Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: This is a podcast with Adrian Marin, entrepreneur, founder and someone who's quickly turning into a personal friend. We talk about being a founder in the modern age, raising money and being an entrepreneur while you have a family. Enjoy.
So Adrian, maybe if you could kind of give us an idea of your journey up to this point. How'd you get started building softwares? And where you at now?
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Cool. So I've been a developer for I don't know, 14, 15 years now. I'm a self taught developer so I didn't go to computer science school or anything but I was always passionate about technology and fixing real world problems with technology. So whenever I had a job that wasn't in tech, I was using tech to basically do my job for me, maybe automate it however I could. And at some point after I finished college and everything I didn't like, I finished college doing finances and accounting and I still don't like anything like that. So after I finished I said this is a good time to restart, to reboot. And I kind of built some websites from my family and I did some SEO and I said I'm going to be a developer. So I moved in a different city and I searched for a job. I found a job and since then I've been doing development and I quite like it.
[00:01:17] Speaker A: Nice. How difficult was it for you to self learn development?
[00:01:21] Speaker B: So I have quite a few friends that they turn developers from something else and the one thing that I always told them something that was difficult for me was the frustration. You look at tutorials, at videos, at things, people build things and in the beginning you make tiny mistakes and you're super frustrated.
Why doesn't it work for me? And if you go past that, it's a threshold there. So if you go past that, everything else should fall into place. So you're going to find all the proper resources. And now even now there are even more resources online so it's easier than ever to do it. But there is a little bit of a learning curve and you have to stick with it. That was probably the most difficult thing for me to just stick with it. And yeah, I did and we turned out really cool.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I know you run a SaaS and that's kind of the dream, I think of a lot of people. You learn development, you start your own business. Yeah, this is actually my dream. So I also self taught developer after I took about four years to learn development and after four years I have a job in marketing. So that tells you how good I got at it.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: That was good. It's good. You're on the right track, man.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: Oh, thanks. Well, you know, I think you're right kind of about the tutorials. I think there's like that common adage like tutorial hell, which is like you just get stuck doing tutorial, tutorial. I think I avoided that. But even then it just ended up being like there was more opportunities elsewhere for me. I don't know, maybe I just don't have the developer mind. I think there's something in the DNA of a developer that's hard to replicate.
[00:02:59] Speaker B: So it's still a good thing. So if I were to change shoes with anybody else, it would probably be with someone like you. So what happens with developers that turn entrepreneurs in the beginning it happened to me and I spoke with other people, is like, you think about like, oh, I can code this thing, I can build this product. So, you know, the marketing and the sales, that shouldn't be that difficult because I'm building something of value. People would just chase me, you know, with money to actually throw on me to give them my product. And in reality that never happens, you know, so having marketing skills is, you know, you know, next to like a little bit of development or tech savviness. That's incredibly important. So if there's one skill that the developer should learn as the next skill after programming and everything else, like maybe marketing, a little bit of empathy and everything that goes into that, trying to figure out, okay, how to talk to my customer. So you're on the right path.
[00:04:02] Speaker A: Well, thank you. You make me feel better. You said you might trade places with me, but that would just mean that you're single and you live by yourself and you don't even have a cat, so I wouldn't recommend that.
[00:04:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I know. Well, I have a cat, so we have something in common.
[00:04:16] Speaker A: Maybe I would trade places with you then. But let's talk a little bit about kind of where you're at now. Tell us about what you've currently got going on in your current business and then let's sort of get into sort of challenges, opportunities there and then just go from there.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: Yeah. So right now the current product that I'm working on is Avvo. It's a low code tool that helps developers and teams build applications very, very fast, especially operations applications, internal tools, CRMs, content management systems, and it does that through.
We identified a few commonalities around building applications and you probably noticed this as well. In most apps you have a listing of things. Those things can be orders, customers, sales, products, images. So you Have a list of things. You click a thing, you see the details, you click another button, you get the form where you edit that thing, you manage that thing. So these things are very common. And what my product does enables the developer to basically write in almost plain English, like, hey, I have products. The products have a title and a description, a price. And my product, avo, comes in and reads all of that and creates this internal tool for you and know, starting from like some basic stuff to actually very advanced configurations where you can cater the experience for your particular user. So, you know, people build applications faster and easier using avo.
[00:05:44] Speaker A: My product Gotcha. And what was sort of the inspiration process of maybe deciding this is the business that you wanted to build as opposed to, like, I don't know anything else.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: So, yeah, it was quite an interesting. So I'm not gonna, you know, it's not the first product of its kind. There are definitely others out there. But I think it was very much tied to how, you know, my. My roots as a developer. So when I started out, I worked in an agency and I had a lot of old projects and new ones come in and we built a lot of like, admin panels, a lot of content management system, a lot of these internal tools. And I always love to do that. I love to like, you know, spend, you know, too many hours on a button or like placement of a certain heading to actually make sure that, you know, the person that uses it is going to get like the most value out of it. Then I built a lot of admin panels, this is how I call it. And then I used a product similar, like avo, different stack. And I thought like, hey, this is just amazing. I know Ruby on Rails because my product is for Ruby on Rails. Rails is amazing. It enables you to move fast. If we had something like that for Rails, then that would be amazing. And I would basically describe stuff starting AVO as just wanting to see if I can build it so good so well for more people, not just one customer. And that's how it started. I spent weekends and some of my downtime, my alone time to actually build it on the side. And I reached a version one, let's call it. And then I wanted to take a few months off of that work to try to make it as a business. And it's been four and a half years, I think, since then, since I took some time off of work. I was just. Now I'm just doing this. So, yeah, it was a wild ride.
