From Side Project to Full-Time Business in 8 Months – Abi Noda – MicroConf Starter 2019

0:00[Music] [Music] about a year and a half ago was the day before Christmas and I got fired I've been working as a CTO for the past six years and I never experienced failure like this getting fired sucks I felt ashamed humiliated and afraid actually I'm Christmas Day I my girlfriend took me to the grocery store to pick out some last-minute gifts and I remember she's just holding my hand dragging me across the grocery store picking out gift cards for me and I question my own abilities you know I wondered I might even cut out to be a CTO and I had been a manager for a few

1:01years so my programming skills had gotten rusty so I worried about in your veering and finding a new job it was the holidays so hiring was kind of dead and slow but I was desperate so I just started shotgunning my resume hitting up everyone I knew and I had nothing to work on Christmas break and I wanted something to feel positive about so I started working on a little side project at the beginning of January a couple weeks later I flew home to Chicago or I'm originally from to be close to family and friends I was in a pretty dark spot it was a typical Midwest

1:45winter freezing cold and I was completely preoccupied with trying to figure out what to do with my life I considered all options I kind of burnt out from management so I thought about maybe getting a remote job kind of low stress and taking it easy for a while I thought about maybe applying their job in San Francisco something lucrative trying to cash in and I even considered a complete career change and actually did quite a bit of research on different data science courses well one night I met up with a close friend of mine to talk about my situation and get his advice and after talking for a while he

2:29I mean he said Abby what would you do if you didn't need to worry about money and the answer came to me instantly I knew that if I didn't need to worry about money if I could do anything I would go off and build my own product be a solopreneur build my own business and in fact this had always been you know my dream kind of lurking in the back of my mind behind fears of failure and concerns of not having money but in this moment in this moment I felt I could do it that if I got started now and didn't quit eventually I could succeed and so I

3:16did over the course of the next several months I built and launched my own product and grew it to the point where it could pay my bills and I could work full-time on it today I'm gonna tell the story of how I did it my name is Abby and I they'll pull reminders so I'd figured out my path what I wanted to do next but one problem was I didn't actually know what I was gonna build and I had no way to pay my bills how many of you know someone who's maybe quit their job to go pursue a business idea then you know a few months later they're drowning and

3:51you know trying to recover and just find a job so I didn't want to end up in that situation and I'm a pretty risk adverse person so I knew that to give myself the best chance to succeed I needed a long runway I figured that it would take me at least a few months just to test out different ideas and find something that could get traction then probably a year maybe even two before it could pay me a comfortable salary and so my first instinct was actually even though I had just gotten so pumped up about going and doing my own thing my first instinct was to actually maybe

4:27just get a full-time job and work on my business on the side and I decided this is a bad idea and the thing was I I wanted to be able to pay my bills you know buy expensive avocados whatnot but I didn't want to be in a pressure cooker I didn't want to be you know stressed out and again ended up burning out in a few months and giving up and so instead of getting a full-time job I looked into getting contract work and you know this this turn out that this worked out pretty well I actually instead of trying to get my own you know

5:00freelance work book my own clients I actually applied to a few different contracting firms @nx management a company called surge forward and a company in Atlanta called pram works and the cool thing was once I kind of interviewed and got accepted they just sent projects my way and so I was pretty easily able to find different contract projects to work on there were a full-time or part-time and you know this worked well for me you know in hindsight I think and when when I talked to other entrepreneurs I I do see the advantage of burning your boats sometimes forces you to you know succeed or die but for me I'm I know that that

5:39pressure is actually counterproductive to you know me being successful and so you know my take away my lesson is really that yeah you shouldn't quit your job and you can make sure that you have something stable something you can rely on so if I provide you a long runway and that's how you'll actually maximize your chances of success so remember that side project I started working on after I'd lost my job that was actually pull reminders and I'll tell you a little back story of how I came up with the idea so at my previous job I was an engineering manager and I managed a team

