you know this stuff is gonna take time, and you got to just be willing to put the work in day after day. I got a massive to do list for the week, and I'll get the half of it if that. But if I look back where we were a year ago,

it's like remarkable the progress we've made. It's like I can't believe we made it quite so far. So I think that persistence is really important. This episode of Gritty Founder is brought to you by product. Traction dot com brought attraction dot com is the best place to hire highly skilled, talented and experienced remote U X and you I designer. If you're building software, you need a designer you can trust. Product traction dot com is the place to hire your next product designer. Visit product traction dot com today and sign up for no obligation design brief to get started right away. Theo Direct URL for this episode is gritty founder dot com slash 031 If you want concise, detailed and time stamped show notes for this episode where Wade Foster, the founder of Zap Ear, shares extremely valuable. Once in a lifetime wisdom for founders. Then go to gritty founder dot com slash 031 and grab a copy of the show Notes for yourself. Hey there,

this is Craig Kent and welcome to Gritty Founder, where I interview the world's top founders and showcase stories of grit, determination and success. You know, people always ask me, Craig, how did you get the idea to start a daily podcast? And my answer is always the same. The reason I started a daily podcast is because I'm just not much of a reader. I love listening to audio books and podcasts, and I even multitask when I listen to audio books, like when I'm at the gym or flying on a plane or driving in my car. That's just how I learned. I'm more of an audio person, I guess. So for me,

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Founder dot com slash b 00 K s and I've painstakingly made a list of every single book that's ever been recommended on Gritty Founder So you can have your pick. You can literally choose any book you like and download it absolutely free. That's right. Your first audio book is absolutely free. Just head on over to gritty founder dot com slash books. That's B 00 K s and pick any book you like, and you can get your first audio book for free and make sure you send me an email and tell me which book you chose. I've loved to hear from you. All right, let's start this amazing interview welcome to Gritty Founder. I'm your host, Craig Kent. And today we have a very special guest on our show. He is the CEO and co founder of Zap e er a workflow automation and productivity software used by over a 1,000,000 people. Please welcome to the show. The co founder and CEO is Appier with one and only weighed Foster Wade. Welcome to gritty Founder.

Yeah, thanks for having me here, Greg.

Awesome. So you built this amazing startup. It's a software that everybody probably uses in the tech industry. I use it. I think it's great. It gives you an opportunity to tie so many AP eyes together and build these cool service is How did you get this amazing job? How did you get your start?

Yeah, that's a great question. So, uh, the start of happier came about from me and one of my co founders. Bryant had been doing a lot of freelance work in Columbia, Missouri, Columbia, Missouri. About 100,000 people, their college town. So some stuff happening. But it's not, You know, it doesn't compare, of course, like San Francisco or New York City or anything like that.

In terms of you know that the tech ecosystem. So for all intents and purposes, we were the people who could do Internet stuff in town. You know, we could help you with a wordpress install. We could help you send a set up a male chimp list like we could do all the Internet things, right. Um and you know, we would get asked every now and then to do what I call like these one off integrations. So thank papal sales and it quick books, or get a list of leads into sales force, that sort of thing. And Brian kind of had this realization one day and he sent me a message on I chat and was like, you know, I think we could build the thing that allows these small business owners to set these integrations up themselves and not have to hire engineers to do this for them so they could just have something off the shelf. And that kind of insight is what led to us. Ah, starting to work on the very first prototype of happier. What year was this? This would have been in 2011.

Okay, So you guys were not in San Francisco.

No, we weren't. We're smack dab in the middle of the United States.

Wow. So it was just the two of you, and Ah, he came over the idea. And then you guys started developing

it. Yes. So we actually teamed up with, ah, third person Mike, who have been working on the Facebook developer platform for a few things. Brian had worked with him a while in the past, and we built out the first prototype of this at a hackathon startup weekend. If you're familiar with those and, uh, you know, we it went really well. Like we had fun building it out like the prototype worked. Uh, people seemed excited about it, So we were like, All right,

let's try and give this a go. And being from Columbia, Missouri, uh, we didn't think of things in terms of like, ah, this is a start up for us. It was like, let's make some software and maybe we'll make a business out of this for us. It always felt like, you know, let's you gotta get customers. You gotta get in. It'll pay for this thing, and then you're in business, right? So that was kind of

our just probably the right way to think about

it. Ah, I I would tend to agree with that. Um, I think in Silicon Valley, it's ah, sometimes thought differently,

right? I'm very curious. What was the first zap that you guys wanted to put together?

