MicroConf On Air Day 1: 11 Years to Overnight Success | From Beach Towels to a Successful Exit

0:00[Music] by her cough on air and you know what's funny is I come in my notes to call out how real life this is welcome my wife is walking down the stairs just finishing a webinar on her own yeah gonna be doing I want to keep them tight to 3 minutes or less as has I just said I have a wife here I have three kids people are running around you will likely hear noises and see kids walking on camera but I'm pretty stoked to do this it's a it's a new format it's experimental and it's something that you know Michael Kampf we decided to do to

0:43bring people together right - because we're all kind of isolated in our houses I think most of us you know in the US and a lot of us in Europe and other parts of the world or confined right now so I went out on a little drive to the store yesterday with one of my sons and it's like you know one in it's like 10% of the traffic it's normally out there and you know half the shelves are empty so it we just live in interesting times and I would say you know there there's a lot of stress in the air and I almost feel like we probably need maybe 30

1:17minutes of distraction a day the other 23 and a half hours we can think about our work and about how we're in our house for the next three or four weeks some of us with with kids around but for this 30 minutes a day I just want to be together with other founders and so today it's just gonna be me we it was short notice the Andrew and I producer Xander and I'm literally just like if you're not in Micro Kampf Connect which is our slack group you're gonna want to you're gonna want to get in there microf connect calm that is how you can start

1:46asking questions and interacting hear the questions I'll be reading and so that's what we monitoring here other days I'm gonna bring guests off we are going to talk about how to cope with it how to deal with your family and your own internal pressures and just just do not get the stress of it and staying sane well at all all happens and then having my you know podcast co-host emeritus Mike Tabor on for happy hour on Friday and that sure will be a little later but again only 30 minutes you'll be casual good conversations and then next week I'll bring other guests on who are you

2:17know a lot of former micro micro comm speakers from last year and we will give you a heads up in advance from watch their videos and then we can have conversations about it ask questions and all that that kind of stuff the other thing that I haven't announced yet is we are planning on recording bees and stripping the audio and turning it into a podcast such that if you miss one or two you can you know listen to them in an audio format so I've been working on that feed right now using cast Oaks and I have a logo design and I'm hoping to have that up and

2:47running here in the next day or two so before I dive in I want to give special thanks to our headline partners microcon sideline of partners for the year stripe and Basecamp we super appreciate their support and love you know love being able to work with them on all of this so with that I am going to dive into slack there are no questions in the slack panel all right so either either everyone no one watched the video or I answered all the questions already so what I've decided to do is either ask myself questions or start telling jokes and trust me you really you know you don't want the jokes

3:28you're gonna want to get questions in there if you're in Microsoft Connect you can head to hi Felix you can head into and people started yet people started pouring in yeah yeah actually that's a good point so producers Android just slack me and said hey give it a give an overview of the talk in case in case people haven't watched it so in essence this talk lets they have some notes here yeah so in a sense that this talk is like the culmination of drip so if the talk is called 11 years to overnight success from beach towels to successful exit and it starts by talking a little bit about

4:03you know drip starting in late 2012 launched in 2013 found credit market fit in 2014 2015 was a year of growth and incredible amounts of stress and I was burning out and started getting acquisition offers as well as funding offers and Derek my co-founder Derek and I had a lot of conversations about whether we should take funding or consider selling the company and then we sold drip in midway through 2016 and that the this talk was the yeah that was 2016 yet I think this talk was the following April so it was about seven or eight months later and it was my reflection on the the entire sale process my thought

4:43process behind it and talk about how stressful and how long it took to actually sell this company because I always you know we hear these these these tales of selling Instagram in a weekend you know to Mark Zuckerberg for a billion dollars and your your perception of start-up acquisitions and sales they they get worked and mine from the first email to the sale was thirteen months and from the time were is pretty heavy negotiations until it closed was about six months and that is pretty typical and so I actually walked through in this talk I walked through a graph of like how much contact I had with with

5:20the buyer which time was leadpages and talked about some of the decisions obviously I can't divulge numbers and everything but so that's what the talk covered and then it talked about the transition and kind of moving to you know to Minneapolis and all that so all right I do have one joke for you just because then a big task why shouldn't you take a broken sphere into a fight because it's pointless yeah it doesn't get any better than that okay ken Wallace asks what happened to the duck site so he's referring to you know when I when I first started so the title of this talk is from beach towels to

6:00successful legs a because one of my early sites was an e-commerce drop shipping site that sold beach towels and I got that around I'd say it's two thousand eight or nine and I owned it for about two three years and then sold it when it just didn't make sense to own it anymore by the time I was doing sass and having successful they didn't make sense to manage a little ecommerce brand I also had some info products that I had written myself some ebooks and courses and stuff but I had acquired a couple info products one was Barnes and I forget the domain was was like beginner

6:34bonsai or something it's a bonsai ebook that I have fired from like a bond expert who didn't know how to market it and so I used SEO to to rank that same thing with this duck boat site was called DIY duck boat and it was duck boat plans so if your duck hunter it was planned you could go to Home Depot's a shopping list and everything and you could buy this stuff from Home Depot and make your own duck bow in whatever it was like a couple days in your garage for three or four hundred dollars of material compared to buying one is thousands of dollars or whatever so I

7:03acquired this and the the guy had a ton of testimonials people had videos of them like building it I mean it was a legit thing and I bought it for a few hundred dollars and I got it up to about I think it was at five or six hundred ollars a month in recurring revenue just purely on organic search and this comes back to a concept that often talked about it like have that tool belt you know my tool belt at the time was organic search a little bit of Adwords and being able to reckon those on top of each other and finding opportunities to use them and duck boats was one of them

7:31and of course sherry my wife always made fun of me for it but it it you know we didn't have car payments it's time but it could have made a car payment or two so it was it was like a joke but kind of it was kind of cool and so what happened to answered Ken's question is I wound up selling the duck boat site in 2014 I believe he was even know if it hadn't been before that I sold it I had a tax bill that came through one year and this was it was 2010 or 2011 actually because I it was one of the first years that I

8:00made like a lot more money than I thought I want assets I think I was about to acquire hit Taylor it just acquired it and so I knew I could sell off some old stuff and so I sold it for you know whatever the multiple was and I used it to pay a tax bill so I would have sold it anyways right I wouldn't still own it today those things become a distraction over time so good to see you guys yeah in here alright Benedict a question would you start with something like beach towels again today that's a really it's a really good question it comes back to

8:30the you know this stair step approach that I talk about a lot starting with kind of a simple product and and making 500 or a thousand or two thousand dollars a month and then stair stepping that into the next one into the next one and you know kind of kind of eventually getting to SAS I don't know that I would do ecommerce today I mean ecommerce trying to write trying to old software products that kind of weren't working in 2005 to 2009 I had done real estate investing

9:03[Music] you