventually we were able to to to make some sales and and generate some revenue. Um and um you know on once we started making a little bit of money, it wasn't a lot, trust me. I uh I took a year leave of absence um from my job in order to you

10:06know focus on this stuff full-time. Then something pretty incredible happened while we were building this business. So I was on Reddit one day and I came across this post. Uh, someone wrote a an article on Medium and the title was something like free stock photos that don't suck. And when it was posted, it got about 300 up votes and people were, you know, going crazy for this stuff. Thought wow, that's really interesting. People are really digging these these free stock photos. And around the same time, I was um really into this uh blog called backlinko.com, which was an SEO blog um from Brian Dean. and he was talking about this this

10:47technique that he had coined called the skyscraper technique. And basically what it involved was finding um popular content on the internet um making a better version of it and then promoting that content. So essentially what I did was I I took that baseline post from Medium and I turned it into a full-blown blog post called uh 12 amazing sites with breathtaking free stock photos. And what I did was I added a few more resources. I added images. Um I added, you know, descriptions to the site. And then I talked about the different licenses that each of the photos fell under. Try to make it as, you know,

11:24comprehensive and useful as possible. When I published that post, um, you know, I promoted it on a bunch of communities and it ended up going viral on Stumble Upon out of all places. Uh, I don't even know if that website exists anymore to be honest. So the the day that it it it got posted on there, it had 17,000 views in one day, which at the time was like just incredible. I couldn't believe it. Um so because we ended up going viral, um a lot of people started sharing the post and linking to us as as a great resource. And because we started getting all these back links and and all the

12:02people sharing the post, we started ranking on the first page of Google for free stock photos. Um, as you can imagine, it's it's a keyword that brings in a substantial amount of traffic. So, at this point, we are, you know, chugging along with this marketplace, but we kind of realized that it was going to be a real uphill battle to continue growing this business because, you know, we're we're going against an entrenched competitor who has network effects and Theme Forest um at the time was also, you know, putting a lot of emphasis on on Bootstrap themes. So, we knew longterm it it wasn't wasn't going to happen for us, but we had this blog

12:41post that was getting all this traffic um and and ranking for free stock photos. And so, we took a step back and we looked at all of the resources that we were linking out to. And none of them really had search functionality. Uh they were basically releasing seven new photos every seven every seven days. And they they all kind of had that that same formula. So, we thought, why don't we just make our own stock photo site and

13:07make it searchable? So, a couple months later, we ended up launching stocknap.io. And it was one of the the few uh stock photo sites at the time that released photos under creative commons that actually had search functionality. And what was so great about this was that promoting it was incredibly easy. pretty much the only thing that we had to do was include it in our existing blog post that was already ranking for that keyword. Um, and yeah, we put

13:37ourselves number one. Uh, and apart from that, the only other thing we did was, you know, post it on a couple communities. Uh, so we put it on Product Hunt, got over a,000 up votes. Um, I think we were the number four product for that week. Uh someone else actually posted it on on Reddit for us and you know that got over 400 up votes and as a result of this you can see that we got some pretty substantial traffic to this website. Um and it was just

14:05going up and to the right. So what can we learn from part two of our journey? Um when you're launching a business you need to find your core marketing channel. Um there's everyone talks about growth hacks and you know millions of tactics that you can try but what I find is is is super important is

14:24finding that one core marketing channel. Um and if you do end up reading that book traction um it'll help you zone in on that. For us it was content marketing and SEO. We just kept doing that and that's what ended up working for us. The next thing is to p uh to put yourself in a position to be lucky. the more content you create, the more product that you ship, the more cold emails that you send, the more people that you talk to in the hallway, the more lucky you're going to get. Um, it's it's basically a numbers game. Um, and so the the longer you do this, the the lucky you're going

14:58to get. So, always remember that. And probably the most important thing is to leverage your existing audience. Um, as you saw, it was so easy for us to get Stocknap off the ground because we literally just had to include it in a blog post that we already had. Um, if we tried to launch that site from scratch, I guarantee you, um, it definitely wouldn't have take, uh, taken off that