Good question. So that weekend we'd built Let's see, we had PayPal and we had high rise, and we had Twitter, and I think we had twilio. So I remember a demo being like, uh, if you pay us through PayPal. Uh, well, log your name inside of High Rises. Customer. Sure make a serious, like a basic thing. Yeah, and then you can get a text about it. So it's like a someone paid you

that's so cool. And what was the response like that? People just go. Wow.

Yeah, People. Well, uh, when we demo the thing Originally, people were, like, impressed by it, even though the demo actually broke, like, halfway through. Ah, because like, it wasn't built for us. Many people is trying to use it at once, and so it broke pretty much right away. But it was enough that people were like, Wow, that's cool. Yeah. So

And then you know what happened after that? What happened after

started weekend? I think, you know, we'd the three of us worked well together. You know, Brian and I had had some working history together, too. We thought, Hey, let's make a go of this. Can we Can we make a real product that people would actually rely on here? And so we started working nights and weekends. Um, you know, being asked, You don't thinking as a real business, like,

you know, we need to tow ah, have a way to fund it. And so we kept our day jobs to fund kind of the product development for this. So so nights and weekends we would spend Oh, I don't know, like six PM toe like 1 a.m. two a. M every night, more or less. You know, we'd miss a few nights here and there, but that was basically the game plan. And we did that for quite a few months until we were able to kind of get a bait already and have something that folks were eager to try and use.

That's awesome. And then, at what point did you you know? Thank you know, maybe we should just go to Silicon Valley Inn, try to get someone to fund this thing.

Yeah. So the thing we started to run into, we were building. We were building these integrations ourselves in the early days. So, you know, we built that all those ones I mentioned highrise papal twilio. And then and then many more male chimps and desk what have you. But every now and then we would run into trouble with a big company trying to build a new integration and get a partnership rolling. And it happened two or three times with, like, really big companies that we thought were really important to have. Like if we didn't have them, it would seem out of place not to have an integration there. And we felt well, maybe if we're a little bit more glued into Suk Silicon Valley, some of these partnerships are gonna be a little easier.

And so that's what led to us applying to y. C. And, um, you know, we're fortunate enough to get in, and they indeed were able to help us kind of tackle some of those. Those giants, if you will go and get those partnerships. Um, set

up. That's really cool. So this was 2011 or what? What

year was this? So why? See, we We went through the summer 2012 batch. So I guess by then it would have been, Ah, May of 2012.

So what's your You know, um, what's been that moment where, you know, you knew this is something that that's gonna be that's gonna be big, you know, it's not. It's not just some small software company, but it's really going to be something that that's gonna be used at an enterprise level.

Sure. You know, I think it I'm not sure that there was a moment. It was just like, lots of little moments. Over time where you start to have more and more customers, you start to talk to more and more folks. Maybe someone recognizes the T shirt out around town. Ah, you know, we were in a ah, a few years back, I was in an uber ride and the uber driver mentioned they used Appier. Ah, So it's like all these little moments that add up, and each time you kind of have one of them, you know,

where zap, You're kind of feels out of place to me. Uh, where it's like, Wow, I can't believe in an uber driver would use this. Ah, all those little moments start to make me think we have a chance to really make something big and important and special that can help a lot of businesses out. And so over time, like you kind of keep leveling up your ambitions, the more people you help because you realize, like, we're in a position that, um, that might be actually possible.

All right, how do you use Appier? I'm curious looking your date A date in your day to day life. Like, what are some really cool hacks that you have been able to, you know, put together with the product that you've

created? That's a good question. I used to be the best users. Appier, for the longest time. Ah, and now I'm not even like in the top 10. Maybe not even in the top 100 of zap your users. There's people doing so much more cool and interesting stuff than I am. Uh, one of my favorite ones. I like these. I like simple. I like some of these simple stuff that that take away what I call like these mental cognitive tasks that you kind of have to do all the time. So a good example of this is I run a weekly meeting with ah Mei er are exactly human. Every week there's a document that has to be created, an account later invited.

