What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from Indihackers.com, and you're listening to the
Indihackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses,
and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they get to
where they are today? How did they make decisions, both of their companies and in their personal
lives, and what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so
that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own profitable internet
businesses. Today, I'm talking to Dmitry Dragilov. Dmitry, welcome to the show.
Thanks. Good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Good to have you. You are the founder of justreachout.io. It's a company that you run
together with your wife and co-founder of Corey. And together, the two of you have bootstrapped
it to over $30,000 a month in revenue, while also only working about 25 hours a week. So you start
working at 9am and you're done by 2pm only on weekdays. Tell me about that schedule. How
do you make that work?
So I mean, for the last five years, I've been kind of pushing on this whole thing of like,
you know, you only live your life once. And you can spend your long hours every day to
push yourself to do the best you can, right? But essentially, it comes down to like, my
grandfather died a couple of years ago. And I asked him, you know, what do you remember
from your life? What do you what comes to mind, you know? And, you know, years before
his death, you know, he just kept going back to all the times you spent with your family,
your loved ones, and wasn't your career. And I mean, he hasn't had anything ridiculous,
like no crazy acquisitions or whatever, but he hasn't had a decent career. He grew up
in Soviet Union. He was an engineer and, you know, like he's, he's done well for himself,
but he wasn't anything insane. And as I was coming, kind of coming up, I was trying to
figure out like, what do I want to do with life? Like, I have this online business, I
can just go boss to the wall, you know, I can raise funding, I can just be that guy
that's always on working, chat with people. How many times you work a week? And I asked
him, you know, 60 hours a week, somebody's 50 hours a week. Oh, I put in 70 hours a
week. What are you talking about? You know, and I'm like, do I want to be that guy and
you know, have, you know, 1 million a M.R.R. or maybe five 600,000 M.R.R. I don't know,
whatever it is. Or do I want to focus on spending time with my kids who are three and five now.
And then when they don't want to spend time with me when they're in their teenage years,
maybe I do more work. Maybe I start working crazy hours to scale businesses. And now I
just need a nice cushy business. After the acquisition, my previous company, I was like,
you know, I walked away from the acquisition, I didn't get the paycheck. But I decided I'm
going to build a business that's it's good, that gives me cash to live on that I can survive
on. But I'm not gonna, you know, trade this time in my life, my 30s, for some big exit
in 10 years or 15 years, it's just a conscious decision, right? I want to remember this decade
in my life, primarily with the time with my family and friends, family, friends, my kids,
and being the dad that is on equal equal parenting schedule with my wife. And so just made it
a conscious effort to build the business around it. And really, you guess nobody really needs
that much time to do the work they do. It's people spend a ton of time procrastinating.
And so timeboxing my stuff myself into it has helped a lot. And it's just the reality
like I can't after 2pm I pick up my kids. I'm not the guy that's going to go out and
work somewhere from a cafe, like I'm just not going to do it, you know, I'm just going
to be with the kids. So I know at 2pm, that's over. So after this, this podcast recording
pretty much is going to be it. I'm going to go and pick up my daughter. And it's freezing
outside. So we're going to come back home and try and figure something out.
Yeah, that's a principled approach. And I think, you know, you're really prioritizing
creating memories that you're going to cherish. I think memories are underrated. You don't
remember work. I've had years where I really enjoyed working and I worked a ton, but like
what do I remember from those years? It's definitely not the time I was sitting at my
computer writing code, you know, maybe you remember some of the accomplishments and the
milestones, but like the actual work you're putting in is kind of just a means to an end
and you end up forgetting about it.
Yeah, I mean, like some people reminisce like remember when we were just five people, you
were doing this, right? And then remember when we were 10 people and look at us now,
1000 people now big corporation. But the reality is I've studied like all these CEOs are super
successful companies in that book. Clayton Christensen wrote Innovator's Dilemma. He
also wrote a book called How Will You Measure Your Life? And this guy Clayton Christensen
goes to all the most successful CEOs, like, you know, like McKinsey, you know, all these
major, major success, and they were part of his Harvard class. And he's like, horrible,
horrible family lives, right? They're on their third wife, they have seven houses, their
kids don't talk to them, just horrible personal relationships with their family and their
loved ones, their friends, but they're the most successful people in the business world.
