From Funded to Self Funded: The Story of WeddingLovely – Tracy Osborn – MicroConf 2016

0:00[Music] [Music] so for the last six years or so I've been working on a start-up called wedding lovely and in these last six years there has been a lot of really amazing awesome experiences a lot of really good things I've happened to me but also in those last six years there has been a lot of powerful things I wish I could be up here say I'm a total success but there's been a lot of burnout a lot of depression I have raised money for wedding lovely but I've also bootstrap the business I've traveled the world and I've had lots of amazing experiences while working for myself but I've never at the startup

0:59I've never made more than $25,000 a year so the last six years has been a roller coaster of goods and Bad's and I wish I was up here saying like I was a huge success like hey you know some of the people here are so freaking amazing and they're talking about making you know $50,000 per month over month or whatever and I wish I could be up there being one of those people but I'm not my business kind of overall just merely went okay and it's a far more likely yeah I want you all to be successes but you know what happens if you have just an okay

1:34business like me you know the last six years has been a complete roller coaster but this is my story I've learned a lot of amazing things a lot of like really good tips that I can help you know bring to you gone through a lot of trouble but it's been really really fun so beginning I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur this I grew up in a very rural area of Lake County California and the only thing you can do there is go to the drive-in or if you had a computer like me spend all your waking time on the computer and this is at the time of

2:07tabled based websites and I figured out in middle school that if I you know created a website for my book project the teacher was like whoo my god you made a website instante and I just used that for everything I did in school so I really liked building websites this is back in 90s and I thought that I was going to be an entrepreneur really early on so in high school a friend of mine this this isn't our business cards as a picture I found but we went down to the local print shop got something wrong graffiti like fuzzy Pinta was at the puffy paint or whatever business cards looked a lot

2:40like this and we went to our on all the businesses and our tiny little town offering them websites for $50 one person it gave us the 50 bucks to build her a website and then we got distracted because it's high school and we never actually did the website so every now and then I think back to myself there was one person who was probably like those darn kids took my 50 and did it build a website so I went to school Cal Poly San Luis Obispo I got an art degree graphic design I thought I was going to be going to the wine wine valley learn how to make do

3:18wine labels as my job but while I was there a friend of mine her brother was had a startup and it was literally a bunch of dudes in a garage and they're like we need someone who designed to do websites for us and I'm like I can do websites so I started working them in the garage and ended up working them for four and a half years going from a start-up to excuse me a garage to a small office and in Foster City California and then from a small office into a really big office in Mountain View I was the sole designer and fryin developer there which was a really you

3:49know fun experience I didn't have a boss I was doing all design development for this company for this startup but I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur I've always wanted to work for myself so I quit that job I tried freelancing for a little bit but when you're freelancing or consulting you still kind of have a boss you have the person you're working for and that person I can still say like I want this and you're like that's a bad idea and they're like well I still want it you're like okay I really didn't like that experience I really wanted to be my own boss so I met my future husband who was

4:23in the back of the audience who's also an entrepreneur and I watched him go through Y Combinator and start his own startup and I was kind of like you know what I want to do that too so the first thing the first part of my journey into running a startup is that I thought as a designer with an art degree that I need to go find my technical co-founder so I went to a whole bunch of like find a co-founder events in the Bay Area talking about and always find the co-founder event is like non-technical people looking for non-technical people talking to other non-technical people looking for the one technical person in

4:56the room it was ridiculous in the waste of time so I didn't I was like okay I don't know how to program it's not the finest cook no co-founder so I wrote this post and we put on my blog I decided that I was gonna write out everything I really wanted to build that it couldn't build to see if I can attract someone to come to me and his post went on to hacker news and top comment is actually a Patrick McKenzie hello where are you hi so it's been on Hacker News I got like a really large amount of points for just being like hey

5:30I'm looking for a co-founder it was actually really cool and then I got a whole bunch of emails from people who are like your ideas amazing I want to be your technical co-founder so I took these emails and it was like 80 emails and I broke it down to like some people I met for coffee and I broke it down to some people I met and did a little project with and I'm just like I am doing this right like this is how you find a co-founder I narrowed it down to one person we started working on this project idea and we decided to just for

5:55fun apply for Y Combinator and we got a Y Combinator in review which was like a big freakin deal the problem was the morning of we just started working together and when you try to find someone that work with it especially someone random on the internet it's like you know things are going well it's totally fine but morning of a very stressful event that's when things can completely fall apart in the morning of the Y Combinator interview it came really obvious that we didn't want to work together and so he went into the interview and we we finished the interview he went home and I was sitting

6:29in Red Rock Mountain View just thinking to myself please I do not want to get into Y Combinator and it's like the opposite what people think I do not want to get Y Combinator because I don't want have to go through this like co-founder breakup after getting in so thankfully didn't get in yeah so at this point I was faced with a choice because I still didn't know how to program so it was like okay do I do that whole process again do I do a whole bunch of interviews and they were done people played by email again me for more coffee and waste less time or I can just