6:15and we gotta cook how many of you guys are developers actually okay cool so we had a code review process that's probably similar to the one you're used to basically we would open pull request you know code reviews on github and then share them with our team on slack and you know ask people to review them the problem was that these code reviews would take you know hours days sometimes even over a week to actually get done you know I remember actually talking to someone on my team asking them hey you know why isn't this code if you gotten done yet and and he told me he had been

6:50nagging another person I her team for days and had basically given up so this is bad and as a manager what I started doing was personally spending hours each day tracking different code reviews that were done and personally nagging people on slack to get them done and and this sucked you know I was supposed I was the CTO and I was supposed to be doing you know more important things strategic things but you know I was just spending hours just just chasing after people on slack and so I looked for a way to potentially automate this the really the only thing I found that seemed viable in that I tried was

7:31setting up a custom integration with zapier so I'm guessing most of you are familiar with zapier but it lets you connect different apps and build custom workflows so I spent a few hours one day setting up my own zap and by the end of it I had a solution that actually cost $150 a month in terms of pricing and all it did was post new pull request notifications into slack and it was around this time that I thought to myself that I could probably build something better but again I was still at my full-time job at this point and didn't start in hindsight I think you

8:06know the fact that I pursued an idea that was a problem I had was it was really critical to my success I you know intimately knew the pain and the problem that I was trying to solve as well as the people I was solving it for and that's helped me you know in all facets facets of marketing and product development ever since so it was let's see where we so it was now about mid-january I had some contract work so I'm stable and I was working on poor miners still as a side project but I was also exploring a lot of different business ideas including crypto stuff

8:46and I'm embarrassed to say that and you know so I was working on poor reminders but I I didn't know if it was something anyone really wanted and I certainly didn't know whether I could turn it into a business and so raise your hand if you've ever built something that no one wanted and that you made zero dollars from so yeah I've probably built over dozen or so projects that have gone nowhere and are in the startup of graveyard so to speak and you know at this point I really didn't want poor reminders or whatever I was working on to suffer the same fate so I did a

9:22couple of things to try to validate my idea first thing I did was just actually Google pull requests reminder and a bunch of things popped up and these are mostly just open source projects on github that are free and you can set up yourself and I remember I was I felt relieved when I saw this because I was like okay I'm not the only crazy person with this idea but I was also a little afraid because they were already these solutions it looked like people were kind of solving their own problem and I didn't you know I didn't know whether anyone would actually want to use my

9:55tool or be willing to pay so I did a little more research and you know they were kind of hard to set up and customize and so I figured I had a shot at building something better really the one other thing I did I was part of the Chicago CTO slack group and so I just asked a group one day hey does anyone else have this problem of pull requests code reviews taking a long time and I actually got a really strong response several people said yes they did it was kind of an interesting discussion and actually one person there said that at actually Groupon at his last job they

10:27had built their own BOTS to solve this exact problem and so at this point I was pretty confident that it wasn't a crazy idea and that you know it would have value for some people but I still didn't know whether anyone would actually pay for it and in hindsight I think it's really hard to know to be honest up until that I actually made my first dollar with poor reminders I had a lot of doubts about whether it could make any money and actually my last boss he he said something to me the one who fired me he said something to me that stuck with me it's actually one of my

11:01favorite little mantras now and he said he said to me when we were working on a new product idea there he said you know if you're a pessimist you'll be right if you're an optimist you'll be rich and I think especially as an engineer it's I'm you know I'm very skeptical and it's really easy for me to pick pick apart any idea come up with reasons why it's gonna fail but in order to have a chance at success you you sort of have to have a little bit of blind optimism and faith in your idea in order to move forward and so so that's something I've adopted is just I

