Founder Views - Conversations that matter to you

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Adam Niman (BSc, CLU) is a seasoned life insurance professional with over a decade of experience in the field. His focus is exclusively on insurance, and he advocates for keeping insurance and investments separate.

I first heard Adam on one of my favourite podcasts (see link below), talking about why the infinite banking concept is flawed. He raised some pretty eye-opening concerns and perspectives that stirred up some waves in the infinite banking circles.

Since first hearing Adam on that podcast, we've since had several conversations, and wanted to have him on the podcast. I definitely think his insights and message is worth sharing.

If you're familiar with infinite banking, have a policy, or thinking about getting setup, this is an episode you definitely want to hear.

Download Adam's ebook "Fortune or Fiction" here: https://fortuneorfiction.ca/

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The Infinite Banking Concept (IBC) is one of the very few subjects that I’m eager to share with as many people as possible.

This was a very all-encompassing conversation with Michael Sidhu, a veteran with 26 years in the financial industry, and an IBC Practitioner.

If you’re concerned about the monetary system, debasement of currencies, and believe you should be in control of your wealth, this will be a great conversation listen to.

We speak about several topics pertaining to IBC and the economy, including:

What’s wrong with the current monetary system
How IBC mitigates your exposure to inflation and uncertain market conditions
The difference between insurance companies and banks
How insurance companies invest their capital
Why bitcoin is a good hedge against the debasement of currency
How individuals and businesses can leverage their policies for tax advantages

Learn more about the Infinite Banking Concept at https://ibcanadagroup.com/

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Benjamin J. Dichter was the official spokesperson and one of the organizers for the Freedom Convoy, a movement that shook up the entire world in the winter of 2022.

The Freedom Convoy was a protest organized by truckers in Canada, and morphed into a global movement of millions of people around the world, fighting back against overreaching government mandates.

BJ is the author of “Honking for Freedom”, a book that provides an inside look into what really happened inside the Freedom Convoy.

In this conversation, we cover topics including:

The motivations to get involved in the Freedom Convoy
Dealing with the global spotlight and mainstream media
Reasons for increased desire in government control
Central Bank Digital Currencies, and the impacts
How the people can take back control from bureaucrats

Order “Honking for Freedom”: https://honkingforfreedom.com/

Follow BJ on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BJdichter

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I met Callum Webber on a mentor call on Growth Mentor (I'm a mentor on the platform, link is below for more details).

On our call, we spoke about several business topics, including a program he is building out that helps men in their 20's live a freedom lifestyle, through health, wellness and productivity.

For the last little while, I've been thinking more and more about ways to optimize my own self for maximize productivity and energy thought my days. So when I spoke to Callum, I thought I'd have him on the podcast to speak about this.

Callum is one of those people with an amazing attitude, great energy, and a ton of passion in what he does, which is very inspiring.

He provided some great practical tips about energy that anyone can implement in their lives right away. Some of which I will be trying as well.

Check out Growth Mentor: https://www.growthmentor.com/?ref=kosta

Callum's Podcast (Freedom Lifestyle): https://open.spotify.com/show/34iyUuLGk6Ms7uLLky1GMP?si=d4a566757e0543e0

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Fr. Ted Paraskevopoulos is an Orthodox Priest in Toronto, Ontario Canada.

Speaking with Fr Ted is always very insightful and grounding, to say the least. Given everything that’s happening in the world right now, I felt a need to have a conversation with him.

We spoke about a wide-range of topics, including:

Tools that people are missing in their lives to help with depression and every day stresses
How parents should instil the right values in their children
Why more couples are getting divorced, and how they can prevent that
The attack on religion in a growing secular society

I also wanted to hear Fr Ted’s views on several controversial bills and legislation currently in, or being proposed, in Canada:

Bill C-11 and how it could impact the church and religion
Bill 89 and the growing sexualization of children in society
The issues with Bill C-4 from a religious and moral context
MAID (medical assistance in dying) and the relation to hedonism

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Genuine and authentic - these are two adjectives I would use to describe Julia Hanna, which seem to be pretty rare in politics nowadays.

Julia Hanna is running for Mayor of Oakville, Ontario, one of the most prominent and sought-after cities in all of Canada.

As a resident of Oakville, I was eager to have a conversation with (potentially) the future Mayor, to discuss many pressing issues, concerns and opportunities the city faces.

In this very open and transparent conversation, we discussed:

Housing affordability in Oakville and wealth from real estate
What she would have done differently as Mayor during Covid
The impossible challenges of satisfying everyone
How she plans to earn the trust back from the people
The lack of accountability in government
The fiscal waste currently happening in Oakville

Learn more about Julia Hanna: https://www.juliahanna.ca/

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I've been on the hunt to learn as much about short-term rentals and Airbnb investing as possible. After getting connected with Spencer and Ashley, I immediately knew there were no better people to learn from.

Since 2018, they have accumulated 6 Airbnb properties, both in the Niagara region and in the US. They also manage over 60 properties for other Airbnb investors across the country.

Their top grossing property in Niagara does $180-$200k per year, which nets them about $60k per year.

I tried to get into their detailed processes and criteria from evaluating properties to purchase, and everything in between to get them listed.

We discuss many topics, including:

The specific criteria they look for in properties
How they differentiate their properties
The importance of focusing on top-notch guest experience
By-laws in Niagara that investors should be mindful of
The costs involved to furnish an Airbnb property
How much profit they make on their properties
What's required to purchase properties in the US

Follow Spencer & Ashley on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spencerandashley/

Spencer & Ashley's Airbnb Property Management company: https://www.instagram.com/travelluxepropertymanagement/

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This is a conversation I was very excited to have, and more importantly, share with everyone. Andrew Lawton is a well-respected Journalist and Broadcaster in Canada. I caught notice of Andrew's work during the freedom convoy protests in Ottawa. He was one of my main sources of accurate information about what was going on, and have been following his work ever since.

I was eager to speak to Andrew about:

The bias in media that people are consuming, and how it affects his work
How journalists and people can be more objective
The impacts of private and government censorship
The potential consequences of new bills proposed in Canada, including controversial bill C-11
The future of Canada
Alternative views and differences of opinion in society
Andrew's list of favourite and most objective journalists

Follow Andrew on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AndrewLawton

Andrew on Substack: https://andrewlawton.substack.com/

True North: https://tnc.news/

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One of the real estate investment strategies that has captured my interest as of late, is short-term Airbnb rentals.

The idea of very high cash flow potential in high-demand areas is something I wanted to dive into further.

I spoke with Matthew Campoli, a real estate investor and realtor in the Toronto area. Besides helping clients purchase Airbnb rentals and other investments, he also owns rental properties himself.

One of his Airbnb rentals in Toronto is on track to cash flow about $40k (that is net profit after all expenses)! We dived into this in detail, of course.

Matt also has an Airbnb property he recently purchased in Miami, which he projects will gross $100k in revenue. We discussed how Canadians can invest in Airbnb properties in the US.

We covered quite a bit of very useful information about Airbnb rentals, including:

Reasons why airbnb rentals are advantageous compared to other real estate investments
How to consider choosing locations for your airbnb rental
Specific Airbnb regulations in the city of Toronto and other areas that investors need to be aware of
The seasonal nature of Airbnb rentals in Toronto (summer peaks vs winter lows)
Areas in Canada that are in high-demand all year long
The creativity and marketing that goes into Airbnb rentals compared to traditional real estate investments
The importance of using property management services for Airbnb rentals
How to invest in Airbnb rentals in the US

Find Matt on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattcampoli/?hl=en

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My oldest child is starting kindergarten, and the thoughts of alternative schooling options have been on my mind. I've been questioning the concept of traditional school system for quite a while, and have been on an exploration to determine what type of schooling is best for my kids.

Hannah Frankman is the founder of rebelEducator. She grew up homeschooled, skipped college to cut her teeth in the startup world, and has been living and breathing alternative education ever since. She’s a regular writer, speaker, and commentator on education innovation.

Most people grow up in societies and communities where traditional schools is all they ever know. Discussing some of the alternative schooling options and breaking down the issues with traditional schools, definitely requires recalibrating the way you think. If you can accomplish that, you'll see a whole different side to how kids can learn, and hopefully decide which option is best for your kids.

This was a very insightful and encouraging episode about the many options that parents have to educate their kids. Some of the topics we discuss include:

The big learnings from Hannah's homeschooling experience
Her family life as a homeschooler
The most valuable parts of being homeschooled
Why self-direction is a great learning method for kids
Major problems with the traditional school system
The social element of homeschooling
Some of the issues with learning in front of a computer all day
What parents can do to better educate themselves on alternative schools
So much more.

Learn more about rebelEducator:
https://rebeleducator.co/

Follow Hannah on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/HannahFrankman

Recommended reading:
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, by John Taylor Gato

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Due to popular demand and several questions about the Infinite Banking Concept, I thought I’d speak to another specialist on the subject.

Nate Dean is the co-founder of Unlimited Life Concepts, a company that educates people on Infinite Banking and helps them implement the concept in their lives.

I tried to steer the conversation in ways that addressed real practical ways people can implement the Infinite Banking Concept in every day life.

We covered several topics, including:

Common misconceptions about Infinite Banking
Ways people are managing their money incorrectly
Using Infinite Banking to pay off debt
How to use Infinite Banking for common expenses
Infinite Banking as a cash flow strategy
How to operate your finances like banks do

Becoming Your Own Banker, by Nelson Nash: https://a.co/d/161TeUn

Learn more about Unlimited Life Concepts: https://www.unlimitedlifeconcepts.com/

Follow Nate on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChroniclesNate

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Jas Takhar is the founder of REC Canada, one of the top real estate teams in the country.

As an active real estate investor, and a very prominent voice in the real estate community, I was excited to speak with Jas hear his insights and thoughts around the current market conditions, and how to navigate these times of high inflation and increasing interest rates.

I always enjoy speaking to Jas, because he’s one of the few people who looks at real estate investing with a long-term horizon, which really helps think through all the noise in media.

We discuss many important topics in this conversation for those thinking about real estate investing, including:

Thoughts on when interest rates will come down again
Why pre-construction is a great investing strategy
Why real estate investing is the easiest way to generate wealth for most people
Population growth and lack of housing supply in the Golden Horseshoe Region
The 4 questions every investor should ask

More about Jas Takhar here: https://jastakhar.ca/

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This conversation includes Clara Medalie, Director of Research at Kaiko. Clara is a very prominent voice in the crypto space, and is often featured on major financial new outlets, such as CNBC and CoinDesk. Kaiko is cryptocurrency market data provider that analyzes data from over 100 centralized and decentralized crypto exchanges around the globe.

My hope on this episode was to better understand the driving forces that have caused the downturn in crypto markets over the last several months, and get a feel for where cryptocurrencies are heading into the future.

We covered quite a few topics in this discussion, including:

The reasons for the crypto collapse
Why bitcoin and cryptos have been directly correlated to equity markets
The market correlations between crypto prices and quantitative easing/tightening
How institutional investors are allocating bitcoin in their portfolios
What has to happen for bitcoin to reach $60k again
If bitcoin can be a global currency in the future
Which alt-coins to keep an eye out for!

Learn more about Kaiko here: https://www.kaiko.com/
Follow Clara on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Clara_Medalie

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This was a fascinating chat with Paco de la India, who is travelling to 40 countries in 400 days, using nothing but bitcoin.

I caught up with him while he was in Zambia, the 15th country on his journey. I was eager to speak with Paco so I can understand the practicality of using bitcoin in day-to-day life.

His first-hand experiences were very insightful. We spoke about his journey thus far, and:

How he uses bitcoin to get around
The best countries to use bitcoin
The worst countries to use bitcoin
His biggest surprises along the way
His experience with the global bitcoin community
How people around the world perceive bitcoin
Inflation and the debasement of currencies and USD
How African countries with high inflation are adopting bitcoin
Tips on the best wallets and apps to use to get around

Follow and learn about Paco's journey: https://runwithbitcoin.com/
Follow Paco on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/runeverycity/
Paco's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/PacoDeLaIndia

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Adam O'Brien is a bitcoin entrepreneur and the CEO of Bitcoin Well, the first publicly traded bitcoin company in the world that allows customers to self-custody their bitcoin. Bitcoin Well also operates over 250+ bitcoin ATM's across Canada.

Adam's startup story is very inspiring. He bootstrapped his company from one bitcoin ATM in Edmonton, to over 250 ATM's across the country, listing his company on the TSX, and doing ~$100M in annual revenue.

Apart from learning about his incredible business, and what it takes to operate a publicly traded bitcoin company, we also touched on several important macroeconomic topics in this episode, including:

The position of bitcoin in today's rollercoaster economy
How over-reaching governments help bitcoin
The importance of self-custody wallets
Handling banks and regulations with a bitcoin company
The emergence of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) around the world, and how that impacts bitcoin
Best place in the world to be for bitcoin investors and entrepreneurs

This was a very insightful chat that encompasses a wide-range of important topics. I encourage anyone to listen to this episode, whether you're into bitcoin or not. Enjoy!

Check out Bitcoin Well: https://bitcoinwell.com/
Follow Adam on Twitter: https://twitter.com/adamobrien_

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I'm speaking with Scott Cordier, a certified financial planner for the past 28 years, and Certified Infinite Banking Practitioner.

I randomly stumbled on the Infinite Banking Concept several months back, and have never looked back since. Infinite Banking is a financial strategy that has been used by the wealthiest people in the world for generations, which is also available to anyone. To fully grasp and understand the concept requires you to re-wire the way you think about money and finance. Once you do, you'll truly understand the power it holds and opportunities it opens up. Not to mention the legacy it can leave your family.

My hope in this episode is to help scratch the surface, and get as many people interested as possible so they can start their own research.