15:21the way that it did. All right, let's get into part three, building and growing Snappa. So, at this point, we have a stock photo site that's getting a lot of traffic. We have this blog post that's getting a lot of traffic. Um, and we wanted to get into the SAS. We wanted some of that sweet, sweet recurring revenue that we all crave for. Um, and I had this idea for Snappa because, um, I was writing a lot of content for Bootstrap A. And every time I need to create an image for it, it was a pain in the ass and

15:51I hated using Photoshop. So, um, we did the smart thing and validated our idea, our idea before we started building it. uh lean customer development is probably the best book um written about the subject. So if you're in an idea phase, absolutely read this book. Super super helpful. So essentially what I did was I sent out a um an email to our newsletter on the stock photo site and I asked them what

16:17they were using the stock photos for. And sure enough, a bunch of people replied back saying that they were using it for content marketing and social media, which is exactly the the the target audience that we were hoping to reach. So then I followed up with them again and I said, "Hey, um, we're thinking of building a new product. Can

16:35I get 15 to 20 minutes of your time?" And then I did about 20 customer development calls. Uh, I don't have enough time to get into it, but like I said, just read this book. And that was the process that I followed. So at the end of those customer development calls, um I felt confident that Snapple was definitely a product that that was needed. And so before we coded anything, we threw up this landing page. Um initially when you clicked this button, you would just go to our email list. And then eventually when we actually had a beta, um people were able to um use use

17:07the product for free while we were in this beta stage. And again, because we already had an audience, um, marketing this was pretty easy in the beginning to get traction. Um, all that we did was we added a banner ad in the sidebar and we also added a link to our navigation. We also added a made by snappa button on our homepage and then we also included a call to action within the blog post that we had. But what really killed it for us was we added a popup. So the first time that someone downloaded an image off stocknap, we showed this popup which was an animated GIF of Snappa in action with

17:45a call to action to try it for free. So when we added that uh popup to uh to the stocknap website, we tripled the amount of signups that we're getting overnight. Um and so at this point we're getting about a thousand people per week that were signing up to try the product. So um we had a beta period for a couple months and we were essentially just you know iterating collecting feedback fixing bugs uh fixing bugs. Um but we were bootstrapped so we need to start making money. So eventually we said all right you know these are the you know two or three features that we absolutely

18:23have to build that we think are critical and everything else after that could wait. So, we officially launched it on November 23rd, 2015. And to incentivize some early upgrades, we offered a 33% lifetime discount for anyone who upgraded to a paid subscription within that first week. So, we ended up launching um and we had $2,000 in monthly recurring revenue after that first week. And then we were doing about $4,000 in recurring revenue by by the end of the first month. Um, and at that point I officially handed in my designation at work and never looked

18:59back. Um, so things were going well. Um, except that a year into our launch, you can see that our traffic was was basically flat. And with any SAS business, you have this thing called churn. And if you're not able to increase the number of signups that you can get or make more money off your existing clients, you're going to plateau. And so we knew that we need needed to figure out an additional

19:25marketing channel. So for us, we went back to content. Um that was kind of where where where our skill was. And because we were selling a premium product with a really low price point, um we needed a lot of volume uh to make this work. Um when we started out doing content though, we were doing a really shitty job of it. Um this is the stuff that didn't work. uh we were writing just generic content that was you know one of millions of blog posts about the same subject. Um and the other problem was that when people did come to these blog post it wasn't related enough to our

20:02product and so we weren't really generating you know any leads and it wasn't really moving the needle for our business. So we basically scrapped what we were doing. So, we re-evaluated and I started thinking, you know, what are people actually using our tool for? So, people use Snappa to create Facebook covers, uh, Twitter headers, YouTube thumbnails, all that kind of stuff. And so, what I did was I started doing some keyword research around the actual use cases of her product. So, when I plugged in Twitter header, I realized that there was a lot of people searching for Twitter header size. So, I thought that's really interesting. When I looked