7:02go get another design job or I can learn how to program and just do it myself so that's why I chose I decided to to figure out how to do a Python programming picked up Django started building this website and I want to say like if you can find the right person to co-found your company with that's totally awesome having someone there with you as you go through the rollercoaster of startup life having a partner having someone do that can't share the burden that is totally awesome but if you're non-technical and you have an idea and you can't find the right person you don't have the right person

7:32to work with don't let that hold you back you know I the whole wedding lovely except for a brief period which I'll get into I've been a solo founder and I've I love learning and it's been super fun because it's constantly every single day I have to learn something new so don't let it hurt hold you back so this is really the beginning of wedding lovely I built this website and it was a different idea the one I apply put on Hacker News that when I was looking for a co-founder was was actually really technical for teaching my cellphone program I could not do that it was

8:03involved PDF generation there's no way I could learn enough programming to do that so instead I built this directory of wedding notation designers you know it comes with weddings I'm actually not to be a weddings person which is really funny because I have a wedding start up this I've jumped in this industry because I like working in small businesses and and I'm a designer and wedding invitations are super awesome like they're the piece of printed design that's never going to move online I mean there's some things like paperless post or as online invitations but really the experience is getting the invitation to mail in opening up not to mention like

8:36there's so many awesome different kinds of designs so much creativity goes into wedding invitations and it's a business that people can work from home as a side like a side business there's amazing designs to do is working on this I love invitations and that's really how I started now this website here is actually fairly simple I'm lucky again because I'm a designer that looks nice so that's just my design background but really it's of how many features have had it was incredibly incredibly simple like it was a login form a registration like a registration form or people can fill out the details for their profile create a

9:11profile for them and that was it it just listed these people so I launched this website with like 10 profiles on it and for a directory you know if you're looking for your wedding notation as I enter and there's 10 people on it that's kind of useless but I still put it on the internet and like a couple days later a couple days later I was leaving for New York I was actually going on a three-month trip in Europe and stopping over in New York and while I was in New York I decided to go see if I can meet my idol one of my design idols this is

9:44Tina's Swiss Miss the Zion blog she's amazing and I decided to send her an email and say hey I'm coming through New York City would love to take you to lunch I've done this a few other times and it's always been really really awesome like trying to meet these my design idols and my influencers like a year ago I did this with Jeffrey's aldeman so if you know the you know anything about friend development Jeffrey's Ellen's pretty famous so I sent him an email hey Jeffrey Zelman coming into New York would love to take you to lunch and he responded with like okay because I've Hurley no one had done

10:12that before which is I found baffling so he met for lunch he put this picture up on Flickr and this led to me being invited on the big web show it's now has like 140 episodes I was number 17 and it all led because I decided to meet up with Jeffrey and buy him lunch and that's actually what the topic of the show was was the fact that I just went forward and and asked him to lunch so I love doing this I love meeting people of course the key here is don't be smart me don't when you're going these influencers they get Biraj with requests all the time and I look at

10:44it as a way of making a new friend I don't want to pitch them my company I don't want to tell them what my selves the whole time I have to ask them about what they're doing so back to that lunch with Tina sat down with her in her studio just talk to people what they're building or in New York City and at the very end of the the day she said hey what are you working on I was like well I just built this website I was not planning on pitching us whatsoever because again 10 profiles kind of you this but I sat down with her and I was

11:13like oh I built this website it's not wedding invite love calm it's pretty cool she's like that's cool so I left went down to the airport I was planning on flying off to Rome and my phone blew up because she quote this is actually the term that she's Swiss misted and her audience is perfect it was a bunch of designers and here's my my website that I want designers jump on it jump on and I got so many people wanting to be on my website it completely it was like pretty much how my business took off I was funny cuz the next day I landed in Rome

11:45got all my stuff stolen story for another time very hard so this is my very first number one lesson it's like if I you know my website again Titan profiles pretty useless and I could have just said okay I'm gonna wait till I have a hundred people on this website before I launch it because then it will be you know useful to someone but I you know just on a whim I decided to launch at this time people happens around the you know Tina and have lunch with her and then she basically launched my business because it was up so I feel very strongly it's worth launching your MVP

12:20as early as possible because you don't know what kind of opportunities are gonna happen and lesson learned number two is to always network and that's why we're here right we're going to be meeting other people meeting other awesome people you never know what people what person you meet is going to lead to the next opportunity for you like I just was on a podcast a week and a half ago and it was because I went through that job at Burma was kind of awful actually a long story and I met another person who also quit that job and we kind of bonded over the fact that