And I started noticing that trend last 10 years or so I've been like just consciously
looking at people that are portrayed as successes, right? The tech crunch, you know, like unicorns,
all these people that are high up that were like, Oh, I want to be like him. Just really
poor family life, more very poor relationships with with their kids, a lot of dads that
are like, trying to figure things out when the kids are a little older, just really,
you know, not taking care of themselves properly, they might be like exercising, but not really,
you know, eating right or exercising right all the time, I was like, just got to really
attack this as a job, really, and prioritize things differently.
A lot of businesses have something that makes them intrinsically difficult to run on a tightly
defined schedule where they can just stop working at 2pm, you know, they might be getting
urgent customer support requests, they might have servers that go down in the middle of
the night or security issues that require taking care of and stuff like that. I wonder
if that's the opposite case with your business would just reach out. How are you able to
stop work at 2pm every day? Do you have any urgent crisis type situations that you have
to take care of? Or is it just smooth sailing work stops at 2pm and you're not worried?
No, I know. I'm not like I'm you into any of that, right? It's a SaaS platform that
goes down. We get DDoS attacks, we get tons of customers who are just, you know, we help
people do PR. So somebody signs up and they're like, Oh, I did a search for Utah texting.
I can't find a lot of journalists. Your platform doesn't look like it's really good. They do
three searches, they write a bunch of angry emails, they leave. I have people who sign
up and then they say it's not working at all. It's not the search is broken or whatever.
And it's I mean, it hurts to lose customers. It also hurts when your site is attacked.
We've been hacked. We had our Stripe account, which is a payment processor hacked by people
that changed the bank account inside the Stripe so that the money was going to some other
bank. And yeah, we had our bank compromised too by bank account, like people made cards
like all sorts of crazy stuff like operationally that will shut down the business shut down
money, which keeps the business alive. Our personal bank account has been compromised
too. But yeah, view it as again, I think it's just mindset. A lot of it comes down to mindset
mindset has been since I started working with Dan Martel, I'm part of his mastermind his
SAS Academy. I think that was the biggest thing that he's taught me like he's got so
much other stuff that he teaches but mindset like the way you think about stuff really
determines like your mood what you do everything else. And in my case, like there's priorities
right? Like there's family life and then there's business life. Yeah, I'm worried like if something
bad happens with it. But I don't have like my phone is this crappy iPhone 5s doesn't
even keep charging anymore. Like I have to charge it every four hours or so. I can't
do email on it. There's no email on it. There's no Twitter. There's nothing on it. There's
just like maps on it. And it kind of sucks. But I don't spend any time on my phone. So
I don't connect to my phone. And it's been like six years now. So when I shut down that
laptop, unless I have to go into my office and do it, I'm not gonna like use it to fix
and anything can wait for a day. Like really, if you think about it, it could wait for a
day usually. I mean, I'm in the PR business. So a lot of times like a pitch has to go in
or out or things have to be done a certain way at a certain time. It just wasn't meant
to be I don't know. I just think of it differently. And a lot of people disagree. They're like
Demetri, you're not a real founder. You're not a real, you're not real entrepreneur.
You know, if you think that way, you know, work has to be first, you have to push yourself
to get stuff done and fight through and I'm like, I don't think so. You know, I've been
doing really well, just with this business, right? And and I have, you know, I have my
course that I do really well with I do consulting as well. But I've built a very comfortable
life for myself, just doing this. And in fact, I can probably work less and just keep up
this this lifestyle.
People like the narrative of them struggling against these insurmountable odds of them
suffering like there's no grad student you'll talk to who won't tell you that grad school
is the hardest, most miserable thing ever. And there are very few founders you'll talk
to who won't tell you that, you know, being a founder is just the most terrible, lonely
hard thing ever, because it makes it more meaningful. But you know, at the same time
I talked to people like you who are just cruising. And you're enjoying your life and setting your
priorities very deliberately. And yet you're still a founder. I mean, you can't take away
that title from you just because
Yeah, I found it. I mean, we're not going from 1k to 100k in six months. We don't have
insane growth plans. You know, we want to grow 10% month over month. But you know, we
don't, we don't have any investors pushing us in that way. And I don't care about it
as much as I probably should, compared to my kids and my family, really like spending
time with them. I feel like a lot of founders actually don't want to spend time with their
family. And that's why they escape into their work. Because spending time with their family
is boring. They might need to work more at it. They don't have enough skill sets. Primarily
men who are guys who are families that have toddlers that need to be occupied with different
activities. It's a much more thought provoking endeavor maybe to build a business, right?
versus spending time with your toddler, right? Maybe, you know, if that's your case, then
by all means, I mean, do that. I don't I'm not here to tell people to just spend more
time with your kids or loved ones or whatever. I'm just that's what I do. And I find, I don't
know, it's very liberating and peaceful.
