No. What's up, everybody? This is Courtland from Andy hackers dot com, and you're listening to the anti hackers podcast on this show. I talked to the founders of profitable Internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they get to where they are today? Had a to make decisions both of their companies and in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses take on the goal? Here, as always, is so that the rest of us coming from the examples and go on to build our own profitable Internet businesses. Today I'm talking to Baird Hall, the founder of a company called Wave Baird. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Koran. Thanks for having me from a long time, listener. So this is fun, Teoh be on the other side of

it. Yeah, it's fun toe, have you? I think one of my favorite things about the podcast nowadays is that Andy hackers has been around for long enough that I could bring on guests like you who were on the forum making posts and comments about getting stunned with your business and apparently even listening to the podcast. And now you get to be on the podcast and we could talk about how far you've come and how successful you've been. You started Wave, I think, way back in December 2016. How much revenue is wave doing today?

We just passed the 76 k m r r Mark recently and still have a pretty good growth. We have. We started it and we really launched in January 2017. And I think that's about when I started showing up on the anti hackers forms.

Yeah, I was about seven months after I started any hackers and sense that you've also somehow found the time to start another business called the subtitle. How much of a newshound in?

I think we're 34,000 month. Yeah, it seemed like a great idea at the time to start another bootstraps ass business, and now it's great. But that first year of that one was pretty tough. But we'll get into that later.

Yeah, but it sounds like it's going well. I mean, 76. 34. It's $100,000 a month and revenue you've basically added starting at 03 years ago, and of course, that's not all going to your pocket. You have expenses, you have co founders. But I have to imagine that your life has changed quite a

bit. It's not a ton different. I think the biggest difference is that pressure is off a little bit. You know that first year, too, and you're getting started. And that point I was in the hole to from a failed startup that we can talk about. But now that those were getting pay, there's definitely less pressure. But aside from that, not much has changed. I started. I think my original goal was to create a business that would let me kind of work part time and make full time monies to my wife and I could travel. We really love to do that. But then we wound up having a baby. I got a four month old at home, so it's funny that I traded that freedom. Infer Daddy Day care a couple days a week.

So where you have found her before wave and before this failed business, there was this sort of your first foray and, ah, starting companies

know this was the 1st 2016 that first failed start that we tried was my first go at it Before that 2010 out of college. I worked for a big software company here in Charleston, South Carolina, where I live big publicly traded company. And I did. I was like Entry level call center, Tier one Support, basically. So I did that for a year and 1/2. Then I moved to start up in town, and I was a sales engineer for four years, and that was a great experience. It was the ninth employee, and I was there for a little over four years, and they hit 50 employees about the time that my left and decided tow work on my own thing. So I was. I was lucky to be able to build sales and support skills before jumping in tow, taking a shot at it.

That's quite a journey from call Center employees to sales to $100,000 a month and revenue as a tech founder. How did you make that transition from being an employee to being a founder

At the time? I didn't know why I wanted to do it. I just had this gut feeling that I wanted to some point try mon thing, and my wife and I had just got married in 2015 in January January 2nd, 2015. And then mid February, I told her I wanted to leave my job and start a company, and this was the first time she had heard it. Anything of that? So she gets a lot of thanks for sticking with me, especially to that first year, too. She likes to joke that she's gonna put Angel Investor on her LinkedIn profile one day because she really helped me get through that first year and 1/2. But so, anyway, I didn't know exactly why I wanted to do it. But looking back,

I know that throughout my whole life I've always been searching for some type of creative al. It's never been good at, you know, arts or music or anything like that. And I was always looking for a way toe create things, and it turns out that you're building companies, is my outlet for that, and I don't think I'd really want to do anything else now.

Well, most people who aren't software engineers when you think about building companies like I'm gonna open a grocery store or a restaurant or something in the physical world. What convinced you that tech companies were the way to go, especially considering that you couldn't code yourself?

Yeah, I've been working in Tech for five years, so that's kind of where my headspace, waas and I had just been with this start up as they grew pretty fast over those four years, I got to see kind of a lot of the checkpoints that they hit very different. That was a kind of a be to be enterprised business for nonprofits. I guess my head was just in tech, and I've always really enjoyed it. And the original idea was I wanted to build an app that let Pacific I'm a big sports radio fan will now sports podcast, of course. But back then I was listening to a lot of sports radio. I was driving around in my sales job, and I was so frustrated that I couldn't use my phone to talk to other listeners of the show. Debate sports with them. So the original idea was to create an app that allowed callers or listeners of radio shows actually kind of virtually call in with their one or two minutes take and talked other listeners. And I convinced my co founder, Nick,

is still my partner today. It, ah to help build it. And it was just a rough go from a business standpoint. Great idea. We got a lot of listener or got a lot of users, and there's a lot of fun, and we learned a lot by making all the mistakes, but that was kind of the original starting point for me.

You're making all the mistakes. Tell us about a few of them.