20:41at what was ranking for that, um the posts weren't that good. So, I published uh my own post, um it was originally published in 2016. So, we've we've been we've been updating this post for the last couple years. Um and it was like the the perfect Twitter header size and best practices. Um and then we followed some, you know, basic onpage SEO principles and highly recommend Backlinko's guide on uh for onpage SEO, especially for blog post. So once we published the post um we we generated some backlinks mainly through manual outreach as well as a bit of guest posting uh guest posting linking back to our post and you can see that after a

21:20couple months this one post started generating some some pretty pretty great traffic. So then what we did was we doubled down. So, we wrote pretty much the same post for the for Facebook cover size and YouTube thumbnail size and YouTube channel art size and pretty much every, you know, different graphic and dimension that we had on our post. And

21:41this worked super super well for us. Um, so once we had a blog strategy that started working, we started focusing on site pages. So once again uh we started doing some keyword research based around the different use cases that we had in Snappa. So going back to Twitter header um we realizes that people were searching for things like Twitter header template and Twitter header maker. And this is when the light bulb went off for me because at this point our homepage is ranking for uh graphic design tool, graphic design software and that type of stuff. and it actually didn't have that much search volume. But what I realized

22:23after the fact is that people actually aren't searching for that. They're searching for Twitter header maker and Facebook cover maker and YouTube thumbnail maker. Um, and so we were leaving like a ton of search traffic off the table simply because we didn't have the pages on our site to target this type of uh keywords. So what we did was we started building out all of these individual site pages to um you know to cover the search traffic. So we have a you know this is an example of our you know Twitter header maker posts and we have the same thing for Facebook covers and YouTube thumbnails and all that kind

22:59of stuff. And then what we did was we started creating template pages. So we have pages that will rank for Facebook cover template and Twitter header template and all the different uh sizes and stuff that we have available. And it works really great as a cohesive strategy because when someone searches for the Twitter header size, they'll land on the blog post and our product is so relevant to that. So all we do is we put a call to action within the blog post and say, "Hey, we have Twitter header dimensions baked right into our product. You know, click here to sign up." And then that will link to the the

23:35actual signup page. So this is kind of a a visual representation of of what this all looks like. So we have the um the sizing and dimension blog post that will link to the uh template pages and the use case pages and then everything interlinks within each other. And what's awesome about this is that we can build links to our Facebook cover size blog post and that will pass on the authority to the template pages as well as the site page uh as well as the site pages. Um so it

24:08all works really nicely together. And this essentially became um our marketing flywheel. So what we do is we we do keyword research and optimization. will then um publish new articles and update existing articles. Um and by the way, updating existing articles is such an overlooked thing. Um there's so many times where we've gone back and edited a post that we wrote a year ago and updated it and add some new content and then it would go from like the second page of Google to like number three. Um so highly highly don't like don't underestimate um editing old pieces of content. Um so from there we would

24:48promote we would promote the article mainly through um manual a bit of manual outreach as well as some guest posting that would earn back links and ranking ability and then that would increase our overall domain authority. Um and so this is basically a sustainable way that we can just keep increasing our traffic and and keep our flywheel going. And like I showed you, what's great about this is that um within these these blog posts, we can actually plug our product because they're super related, which will drive free signups and word of mouth. And as our uh overall domain authority increases and we start ranking for these

25:24money keywords, you know, we're also driving free signups and word of mouth as well. So this is all we do. This is what we've been doing for like the last two or three years. Um and so you know previously I showed you that graph or the or our traffic where we're basically flat and once we started implementing the strategy uh you can see that our traffic has has has really uh taken off as a result and because we're able to increase our traffic um you know our monthly recurring revenue has just you know slowly gone up and to the right without hitting any you know major uh plateaus

26:01along the way. So takeaways from part three, double down on what's working. I think this is some of the best advice that I've ever got and I think it's a really good piece of advice for for you guys. Um especially now uh with with uh you know growth hacking and like the millions of marketing strategies that you have to be doing, it's really easy to get overwhelmed and think that you have to be doing a million different things. Um, I would highly encourage you to just keep double down doubling down on what's working until you've completely exhausted that channel. Um, and then you can start moving on and and

