What's up everyone, this is Courtland from ndhackers.com, where I talk to the founders
of profitable internet businesses, and I ask them how they got to where they are now, so
that the rest of us can learn to do the same.
Today I'm talking to Moritz Dausinger, the founder of Mailparcer and Dockparcer.
Moritz has a story that a lot of us can relate to.
He had a full-time career, but on the side, he spent years working on project after project,
without any of them really amounting to a long-term success.
That is, until he finally started Mailparcer, the side project that would allow him to quit
his job and begin a career where he had the freedom to truly work for himself.
In this interview, my goal was to let Moritz do most of the talking and tell his story
from beginning to end.
He did a great job highlighting the most common challenges that frustrate entrepreneurs and
describing exactly how he was able to solve them.
So without further ado, let's hop in.
I'm here with Moritz Dausinger.
Moritz, thanks for joining me.
Hey, how are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah.
I'm glad to have you on the show.
Why don't you give listeners a brief introduction as to your background, the companies that you've
started and where they are today.
Yeah, sure.
So I'm currently a solo founder working from Paris.
And I think my first serious attempts in building online business is like 10 years ago.
Since then, I had a couple of successes, but yeah, definitely failed several times as well.
So my two most recent products and also the most successful ones so far are Mae Parcer
and Doc Parcer.
And Mae Parcer, I launched as a site project and Doc Parcer is online since mid of 2016.
It's funny, I pinged you on Twitter to come onto the podcast and you sent me an email.
But your email was in response to, in fact, a much older email that I had sent you around
this time last year.
It was from when I was launching Indie Hackers.
I actually reached out to you as one of the very first people that I wanted to interview
because I found some information about you and Mae Parcer on Hacker News.
And for those of you listening who don't know what Hacker News is, it's basically a tech
focused online community.
Anyway, you had made some giant posts on Hacker News asking everybody what had become of the
side projects that they'd launched in the Hacker News community.
And you started off by basically sharing your own story of how you would launch Mae Parcer
a few years earlier and now you'd grown it into this big thing where you'd hire some
employees and revenue was increasing.
And the thread was super popular.
I mean, you got like 300 replies to it.
And I saw it when I was doing research to try to find out what idea I wanted to work
on.
And it was one of the inspirations for Indie Hackers itself.
So thanks for that.
Yeah, first of all, I remember that email and I'm super happy to hear that this thread
on Hacker News inspired you to launch Indie Hackers.
You know, I put this post online because it was a day when I tried to clean up a little
bit my workspace and I looked back at all those projects I did over the last years.
And you know, like, at that point, Mae Parcer became already, let's call it a real company,
like a real business with a good income and a team in place.
Yeah, I wanted to, I don't know, just hear a little bit how it went for other people
are, especially on Hacker News, they're mostly developers.
So as a developer myself, I feel very inclined to launch new ideas.
This is really the fun part of my work to sit down, think about new stuff and launching
new ideas.
So obviously over the last years, I launched a couple of projects and each time it was
more like the fun of doing it.
And I think Mae Parcer is one of the few projects I really had, which then really turned into
a business, which by that, I mean, you have other aspects on the than just developing
it developing is one thing, but having a business means much, much more than just developing
a software.
The projects which didn't turn into a real business, I think they were either never meant
to be a real business.
So there were some kind of fun projects, which were just technically challenging, which I
mean, or I wanted to create a business, but there was just this initial small traction
missing which kept me going.
So then, yeah, you're losing interest.
But as you poured so much time in it, you also don't want to just kill it.
So yeah, what's the choice left?
Okay, you put it on autopilot.
Yeah, I talked to a lot of different people who it's just an extreme range of where people
are when they decide to start a new project.
And one extreme you've got people who have stars in their eyes and from day one, they're
thinking about being the next Mark Zuckerberg and starting the next Google or Facebook,
and everything they do from the outset is with that goal in mind.
The other extreme is that you've got tinkerers, which is like what you mentioned, people who
build projects where they just want those projects to exist for their own sake.
And they're not necessarily thinking about how can I turn this into a business and make
sales and keep working on it indefinitely.
What kind of a headspace were you in when you launched mail parser?
So to be completely honest, when I when I started may parser, I had no goal in mind
whatsoever.
Like, I just liked the idea to transfer data and not just text written by humans, transferring
data from A to B by email.
So I liked this idea.
So I thought, okay, let's try what what could I build around it?
While doing that, I discovered that there might actually be a business case, there might
actually be a potential to build a business.
But then still, I mean, back at that time, I had another full time job, I, I was really
not in the mindset of that may parser going to be my next big business.