[00:07:31] Speaker A: That's amazing though, that you've been able to sustain it for four years. And do you think there's anything that goes into sort of like the mindset of building that's allowed you to last that long? And I'll give you some context because I think that's, I phrase that as a weird question. I had a guy I knew who had a SaaS business and you know, big goal with a bunch of SaaS businesses, you want to exit, you want to make a little bit of money, and then you make a lot of money all at once.
[00:07:53] Speaker B: And that's okay. And that's okay.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: That's okay. That's totally fine, right? Not judging anyone. If my business exits, I have stock options, so I get a lot of money too. Right? Not judging.
I am curious as to sort of your mindset as far as are you building to exit? Are you building to exist? What's your sort of long term strategy and how has that helped you get to sort of where you're at right now?
[00:08:14] Speaker B: This happens to, I think a lot of other founders and it happened to me, that mindset and my, my goal, my mission changed along the way. In the beginning, as I said, I just built it to see if I can do it. And then I, I stuck to it to, to see if I can make it as a product. First it was like, can I make it a subscription? So can I make it so valuable that people would pay every month for, for this product? So is it that valuable? And then at some point, you know, I was talking to friends, you know, just joking about like, if somebody gives me like a million dollars, oh, I'll sell it tomorrow, that's going to be fine. But then you get more and more into this SaaS, what do you call it, economy like this. You talk to more founders. You know, I've been into an acceleration program. Now we're a part of tinyseed and you're around more and more business focused people. And you see that there, this is what happened to me. I saw that there's so much more opportunity out there. So now the focus from like, you know, somebody's gonna give me a million dollars, like, oh, I'm gonna be so happy. Switch to like something else. Like we're definitely not there to survive anymore because now we're profitable.
We took a little bit of investment, but we're profitable. We are building things that we want and our customers need. So it brings more value. But so I don't have right now an answer about, yeah, I want to have an axis or no, but you know, even a million dollars I've never seen a million dollars. Like, that's a lot of money. Right. So we're not building just to survive right now, but building to actually make something of substantial value to our customers.
[00:09:51] Speaker A: Yeah, and let's kind of switch to talking about your customers because I'm really curious about this. So what are some of the maybe opportunities and challenges of building for developers?
[00:10:00] Speaker B: So let's talk about opportunities. First of all, as a developer, we can, as developers, we can empathize with our customer. Right? Because we have built, I have built admin panels in the past, content management systems. I can empathize very well. Like, okay, this button. This would be very useful. Or this, you know, it's not very useful even when we build tooling for ourselves using avo. So we're dogfooding the product. We come up with, you know, great ideas about, okay, we need this. This is something that I add in every app. Let's make it easier for everyone. And we bake it into the platform and we release it. And you know, most of the times people, you know, cheer and clap and they, they love it. So those are kind of the opportunities, you know, you know your customer very well, you know what they want and what they need, and it's easy to talk to them. This is another thing because again, we kind of, you know, developers are a special breed, let's call them, you know, so you kind of, whenever you get into a conversation, you kind of know, okay, this is the very extrovert developer, which is rarely. You see them very rarely. But this is the introvert developer. And sometimes you might smell that they have an issue and you have to like, you know, pull it out from them. But, you know, it's, again, a lot goes into empathy and the fact that we are kind of the same. So there are some opportunities there regarding challenges. Well, maybe you've heard this before, but, you know, developers are one of the groups of people that it's the most difficult to sell, actually, especially when you're selling a dev tool. Because so what happens is developers love to build to actually when they see a tool like this, not only this, I do the same thing, my mind goes like, okay, how did they build it? Can I build it? Is this a big enough challenge for me? So developers like to build stuff and some of our customers, you know, they're a little bit past that build stage and they just want to ship things. So there are, there is like a, you know, a smaller percentage of developers that they understand the build versus buy, you know, conundrum and they actually prefer to buy because there are some advantages that, you know, work very well with their current stage.
[00:12:12] Speaker A: Gotcha. And then let's go back to sort of the opportunities there. Because you said something about dog food in your products I'm really interested in. So how essential is dogfooding to your development process? Like, do you only solve issues that you yourself have or what's the process to creating new features?
[00:12:28] Speaker B: No, I would say that falls kind of in the second place. Obviously, if we find this great opportunity, which we do maybe once in every month or two months, this great opportunity from one of our use cases, yes, we go all in on that. But this being a product that enables you to build all kinds of applications, so developers use it in all kinds of ways. We think, okay, you're going to need like three buttons in the top, right? No, no, no, no. Somebody will figure out that they need the button in the bottom left side of the screen and that makes sense for their use case. So then, okay, they come to us, okay, can we do that? And we're like, okay, of course, yeah, if that makes sense in the whole grand scheme of things. Yes, we do that. So I would say that most of the work that we do comes from the feedback and ideas and requirements from our users. And you know, when we find the nugget, we get on it and we ship it really, really fast. But most of it comes from outside feedback.