26:40experimenting with other things. The next thing is to build your flywheel. Uh, I showed you what our flywheel looks like. Um, yours may be different. Uh, not every business is going to, you know, work well with content and SEO. Um, there's millions of different strategies. Um, in the beginning, you're obviously going to have to do stuff that don't scale. Um, there's there's no avoiding that and and you know, highly encourage you to do stuff that don't scale. Uh, but if you want to grow your revenue to meaningful levels, at some point you're going to need a s, you know, a sustainable, repeatable way to

27:13acquire users. And number nine is to play the long game. Um, as I showed you, you know, my journey began in in 2012. Um, and it really took a long time to get going. Um, and uh, so just know that uh, you'll have to exercise some patience. It's going to take a while. Um, but pretty much everyone I know that has some level of success, it's because um, they were consistent, they put in the work, and

27:41they kept showing up every single day. So, thank you so much for listening and uh, there's a link to the slides if you want to grab them. [Applause] when you were doing your keyword research, how did you figure out what your customers actually looking for? Like with the I guess keywords to look up or

28:04if that makes sense. Yeah. So, um basically you just want to think about your product. So, like like I like I said, we literally just looked at okay, what does Snappa do? Like what are people using this product for? And so we just started plugging in, you know, Twitter header, Facebook cover because that's what they were actually creating in our software. Um, so yeah,

28:24just do a deep dive into your product. Literally plug in like all of the use cases. Um, you know, what problems you're solving, what solutions you're solving. Um, another thing that works really well if you're using hrefs is to plug your competitors. Um, so what you can do is you can using their site explorer plug in a competitor and then they have a top pages report as well as a a keyword report and it will show you which keywords and which pages your competitors are ranking for. Um, and that might also give you some ideas uh that you haven't even considered. So I would yeah start with your competitors

28:58and then um just think about all the different use cases and solutions that you're trying to solve and then start plugging those uh in as well. Um, and then HRS will even spit out different keywords, ideas, related terms, all that kind of good stuff.

29:20So when I look at the journey from 2014 to now, it looks very organic and it looks like, oh, this is how we did this and we built on that. I'm having trouble reverse engineering that in my mind for like building a software application. I'm having trouble figuring out where the start is. Uh can you talk a little bit about how I don't know how it evolved? Did you always have in mind this place where you ended up or you just went with the flow and were willing

29:48to change pivot? Yeah. No, we definitely didn't have this in mind. Uh so essentially I was I was working my day job and I was just at a point in my life where I just wasn't really enjoying the the work that I was doing and the more I you know read about online businesses and and I I was just

30:08getting more and more attracted to that. So with Bootstrap A we were literally just trying to do anything that we can make money and quit our jobs. Um, and uh, like I said, so, so we started with Bootstrap A. We grew that with with content and SEO, and we we were doing about, you know, maybe like $4,000 in profit between my co-founder and I. So, you know, not still not really enough for like a full-time living. Um, but then when we when we when we had that blog post, um, we just saw a huge opportunity there. Um, you know, and that's why we thought, hm, if we created

30:44this stock photo site, whether or not this particular stock photo site ends up being like the next business, um, we knew that it would be super valuable long term and we can we can leverage that. Um, and then it was only once we had that that stock photo site where we realized like, huh, we can totally use this to build this SAS product. Um, I I didn't have the idea for for Snap in 2012, and I think that's a really important lesson. um you know what you're working on now might not be the thing that ends up taking off um but it will help you and and will contribute to

31:19that and you'll find that there's just a lot of at least for me there's just been a lot of serendipity there's been a you know a lot of luck um as long as you you know capitalize on the opportunities as they present themselves that's the most important

31:43Um, how would you different how did Snapa differentiate itself from free competitors like Unsplash because it is able to do uh search and it is free I remember. Yeah. So when we launched stocknap uh Unsplash didn't actually have search at the time. um they they came out with it e either like right around the same time

32:06that we did or um shortly after that. But the thing with a free service is that competition doesn't really matter that much because it's free, right? Like no one's going to complain about your free service. Um and so we were just we were just one of many free stock photo sites. Um, and it was kind of like the more the marrier at that point because uh whereas if if we launched a paid stock photo site, that would have been obviously a different issue. They would have said, you know, why am I going to pay you when there's all these other things here? So, yeah, that was uh