So I built a very, very minimal prototype, which I launched on Hacker News, it hits
front page, I got a lot of contacts there.
But then still, this didn't this didn't result in any paying customers.
So it was still not a business.
However, I got in contact with the guys of Zapier.
And so Zapier is a platform which allows you to connect several apps together.
And basically, two of the founders told me, look, if you build a product around this,
there can be really a use case.
And there can be a business case for it, because we have a lot of demand for this kind of stuff.
So definitely hearing that from those guys motivated me a lot to to just continue exploring
the idea.
As I said, it was a side project.
And so no real ambition of making it a huge company, I also always thought may parser
is some kind of niche product.
So it would not have the potential to to build, let's say, 30, 40, 50 people team around it,
which is the idea is maybe too small, too niche to support a big company behind it.
Yeah, so I kept just going with it.
And luckily, through Zapier, through the guys of Zapier, I got some leads coming in, I got
some first customers coming in, it was really an amazing feeling to have this first alert
email coming in, telling me that there's paying customers.
So that was like a huge moment.
And I remembered back then, I told my wife that I and I said to her, look, if this software
could bring something like 400 bucks a month, that would be really cool, just for helping
us with the rent and all this kind of stuff.
So still, when I had my first customer, I didn't think that this will be my full time
job and a big success story one day.
Yeah, $400 a month is a very modest goal.
And just to give listeners some context, describe to us exactly what mail parser is.
Yeah, definitely.
So mail parser is a cloud based email processing and workflow automation tool.
So from a technical point of view, you can look at it as a web scraping tool, but for
email.
So it allows you to pull data out of recurring emails, emails, whichever the same kind of
format all the time.
So for example, if you are a real estate agent, or you are car seller, or I don't know, you
have a website with a contact form, chances are high that you're getting the same kind
of email every day is let's say between 10 or 100 per day.
And my customers find themselves copy and pasting this data, which is inside the emails
to a database or CRM system or whatever they were, they want to have this data.
And with mail parser, they can automate the entire task, meaning they automatically forward
the email to mail parser, set up some parsing rules.
And once the data is extracted, it goes straight towards your M system and database on Excel
file or you name it.
Yeah, that's a great idea.
And I talked to a lot of people who have trouble coming up with ideas, I think it's one of
the great bottlenecks to entrepreneurship, just that beginning stage of figuring out
what it is that you want to work on, that people will actually pay for, and that you'll
be motivated to continue with you on the other hand, have launched a ton of projects, including
mail parser and doc parser.
Can you tell us how you came up with the idea for mail parser?
For me, the process where they're coming up with ideas is you stumble on an idea on some
kind of problem space.
And but you don't know yet exactly what you want to do there.
And then you start exploring and then you during this process of exploring, you might
end up with an idea where you and you think this idea could actually be worth it.
But then still then, I think you are at a point where you don't know anything about
what you want to do, you still need to validate if what sounds logic to you is actually a
valuable business.
I mean, I'm a big fan of coming up with brilliant ideas in the shower and all this kind of stuff.
But I think this is just a moment and the whole process of developing ideas is actually
a long process, which is about iterating, trying out, stopping, restarting.
Then one day, I think you will have an idea or you will have a project in mind.
And once you get this initial validation from a paying customer or from somebody who could
become your final user and who tells you, yes, I would pay for that, or I'm paying for
that even better, then this is the moment where I think you actually have something.
Then it's about executing, then it's about going forward and really doing the hard work.
Did you have an idea notebook or a collection of ideas that you were choosing between or
was mail parts are sort of it?
I definitely have always a list of ideas on my computer, but I'm not exploring those ideas
in a structured way most of the time.
I'm just noting them down and to be honest, since maybe one or two years, I didn't open
this text file anymore.
It's just sitting there alone and untouched, huh?
Exactly.
I think a lot of people have similar things going on.
My personal idea notebook will sometimes sit untouched for a year and then sometimes I'll
write in it five times in a week.
When you came up with the idea for mail parser, were you at all worried that there might be
another tool out there that was pretty similar or were you not even looking at the market
or the competition?
Well, I definitely did some research.
I discovered all of the competitors over the course of doing things.
In the beginning, I thought, okay, I'm the only one doing that.
That's weird.
That's a bad sign.
Then I found one or two software products who are doing the same thing, but they were
like old school desktop software for Windows, I don't know, 95, 98.
I thought, okay, there was software like this before, back in the days of Windows 95, 98,
and somehow nobody made this kind of software for the cloud.
I thought there's a real potential to really do more or less the same kind of stuff, but
in a much more modern way, in a much more easy way, better looking, better pricing,
all this kind of stuff.