The biggest one was just we thought a feature was cool so we would build it. And we always thought that next feature was gonna be the thing that got us on the right track and we would, you know. So if we could build this integration or if we could just, you know, get social media integrated so it's easier for people to sign up like Well, that'll set us on the right path. I don't know if we've coined the term I don't think we have, but it's basically like the feature fallacy that we kept chasing that I felt Nick, my cofounder man. He really put the work in to make that product. It's the best he could. But the problem wasn't the product. It was just There was no business behind it, so we could never raise money. And we tried so many different types of business model sponsorship, subscriptions,

ads and everything, and we just never could really model without on paper. But we could never actually get any positive traction for any of the revenue model. We worked on that product from 2015 towards that in 2016 and spent my savings. I put 30 grand in my safe, almost most of my savings into it, and Nick put all that time into it, and we wound up selling it for parts and yet definitely was in the hole from all that. But it was a good experience of what not to do, and I was just stressed out all the time. There's just so much weight on my shoulders because it was so such up. Swing for the fences felt like we were kind of either hit a home run or strike out, and we learned during that time that we don't ever wanna run a venture back business where you know, waiting on somebody to invest in your company, the next milestone or next checkpoint that you have to hit just really stressful.

A lot of people start things and fail. I've been there about half a dozen times. What you think was the hardest part of that stress and going through that failure and seeing your idea not work out the way that you plant.

There were a lot of things, signs indicating that it was working. We had a lot of users that loved using it, and we had a lot of big ESPN and Fox sports radio shows using the product, but we just could never get anyone to pay for it. So on one hand it was definitely a success just to build something, to have somebody used it. I mean, how many people don't even make it that far? So we try to be positive about it, but it was more tough running out of cash and looking back at all that time and effort that we put into it really just stung towards the tail into that the most. And the lesson learned is, you know, we should have realized a lot earlier that there wasn't a business to be had and we should have just kept it on. The side is a, you know, fun side project.

Yeah, there's There's always gonna be some story. You tell yourself looking back as to why this was worth it. Why did you invest all that time? What did you get out of it? With some of the things I've started in the past that have not worked out, I could at least look back and say, Well, I learned a ton. You know, I learned a lot about had a code. I've become a better front end and back and developer, a better designer. Better it sails. What do you think you took out of this failed experiment?

I think the biggest lesson we learned was we need to stop coming up with their own ideas and listen to the market and listen to what people want. That company was more B two c focus. We felt like all the pressure lied on us to come up with the ideas and trying to manufacture growth on her own. We didn't weren't doing a lot of listening, even from our users or from the kind of partners that we're using the product so that, I mean, that was the big lesson. There's just once we made that shift of Okay, let's maybe our ideas aren't that great, but we can start with an idea and then start listening to what people think about it and follow down that road rather than feel like we're pushing something up a hill. That was definitely the biggest lesson. Marketing to consumers is really tough, definitely not for us. But I learned a lot Justus for us, how to promote things on social media and you know how to get in front of consumers, which we don't do a lot of now. But a lot of those principles, I think, still carry over to marketing in any respect.

So at this point, you've got one failed startup under your belt. You're officially an entrepreneur. A lot of people quit at this point in time like well, I just blew through my savings. That wasn't pleasant work so hard for all this time into it. You know, maybe I learned some lessons, but I don't really want to go through that again. It was nice and stable having a job. Why didn't you guys quit and just go get jobs?

The answer was kind of right in front of our faces. So towards the end of that failed startup, we were working on a marketing tactic of sharing audio content submitted by these users and putting it on social media. So the thought was if we could actually share what these people are talking about on our platform on Facebook, Twitter, instagram, other people will hear it quick, blink the down low back and come join in on the conversation. But we learned that really quickly that you can actually put audio on social media. You can't upload an MP three file of Facebook. You have to turn it into a video file and then share it. So Nick, my co founder, really like over a weekend built this really quick internal tool. He cobbled some existing tools together and build me a quick interface so that I could create these MP four videos and do you turn in audio and MP four videos and we were just using it internally and sharing these videos on social media. And as we were realizing that we needed a cell that failing company, We started getting e mails from podcasters and other people.

They were saying, Hey, your app is not interesting, but how are you creating these little video in the light bulb Just kind of went off. Or like Ah, man, we are working on the wrong thing. This little tool that we built is actually more interesting to other people than the whole at platform. So I don't know what I would have done if we didn't have that realization those last few months. I guess I might have went and got a job, But at the same time we were selling, we saw the I pee, like the code base and all the functionality we sold that. And that took about 23 months to actually get that sale completed. And while that was happening, we were kind of spinning out that internal tool as its own product.

Did sail help you finance working this other product? You've blown your savings at this point. How do you How do you find the time and the money to work on yet another start up and you've already been going for so long and things haven't worked out?

Yes, we sold the previous. We didn't sell the company. We sold all the I p for it for about $27,000. And after two years of two people working full time on something, that was nothing. So we did take that money and we started the new L L C and, you know, funded it with. I think we both put 1000 bucks into the new LoC in. We both instantly said, Okay, let's work on this new thing. But we both had to go get freelance contracts. So there's a group here in Charleston that a group of freelancers that we worked with and just worked on a variety of projects half the time to pay our bills and spend the other half working on a way of,

You know, I spent a lot of time freelancing in my twenties, and I was making a considerable amount of money as a developer doing this remote contract work, and I always had these profitable side projects. I was trying to get off the ground, is trying to make him work, but I never had the right level of motivation. I couldn't get enough momentum going to take a mess. Seriously. Because when I compared how little money those are making too. How much my hourly rate was a freelancer. The masses turn that up and I couldn't take it seriously until I just eventually quit freelancing. How did you maintain the motivation to keep working on wave when you were freelancing?