So tell us about your business. It's called just reach out. You mentioned that it's a
PR business. How does it work?
Yeah, it's a software platform helps you pitch journalists without the PR firms. So helps
you get featured in press pitch journalists all on your own. So if it's meant for an indie
hacker type of folks, like people who are one person team, two person team, three person
teams that want to be featured in press and can't afford a PR firm, but can afford 400
bucks a month to figure it out or even 200 bucks a month. That's what usually costs.
And yeah, it's a software platform that searches different asks that journalists have. So specifically,
like, I don't know, if you're an e commerce business, you know, there's tons of journalists
every day that need to speak to an e commerce business. So they're like, Listen, I need
to speak to e commerce business, you search that you find them, you start talking to them,
because they already have an ask, you can just answer it. But we also help you find
podcasts, we can help you that are looking for a guest, we can help you find journalists
specifically who are covering your topic, we can find you can help help you find different
links that are broken and different publications on your domain of expertise. There's different
tools in there, we help you holistically as well, we guide you through the process, we
give you an action plan, we tell you what to do, when to do it. There's a whole bunch
of Academy and lessons and stuff that guides you through a week by week plan. Our team
kind of supports you as you do the PR outreach. It's meant to just disrupt this PR industry
altogether, and help in indie hackers, get press, get featured in press.
PR is something that curiously rarely gets mentioned on this podcast. I talked to a lot
of people who are indie hackers who mention surgeons and optimization, and they talk about
submitting their apps to sites like Product Hunt and Hacker News, and they talk about
cold emailing customers, but they very rarely talk about pitching press. Why do you think
PR is something that indie hackers don't do very much of? And should they be doing more?
Well, I think when we think of a PR, I think everybody thinks of a PR kind of in a wrong
way, right? So like if you're an indie hacker, you got a cool app or something, right? The
first thing you're going to do is just put it up on Reddit or something and just get
some users to use it. That's all you really want. The trouble with that is that the traffic
stops and so you got to keep doing it. So you might go to the Startup Digest newsletter,
or you might, you know, like try and get on this podcast or like try and like kind of
keep it going. It's a lot of work that keeps doing that, right? And that's the level where
an typical indie hacker mindset is at. And then you have other people who have a little
bit more money. So like I got to find a PR consultant PR guru who can just get me into
Forbes, right? Or maybe I can go into like somewhere else. The trouble is that like Forbes
or Reddit or Startup Digest, maybe like a tiny sliver of those people who actually see
your message are the right customers for your app. And like 99.9% of those people are probably
not the right ones. So you'll spend tons of time trying to secure all these placements.
And then you'll only convert like tiny, tiny percentage of those. And while you can put
those logos and even if you get into like TechCrunch or whatever, you put those logos
on your site, you'll still convert very tiny percentage of those places and you won't get
customers that are repeat customers. And so PR firms typically feed on this and they think
saying, well, keep paying us money. We'll keep doing this for you, right? You can kind
of yourself say, well, maybe I can just keep doing Reddit. Maybe I can hire some kind of
like Fiverr or somebody to kind of just do this for me. The trouble is that it's not
consistent traffic. And so what I like to teach people to do, and that's what a lot
of our customers have done, like pipe drive, HubSpot, a lot of the bigger companies who
use our platform or who I've consulted, they marry SEO and NPR. So essentially, when you
do your PR activities, you're not promoting the product that you're building the app.