12:49we both work this job but at different times and it was awful but then she started working at this amazing design agency and they have a podcast called design mistakes and people who run this design agency or the kind of people that speak it and have been apart so she invited me on the show and this is random connection I made was a really awesome career opportunity for me so I continued working on my website at that point because people were on in people were using it so I was trying on board as many designers as possible and I started I built another website for planners and built in their website for

13:20photographers and I heard about this this organization called the designer fund and at the time it was super nervous I just knew that they're looking forward designer founders to do this like whole a batch process where have meetings every week and at the time it was like a five five thousand dollar grant and I'm like woo design your founder I'm a solo designer founder boom this website I want to be a part of that the thing is I didn't know the founders there was at the time there was no application process but I found that the founder of designer funds on Facebook was posting all the events he was going to on like

13:56Foursquare or Facebook events so I started just showing up to the events you as I like oh hey nice to meet you I'm Tracy and then I would come to the next event I bring a mutual friend and that mutual friend to be like hey Enrique have you met Tracy and he's like yeah I met Tracy and I do that's for another event hey Enrique have you met Tracy different friends yes I met Tracy so I basically stalked him but it was actually he told me later it was because I was constantly you know in his field of view when he was looking for the next

14:25companies I he was gonna running the design or fun that that really led to me being a part is not fun I was eventually accepted into the the batch or whatever we did I got that five thousand dollar grant which was awesome and that wouldn't have happened if I didn't make myself known to the founder so often but there was one additional huge benefit of getting into design fine is that Enrique used to work at 500 startups and five are startups at the time also didn't have an application process is just you can get into five I'm sorry I was based on who you knew and Enrique is to work

14:59there so he asked me if I wanted to get an interview with 500 startups and when that kind of opportunity happens for you I was planning on bootstrapping but when that happens it's like you might as well it'd be kind of fun to go through that interview and see what happens so lesson them learn number three you want something hustle you know if I really wanted to get in the fun to designer fun I pulled out all the stops so I can get into that company and because I got into there that led to way more opportunities and if I just sat at home or sent emails

15:27already sent messages and I stayed home I probably would have gone into it so I'll get back to the 5.0 sarbs interview in a second but in the months before this I was working on my projects I started writing and started writing about my experience with building my business so I wrote this post and some of y'all might might recognize it because I word this post about my experience of building my site and it got on to hacker news again and this one got even big arrows 490 points which is kind of a really freaking huge deal and I became known as like the hacker news Weddings person and someone

16:09a couple days ago or yesterday was like oh I know you from hacker news you're the weddings person I'm like yes it happened again this is like my life the hacker news wedding person so I mean it's really great for marketing hacker news isn't really my you know my goal for a wedding love like there's not a lot of people getting married there but it's really great for people to know me well did it mean that it's not an engaged website people get engaged but it's been really great for my career and just writing about the experiences I had with building wedding lovely and for you

16:49know when I sat down for this 500 startups interview I was meeting with former partner pulsing but also later on that day dave McClure and I sat down with Paul and I opened up my laptop and I had my deck and I started nervously going through it and he stopped me and he's like oh I've no I know you you were on Hacker News and then the first thing is he's like you're a cockroach he's like you he's like you're a cockroach you will never die and I'm like oh okay that's kind of cool and he's like you're in I like what you do and you all you know you'll always

17:22keep your company go I recommend that was awesome and it's funny cuz I sat down with David Claire afterwards and we did my pitch with David Claire and he's like we'll let you know and I'm like here he said I'm in no take-backsies and he had this face I think that that wasn't opposed to happen but I've written since um since about other experience I've had with building my business you know good and bad things and when I get really busy I stopped writing and I always forget it because all these posts have been like kind of like super crucial from a career that original ones are

17:54counted hacker news all of these have all led to really awesome opportunities like I don't think I've ever had really like a bad experience for writing so you know I highly recommend to write about your businesses write about the good write about the bad some people will say they don't want to write because they want to be stealthy they want to show you the bad things but really I've truly believe it's gonna make everything easier when you open up let people know bring in more people to know about you could lead to opportunities so I was told I was in 500 startups the thing is I was really kind of dedicated to

18:29bootstrapping at that point because my husband had just gone through startups with Y Combinator and the it's totally different a funded company versus a bootstrap company things are the way you run your business is completely different because of the funded company you really want to grow as fast as possible as many users as possible get those hockey stick but you really don't kind of want revenue because if you have revenue that mystery is gone whereas at the bootstrap business you want revenue because you want your your business to you know to last and be paid and I was like really going back and forth like do

19:00I want a bootstrap business or a funded business the thing is when someone's giving you a $50,000 check for five percent of your company kind of hard to turn down so I don't know my I sided alright wedding lovely is going to be a funded business I'm going all-in to 500 startups so side note again about writing around this time is this 2011 by the way around this time I heard about this this event called the National stationary show and again I have a website full of wedding invitation designers and national stationery show has like a thousand different companies there and I'm like holy crap I need to