And there has to be, like, a slack notification and all that stuff. And so I've gotta zap, set up that every week. Ah, on Monday, it's creates a Google doc. It's a template of doc that asks folks to fill out their appropriate section. Ah, it puts that Google doc in a right dry folder that shared with all the appropriate people. It ah. Then creates a calendar invite for later in the week for when that is gonna happen and includes the link to the document in the calendar and fight. And then it sends a quick channel mention in Aah! Slack to say, Hey,

you know the docks ready? Uh, go ahead and make sure you get your your sections filled out before we meet later this week. So it's kind of like a bunch of little things that you don't like. Sometimes you don't realize when you're doing it like every week. You have to click all those little things to make that

happen, like 10 minutes of your time every week.

Yeah, and it's, you know, it's a task that you got to do, and it's not adding anything to your company. It's just annoying thing that you have to dio and like to me, that's one of my favorite little things about Sappier is just these little annoying things. It's just kind of you could make it magically d'oh! And now you don't have to be involved in it. You don't have to spend any cognitive, ah, muscles on making

that happen. That's really cool. I built this Zapp where, Um so you know, I've got I've got, like, a bunch of different emails, and every email has a calendar, and so I built. This is AP, where, um soon as there's an event that gets added to one calendar, it copies it to all the calendars and so this way I can keep all of my calendars and sink. Now, I don't know if there's like an easier way to do that, but I did it with happier, and I thought it was like super cool.

Yeah, I think that's one of the fun things about Sam. Pierre is like, Sure, there's probably other ways you can do it but likes happier. Is this thing that you know? You can set things up so fast, like you could do that in minutes and, you know, you're kind of building a little bit. So it's this thing that you make, and you kind of have that affinity towards these things that you make where you like you and I both the pretty cool little thing. Um, and I did it so fast. And so it's one of those things that I think you know. A lot of our customers end up talking toa other folks and saying like, Hey, I I did this kind of cool thing like and and they're proud of it, Which is fun.

Yeah. So how big is the company

now? We're a cinch over 100 people. So it's Ah, we've grown quite a bit from our humble ah, three person beginnings in Columbia, Missouri.

Yeah, that's that's pretty awesome. And you guys are a remote team, right? So like everybody's distributed.

Yeah, we don't have an office. It also ah, 100% remote, Which is definitely, uh, a bit atypical, but I think is becoming more and more common.

Yeah, And was this how you know, you envision the company would be or was there a point where you decided that this is how you want to build

the company, Huh? Again. You know, I can't recall, like, a very specific moment where we were like, ah, were remote team or Oh, we should really think about this. We should be in office. Company. I think it was just like mo mentum that brought us here a little bit. Um, you know, we started doing nights and weekends as a side project. So when things are a side project,

of course you don't have an office. Um, you just work on it when you can and where you can. So from the get go, we had built that into our DNA and tow how we work. Then, as we started to grow, there was other little factors that may have remote easier. So, you know, we've gone through. I see. And that was the only period in our history where all of us were working together. But at the end of that, Mike moved back to Missouri to be with his then girlfriend, now wife,

who was wrapping up law school. We needed help, too, And so we needed. We needed a new engineer, and we needed someone on customer support to help us out. And we didn't know anyone in the Bay Area. Really? Ah, so and we didn't really know much howto higher. So we didn't feel like we would be very competitive trying to recruit from folks from the Bay Area instead, kind of some of the advice was, Go talk to your, uh, your friends or your old colleagues that you've had in the past that you liked working with that you could collaborate well with. And so that's where we went after.

And we found a customer support person in Colombia who actually was an old roommate of mine or not Columbia in Chicago. And then we had another engineer that we'd worked with in the past, who was in Colombia. And so, you know, right out the gate, we were in 34 cities, and that just kind of set us set the ball rolling to be a remote company.

And what is the company making in revenue? I think you once mentioned was, like, 20

million. Is it? Yeah. As of May this year, we disclose we're at 20 million. Air

are Wow. Wow. That's a big company. I don't know a lot of SAS companies that are there, you know, doing those numbers. You know what would be some advice you can give founders who are building this ass company. And they're just in the early days.