Yeah, we were. We felt the same way. It was tough toe valuing. Your time was very difficult. That point. What we did was our sites with wave. We have absolutely never thought that it would get anywhere to the size that it has a ce faras recurring revenue goes we are initial goal with Wave was we thought it would be really cool if we could get this spot business generating enough income for both of us to pay our mortgage, which was about 1800 bucks, $1700. And that was our goal. And we were just working to get it to that point. And it just kind of kept growing each month, little bit by little bit. And we've always had very linear month over month growth. It started at 40% drop down a 30 then stayed a 20 for a really long time in every month we like, Well,

we can't stop working on it because it keeps growing and that possibility is still there. When we first started something else that was really important is we created Nick has much more of a finance mind than I do. And he created a lot of different models, right? Even before we decided to get into it, we really took our time much more seriously. This go around, We said, Look, if we're gonna put time into this, we need to understand what it potentially could be. So we would model it out based on what we thought. The price could be based on how many users we could get and you pretty simple Aah! Financial models. But we created three different ones. We created kind of the minimum viable model,

as in like if we made less than this, we're not even gonna work on it anymore. But there's kind of like, Hey, let's pay our mortgages And here's the model of what that looks like. And then we created a you know, a better case scenario, and then the best case scenario, which we kind of kept in mind, too. So we at least had an idea, like Okay, this thing is gonna fall somewhere on this spectrum between these two in points and really anywhere in that we're gonna be happy with the results and at least try and see what happens.

That's so smart because so many founders get stuck in this weird no man's land. This zone where my company's not doing that great, like, maybe I should quit, but it's got potential. I've got a few more things I could try and I can add. You know, maybe I should stick with it, and it's really hard to make that decision. You could spend years of your life working on something that has no chance of working just because you haven't said any sort of defined cut off point. You don't have any criteria for evaluating whether or not it's worth continuing to work on where it sounds like the two of you made that decision up front and you knew, you know, maybe if it goes this long without hitting this amount of revenue, we quit, move on something else

again. For us, quitting was never really a thought because we started making money really quickly with wave. Um, we I mean from like month two on, we were at least paying our AWS bill. So we knew right away. Like this thing has some type of legs. We never didn't know exactly what So it was less about quitting and more about, like, a Is this a side gig, or is this a full time project? And that's what we really are. Goal has always been to build our own company that can support us full time. We're not interested in psychics, but if the worst case scenario is this thing just kind of lives on its own and you know, who knows does whatever than anything,

really, in that mind sets a positive result. So I think that's where Head was. We never really thought about quitting. And we're like, Well, if this doesn't work, we'll just, you know, maybe it will generate a couple 100 bucks a month and we'll try another one. So it felt very much low pressure and just get to work on it and see what happens really revisit every quarter, just about and kind of do a health check on the business. See how it's doing and make a decision on whether or not to push forward or you know how much time

you spend on. So let's talk about these early days when I think about starting a project or even just building a feature. What's going through my mind is how important it is to focus on the problem that I'm trying to solve. So what is the problem solving? Who are the people who have this problem? How frequently do they have this problem, how much they care about it, how much time and money and energy air they already investing in solving this problem? Because all this stuff is gonna completely dictate what your business looks like and how well it works. But I think this way because I'm largely just very theoretical. I literally talk to founders and interview founders for a living, and the reality on the ground is usually a little bit more practical, a little bit messier. How were you wrapping your mind around the idea behind wave in the early days, and what made you confident that was going to succeed before he started giving me getting revenue in the door?

It was pretty clear early on because there were podcasters that we saw on social media were doing research and looking around, we saw podcasters already creating these videos, these style of videos so that you've probably seen him on social media where, you know, it's a picture with an animated wave form and syntax and some captions. And a lot of the the more prominent podcasters would have video coordinator of some type somebody actually creating these videos and adobe aftereffect. So we're seeing podcasters were already doing this thing, but they were just doing it very, very manually. And for everyone podcaster that has the resources to do that. There's 100 more that want to get to that point. So where we knew that there was at least some appetite for in the market, we didn't exactly know how much. So just seeing those patterns, I think, is really important as an entrepreneur is making sure that you're actually looking out in the market and seeing something happening because most of us boots, trappers air,

not creating some new category. Most of us are you improving an existing one or and, you know, hooking into an existing market something like that. So that was really important for us to make sure that people are doing this and that. There's other people that want to do it as well. And we early on. For me, it was just a lot of direct email and social media direct messages. Back then, you could message just about anybody, and I would just reach out to podcasters. And we also tried musicians, audio book authors, journalists like we tested some other markets because it seems obvious now. But back then,

podcasting is not what it was that we knew it was growing, but we didn't know it was gonna turn into this booming industry. So we actually did some validation early on of like, Okay, well, what different types of audio creators could use this, and we would just use direct outreach, tow you reach out to £50 Castor's 50 musicians, 50 journalists and can see what happens and the podcasters just right away. The reaction we would get through our emails and social media messages were far and beyond more positive than any other group that we tested. I

love that you said that you were looking out of the market. You're looking what people were doing. You're sending these e mails, a lot of any hackers, air solo founders and their developers. I think it's easy for them to spend all their time just Cody ing and building the product. And maybe they have this vague sense like, Hey, I should probably be doing other things, too. But I'm not really sure what those other things are, how to do them well, so I'm just gonna keep coding and hopefully everything will just work out. And usually for thinking like that. Things don't work out. But because you had a co founder, Nick could focus on the code and the product and the financial modeling or whatever else he was doing. What kinds of things were you doing in those early days while he was coding the product? Where you just sending tons of e mails to customers?