I was aware of the competition, but I thought I can do it much better, so that motivated
me a lot.
I think you have a great insight there that a lot of people don't develop even after spending
years running a business, and that's that it's not a bad thing to enter a market where
there's competitors.
In fact, it's probably a good thing because that validates the fact that there's actually
a market for what you're selling.
There's actually a problem there that people need solved and are willing to pay for.
The reality is that pretty much every idea has been tried.
Whatever you think of is probably not original, and so if it's worth its salt, it's likely
that there'll be at least a few semi-successful companies already out there trying it.
I think the most common thing is for people to think the exact opposite, that oh, if there's
no competitors, that means I'll be all by myself, and that therefore it'll be easy to
reach customers.
In reality, that's just not the case, and no competitors is a pretty clear sign that
the problem probably doesn't exist.
So what you want to do is enter a market where it's clear that the problem does exist, and
then you differentiate yourself from the existing competitors by building a solution that attacks
the problem from a different angle.
In your case, that was recognizing that all the existing software out there that solved
this problem only appealed to people who wanted a desktop application, and so instead you
built a web application.
Yeah, I actually had the same situation when I launched DocParser, just for giving you
some context.
DocParser is basically based on the same idea of getting data out of an unstructured format,
but it's about PDF documents, so it's more about invoices, purchase orders, all kind
of business documents, and so when I was researching the potential for DocParser, I was seeing
a lot of service-based companies who are offering this kind of stuff for big enterprise customers.
So basically, you're this kind of companies where you land on their website, and they're
talking about what they can do, and there's no demo, there's maybe not even a video.
You cannot create an account, you need to schedule a demo, and you know that there will
be a sales rep responding to you.
So I thought, is there maybe a possibility to make this technology, which is now reserved
for let's say big enterprise customers, make it available for smaller and medium-sized
businesses?
Because I think those small and medium-sized businesses today, they're much more into automating
their workflow, they're using SAP here, they're using other automation platforms to create
their own custom-made workflow automation system.
So I thought that the timing would be actually right to say, okay, this kind of stuff is
solving a problem, which bigger companies have, and they have the money to purchase
this from a consulting company, and it might cost several thousands of dollars.
Maybe there's a possibility to make this kind of technology accessible for smaller companies,
maybe not as powerful, but maybe it will still do 90% of the job, and people will be really
happy to pay, let's say, $29 per month's worth.
Another thing that trips up a lot of early entrepreneurs besides just coming up with
the idea is finding the time and the motivation to start something, and then to keep working
on it and take it to completion.
Unless you are rich, or you've got investors, or some other beneficial financial situation,
you probably have a job, you might have a family, you might have hobbies outside of
entrepreneurship.
What kind of situation were you in when you started building Mailparcer?
And how did you find the time to get the product to the point where you could launch it?
First of all, I think it's a huge advantage that I'm a developer by heart.
It's really what I like doing, so it's some kind of pleasure time for me developing a
new product.
Even the time constraint, so that you can only work at night or on the weekend, is a
curse, but also an opportunity, because it forces you to really boil down your idea to
the, what you call, minimum viable product.
What is the smallest feature set you can offer, which really brings enough value to a customer?
Also in terms of marketing, in terms of all kinds of things you need to do, you need to
limit yourself to the bare minimum in the beginning.
It's really hard to choose what you should do and what you should not do, but by doing
so you, I don't know, you stay focused, I think.
That was, for example, something when I went in full-time on Mailparcer, there were some
moments where I thought, okay, I have so much time now, what should I do, actually?
Should I launch a marketing campaign?
Should I do code outreach emails?
Should I do this and this and this?
It's an awesome feeling, but it was the first time that I was in a situation where I thought,
now I really need to decide what I should do.
Before that, it was always really clear what I should do, but I never had enough time to
do it.
I was just talking to a friend who is working on launching her new startup, and she's having
a lot of prioritization issues.
But it actually doesn't matter, because she has five or six things that need to get done
before launch, and so regardless of the order that she works on them and she has to do every
single one of them before she's ready.
I think it actually gets much harder later on when you get to the situation that you
brought up where your product is out the door and now you can go in one of a hundred directions
and it's not obvious or clear which one is the most beneficial.
Anyway, I'm sure in the early days of Mailparcer, all you really cared about was getting to
the point where you were ready to launch.
What went into that exactly, and why did the launch on Hacker News go so well?
So as I said, I put this show Hacker News post online when the product was really minimal.
The website was embarrassing if I look at it right now.