Some of the topics we discuss:

👉 What is infinite banking
👉 The historical rates of returns on policies
👉 Dividends paid for 100+ years, including during both World Wars, The Great Depression, and the 2008 Financial Crisis
👉 Your cash growing 100% tax-free
👉 Taking out loans on your policy to fund investments, expenses, and lifestyle
👉 Why less than 1% of financial advisors know about this concept
👉 Why this is more beneficial than investing in stocks

To learn more about Infinite Banking in Canada, visit https://ibcanadagroup.com/

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This episode includes Bitcoin OG Brad Mills, and entrepreneur and Bitcoin investor" Jimmy Toussaint, also known as "The Prettiest Boy in Bitcoin".

With all of the chaos in the markets, I thought it was important to speak to people who are deep into Bitcoin, and get their perspectives on what is happening, and where things are going.

As an investor in Bitcoin, and someone with a high-level understanding of what Bitcoin is, what it does, and why I think it's valuable, I was hoping to break things down in a simplified way that most people in a similar category would understand.

We discuss many topics including:

👉 Why Bitcoin is trading in correlation with equity markets
👉 Ethereum and Altcoins, and why you should be skeptical
👉 Ways Bitcoin can handle regulatory hurdles
👉 How Canadians should deal with the tax components of Bitcoin
👉 Elon Musk and Dogecoin
👉 Why Bitcoin remains volatile
👉 How every day people should invest in Bitcoin
👉 Why Bitcoin will eventually become a global currency

This was one of my favourite and most informative episodes. I would encourage anyone with an interest in Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies to listen in.

There is a lot of change happening in the world, and I believe many people will get blindsided. Hopefully this conversation can help people gain perspective and position themselves better.

Enjoy!

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I'm currently exploring some real estate investment opportunities, and so I wanted to chat with an expert. Daniel Foch is a highly regarded real estate broker, investor and market analyst.

In the conversation, we explore many topics that could impact the real estate market in Toronto, as well as the economy as a whole:

👉 The effects of rising Interest rates
👉 Central banks and monetary supply
👉 What's causing inflation and when will it ease up
👉 Where you can find cash flow positive properties in Ontario
👉 The relationship between home building costs and resale values
👉 Where savvy investors are allocating capital
👉 Windows of opportunity for buyers or investors
👉 Macroeconomic events that can reshape currency values and the world order

If you're someone who owns real estate, thinking about selling, buying or investing, this is a great episode to to hear insights that many people are thinking about, but don't often hear about from the mainstream narrative.

Hope you enjoy!

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Derek Steer, Co-founder and CEO of Mode Analytics.

Mode helps entrepreneurs grow their businesses faster through data-driven decision making. The Mode platform combines the best elements of Business Intelligence (ABI), Data Science (DS) and Machine Learning (ML) to empower data teams to answer impactful questions and collaborate on analysis across a range of business functions.

In 2019, Mode added a number of premiere enterprise companies to its customer base, which now includes Anheuser Busch, Zillow, Lyft, Bloomberg, Capital One, VMWare, and Conde Nast, among others.

In 2020, Mode was the recipient of four G2 Awards, including Best Estimated ROI, Fastest Implementation, Highest Performer, and Overall Leader. At this point, 52% of the Forbes 500 have signed up for Mode.

Mode is currently being used by marquee companies such as Lyft, Zillow, Unbounce, Doordash, Everlane and Meredith publishing for product, financial and marketing analytics. Mode goes beyond traditional business intelligence by speeding up answers to complex business problems and making the process more collaborative, so that everyone can build on the work of data analysts. Mode recently closed a successful Series D round for Mode, bringing the total funding raised to $83M.

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Sagi Eliyahu is the CEO & Co-Founder of Tonkean, the no-code, automation platform that helps companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, and TripActions to solve their operational inefficiencies and business problems.

Tonkean recently raised their $24M Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, bringing the company’s total fundraising to $33M.

Prior to Tonkean, Sagi held executive engineering roles at Jive Software. He also served for four years in Unit 8200, the Israeli Defense Force’s elite intelligence agency, and applies much of what he learned from developing data and information systems for the agency to his work at Tonkean.

Sagi believes operations is a vastly underappreciated function within companies, and that we must empower operations teams to help design a better future of work — a future that’s more adaptive, efficient, and appreciative of the importance of people, as opposed to technology or data.

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Nicolas started selling newspapers in the streets of Paris in high school, studied Math at Ecole Polytechnique then Business at Stanford GSB, and started and sold 3 tech companies with up to 65 employees and $11M in revenues.

He is now the co-founder and CEO of Chili Piper - the System of Action for revenue teams - and of KosmoTime - the first Focused Productivity Assistant.

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Ondrej Sedlacek is the CEO and founder of SatisMeter. SatisMeter helps companies measure and improve customer satisfaction through NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys.

If you're in SaaS, then you've heard about the importance of NPS. If this is a topic you've been interested in learning more about, there's no one better to learn about it than Ondrej.

We talk about how SatisMeter got started, and how they've grown to help over 400 companies, why everyone should use NPS, and how it reduces churn.

Enjoy the conversation!

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Rytis Lauris is the CEO of Omnisend, a marketing automation SaaS that helps e-commerce companies.

Omnisend is bootstrapped, employees +70 people, and has grown past +$11M ARR in only 6 years!

Rytis talks about his founding story, specific marketing strategies that helped Omnisend gain traction early, understanding monetization strategies, leveraging integration partnerships, how he manages a growing team all over the world, and much much more.

Learn how this bootstrapped SaaS is on route to Unicorn status!

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Tom Wright is the CEO and co-founder of Cascade, a software that helps teams stay focused on their goals.

Very impressively, Cascade serves +25,000 users, have 40+ employees, offices in 3 countries, and are closing in on $10M annual recurring revenue -all while bootstrapped!

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This is one of those episodes you might have to listen to more than once. Eugene Levin is the Chief Strategy Officer of SEMrush, an SEO management platform with over 800 employees around the world.

Eugene has a very unique mind when it comes to marketing and how to think about growth in business, and it's clear how much he's contributed to the great success of SEMrush.

This episode is jam-packed with actionable takeaways and advice from a high-level executive. We touch on several topics, including how to have a "winner take all mentality", the best ways to utilize marketing spend, the channels driving SEMrush's incredible growth, actionable tips on how any company can think about SEO, important metrics, and much much more.

Truly one of those episodes you want to listen to in full, and soak it all up. Enjoy!

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I’m speaking with Josh Pigford, CEO and founder of Baremetrics. If you’re in SaaS, you’ve definitely heard of Josh and Baremetrics. Hundreds of SaaS and subscription businesses use Baremetrics to properly display dashboards and metrics to give a real time breakdown of how their company is performing. This is fundamental for every SaaS company, and Baremetrics has been the staple in that department for quite some time.

Recently, Josh caused some waves in the SaaS world when he revealed that he almost sold Baremetrics for $5 million, which was a big shock to a lot of people in SaaS, given how transparent and open Josh is with his business. So we’re talking about that, why he went through with the sales process, how the deal fell through, and what impact that had with his team when the news went public.

We also talk about how Josh grew his remote company to well over $100k in monthly recurring revenue and what he’s planning for the future.

I’m really glad I had Josh on the podcast, this was a very insightful episode, and I have no doubt you’ll get a tonne of value from it. Enjoy!

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I'm speaking with automation and efficiency guru (or automation geek, as he calls himself), Will Christensen, co-founder of Data Automation.

Almost all companies of any size struggle with efficiency and waste countless hours with redundant and manual work. Will specializes in helping SaaS companies save time through automating workflows.

We talk about ways Data Automation helps SaaS companies save time through automation, how he's grown his company to +$1M in revenue, specific marketing channels to attract more business, and much much more.

Will also shares some of his favourite automation and efficiency hacks which are absolute gems!

This was a really great episode with key actionable insights that will really help you see the importance of efficiency in your business. Enjoy!

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In this episode, I’m speaking with Spencer Fry, the CEO and founder of Podia. Podia helps creators sell anything online from courses, downloads, and memberships, without worrying about any tech.

Podia is about 5 years old, they’re a fully remote team of 19 people at the time we recorded this (possibly even more now), and they just seem to be picking up a ton of traction in this space. Spencer has a bold vision for the company, in the next 5 years, he wants Podia to be the ONLY platform that a creator uses to monetize. We talk about what he’s doing and what they plan on doing to execute on that big vision.

Spencer has been serial entrepreneur since day one. He has actually never received a pay check from someone other than himself, which is pretty unique. He’s founded 4 companies including Podia, has had 3 successful exits, and is now focused on growing Podia to the the leader in their space.

If you’re in SaaS, a CEO, a founder, or anyone in business, definitely listen to this chat with one of the best executors I’ve ever spoken to. Enjoy!

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I’m speaking with serial entrepreneur, Josh MacDonald in this episode. Josh is a fellow software entrepreneur from the greater Toronto area (as am I), so it was really great to connect with him and hear his story - and what a story it is!

Josh is only 24 years old (at the time of recording this of course), and he has a tremendous wealth of knowledge and insights that are very impressive.

Josh got into the internet game at a very young age, he was making tens of thousands of dollars when he was only 15 years old. He recently wrote a book called the The Non-Technical Founder, where he talks about his journey and experiences as a non-technical founder, building, growing and eventually selling companies.

He’s done all of this bootstrapped, which I love of course. Currently, Josh passively runs a SaaS company called getshout.io, and an apparel brand called Abella, which is making 5-figures a day in revenue.

This is an episode I’m really excited for people to listen to. Enjoy our chat!

The Non-Technical Founder: How a 16-Year Old Built a Six Figure Software Company Without Writing any Code

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I’m speaking with Amar Ghose in this episode. Amar is the CEO of ZenMaid, a scheduling management software that helps cleaning and maid services be more efficient and organized.

Amar has done an amazing job of building himself a very nice, high margin company. ZenMaid is fully remote, bootstrapped, and are set to cross over $1.5M in annual recurring revenue this year. I’m pretty envious of Amar’s lifestyle, as he’s pretty much a full-time traveler, along with his wife.

We dive into how Amar grew the company to what it is today. I love his story, because it’s all about persistence, consistency and staying hungry. Amar reminds us how business is a marathon, not a sprint. He shares how the spent the first several years cold calling to get his first handful of clients, and recounts the very slow grind. They were only growing at about $300 in MRR per month for the first 3 years before things started to take off.

But that persistence and dedication have certainly paid off, Zenmaid is growing significantly, revenue is climbing the team is expanding. Learn how ZenMaid has become the market leader for maid services in the world.

Enjoy our chat!

Thank you to my friends at Customerly and Data Automation for sponsoring this episode!

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I’m speaking with Colin Nederkoorn, CEO and co-founder of customer.io. Colin was an absolute pleasure to speak with. He built customer.io in 2012 with his co-founder John, and have been exploding ever since.

For those who don’t know, customer.io is a SaaS company that gives companies one place to manage all of their their emails, push notifications, SMS’s and other messages that come from their product to their customers.

Customer.io is now doing over $10M in annual recurring revenue, they’re fully remote, and have a team of over 50 employees worldwide.

We’re talking about how customer.io maintains a positive company culture while being remote and distributed, how they’re maintaining their steady and consistent growth, how their product team has evolved over the years, and much much more.

I had a great time speaking with Colin, so much that we lost track of time so had to cut it a little but short at the end. But nonetheless, a ton of great value in this episode, I hope you enjoy!

PS. Thank you to my friends at Humi for sponsoring this episode. For everything Payroll, Benefits & HR, Humi has you covered. I got my listeners 30% off their subscription. Sign up here to claim the promo, you won't regret it!

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I'm speaking with Luca Micheli, CEO and founder of Customerly.io. Customerly helps companies create better relationships with their customers with effective communication. He launched Customerly about 4 years ago, they have over 17,000 customers around the world.

This is a fascinating story, Luca is competing in a very hot market, where it was once pretty much a monopoly with Intercom as the main provider in the space. The communication marketing space has now opened up which is evident through Customerly's success.

Luca is from Italy and currently lives in Ireland. Customerly is fully bootstrapped, which is amazing. We're digging into a lot of great topics in this episode, that a lot of you will definitely find useful. We break down exactly what Luca did to gain such a large user base in a short time, with lifetime deal offers and other marketing techniques. We talk about what they're doing today to drive up their user base, as well as some of their mistakes and learnings along the way.

Whether you're a bootstrapped founder or not, this is an episode you're sure to get a ton of value from. Enough of the intro, here's my chat with Luca. Enjoy!

Thank you to my friends at Chargify for sponsoring this episode. If you want to manage your SaaS revenue better, make sure you check out Chargify. I was able to get my listeners the first month of Chargify completely free, plus free premium onboarding. They have to know that I sent you, so make sure you sign up here and tell them Founder Views sent you. I promise, you won't regret it!

Another big thank you to my friends at Customer.io. If you want to step up your communication with your clients and prospects, of if you want to improve the level of engagement and value you provide, I highly recommend Customer.io. Go to customer.io/founderviews to sign up. You won't regret it!

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I’m speaking with Braden Urquhart, a fellow Canadian and CEO of RecTimes, a scheduling software that helps ice rinks manage their bookings.

This was such a valuable episode to listen to if you’re focused on building a profitable, lean and high-margin business. RecTimes is a small remote team of three people. But because they’re playing in such a tightly defined niche market, they’re able to find customers and penetrate their market a lot easier than most companies, which is such an advantage. They're growing steadily, and looking to double their revenue in the next 12 months.

But more importantly, they’re able to live a very nice and comfortable lifestyle, and be around their family and kids, which is a massive benefit in playing in a remote and tightly defined market.

We’re diving into that and a whole lot more in this episode. There's a lot of great takeaways, and I have no doubt you'll find valuable. Enjoy!