Yeah, I think for me, one of the things that was was tough, you know, I grew up is ah, like I was kind of Ah, the typical, like, straight a student. Um, you know, got to get good grades very, like, come from a conservative town. And, you know, I think one of the things that took me a while to,

like, shake for myself was this sense that, like, just do what Your teacher style. You do what you're told sort of mentality and you'll go. You'll do fine, but an entrepreneurship. It's not like that at all. No one gives you an assignment. No one tells you what the right answer is you're just have to totally figure it out on your own. You totally have to make it up and create it yourself. And so I think a lot of folks kind of, you know, if you're similar to me, your prey out there reading books and blogged posts and like trying to figure out what's the What's the secret sauce like, What's the assignment that I could do to,

like, make this thing happen? And there isn't one, like the best thing you could do is just try and find a problem and just trying to start solving it and get it in front of potential customers and see what they think. And if you kind of keep working on that day after day, you're gonna eventually hone in on something that we'll work out for you. It might take it might take time like it might take many months back. It could take more than 12 months to kind of get where you need to be, Um, but if you stick with it like I'm, I'm pretty confident you'll find something that can work.

Have you had any moments like that where you, you know, you felt like the company was not going to make it.

Yeah, you know, I think early on one of the things that we were running up against in our customer development was this concept of to a sink. So we heard a lot. You know, Johana, Maybe not a lot, but enough of folks that were interested in, like, contact sinking. So can you make sure that, you know, oh, my serum and my ah, Google contacts exactly mirror each other. And that's not really what we were focusing on. We're focusing more on this event driven work,

full style integration and, you know, hearing that pop up a couple times in short succession, maybe think like, oh, my is the thing that we're working on this more event style stuff Is that not important? Is that gonna not if we don't add this other thing like, are we gonna fail? And, um, you know, for a while that had me worried. But we kept the work in, and the thing that we saw was the thing that we were working on was being successful. People liked it. People used it.

We still would get requests for this other thing. But we realized like it's okay to focus on just one set of problems. What we realized. We'd identify several problems that people could one soft and so Ah, that kind of helped me sleep a little better at night, knowing like, Well, if we keep focusing on the customers that we have, the ones that are excited about this problem, we can nail that. And if eventually it kind of runs out of steam, you know we can. There's tangential problems we can solve, too. So that's how we thought

about that, right? Yeah, that can be very distracting. You know, when customers are asking for something and it's very easy for a team to say, Yeah, let's let's build it. You know, customers are asking for it, so we should probably build it.

Yeah, and in those early days, your customers are gonna be so eager to give feedback you're going to get a lot of it and sorting through it and figuring out what's like the signal from the noise can be a tough task asking it's a bit of an art form, um, more than a pure science, I think

right, because a lot of times they you know, traditional advice will say you need to listen to your customers. They know they know what they're asking for. What's your thinking around that? And is this something you honed in while you were in the accelerator program? Or is it something that you just I always believed?

Yeah. I think this is 100% right. You always need to listen to your customers, and you always want to try and understand what their problems are. Um, the thing is, when you listen to him, ah, you may not be able to know. Ah, you gotta be very careful to listen for the core problem because a lot of times customers will explain it as a feature. They'll say like, Well, if this button was here, I think that would be better or something. Or if you made it like this, I would use it more or something like that.

And so when they're saying things like that, their basic, they're talking, they're trying to solve a problem for themselves. But they're presenting you a solution to it. And so you need to figure out okay, what are they actually complaining about here? What's really bothering them and it may be that yes, they are right that, you know, moving a button around or like, maybe an interaction would be a smart thing. That's totally possible. Um, but if you don't understand the root problem, you can't know for sure. But once you understand the root problem, you might be able to know better how to go about

solving that problem for the end customer, right? Hey, everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode of Gritty Founder will be right back and pick up from where we left off after the short message, I want to take a moment to tell you about a very special deal on gritty founder dot com. If you're an established founder or you're just starting out, you know how important it is to have a reliable Web hosting plan. I'm constantly working on new Web projects, and I like to make sure that I'm getting the best deal on Web hosting without compromising on things like security, quality and ban with to see the hosting plan that I currently recommend. Goto gritty founder dot com slash hosting and check it out. I've crafted and negotiated an amazing deal for my audience, so you can get the best deal on Web hosting and build a beautiful website that showcases your business on the Internet without being charged an arm and a leg. So there you go. I've done all the work for you, and all you gotta do is go ahead and lock in hosting plan at the lowest possible rate without compromising on security.