That's not what you wanted to promote. You want to promote the content that you create
and it's one piece of content. That's all just one piece of content. You're not doing
two, three, five, you have one piece of content on your blog that you want to promote. And
that's going to be the main piece of content. And you'll be doing PR around it. And the
way you come up with that content takes a little bit of time and effort. And our software
guides you through it. We have like a whole wizard in there that helps you create like
the link baby type of content and stuff. But it's a process. But I'd say when you think
of PR, think of a long term approach that consistently gives you traffic from Google
or some other way. So it doesn't have to be that you rank number one for that term. It
could be that every single result that's ranking for your term has you as number one, right?
So like the best photography CRM software, if you see that there's seven articles there,
it's very hard for you to outrank those seven articles, right? But you can try and negotiate
with them to try and put yourself into each one of those articles. And now without lifting
a finger, you know, you did lift one finger maybe, but you just inserted yourself in the
top seven places on Google for the top CRM photography software, just by, you know, negotiating
with them, you can say, listen, I'll help you rank, I'll link to you, I'll promote you,
add me in there. So thinking about PR in that sense, where it's like consistent traffic
flowing to you, and very specific traffic that will convert was usually the best way
to think about PR. So I think just indie hackers think about it wrong, like they think, Oh,
I just got to keep doing this tech crunch or Reddit thing, or, you know, like, just
doesn't use that white combinator thing or whatever, it just doesn't really work all
that's in the best way, you know, like the ROI isn't there.
So I'm trying to wrap my mind around how all this works. Let's say I wanted to do PR for
indie hackers, which I don't do and never really have done. And I wanted to use just
reach out, what would that process look like? Like, where would I start? And where would
I end up? So the first thing I'd say is you use our tool called press opportunities. That's
to that's a tool that kind of finds journalists asks, or it's like, essentially, you're going
to put in entrepreneur into that topic. And we're going to show you all these journalists
like Forbes or Wall Street Journal, or wherever they are at, there could be some smaller blog
blogs. But it's information week. And it's like, we're looking for entrepreneurs to contribute
to our article for, you know, 2020 trends in investing, whatever, if you qualify, please
respond. So you'll respond to those. And you'll start getting some people saying, Oh, this
is great. You know, Coraline, I'd love for to have you on, you know, we'd love to kind
of get a quote from you. So you'll get a few quotes here and there. And then you you're
going to start thinking, all right, well, I'm getting some quotes here, getting a little
bit of traffic, but what is it that I really have, that is gonna just push the no be amazing.
And what am I amazing at that is gonna just stir things up on the web, right? So it could
be a study piece of data insights that you might publish, it might be some type of like
serving of all the people you've interviewed and figuring out kind of the main failures
of indie hackers and kind of what they need to overcome them, whatever it may be, it could
be some type of study. And that study usually looks like, you know, some type of a page
on your site. So I'm like, I'm looking at one right now before this call, their customer
of ours. They're a law firm, right? Very boring industry. But what they did is they did a
study of states with strictest texting while driving laws. So essentially, they they rated
all the states in US by the how strict they are in terms of finding texting while driving.
Right. And so now they're pitching every single state local news, Oregon, Utah, Illinois, Wisconsin,
saying like Oregon, you're the strictest one because you're $1,000 per find Utah, you're
you made it into our study. And so they're getting coverage in all these like local states.
That's just an example of a piece of data that's interesting to lots of different publications.
But essentially, what you'll be using is you'll be using our action builder and our strategy
builder to help you figure out what your story will be and our team before you start reaching
out. And then you're going to start testing things, you're not going to run the study,
you're going to test things. So you might come up with like the biggest failures of
entrepreneurs that are bootstrapping, bootstrapping entrepreneurs, and you're going to come up
with say three, you're not actually going to run the study or anything, you just come
up with this idea. And you're going to use our engine to find journalists who are covering
this topic, and you're going to pitch it to them and say, hey, I have this data and the
study that I've done. Are you all interested in seeing more of it? Once you get people
responding to that, then you start running your study. If you don't get anybody responding
to it at all, then you switch up your pitch, then you switch it to the next one. The next
one for you might be, oh, you know, I had the founder of GMass on my podcast, and he
shared this insane insight about how the Google OAuth process works. And you expose this Google's
Gmail API issue, maybe that'll be an angle. So you take that and you Google, you put into
our term, you know, into search terms and just reach out, Gmail API, and you find everybody
who's covering Gmail API, and you say, hey, start pitching them. Hey, I saw you covered
Gmail API. I just interviewed the, developed a GMass founder who's working with Gmail API,
and they have a big issue with it. So you're always looking at that intersection between
what you got, what you have that's amazing, and what are people covering, right? So our
engine kind of helps you discover, we have this discovery engine that helps you discover
those journalists on different topics. But it's your job to figure out what that topic
might be. And this is where our wizard, our software kind of works with you. And we also
work with you over email or recalls to try and like point you in the right direction.