Yeah, lots and lots of outbound communication, just emails and social media messages, mainly, and was also doing some block and getting the content marketing engine going. But that takes time to generate results, and we knew we needed to get in front of people as quickly as possible. It was tough doing that. I mean, we are products started. The original package was $7 a month. So, you know, sitting there all day, send out 50 emails, the podcasters for you, hoping to get a $7 sales pretty brutal.

But that was really the only way we could have done it. We didn't have an audience. We didn't have any money. The only thing that we had was some time and so that left direct marketing. I guess we could on social media. But that's not a direct result either. So it was kind of the only option, and it was a great way to get in front of podcasters and learn what resonates with them. What type of copy should we use? Direct sales is a great way to test pricing as well, because you can email 10 different people, 10 different prices and see what comes back. So it was definitely, really been official. That's really what I spent most of my time doing and then support as well. We had drift installed on her website initially,

and any time somebody came to the website had a question. I was just ready to answer as soon as possible. like that was somebody landing on our website and sending us a message was like gold to me. And I spent a lot of time chatting with people actually looked at our intercom. We put an inter common early 2018 and I was looking at our stats the other day, and we've had over 10,000 conversations and allow 24 months. I think it averages out to be like 14 a day or something like that. Back then, of course, we weren't giving that many, but we spent. We just been a lot of time just e mailing a messaging people and then chatting with him when they came to the website and kind of learning on the fly.

I talked to Rob Fitzpatrick a few weeks ago. He also has a background in sales, and he wrote a book called The Mom Test. That's all about how to talk to your customers, is the founder and really get the truth out of them. But then a truce that you learn for having all these customer conversations and interacting with people that you never would have guessed without having those conversations.

We learned a lot about podcasters. I didn't know anything about under podcast in my life. Aside from being a guest like this as of late, but so early on, it was just learning so much about podcasters what their goals are, what their process is, how much time they have all of them have some other business or other thing going on. So, you know, really, early on it was just learning so much about podcasters and what they do. Yeah, I done sales before, So I kind of knew that process. I knew why people buy things, how to get people's attention. Um, I've kind of approached that already. So it was really more just learning about the market through that those early days

I'm on any hackers right now. I'm looking at some of your old comments from three years ago 2017 and you have one that's explicitly about cold emailing people. Uh, because I was talking about cold emailing, I did the same thing with Andy hackers to find my first interviewees. Unfortunately, I wasn't making any money from them. I was just doing free interviews, but in your comment, you actually gave some tips for how to make cold emails work. So you said that instead of scraping large lists for sending out email blasts, you would instead spend your time researching prospects if it into a specific persona that you were targeting. And then you would personalize each email and you made sure to not come across as sales. And you said that you sent 10 to 30 cold emails a day until you had your first dozen or so customers, which took two weeks. I think a lot of people try this cold email strategy, and they don't have that kind of success. What additional tips would you give to people who are struggling with this?

The first step is researching a good sales person spends time researching who they're going to reach out to you. That's why we hate salespeople so much. And especially that's why we hate cold email salespeople because they just buy a list that you happen to be on and you get this very boilerplate email that is very sales E because they pitch their company, they say something that tries to be personal, and then they trying to actually sell you all in one big email, and that is not the way to do it. So if you're worried about doing direct sales because you don't want to feel slimy and sleazy, don't worry, because that is not you don't have to do it that way, and it's not the right way to do it. So the first thing is, even if you're selling a $7 product like, we did take the time to do research and have a reason to reach out to somebody and they're going to appreciate it, your life is gonna be a lot easier if you take that extra time and do it, and you're gonna have a better response rate as well. The big piece of advice I would give to people that are nervous about doing sales is you have to understand that, yes,

people hate being sold to. We all do. Even sales people hate being sold to you. But at the same time, people love being attended to and cared for. And there's nothing better than somebody else solving problems for you, authentically like That's what we all want. We all want to interact with people, and we love that idea of like being helped. So if you can approach sales authentically like that, it's much less intimidating because you're not coming in. Is that like, sleazy salesmen? That kind of, you know, gets a bad rap because that's the way most people and and really it's more The bad rap comes from lazy sales people.

They don't want to do the research, you know, they want to send out 1000 e mails, get a couple sails and move on. So that's the other big advice that would get. And then the thing that kills me with cold e mails Oh my gosh, is the length of them like they really should be one or two sentences long. You really shouldn't be sending a cold sales email. What you should be doing is sending an email to somebody and all you're trying to do is get permission to have a conversation. So if I was gonna try and sell you with Wave, I'm not e mailing you about our pricing tier and our features and how they work. I'm just sending you an email that says, Hey, Courtland, like I love the podcast. I love what you're doing for the any hacker community.

Uh, you know, what are you doing to promote your podcast on social media and keep it really short. And if you if you don't get a response, that means Courtland doesn't care about social media. Fine. Well, then it's not gonna be a I can't help you, But if you do get a response, you're getting permission to start a conversation. And I know that's just seems a lot more friendly and easy it rather than trying to sell somebody in one email.