11:36try to force myself to have a little blind optimism and even when I'm telling giving myself reasons why something won't work I tell myself just got it just got to stay positive so I built the first version of my product in about three and a half weeks and there's probably a lot of people here relate you know when I started working on poor reminders I was really excited to actually kill two birds with one stone and go build it using some new programming language and Frank elixir if anyone's heard of that you know I I was a yeah I've been wanting to learn it and I figured you

12:13know this will be really fun I'll learn a new technology while I build this project but but I stopped myself because this is a trap that I have fallen into many times and I see a lot of other people making the same mistake and that is to combine the idea of a passion project or a hobby with that of trying to start a profitable business in a finite amount of time and so for me I realized that look you know as much as I wanted to go learn these new tools and have a lot of fun with them I was trying to launch a business and I knew that I

12:46had to deal with marketing and sales and customers and legal and design etc and so I knew that I couldn't be bogged down you know learning new tools and figuring out how to configure you know what's their framework or something like that and so instead of picking a shiny new tool I just went with Ruby on Rails which she which I was already proficient with and you know was really productive with and didn't have to learn anything new and so I guess my lesson here is that well first of all I'm really glad I made that decision I think otherwise I'd be in a world of pain and you know as

13:22especially as software developers I think it's it's so tempting to go try that new shiny tool to build your business and you know my advice would be don't do that pick the most boring tool that you're already really proficient with and you know that I think has stuck with me that's a problem that actually run into multiple times even as my product is matured I've been drawn to overcomplicate the tech side of the business this is the first version of pull reminders it's pretty simple it just posts code reviews that haven't been done in slack this is basically still what the product looks like I remember yeah I you know kind of go down

14:03rabbit holes sometimes then I spent days like hours and multiple days actually iterating on picking the perfect emojis for those links today I don't have emojis at all one of the interesting things are one of the most challenging parts of actually building pull reminders has been figuring out how to support all the different possible workflows code review we're close on github so you know with any business a b2b business you know different companies have different workflows and you're trying to build a tool that can sort of you know accommodate them all and for me especially early on what I did is just focus on the most common use

14:39case and you know I think that was actually really critical to my success because it allowed my product to be very turnkey and today I think especially in b2b people are so inundated with tools and cold emails and whatnot I think their patience level is very low in terms of trying a new product and seeing if it works for them so for me I you know was able to make chloramine there's very turnkey something you could set up and get success out of within minutes and you know that's been really critical to I think my ability to grow the business so I launched at the end of

15:14January and like a naive solopreneur I really banked it on a tweet I had a handful of Twitter followers and so I just envisioned that would tweet about my product and we got tons of retweets and I would get hundreds of customers that didn't happen I got a few friends who liked it a few strangers who retweeted it but really no one seemed that excited I certainly no one was offering me their credit card to purchase it and you know at this point I still didn't know if for reminder could be a business and you know in hindsight I realized that you know things like Twitter or like one blog

15:57post those aren't really the things that result in success even though I think as creative people we tend to really focus on them and get really excited about them and you know for me the funny thing was you know I got zero customers from Twitter but actually my very first customer came in through SEO which is really weird so you know my advice would be you know don't focus on things like tweets and you know going viral instead you know think about what are the kind of slow boring things that you can invest in that are gonna actually lead to growth so as I mentioned so now it's

16:34let's see end of January and I still haven't made a penny from poor reminders and I'm getting a little anxious maybe looking into some of my other ideas at this point in any case this has changed when one day I got an email from a guy named David he is an engineering manager at a company called Monday comm in Israel and when he emailed me this was really the first time a legit human beings are in that real human being from a real company reached out to me with interest in my product and you know I jumped out of my seat I was like oh this

17:06could be my first customer and so David emailed me and he said he loved my slack integration has flattered and but that he had just one feature request and that was to disable notifications on weekends because it would disturb his team so I was like yeah easy peasy I'll just add a checkbox this Neil no notifications on weekend and still be done so he me emailed me back and said actually his weekends were Friday to Saturday and not Saturday Sunday because this company's based in Israel of course I had my calm face and I said no problem I'll just you know create you can top the old notifications

