Smash Notes
Bernard Huang
Episodes
Notes
The Failory Podcast · How +3 failures led to a $150k/month SaaS, with Bernard Huang of…
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What Would Bernard Huang Tell Himself After Mosec and Food by People?
Bernard Huang would tell his 2013 self, the one just past Mosec and Food by People, to take better care of himself. He means more sleep, better food, and a stricter watch on what consumes his energy, including relationships and favors that are not the work. Everyone, he says, has a finite amount of energy in a day, and a yes hides its cost. His example is coffee with someone he is not close to. He accepts because he feels he should help, then leaves knowing the hour was wasted. An all-nighter has the same shape. The extra hours are paid back when he is useless afterward. Stop taking those meetings, he says.
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Why Does Bernard Huang Say the SEO Industry Is Full of Misinformation?
Bernard Huang, cofounder of Clearscope, says SEO collects bad information because Google has never plainly explained how ranking works. Facebook ads, Google Ads, and an influencer package all state a price and a deliverable. A click costs something. An audience has a size. SEO is a black box. Nobody really knows the algorithm, and it changes, so a tactic from two years ago may not work now. He compares SEO practitioners to doctors. Their guesses beat a layperson's, and they still do not fully know. That is why someone who ran SEO inside a large company, then left, can find the old playbook does not transfer.
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What Is Clearscope
When running Mushi Labs, Bernard and his co-founder began working on a SEO & content tool called Clearscope. Here he shares what is it about.
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How Did Bernard Huang's Mushi Labs Get Its First SEO Clients?
Mushi Labs began when Game Runners, Bernard Huang's previous project, was running out of cash and a company emailed asking for search help. He and his cofounder decided to take the work, and the SEO consulting practice is what they became. The lesson he names is blunt. Sell something people already want to buy, to enough of them, at a price that adds up. Consulting is where he learned to sell, to negotiate, to set expectations, and to deliver. The operating rule was concrete. If a client emails, you do not leave it sitting for a week. About twenty-four hours was as long as he would let a reply wait.
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What Was Game Runners and Why It Failed
Game Runners was a League of Legends coaching service helping players learn the best new strategies fastest.
They focused on the kinds, but parents weren't willing to pay to get their kids better at LoL.
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Why Bernard Leave 42floors
42Floors was acquired by Knotel in July 2018. He left the startup in Feb 2015 to co-found Mushi along to his Food by People co-founder.
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Getting Hired by a Y-combinator Startup
After his startup, Food by People, was closed, Bernard moved to San Francisco and he joined 42 Floors, a Y-Combinator backed startup, as a growth hacker.
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Why Could Food by People Not Make Money on a Cookie Order?
Bernard Huang says the unit economics at Food by People, his marketplace for home-baked goods, never worked. A ten percent fee on a $24 order for a dozen cookies was about $4.80. He calculated that the company would need on the order of 200 of those orders a month just to make $1,000, and a buyer often did not return. Big catering orders were a different shape. The middle of the book is where he says they got hurt. He did not fully see the model while he was inside it. What he sees now is that a small cut of a small basket could not carry the company, no matter how many home bakers listed cookies.
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How Did Food by People End Up Raising Only $87?
Food by People raised $87, and Bernard Huang is clear that it was not millions. Maciej Ceglowski, founder of Pinboard, was satirizing venture capital. His line was that a founder does not need a VC's money. A founder needs grit, execution, and a little press, and Ceglowski could supply the press. The joke took off on Hacker News. From about 300 applicants he manually picked roughly ten people who might actually build something, Food by People among them, and he sent $37. Andreessen Horowitz added $50. Huang says he was still bullish on real venture rounds and only later understood the whole thing as satire. He and Ceglowski disagreed about that.
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What Led Bernard to Become Founder at Food by People
Bernard shares about the beginnings of Food By People, a marketplace for home-baked goods that leveraged the Cottage Food laws passed by the US government.
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Why Did Bernard Huang Shut Mosec Down If Customers Liked It?