I love that. And I would definitely respond to that email if you'd send it to me, because at that point we're just talking about podcasting, and why wouldn't

I want to do that? Yeah, and something else that gives salespeople bad rap is a lot of them are stressed to hit their next number, right? So they're forcing it. They're pushing their pushing. If you approach sales as like, I'm not forcing anything in the great thing about being entrepreneurs, you're usually selling something new. That's novel, and if somebody needs it, they're gonna tell you pretty quickly. If they don't need it, you've got a huge, massive market to move on to. There's a lot of prospects out there, so you don't have to force it with people.

You just you know, if they don't seem interested, then just move on to the next one, learn from each conversation So I know why people are intimidated by cold, just direct sales in general. But hopefully those things can kind of help lessen the intimidation factor there.

I want to add one thing that I think it's cool about your story that a lot of people struggle with, which is that you kind of knew who your customer waas you're talking to people you've honed in on the fact that podcasters really like this is supposed to other people doing audio and because you could really describe who they are. These your podcasters, you know where to find them and somebody who will start a company where they don't have a clearly defined customer. They don't know who they're selling to, and so they can't even do this because I have no idea who

the email. I think the old adage goes, If you're selling or marketing to everybody, then you're not selling to anybody. You just It doesn't work that way. You have to really know your customer is, and we actually niche down a lot farther than just that. Podcasting was a pretty big space in itself. And we said, Well, we can't We're not just gonna blast any podcaster. Let's actually start with podcasters that air using their podcasts to promote their business. That way we're at least like getting a little bit of a B to B Element. And when we started doing that, we found that consultants, business coaches, people of the personal brand,

bloggers and influencers that air using a podcast like sell products through their website. Those people really were incentivized to promote their podcast because it, you know, help their whole process of their whole business. So we found initially that that was our group to start with. And I would say that those people made up the majority of our 1st 100 customers like those 1st 10 are brutal to get. And then when we found out that that niche really was receptive to new marketing strategies and would use a product like ours that made the next you know, 50 customers or so a little bit easier,

what is your life look like? In terms of the hours you're working at this point because you're freelancing. You're sending all these e mails. You discovering all these insights about customers? How do you find the time for all this stuff?

I was freelancing maybe 3 to 4 hours a day. I think 2 to 3 hours you got me, like, 30 grand freelancing that first year. So it wasn't much. I wasn't working a ton, but my wife and I were living in apartment and she would leave for work. She worked for a tech company downtown, and I just sit at the kitchen table and send out emails and takes support calls, all dames, pretty much it take a break to go workout, hang with my wife for a little bit. And then when she goes to bed early and I usually stay up late and night is kind of when we would think about like, OK, what do we need to work on product wise? That is kind of when Nick is in his creative engineering mode. But those days were very, very monotonous, and it definitely felt like it's not too much of a ground cause you're just sitting there at your laptop all day. But mentally it was definitely tough to stay disciplined and constant with that,

Yeah, especially if you're selling a product that's like $567 a month. Not making that much money you're

getting for selling a $7. They were still in the $7 product. And, like, haven't it discounted every now and

then a man, How long did it take you to actually get to the point where you could start making real money and eventually quit your job and stop freelancing?

Um, it wasn't until the next years. So we started in 2017. I freelanced all 2017 and then 2018. I can't remember exactly what m R number we were at, but it was still growing, and that's kind of when it started clicking like, Well, wait a second. We might be ableto push this thing a little bit farther and work on it more full time, and I took on a big freelancing contract the first quarter of 2018 and that was really heavy contract. That was stuff cause wave is actually starting to take off a little bit, and then I was working pretty much full time. But that was just for 1/4 and Then at the end of that, I had saved up enough, and wave was starting to pay us a little bit. But so I guess it was probably 15 months after we launched Wave that I actually started focusing on it full time.

15 months of just nothing but sending cold emails. Did you find a different strategy that was a little bit less monotonous?

Oh, no. Some point. No, it's a The 1st 6 months was really, really heavy outbound. And then through that process, we really started understanding who are customers were what got their attention. And then we moved to content marketing. We started blogging for us. It took about eight months for blocking Thio really start seeing some good results and start getting some some traffic from S E O. We have been doing social media too, so it was definitely very much a snowball effect. I've written a block post every week. I mean, not every week, but that was the goal. Pretty much consistently won a week since we launched. So we got up enough content library toward it all started coming inbound and we stopped an outbound, probably after eight months.

If you could go back in time. To yourself is a fledgling blogger who was just getting started. What would you What would you tell himto? Help him sort of skip a few steps ahead and loud effectively,

If that's a good question, I don't think I'm the best blogger out there. I just keep it really simple. I just try to put myself in the shoes of my target customer and ask, What are the things throughout the day that they're Googling for? So for podcasters, it was, you know, how do I grow my show? How to promote my show on Facebook? It's not how to articles early on. That's kind of the easiest ways to get started. And then once we kind of exhausted all those how two's across all the different social platforms and and things like that we kind of gravitated towards more podcasts. Don't call thought leadership, but just podcast podcasting strategies. So had interview people. How to,

you know, make sure that you're editing properly what tools to use things like that. But content marketing is kind of a black hole where you can go as deep as you want with keywords, strategies and just making sure you're content is formed in all these perfect ways. But I would say just keep it simple, right? Short articles and just trying to think about how you can help educate your audience and it takes a lot of time. So, you know, one article generally isn't gonna make or break your blogging success, so you just have to stay consistent. And I don't know if six months is typical, like advice that people would give. But that's what it was for us. That's how long it's So at

some point during this whole journey, you decided that one business wasn't enough. You weren't just going to stick with waving that even though it was growing things were working out, he decided to start a second business called Subtitle. Why did you start that with the story there?