[00:13:27] Speaker A: How much of your product would you say was built by the sort of dog feeding process of like, oh, hey, we need this feature like yesterday versus how much was built by say, talking to customers?
[00:13:37] Speaker B: Again, like in the beginning it was a high percentage from us, like from dog footing. Because we know, you know, you in the beginning you have to build a lot. Now it's a little bit less in terms of percentages, I don't know, maybe 10, 20, 10, 15% comes from us. We build apps, maybe every month a new app. We build just now, one for invoicing and some other things. And it was like really quick. We built a full freaking app with everything we needed in like five hours. And you know, we were amazed how fast we could go. And again, we identified a few things and we added it, added them to the backlog. So that was, that's an important thing of our process. Whenever we see one of these improvements, you know, opportunity improvement opportunities, we just move it to the backlog. And now we have like a big 700 issue backlog. But it's okay, it's all good. We're going to get on it at some point, but it's good to be there because if somebody else has, you know, the same problem, they're going to comment there and say, yeah, I want this. And then another one, yeah, I want it. So then we can prioritize it a little bit more easily. So this all comes back to the fact that it's a dev tool. We're devs, we are building this together and we are solving most of the times common problems.
So we always put that on the backlog and we want to have visibility on that.
[00:14:53] Speaker A: I think let's dive into that a little bit more because I'm really curious, what's your process for say, recording, logging, evaluating customer feedback, whether it's for, say, building new features or bugs? Because I know there's a prioritization process that goes into everything, like, is this worth doing or should we hold off for a month or like a year or like a never?
[00:15:11] Speaker B: Yeah. So it all starts. So we use GitHub projects a lot because it's a dev tool, it's a piece of software we have. A big part of our code is open source. So GitHub is the place where the code lives. And also the GitHub projects, which is like kind of like a big Kanban board and all the issues and all the feedback that comes in and all the conversations that we have on the project. So we also have a Discord channel, Discord server and people sometimes send in emails, so information comes from all over the place. Some are more used to chat and they don't want to, you know, write GitHub issues. And we sometimes, you know, send them there, like, okay, post the GitHub issue because, you know, this is a little bit more difficult to implement. And the chat, you know, we're going to lose track of it and everything else. If not, we're going to do it. If it's really important, if it's something that we think it's, you know, hurting more people, we just create an issue and say, okay, we're going to talk about it there. So everything goes into GitHub, into GitHub issues. And then we try to put the way that we prioritize it, we don't have a big manual about it.
We are those kinds of developers who, if a customer says like, hey, I want this thing and if it makes sense, or we think it makes sense for more people, we build it. And if you talk to other entrepreneurs, other SaaS, they'll tell you, don't do that. Tell them usually what happens in SaaS is the response. The boilerplate response is, thank you for your improvement recommendation. We'll take it up to the team and try to prioritize it, or we'll figure it out. Something like that. What we do, we put it up there, and we usually do it. Not every time, but we usually build it, Especially if it's something that's painful. Especially if it's a blocker for a customer. So this is another thing, because customers build their apps kind of with our product. If they cannot move the button from the left to the right, they will be blocked. And maybe for them, it's a very hard requirement. And at some point, if there are so many blockers, they'll just switch to a different solution or build it themselves, or there will be all of those, let's call them, resentments of like, oh, Ava doesn't do this for me. So what we're trying to do is we either build it for them or fix it, or we figure out a way and give them the code. Okay, you could do it like this. It's not gonna be for everybody, but for your part of the app, you can move the button and this is the thing that you have to do to build it. So we are trying to unblock our customers as much as we can. This is kind of paramount to our philosophy. Let's call it.
Yeah, but one thing, like, if a customer comes to us with a really cool idea, we even have, like, a cool label on GitHub. We actually label that as cool and we prioritize it because it's just really cool. And people love cool ideas. Not just serious business kind of tasks. They like the coolness and the shiny things as well.
[00:18:20] Speaker A: Yeah. And I imagine how cool would that be as a customer to submit a feature request? And it's literally labeled, like, a cool idea.
That's an amazing customer experience. Because I feel like pretty much every. Yeah, like, every conversation we have with almost any business is like, ugh, this sucks. You know, like, they think I'm an idiot.
[00:18:37] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I know, I know, right? So, yeah, this is part of. So before starting Avvo, I was part of this startup. It wasn't the biggest. It was a small startup in San Francisco, and the founder, like, you know, I took a lot from that founder, and one of the things that I took, you know, is it was like, you know, we gotta, you know, take care of the customer. You don't, you know, you don't give them just boilerplate responses like, even if you won't do it, Tell them, like, don't. We won't do that. Like, it's not worth it right now. Like, and I think that kind of is somewhere deep inside me, like, you know, let's prioritize the customer, and let's make them feel like they're valued. They are really value a valued customer of ours, and we can do cool stuff like that. So.