19:36be there I think tickets cost money but I found out that a press pass was free so I didn't have a blog at that point for my business but I was like well now I know I have to so I like threw it up I threw a wordpress blog up I wrote a few posts submitted it to National Association at stationary show which I got me a press pass I attended the show I created a little I went to a local bakery and I got cookies and I made a little gift quick t-bags with my card in it I went around the show to all these hungry exhibitors

20:06my do you want some cookies by the way I'm Tracy which is really good tactic and I didn't think I was going to keep up the blog afterwards but then I occurred to me that I'm working on a business it works with wedding vendors and with wedding lovely you know bringing on these these stationers they all have products they all want to share their products so I don't have time to run a blog myself to write every single day in addition to all the blog I'm doing about the business and my personal blog but I have a lot of these small businesses that have content that I want

20:35to share it so I decided to just open up to these businesses and I started running their content on my blog which is really cool because then these businesses come to me asking to stroke ace their material on my website and today this blog actually I mean for a weddings log which can get some blogs out there can get like millions per month not quite there yet but it actually gets a pretty good amount of traffic and I can sell sponsored posts I can sell site for advertising additional in addition you know and the people that I work with the businesses that I work with I blog about their business and

21:09then they share it on social networks and on their blogs it's been like totally awesome it's been like this little secret of wedding lovely in addition the way I make revenue is that vendors can go on a free account and then they can pay for an upgrade account but that's promoting this drink works like either bloggers all have the same idea of three accounts paid accounts so small businesses in the wedding industry get a billion emails a day from people being like pay for my directory pay for my directory pay for my directory I didn't want to do that I didn't want to get lost that noise and it's kind of

21:38like how the wedding industry is like super smarmy but if I have this blog and I say hey I have this blog would love the showcase your content you know and they're like oh yeah I'd love to because that's like really good feeling send me their content and then I'm at during that interaction with them then I can invite them to move to a paid account it's so much better in addition with wedding lovely overall it's never had a lot of traffic I don't get into a second but it's never taken off entirely so by changing this paid account I changed it from you're gonna pay and get this much

22:11traffic instead it's actually you could you pay and we're going to showcase you on our blog Noren do these other ways of showcasing your business and it changes the good feelings from kind of like quantitative like how much traffic they're getting to how good they feel about wedding lovely overall his blog running this blog has been pretty much my biggest secret so here's the fun part acquisitions I went through 500 startups as a solo founder and you know went through demo day this is not actually my demo day but looks very similar to this so gloss over that I have lots of stories 500 can't get into here but the

22:49end of 10 today I demoed and then a really good friend of mine a really amazing person contacted me and she says I want to be your CTO and I'm like holy crap and then I got contacted by a really big business like an awesome amazing I would be over the moon to work for this business and they said we want to acquire you it's like oh oh my god this business I am like on cloud nine this is everything I ever wanted I have this an awesome new co-founder and everyone is hiding I'm so lucky to be working with her you know and I was

23:22like oh I finally got that Kufa everyone hood and then I would started going through all the acquisition proceedings I in said instead of doing the five nine startups and doing the fundraising I should have done at the time I decided to focus entirely on acquisition because again this company was so amazing and I would love to work with them and it's not a weddings company by the way that I was like I'm totally gonna do this so less than number five you know if you get approached for acquisition establish expectations early on I did not do this and it was like months upon months of

23:57doing meetings back and forth of this company you know going to here and then eventually flying into there to New York City like on a fancy flight and going put up in this really posh hotel and going fancy dinners and meeting the entire executive team and everything was going so well and I was like dude this is totally going to happen except you know after those fancy meetings and fancy dinners came back home and I got the offer and it was about that big and I had you know I was trying to be very smart about this in 500 hours really helped me out I met with a bunch of eyes

24:30in the Bay Area when I was you know sorry going through the acquisition proceedings and these advisers said like okay you know your business is probably worth here on the very very low end and up here is like they're insane but they want to throw money at you and this offer was way down here it was almost so loud to be insulting and I tried to negotiate it up and once like I emailed back Mike hey how about this essentially and they're like yeah never mind it sounds like devastating because I love this company and it sucked so much I had no idea that they would like

25:03undercut me that much and him like even though I really really wanted to work for them it would have been really stupid of me to take that offer so this is kind of the start of the downside for wedding lovely because went from cloud nine his acquisition fell through we didn't fundraise when we hide all that momentum for fighting our startups so we were planning on launching a new product and this new product was I was like ok well wait for this new product this new product will take off it'll get that get that like hockey stick up into the right and then we can have that momentum to go