Thank you to Nuclino for also sponsoring the episode. if you’re a company that’s serious about growing, being organized and being efficient, I highly suggest Nuclino for your internal wiki. I was able to get my listeners a pretty sweet deal. I got you 30% for 1 year of service. Go to nuclino.com, and use FOUNDERVIEWS during checkout.

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Recently, I did a talk at the GrowthMentor Summit, which was a virtual summit, that included 50 of some of the world’s best growth leaders.

This was such an amazing event. There were thousands of attendees from all over the world, that had free access to some incredible insights from some very talented people.

My talk was on outbound sales. It was called "How to get your first 500 paying clients on a bootstrapped budget". I spoke about how I single-handedly got my first 500 paying clients through cold-calling and outbound sales.

I broke down the talk in 3 sections:

The 6 CRITERIA needed to get your first 500 clients.
The 3 KEY ELEMENTS you need to make sure you succeed.
The 9 STEP PLAYBOOK I used to get my first 500 clients.

So this is the audio version obviously, if you want to see the actual video with the slides, click the link below.

Click here to see the video of my talk with slides.

BONUS: Click here to get access to my custom recurring revenue calculator

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Competition is a great thing. When I see an industry with many different competitors, and many companies offering similar services to customers, my mouth starts to water. This tells me that there’s a healthy market of customers spending a lot of money on services that solve their problems. There are several advantages to playing in a competitive market:

A small piece of a big pie = $$

My first SaaS company was in one of the most competitive markets there are – real estate! There were literally hundreds upon hundreds of competitors offering similar products. That didn’t stop us at all. In fact, it actually encouraged us. We knew there was a massive market out there spending money on this service, and we wanted to get our piece of the pie. And believe me, if the market is big enough, even with hundreds of competitors, a small piece of the pie can be very significant. Significant enough to build a 7-figure ARR profitable company, and live a very good lifestyle!

Skip finding “product-market fit”

Another advantage of playing in a competitive market is that you can essentially skip the stage of finding product-market fit. Clearly there’s product-market fit if you’re offering a similar service to other companies that are making money. It’s simply a matter of positioning yourself in a slightly different way, with slightly different value propositions, and pulling some of those customers your way.

Position yourself how you want

How you position yourself is the most important thing when entering a competitive market. Obviously, you don’t want to flat-out copy another company’s product offering. Although you’ll likely be offering very similar services, you want to focus your offering on some sort of unique value in your product or service. For instance, it can be as simple as highlighting your amazing customer support, your more attractive pricing model, a particular feature that’s sleeker, etc.

Define your niche and attack it

When you determine your main differentiators, you can then define your ideal customer, and narrow down on a tight niche in the market. When you clearly define the type of customer you’re after, it improves your messaging, marketing material, it makes selling very easy, and allows you to gain traction quickly.

Next time someone says that a market is too crowded, or they deter you from starting a business because of too much competition, just ignore them and start licking your chops!

founderviews.com

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I’m speaking with Mark Thompson in this episode. Mark is the founder and CEO of PayKickStart, a subscription management, and affiliate solution that helps entrepreneurs and SaaS companies sell more and manage the payments side of their business with ease.

PayKickStart recently surpassed $1M in ARR, and has really been picking up steam. Aside from PayKickStart, Mark runs Digital KickStart, a sister company that houses a couple dozen other SaaS companies and apps.

This was such a great episode, because Mark is a true raw and bootstrapped entrepreneur, which I always admire and respect, who also happens to be a a non-tech founder in the SaaS game. Mark talks about how PayKickStart was actually built as an internal tool, and how it organically formed into the great business it is today.

We talk about about how he manages his fully remote team, what to look for when hiring overseas developers, he also gives a lot of actionable insights into what PayKickStart is doing to drive up growth, and much more.

This is a jam packed episode you’re going to want to listen to in full. Enjoy!

Thank you to Nuclino for also sponsoring the episode. if you’re a company that’s serious about growing, being organized and being efficient, I highly suggest Nuclino for your internal wiki. I was able to get my listeners a pretty sweet deal. I got you 30% for 1 year of service. Go to nuclino.com, and use FOUNDERVIEWS during checkout.

If you're looking for a phone system to fit your MODERN business, check out my friends at AirCall. I got my listeners an exclusive 7-day free trial. Make sure you sign up here so they know I sent you!

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I was super excited about this episode, I’m speaking with Renat Zubairov, the co-founder and CEO of elastic.io, a B2B SaaS that helps enterprises connect and process different applications.

They were founded in 2013, and have been seeing triple digit revenue growth year after year, which is extremely difficult for a company this size. They’re currently doing well over $2M in annual recurring revenue. elastic.io was acquired in 2017 by mVISE, a publicly traded company in Germany. They acquired a majority stake of Elastic, but they still operate independently.

This was such an informative chat, Renat is a very high-level CEO. We deep-dive into a lot of marketing, including some of the advantages and disadvantages of inbound vs outbound sales, how elastic.io is benefiting from content marketing, and what marketing channels are currently working the best for the company. Renat tells us why churn is the most important metric in SaaS, and how elastic.io maintains negative churn, which is something all SaaS folks should strive towards.

If you’re in the B2B space, or just want to level-up your way of thinking about business, this is the episode for you!

PS. Thank you to my friends at Chargify for sponsoring this episode. If you want to manage your SaaS revenue better, make sure you check out Chargify. I was able to get my listeners the first month of Chargify completely free, plus free premium onboarding. This deal is only good if you sign up before the end of 2019. And they have to know that I sent you. Make sure you sign up here and tell them Founder Views sent you. I promise, you won't regret it!

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This was an episode I was really excited about. I met Nim in Boston back in January 2019. He told me about what he was building, and I was instantly pumped about it. He founded CloudTax, which is a tax filing service that helps Canadians easily file their taxes online for free.

The reason i was excited to speak to Nim is because tax and accounting have always been close to me. I got my BCom in accounting and finance, and one of my side hustles back in the day was filing taxes for my classmates, so this was a really fun and nostalgic episode for me especially.

Nim was born in Sri Lanka and migrated to Canada shortly after the tsunami in 2004. He worked with the CRA for a couple of years, and had some experience at Sunlife as a financial advisor. He eventually circled back to his original passion which was taxes, and that’s how CloudTax was formed.

We’re talking about how he built the initial product, how he funded the development, getting certified by the CRA, and eventually launching the business. This past year was CloudTax's first filing season, and was a huge success. Several thousand Canadians across all provinces filed their taxes with CloudTax.

This was a great episode that I’m excited to share, so I hope you enjoy!

Also, thank you to Nuclino for also sponsoring the episode. if you’re a company that’s serious about growing, being organized and being efficient, I highly suggest Nuclino for your internal wiki. I was able to get my listeners a pretty sweet deal. I got you 30% for 1 year of service. Go to nuclino.com, and use FOUNDERVIEWS during checkout.

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In this episode, I’m speaking with Baptiste Debever, the CEO and founder of Feedier. Feedier is an app that helps companies get feedback from their employees in a fun, seamless and engaging way.

He launched the company in early 2018, they have over 8000 users on the platform and over 50 paying clients. They’re a team of 8 people based in France.

Baptiste breaks down what they did to get their first thousand users by using AppSumo shortly after they launched.

We talk about how Feedier is using content to drive the bulk of their leads and sales, their outbound strategy and how Feedier dips into the outbound sales game. We also get into metrics, and which kpi’s are important for Feedier to track their success.

I had a really great time speaking with Baptiste, he’s definitely a go-getter, and there’s no doubt in my mind you’ll be seeing a lot more of Feedier for years to come. So here it is, I hope you enjoy our chat!

PS. If you're looking for a phone system to fit your MODERN business, check out my friends at AirCall. I got my listeners an exclusive 7-day free trial. Make sure you sign up here so they know I sent you!

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In this episode I’m speaking with Robert Zalaudek, founder and CEO of Pomodus. This episode is a little bit different than what you might be used to - Robert is just starting out in the SaaS space. He’s developing an app called Pomodus, which integrates with Slack and helps you stay productive and focused.

I wanted to get Robert on the podcast, because a lot of my listeners are early stage SaaS founders, just like Robert. So i thought it would be helpful for other folks in similar positions to hear Robert’s journey and what he’s done to not only build Pomodus, validate the idea, but also what’s he’s doing to market it, and gain the initial traction to get the business off the ground.

I know that part is often a struggle for a lot of early stage founders out there, and Robert does a great job of providing actionable ideas and insights.

We get into quite a few specifics including how he plans to leverage Product Hunt for his launch, other marketing tactics he’s going to use to help gain initial traction, and what other startup founders should avoid! This was a really great episode, with a ton of really great insights. Enjoy!

PS. Thank you to my friends at Humi for sponsoring this episode. For everything Payroll, Benefits & HR, Humi has you covered. I got my listeners 30% off their subscription. Sign up here to claim the promo, you won't regret it!

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In this episode, i’m speaking with Devid Henzel, the CEO of TaskDrive. TaskDrive helps companies improve their outbound sales efforts by providing qualified leads to your sales team through personal outreach, among other services. David actually acquired TaskDrive about a year and a half ago, and has been scaling up the company ever since. He also has other portfolio companies he runs, aside from TaskDrive.

We’re talking about many different topics in this episode, including the benefits of outsourcing your workforce, he gives some really good advice on how you can get influencers to help gain traction if you’re just starting out in business, of course we’re talking about outbound sales, and specific outbound sales strategies that work.

David shares some of his and his team’s favourite tools to stay organized and productive. He also drops quite a few gems including some great questions to ask your next hire, and some amazing book recommendations that really helped positively impact his businesses.

I had a great time chatting with David, definitely one of the top class CEO's I've spoken to. This is an episode you're guaranteed to get a lot of value from. Hope you enjoy!

BONUS: Register for David's FREE talk on finding your company's north star!

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In this episode, I’m speaking with Darren Gallop, a fellow Canadian SaaS CEO. Darren runs Securicy, they help guide companies through creating, implementing, and managing Information Security Programs.

Securicy has raised a total $1.8M from investors. Before starting Securicy, Darren founded Marcato, another SaaS product for music festivals, which recently got acquired.

This was such a great episode, Darren is one of the brightest CEO’s i’ve spoken with. We talk about quite a few topics, including how Darren leveraged his existing network to gain early traction at Securicy, some of his go-to market strategies that they’re testing right now, he shares a lot of specific frameworks, metrics and tools that Securicy implements in their company. Darren also talks about some really good hiring tips, and how responsibilities change as a CEO when you have investors.

A lot of great discussions in this episode that many people will find a lot of value in. I hope you enjoy!

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I’m speaking with Xenia Muntean, the CEO and co-founder of Planable.io. Planable helps brands and agencies better manage their social media content.

Xenia has been running Planable for about 3 years and has seen incredible growth in such a short time. They made their mark at the famous TechStars accelerator in London. They recently closed a seed round to help ramp up their growth, which we talk about in the episode.

Xenia was recently named in Forbes 30 under 30 for 2019, which is incredible. We’re also getting into a lot of other topics including, how Planable got their first handful of customers and some specific strategies they used, Xenia’s opening up some of her marketing playbooks and sharing what they’re doing currently to drive new business, she’s also sharing the customer count that Planable currently crossed, which is huge.

This conversation is jam packed, we really dived in pretty deep. I had such an amazing time chatting with Xenia, this is one you’re definitely going to enjoy!

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In this episode, I’m speaking with Mubashar (Mubs) Iqbal. I stumbled across Mubs on Twitter, and immediately wanted to talk to him on my podcast.

Mubs was Product Hunt’s maker of the year in 2016, and has been the runner up a bunch of other times.

He is what you can only describe as a MAKER. He’s built and developed a countless number of websites and apps, which we’re talking about in this episode. Most recently, he developed an app called PodHunt, that allows people to submit and find new and exciting podcast episodes.

He’s already garnered over 600 users in only a few months, and it’s growing rapidly. We’re talking about a bunch of different topics in this episode, including his involvement with Product Hunt and how he won Maker of the Year, his most popular projects, and he also gives some tips on how non-coders can get idea and projects off the ground.

This was a really fun episode. Mubs is extremely talented, he’s fun, down to earth, and most importantly, a great person. I hope you enjoy our chat!

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Mature businesses with firm roots in the ground can buy a lot of time when going through slow growth periods or rough patches, compared to newer startups. The value of time is a true luxury and could be a major advantage for bigger companies if utilized properly.

Established companies can afford to go through sluggish stages where there’s either stagnant sales, slow growth, or even misalignment amongst the team. Mature companies can go through several months or even years before there’s even a hint of genuine going concern. Bootstrapped startups on the other hand, can only afford weeks at most before runway is dry. Startups must have the foot on the gas at all times and be laser-focused, which can be good or bad (more on that later).

What’s interesting is that these “rough patches” can actually be really good for companies. One of the main reasons why mature companies go through what seem to be “sluggish” periods, is because they are able to consciously sense a change in how the market is behaving. So what seems like a slow growth period, is actually time to regroup and figure out the best avenue to attack or pivot into. These periods give mature companies a huge advantage in order to look at a macro view of the market or industry landscape they’re playing in. It allows them to observe what’s going on in order to shift their focus and attention on forward-thinking trends or changes in the industry and move their business in that direction.

Startups on the other hand, have to be laser-focused on what their working on, and just hope they’re on the right track. The don’t have the luxury to sit back and observe the market and figure out if they’re going in the right direction. It’s basically all or nothing for startups, especially bootstrapped ones. Their visions could either work out brilliantly and lead to great success, or the opposite – failure. Most startups fail – you only hear about the very small few that pick the right track (execution has a lot to do with it too, of course).

My guess is that it’s very common for even great companies to experience these “slow periods”. You can compare these companies to sports superstars. Even the best player will never be consistently great each and every game. They will have amazing runs, average runs, and even poor runs. What separates the superstars from the mediocre players are how quick they are able to bounce back from “slow periods” and get on the gravy train.