Subtitle is another example of a business kind of spawning from another. So with wave, we had always had customers asking us if they big feature request was always How do I add subtitles or captions to my videos? And every time that we evaluated that project from an engineering standpoint and the ongoing cost of it, we pushed it off kept punting on it because it was gonna be a lot of work to integrate that and just to get the u I working properly and we kept punting it come punting it. And it was definitely our number one feature request. And that was painful too, by the way, just saying no to a feature because we didn't think the r. O. I was there. Even though that's what people really wanted, people were still signing up and using our product. Without that feature, it was just something they wanted added on badly. So the idea waas Well, if we create this video captioning tool for our product,

it could actually work with any video, not just audio turned into video that wave creates. So why don't we create this is a separate product and just integrated in the wave. That way we can sell to people that are recording actual video footage and then just integrated with wave and up sell customers there. So that was the original thought, and I was naive enough to think like, oh, this will be so easy. We're just gonna launch it, you know, I'll do all the same marketing We'll do some direct outreach will do some content. Marketing will do the same pricing strategy and, you know, this will be no problem. We launch that in 2018 and we just paid ourselves for the first time in January of 2020. So that took two years as well to make any money personally from it.

That one was almost justus long of a road. But that was why we did it. And it turned out to be the right call because it's a totally separate market. That subtitle serves and it integrates with wave. Empowers that for all the way, if users.

Yeah, I was gonna ask where you got the confidence to switch into this new business And did you feel like you're giving up on your old business? But you had that kind of Now you've found her optimism were just so sure things are gonna work and you have is a rosy picture of how it's all gonna work. And it I think sometimes you need that to propel yourself into what ends up being a pretty slow and painful process. It's be kind of unrealistic to convince yourself to go through with it.

Yeah, I was lucky at the time because I have been full time with wave for six months or so and, you know, wave. It was starting to run itself to some degree. It's still obviously work on it every day, but we've really built it to be is automated as possible. So I had a little time opened up. I was used to freelancing anyway with that other half of my day, so I was kind of readyto take on the new project.

So there's this book called Traction Run by Justin Mayors. He's been a guest on this podcast before in Gabriel. Why yorg? Yeah, it's all about the different channels you can use to find customers and grow your business. So their sales and email and advertising blogging S E O. I think there's something like 19 channels in there. What would you say were the most successful channels for you later on? As wave continue to grow? Was it always just s CEO? And I know you stopped doing the sort of direct email outreach What else worked?

Well, I think the biggest benefit that we had with wave was that users were creating content that they within share on social media. And what we found out early on with wave customers is ah, lot of them were buying originally just because that first set of customers was buying just because they were already creating these videos very manually, and they wanted a faster way to do it. But the more we talk to people and with the more we talked people that weren't doing it podcasters before buying Wave would tell us like I just want to look like Gary Z. Or I want to look like, you know, insert very, very popular podcaster. And we learned that they really cared about the appearance of their podcasts on social media because, you know, it's definitely like they're looking at their peers a lot, and they want to stand out and separate themselves from the crowd. Right? So one thing that we've always done early on is really focused on sharp, good looking animations and making sure the elements of the video are very pleasing to the eye,

so that when they shared on social media, they'll feel very proud about. It's really tapping into that emotion of, you know, being proud of what you're sharing and That's why a lot of customers love wave. And we've run 1/3 partner on named Rob, who's a really sharp engineer. And he was actually are kind of specialist on the animation side. And he created all of these custom animations from scratch, and people would see those on social media and ask the person that posted, Hey, how'd you do that? And they would share wave. And that was really when things started taking office when we created those really good looking animations and word of mouth marketing started to kick in, and that was, I mean,

that's been the best advantage that we've had a SW far as our growth goes. Sure, content marketing is great and weak launched an affiliate program, which is great, But it's almost, I guess, I don't know if that's ah, chapter in the traction book, but I guess we recall that engineering as marketing was probably the biggest advantage

that we had. Yeah, it's like product driven growth, much of contraction either. But it's it's great because it's free, essentially building your product. It exists forever, and now you just get this free growth where you don't have to write block post. You don't have toe advertise. Just getting people recommending your product are teaching others about it just by using it and you know it listening to your story it It reminds me why I get so frustrated it people who launched something and it doesn't work in, like, a couple weeks. And they quit because so much of what led to your overall success of her time, or just these things that you learned on the job from selling and seeing what works and talking to people like you probably had no idea. And the very early days that one of the problems you were solving was just letting these fledgling podcasters look more professional look like they're heroes look like Gary V. But once she realized that you could start doing all sorts of specific stuff, Thio help people get that feeling and solve that problem, and you're never gonna uncover that unless you stick with your business and keep talking to people and keep trying things out.