People started commenting in the spirit of, look, if you build something around emails,
and for example, Excel, those are the tools which are used by so many people out there,
so there has to be some kind of value in it.
And so the discussion continued on Hacker News and it drove a lot of traffic.
I think I had something around 11,000 page views, which I could attribute to this Hacker
News launch.
However, this traffic resulted in zero customers, literally nobody was using it.
However, I got in contact with the guys of Zapier, so I was able to talk with the guys
of Zapier.
They told me that that sounds really interesting, so we continued the discussion from there.
I got in contact with other people.
Did the Zapier guys see your Hacker News post and reach out to you, or did you email them?
They commented on it, and I wrote them an email, saying thanks for the comment and really
interesting.
Maybe we can talk a little bit about that.
Back then, they also told me that they were actually working on their own email parser
or not really working on it, but they had some kind of email parser prototype flying
around.
I think it was Brian who developed that, and they told me they might launch that one day.
I knew that it's an interesting topic for them, and in the end, they actually launched
their own email parser, but we still see a lot of customers coming in through the support
of Zapier, because basically, Mapars is just a much more developed version of the Zapier
email parser.
The Zapier email parser covers a lot of basic cases, but when it gets a little bit more
complex, then this is the moment when you need to use a solution like Mapars.
I think this show Hacker News post didn't result in any business.
It didn't give me long-term sustainable traffic, but it opened a couple of doors, and those
discussions which resulted from this post kept me motivated.
A lot of companies go through the infamous trough of sorrow, where they launch and get
a ton of press and a ton of traffic from that press, but it turns out to only be temporary.
A few days or a few weeks later, their traffic has completely dried up, and they find themselves
scrambling to find out how to get more users in the door.
What did the aftermath of your launch look like with mail parser, and what did you do
to take the Zapier deal, which was only providing a small trickle of users, and snowball that
into a larger number of paying customers down the road?
Yeah, I definitely saw the same thing here.
So there's this huge peak of traffic, and then there's just nothing.
For me, this was not a huge deal, because as I said, it was a pet project.
There was no real ambition there.
I was totally fine with having just a couple of visitors on my website, and I don't know,
maybe two people created an account per day just to try out a little bit, so it was really
low.
Luckily, there were a couple of really targeted leads coming in from the Zapier platform.
That was really, really cool.
I also started slowly creating content, so by doing those two things a little bit on
the site without any time pressure, over a couple of months, it just became more and
more and more, so the content worked really good.
By now, content is for both businesses, mail parser and dog parser, the main acquisition
channel.
With content, I mean really targeted blog posts, speaking to the customers, talking
about the problems our customers might have.
The thing with content is it just takes a long, long time.
Then another huge driver was word of mouth, like people who actually found that useful
what I was building were talking to other people in their network, and it happened quite
often that people told me, yeah, I heard about you from a friend of mine and so on, so that's
definitely a really good sign if you have people referring other people.
Word of mouth is like the holy grail of growth channels.
I found that it tends to work best when you're doing what you mentioned earlier and targeting
a specific niche of customers who tend to hang out and talk to each other, because then
they can actually spread your product and refer to one another.
Did you notice that any particular niche of users was getting the most out of mail parser?
To be honest, it was a long process for me to figure out who my customers really are,
and this is probably because mail parser and dog parser are both what I would call a tool
in the chain of other tools.
They are by definition very broad in the use cases.
We are offering lots of integrations.
Lots of different use cases are shown on the website, so it was a really broad spectrum
of people coming in.
Also, the advantage in the early days when things were really slow, it allowed me to
really double down on customer support and become in really close contact with the few
customers I had.
By talking a lot to them, doing sometimes also calls on the phone and really engaging
with those few users I had, allowed me to really understand much better what they are
actually doing there in their business.
Then another pattern I discovered a little bit later is that while mail parser is actually
used by, say, real estate agents or e-commerce stores or marketing agencies and so on and
so on, the user implementing for it is mostly an IT consultant.
The question now is, is my target customer actually the end user using this or paying
for it to automate his business, or is my target customer, the IT consulting, setting
this up for them?
Those are the insights you just gain when you are on the business for a couple of months
at least, and then slowly you are getting a better picture of your customers.
That's one of the biggest reasons why it's important not to quit early.
Like you said, if you keep working on your business for months or years, you inevitably
talk to a lot of customers and find out more about what's causing them to buy, what kinds
of problems they have that they need solved, that you can solve, what's causing them not
to buy, et cetera, and your chances of digging yourself out of that trough of sorrow are
much higher.
At what point did you decide that, okay, Mailparcher is doing well enough that I can quit my job
and work in this full-time?
Why Croy May Parcer?