17:47for every day so no matter what your weekends are you can configure in notifications and so again this is my first chance at a customer super excited so I went off and you know spent a day and a half building this and got right back to him so about a week later you know he got back to me so I I was working great he had one more feature request hi this is obviously truncated he he actually sent like six feature requests and you know while I was super excited to be able to work with a real human being at a legitimate company and get feedback you know I

18:20wasn't trying to run their charity I said to get anxious because I hadn't gotten paid and I wasn't trying to do this for free so I decided to pop the question I asked David I said hey would you be willing to pay fifteen dollars a month to use poor reminders and this $15 a month was completely arbitrary to be honest I just kind of picked a number that I felt like humans say no to because being rejected at this point would have been pretty brutal for my confidence and he got back to me and said we are definitely willing to pay for something that gives us value so who

18:58thinks this means yes yeah so I didn't know this is uh you know I stared at my you know scratching my head a little bit and in any case I decided to just let the matter be and I went and built you know half of his six other feature requests so a couple weeks later I'm getting really anxious I still haven't made a dollar and so I emailed David again and said would you be willing to pay twenty dollars of mine to use Paul reminders I have no idea really why I raised the price five doubt this isn't one email threat I changed the pricing on him I think I was just

19:39resentful you know I just yeah not anyways and he mailed back and said that he was willing to pay but you know he didn't know how and in fact at this point I didn't even have a I didn't have strike cook dinner I didn't have a subscription for him and so I built one right away and got my first customer so overall this process took over three weeks this threat is just a monster 45 emails over 67 commits and at the end of it I made 20 bucks and this is probably one of the hardest earned twenty dollars of my life yeah maybe yeah pretty much

20:21and but it was also one of the most rewarding and I'm sure you guys know this but the feeling of coming up with an idea and you know turning into a real thing and then having someone pay you for it and validate the value of what you created is one of the best feelings in the world and it's really the the best part about still about running pool reminders today and so in terms of lessons I took away from this is that you know when when you first launch your product and you start getting that initial interest and by the way I my initial these people who I became my

20:54initial customers actually did find me through Google which is surprising in any case you know when you start getting these people I would what worked for me was pretty much doing whatever they said even when that took my product in kind of weird directions that you know felt like you know scope creep or you know whatever and that worked out for me and you know I think that's really important because whenever you launch a product I think initially it's usually not quite the right fit for what a customer actually needs and so by iterating and just you know going back and forth with this first user I was

21:26able to build a product that you know actually solved the need and could be commercialized okay so I'm my first customer and for $20 a month and you know I figured I would have some well I did have some other leads I was kind of working with and and at this point I knew I needed to come up with some real pricing instead of just quoting people arbitrarily based on my mood that day and so I'm prey pricing is hard I looked at sort of other products out there developer tools you know just try to price it based on my competition I didn't I didn't really have any you know

22:06this is the only commercial product that solve this problem but one thing I did find is that you know all the tools in this developer tool space really priced based on seat so I knew that I was gonna price based on a number of users but I didn't know how much to charge so I thought I asked myself you know what's something else that developers and development teams are willing to pay for but give some productivity productivity value and what came to mind was coffee so I thought to myself you know developers development teams you know one cup of coffee per month yeah probably more than two bucks depending

22:43on where you get your coffee and so I actually decided this really kind of stuck in my mind and I decided to price my product as two dollars per user per month essentially so that would be less than a price of coffee and then my mind this was you know a number that would be hard for someone to say no to and I even thought about adding the copy on my website productivity for the for less than the price of coffee so this is actually this is what my actual pricing looks looks like it looks like and you'll see instead of doing a per seat pricing I actually went with plans and