Good working teams with great leaders will always push through these periods and eventually figure out the market direction and how to drive their business forward.

The truly special teams on the other hand, will not only figure out the market direction, but will dictate the direction of the industry for everyone else to follow.

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I’m speaking with Jake Stainer, the former Head of Growth at Typeform. Jake is currently the Head of Growth at Travelperk, a company that helps businesses manage and book their travel. He founded an online language learning app Papora, and he also consults companies to accelerate their growth. Most notably, Jake was the Head of Growth at Typeform. He started with Typeform very early on, when they were only doing $1M ARR, and had about 20 employees. He stayed on board with them for just over 4 years and helped take accelerate to $25M ARR in that time! We’re diving into a lot specifics on what strategies Jake used to help Typeform grow exponentially, including tips on product-led growth, how to create viral loops within your app, how he used SEO to help them get from 0 to 30,000 signups per month! and much much more. This is a conversations filled with little golden nuggets, so you’re definitely going to want to listen in full. I hope you enjoy!

Contact Jake here!

Bonus! Contact both Jake and I on Growthmentor.

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In this episode, I’m speaking with Liam Martin, co-founder of TimeDoctor, a company that helps remote teams stay focused, efficient and productive. In 8 years, Liam has helped bring Time Doctor to a comfortable 7-figures in recurring revenue. They’re a team of over 100 employees in 32 countries around the world. Most impressively, they’ve done this all while being bootstrapped!

Liam also helped start the conference called Running Remote. It’s a conference where remote companies can get together, learn and collaborate. Next year will be its third year running and going to be held in Austin Texas. Definitely worth checking out!

We’re diving into a lot of different topics, including how remote companies can improve their company culture and tips for hiring remote. We get into marketing at some length, as we talk about why Facebook and social ads no longer work, and what SaaS companies should better focus their attention and spend on.

This was a really fun and informative chat, and I was glad Liam and I were able to connect. Happy listening!

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There are a growing number of tech companies that are choosing to be fully transparent with their financial metrics. Some of the bigger names like Convertkit, Buffer and Hubspot, are all publicly disclosing every financial detail for the world to see. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of other companies following this open data movement.

From an observer’s perspective, it’s pretty awesome to be able to see how private companies are performing, compare numbers, and analyze data. It’s also great for startups or entrepreneurs to see that information and be able to set realistic benchmarks and goals across industry-specific data.

In fact, it’s because of these transparent companies that helped inspire me to start a blog and podcast talking about my journey. I think it’s truly great to share your experiences with your community and even better for the overall business ecosystem. It would be a shame to keep in all of your experiences and unique insights bottled in. It’s great karma, and a true win-win for everyone to share what you can.

However, from the lens of a business owner already deep in the game, I tend to view things differently when talking about transparent financial data. I’ve always had the mindset of business being like war. In war, it’s very easy to get stabbed in the back if your guard isn’t up. If you’re in battle, which exactly what business is, you would never give all of your closest secrets to the enemy – what good would that do for you? If you’re an entrepreneur that’s in it to win it (like I am), then any piece of information can, and likely will, be used against you.

Other than the short-term clout, praise and acknowledgement on social media (and probably an uptick in Twitter followers), there aren’t many benefits to disclosing your numbers to everyone, especially your competitors.

From my perspective, there’s a lot more downside to making your financials transparent.

Everyone can see when times are bad

All businesses go through their good times and bad times. I’m sure most founders would love to share their data to the world when things are going well, and growth rates are triple figures. But what about when you have that streak of bad luck and horizontal, or even negative, growth rates?

Customer perception

If your business is going through a downturn, or stagnant state, it doesn’t give off the best perception or feeling of trust to your customers. Your customers might feel a sense of uneasiness seeing their provider go through rough times, and could even think about jumping ship because of that. And you can’t blame those customers for doing so. It’s only natural for people to want to do business with stable and growing companies. Even if this downturn is temporary and just a small bump in the road, the perception alone is enough to sway customers.

Recruiting concerns

Recruiting and hiring are two of the most important functions of a growing company. A good recruiter will be able to sell the company’s vision and get candidates excited for the potential job opportunity. If you happen to be recruiting during a rough patch, it could easily sway good candidates from applying to your company. If your numbers are public and a candidate sees big spikes in churn for a few months, or slow MRR growth, they might think twice before applying.

The competition

If my competitors are anything like me, they’d want to step on the jugular when they see an opportunity. Again, if you happen to be going through a temporary rough patch, it could very well be seen as a perfect opportunity for a competitor to get aggressive in their marketing a steal away some of your market share.

Everyone can see when MRR goes up

Your transparent data is showing 20% MRR growth MoM, which is fantastic! You’d want to share this to the world, right? I’m sure many people would be very impressed, including your competitors. Remember, if you’re in business, that means you’re in war. If your enemy has figured out a new tactic, or developed an awesome new weapon, you would definitely want the same thing. By sharing your financials, you’re giving an opportunity for your competitors to analyze and understand what tactic is working well for you, and eventually copy it for their own success.

You can’t act bigger than you actually are

In most cases, startups have no choice but to “fake it until they make it”. For example, if you visited my company’s website when I was just starting out, you would have had no idea that it was a two-man operation out of my parent’s basement.

Let’s face it, as a new startup, you want to give off the impression that you’re much bigger than you are. You’re going to have a company address in major city, a bunch of 1-800 numbers in different countries, and a team page, including some of your successful friends who are advisors. In no way am I saying that the information on your website should be false. That would be flat out unethical or even illegal which is a big no-no. However, without lying to your audience, you just want to look like you’re bigger than you really are. That’s the fact, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Customers will be hesitant to sign up with a company doing only $1k in MRR. Not to say it’s impossible, but I can almost guarantee it would be a lot more difficult to sign up new customers if they knew you weren’t even making $1k per month.

I’ve definitely been flirting with the idea of making my company’s financial transparent, but after some careful thought, as long as I’m in war, that information is something I’ll be holding close to my chest for the foreseeable future.

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In this episode, I’m speaking with the main man himself, Dan Martell. Dan has been one of my inspirations in the SaaS game, bar-none. I haven’t met too many people in SaaS who haven’t got at least some value from Dan.

Dan has built 5 companies, and successfully exited three of those, most notably Flowtown and Clarity.fm. He’s an investor in over 40 startups, including Intercom, Hootsuite, and Udemy, to name a few. For the last several years, Dan has been coaching some of the world’s top SaaS founders to help them scale their businesses. He was also recently named top 5 YouTube channels for entrepreneurs in the world by Entrepreneur Magazine, which is pretty awesome.

We’re diving into several topics in this episode, including some of Dan’s exclusive concepts such as:

How to perfectly craft your messaging in your marketing.
How to build authority in your industry.
What’s a North Star Metric (NSM), and how SaaS companies should be using it.
Two common challenges most SaaS companies face, and how to tackle them.
Much much more!

This is a jam packed episode with so many amazing takeaways. I hope you enjoy it!

Visit danmartell.com to learn more.

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In this episode, I'm speaking with Max Kolysh, one of the founders of zinc.io. Zinc is an e-commerce lab that builds products that helps tens of thousands of Amazon and eBay sellers with listing creation, inventory management, pricing and order fulfillment. Max co-founded Zinc back in 2014. They went through Y-Combinator, and raised a seed round of $400k, and are now doing $6M in ARR. It was a great pleasure speaking with Max, I have no doubt you'll get a ton of value and insights in this episode. Enjoy!

Visit zinc.io to learn more.

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It’s very common for companies to get comfortable and settle in a “coasting state”. A “coasting state” is when a company is making money, growing (albeit slowly), and trekking along steadily in their market. Not to say this is a bad thing (far from it, actually). After all, most companies will fail before they even get close to that “coasting state”. The fact is, most founders are satisfied coasting along comfortably, and collecting their stable pay check. This is also the reason why there are only few industry-leaders in a respective market.

For the big dreamers, and the founders who decide they want to abandon the “coasting state”, and instead elevate themselves as market leaders, they have to change their mindset and ideology when it comes to thinking about business. When confronted with a decision, you can’t think about today, you have to think about the future. Every decision has to be made with the thought of scale and long-term focus in mind. You can’t think about the effects that choice will have in a day, week, or month. You have to think of the impact that choice will have a year from now, and whether the choice will impact your long term vision.

Many times, these big decisions will make you very uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable is a good thing. Being uncomfortable means you’re growing, and stepping out of your comfort zone. If you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you likely won’t be advancing your business forward. That’s exactly how companies fall into the “coasting state”. The only way to truly grow and evolve your company is to embark down paths that you’ve never explored before. For example, if you usually hire one person at a time, try hiring four. If your team usually relies on you to come up with the answer, empower them to do it on their own.

Usually, companies will come to a crossroad- they will either choose to continue on the “coasting state” (which is what most do), or decide to break barriers and reach the next threshold as a company. I define company thresholds as companies doing the following revenues:

Threshold 1: $1M to $2.5M

Threshold 2: $2.5M to $5M

Threshold 3: >$5M

Each threshold to the next might not seem like a big difference, but believe me, the differences are enormous. A lot has to change for a company to break into each new threshold, such as added resources, updated internal processes, more communication channels, and introducing multi-level management. It’s very easy to get swallowed up and overwhelmed as a founder, if you don’t cross each threshold carefully.

Here are the 3 steps you have to take to successful break through the next threshold in your business:

Mindset

It all starts from the top. The leaders of the company have to first firmly believe in the vision themselves. The biggest challenge starts with mindset and belief. As cliche as it sounds, the biggest limitation stopping most founders from breaking into the next threshold is their own mind.

Instil the belief in those around you

Once you believe in the vision, you have to instil that belief into the rest of the team. Often times, that’s the hardest part. Generally, humans don’t like change. When your team is used to being on a particular path, and working in a particular way, asking them to change course, usually comes with some resistance and hesitation. It takes persistence and continued confidence from the company leaders to really pound the message in to the rest of the team. However, once that alignment happens, something amazing happens. The floodgates and horizons open up, and it will only be a matter of time before the threshold is crossed.

Actions = Ambitions

Once you and your team have the right belief and mindset, and everyone is bought into the vision, it’s time to get to work. This is often the tricky part that involves some mindfulness. You can’t continue doing what you usually do on the day-to-day. A simple question to ask yourself is, “do my actions = my ambition?”. If you’re still spending half your day doing customer support, or still boggled up doing admin work, you’re likely going to be at a standstill. Literally everything you do on a day-to-day has to move the needle forward. Your actions must equal your ambitions.

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In this episode, I'm speaking with Tom Libelt, the founder of Smart Brand Marketing and We Market Online Courses. Tom is a straight up hustler. His family moved to the US from Poland with to escape communism, with only $500 in their pocket. He was a serial entrepreneur from a young age. He owned a coffee shop, a record label, was a top hip-hop Polish recording artist, created a documentary, sold over 5000 Kindle books, and now runs Smart Brand Marketing, where he primarily helps companies market their online courses. His company does over 7-figures in annual revenue, his team is fully remote, and best of all - fully bootstrapped. This was definitely one of my favourite interviews, I had a lot in common with Tom which made for a really good chat. I hope you enjoy!

Visit smartbrandmarketing.com to learn more.

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Think of absolutely ANY business problem a company might face. 

The one thing that can absolutely solve just about any business problem is… SALES! 

That’s right – in one way or another, more generating more sales can solve those plaguing business problems that are in your way. 

Need to make a few key hires in your business? Increase sales so you can afford to make them. 

Need to launch those products that have been in the back burner for a while? Increase sales so you can afford to hire another developer. 

Burning cash every month? Increase sales to be cash flow positive. 

Expenses outpacing sales? Increase sales to make up for it. 

Need to improve your company’s branding? Increase sales so you can afford a branding person. 

Customer support falling by the wayside? Increase sales so you can afford more support people. 

Need to step up your marketing? Increase sales so you can afford a marketing budget. 

Get the point? Sales can help solve, or at the very least, alleviate nearly any business problem that a company faces. 

Most small and bootstrapped businesses have resource problems. In most cases, these companies have so many opportunities in front of them that aren’t being taken advantage of because they simply don’t have the resources or time to tackle them. Small companies are often forced to prioritize and pick their battles, which means leaving opportunities (and money) on the sideline. 

The common reaction for companies in these positions are to go out and seek some funding. An injection of liquidity can usually help many of these situations. However, for bootstrappers, that injection has to come from customers, and that means more sales. 

Sales solves every problem.

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One of the biggest opportunities I didn’t take more advantage of while growing a company, is not gathering enough feedback from employees more often. Being the co-founder of the company that started from scratch, I personally did every single role in every department on my own. I was a salesperson, support rep, marketer, graphic designer, onboarding specialist, retention specialist, and billing person- all at the same time. Needless to say, I know every facet of my company very well.

However, as we started to grow the team, and bring in people with different backgrounds and experiences, I quickly realized I didn’t know as much as I thought I did. With diversity, comes new insights, thoughts and ideas that can make some of the biggest impacts in your business. When you start managing, as opposed to being wrapped up in the nitty-gritty daily operations, you can easily lose sight of the processes, procedures and efficiencies within each role. This is when you have to put more trust in your team, and continuously seek feedback and input, no matter how big or small.

We launched Web4Realty back in 2011. A LOT has changed over the last several years. There are so many new tools and apps that have changed the way companies work and operate. For example, the way we did sales and support only two years ago, is very different from the way we do it today. We have different processes, use different apps, and have streamlined operations. As a manager, even though you’re responsible for implementing new procedures in the company, you’ll never see things from the lens of the people actually working in them in the day-to-day.

Here are 3 reasons why employee feedback can change your business for the good:

Continually improve your business

If you want to continue improving your business processes and efficiencies, and ensure your team is performing optimally, consistent feedback is imperative. There are no better people to provide information on improvements and opportunities, than the one’s performing the job functions on a daily basis. Although the final decisions usually come from the managers or founders, the feedback from the rest of the team is what drives those decisions. WIthout feedback employees, you’ll essentially be shooting arrows in the dark.