[00:19:22] Speaker A: Yeah. And then sort of going back to your development process, how much of it would you say is. It sounds like you're saying a ton of your development process is just driven by feel. And we just have a pretty. We just have a hunch, an intuition that this is going to be really good.
[00:19:36] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Now. Now that you're, you know, you're calling. Calling it by feel, it kind of is. It kind of is. Let me. I mean, we do have some looser milestones. Like, okay, we have a couple of features that we want to get done this year. Like, bigger features that we have to, like, dig in and do. But it's a lot about feel and a lot about reaction as well, because, again, people build all kinds of apps and they have all kinds of requirements, and they have all kinds of corner cases and edge cases that we haven't thought about. And we do a lot of backfilling like that. Like, okay, this customer has a problem, let's fix it so they can run with it and whatever, and then we'll get back to our kind of thing. And I'm not saying it's the best way to go. I'm not saying that everybody should do that, but it kind of works for us. And we're at this point where the product does deliver a lot of value. We kind of have some kind of profit, so we can do that rather easily.
[00:20:34] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. Well, cool. I think probably my favorite entrepreneur of all time, Jason Freed, Basecamp 37 signals. Hey. He does stuff the same way. It's just intuition. In fact, he and I were having a conversation by email where he was talking about he had raised conversion rates on his site, like, 30% or something like this. Wow. And he didn't. And he didn't know how.
That's. What's crazy is he didn't know how.
[00:20:56] Speaker B: That's awesome. But scary.
[00:20:58] Speaker A: Exactly. So I was like, why do you not know how? Why did you decide to do this now? And basically, it's all came to like, well, it's just a feeling. Like, we just had a hunch that this could be better. We made it as best we could, and then we left it.
[00:21:12] Speaker B: And that's great, right? I mean, that's awesome. That's a good result. And you don't have to have a method all the time, because at some point, this method might not work if you try to apply it again and again. Like, you know, this 30% was this tiny, you know, switch this new button on the website, new and copy. But this doesn't mean you have to, like, you know, dig so deep into it and think about it. Like, I would take that as a win and that's that.
[00:21:36] Speaker A: Yeah, it's just amazing. So maybe you and Jason are a different breed.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: Yeah, maybe. I don't know. It's a good. It's a. It's a tall order. Like, basically. Yeah, it's a big guy. He's a big guy.
[00:21:49] Speaker A: Absolutely. But let's kind of go back to your product and talk about. One thing that we had mentioned by email that I'm really curious to hear about is the challenges of selling downloadable software as a SaaS.
[00:21:59] Speaker B: Yeah. So SaaS in the most classical way, like, not necessarily classical, but how we have it today is usually you go on a website, you click register, you click subscribe, and then you use that website, that application right out there in the cloud. And that works fine. That's awesome. Like, people are used to that. AVO is a little bit different because it's not a cloud app. It's a piece of code which you pull from the server. So you pull it inside your app and you start, you know, messing around with it. You, you know, with methods and APIs and everything, everything that goes into it. So a developer works with it. So it is essentially kind of like downloadable soft software. So people don't see it as a SaaS, and they. I don't know, it's.
I don't know how to put it. Like, they actually don't see it as a. As a SaaS, as something they. That they should pay forever. And we are trying to change that mentality a little bit. And we think it's. We think about it as SaaS as something, you know, pay as a service, because we keep maintaining it. Like, we actually have releases every month. In every release, we bring, like, at least one valuable stuff on something that makes a big. Packs a punch. So again, we think about it like, hey, we are working on this. You have a team working on this every month. Yeah. And doing a release and you get all of these upgrades and all of these improvements and all the bug fixes. So it's just a little bit of a different medium. It's not in the cloud, it's in your app, inside your code and you can do that. So again, maybe it's a little bit on us that we don't know how to sell downloadable software. But again, we've looked through the big SaaS landscape and we couldn't find too many people doing this business model. Right. I mean, we have on premise, which is like, you know, cloud software, but you can put it in your personal cloud and everything else. But again, those kind of customers that need on premise, those are usually enterprises and they're usually used to paying for, you know, for software in much, you know, in many ways, let's call them. So yeah, if you could go back.
[00:24:19] Speaker A: Do you think you would build it the same way?
[00:24:21] Speaker B: Oh, tough question. So we started this conversation kind of like on the grass is greener on the other side kind of thing. I always think about like, yeah, I have all of these challenges of convincing people like, it's SaaS we keep upgrading and everything. If I only had a traditional software, cloud based business and the other founders who have that tradition, they have other problems with churn and, you know, competition and there are, there's a different set of problems. So I don't know, I think I'm going to keep my answer to no, I would still do it the same, at least for a few years, a few more years before I, you know, throw in the towel and say, okay, maybe this is it for, you know, downloadable software. So this is all you can, you know, do. And this is always going to be an impediment. But I think there are ways of like, you know, changing people's mentality about this kind of SaaS and software.
[00:25:20] Speaker A: I imagine there have been some sort of or some kinds of advantages to downloadable software. Like, I imagine there's something in a customer's mind where it's like, yeah, I'm not tied to this forever. Like, I just buy it and then it's mine.