32:39wasn't really an issue for us. Um, so I'm not sure if you still support uh the first two businesses, the themed website and and stock the stock one, but if you don't, when did you decide what was the critical moment when you're like, "Okay, not going to put that much effort into this or I'm going to shut it down." Like what was the that that moment and how did you make

33:03that decision? Yeah, good question. Um, so right pretty much right when we launched Snappa. um at that point like Bootstrap A wasn't even really worth supporting at that time cuz we were doing more profit within the first two months than you know Bootstrap A was generating. Um so we basically put on autopilot and then um a friend in the space actually reached out and said, "Hey, I see you're working on Snappa. What are you what are you doing with Bootstrap Bay?" And I said, "Nothing really." He said, "Can I buy it off you?" I said, "Yeah, sure." Uh so we ended up selling that website. Uh it was

33:39a very small acquisition. I was just happy to not have to support it anymore. Uh Stocknap we ended up selling a little over a year ago. Um so a buyer had reached out to us. Unfortunately, I can't say who it is because I'm under NDA. Um and they made us a you know a really generous offer and we we accepted it because um when we first launched Snappa Stock Snap was about 90% or like 80 to 90% of the signups we were getting were coming from that website. Uh by the time the buyer uh came stocknap was maybe about 15 10 to 15% of the signups

34:17uh because we had you know developed this content and SEO strategy. So, we knew that we were going to give up, you know, a bit of the signups by selling the website, but the purchase price, you know, more than than than offset that. Um, and beyond financial reasons, now we didn't have to support the the the stock photo site anymore and we can focus 100% on Snappa. So, even just from like a focus and a and a mental perspective,

34:44um, that that worked out nicely for us.

35:00Hi Chris. Uh my name is Craig. Um I was just wondering like since you know you said you don't you can't implement this stuff yourself. you kind of are more like the vision guy and there's only you know a certain amount of hours in a day and you were kind of you know you had a co co-founder you have a co-founder and you were doing one thing that was kind of working you know okay and then you were like oh but if we do this other thing this will really you know take off was it hard to convince your your co-founder to go like we're going to do

35:29something else now you know even though you were doing this kind of thing I don't know if that makes sense to you yeah no it makes sense um we were pretty aligned Um the biggest danger is like if you have something that is working really well and then you're like let's go off and do this other thing too because there's an opportunity. I think that's when it's dangerous. So with Bootstrap Bay A we had got to about like uh like kind of we're in this like 8 to$10,000 revenue range. Um, and we were doing like maybe 4k profit off that cuz we had to pay the

35:59theme authors and for and that it just kind of leveled off because we had got to about number, you know, four in Google for for those keywords, but we just couldn't get above that because there number two and three was like a free competitor that had like a lot of, you know, backlinks and support and then rap bootstrap was number one. So, we knew that like this is going to be a huge uphill battle to try to get beyond this plateau that we're at. And to be honest, we weren't passionate about the business at all. We we wanted to get more into we we wanted like a

36:31proprietary software that we can build oursel rather than just reselling other people's themes. Um so, yeah. So, we were both aligned on that like, yeah, we got here, it's great, it's a start, but this isn't going to get us where we need to go. And that's why we started uh jumping on these other opportunities

36:49that kind of presented themselves. Okay. Thank you.

37:02Hey. Uh so you said you wanted to make proprietary software. uh in in terms of kind of stepping up through side projects to this thing that is making you enough money. Uh would it make sense to just focus on proprietary software because that's what I want to do. I don't really want to do Yeah, I want I

37:26don't want to resell it either. So, is it is it a reasonable thing to just focus on proprietary as I go along? Yeah, I mean my advice would just be like start as as small as you can. Um SAS is really tough. It's in the u in the growth I think three different speakers put up the same slide which was like the amount of software products and and marketing tech and it was like an insane amount of companies. Um, so yeah, my advice would be try to start with a sliver and and start as as small as possible and launch as quick as possible and then try to grow from there. But if