Empower your team

There’s nothing I love more than when team members contribute to the greater good of the company. I’m not talking about simply performing their required tasks. I’m talking about providing thoughtful feedback and taking initiative. I always encourage my team to seek opportunities in their processes, and continuously be mindful of ways to be more effective in their roles. This is one of the amazing parts of working for a young lean company in the new-age. Contributions from team members are real and impactful, and there’s no greater feeling than making a true difference in the company.

Even though it’s your business, you can always learn

As a founder, you can never stop learning your own business. Although it’s your business, you can’t be naive about knowing everything. You have to really understand that ins-and-outs of every single layer in the company in every department. When you start managing and looking at things from the top layer, it’s tough to get a real glimpse of what’s happening on the ground. The only way to do that is through constant feedback and dialogue from your team. The more you learn and the deeper understanding you have, the better decisions you will make, which should have positive ripples to everyone involved.

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We all know that team building and culture are very important for the success of any organization. In order to push projects forward, achieve company objectives, and live out a company vision, your team must be coordinated with each other, in-sync, and integrated. Team building is not something that comes naturally in an organization. It has to be deliberate and purposeful. In most cases, team members are focused on their particular tasks and department objectives, and don’t really have the time to build meaningful relationships with other people in the company.

Team building is something that requires effort. In a remote environment however, that effort has to be magnified significantly. In remote companies, team members are even more isolated and autonomous, for obvious reasons. It’s very easy for employees to fade off into their own zone and get out of touch with the bigger picture. Remote teams are often located in different countries, time zones, and have different cultures and beliefs. Strengthening your team building in these circumstances, when the only connection they have is a computer screen, makes it even more difficult.

While working remotely with dozens of team members all over the world, I’ve discovered a 5 tips to help with team building and make your team seem less distant and more integrated.

Send pictures of your food

You know the saying, nothing brings people together like food does. Same goes in remote setup. It’s very easy to send snapshots of your breakfast and lunch with the rest of the team. As simple as that sounds, it often spurs up the most dialogue and engagement with team members. Showing the variation of different types of food from people in different continents and cultures makes it even more fun!

Vlog your surroundings

Working remotely certainly comes with its perks. You’re technically able to work from anywhere you’d like, as long as there’s a good internet connection. Working at your desk, living room, a coffee shop, or out of town? Let your team know where you’re at, especially if it’s somewhere different! Letting your team inside your day-to-day surroundings helps form a closer bond and stay more connected.

Initiation videos for new employees

For each new employee, we send them a set of fun and personal questions. The kicker is that they have to answer them in a video message. This simple exercise helps new employees get acquainted with the rest of the team, and showcase their unique personality!

Company announcements in video

Instead of emailing or writing out company announcements, do it with video. Although it might not be practical, nor possible every single time, it’s nice to sprinkle in video whenever you can. Video is a great way to communicate with your team. It’s the next closest thing to being face to face, and it’s a great way to further build a connection with your team.

Share non-work/life events

There’s a lot more to life than only work. One of the benefits of a remote setup is the efficiency of communication. Most communication between team members is clear and to the point. Although a benefit from a time/efficiency perspective, it’s also a drawback in building relationships and personal connections with your team. You should share as many life events with your team as possible. Baby started crawling, you opened up a nice bottle of wine, travelling somewhere exciting with the family? Bring your team in your life as often as you can!

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This was a very exciting episode. I’m speaking with Thomas Smale, founder of FE International, the hands-down market leader for M&A and advisory services for SaaS and other online businesses. They’ve completed hundreds of millions in acquisitions over the years.

If you own a SaaS or any small business, this is an episode you’re going to want to listen to in full. We talk about what potential buyers look for in companies, how companies can increase their valuation, the acquisition process in detail, and much much more.

Oh, not to mention, FE International is fully 100% bootstrapped, which you know I love. Thomas has an awesome bootstrapping story as well. He basically started buying companies with his credit card believe it or not. You’ll hear more about that in the episode. Enjoy!

Visit feinternational.com to learn more.

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In today’s episode, I'm speaking with Laura Roeder, the founder and CEO of MeetEdgar. MeetEdgar helps professionals and small businesses manage their content and promote it on social media. Laura founded MeetEdgar in 2014. In less than 4 years, they’ve grown to over $4 million in annual recurring revenue, all while being fully remote, and bootstrapped, which is absolutely incredible. We dive into a lot of different topics, including how she grew to $100k MRR in less than 12 months, her bootstrapping story, marketing tips, challenges of managing a remote team, tips on churn, and much much more. I had a great time chatting with Laura, and I think you’ll get a ton of value from this episode. I hope you enjoy!

Visit meetedgar.com to learn more.

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You marketed your product, your sales team pitched the product to a prospective client, had a few follow up meetings, and finally closed the sale! Congratulations, the client is in the door!

Now the hard work begins…

NOT to take anything away from those in sales – in fact, sales is the most important department in business, in my opinion. Without sales, companies slow down, flatten out and eventually die. No matter what turmoil a company is going through, in almost all cases, sales will help solve that problem.

In SaaS however, the hardest part is engaging the client post-sale. Most companies make the mistake in assuming just because a client signed up, they understand the value they’re supposed to be receiving. Even if your sales reps have properly informed the clients about the great benefits and value that your service provides, that’s simply not enough.

The silent killer in SaaS is churn, as we know. Therefore, from the moment your new client signs up, each piece of communication and engagement has to be properly thought out and strategized to ensure they’re continuously reminded of that value they signed up for.

Here are a 5 general tips and ideas to ensure your post-sale communication is continuously on point, and bringing value to your clients:

Your intro email

The first email that your new client receives after they sign up is a very critical piece of communication that often gets overlooked. This email has the potential to set the tone of your relationship with the client, and set their expectations moving forward. Think outside the box, get creative, be simple, and make it stand-apart from the dozens of other apps your client uses.

Specific event-based communications

Way too often, companies dump all of their clients in the same bucket. They put their clients in a drip campaign, and let it run aimlessly at the same time, and at the same format. This is a terrible idea. Each client is unique, uses different parts of your app, and sees value in different ways. Thus, it’s important to empathize with the uniqueness of clients, and rethink your communication to reflect that fact. Specific event-based communications are key. For example, if a client performs a certain task on your app, a triggered email that is relevant to them, should be sent to that client. If another client doesn’t perform a certain task for a few weeks, a triggered email should be sent to them. The amount of event-based communication options are endless. Think about how your clients use your app, and what communication should be sent their way, depending on how they behave.

A very under utilized form of communication is SMS. Most companies default their communication channels to only email. Think about how you would feel if you got a short and personal text message from an app provider. For example, if a client performs a milestone on your app, a quick “congratulations” text message will make the client feel pretty great and appreciated. An SMS breaks that barrier in the relationship and makes things more personal. This is a small touch that could help contribute to a longer-lasting business relationship.

Positive acknowledgement/congratulations

You should try and remind your clients about the value they’re receiving from your app, every single chance you get. If your client is seeing value from your app, and you’re acknowledging that value to them, it’s eventually going to be very hard for that client to leave. This is very easy to do using event-based triggers. Think about something great a client does or can do with your app, and then simply send out communication congratulating them on that accomplishment. Simple, and goes a very long way.

Provide tips and advice

Value can also be shown to clients by not only how they use your app, but by showing them what they can do. For example, if a client is using your app in a particular way, you can advise them on something else that can compliment or aid them on their regular usage. Many apps, particularly SaaS tools, are very thorough with a lot of functionality. Often times, clients may not even know something is possible, or a new feature came out with them not knowing. Continuously keeping your clients informed, and providing relevant advice is extremely valuable.

Never underestimate the importance of post-sale communication. In a way, sales never truly ends in your client journey. It’s your responsibility to continuously showcase your service’s value to clients, every chance you get.

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I'm chatting with Foti Panagio, the founder of growthmentor.io, a platform where you can get advice and mentorship from vetted experts. We're talking about the challenges of a double-sided marketplace, how he plans on growing his startup, marketing opportunities, and much more. This was a very fun and insightful chat, with a lot of great takeaways. Enjoy!

Visit growthmentor.io to learn more.

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One of the most important topics in SaaS that isn’t too often covered, is the dunning process. For those who might not be familiar with dunning, it’s the process of communicating with customers that are past due, to collect payments before their accounts get cancelled or closed.

Dunning is usually a structured automated process whose form of communication is email or sms. For SaaS companies with a large number of customers, dunning is a crucial process with several benefits, including revenue retention, helping churn, increasing cash flow, and more efficient use of resources.

An effective dunning processes requires a lot of thought and strategy, which usually depends on what you choose to optimize for. That usually depends on the nature of your business, industry and types of customers. A typical dunning process lasts about 30 days, however that could vary more or less, depending on your business.

What strategy to use?

If you’re optimizing for revenue retention and churn prevention, than you will want to have a longer dunning period, usually 30-40 days. This is primarily the case if you’re a B2C or your customers are small businesses. This optimization strategy is ideal if you want to keep the client on as an active account, and hope to collect the revenue within the dunning period, rather than closing the account and churning the client sooner.

If you’re a business that is dependent on cash flow, you’ll want to optimize for collection time, and will likely have a shorter, more pressing dunning process. This strategy could be ideal for any type of business, whether large or small. If your business is dependent on cash flow for day-to-day operations and covering expenses, you’ll want your dunning period to be shorter, usually 7-14 days.

No matter what the nature of business you’re in, or what strategy you’re using, there are some general tips and guidelines to follow that will ensure your dunning process is most effective:

Tip #1. Be as accommodating as possible

In some way or another, your client is an entrepreneur. Whether the client is a small business, or large enterprise, it’s usually run by an entrepreneur. We all know what the life of an entrepreneur is like- several highs and lows throughout the month, week, or even day. You should always give the client the benefit of the doubt. Maybe there were a pile up of expenses that occurred or unexpected bills that affected cash flows. As long as the client is open and transparent about this, you should always be accommodating in these circumstances.

Tip #2. Grace periods are important

As mentioned above, you should try and give the client the benefit of the doubt. It certainly helps if the client is transparent and informs you of any delay in payment, but if they don’t, you should still provide a generous grace period. Just because they haven’t informed you of any delay or missed payment, it doesn’t mean they won’t pay altogether. They could still be going through some situation that’s affecting cash flow, or an array of other reasons. It’s usually worth waiting a few days to collect the payment. If there’s still no word from the client, and the grace period has passed, then you have every right to pull the plug on their service and close the account.

Tip #3. Be personal and human

Dunning communication is tough. It’s basically a form of collections, which generally has a negative connotation towards it. It’s important to make the communication very human and personal, and should usually be sent from an actual person, usually a manager or CEO. Of course, the style and tone of the messaging is purely dependant on the brand and company. If your company’s branding is very “young, hip and cool”, than your dunning messaging probably shouldn’t sound robotic and canned.

What happens at the end of the dunning period?

Once the dunning period comes to an end, you have a choice.

i) To close and terminate the account, or

ii) Keep the account open and further try and collect payment.

The first option is the most simple and cleanest choice. After the last dunning message goes out, and there is still no response from the client, you simply close their account and move on. No time or resources are required, and you simply focus your attention on getting new customers and servicing existing ones.

From my experience, the second option could be very effective. Sometimes the client simply didn’t receive the dunning messages. Maybe they changed their email, their email server went down, or messages were going into spam. More often than not, a simple phone call could save the client from churning.

In other cases, the client was thinking about cancelling, got the dunning emails, and is simply letting their account expire. In these situations, a simple phone call will inform you of this, and give you the opportunity to retain the client. Sometimes, a quick conversation reminding the client about the value of your service is all it takes to retain their business and collect payment.

The second option is definitely more time-consuming and resource-draining. However, depending on the nature of your business, type of customers and available resources, it could be worthwhile exploring.

Depending on the size of the business, a good dunning strategy can retrieve tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per month or more, automatically. The amount retrieved in dunning is usually a fair percentage of a company’s revenue (5-10%). It’s easy for companies to overlook the importance of dunning when it’s on autopilot, but never underestimate how impactful it is to the bottom line!

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For the first six years, we ran our company out of offices. We’ve experienced everything you could out of an office, from expanding into bigger spaces, growing the team, launching products, hitting milestones, etc. For the past two years, we decided to make the drastic switch and ditch the office to become a fully remote company. After comparing the two experiences, I can confidently say that there are clear overall company benefits of working remote. Although everything about working remotely is not positive, the benefits certainly outweigh the drawbacks by a wide margin, in my opinion.

A lot of what you read about working remotely is geared towards the individual’s experiences. There are definitely a lot of personal advantages of working remote, but in this article, I will explore the benefits to the company itself.

Here are 5 of the clear-cut company benefits of working remote

Bigger hiring pool globally

Being a remote company, you’re not restricted to hiring people from a particular vicinity or regional area. Instead, your talent pool opens up globally. You can literally interview candidates for any position, all over the world. I’ve personally screened candidates from every single corner of the globe, which is such an eye-opening experience. What I’ve learned is that there is so much incredible talent out there, and the world is definitely shrinking year by year. Since you can hire globally, it substantially increases your probability of finding high-quality candidates, in comparison to hiring locally.

More diversity = creativity

Currently, our team is comprised of 17 people in eight different countries. As you might imagine, the differences amongst us in culture, language and upbringings, is enormous. However, when you can combine the differences amongst people, and bring them all together, it leads to amazing creativity. The unique insights and experiences that everyone has, is so beneficial to the company, and can lead to some incredible ideas and solutions to better provide value to your clients.