23:18this is really important this allowed me this still allows me to actually make a lot more money than if I simply charge per seat because for example if a company has you know 14 developers instead of paying me $28 a month just a flat rate of $2 per user they have to jump up to the $50 a month plan not on the other hand this also leads to some problems so I I've actually changed these thresholds a couple times and I still get potential customers who email me and say hey like you know that jump from 14 to 50 or 50 to 100 is a little

23:54steep and yeah I haven't found a great solution to this problem I to be honest what I do is I just offer people discounts you know 20% 50% kind of arbitrarily but again overall this is I'm probably making twice as much money as I would be had I just done per seat because especially that jump between the 7 developer and 25 developer plan it's quite a big pricing jump and you know has allowed me to grow my revenue a lot more quickly so you'll see it kind of scales down my pricing as you go up like the 75 developer a month plan isn't is less than $2 per month per user I don't

24:31have a brilliant reason for this I think again I just wanted to give make it hard for people to object to my pricing so you know no magical reason for that and I'm very embarrassed to say this but I have any unlimited plan for $149 a month again I is kind of a bad decision as far as maximizing my revenue but the thing is especially working alone I really didn't want to deal with the sort of you know high-touch sales process and you know quoting people and dealing with that whole process and so out of I guess laziness I just you know created an unlimited plan so above 75 developers

25:08right now is $149 a month it's unlimited and again I definitely leaving money on the table by doing this and I've constantly kind of gone back to this but as one person I I'm still not sure whether like the money I'm leaving on the table outweighs the time I gained back and able to focus on you know things like product and marketing so not sure about probably not a good idea to have an unlimited plan so as the business started to grow and as I started to Lang customers I ran into a problem Cheryl you are familiar with witches I started to get all these feature requests people

25:45would email me chat me an intercom with ideas and work last suggestions and I didn't know what to do with them in addition you know once I kind of wrote down their suggestions I didn't know how to keep them in the loop or you know tell other customers about the things I was working on so what I did is create a public backlog this is on github it's public now design like a pretty typical Kanban board and I used a first thing I did was just throw everything I was working not everything but the features the shiny things I wanted to brag about to my customers into this backlog and

26:15started logging it I also started getting a lot of customer submitted issues here and you know worked really well in terms of providing an easy outlet my audience developers were already knew how to use and submit requests for so just a quick example so this is like an example of a feature that I created sorry issue I created and what I've done here is just piece it the request from intercom into the github issue and tagged people so now they're able to follow it and this is an example you know I also ran into this a lot where different users would email me with like a similar idea or a similar problem

26:55similar feature requests and they would have completely different ideas on how I should solve it and you know while I consider myself a decent product person you know sometimes I just not know what the best solution was and you know whether it would work for everyone so I have quite a few quite a few issues like this where there's this someone submits an issue and then I actually tag a bunch of other customers to get their opinions you know in real time about you know what the best solution is and so overall having this public roadmap it's it's not only actually been a good way for me to

27:27just say organize myself it's been a really easy outlet really easy solution for customers to submit requests to me and a way to keep them excited about the things that are you know coming soon in my product so it was now early March I had a few customers but I was I had reached the sort of dreaded stage of starting a business I think which is you have a product you know it offers value you've gotten you a pretty good messaging you know you can if you if I get a coffee meeting with a CTO I can probably sell him on poor reminders but the problem was I just didn't have

28:03eyeballs right on my product I just wasn't I didn't have a way to actually reach my target audience in order to make money and this is this is a stop that I've always struggled with even with my other projects and it's something that in hindsight I think is really important to think about before you even start working on your product is assuming you are able to build something that solves a problem and message it while position it while you're still gonna really struggle to build you know build momentum if you don't have a way to you know with relative ease reach your audience of course things like content market

28:36marketing are things you can invest in to do this longer term but you know I I didn't have a long that long of a runway for this and so while I was working on poor reminders I came across something called github marketplace go through this quickly and basically github marketplace like a lot of third-party directories and marketplaces you know you submit your app they review it then if it gets accepted people are able to purchase it through github and exchange for a 25% cut so when I saw this I was like perfect but this is this is the answer to all my problems and this will