38:06you want to launch software, go launch software. I'm not going to tell you to do something else. Uh, you know, follow your passion, but just be, you know, be smart about it. Yeah. So, can you talk to employees and contract labor? How did you find enough capacity to get the work done? Do you have employees? did you use? When did you decide to bring them on? How did you get to to the point where you were ready

38:30to to make that commitment? Yeah, so it was just Mark and I up until so we launched in November. Um and then in April, we just had like a ridiculous amount of feature requests and and work piled up. Uh so we hired our first uh full-time developer. Um so that was like I guess four or five months into the business. Um and then it was just the

38:53three of us for the next year or so. And then I got to the point where um I just couldn't execute on all the marketing stuff. I just didn't have enough hours in the day. So then I hired um a full-time marketing guy. So he's now managing our content and our blog and as well as the the support. And then we also worked with a freelance writer who writes some of our content. Um so now it's still the the four uh four of us full-time. and and we also work with some uh freelancers that designed the templates for us. So for us it was just um when we had the money we we kind of

39:31hired what was needed and when it when the pain got really difficult and we just didn't have enough hours in the day we would then hire the you know hire what we needed to fill that. Sure. Yeah. So, so did you have enough income coming in to pay the employees for a reasonable amount of time or or was it kind of a you know, we have work now, you know, come join us, but you know, there's no guarantee your job's going to be here in a year. I mean, what what was that

39:58conversation like? Well, we didn't we yeah, we didn't tell them like we don't know if there's going to be enough money here. Uh, so the the the beautiful thing about SAS is that it's it's very predictable and forecasting is really easy. So when you're bringing in X amount of signups, um, your churn is X, you can literally plot your graph of where you're going to be 6 months from now, whether you're going to be a year from now, barring any, you know, unforeseening circumstances. So with the developer, we hired like a little bit ahead, like maybe a month or two. Um, but it like we had the money for it essentially. And

40:37then with the marketing guy, it was the same thing. Like we had the money for it. All right, this is getting painful. Let let's hire them. So, uh, yeah, that's that's how we did it. Other questions? There's a couple in the front corner here.

41:02Hey, so my question is so you had uh stocknap which was getting a lot of traffic, right? So what made you decide to go and build another site uh snapper versus just having a paid plan on snack um snap photo site? Yeah, good question. Um number one, we didn't have the passion to build a to to grow a a stock photo site and as our

41:26primary business. So that was one thing. Number two, um there's a million stock photo sites. Uh and to be hon I I just Yeah, it was a combination of me just not wanting to work on a stock photo site for the next 5 years and also like I didn't know how we would really differentiate oursel if we actually started charging for money. I mean, there's a gazillion paid stock photo sites. Whereas, as a free stock photo

41:52site, everyone loves you. It's free. Like, no one's going to complain about uh free stuff. And um like I said, our passion at that time was like we want to get into software, we want to build a SAS. Um I had a personal pain of of creating you know these types of graphics. Um so you know bit of scratching my own itch and that just seemed way more fun and attractive to me

42:17than just growing a stock photo site. Cool. Last question. Thanks. Great talk. Uh you talked a lot about the power of how you harness the content you were generating. Did you do anything in terms of external content like other bloggers and and engaging them and trying to harness their content for backlinks or anything like that? Yeah. So if if you guys have let's say if if there's any like consultants in the room with you know high dollar value um you know packages or whatever. That could be a good strategy where you know there's you go on this blog you you guest post you kind of show some of your

42:56secret sauce and if you get you know three to five leads that might be that might might work really well for you. With us we are selling a premium product with a typical you know 2% two two three% free to paid conversion with a really low price point. So if for us to guest post on blogs for the purpose of of you know generating signups uh it it would be really difficult because we need a lot of signups. What we did instead was we identified these blog posts on our own blog that had a lot of

43:29search volumes that we want to rank for. And when we guest posted we did it not to generate signups for Snappa. We did it purely so that we can link back to our own content which would help that content rank. Uh so that's the strategy that that worked for us.