Employee attraction and retention

Including “remote” in a job title is very enticing to many people. Each time I post a new job, I probably get double or triple the amount of candidates applying, simply because it’s a remote position. Most people have depictions of working remotely, as travelling all the time, being on the beach, and working in boutique little coffee shops. Although technically possible, that couldn’t be further from the truth in reality. It definitely takes a certain type of individual to work remotely successfully. It requires someone with defined character traits such as self-motivation, self-drive and determination. Although the vast majority of people who apply to remote jobs are simply not cut-out to work remotely and don’t understand what it takes, the ones who do, are golden. The individuals who understand the benefits will really appreciate the uniqueness of it, and are way more likely to stick around for a long time. Increasing employee retention means that management can utilize their time of other productive activities, rather than hiring and onboarding, which is very time-consuming and resource-draining, especially if you’re bootstrapped.

Less stress = higher productivity

The little benefits such as not having to commute to and from work every day (usually in traffic), alleviates so much personal stress. Saving about 1.5 to 2 hours per day on commuting can do so much good to your personal life. You can use that time on your kids and family, not have to rush on breakfast and dinner, pick up your kids from school, attend your appointments, etc. The list goes on and on. These personal benefits equate to more happiness and less stress in your team’s personal life, and ultimately higher productivity at work. An overall win-win.

Money saving

This is an obvious benefit. Office expenses definitely add up. There are many more expenses aside from the rent itself. You have to consider utilities, maintenance, restocking supplies, furniture, cleaning, etc. These are all added costs the company can save and reinvest into more money- making resources.

Working remotely certainly doesn’t come without its challenges. However, if you’re in the unique position to be able to grow a company remotely, and have figured out what it takes to be successful, the benefits are tremendous.

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Since I started being more active on social media, many people have been asking me “why do you blog and podcast?”. My answer is an important lesson that I think several people can get value from.

First, one of my jobs in running a SaaS company, is developing strategy. A lot of my own strategy and thought-process is done through writing. I’ve been writing for several years now. It helps me absorb my thoughts and understand topics and situations I’m thinking about, a lot better. Personally, I need to write in order to continue my mental and business growth. A blog is also a great way to stay accountable and continue writing. I consider the posts on this blog, as my “business diary”.

I’ve been an avid podcast listener for quite some time. I’ve even joked with friends about recording our conversations in a podcast. Eventually, my itch to start a podcast finally got too much to bare. So, I bought a microphone and started recording my thoughts. Instead of talking about starting a podcast, I just did it. It’s really as simple as that. I didn’t ask for anyone’s approval or opinion, I just did it. That’s where most people fall short. They talk about doing things, and never execute. The only thing stopping people are their own limitations and excuses. Just DO whatever you’re thinking about!

Although my Founder Views podcast is now a fun hobby that started from scratching an itch, it’s what spurred the idea to start a podcast for my company, Web4Realty. After a few months of podcasting on Founder Views, I started thinking of ways to apply podcasting to Web4Realty. So, I started a new podcast called Top Agent, where I interview real estate agents to discuss their successes, tips and marketing strategies. A simple and effective marketing and branding strategy for my company was created because I simply scratched an itch. My point is, you never know what great ideas will come out of simply doing!

I also believe that if you can consistently provide value to an audience, there’s going to be a positive ROI for you at some point. Whether it’s the positive effect of feeding your insights and experiences back into the ecosystem, your own personal and business growth, or even financial rewards- there will be something positive that comes out of providing value to a group people consistently.

Stop talking, and just f* do it.

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I recently attended a live podcast panel discussion in Toronto, hosted by Drift. The main focus on the discussion was on marketing, specifically branding. The topics really resonated with me in my current journey and stage with Web4Realty.

In most cases, startups don’t think about branding in the early days. The early days are all about the grind- selling, gaining traction, building out your team, looking for efficiencies in your processes, and more selling. Assuming you execute on those above items, and your startup makes it out alive after two years (more than 50% of companies will fail in the first two years), your brand will organically begin to take shape in your market, without any real effort or focus on it.

In general, the concept of branding gets thrown around pretty loosely. When you really unpack what branding truly is, it becomes much more valuable and important than most people realize. Nowadays, whatever business you create can easily be copied very quickly. In eight years since we launched Web4Realty, I’ve seen at least a dozen of companies in our space, come and go. With so much open information and resources available, the barrier to entry, especially in technology/internet companies, is extremely low. It gets to the point where the biggest difference-maker for a buyer becomes the brand.

Branding is like the top layer of a cake – the last component needed for a business to consider themselves a real market leader in their space, is brand. The companies who get to that point, where they can really start honing in on their brand, are the ones who can put the stamp on the ground, and officially say, “I’m here, and I’m here to stay”.

Branding also has a multiplier effect that positively impacts several aspects of a business, that you might not even realize.

Influence customer buying decisions

As mentioned above, there’s very little difference when shopping around for competing services. When you strip away the messaging, marketing and brand of competing products, they are usually very similar. In most cases, the company with the stronger brand-presence will win the business. There’s obviously other factors that affect decision making, but branding is a very strong influencer.

Pricing advantages

When a company wins the branding game, they can usually charge more. At this point, those companies are in a different league, and no longer competing on price. Those companies can get away with charging a premium, because they know buyers are willing to pay more due to the brand recognition and trust. Higher prices equates to higher margins, meaning even stronger brand.

Employee attraction and retention

It’s much easier for companies with brand-recognition to attract the best talent. Hiring the best people will further stimulate the growth of your company, which will eventually start compounding your rate of growth, making it harder for the competition to catch up. A company with the best talent, will likely be able to grow faster, which will help enhance the brand, and further solidifying itself as a household name in the market.

Hold up, not too fast…

Knowing when the right time is to really start focusing on brand, is critical. It’s important to nail down the basics in your business, secure the foundation, and ensure your customer journey is near perfect, before you really start putting too much emphasis, time and resources into branding. If you invest heavily on brand too soon, it’s very easy for your brand to backfire and start working against you. The last thing you want is a negative connotation around your brand. This is a detrimental mistake that a lot of companies make that eventually lead to their downfall.

You’ll know when you’re ready to step up your brand game. When that time comes, you better be ready to take the throne.

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There are very few things that can make me lose sleep at night. One of those things are negative reviews. Although negative reviews in our company are very rare, they always sting- really, really bad. Each negative review is even worse than the last. Reading a bad review feels like getting punched in the gut. Negative reviews suck, and they always will.

However, negative reviews are inevitable. As much as you strive to be the best at what you do, and consistently improve the level of service to your clients, you will never be able to make every person happy. No matter what, you will come across a client who simply can’t be satisfied.

Studies show that 85% of shoppers form their buying decisions based on online reviews. Too often, companies don’t take online reviews as seriously as they should. Nowadays, people prefer to trust their friends, peers, colleagues, or even recommendations from people they don’t even know, to form buying decisions. Each review, whether positive or negative, is a huge opportunity to examine what happened, learn from the situation, and continue to improve your processes and service.

When a negative review is written, it’s important to take a step back to try and understand why it happened. There are several reasons why people write negative reviews.

1. The client does not fit the profile for your target customer

Most negative reviews come from clients who expected something other than what they received. In many instances, it seems like the client leaving the bad review is being unreasonable. Although true in a lot of cases, it’s probably because the client simply doesn’t fit your target customer profile and had different expectations. In cases like this, it’s usually no one’s fault, but just an unlucky situation for both parties. This is why it’s important to properly qualify and attract the right clients.

2. Over-promising and under-delivering

Clients get frustrated when you over-promise and underdeliver. It’s much better to be honest and forthright with your clients at all times. They will always prefer you be up-front, rather than saying one thing and doing another.

3. Miscommunication

One of the most common reasons for negative reviews is due to miscommunication. After all, we’re humans, and we’re far from perfect. Sometimes emails get missed, scheduled calls get overlooked, or there is an oversight on a project. These things happen, you just have to be empathetic, apologetic and sincere. In most cases, level-heads will prevail.

When those negative reviews come in (and they will, believe me), you just have to suck it up and deal with them head on. Following these four steps will help you tackle any negative review in the best possible way.

Step 1: Relax

It’s very easy to panic and make quick, rash decisions when a negative review comes in. We know how important online reviews are nowadays, and a negative one can often feel like the sky is falling down. First thing you have to do is relax, breathe, and proceed with a rational, level head.

Step 2: Reach out to the customer

Often times, a quick reach-out to the customer from a manager or CEO can help ease things over. Calling the customer to understand what went wrong, and showing genuine concern, is critical. It’s important to show empathy with the client, and try and understand their perspective. This phone call can be the first step in trying to earn the client’s trust back. Also, depending on how the call goes, you should ask if they can kindly remove the negative review.

Step 3: Reply to the negative review

If you reached out to the client, and they aren’t going to remove the negative review, then at this point you should publicly reply to the review. It’s important to be honest, empathetic and genuine when writing the reply. When you reply to reviews, it shows potential prospects that your company cares about its customers and level of service. It also humanizes your brand. Most people are actually rational, and understand that no one is perfect, and mistakes happen. Believe it or not, a good reply to a bad review can easily neutralize its negative impact.

Step 4: Get to the bottom of what happened

As gut-wrenching as a negative review can be, it’s also a great learning opportunity for your team. You should audit the entire process with the disgruntled client to see what went wrong and how things can be improved moving forward. Make sure you communicate the outcome of your audit with your team, and ensure they understand the importance of maintaining a positive public image online, and the dire consequences of negative reviews on the business.

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A common question I get asked is “what do you do at work every day?”. What is a very simple response for most people, is actually one of the most difficult questions for me to answer. I get asked that question often because we’re a remote company and I work from home, which is a new concept to most people. From an outside perspective, it probably appears like I do nothing all day, and that I’m living the life, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I try and answer the question by processing what my last few days looked like, and I almost always have a tough time mustering up a decent response, because my work days are always different.

Operating a growing business includes a lot of moving parts, involves a lot of unexpectedness, and wearing of multiple hats. Although you’ll certainly have a plan for each day, it’s not too often that those plans follow through in the precise way that you envisioned. This is why organization and discipline are very important traits to have.

I’m responsible for the operations side of the company. Generally, my days consist of focusing on the following broad topics:

General management
Financial
Strategy
The unknown

General management

I like to have my nose to the ground in every department, each and every day. This allows me to continuously look for strengths, weaknesses and opportunities in all areas of the business. A lot of that involves providing support to department managers and team members, as well as offering suggestions when they are needed.

The greatest benefit of having a good general overview of the day-to-day operations, is that it allows me to understand what our customers are saying, what they’re asking for, and ways we can better serve them. Each department’s needs are different, and the expectations from clients are different in each stage of the client-life cycle. Keeping an eye on all of this allows me to shape ideas and better understand which direction the business should be taking in the long-term.

Financial

Given my background in accounting and finance in University, I was naturally inclined to manage the finances of the company. Managing cash-flow is probably one of my most important financial responsibilities. As a bootstrapped company, we had no choice but to be very conservative with our money, especially early on. We got really good at stretching a dollar. Having a conservative financial management style, is what helped grow our business from two kids out of a basement, into 16 full-time team members (and growing), all while making sure the cash flow was positive, and the business was profitable. That’s certainly an achievement I’m very proud of, and an objective I will always strive to uphold no matter what.

As a SaaS company, there are several important high-level metrics that need to be analyzed and kept up-to-date every week/month. Analyzing these SaaS metrics helps ensure the ship is running smoothly and the business is healthy. Metrics also allow you to notice trends which helps understand what areas are performing well, and what areas need to be focused on.

Another financial responsibility includes bookkeeping (thank God for accounting softwares that basically does this for you). It’s very important to have a clean, organized, and up-to-date set of books. The person running the finances should be able to answer almost any financial-related question very easily. A clean set of books also helps make sure your accountant loves you come tax time. I’m often surprised at how unorganized companies are in this department, considering how many great tools there are that make bookkeeping super easy.

Strategy

Most of the company strategy is done through the daily conversations with my partner, Raza and other team members. However, a lot of my own strategy and thought-process is done through writing. For me, writing serves as an outlet to research and thoroughly understand different topics and situations I’m currently going through or thinking about.

Writing helps me absorb my thoughts better, and helps improve my critical thinking abilities. These skills then help several other areas including managing people, decision making, and creativity. Whatever you’re outlet is, it’s important to find it and stick to it. Although I do a lot more writing than what’s posted on this blog, that’s one of the main reasons why I created this website and started a podcast.

The unknown

One of the great (or not so great?) things about being a business owner, is the feeling of the constant unknown. You literally wake up every morning, not really knowing what to expect, what’s about to hit you in the face, or what fire you’re going to have to put out. Whether it’s a string of bugs causing chaos in the support department, apps that your team relies on that go down, or your own server going down, there’s bound to be a curve ball thrown into the mix.

That simply comes with territory of running a company. As a business owner, you have no one to turn to or rely on in unexpected situations that arise. At the end of the day, the CEO is responsible for everything, whether it’s good or bad. It takes toughness, calmness and patience to deal with all the shit that comes your way. You just have to figure out a way to deal with it and continue on.

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When you’re several years deep into your startup and becoming more mature as a company, it’s very easy to lose sight of what got you to where you are – your early clients. The clients you acquire in the first two years of business, are all taking a chance on you. They know you’re a startup and anticipating issues, yet for some reason, they’re giving you their business. They’re investing their time and resources into your service, and hoping you succeed to see a return on their investment.

Those early clients are also more than likely your main advocates. They are the ones referring their colleagues, spreading the word, and constantly rooting for your success. Not to mention, they’re also the ones financing your business (especially if you’re bootstrapped).

As you grow, especially in a high volume SaaS business, efficiency becomes very important, both in internal processes, and how you manage customers. In the early days, it’s more than likely that the CEO was doing sales, customer support, and everything in between. Because of those close and frequent interactions in nearly every part of the customer journey, your early clients felt a special bond and connection with your company.