25:35fundraise again that didn't happen could we launch the product which is this one and what did okay but it didn't go super awesome and it was just like this pit opened up we started losing money I had to layoff the employee the person that started working for me first person ever started working for me hold vendor a very good friend of mine had to layoff Toller we'd have no money to pay her so many tears and then more devastatingly this amazing person that's good friend of mine my co-founder came to me a little bit over six months of working together said I have a new job and I'm gonna do that instead and it

26:14was like the ultimate vote of no-confidence in the company I had built and that totally sucked because it was like this person who originally said hey I love your business I want to co-found with you very shortly after was like you know I never why I'm gonna go take this other offer instead it really really sucked it was the second lowest points of this business so far but I was already I was branded a cockroach by Paul saying and I decided that hey at least I don't the pay anyone anymore let's go back to a booth strats business so the company stop backsliding I started paying myself

26:50extremely extremely little I'm a Galaxy Quest nerd so never give up never surrender high side just move it back to good start business and keep working on the business on wedding lovely just myself so you know year and a half I'm just kind of plodding along me doing everything design development marketing sales everything for a wedding lovely I took some time off I you know worked while traveling was able to go to Europe did not get anything stolen this time which was much better than the last time we traveled and this was really I was able to take this time off and do this because wedding lovely as a whole is

27:28actually really inexpensive not to mention I'm really lucky that I got myself in a housing situation where I have no rents in the Bay Area which is like totally huge and I was reading a Nathan Barry's convertkit post which was pitted recently I was talking about like lowering expenses of the company be profitable like seriously lower your expenses as much as possible to let your company run as long as possible because you know you might run into his roadblocks like I did and by me I'll cut my expenses down I was able to continue working on wedding lovely I started freelancing and doing some cold consulting at work again but again I

28:06don't like working for someone I'm really stubborn so I decided I was gonna start a side project to kind of you know renew my interest and working again so I I'm not I went I decided to do a book called hello web app I did a Kickstarter campaign I have so much I can tell you about writing a book and I cannot fit into this presentation but seriously writing a book self-publishing this book has one of the best things I've ever done and the Kickstarter campaign was super successful I launched these two books which are amazing and I did all the design for the self published last year

28:41in terms of pure profit I mean about ten thousand dollars off these books and by having two businesses I got totally burnt out and wedding lovely and I was the pressed I don't I needed to not focus 100% on it and I was able shift my focus to the second business and that was awesome I really glad that I was able to do that so it's kind of splitting your focus it's not that great but when you're getting burnt out that's a good idea so I didn't learn my lesson I'm like I'm a booster at business during this time if i started i did the kickstarter campaign i'm sorry writing

29:16the book i'm just working out wedding lovely kind of working on both on the side essentially but I'm still going to law in networking events because again networking events are really awesome and never know who you're gonna meet so I this one event for female founders essentially this woman came out to me who was like you are amazing I believe in your business here is a 20 thousand dollar check please fundraise and I'm like woo I've just people handing me tax like it's really hard for you to turn them down it's hard because you know I again I really want to be a boost drop business but I also have really big

29:47ambitions for what I was building so wedding lovely is a wedding is a wedding planning apps and then can sign for wedding lovely creates a plan for them then I have a bunch of different individual directories this is the one I originally built wedding invite love that's what it looks like today so I have waiting let invite love calm wedding planner love calm wedding venue love calm I have a wedding button or directory so I have 11 different web sites under wedding lovely a lot of that has to do with the fact when I was going through 500 startups and I want to make it big watching more web sites is

30:16another way to make your company look like it's doing really awesome don't really recommend that because I'm maintaining all of this myself but my true true goal is the build essentially the Airbnb for weddings because when you're planning your wedding if you're not working with a planner which is really expensive you're booking photographer a caterer a baker a venue maybe a videographer you're working all these individual small businesses and they have different ways of invoicing and different ways of doing billing they've different ways of communicating they want credit cards or checks and I really really truly believe that all these things need to go under one

30:48platform but building that completely on my own is impossible I will not be able to do that on my own so I took her money and I'm like this is it this is the time I'm gonna make this big business I really really want to build so I took her money I got another $5,000 from a friend of mine and I just launched myself into fun raising meeting San Francisco Toronto York and crickets because at this point wedding lovelyz been around for four years and I kind of see when investors are looking at if I hadn't made wedding lovely a success in four years what's this you know what's the chance I'm

31:27gonna make it a success after I get money not to mention I probably don't I don't really fit the whole Mark Zuckerberg look yeah I'm a solo female non-technical designer founder first-time entrepreneur I don't check a lot of boxes and essentially it was kind of really stupid for me to take that money I the money was on a convertible note I applied it into the business as soon as I got it because that summer I had to like you know make all those numbers look really awesome so I invested that money the whole of fundraising took 8 months from start to when I said screw this I'm done and at