Quality and bandwidth should go check it out. A gritty founder dot com slash hosting again, that's gritty. Founder dot com slash hosting All right, let's get back to the show. You know, we were talking earlier about this difference in thinking when it comes to businesses and can you can you expand on that a little bit? I'm curious to know how you used to think about Zampa or when it when you started. You know, you need to build a business, get revenue in the door, that kind of thing versus a startup in

Silicon Valley. Yeah. You know, I think there's a few things that we did that were atypical around, you know, building a business versus gang. You're running a start up or what? Not one of the things that we thought was we really wanted to get feedback early on from people that had the problem. Eso kind of talking about, you know, trying to sift through the signal from the noise. So one of the things we did was we ran a paid beta program. Soto actually use app here. You had to pay upfront. Um, no trial. No,

nothing. Like, just give us the money and we'll let you end. And like, at the time, there were some people that thought that was silly. They're like, no one's ever gonna help you or what not, but we could like 1000 people to do it and so tow us. That was really important, because this showed us that these people care enough about this problem to try and solve it, even without even knowing if it could. That's huge. Um, and so that the US was the types of things that we were willing to do is say, like,

what are the things that can help us make smart decisions? And what are the things that are gonna help us find the customers that we wanna have that we know we can help? Versus if we'd have just listened to everybody You know, we had had all sorts of tire kickers who were just, you know, you see these folks unlike not to knock on product hunt because I love product hunt, but those people are our tend to be just gratuitously interested in APS. Um, and those major reno up your customers if they are your customers. Great. But if not, you're just kind of listening, Thio. Ah, the wind blow a little bit, and it may not actually be what's gonna help you,

right? Yeah, I totally agree. So how did your team go about, you know, figuring what zaps are going to be more valuable than others and like, did you guys maintain a list? Did you did you guys use adhere to builds Appier like, No. Can shed some light on that.

Yeah. Great question. You know, we did. We pretty much just had a list of what people ask for, and we just counted. Ah, and you know, the ones that have the most requests. That's pretty much what we built. We deviated a little. Um, So, for instance, if we knew like, an app was popular, So,

like, you know, we knew male chimp was popular. So, you know, we built that pretty early on right out the gate because it's male chip. Of course it's popular. Um, so some intuition was involved. But past that, it was literally just Hey, you know, we've got, you know, x number of requests for this one. Seems like we should build it. So we went to go build

it. And what's that process like today? Like if if his app doesn't exist, you know, how quickly can I make it happen if I was just a customer wanting to use that

So today it's pretty different from the early days in the early days, we had a brute force build everything ourselves. Now there's like so there's quite a few options that you have at your disposal. So most of the APs on Zap here are added by the vendor themselves. So of the 900 like 800 some odd have been added by the partner directly because being in Zambia is ah, helpful for their customers, you know, means they turn unless they're able to get more customers, make happier customers a lot of reasons why folks build a zap. Your integration. Ah, and so most of them come through that way through a developer platform zapper dot com slash developer. Now, you don't have to be, like inside the company working of company to add it, though, if they have a public athe I you two can just go in and add it yourself is Well,

if you wanted, um and then we also have things like our web hook. APS are code abs, um, R s s abs, like email parsing ab that allow you to get access to other types of things, even if they aren't natively on zap here already.

And I mean, as far as I know, your biggest competitors, er used to be if if this then that, um Because I remember using, you know, I have t t I have t o r I t t t It was this thing. That girl your cheese t t t uh, I remember using them. Is there any other company that's doing anything similar, or is it just you guys right now?

Uh, you know, definitely like that. You know, if there's happier been the ones that have kind of popularized this, like, model of InStyle integration earlier on, we're a lot more similar. But like you said, it's It's we're quite a bit different now. They're very consumer Internet of things focus where we've been very B to B business focused. Um, but past the two of us, like there really hasn't been a lot of you know, there's been kind of some pop up clones trying to do the same things, but none of them have really stuck around long enough to thio. Kind of provide an alternative look of how the world might be, I guess,

Yeah, during this process of building your company, um, if you could go back in time and tell yourself Hey, you know, this is some some advice I wantto give you. What advice would you give yourself to help you move faster through the process of building a startup?

Yeah, it's a good question. Um, well,

not that you guys didn't move fast. I mean, you know, you started the company in 2011. You got into y c in 2012 And, like, look at all the progress you've made, right, but oh, yeah, just just for the people listening.

You know, I think it's it's a tough question. It's a good one. Um, you know, obviously hindsight you would make, like you have, you know, a lot of what success looks like. So you might say, Oh, if we would on Lee going down that path quicker. So for us, you know, we worked nights and weekends on this thing for, you know, six months.