[00:25:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:33] Speaker A: And I think that in itself is like really nice.
[00:25:37] Speaker B: It is. So yeah, that's one thing that you can, you know, that's one advantage. That's one pro. Another pro is that because it's inside your application, because it's a library, basically you have access to a lot of power, a lot of actual RAW code. So you're not talking to the service through an API, you're actually talking to it, to this product using code. And that's extremely powerful. And that gives you, you know, some bigger capabilities that you cannot do with cloud software. So I would say, like, that is the biggest, biggest pro that our product provides.
[00:26:17] Speaker A: And since customers are able to download the software, how have you been able to maintain your moat?
[00:26:24] Speaker B: So I guess we're not such a big niche. That's one thing.
And building. And again, going back to, you know, there aren't too many, you know, SaaS, businesses that do this. It's because of, you know, all of these, you know, hardships because it's difficult to sell and, you know, people don't want to pay for a subscription, yada, yada, yada, and downloadable software. So I guess not a lot of people want to go into this kind of business. So that's one thing. The way we kind of like to think about it is like, you know, we just build a great product and people, you know, just appreciate it and you know, that that's why they stick with us for such a long time.
[00:27:02] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, to go back to Jason Fried, he said in, I think it was a podcast episode with us actually, that they just give without expectation of return. Like they make different software or different features of whatever and then and there they go on podcasts. In fact, Jason Freed was our first guest in this podcast and we had zero subscribers. Just because like the guy who started the podcast just kind of had followed Jason for 20 years and he goes like, hey, would you go on podcast, Jason? I was like, yeah, sure, why not? And this is the guy who's making, he's probably making hundreds of millions. Goes on a no name podcast from a guy who's read some of his books. So yeah, I mean, just like that, giving it without expectation of return, I think that's so powerful because I think humans, I think at our core we're really, really dumb. And I think we're just not able to see that far into the future. And I think if we were like, I think if humans had 10 times the IQ, we'd be able to see like, okay, if I, if I'm give things away now or just like sort of go by intuition sometimes or just try to do the right thing, then this is actually a far more effective long term strategy than like just trying to nickel and dime or like trying really, really hard to get every squeeze out of the juice, you know, or juice out of the squeeze or whatever. But that's, I think there's something that's like really brave about that.
[00:28:14] Speaker B: It is. And so, yeah, I think we do this, we do the same thing. We, we build things without expectations. And I think, okay, so whenever you talk to other founders, whenever you talk to mentors and whenever you talk to people who have built businesses, I think most try to do it mathematically, to think about numbers. Everything, like everything you do, you have to figure out, okay, does 70%, do 70% of my customers need this? Is this gonna make my product, you know, 10, 10% more expensive? Can I charge more and everything? And that's a great way. That's a good way to think about it. But sometimes you can run by intuition. Like, for example, like how we are running right now because we're developers, we're building for developers. Like, we have a lot of empathy with the. But we know what they want to build. Now, I'm not saying, like, go out there and build, you know, build in your garage for two years and then release it because you know what you're going to, you know what people are going to want. But you can, you know, create this initial iteration of the product. You know, it's not the best, you know, but you kind of have this direction. You didn't have to, like, validate it too much. And then you validate the people. See, okay, I want this, I want this a little bit more, I want this a little bit less. And then, you know, so you don't have to mathematically validate every time. And that's kind of how I look at things. At some point, you. You kind of should know the domain and the business. Of course, this depends on the business, on the customer, on the product and everything else, but you kind of should get the feel about what people want next or would want to use.
[00:29:57] Speaker A: Yeah, totally agreed. I think we just kind of get tripped up focusing on the math sometimes. So let's talk about the math. Now, you guys were recently funded by tinyseed, and you said that had just been a great experience. So what was your motivation to seek funding if your business was already profitable?
[00:30:14] Speaker B: So we took funding from tiny seed, because they are tiny seed. We haven't. We. We were not on. We didn't go on this fundraising, you know, bender into talking to investors and finding people and, you know, pitch decks and everything else. No, we did it because they were tiny seed. And we know it was. They call it expensive investment because they don't give up, you know, that much money for some part of the equity. But what you get is, you know, access to a big suite of mentors and a big suite of other founders. So I think we're, I don't know, 1, 170, probably 200 founders now. And when you get access to that, you can really fast learn a Lot of things. So I'm not only talking about the workshops and everything, you know, else they prepare, but whenever I have a problem, like I go on our slack and we, I ask for advice and, you know, I get a lot of good pieces, you know, a lot of good feedback from people that went through this that were probably at my size, you know, some in my niche and had the same problem. So that's invaluable. That's more valuable than actually, you know, trying to, you know, you tweet about it and people, you know, write on, you know, they write comments to you. You get feedback from people that actually had that, that issue. And that's one thing. And the other thing is we. There is like a lively community inside Tiny Seed. And being around all of those people, you kind of want to do more. So if I went into Tiny Seed as a half developer, half entrepreneur person, now I'm definitely less of a developer and more entrepreneur. Like, I want to do more business development than I want to do software engineering. So it kind of, you know, pushes you and nudges you to actually, you know, improve your business and your sales and your marketing and everything that, you know, you're maybe missing right now.