It especially gets tough to maintain those close relationships, as your company scales. When you’re company is growing, new employees are being added, new departments are being formed, and new processes are being implemented. During periods of growth, the CEO isn’t as hands-on with the day-to-day operations, which means those frequent interactions with clients diminishes. Instead, the CEO is working on higher-level facets of running a company. This is normal and expected.

As a CEO or founder, your intent is never to neglect or make certain clients feel insignificant. It’s important to be empathetic to the fact that your early clients most likely feel like they should be prioritized. When there are new products or features launched, early clients expect to get them first. They expect discounts on products and services, and feel like they should be speaking to the CEO when they call for support. I’m not saying they should get all (or any) of those things, however I’m simply stating you should be empathetic to how they feel.

When you show empathy to their feelings, it allows you to take a step back and evaluate potential solutions. Here are a few simple things you can do to make sure your early clients always feel important:

Create tags in your CRM

Support reps should know they are speaking to an early client. Although the client is not speaking to the CEO, the support rep should acknowledge them and their loyalty to the company, and even go above and beyond when helping them. That will compensate for the fact that they are not speaking directly to the boss, as they’re used to.

Segment your early clients to send more personalized email communications

Think about segmenting your early clients when sending standard communication to your users. Instead of the blanketed emails, make it a bit more personal for your early clients. They should feel important.

Random check-ins

From time to time, the CEO or other team members should check-in, see how things are going, or just say hello. It’s always nice to hear from someone unexpectedly, without a real purpose. Keep them feeling important!

Overall, it’s nice to show genuine appreciation to your early clients, whenever you can. In most cases, they will understand that things aren’t going to be the same as in the beginning, but will be happy for your success.

Your earliest clients gave you the boost to get you to where you are today. Don’t forget about them.

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2018 has definitely been our most active year in terms of hiring, by far.

An important metric to look at as your company scales, is revenue per employee (how much money you make per employee). This is a great indicator to show how efficiently your company is growing.

Total Revenue / # of Employees = Revenue per Employee

A good employee should be an asset to your company. Just like any asset, they should be making you money (or saving you time, which is also money). If your team is growing, and your revenue per employee is also growing, that means your company is scaling efficiently and utilizing resources optimally.

Of course, as with any investment, it could take a while to see any return. Don’t expect to hire a new team member and see revenue per employee increase right away. Ideally, you should see slow and steady increases in revenue per employee.

It’s important to keep in mind that revenue per employee is a broad benchmark for general growth efficiency, and is not really something you can optimize for, as it’s a lagging indicator. It takes a while to see reward from new hires (assets), as growing companies are constantly hiring, downsizing, and reshuffling their workforce.

However, if your team is growing, and your revenue per employee is decreasing, that usually means there’s a problem somewhere and you should reconsider how you’re deploying your resources. If you’re noticing a downward trend in revenue per employee, it might be a good time to audit your operations and see how you can improve certain processes and make things more efficient.

Just wanted to share that quick thought on hiring. Revenue per employee is not really a common metric you come across and try and optimize for, but I do think it’s an important one to at least keep an eye on, as it could open up your lens on other inefficiencies in your company.

Best of luck!

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Throughout the years of managing a growing team, there are a number of observations you start to make and situations that arise that get you thinking about people, in general. When your company‘s headcount starts growing, you naturally start observing character traits, mindset, and psychology of people, among many other things. One of those thoughts is the question of work ethic versus skill. When you’re in a dynamic startup-type environment, there are several ups and downs which can expose the true character in a lot of people.

One of the first things you look for when filling positions to grow your team, is if the person is qualified and has the skills to perform the job well. That goes without saying. Work ethic on the other hand, while very important, is a pretty hard character trait to judge during the hiring process. That involves a lot of intuition and gut. It’s only in turbulent times, where the true character traits of individuals are brought to the forefront.

Now, the question is, who would you rather have on your team to fight through the tough times? Someone with great skills or someone with greater work ethic? The answer may not be so obvious once you start peeling back the layers.

I would much rather have someone screw up a few times, and be 100% committed and dedicated to my company, rather than someone who is better skilled. Don’t get me wrong, someone with great skills can be an amazing asset for your company, especially in the short-term. However, I really question whether an individual with great skills and not-so-good work ethic would be a positive long-term investment.

The individuals that are ready to hit the pavement and give it their all for you, are the ones you want in your corner. Skills can always be taught. Work ethic, on the other hand, is a trait people are born with. You either have it or you don’t. These days, finding people with amazing work ethic is seemingly harder and harder to come by (the reasons for that are probably meant for another post). Whereas, you can always find people with good skills.

The most optimal way to have the best of both, is to invest in the people with the work ethic, and continuously train them to be better skilled. You can’t train work ethic.

Therefore, from my perspective, work ethic trumps skills, any day of the week. Especially when your outlook is long.

Would love to get some discussion on this topic. Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts.

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A topic that has gathered my attention a lot lately, is marketing. Marketing is a much more diverse and complex subject than people realize, and all ties back to understanding human behaviour.

One can argue that humans have changed more in the last 10-15 years than in any other time in history. The simple reason for this change is the invention of the smartphone.

Mobile devices have changed the way people communicate, connect with each other, create relationships, and consume information. A recent study I read shows that the average person spends about 5 hours on their phone per day! And I actually saw other studies that show this number as a lot higher, but I’m using the lower number to be conservative. So, Assuming the average person sleeps for 7 hours, that means that a person will spend nearly 30% of their waking hours on their mobile device! You can bet your mortgage that that, number is almost guaranteed to increase over time.

Today, successful marketers have to really understand human behaviour if they want to be effective. People are constantly consuming content on social media, and brands are continuously vying for people’s attention. As a marketer, a huge challenge is to ensure each piece of content put out is carefully prepared and stands out in a stream of constant information flow.

Another significant obstacle for marketers has been the total dilution of traditionally effective marketing channels such as email, physical mail, and banner ads. As consumers, we’re constantly being bombarded with messages, emails, and ads and we’ve instinctually learned to disregard those type of messages from our minds, and automatically label them as “spam”. That makes it even harder for a marketer’s message to penetrate through all the noise.

These concepts apply to any type of business, whether you’re a SaaS, a mom-and-pop bakery shop, or a non-profit. Having at least a small insight on human behaviour is critical.

Before publishing your next post or releasing your next piece of content, you should ask yourself the following:

What value is this post providing to the person on the other end?

How is this post going to stand out in a non-stop stream of content that people are consuming?

Those who know their audience and can answer the two questions above, are the ones that will be successful at marketing in the 21st century.

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Remote companies and company culture usually don’t go hand in hand. When you think company culture, the thoughts usually consist of an open office environment, daily huddles, a nice lunch area to hang with your co-workers, cool boardrooms, and of course the company ping-pong table.

When we took our company remote, we didn’t really know what to expect. As with most of our business decisions, we usually use our instinct and do what feels right. This decision was no different. Going remote definitely felt right, but we weren’t entirely clear how it would all play out.

Two years into being a fully remote company, and with team members spread across seven countries, I can proudly say that our company’s culture is realer than ever, positive, and much better than it was in a physical office. As surprising as that may seem for a remote company, here are the reasons why:

MORE COMMUNICATION

Yes, that’s right. We communicate with each other much more than we did in the office. Effective communication quickly becomes very important in a remote setup. In an office, it’s very easy to talk about unnecessary randomness (watercooler talk), just because of the close proximity. Although we have a #general slack channel where team members post random stuff and GIF’s, the random talk is much less. Instead, we communicate much more when it matters, and we do so much more efficiently.

TRANSPARENCY

To run a successful remote company, you have to be much more transparent. We use Slack to send off event notifications to team members in every department. This means that a lot of the company’s and team members’ wins and losses are visible to everyone. This is a great thing in developing a family-like culture. Just like any family, we’re there to celebrate wins, and pick each other up during losses. I find it much more difficult to be transparent in an office environment without taking everyone away from their work to attend a pointless meeting.

ALWAYS AVAILABLE

Slack is essentially our virtual office. Each team member has Slack on their mobile device and on their laptop. We’re always available for each other, around the clock. If a team member is putting in some extra work late at night, and sends a Slack message, chances are someone will come online and chime in. Unlike working from a physical office, we’re always available and connected with each other.

TRUST

When working with teammates all over the world, most of which you’ve never even met in person, trust is essential. Trust is the foundation of every remote company. Remote team members are very autonomous and not micro-managed. Work hours can also be pretty flexible in most cases. At the end of the day, it’s all about showing results, and trusting that your team will produce what’s expected from them. Building that deep level of trust allows you to develop bonds with people that get stronger over time. That trust then leads to solid friendships and respect amongst team members that make the unity in your company even tighter.

LIFESTYLE

The greatest benefits in working remote are the lifestyle advantages. Having the flexibility to work from wherever you want, not having to drive in traffic, live in different places, and see your family more often have a lot of positive effects. These perks lead to increased happiness, less stress, and more energy, among a whole list of other benefits. All of this translates into a positive work environment. The more people on your team that share these common attributes, leads to extremely positive vibes and vitality in the workplace.

What I’ve learned managing a growing company, is that culture is everything. When you’re growing your team and adding employees, of course you want to find people who are more than qualified to carry out their job. However, what’s even more important than that, is finding people who are able to integrate seamlessly into your company culture and get along with the rest of the team. Culture and work environment is something I wouldn’t sacrifice for anything or anyone!

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Some people are born with certain skills and intuitions that come naturally. There are no guides, rules, or courses for managing cash flows in a small business. Although there are certain things anyone can do to help with cash flow, the majority of it is through intuition and deep understanding of the business. I also believe it would be very difficult to train someone to manage cash flow successfully.

Below are 10 tips on how to better manage cash flow, in no particular order.

Keep in mind, that these tips are coming from the perspective of a bootstrapped founder, whose company is 100% revenue-financed. A funded company with more cash to burn will most definitely have alternative views on spending.

Go freemium for as long as possible

When starting out, you’re going to need a few necessary apps to manage your business. The good news is that most come in freemium plans. You should be able to get away with freemium versions while your company is still young. Only pay for apps when you can truly see the value and ROI.

Start paying yourself after you make enough revenue to cover your fixed costs

When starting out, there’s a lot of sacrifices you’re going to have to make. One of those is not cutting yourself a paycheck for a while. If you believe in your company strongly enough, this shouldn’t be a problem. Only start paying yourself, when your revenue is able to comfortably cover your fixed costs, and keep some savings in the bank.

Pay monthly instead of annually

Skip the annual subscriptions until you’re more mature. Finance 101 says that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. Unless you can invest your money into something that will make you more money in the future, keep more of it in your pocket rather than someone else’s.

Don’t pay yourself too much

When you’re ready to start paying yourself, don’t get too greedy. Take a modest amount, and make sure your cash reserves continue to grow, month-over-month. Keep your profits in the business, not in your pocket. This is the only way you’ll be able to grow more effectively in the future. This tip is especially important for bootstrapped companies.

Make sure your investments start paying for themselves in 3 months or less

There are going to be times where you have to break away from your frugal habits, and make some investments to grow the business (ie. hiring people). Your new hires should be able to produce enough so they’re paying for themselves in three months or less. You don’t want to be in the negative for too long.

Cut costs wherever possible

The world is shrinking, and there are so many competing apps and quality resources nowadays. If you can get the same level of service elsewhere for a lower cost, do it. Be careful with this though. Sometimes, experience and service are definitely worth paying a premium for.

Pay your bills when they are due. Not any sooner, not any later

Back to Finance 101. A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. There is no need to pay your bills early. Pay them when they are due. Keep your money with you for as long as possible, instead of putting it in someone else’s coffers.

Don’t pay interest

If you can’t pay your credit card balances in full, that means you’re overspending and your business is hemorrhaging cash, which is unsustainable. Buy what you can afford. However, when you’re just starting out, paying minimum balances might not be a bad idea for a little while, just don’t make it a habit.

Don’t try and do too much and over-extend yourself

Be honest with yourself and your team members. It’s very easy to get caught up with optics and image, especially in a materialistic society. Don’t worry about “keeping up with the Joneses”, and don’t care what other people think.

No matter how big you get, stay frugal and simple

This one is self-explanatory. It’s very easy to spend when business is going well. Whenever you’re buying something, always ask yourself if it’s a “need” or a “want”. It’s okay to treat yourself, but keep your spending in the “needs” category.

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Since day one, we’ve always preached that our company’s bread-and-butter was our customer support. That sentiment holds true, nearly eight years later.

The evolution of our company’s support department has been one of the most challenging to execute, and the most rewarding. In a very competitive industry, one of the differentiating factors you can provide your clients is amazing customer service. If it’s relatively easy for clients to move to another provider, going above and beyond and providing that extra personal touch will make clients think twice before churning.

Throughout the years, we’ve tried and tested dozens of support desks, knowledgebases and live chats, in an effort to make our support process more efficient. I’m proud to say, that I think we’ve finally nailed our support process, which has resulted in a consistently near perfect CSAT, hundreds of organic reviews from happy clients on social media, and a steady stream of referrals.

Here are 5 tips that have worked for us to help maintain our near perfect CSAT:

1. Instant first-response times

On average, a client inquiry should be responded to in less than 30 minutes. Whether you have to compensate/reward your team for doing so, or hire more resources, instant responses should be a requisite in your support department. Given the efficiency in communication tools nowadays, there should be no reason why that can’t be achieved. In my opinion, first response times are the most important metric when measuring client satisfaction. It’s not very often that you get a personal response that quickly from a service provider. There’s a certain feeling of comfort when a client gets a real person responding to their inquiry in a matter of minutes. Even if they’re really upset, an instant response almost always helps ease any pain points.