32:03the end of that eight months when I didn't get any additional money I didn't have that original money anymore so I couldn't pay back the original investor says she still invested with us and 500 service was cool because they're like here's the money you know go play but this person actually cares about their money and I know they care about money and I and it's so stressful to me that I can't give that money back and I haven't looked like I'm gonna give her a return on her investment that's a lot of money I really wish I didn't wanna tween fundraising and bootstrapping watch I stayed bootstrapping I can even go from

32:37one to another but because businesses are run so differently between fundraising and bootstrapping the way you build your business is so different between these two that it kind of just made it impossible for me to be a run wedding lovely of all of these sites and this big ambition I had but I also couldn't fundraise because all the magic was gone wedding lovely wasn't access I wasn't new or anything that so this was the truest low point of my business I this was in 2014 November is when I decided not like I was gonna stop doing meetings and just go back to the business and just go back

33:12to bootstrapping without someone on mesfet and I got that was gone at that point and the December was a wash I was supposed to be working on my book it wasn't out that oh yeah out then the book ended up being a year delayed I always say like Oh books are really hard that's why it's a year delay but really it's because I was doing this fundraising and when the fundraising fell through I got really depressed I couldn't work on either of them so December I did nothing I was completely burnt out I couldn't work on either of my projects it sucked completely sucked but still didn't shut

33:47on the website because I have a cockroach and I will never die and if I know take a step back from the website it kind of runs itself again it's really low expensive I actually cost very little to do it was you run so I was able to take a step back and kind of continue growing like barely sleep like that but it's still growing even if I don't work on a full-time so for the last year I've kept wedding lovely up I've launched those books recovered for my depression and I started figuring out some things I really shut down three years ago like I don't do everything myself so I started

34:21hiring remote workers and virtual assistants to help me run my company and I've talked to the people here also have a virtual virtual assistant and everyone has told me so far that is totally awesome and I completely agree I shouldn't have hired this person you know three years ago she's amazing she's basically running Philippines virtual assistant she's basically running wedding lovely for me right now dealing with all my support emails doing all my marketing social media jumping her at the sales I just used like the sketchiest looking website ever that's where I found her and I wish I started working with this assistant earlier because running everything myself is

35:00like the recipe for burnout especially when I go through these like incredibly stressful events of trying to get funding and another thing I always wish I did earlier that's made my life so much easier now is automation like doing as much as possible in the backend to smooth out how the business is run so I could spend less time on it so I can go speak at conferences like this it's like from you know obviously how they can email of course so in a vendor or a user jumps on and it walks them through the you know your product invites them to to upgrade you know that's all automatic

35:30get six months of emails that's awesome I also have a lot of interior these like little admin as I built for me and my assistants so you know our blog is run on a wordpress blog and that our business is on you know python is they're completely separate I needed a way to bring like the vendor gets featured and they get on the blog I want to put on their profile but stew different systems so we have this forum but my assistants can fill out every time we have a new feature up which creates this template for an email and they can copy/paste us put this into

36:00Gmail so it looks like it's coming from a real human but it has all our social media links filled out and then I think advantage of WordPress where I can use their little widget they post automatically on all of social networks I use a lot of things like zap here to tie together you know MailChimp and and my sales and everything and then there's even things that my husband built kind of cuz I was whining about Google Analytics and I have 11 different web sites there's no way that I can go into every single page in Google I like some kind of a bounce rate and everything so

36:32he built this service oh I get an email every Monday that goes over everything I need to know for the business like how many uh what my revenue was when the new pageviews so it saves me a lot of time I don't have to worry about so much about analytics because I have emails coming to me but really this business has been a lot like juggling nine different balls but I constantly have to put three down so I'm working on it working on six different things with things like sales or marketing are falling behind and if I pick up the sales and marketing balls then I'm not working on development or

37:08design it's still really kind of overwhelming to run and every now and then I kinda wonder if I should shut it down but because it kind of mostly runs itself it's just keeps going so today I spent the last year trying to go after some acquirers trying again and of course when you want to be acquired there's no virus so I was chasing out into companies did a whole bunch of meetings of these two companies fortunately both fell through I ideally I love it if I can take the IP that I built with fighting lovey and bring it to a company that I can use it and and build

37:44something like build this idea of the Airbnb weddings that would be awesome because I don't really shut it down because I work without 6000 vendors I know and I get emails fairly often even though again the site hasn't been a huge success I get emails from them when they do get a lead through my sites and they work with the new customer and they tell me how much they love wedding lovely so I'm trying to find the right place I would love it for it someday the rights acquired came to me here I found the right acquire and take that ap and move it to a new area

38:12bring off my hands but that hasn't happened so far and again I'm not close to being a success if you knew the wedding industry almost no one knows about wedding lovely not always hurts you know my mount of traffic is not that great SEO is not that great Marketing is not that great every now and then though I need to take a step back and that these numbers again for like a business it's not that big but when I look at it as I built this network of sites from scratch myself design development marketing sales etc and I've somehow it feels like icon $70,000 off of random