What if we would have gone full time, ran out the gate? Like, what if we don't have that, um, you know, courage or whatever to make that leap right out the gate. Well, maybe we would be six months further down the road right now. Um, so, you know, you kind of have those wonders in the back of your head, but also at the same time, like the decisions we made is what led us to where we're at. So maybe if we jumped in,

you know, headfirst like that. Same reason we Giles shows not the head start jump in headfirst. Might be the same reason why we've taken the pragmatic approach. We have the building business, so maybe it would have worked out in some way, you know? So you get into the is all like what could have been scenarios, and it's it's tough to say, right,

that's true because, ah, I mean, I personally think that entrepreneurs should reduce the risk in any venture of theirs. A lot of people say, you know, entrepreneurs are risk takers. I don't believe that. I think you know, you're always trying to reduce the risk for yourself and your company and your team. And so I think, you know, it's It's amazing that you guys, we're able to work on this, you know, 66 p. M.

To 2 a.m. And keep your keep your jobs and fund this thing without having to, you know, initially go in, asks, um, someone to give you money.

No, I mean, I tend to agree with that. You know, I think I think entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes and backgrounds. Ah, a lot of the successful ones the like. They do know howto they're successful because they know how to manage money well, and they they know howto, you know, maybe they don't know it on day one, but eventually they know how to work with a p n. L or balance sheet er casual statements and know howto make all that stuff work for them. And a lot of that does boil down to risk management in trying to figure out like how you know, what are the calculated risks you can take that will pay off in your favor. So I do think a lot of entrepreneurs kind of know how to properly manage risk. And they know, you know, when's a good time to kind of put all your chips in versus maybe an area to fold up a little bit,

right? So what's been like the one quality that you think or several qualities that that I've worked really well for you characteristics in your personality that you think are super important for entrepreneurs?

Yeah, I think, um, persistence is a really big one. You know, this stuff is going to take time, and you got to just be willing to put the work in day after day. Ah, I think there's, um, you've seen some studies around folks who say things like, Ah, you overestimate what you can do in, like, a day or a week, but you underestimate what you can do in, like,

a year or two years or something. And in our case like that Certainly is the case like we're always, you know, really? You got a I got a massive to do list for the week, and I'll get the half of it if that Ah, but if I look back where we were a year ago, it's like, remarkable the progress we made. It's like I can't believe we made it quite so far. So I think that persistence is really important. Um, I also think another one is like, just huge amounts of empathy. You know, in any sort of business,

you're gonna have customers. And as you're building out your original your first be one of your product, you gotta be ableto put yourself in your customer shoes and try and understand where they're coming from toe understand their problems. And if you're able to do that, you're gonna be a lot more successful it trying to make them happy and successful.

Right? And, um, how did you guys empathize with your customers? You know, can you give us a scenario like how you learned how to do that?

Yeah, I would almost every the first policy, probably 10. 20. Zap your users. I on boarded on Skype calls. I'd get on Skype calls with him and, you know, say like, hey, here's access to it. Um, you know, you mind if I try and watch? You set up your first lap and I'd try and just say it. Let him let him take the reins and just let him go and see what they could. D'oh!

And, uh, those some of those first ones were painful painful because, like, they were just not able to use the product at all. And you know, you I'd take notes and be like, Okay, well, this is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong. We need to change this When you change that, then we just iterated and we try it again and say like, Okay, I think we've cleaned up these problems,

and then you you know, you do another call, and you'd be like, Okay, well, that that we did fix that one. But this one's maybe worse now. So I think we gotta go back to the drawing board. I think a lot of that just iterating and watching and, you know, being willing toe, I think the best thing you could do is an entrepreneur is always care about your customer. You can't fall in love with the product you're working on. You want to really fall in love with the customer that you're working with. And if you do that, you're gonna be willing to throw out the things that aren't working for them and keep keep working to try and find the things that will work for them.

Yeah, and, ah, the 1st 1000 customers they actually paid to be part of the beta, right? Yeah. And what was that process like when you when you guys got that first paying customer? Like, What did you think?

Ah, I did. Our went outside and did a giant

fist bump. And I

was like, Oh, I got it worked, right? Someone actually wants this thing. Yeah. Yeah, I was so excited. Uh, in terms of like, how it logistically worked, It was it was super basic.