I was a consultant for another company, and so I was basically already in the position
that I had my company set up and had an account and all this kind of stuff.
So the switch was basically just saying, I stopped consulting work and I'm going to start
doing full-time May Parcer now.
So the barrier was already much lower, and it was at a point where May Parcer was really,
it was growing month after month after month without much effort to a point where I would
say it was maybe not enough to live from it, but close to it.
And as it was growing linearly during the last months, I thought, okay, the risk is
actually there's no risk in just trying it.
It was the point, basically, when I thought, okay, I cannot ignore that anymore.
It's not a side project anymore.
There's something going on, and I really would like to try how far I can go with it.
Were there any challenges to being an entrepreneur outside of the United States?
When I read articles online and look at advice for entrepreneurs, it all seems to be pretty
US-centric or sometimes even Silicon Valley-centric.
Where were you when you were building Mailparcher?
I'm based in Paris.
I'm originally from Germany, but I moved to France five years ago, and when I started
May Parcer and the business before, by the way, which I started with a French co-founder,
both of them were launched in France.
There's this cliché that France is not an entrepreneur-friendly country, but I have
the feeling this is changing massively at the moment.
So there's a huge wave of young talents who want to start their own company, create a
startup, and the state and the government is actually helping those people a lot.
It's really easy to get some, not really easy, you still need to have what it takes, but
it's easy to get some kind of first credit, which is basically for free, which you can
or cannot pay back from the government.
Then there's also the unemployment insurance, which is also a big help for a lot of people
when they're starting out.
So they get basically over two years, I don't know how much of their salary, but a big percentage
of their previous salary paid over two years, and then during those two years, they can
try to build their company.
So I think starting a project is actually, I don't feel like there are any kind of things
hindering people in France or in Europe in general to start a business.
The problem might be at the later stage where you have, for example, all those really fast-growing
huge startups in the US like Airbnb, Uber, and so on, while in Europe, there are less
of them.
So apparently, there's something going on which makes it more difficult to grow towards
really big stage.
But to be honest, this is not the business I'm in for.
So what I'm doing is more or less like a traditional software company saying, okay, I have one
or two products, and for launching this kind of company, Paris was a great place.
Did you find that you had a lot of support among people in your community, or were you
kind of alone where your friends and family had no idea what you were doing?
I was already working in the startup space for a couple of years, so I had a good network
here in Paris.
I'm still exchanging with a lot of people who are based in Paris, so I think I was lucky
enough to have a good backup in terms of professional network, and for the family, really great
supportive wife, parents also supportive, so I got really lucky there, I think.
I think that's so important.
I talked to so many people who want to work on something, but when they start, nobody
in their immediate vicinity has any idea what they're doing.
It's hard enough as it is to start a business and stay motivated, especially when things
might not be going perfectly according to plan.
But when everybody around you is like, what are you doing, go get a real job, it just
makes it that much harder to stick with it.
That's one of the reasons why it's so appealing to live near some sort of startup hub.
I think that's totally true, and for example, right now I'm working as a sort of founder.
In theory, I could stay at home and working from home, but what I do is I go to a co-working
space for several reasons, just because it's much better to work here for me, I like it
to go out of the house, and I like it to separate geographically where I work and where I'm
having my leisure time.
But one of the big reasons as well, and that's especially true in a big city, that you see
a lot of other people doing basically the same stuff you do, and by seeing that, it
becomes normal.
So if I would be, for example, super isolated and not having anyone to talk about this kind
of stuff, I would probably ask myself, what am I doing there?
Is it really worth it to quit my job, live on a budget for a couple of months, and pushing
it and pushing it?
By seeing other people doing the same kind of stuff, it really helps and it gets normal
in a way.
Yeah, I completely agree.
I live in the middle of San Francisco, and it is crazy motivating to be surrounded by
so many other people who are also working on projects and startups and launching businesses.
I want to get into how mail parser grew to the point where you were able to sell the
business and also what led you to start dock parser.
So why don't we jump in at the point where you would just quit your consulting job to
work on mail parser full time?
What kinds of tactics did you use to grow mail parser?
And even dive into some of the specifics on things you might have tried that didn't work.
When I went full time on mail parser, I think in the first two to three months, I was improving
a lot of stuff in the app because before that, it was a side project and I never had enough
time to make it really good looking and all this kind of stuff.
So I put a little bit of effort first in the product and when I had the feeling, okay,
now it seems to be some kind of in a good shape, then I decided it's time to really
boost the customer acquisition.
But back then, I had really zero ideas about how to actually find more customers.
At the same time, I also felt like I'm really busy all day long with customer support, fixing
bugs, adding new features and so on and so on.