38:51strangers on the internet but it still happened that's a lot of money and I did that that is so cool and yesterday was actually the first day of a real job I started working with Dream Factory as I'm a part of their developer relations team so me being on here on stage is actually paid time which is awesome and it's really surreal to be actually have a real salary again because again I've never paid myself over twenty five thousand dollars this entire time and suddenly I have a salary in this company and I have a boss again so we'll see how that goes but they're really amazing

39:26there I found this they support me and my side projects and they support me going around and talking these conferences they know I can keep running wedding love in the back um keep laying lovely running as a side project and advising that they're really supportive so it's hard to be up here on a bootstrap confidence saying I got a job but you know I'm really happy so to kind of go over some of the big lessons I've learned over the six years of wedding lovely launched an Minimum Viable Product as soon as possible because he never know what opportunities might arise if I didn't launch wedding invite love back

40:06in a day with only 10 profile so it's basically this this useless website that no one can really use but it was still up and I managed to find someone who managed to launch that business even though the website wasn't that great if I didn't have it online if it was only a demo my laptop that wasn't launched she wouldn't have blogged about it so the mere fact that this website was live on the internet people who could find it my website took off and I will never launch a Minimum Viable Product as soon as possible now we're all here probably all know this because we're all

40:43here Network as much as possible because you never know what person you meet might lead to the next big thing in your career or your company you know and Hustle is kind of I was tempted to put like hashtag hustle because it's such a meme right now but I didn't you know it's very much if you want something you know do as much as possible to get it even if it involves kind of sort of stalking the founder of another business because you want them to know you and know your business I have never regretted writing about my experiences even when it's post where I talk about

41:18my depression of building my business writing by your experiences writing about how much money you made or even how much money you didn't make I've written about the experience of writing my books I've written about you know things I've done wrong I the things I've done well every time I've written posts like these it's always been a benefit to myself my company or my career and then you know if you have an acquisition inquiry it is really worth it as do as much as possible to establish those expectations if I went to this company that came to me and I said hey my minimum really you

41:51know for my five person business I'm not gonna sell for anything under four hundred thousand dollars you feel kind of scummy but they could have been like oh well okay nevermind and I would have saved myself like six months of meetings and worrying and excitement and then the eventual depression when everything fell through so try to make establishing a baseline number when these kind of things come in even when the company is so amazing you want to work with them can save you a lot of trouble and then again never give up never surrender kind of embarrassing I love that movie but a lot of people say like fail fast

42:30which is good you know depends on the business but for me I've been able to build wedding love that kind of his lifestyle business now I had it kind of runs itself and it could have saved me some brain power by shutting it down but I've learned a lot of those last six years and I actually I am NOT regretting keeping up the song even though things have not been going well do as much as possible to cut your expenses I am again so lucky to live in a place where I have no rent and that's really how I've been able to run my business by not having the overhead of having a

43:05large chunk of money leaving my account every time every time I mean it will also look at your business expenses look at how much the support is costing and look at how much consultants are costing now there I have made so many mistakes on this myself you know I when I got that second round of investment I paid out for this consultant I totally regretted that because it was waste of money I should have done that I wasted that money and I could have like kept my business running as long as possible so look at your expenses see what you can cut out and see if you can get your

43:32company profitability cuz it'll last longer don't flip-flop between proof starving funds are you saying don't do bootstrapping funding bootstrapping funding bootstrapping like I did it's ridiculous I mean it's like I'm gonna get a DA thing but it's really hard when so I'm gonna hands you a check and say I love you build this big business you've always wanted to build it's really hard to turn that down but it's the way that wedding lovely was built it was built in a way for funded business and it was built from the way for bootstrap business and built in a way for funded business and it's like this in giant

44:03octopus of eight different or 11 different websites that I run and if I stayed bootstrapping this entire time I would have kept it to one site so going back and forcing bootstrapping funding was one of the worst things I've ever done for my business I love my remote workers I love that I have people who are awesome and I keep throwing more and more money at them because I might please don't leave me because you are so awesome people who are running my business for me while I'm up here people who are working on my marketing and sales and everything that I was doing myself and worrying about and fretting

44:39about like paying so much time setting up the blog and setting up social media I don't the worry about that anymore and I should have done that three years ago finally there now by really which I did that earlier and then automated as much stuff as possible again every time I built some way to smooth out my business and make sure everything is happening in the background so I can do one thing that leads to five different results I've never regretted that and I've always wished I'd done it earlier so see we can do see things you know if you can't hire out see if you can with code