29:11lead to success for poor reminders and I applied I submitted pull reminders to be reviewed and I remember this this is one of the most terrifying moments and starting the business was when someone from github reach out to me to have this initial chat about my product and I was so scared because I wondered if you know this is still kind of a side project at this point and compared to the lot a lot of the other matured tools on github marketplace I I felt a bit inadequate and so but when we got on that call I remember this guy from get whoa github was super warm super reassuring

29:44told me he liked pull reminders and that I would be accepted so this is what the listing looks like and github marketplace people are able to pay and April 1st is when I went live on the github marketplace and naive once again I decided to again try to launch a tweet that would propel me into you know SuperDuper profitability this time strategically I even people at github because I hope they would retweet it once again that didn't happen I think this actually got less retweets on my first seat which is sad but the cool thing was that actually some people from github congratulated me and supported me and this this was this

30:27is a really encouraging moment for me because you know especially working alone on this little bot called poor reminders it often felt kind of small you know a little bit silly and a little isolating and so having these people from github congratulate me really made me feel like I was actually part of something bigger and this was a you know big motivational moment for me funny enough though just like about a week and a half before this I had woken up one morning opened up Twitter or hacker news or something like that and heard that github had just launched a brand new slack integration of their own I

31:01remember it was really hard to get out of bed that morning and you know I figured that I was toast I've been working on poor reminders and I I just assumed github had probably just built the exact same things so once I eventually did get out of bed I immediately went in and sold the app and luckily found that at least for now I was safe they hadn't built reminders and and other features of course and while I was looking up information about this bot and when I'm product tenant have you known people were saying the guy who created it at github his name was Brandon keepers and people were saying

31:36you know this Brandon guy he's awesome he's credit all this thing I realized half my open-source libraries and my rails app were made by him I was like so I actually looked him up and he lived in Chicago so and I was in Chicago at the time so I reached out to him I emailed him and said you know hey I'm about to go on the github marketplace would you'd be willing to meet me maybe give me some advice and you know I was I was really scared I I kind of saw Brandon as the guy who was gonna maybe just crush my business and you know maybe irrelevant so you know I

32:09hope that you know not only could he maybe provide advice but maybe if you've liked me he would spare me right so we met up for drinks one night I remember a awesome guy and yeah while we were having drinks he he just he asked me straight up he said so were you scared when you the flack indicated and I said yes I was and you know he laughed at me and said look you have nothing to worry about you know we have no plans no nothing in the roadmap anything like what you're building and really he was super supportive of what I was doing and

32:45you know this was this is a make-or-break moment for me and you know worked out well and you know overall github marketplace it has worked out well for me so again sorry for scaring my MMR our I wasn't sure it was something I wanted to share but you know today I just this month I just crossed 21 km RR and really the moment I got on github marketplace in April was when my momentum really started to take off so by the end of the year last year I had over around I think 350 paid accounts and then I have actually about double that in terms of total accounts because I give my

33:23product away for free to open source projects and nonprofits and pretty much anyone who asks for a free account so you know I talked earlier about kind of runways and figuring out how your paid bills and you know one of the problems for me and not just for poor minors but actually on other projects I've worked on especially with co-founders has been deciding when to go full-time I think as you know bootstrappers is this moment when you're able to quit your job and go full-time is like you know a huge milestone for everyone and especially when I've worked with co-founders this is sometimes been like a point of

34:03tension you know one person is Go Go Go ready - ready to burn their boats and go and yeah like I said earlier I'm a pretty risk adverse person and so I am not willing to make this leap just based on my emotion I've always needed you know a really calculated methodical way to go about this so I think I've come up with I'll share the way I did it and you know maybe this can be helpful to you if you're thinking about this for yourself or with your coat so in hindsight I hate that I came up with Queen this term for it but so it