Yeah, I couldn't imagine doing this and not being interested in other people. I think that's really what's driven us is we're just curious. We want to know, like what makes broadcasters tick. We talked to them, we chat with him and we ask him questions, and we tried to read between the lines and see what they really want. And it took a long time. A lot of conversations on intercom Thio kind of really distill down what people want it because a lot of times people don't know what they want, but they'll get pretty close to telling you. So I think the best advice is you've gotta have a certain level of empathy just to be ableto put yourself in some muddy shoes when you're chatting with them and say, Oh, you know, man, that sounds really tough, you know?

How would you improve that? How do you want it to be and just chat with him? And I think that's been a big event. We've always put customer support as a massive priority for us. We try to have very fast response times, and we try to help people as fast as possible, and it builds trust with them so that they will tell you these things, and you can get the real story after you. Kino chan it with somebody a couple times, though they'll tell you what, they're really dreams. Their passions are. So you have an empathy and just being willing to take the time to listen

to people couldn't agree more. There's so much you learn from listening to what people say, and it kind of seems like it's gonna be unproductive. Well, I've got code to write. I got fears to build, so I really just want o talk to people on the off chance that they tell me something useful and a lot of times they won't tell you that much useful stuff. But here's the thing. If you authentically like the customers that you're serving, then you're gonna want to talk to them anyway, because it's just fun to talk to people that you like. And then every now and then, I'm gonna say some stuff that changes your mindset. So with Andy hackers, I first built the forum with this very utilitarian goal. I thought, Hey,

founders have problems. They need to ask questions that need to get answers. So that's what the form is for. Whereas I talked to so many Andy Hacker since then and just learned how they're actually using it, a lot of people were just like, Hey, you know, I get tired when I'm working on board at the bus stop. So I opened the hacker is because I just want to learn something. You know, if I'm gonna be distracted, I don't wanna go on instagram when I'm going to be distracted in a useful way. And I would never know that if I didn't talk to people. And that changes how I build the forum and what I what I wanted to do, So I can't agree more of what you're saying. I think Founders should really think from the gecko. Who do I actually like talking to and try to build a product for those kind of people?

Yeah. And I also don't want to sound like, Oh, you have toe go out and talk to 100 people before you launch your product Like that's definitely not the case. I think it's just need to find a good balance. You also don't want to not launch your product for so long and just sit there and talk to people forever when you could have been getting actual feedback on your product. I think we did a good job of that early on where we just we put something out there. We get a little feedback. We talk to people, we take a break and, well, you know, we build whatever we found and then we would launch it. Then we'll get feedback on that. It's kind of a cycle is like almost every three weeks. We feel like we kind of shifted our priority back and forth from Hey, let's figure out what people think about this two.

What's built it and launch it and, you know, go through all that process and support it. So there has to be a balance on both sides to and make sure you're not, you know, falling on one side or the other two heavily.

One of the cool things that I know about your business is that you've been working with contractors, and I think your strategy is your finding contractors who are pretty entrepreneurial themselves. A lot of them are. Any hackers would be in the hackers, and so you're kind of giving them the opportunity to work part time on something, finance their lifestyle while they also start businesses on the side. How does that work? How do you find these people. They kind of seem like the ideal generalist early employees to help you out.

Early on, we realised that we wanted to try and avoid having employees just because of, you know, all the administrative headache that comes with that. And early on we didn't have enough money to pay employees anyway, so we had to use contractors. And the first contractor that we had was robbed, who actually is now a partner in our business. We actually found him off up work. He had just graduated and was traveling Europe at the time and was just picking up some hours while he was traveling at the use in Italy at the time. And we started working with him after a couple months. He was very entrepreneurs. Well, he had tried to start up and had some other ideas, and he just did such great work that we right, we need to get this guy on board before he comes up with some product and takes off on his own. That's when it clicked for us.

It's like, Oh, we really like these contractors that have other interests and their other businesses that they're working on, but I need the contract to pay the bills. We also in that case, suits you know, the hours that they're working a really important. They want to make sure that they keep that job so that they have that kind of security in their back pocket as they're working on their own product. So, you know, we've done it a lot of different ways. We've found people from up work. We have found people just they're linked in searching around also our marketing, the contractor that really handles a lot of our marketing, who I also then brought for wave and then brought him as a partner for his up title. So we really tried toe bring in good people when we find him.

He was just a local connection here in town, So I think it's hard to find great engineers because they're generally not like outed, you know, happy hours, or like certain different events. But sales and marketing people are generally pretty easy to find around town. You know, if you live in a fairly decent sized city in Charleston's on a big city at all, but we have a little bit of a startup community where you can go meet connections and also people that you meet through freelancing and past shops are great to reach out to. So we've kind of done all those different things and have some success finally getting those right people in place.

I've had a similar story with Andy hackers where some of the people you work with we found off up work. Rosie Sherry are excellent. Community manager is a

founder herself. She's

great. Yeah, she was a guest on the podcast. He bootstrapped her community to like a $1,000,000 in revenue, and now she's running the hackers community. So it's super cool to be ableto toe work with people who were founders themselves because they understand kind of the breath of skills that you have to have, and they're willing to do kind of any part of the job, not just like one specific thing that just kind of that the perfect early people to work with. And I've thought about building something in Andy hackers itself to sort of allow and

the hackers to hire each other. I would love that. I would love that, and I've actually post on any Akers that would be a great way to find people because you know that they know somebody's on Indy, Akers and they're working on side projects and stuff. You know, they're motivated and you know, there fairly generalist, which is really important and that they're willing to learn on their own. That's the other thing about employees is we don't we don't have the ability of the on ramp somebody into a job and train them. We need somebody that can jump in tomorrow and start working and learning. So that's something else that is just great about that kind of any hacker mentality that I would really like that. So what are your

personal goals with all of this? I mean, at this point, lead from the outside looking in. It feels like you've made it feels like you've accomplished a lot of your goals. And as you said, wave is way bigger than you ever thought it could be. Where do you want to be in a couple of years?