[00:32:16] Speaker A: Are you saying that Tiny Seed is more valuable than the entrepreneur subreddit?
[00:32:22] Speaker B: I don't know. I know I try to stay out of Reddit.
Not that much. Not that much.
[00:32:29] Speaker A: I do too. It's a cesspool. Whenever I'm on Reddit, I can feel my IQ just falling.
[00:32:34] Speaker B: Yes, Cringy. You want to say stuff, but no, no, no, no, no. It's not worth your time. I know.
[00:32:40] Speaker A: Totally. Totally. Let's talk about, I'm really curious here. What have been some of the challenges that, say, getting outside investment have helped you with and how other than say, sort of the advice, what's it. Well, maybe related to the advice, kind of. What advice have you gotten that's truly allowed your business to take off?
[00:32:58] Speaker B: So the, the one thing that I think I, you know, I figured after we got the investment wasn't the actual money as a tool of, like, doing things, but it was the fact that we had a safety net. So before we had the Tiny Seed money, we did have some money extra set aside. So we were paying for salaries and everything else, but everything else that we wanted to spend, especially if it was a more exotic spend, we would look twice or three times or maybe, you know, change our mind up because we didn't want to spend that hard work money. Now with the Tiny Seed money, I'm not saying it's not hard work money, but it's a little bit easier. And they actually tell us like, hey, I don't want to see you next year. Like, I don't want to meet you next year and tell me, like, you have the same amount of money, like go out and spend it. Go spend a few thousand dollars. Like learn something, do some experiments. Like, you know, you shouldn't be afraid of actually using that money and you should. And this is basically advice that we got from other founders from Tiny C. Like, try to learn to spend money and to not think in such an economical, you know, in the same way that you thought about money and things before. Because that was the truth. We were always, you know, nitpicking on what to spend on. But now it's like, okay, let's try to figure out is there like a, you know, a great opportunity for a workshop that does sales or whatever? Can I get like a sales coach for, you know, a few hundred dollars per month? Yeah, let's do it. Because we have that and we're not going to be, you know, go bankrupt and we are not going to spend our super hard earned cash. So it's a different mindset. That's what the money gave us, basically. That's the biggest plus.
[00:34:40] Speaker A: And do you think you've gotten better at spending money since then?
[00:34:44] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say yes. No, we still make some mistakes because you always do make mistakes. I think everybody, the big ones do it. Everybody. But yeah, we did spend some money wisely and we did learn a lot of things and we have validated a lot of things and it's way easier now than it was before.
[00:35:04] Speaker A: And if someone else is kind of thinking about taking outside investment, what advice would you have to offer them?
[00:35:09] Speaker B: Talk to people like, first of all, you know, check where. So first of all have a mission. Like don't take outside investment just for the sake of it or just because everybody else does it. Or, you know, if you don't have a plan with that money, that's usually a red flag, like, don't do it. It may be a challenge, maybe a good challenge to try it out, but don't do it because then you're going to have the pressure to actually deliver on something. Another thing is somebody that actually sold their company for a lot of money, they built a very big business. They told me, like, as soon as you get investment, you basically signed off on selling your company eventually. It was quite deep for me and I think because I'm a developer I built this dev tool, this software product. It's my baby, it's like it's mine. But when somebody tells you, yeah, you're going to have to sell it at some point, you're going to have to have an exit somehow. It's not 100% there, but usually that's what happens. And you know, to me it was maybe a sign of maturity or something like, okay, I'm ready to at some point give this on to somebody else. You know, it's, it's a different mind. It's a, it's a mind shift. And yeah, be careful like where you're taking the money and what you're going to do with it. But definitely have something, have a target, might have something to do with that money that you're bank to raise.
[00:36:32] Speaker A: Why do you think raising money kind of locks you in to selling? Like why, why are investors not just happy to get a nice little cash cow? They just get a few thousand a month and they just don't work at it. Why is that so bad? That sounds nice to me.
[00:36:45] Speaker B: That's, that's, that's really good. Yeah, well, that depends on where you're trying to raise money from. So, you know, people, I think they know, you know, there are angel investments, VCs, private equity, bootstrapped, mostly bootstrapped. Kind of like what Tiny city is doing. And it's different flavors and every type of investor, they want something different. Like, you know, the angel wants to, you know, maybe 5x their money in a short period of time. The VC wants to 50x their money and if they want to 50x their money, you're probably gonna, you know that's gonna happen in an exit. It's rarely happening in just a new series of raising investment. Or maybe it does, I don't know. I'm not so, so great, you know, with investments and everything. But with tiny seed, the deal is you get this money, we give some equity and then whenever you sell, it's the regular thing, you know, they get their share if we have an exit. But we also have this limit on how much can a founder earn per year. And it's a very high amount. Like it's a, it's a big, very big amount. And whenever you go over it, they consider it as dividend. So they get a cut for their share of the company. So it's kind of like, you know what you're talking about. It's kind of like, yeah, we built, we invested in this company, they make a shit ton of money and we're making some money, so that's great. I don't know how that falls into the whole tiny seed fund economy. I really don't know about that. But I think it's good. I think they love it.