34:36kind of starts with this idea sorry for the name it have a viable monthly income and really for me that this wasn't like the minimum I needed to make ends meet and in fact you know when I've had conversations with co-founders we've had conversations where we're literally looking at our monthly expenses and trying to find you know what's the minimum you need to go full-time but for me as a risk adverse person this doesn't work for me because if I'm just making the minimum you know while I'll be able to pay my bills psychologically it's just too stressful and makes me too anxious and well result in me basically

35:10imploding and so for me my minimum viable monthly income was actually around $6,000 a month and so yeah I'm a single guy living alone this this is far more than what I needed to survive but this was the number where psychologically I felt like okay if I'm making this I can keep going you know I won't get negative I won't get FOMO about you know maybe just going and getting a job and so first I came up with this number $6,000 a month so then in terms of trying to figure out okay so when should I actually quit or quit quit my contract work and focus full-time I

35:52one option was to wait until my MOR actually reached $6,000 a month but but I knew that this was probably you know not taking an advantage of the opportunity I had because I had gained some momentum and I knew that even with the momentum I had it was gonna take a few months actually hit that six thousand a month Mr R so instead I kind of came up with this idea to come for myself and you know rationalize when I should quit and basically I came up with the idea of like the total amount of wealth I was generating in a month which was my M RR plus the increase in the

36:29hypothetical growth and the valuation of my business so I did three X monthly recurring revenue and so this this formula you know made me comfortable because I felt like okay if the total amount of well if I'm generating for myself exceeds my that minimum sort of comfort level then then I'm okay and this formula allowed me to actually you know quit sooner because it factored in the momentum in the growth I had so I think I was actually able to quit you know while I was still around like 3500 mr around 4000 mr r when i factored in the growth and momentum i had so again i you

37:07know as a risk adverse person and someone who believes that being risk adverse is you know actually beneficial to my ultimate success you know this is the formula I came up with and you know hope that it might help some of you and your conversations and thought process about setting when to go all-in so another thing that I've worked on that has been really tricky is building a referral program and you know I think b2b is really tricky because you know how do you incentivize a person to share your product even though it's actually the company that is a customer and so I've tried many things than they've all

37:44failed so I'll just do quickly first thing I tried was to offer gourmet coffee and tea I spent a whole day actually researching the different Roasters you know across the country and cropping her logos into here and the reason I thought of coffee and tea was because I figured like developers you know I didn't want to end up on hacker news is the guy who's trying to bribe developers and to sharing my product so I figured offering coffee was sort of like a low risk a very non aggressive way to ask for referrals didn't work at all the next thing I tried was Amazon giftcards she's just offering cash this

38:21was something yeah I I asked some of my friends hey like you know what would you do to make you actually share this I said Amazon giftcards didn't work and so I jumped but I added this call to action after that to try to just offer cash so every user even today gets this prompt at some point inviting them to share my product and earn cash and this is what my referral program looks like today I just actually use PayPal so it's all digital and total I think I've generated about five referral customers so pretty disappointing and the thing is that I know word of mouth is

38:56is happening because my business has grown faster each month without me doing any additional marketing so at least you know in my mind that has to be word-of-mouth that's growing it and you know it's been kind of frustrating to not figure out a way to amplify that so I guess the lesson is like b2b referral program is a tricky thing and so so beware really quick I get asked a lot about onboarding in sales and for the most part my product is self-service but I still do manually well now more in an automated fashion on board and sell to users and so a lot of products I've seen

39:37out there they you know you sign up for them and then you get a drip email campaign and personally I've always found them you know a little bit annoying and not super helpful and especially with a developer audience I knew that you know I had to be really sensitive about contacting people so I ate it on this email probably like 50 times and really just tried to scrunch it and make it as short as possible so basically I send an email this is now automated but for a long time I sent each one out manually just saying hello and offering my contact information I don't ask a question I don't send them a