Bernard Huang says Mosec was not killed by angry customers. People told the team they loved the product. He locates the failure in execution, and he gives the largest share to shiny-object syndrome, which he calls common among young founders. Instagram had sold to Facebook for a billion dollars, and friends were excited about products that looked cool. Mosec was a business-to-business tool and it was not sexy, so the founders kept asking if the grass was greener. He now quotes the advice he wishes he had used. If something works, makes money, and has traction, keep chopping wood until you are rich or it stops working.
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How Many Times Did Bernard Huang's Mosec Change Its Product?
Bernard Huang says Mosec changed its idea about every other week. The team came into Betaspring with an education startup. They then decided to build a cloud address book, around 2011, so contacts would sync to a computer. That same week Apple announced iCloud at its Worldwide Developers Conference, and Huang says the product was dead on arrival. They pivoted to a Kickstarter for startups. They had about $20,000. Mentors at Betaspring told them to stop. They would be a fund trying to fund other funds, without the experience, the network, or the capital. He says they were stubborn twenty-year-olds and were sure the mentors were wrong.
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What Made You Become a Founder
Were there any clicks that made you realize you wanted to run a business on your own?
Bernard shares he was a guy that would constantly try new things and had like a taste of success on all of these things.
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What Were the Beginnings of Mosec
Mosec was a phone-based CRM focused on call tracking and notifications. Bernard co-founded it in 2011.
Here he shares how he got into the business and how they raised $70k from startup accelerator Betaspring.
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Why Did You Stop Playing Poker
When and why did you decide to stop playing it? Weren't you making great amounts of money?
Bernard shares how it became more difficult to earn money as the US government passed laws that made illegal to gamble online.
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Why Did Bernard Huang's Dickey's Franchise Fail?
Bernard Huang says poker had warped his picture of money. He thought buying a franchise was like financing a McDonald's and that the cash would start arriving. He had never managed people and had never run a business. Four co-owners shared the Dickey's Barbecue Pit, and he names the failure least-common-denominator syndrome. Equal, inexperienced partners watch one another's effort. Someone covering nights and weekends looks at a quieter partner and asks why a twenty-percent owner should be carried. Huang says that at twenty he did not have the words to fix that, so he pulled back from a business he only partly owned.
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How Did Bernard Huang Buy a Foreclosed Dickey's Barbecue Pit?
Friends asked Bernard Huang, then at the University of Texas in Austin, to take over a foreclosed Dickey's Barbecue Pit. The price was low because the restaurant was in foreclosure. On a spreadsheet, matching the previous owner's revenue would have made them money, since that owner was carrying financing costs they thought they could skip. Huang had a little over $120,000 from online poker, and the paper case looked solid, so they bought it. He tells it as a decision made from the numbers, before anyone had run the store. The restaurant became his first business and, later, his first failure.
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How Did Bernard Huang Make $120,000 Playing Online Poker?
Bernard Huang started playing in college, in the years after Chris Moneymaker won the 2004 World Series of Poker from a small PokerStars satellite. He says PokerStars and Full Tilt glorified that path, and he decided he had to try it. He made a little over $120,000 playing no-limit Texas Hold'em. Friends then asked him to put the money into a foreclosed Dickey's Barbecue Pit in Austin, where he was a student at the University of Texas. He tells the poker win as the stake for that first business. It is the chapter before the restaurant, not a career he says he stayed in.
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Who Is Bernard Huang, Cofounder of Clearscope?
Bernard Huang is the cofounder of Clearscope. On The Failory Podcast he introduces himself through the failures, not the product. He says he was set on being a founder as a child and started breakdance clubs in middle school. At 31 he calls the previous ten years a long run of trying and missing before he got to this point. Success, he says, does not come overnight for most people, except that when it comes it can come all at once. The path he is summarizing runs through online poker, a Dickey's Barbecue Pit, Mosec, Food by People, and Mushi Labs, and it ends at Clearscope, the SEO product he runs now.