[00:38:24] Speaker A: Maybe there's just something I fundamentally don't understand about angel investments, which I've never been too active in that world. It seems to me like there would almost be some appetite out there for angel investors who like, they just want a nice paycheck. They don't want to sell pictures of their feet, they just want something to come into the bank account every month.
[00:38:40] Speaker B: Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. That's. Yeah, that's what I mean. Like every type of investor, they have a different mission, they have a different goal in mind and that's why they have different thesis, different types of companies they invest in. They help them in a certain way because angels usually are more involved with the company.
So yeah, that's a good thing. Like I love lifestyle business. Like I love what we have right now. I want to make it bigger. But you know, I have a kid, I have another kid coming and I do want, I do like spending time with my kid and, and you know, going out and picking, picking him up from kindergarten and everything else. So you can build a big VC funded business, that's great. But you're going to miss on a few things. If you want to do that, that's perfectly fine. I'm not judging.
I think each do their own right.
[00:39:29] Speaker A: I had a guy tell me about a month ago that I should either be an entrepreneur or I should have a family, but I shouldn't do both.
How difficult has it been to balance those kind of two different sides of you?
[00:39:40] Speaker B: So by the time our first kid came, we weren't quite profitable but we were pretty close. So it wasn't that scary. It wasn't that scary. But things were starting to pick up. So it wasn't difficult. Another, another reason why I'm saying it wasn't difficult. It was a little bit because the nature of our product, we don't have anything, you know, a service in the cloud. So things, nobody is going to call me at 3am that, you know, because the server broke or whatever database is full or whatever. It's, it's a different type of product. If somebody has an issue, they'll post the, you know, they'll write to us and we'll fix it in tomorrow or the next day. So it's all good. So, you know, I think, no, I got cozy like that.
I created this kind of environment for myself, I don't think I just stumbled into it, but it feels like an easy business from that point of view. But then, you know, you probably spoke spoken to a few entrepreneurs. The highs are high and the lows are low, you know, so, you know, the lows are still there, but when you make a little bit of money like you're profitable, like they're not that bad. But yeah, it wasn't that bad balancing the family and the business.
[00:40:56] Speaker A: You said you kind of had sort of an easy business. What makes it so.
[00:41:00] Speaker B: So because AVO is this product that you put inside your app. So it's not something that is running 247 on a server. So you put it in your app so you control it. If something breaks, you just revert to the previous version or you undo the, you know, the, you yourself like do undo the changes and you know, you call us and we fix them and then you try again. But it's not something that has to run 24 7. So it's not something that you know your app is going to ping our server so our servers have to be up and everything else. So it's not something that we need to have on call people and do all of that, all of that, you know, rotation and make sure that the infrastructure is up. So that's why I think it's, it's an easy business for developer.
[00:41:44] Speaker A: Okay, well, nice. That sounds, that sounds sweet.
And then I think kind of one more question I would like to ask is sort of what advice or tips would you give for your younger self about building the business? What missteps were you making along the way?
[00:41:59] Speaker B: Good question. So one, there's a quote. So first time founder, they obsess about the product. The second time founder, they obsess about distribution. And the third time, third time founder, I can't freaking remember. So. But it's very true. Like I obsessed a lot about the product. Sometimes we do now. But you actually have to think about distribution. And what that means is like think about who you're selling to. Think how are you going to reach those people, those teams, those businesses, how are, what are you going to tell them? And if it's an easy thing to do because if you don't have all of that figure out, figured out, you know, in some measure it's going to be difficult no matter how good your product is, no matter how you know well it's doing its job and whatever if you cannot reach those people. So it's, it's a lot of Marketing problem. So because of the nature of our product, because it's a dev tool and everything else, it's not, you know, I don't know, a link shortener service or something that's a little bit more. It's a classic business where people kind of figured out, okay, this is how you usually sell it, this is how you usually price it, this is how you talk to people. So you know, try to figure those things out and you know, it's going to be easier for you to deal with everything like the business and the customers and everything.
[00:43:18] Speaker A: How much of your time would you say is split between building product versus marketing?
[00:43:23] Speaker B: Now now is definitely more towards marketing and business development and trying to figure out sales funnels because I'm learning all of these things. I'm learning, you know, sales funnels about customer, the buyer, buyer's journey and you know, problem aware, you know, solution aware. Like, you know, there are all of these frameworks and all of these things and to me it's a little bit, you know, overwhelming. Like there are so many things to think about and which is right for my job, my company, which is right for my product. So now I think most of the time that I'm doing that I'm spending is on this business development, I call it, you know, a little bit of sales, a little bit of marketing, know some SEO in there and trying to figure out, okay, where am I, you know, where should I inject myself best in the buyer's journey and how to talk to people and you know, things like that. So 80% is probably, is probably going towards this business development side.
[00:44:19] Speaker A: Gotcha. And if you don't mind me asking, so this is the world that I live in all day is this sort of whole process and whatever making sales easier, marketing job. So that's what I do. So if you don't mind me asking, do you guys have like a sales process or is everyone just self serve?