45:11or with your sites if you can smooth out any kind of process that's taking you time or costing you money so again the last six years has been nuts I've I I've very much not an out signing success but I have had so many amazing experiences I've had press I've gone to events I've travelled the world I've been able to take some time off and learn how to surf I've built these sites I've been able to come up here and tell you about it and all the work for myself I've gone I've learned about fundraising and learned about acquisitions I've learned about bootstrapping I've learned so much over

45:51these last six years the thing is if I can look back at the sexist six years and think the next six years maybe you know would I do that again I totally would because overall this has been one of the most fun experiences of my life building this business and running it and I don't I regret some things but overall I don't very don't forget it whatsoever so thank you for listening to my story

46:27so as a person with zero experience with finding I just wanted to know what were the terms of the first finding you got with that 5% stake you know how did that change it seems like after that you've been pretty free what you wanna want you to do with the company but was there anything any conditions from their side did you feel like you had to answer to them whether you're growing the company whether you're giving return on investments to them I just want to know like if you if someone comes across next time and says I'm gonna give you a 5% but I'm gonna keep my mouth shut and you

47:05can do whatever would you take it again well I was lucky that the first investment came from 500 startups and 500 has invested in like over a thousand startups so far so they were kind of like yeah you do what you want with it we're hoping cuz they did when they call it the spray-and-pray approach they really are not paying attention to me whatsoever and that was lucky because I knew that they weren't going to be worrying about my business I can't go really in specifics about it but there were some things it was equity instead of a convertible note and there were some things in my

47:33contract which then made the acquisition stuff without that company a little bit weird it was something like they had the right of first refusal for any acquisition under a certain amount I was able to use I in negotiation because I was able to say to the company I'm like hey there's no way I can take your offer because I have this one investor that has this term and they're gonna turn your shut down that didn't work but I kind of use that term for my advantage the second investor has been a lot more hands-on and she said that you know if you're not going through a big company

48:05like that the second investor is an individual they might say they're gonna stay you're not gonna bug you but they probably will if it wasn't like a big company if I'm in her startup so even they say that it's probably they're probably still like how was your business why haven't you taken off yet why having built it big so I just got lucky because those 500 startups I have a question you mentioned that you you know you regretted flip-flopping back and forth between bootstrapping and funding is it the flip-flopping you regret or do you regret taking funding at all ha a little bit of both I mean every

48:39time I took funding I'm like cool I can spend money and it's again it's silly I look hindsight is twenty-twenty right it's looking back and I'm like why was I thinking that fundraising process I've stayed a lot of time if I didn't fundraise I would have saved a lot of time in trouble I'm especially a second time in eight months I think really in eight months I got nothing done because I was working on fundraising I completely regret fundraising and taking the money for the second one just being a boost our businesses a little bit is simpler and I want my business to be really you know profitable which is why

49:11I had revenue from the beginning so I guess a little bit of both so you mentioned that you have you had the low overhead cost with rent etc yeah do you what are the given takes between having that because I'm in a similar situation to having family pressure responsibilities those things pushing you driving you to hustle harder to fail faster that kind of thing what do you what do you feel about the give-and-take there that's funny I don't have weird to say I don't really have family so I've never had that problem it's kind of funny my grandfather I told him I was actually originally with science or went

49:57to school University for computer science and I switched to an art degree never learned anything about programming which I had to learn it later my grandfather was like you're gonna be living in a box because he was so mad at me going to an art degree so I had a little bit of pressure from him I mean all I get all depends on what you tell your family you could just tell them all the amazing things that are happening with your business and get you know tell them how awesome it's going and then maybe decrease that pressure because you're not letting them know if you're living a family and you have people who

50:25are paint engineer the cake investors kind of their investors in you bugging you and you kind of let them know all the good things are happening and get that pressure off of you they're another hint I've often heard that taking money can really kill a business and you seem like your story kind of parrots that in some ways from your perspective you can go back and do it all again and only focus on bootstrapping what will be the things you would focus on more to grow your business yeah if I could do it all again just focus on bootstrapping I was the best way I have eleven

51:06different websites and I wish I just put underneath wine because I had to build this whole back-end so then I can just do code in one area and it automatically goes between all these websites but each of the websites have to have their own color scheme I did that a lot for SEO purposes and a lot for vendor purposes but it's really overwhelming to just maintain myself so if I was doing a bootstrap business I would just have like one site or at least less than five different sites rather than eleven which I have right now and the second thing I would do would be you know yes this

51:38works for a funded business as I wish I hired a remote salesperson early on instead of doing sales myself that's one of my biggest regrets is I didn't focus on sales didn't focus on having someone to be proactive to going to vendors and you know even if it's not just like hey pay it's like hey work on our business or work on our blog and then pay focusing getting more revenue and focusing on ways to bring in more revenue earlier on I should have done and when you're on a funded business you're not really worrying about revenue so I would have definitely worked folks on that more

52:08[Applause] [Music] you