Ah, like where you guys accepting pay power or stripes or credit? Did you have a merchant account? Like,

great question. So I we had were on a call with ah, the potential customer. And you know, he goes all right. I'm in. Ah, What is this thing costs or like, what do you need for me? We had not had a single discussion about this at all. And so in the moment on the phone, I say, uh, it's gonna be 100 bucks and you can pay me through PayPal. Hey, hey. Was like,

okay. And so I gave him my personal PayPal account and he sent me 100 bucks for your pay fell, and that got him into the beta. So super basic. Ah, yeah, Not nothing fancy at all.

That's amazing. And so and so that just became the default number. $100 to get into the beta.

Yeah, that we we started at that, um so they're like that. I forget how many of the 1000 were at that number, but it was relatively small, like 20 or 30. And then around 20 or 30 we'd cleaned up the product enough that we're ready to have more customers. And so we lowered it down to 10. And I think at that point in time, and it wasn't a subscription, it was a one time thing. And it was a pay. This amount you're in for the life of the beta the beta might last more month. Many more months, or it might be over tomorrow. Uh, that's just how it is like you.

It's like we're very up front about it. Had people would pay us, and we'd be like, All right, cool. Thanks for coming in.

That's awesome. And this was even before the accelerator,

right? Yeah. This was before I see

up. Wow. I mean, that must have been huge when they heard about your company and they found out that you guys were actually you guys were running a profitable, or at least a beta that's generating revenue,

right? Yeah. It wasn't generating much money. It was definitely not profitable. But, you know, it was clear demand, right? It's like, you see, it's it's unquestionable. These people are putting credit cards in and paying money.

Yeah, it's amazing. Can you share a bit about Like what? That what that process was like when they heard about your company in life, when they actually found out that you guys were generating revenue already?

Sure. Um, you know, I actually don't know too much of the inside details so forth. They were thinking we actually had applied for y C once. Right after that startup weekend, they rejected us Ah, and said, You know, Hey, it's but we just got a default rejection. I don't know why, you know, they said they said if I if I would guess, it's that we were, you know, three people without impressive resumes and we basically done nothing expect.

Spent a weekend making a hack together app. Um, but we had a plan in place. So in our in our application, we said, Hey, here's what we think And here's what we're gonna go. D'oh! Then when we came back and applied again, it was, Hey, that plan we said we did it. Here's the results. It's working. And so I think I mean, if I'm guessing like they just looked at that and said like all right, you know, these type of people that do what they said they were going to do and, you know, it seems like they got a pretty good business on their hands,

and this was literally, like, a year later.

Yeah, it was a six months later,

six months later. So it was like the next batch. Yep. Wow, That's That's amazing. All right, wait So the first question is, what is your favorite quote?

So there's old, uh, African proverb that I like to talk with my team, which is, uh, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Um, which I love because, um, you know, if we're gonna be successful, we gotta do it as a team.

Yeah, it's all about teamwork. That's a great quote. I love it. Okay, The second question is, what's a book that you can recommend?

You know, I think one of my favorite books. Ah, and it's a bit, er it's a bit nerdy, but early on is an entrepreneur. I read Steve blanks four steps to the epiphany, and it really changed kind of the way I thought about, um, you know, start ups and early stage companies and, like, you know, how you generate to a business model, that sort of thing. And you just had really helpful ways to think about stuff that, um,

it at the time. For me, it was totally revolutionary. I was like, I never even I had so many misconceptions about how you might start a company.

Hey, Uh huh. and that book. Really? Just, like, gave you a foundation. Kind of think about, like, a framework to think about it.

Exactly. It was, you know, it wasn't Ah. Like I said at the beginning, it wasn't like a homework assignment. Go do this. But it was very much like, if you follow this process, okay? Things were gonna be a little easier for you.

Yeah, that's great. And the third question is, what is a mediocre superpower that you'd like to have and why?

Well, that's a great question. I So I am a to be, like at my full speed. I very much need to get eight hours of sleep. So if I wanted a mediocre superpower, I would take six hours of sleep and be able to be at the same functioning level.

That's a good one. You just you'll take six hours, But you still want to be able to function at you're at your

peak. Exactly. So just give me those two extra hours a day. Let me get more done way

news. App for

that? Exactly right. Just think most people call that coffee,

Right? Coffee? Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Hey, wait. It's been great. having you on the show. Thanks for chatting with us, and we look forward to chatting with you in the future soon.

Yeah, Thanks for having me, Craig. It was a blast.

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