[00:44:34] Speaker B: So yeah, we did run some experiments. So right now we're back to everything self serve. So until December it was all self serve. We had like two painters cheap. We have free, cheap and expensive. And in December we tried, okay, let's make the expensive one call us basically, you know, tier. And, and we had two calls from December and we usually make a few sales like when it's self serve. And then we said, okay, maybe developers don't like to call people, you know, spend, you know, 30 minutes to figure out the price. And that's kind of through. We have had some tell us and now we're back to self serve for the cheap and expensive plan. And it's a call us for enterprise and we go and usually, you know, there are very few enterprise calls that just call us for the enterprise. They're usually users of our cheaper plants that want to upgrade. They need something from the enterprise and usually that's audit logging or role based access control, one of those and they upgrade to enterprise when they need it.
[00:45:33] Speaker A: Gotcha. Okay. You know, talking about kind of all the different marketing frameworks, I use a very simple one and I think this is probably what I would recommend to you to use in your situation because I think there's so much. So the marketers are just people who, they're two people people to be developers. That's all. All they are. They have the same kind of gears in their head. They have the same like sort of data analysis. It's all there. They're just people but not quite salespeople people. So there's a little bit more than developers and that's where marketing sits between development and sales. So there's a ton of all that to say. There's a ton of frameworks and there's a ton of people saying, oh, this is the way you should do it. This is how you should think about it.
[00:46:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:46:07] Speaker A: I think in your situation, if you don't have a very strong sales process, which sounds like you don't with everything being self serve, then I think I would just kind of think about things as like you have your cold leads who are not interested, they're just like tire kickers. You have your warm leads who are somewhat interested but maybe now's not the right time or maybe they don't truly see the value of the software or whatever. And then you have your hot leads and these are pretty much people who are ready to buy and I don't know, kind of where you're at in your business but probably like 80 to 90% of your effort should go to your hot leads. So these are people who are actively searching for things to solve the pain that they have. And this is going to be reflected in the keywords they're searching for. So they might be searching for like AVO competitor or AVO alternative or something like that.
[00:46:49] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:46:49] Speaker A: Or whoever your competition is. Competition alternative. They're actively looking to buy or they might be searching for like how to do X and that's the key thing that your software solves. So probably 80 to 90% of your effort should be focused on that. And then once you've kind of exhausted that that's your. That's your. Well, like, that's. Those are people who are going to take the least effort to spend the most money.
[00:47:13] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:47:13] Speaker A: That's where you really want to spend a lot of effort. And then after that's exhausted, which is going to take years. I doubt that you're here yet. You might be, but I doubt it. Yeah. Then you go to your warm leads and that's just people who are kind of searching for information. So that would be like how to do X or why to do X or things like this that are more informational.
[00:47:32] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:47:33] Speaker A: And then you can kind of think of it as a. As a funnel as well. And this is how probably most people talk about it because you have like your awareness and you have like, you know, whatever, but you have like cold top and that's everyone. Then you have warm, which is a little bit less, and you have your hot, which is very few. But that's kind of how I think about it.
[00:47:48] Speaker B: No, that's very interesting. So the way I kind of read it is like the hot leads are the problem aware customers. Right. They know they have a problem and they're looking kind of for solutions. Right.
[00:47:57] Speaker A: I would say not just problem aware. So for a long time I had sciatic issues. It's like a nerve in your lower back and it keeps bending over and it hurts everywhere. Oh, it's horrible. It's horrible. And I had it for about a year. I was problem aware, but I didn't do anything to solve it for a year. I just kind of hoped it would get better.
[00:48:15] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:48:16] Speaker A: That's the difference is after a year I was like, okay, I'm going to change this or it's going to ruin my life. I don't care if I have to do surgery, if I have to do physical therapy, I don't care. I'm going to solve it. And that's the difference between problem aware and ready to solve. So I think. Yeah. So I think that's kind of how you should be thinking about it is like your hot leads are the people who are ready to solve. They are in pain and they're saying, if I don't solve this, it's going to ruin my life. So I will do anything.
[00:48:39] Speaker B: Yep. Makes total sense. Yeah. Thanks for. Thanks for the feedback.
[00:48:44] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Well, gosh, thank you. Just talking to you has been really incredible. Anything else you wanted to cover before we hop off?
[00:48:50] Speaker B: No, I think you're great. Thanks a lot for the interview.
I really appreciate the time.
[00:48:55] Speaker A: It's been amazing. Can I give people a really quick summary. Where can they find you? What's the key problem that Ava solves?
[00:49:03] Speaker B: So it helps developers and teams build applications incredibly fast. And they can find us at AVOHQIO or AVO Coal. Yes, that's a real domain name. And you'll find me there as well. I'm Adrian, the dev everywhere, so you'll find me if you go on avohq IO.
[00:49:24] Speaker A: Nice. Avvo Co. That sounds like a very expensive domain name.
[00:49:27] Speaker B: No, it's not. It's actually not. I didn't buy it with tiny seed money, so it's not that expensive.
[00:49:34] Speaker A: Well, great, Adrian, it's so nice to have you on. It's been a great guest and. Yeah. See you later.
[00:49:39] Speaker B: Thanks a lot, Brady.