2. When someone calls, make sure the phone is answered

If you have a phone number on your website, you should make sure someone is there to answer the call. The last thing you want is for your client to repeatedly get a voicemail. Whether you have dedicated support staff on the phone, or a call center taking messages, a live person should be on the other end. Like quick first response times, there’s an element of comfort when a client gets a live person on the other end of the line, every single time they call.

3. Only scheduled phone calls for dedicated support

This is a controversial one, where not all clients will be happy with. In fact, we’ve even lost a few clients from implementing this. Dealing with customer support can be a very draining and stressful role at times. Support reps have to constantly be on their toes, multi-tasking, replying to emails, fixing client issues, reporting bugs to development, etc. Now, imagine doing that and then having the phone ring throughout the day and constantly interrupting your flow. This will not only cause physical burnout, but it also means tasks will get piled on, bottlenecked, and never finished. Furthermore, it will lead to many upset clients wondering why their inquiry hasn’t been dealt with.

A solution to this problem is simple. If a client wants to speak to a representative, they simply book a time that’s convenient for them on the support team’s calendar. This helps ensure the support team’s days are structured, organized and way more efficient. This method is also just as efficient for your clients, since they won’t have to hope someone picks up the phone when they call. If not, at least they’ll get an email response in a matter of minutes. If you can set this expectation early on, it’s great system. It’s truly a win-win for everyone involved.

4. Reply when they least expect it

Whether it be through your phone, tablet, or smart watch, we’re literally connected at all times. I’m not saying to work 24 hours a day, however it doesn’t hurt to peak at your inbox from time to time after working hours. When a client receives an email response at 10pm on a weekend, they’re not only going to be shocked, but they’ll probably tell their friends and colleagues about it too. It’s hard to forget when someone overdelivers, especially when it’s least expected.

5. The CEO should reply to emails

A CEO often wears multiple hats. One of those hats should unquestionably be customer support. When a client sees a co-founder or CEO reply to a support enquiry, it tells them that your company truly cares about its clients. It’s not too often, if ever, that a CEO helps with support. Not only will it help your client feel good because they’re getting help from the boss, but it also helps the CEO understand what clients are asking for and how to further improve the business.

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I’m sure everyone knows about the classic 3:1 LTV CAC ratio that all SaaS folks should strive for. Just a reminder, LTV is the lifetime value of a client (the amount of money a client will pay you in their lifetime). CAC is the customer acquisition cost (the amount of money you spend to acquire a new customer). You can read more about these SaaS metrics and more, here.

Let’s use a very simple example to put this ratio into perspective. Take the data below:

—–

Current LTV: $1000, New customers in the month = 50

Monthly Expenses:

Sales & Marketing = $16,650,

Support Costs = $6,000,

Hosting = $3000,

Other Personnel = $3000,

Rent = $2000,

Supplies = $1000,

Total Expenses = $31,650

—–

With this data, your CAC is $333 ($16,650 / 50 = $333). This would give you an approximate LTV CAC ratio of 3:1 ($1000:$333 = 3:1).

From my experience in SaaS, sales and marketing expenses, which are used to calculate CAC, account for about 20-30% of total operating expenses.

If you take into account all other necessary operating costs as per the data above, the LTV to cost ratio would be only 1.58:1 ($1000:633 = 1.58:1). This means that it would cost you $1 for a client to pay you $1.58 in their lifetime.

If you ask me, the benchmark 3:1 LTV CAC ratio is too low, and approaches a fine line between growth and staying afloat, especially if you’re bootstrapped. If your intentions are to run a profitable and sustainable business, the unit economics aren’t too great. That doesn’t leave much buffer room to reinvest in your company, pay yourself, leave cash reserves, pay taxes, etc.

In general, the LTV CAC ratio is very important, as it helps measure your rate of return on your sales and marketing investments. The ratio establishes a fair gauge on how efficient your sales and marketing activities are, and should not be overlooked by any stretch.

I personally like to see bootstrapped SaaS companies with LTV CAC ratio of around 5 or 6 to 1. If you’re only financing source if from your revenue, than you have to operate somewhat conservatively. Having a higher ratio than the benchmark 3:1 is much healthier and sustainable for a bootstrapped company, which will improve your chances for growth in the future.

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The lifeline of nearly any business starts and ends with those who pay your bills – your clients. Unfortunately, most people view client support as an entry-level and basic part of a company process. That sentiment couldn’t be further from the truth.

As a startup founder, having your nose to the ground and listening to your clients, will tell you how your business is doing, foresee where it’s heading, learn what your clients want, and understand how you’re perceived as a company.

Client support does more than just make clients happy. On a macro-level, it does a heck of a lot more:

Revenue generating opportunities
Quick support leads to higher Lifetime Value per Client (LTV)
Building client advocates

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Think about the effort and thought you put into your sales and marketing process. From refining your sales pitch, creating sales material, content marketing, social media, etc. As important as it is to be able to effectively market and sell your product/service to potential clients, it’s equally as important to be able to sell your company to potential new team members.

It’s very tough for a new company to attract and retain quality talent. Unless you’re a big name like Facebook, Google or Amazon, who have no problem getting quality applicants, most companies have to go above and beyond, and do an extraordinary job of selling themselves to compete for that same pool of talent as the big players.

Being able to communicate your company’s story and vision to a potential candidate in an enticing way is critical. And believe me, every startup has a story, you just have to figure out a good way to tell it. Most of the time, the candidate has never heard of you or your company. If they decide to work with you, they’re basically taking a leap of faith and trust in you as the leader.

As with any craft, hiring is a skillset that truly gets better with more practice and time. Just like in sales, where you’re constantly refining your pitch and presentation to make it perfect, you also have to refine your pitch, or “story” when recruiting. Your story must be compelling enough, where that candidate is genuinely excited and enthused to join your team.

Once you’ve sold the story and vision to the candidate and they’ve accepted your offer, the real task begins, which is onboarding the new hire. The first couple of weeks are when new employees are likely to have a change of heart, or fall off , get discouraged, and quit. The last thing you want, is to start the hiring process from scratch again. That will only stall your growth and halt any momentum. That’s especially true if you’re bootstrapped.

Bootstrapped companies, simply don’t have to resources and time to mess around with the hiring process. It has to be calculated and very deliberate. This is why you can’t half-ass onboarding. Starting from the very first day the new hire starts working, their experience has to be positive and structured. If there is any disorganization or unpreparedness during the onboarding process, it will raise serious red flags in the eyes of the new hire, and make them question whether they’ve made the right decision.

Hiring and onboarding are two things that startups often overlook or don’t take seriously. Do not make that mistake. Do not half-ass your hiring and onboarding process!

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If you were looking for some secret sauce to starting a SaaS with no money, I hate to break it to you, but that doesn’t exist. If you aren’t ready to hustle, put in the time and work, make sacrifices, and be fully dedicated, than you should probably take the conventional route and seek funding right away.

We started and grew our SaaS with $0. No angel money, no seed rounds, no money from parents/family, no bank loans. Nothing. Just a few bucks in savings, and good old fashioned revenue financing. Seven years later, thousands of clients attained, dozens of employees hired, and we still haven’t taken a penny from anyone.

How did we pull it off?

Discipline and frugality
No plan B's
Focus on sales and only sales
Keep costs low
Sell your story

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We started our SaaS near the beginning of a tech-craze in 2008-09, where a lot of big companies and apps were popping up that were starting to kill it. These companies included Airbnb, Tumblr, Spotify and Groupon, to name a few.

During these years, I noticed a peculiar trend that was happening. There were several companies who weren’t focusing on making money and being profitable. Instead, their focus was on pitching to investors and securing that seed or venture round. At that time, it was almost as if the only way to validate your business was to get funding. Securing investor funds was considered a huge win in the tech world, and young entrepreneurs were seeing that as a road to riches.

Instead of focusing on matters such as profit margins, keeping costs low, and being cash flow positive, many of these companies were focused on metrics such as runways and burn rates. These companies were so fixated on spending as much money to grow their businesses and trying to secure that next round of funding, where they had no time to work on being a sustainable and profitable business. (BTW- in no way am I putting all funded companies in the same bucket. There are certainly ways to burn cash wisely and still maintain good units of economics in the long-term. Rather, I’m referring to the companies who’ve seeked funding for the wrong reasons).

The only problem with that strategy, is if you’re unable to secure that next round and funds run dry, your business is dead. I’ve personally seen a few of these type of companies die in front of my eyes because investor funds ran out. These companies were building a culture around hiring, marketing spend and hyper-growth, where they couldn’t pivot enough and adjust themselves to focus on sustainability when they ran out of cash.

Call me old school, but I prefer making money and building a sustainable business. In seven years of operating my business, I have not once looked at my runway or burn rates, because I never had to. Since day one, our focus was on profitability and creating a business with longevity. I couldn’t be more proud at the fact our entire business was built on revenue financing, and without a single penny taken from outside sources.

I currently see this culture of burning cash slowly starting to fade. There are more and more companies who are bootstrapping their way to success. Companies such as Basecamp, CB Insights, Baremetrics and ConvertKit, are helping pave the way by making their bootstrapped success stories open and transparent. This openness is helping the SaaS ecosystem for the better, and encouraging young entrepreneurs to do it on their own.

Cash is great – let’s hope this culture of burning it fades.

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It’s very easy to get complacent in any business, especially when things are going smoothly. When you’re getting a nice stable paycheck, business is growing steadily and you’re living a good lifestyle, it’s very easy to take a back seat and get comfortable.

If you’re ever feeling too much of this, you should be very worried. This is when you should snap out of it, and get in serious grind mode.

These are the moments when you have to start thinking about escalating your business, breaking into that next threshold, and setting new goals. Whether it’s breaking a revenue benchmark (ie. going from $1M to $5M), growing your team, or investing in more resources, it’s usually these moments of comfort where you know it’s time to start plotting and executing your next move. Too much comfort is usually a bad thing. It’s those feelings of uncomfort that usually mean you’re trying to move the needle and grow the business.

Business is very competitive and cutthroat. If you aren’t thinking about how to reach the next level, and be the leader in your industry, those next young and hungry entrepreneurs are going to catch you, eat you up and leave you behind.

Never settle and never get comfortable. Think bigger, always.

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I’ve been having quite a few conversations about being a remote company lately, so I thought i’d continue on the topic.

Running a software company certainly has its lifestyle advantages, I must admit. Being able to work from literally anywhere in the world is pretty awesome. Mostly I work from my home office, but sometimes I like to get out and work from a coffee shop. If I’m away or on vacation, all I need is my laptop and an internet connection, and I can be plugged in, with absolutely no impact to the company or any of our team members. So that part, is definitely pretty cool.

In this episode I lay out 4 main benefits of working remote. Number 3 is definitely my favourite! ;)

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One of the most common questions I get is regarding how Web4Realty came to be a remote company. Something that’s so normal from my perspective, is very uncommon from the average person’s viewpoint, which will certainly change over time, as more companies realize the benefits of going remote.

About three years ago, I began to read a lot of content about remote companies like Chargify, Buffer and Zapier. To this day, I’m very thankful that more and more companies are opening up and becoming transparent. I think that transparency has such a positive ROI in the overall business and startup ecosystem. That’s one of the main reasons I started opening up and sharing my experiences.

So, as I started reading and learning from other successful remote companies, we started applying some of their ideas into our business. We started implementing a lot of similar tools and apps that they were using, which made our operations more and more efficient. Slowly but surely, we were setting ourselves up to being a remote company, without even knowing it.

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Bootstrapping is one of my favourite topics to discuss. Probably due to the fact that Web4Realty is 100% bootstrapped and revenue financed, and has been since we launched. That alone is one of my proudest achievements thus far. I have so much respect and admiration for other bootstrapped companies, because I can relate to how difficult it is, and the sacrifices that have to be made.

In my opinion, bootstrapping is one of those terms that get thrown around loosely, and means different things to different people. My definition of bootstrapping has four components:

Starting a company with very little to no initial capital
Giving away no equity in your business
Staying LEAN
Being able to create your own company processes

In this episode, I break down what bootstrapping means to me.

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One thing I’ve learned while managing a growing company, is that hiring the right people isn’t easy. My hiring and interviewing process has evolved quite drastically over the years. I’ve learned that hiring is a true skill that gets better over time and with experience.

In the last 12 months, I've hired 6 team members, so I thought I’d document my hiring process into 10 steps:

Write out your Job Post
Post the Job
Organize and Vet Qualified Applicants
Make Your Initial Contact
Scheduling the First Phone/Skype Conversation
Create a Shortlist
Second Call with Shortlist Applicants
Third Call with the Department Manager
Send a Test/Scenario to Top Candidates
Send the Job Offer!

10 Steps to Making Your Next Hire: http://www.founderviews.com/the-hiring-process-in-10-steps/

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A metric often overlooked, which is extremely important to the health and growth of a SaaS business, is expansion revenue. Most SaaS folks are fixated on the basic top-line metrics such as new business MRR revenue, and MRR revenue churn.

Tucked in between these figures is a very important metric called Expansion Revenue.

There are a lot of tremendous benefits of expansion revenue, which I will list off.

SaaS Metrics for Dummies: http://www.founderviews.com/saas-metrics-for-dummies/

Expansion Revenue: http://www.founderviews.com/dont-sleep-on-expansion-revenue/

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Churn is arguably the single most important metric for the longevity, growth, and profitability of a Saas business. In this episode, I discuss 6 ways you can reduce churn.

Blog: http://www.founderviews.com/how-to-reduce-churn-in-saas/

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I recently consulted a very talented and gifted tech-entrepreneur. This individual is a highly-skilled developer who’s built several successful apps and business. For the longest time, I wrongfully assumed that sales was an innate ability that all entrepreneurs come equipped with. After all, how else would an entrepreneur get their app or business off the ground other than sell and hustle, right?

Blog: http://www.founderviews.com/the-importance-of-sales/

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Founder Views - Conversations that matter to you: Recent Episodes

Kosta Panagoulias