40:16huge long email with tons of images and I think this email has worked pretty well for me again I doesn't create more work for the customer but it starts a conversation if they'd like to and this has worked well for me similarly this is the one other email I sent which is just a trial reminder again super simple I've iterated on this more than my welcome email and I just give him a link to sign up and again offer my contact information if they'd like to to chat so it's been mentioned well as you guys know that I work on floor reminders alone and the the reason this has been

40:55really rewarding for me is that when you know the whole reason why I wanted to start a business in the first place was to have the most freedom and autonomy in terms of my lifestyle but also creatively as possible and you know this is a quote by Derek Siver's raise your hand if you don't know who he is okay just go so he's a guy who sold a company to Apple I think in the 90s and sort of blogger speaker has a really great book called anything you want and this is in his bio so he talks about this idea of working alone as an entrepreneur it's sort of

41:28it's not it's not it's an idea that's kind of discouraged and conventional sort of startup advice but I can tell you for me personally it's been it's made the process you know much more rewarding and compared to to other projects businesses that I've started with co-founders I think personally for me it's been more enjoyable the downside has been other difficult things about working along the biggest thing for me has been staying positive so as you can tell I'm really risk adverse and I get discouraged pretty easily someone work alone I to be honest I have a lot of down days and for me the solution to

42:04this has been that mantra from earlier you know if you're an optimist you'll be rich I really have to proactively focus on my mental disposition and making sure that I'm staying positive you know otherwise I get down and discouraged in my productivity just plummets and finally you know one of the hardest things about working alone this is taking a vacation so last August my father had actually planned a backpacking trip for me my brother and him and some of my father's friends and you know leading up to this I was I was really nervous because at this point I was just starting to get momentum and I

42:43was having all kinds of tech issues you know there had actually been multiple times for my app had crashed like in the middle of a meeting somewhere and I had to whip out my laptop and you know get things back online so so I worried about being in the wilderness for a week with no internet and you know what would happen if my app went down so I thought about how can I something this might be a good business idea I'm not sure I thought about what can I do I I couldn't really come up with anything I what I ended up doing is just added my friend

43:11he lives a friend of mine in Japan I added him to my Heroku account and said look if it goes down just run Heroku restart over and over again until it comes back up ad and luckily you know that did happen vacation went well although I did almost get eaten by a bear which so you know in hindsight I need a transition plan for my business or hey go out into the wilderness so that's my talk you know I hope that you've seen that you know building a business it's it's really the step by step process similar to building software and you know again the main thing that helped me is really

43:50focusing on having a good balance between you know force blind blind optimism but having a rigorous and disciplines you know customer validation and go-to-market strategy so Sam thank you I talk ami you mentioned that you were doing consulting work originally while you were building on the product what was the ratio consulting work to product building maybe in terms of hours yeah the ratio was based on the work I could get not like what was the perfect ratio for me so at the very beginning was actually almost full time in fact I actually took a project out and Dover New Hampshire at Liberty Mutual where I was in the office but I I think contract

44:31work you know when I get a full time job I just get swallowed by it I even even if I'm trying to focus on my side project I just kind of get sucked in so I think contract work because it's just the relationship between you and the person you know paying you for me it really allowed me to stay focused on my side project even if the hours I had to put in for the contract work were like full-time but that was just initially then the project after that I went to like half time 20 hours per week and then just like kind of ad hoc part-time

45:02projects after that one more question thanks for the talk how do you feel about having a simple product and the danger of others coming in and yeah that's one of my biggest sort of that's one of the main things that gets me negative these days is you know my another lesson from this is like it's really important to have a business that's defensible right and for me right now just the momentum the word-of-mouth momentum I have is sort of my moat so to speak but it's something I'm actively focused on one of the things I've done my business is actually not called pool panda and I've

45:46built two other products so I've been diversifying my offering to you know similar to like an investor with the portfolio lower the risk of any one product you know having a competitor or being made irrelevant