So I thought, okay, now is the time I need to hire, I need to get other people on board.
And so the first step I did was actually getting a customer support teammate.
I got really lucky there, Joshua is an excellent guy and he took so much away from my daily
operations and it freed up so much time for me, which then gave me the time to write a
couple of blog posts, write down some ideas, thinking about what is interesting for my
customers, trying to better understand what would they maybe search for and so on.
A couple of weeks later then, I think it was beginning of 2016, I was able to hire Tom
who helped me with the marketing and growth.
So there again, I got super lucky.
Tom is an ex-senior executive in marketing, but he's right now traveling the world with
his family.
So he was all in and said, that's a great project, I want to work with you together
on that and he basically taught me a lot of stuff like how to approach B2B sales because
this was something I didn't know before.
So we tried a little bit of different things, a little bit of paid acquisition, a little
bit of cold outreach emails.
However, what worked in the end was content on our own website, like on our own blog.
So on the website and on the blog, what we did on the website is lots of, we added a
lot of customer testimonials.
We added a lot of use cases.
So basically, we made sure that whenever a prospect lands on our website, he finds himself
and he knows that May Parse is a good solution for him.
So that was a really crucial part to create a lot of content about use cases, all this
kind of stuff.
And then we created a couple of articles on our blog with a goal to just attract a lot
of traffic from Google.
And basically, we have two types of articles.
One type is very, very specific, talking about exactly the problem our software solves.
And then there's another type of article which is more a little bit related to our topic,
but not really the same thing.
For example, May Parse is about getting data out of emails.
One article which works really good for us is talking about how to automatically forward
emails inside Gmail.
So it's another topic, but the idea is a guy who is interested in automatically forwarding
certain emails in Gmail is probably a guy who has a lot of emails going on.
So maybe he's also interested in our software.
So those are the two type of blog posts which were really good for us in the beginning.
So two questions.
How did you find Thomas and Joshua?
And were you making enough money at the time that you found them to pay for their salaries
out of your profits?
Or did you have to dig into your savings?
So I found both of them on Upwork.
And that's why I think I got really lucky because I think it's really, it's not obvious
to find really good guys on Upwork.
Both of them on Upwork were actually new on the platform.
So they were not what I would call a typical Upwork freelancer who was just doing one project
after the other, after the other, after the other, both of them were pretty new to the
platform and open for all kind of missions, like all kind of arrangements.
So basically I found Joshua there and we had an interview and I knew right away I want
to work with him.
And then I don't know, we had some kind of discussion around how many hours he wants
to work and how many hours I can pay him in the beginning because I was not able to pay
him a full-time position.
I think we saved like 10 hours in the beginning.
This was at a time where maybe may pass or made say 6,000 MRR.
So yeah, it definitely meant that I was paying myself much less because I was paying this
money to an employee.
So it was some kind of bet on the long-term and the same was with Tom when I found Tom,
it was the same thing.
It was some kind of big amount like in terms or in regards to what the software made every
month.
So it was some kind of long-term bet that I thought, okay, if I want to grow and grow
more than I need to cut down there, meaning I'm not paying myself that much.
This is what for me is bootstrapping a business is like you are having restraints around money.
So you need to figure out where is it worth it spending the money.
Exactly.
At what point did you start to see the returns on that investment?
Well with Joshua, I think I saw it right away because he just freed up so much time in the
beginning.
It was like, okay, I hired him for 10 hours.
That means 10 more hours for me, more or less.
Also due to the fact that he was doing support before for also very technical B2B companies.
So he was really up to speed really fast.
And so there I thought, okay, that was a really clever move because now I have much more time.
With Tom, it was the other way around because Tom taught me a lot of stuff and we were brainstorming
around like, where should we go with the marketing?
What could we do?
So it was less obvious in the beginning because it added just a lot of work and as it is always
with marketing, it's very, very difficult to measure.
I mean, with all the tracking tools you have in place, I'm not so sure if especially on
a small scale, if you can really say, okay, this much dollar spent, this much dollar earned.
So with Tom, it was even a much bigger bet, but then a couple of weeks or a couple of
months later, you see, okay, look, there are actually customers coming in, they're converting
through the content which we created.
Then you go into the mindset of saying, okay, that was also a good move.
What was your business model at that point?
Were you just straight up charging customers a monthly fee to use mail parser?
Yeah, exactly.
Mail parser is targeted to, I would say, small business, medium-sized business, but also
some bigger groups.
So the pricing starts with $25 per month, $50 per month up to, I mean, there are customers
paying several hundred dollars per month.