We've been spending a lot of time on this lately, you know, we've been working away for three years, and we're really trying to figure out we have some ideas of different products that we could add on the waiver, you know, different big initiatives we could do to grow the business. But we're realizing there's really four core partners through both products, and we're just really realizing that we love that initial creative, just that starting in launching process. We really like it. That's what really motivates us. Course. The money is great, but the money really is more just in indicator that it's working and it's worth working on now. We were already starting to get the itch and poor working on a few different concepts of some new products that we want to launch. So I think for the foreseeable future we've I think we've got a few more in us that we want to try in, ah,

couple different products. We'll see how those go Aside from that, it would you like long term goals? I think it would. I'm really inspired by a lot of these investment groups that have started popping up like Tyler in Earnest Capital, and there's some other groups like sure Swift and Sass Group that are buying and investing in other bootstrap companies. But we got a couple. We got to get a couple more wins to get to that get to that level. But so long term, I think that would be a lot of fun. But a short term we really want to do, try and do this, you know, one or two more times we just were really motivated. For some reason, we just we just love putting things out there and trying to make him work.

I remember being a kid and reading about the most successful entrepreneurs and how they would make a lot of money and be successful. Their companies, and then they would just work more and keep doing it. And I never understood. It is a kid until I got older and Southern working on stuff and realize that it's actually just really fun to do it, especially when she get better at it and it starts working and you realize how many different things you could build. Uh, you realize how much of an impact you have on others and how much fun it is to just kind of be in control of your own life and building kind of whatever you want. You were able to do this almost her first time out of the gate, and this is kind of like your first stint as an indie hack, and you've already built several successful companies. Ah, lot of people I talked to flounder for months or years without any success. What do you think brand new in the actors could take away from your approach to things in your story that would help them

succeed? Well, first off, I feel like I floundered for a long time, so don't feel alone. If you feel like you're doing that, it's definitely, you know, even there is a whole year. Before I left my job where I was working on stuff, thinking about concepts and products of there was this whole other period before even getting started that I felt like part of the journey as well. So I think the first piece of advice I would get his entrepreneurship is much more of a journey than it is, making one company work because even figure that 1st 1 to work. If you really want to be an entrepreneur, you're probably gonna keep doing it, so that should take some pressure off like the 1st 1 doesn't have to be perfect as long as you keep a runway in front of you and don't quit your job and blow your savings like I did. Then you can hopefully have a couple more shots.

So definitely, you know, try and keep the pressure low and just keep work, and everybody's story is gonna be a little bit different. You know, the things that I think have really helped us as getting a team involved getting a team in place. You solo founders out there like I am so impressed when somebody is able to create in Bootstrap a sass product and Selah and Market and Support and do all of that all by themselves are partners, and I we just could never imagine doing that. So if you have been struggling for a while by yourself, one idea would be that you go find a cofounder. That's another, you know, long process itself to find the right partner for long term, but it can be really worth it. So getting the right team in place, it's really important and then just tryingto move fast,

and our success has correlated with our ability to make decisions quickly. It's something we've gotten a lot better at over the years, so just moving fast, making decisions and trying to make good, quick, reversible decisions is also good to Don't put all your eggs in one basket like you keep things moving along. I'm kind of getting off track a little bit, but those would definitely be the kind of the big picture items that that I would advise people to. D'oh

keep expectations low, don't blow through your savings and also don't feel bad if it's hard because it's it's hard for everybody and if at all possible work with a team of people that you can move fast and integrate together on ideas with Baird Hall, Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your story and you're learning. So we'll have you back on the podcast again at some point to talk about all these new ideas that you're excited to work on. Can you let listeners know where they can go to find out more about wave and subtitle and whatever else it is you're working on

if you want to check out the products wave is Debbie V. V e e dot ceo, wave dot Co. And then subtitle is like subtitle with the c subtitle dot com and then we've created a new brand called Low Five Ventures, L O F I dot Ventures, where we're gonna be launching some products under that brand, and we're doing some blocking there as well. So a lot of the things that we talked about today so my partners were right in block Bosa's well about building N V. P's and financial modeling Some of that good stuff. So go find us that loaf. I'd adventures and then all of us on twitters will probably pretty easy to track down. So, yeah, come talk to us. We we would love to interact with some other people. We just all sit in our kitchens independently and work on these companies. So anytime we get a break toe talk to somebody about their business would be a lot of fun, so definitely reach out to us.

All right. Thanks so much, babe. Thanks, Corley Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you should subscribe to the Indy Hackers Podcast newsletter every time there's a new episode out. I just tried to send out my thoughts, my takeaways, my advice, and it's also your chance to reply to the email and tell me what you think about the show. In the episode. In particular, you could find the newsletter at Indy hackers dot com slash podcast. As always, Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next time.