Someone wrote an article a little while back where they went through every interview on
Indie Hackers and they tried to extract a lesson or a bunch of common lessons that they
could pull out of all of the interviews.
By far the number one most oft-repeated lesson was to raise prices.
I think it was found in 19 different interviews.
Did that play at all into how you grew your revenue with mail parser?
I saw that article.
I really, really liked it.
I thought it was a really cool idea.
Definitely did the same, yeah.
I think when I started out, it was like $9 per month or something like that.
I think my biggest costs are support, or when I get a new customer, I need to try to figure
out, is it worth it supporting this guy that much?
Because if he pays me $10 a month and he stays, let's say, six months, so I'm earning $60
with him, but if he writes, say, 10 emails to our support stuff, then it's just a zero
game.
I think it's really important that you try to understand your numbers a little bit and
to say, okay, this kind of product, it's very support intense, very high touch, so actually
we cannot offer it that low.
If you are having a funding and you have the ability to hire lots of people in advance,
all this kind of stuff, then you can do it.
But if you are bootstrapping, I think you need to make it work right from the beginning.
Another one reason why I raise the prices, because I said, the customers I want to have,
the customers where I'm happy with, and the customers which are the most happy are this
kind of customers, and for them paying $25 per month is really a no-brainer.
So raising the prices is not for me just about earning more money, it's just also about positioning
your product inside the market.
Do you think if you could go back to the beginning knowing everything you know now, you would
immediately start charging $25 a month?
Or do you think it was necessary to start with a lower price to start bringing in your
first customers?
I think having low prices in the beginning allows you to get much more leads into the
software.
Also, your software is likely to not be that good because it's very new and you will have
a hard time as a nobody justifying that people should pay you $100 per month.
That's really difficult, I think.
I think especially with B2B SaaS applications, when you are bootstrapping them, I don't know,
your product evolves together with your company, it evolves together with your brand, and everything
evolves together.
And so it's, for me, some kind of natural process to climb up a little bit in the market
and to find your spot in the market where you say, I can totally justify charging $25
per month for this kind of product.
Before that, it would have been probably a ridiculous idea.
And if I would have done it before, people would probably have said, no way, I don't
know who this guy is, I'm not paying him $25 per month.
You eventually ended up growing Mail Parser into a much bigger and more profitable company
and then selling it.
Give us a sense of why you decided to sell Mail Parser and work on Doc Parser and Set,
and also how big Mail Parser was when you decided to sell.
To give you a little bit of background, it was the time when I launched Doc Parser mid
of 2016.
I launched Doc Parser because I had more and more customers asking for document processing,
so I thought it's a good idea to launch a second product and Doc Parser took off a little
bit as well and it was fun developing it, much more challenging than I thought in terms
of technology.
And so I found myself at a point end of 2016 where I had a really good running B2B SaaS,
which was Mail Parser, and a new software which I really wanted to develop much more
and which I liked a lot, a new shiny thing, which was Doc Parser.
And as I'm a product guy, I enjoyed much more developing the new product.
So still, May Parser was really big and I think I hit around 30K of MRR at that time.
And so the decision was to be made, do I hire now more people?
Do I hire a real team around May Parser, making this some kind of bigger operation, meaning
five people or maybe 10 people one day around it, or is there a way for me to continue what
I'm doing that I love doing, building up products, staying in a small team, and I don't know,
find somebody maybe who would take over May Parser.
And so I decided to go into this direction that I thought, okay, May Parser is, in terms
of features, a very stable, very developed product.
The next steps for May Parser are scaling the team around it, scaling operations.
This is not something I would like to do right now, it's also just for personal reasons,
you know, having young children, young child, second kid on the way, and so on and so on.
So I thought, if I could find somebody taking this over, and I can grow and build up the
DocParser product, that would be the perfect scenario for me.
And this is how it turned out in the end.
It's pretty cool to be in the position where you start a company and then start another
company right after that first one succeeds, so to speak.
Can you tell us about the launch of DocParser and whether or not your experience of Mail
Parser made growing and marketing and selling DocParser any easier?
Well, in the end, I think I did the same journey of DocParser, meaning launching very early,
trying to get people into the door, developing the product around the feedback they give
me.
And then I changed the product a lot during the last months, based on this feedback.
And now I'm coming to a point where I say, becomes more stable in terms of features.
I think I found a little bit the product market fit.
Now would be a good time to really put more efforts into marketing.
So I think I did the same journey there.
However, things were much faster, easier to get people into the door.
In the beginning, I was able to do some emails to the MailParser customer base.
I knew already a couple of people putting up the same PR integration was much more easy,
all this kind of stuff.
So it's more or less the same process, but supercharged.
What would you say are some of the biggest lessons that you learned and challenges that
you overcame in growing MailParser and DocParser?
So I think the biggest challenges were in the beginning when you need to juggle around
between, I don't know, developing the product, customer support, bug fixing, and so on and
so on.
And then if you're a developer, it's really easy to completely forget about marketing.
So when you are alone on your product, this is really the time where you have so much
things to do and it's so difficult to decide what to do.
Once you're at the point where you can hire, it gets different.
It's not more easy, but it's different.
It's incredible how big a difference it is if you have good people on the team and I
don't know how much faster you can go when you're working together with good people.
So getting to a point where you can actually hire somebody, that was a big struggle.
Then finding some good, good profiles is also a huge struggle.
I got lucky there and I'm super grateful for this.
Even still, even if you have a team in place, I think the least fun part for me is being
a solo founder, to be honest.
I love covering every aspect of the business.
I like to code.
I like to put my head into marketing a little bit.
I like to do some sales, all this kind of stuff.
I like that, but I think in the next projects, I definitely would go for looking for a co-founder.
I think it's a huge value to bounce some ideas around with somebody who's as much into the
business as you are, because even if you can outsource some tasks and get a team around
you, they are not the founders.
They're not thinking about it 24 hours a day.
They're not getting up in the morning and thinking about the business, going to sleep,
thinking about the business.
So this, I think, is something only the founders do.
Yeah, so that's, I would say, the most challenging things to juggle the resources and come to
a point where you can build a team and then still stay motivated as a solo founder.
It's really cool that you're a serial entrepreneur who built Mail Parser and sold it, and who's
now running Doc Parser, and now you're sitting here talking about moving on to the next thing
already.
What are your goals with Doc Parser, and how will you know when it's time to move on to
the next thing?
So that's an excellent question, and to be honest, I don't have a real answer there ready
for you.
What I know is that with the buyer of Mail Parser, I found somebody who is capable of
growing the product and bringing it to the next level.
It's a small private equity kind of thing in Canada.
They're called Shoreswift Capital, and what they basically do is buying mid-sized SaaS
businesses and they have an awesome team in place and try to put them on the next level.
So with that in mind, I could imagine that I, one day, also transitioned Doc Parser to
their team.
That would be, I think, a great thing to do for me, but this is on a time scale of several
years for me, and so until then, I think my immediate goals would be to develop Doc Parser
maybe to a team size of four to five people, make it really stable in terms of features,
better understand what my customers are, and then make it a more stable business.
And I think there I'm looking at a timeframe of one or two years, maybe three years, and
after that, who knows?
But as I said before, I think for the next project, I would like to join a bigger team
again because that's something I always enjoy doing.
There are a lot of different philosophies around entrepreneurship and how to grow your
companies.
A lot of people swear by Eric Ries and the lean startup, and I've noticed a lot of people
recently putting a lot of stock into near a y'all's book.
I had him on the podcast recently, and he wrote Hooks, how to build habit-forming products.
Are there any schools of thought that particularly appealed to you and helped you build your
companies, or are you more of a person who likes to learn on the job and figure it all
out from your own experiences?
Well, I'm definitely somebody who's learning by doing.
I like to read a lot, and I'm reading a lot online, and I'm blogging articles, all this
kind of stuff, but I think every story is different.
Every startup is different, and stuff which might have worked for other people might work
for you as well, but maybe it doesn't.
What I like to do is always try it out with a minimal effort, not with minimal effort,
but like to try out an idea without over-engineering things too much.
I think this is the school of lean startup a little bit, and I'm definitely doing this
every day when it comes to marketing, when it comes to sales, when it comes to product
development.
I think about where I would like to be, and what I think I can imagine this to be, but
I know it's such a huge effort to do that, so what I'm trying to do is to take the very
first step, and I think done is better than perfect.
It's much more important to get going, test your idea, write a couple of blog posts, see
if you can get some traffic, all this kind of stuff.
I think that would be the school of lean startup, and right now I'm looking into a book which
is called Who, and it's about hiring, because I think that this is still an area where I
need to learn a lot, where I struggled also a lot, like hiring, making it a repeatable
process to hire really good people around you.
I'm looking forward to learning more about that topic.
Awesome.
I think that is great advice, and also a great place to end the episode on.
Can you tell listeners what they can go to find more about you and what you're working
on?
Yeah, sure.
I'm on Twitter, and Dowsinger.
I'm on LinkedIn, just Google my name, and you will find me.
All right, Mortz, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Thank you so much.
It was a pleasure.
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