I love stuff like this, because a lot of people won't do things that they want to do just
because it seems too hard. Like they won't take a step if they don't know what the first
step is, because it's just complex in their minds. They're going to have to do a bunch
of work, they're going to have to read a bunch of articles, read a bunch of books just to
figure out what the first step is. And so if you can create some software that makes
something complex, easier, or more approachable, that really teaches people how to do something,
then you end up inspiring people to do a thing that a lot of people wouldn't do previous.
Like for example, I will consider doing PR because of JustReachOut, whereas beforehand,
I just wasn't on my list of things to spend time investigating. How did you come up with
the idea to build software that would do this?
Well, it was just a problem. Like it's always an issue for everybody. Like yourself right
now, we're talking about this, right? Like anybody who's listening to this right now.
I mean, if you happen to listen to this point in the interview, you're probably like, well,
I kind of have this thing. Like I want to get publicity for myself, right? And I kind
of don't have money to like, I don't have $10,000 a month to pay a retainer to a PR
firm, right? Or $7,000 a month. Like it seems crazy to me, right? As a bootstrapping entrepreneur,
even if I have money, right? It's a lot of money. And so I'd say this was the main kind
of drive for it because I kept consulting people with this, right? I kept like doing
this for people, right? And I was like, I can only consult so many people. So I created
a course called PR that converts and I launched it to my list and I made a lot of money with
it, like more than I ever thought I could make. And I thought, wow, like if I can make
money selling a course to my blog readers, maybe I should build a tool to help them actually
execute what I'm telling them to do because a course just tells you what to do. It doesn't
actually follow through and make sure that you execute, you're selling videos, right?
And a Slack channel. So I had some software engineering expertise, so I started building
it myself and just this need to really help people. And you know, the first version was
just on paper. I just drew it out on paper and I started convincing people to pay me
a little bit of money to develop it. And I asked for feedback. That was the biggest thing
that I've done that was probably the biggest push for myself, right? I asked for feedback.
People gave me feedback. I incorporated that feedback into the sketch, gave it back to
them and did that over and over again to rope them in as my customers. That was my main
way to get my first customers in the door before I started building it. Then once I
had my five people that were in it, they were like, yes, I'll give you 10 bucks to build
it. And I was like, OK, I have five customers, give me 10 bucks and tons of feedback on this
thing. I'm going to actually try and build something. But you know, by the time I launched
it, it wasn't even working that well. And I charged $99 a month. So it was kind of like
a steep price point for someone that wasn't working. It was just a search engine on Twitter.
So you could have just searched Twitter yourself and pitched those people over Twitter. But
I was like, mine is going to be different. It's going to be awesome. It's going to have
all these features.
How different was your initial mock up and sketch you were showing these people that
they were committing to pay for versus what you actually ended up launching? That was
just this Twitter search engine.
It was kind of different. I mean, I had some product expertise because I work at a design
firm, but I'm not a product guy. I'm a PR communications SEO guy. I write really well.
That's my strong suits, I know, right now, at these things. SEO, PR. Product is something
that I know a bit about. I've helped build products always from a marketing standpoint,
but user experience is something I was trained in a little bit.
And so market research, customer development, figuring out product market fit, pricing were
all completely new to me. And I was by myself, so I had to really figure that out. I'd say
drastically different. I mean, we went, we decided to do a Twitter search engine, which
we don't even do Twitter anymore. We thought that people would just tweet at journalists.
And we went completely out of route. We ended up building an engine that scans journalists
asks, so meaning like help a reporter out, journal request, profnet, source bottle, tons
of these different newsletters.
And that was the initial version, really, because we found that people didn't know what
to tweet at journalists when you just give them lists of journalists, right? And these
are people that needed to be trained. So the only way to train them to learn how to do
PR outreach or talk to journalists was to show them asks from journalists daily. And
if you see asks from journalists, you get to the point where you're like, okay, I kind
of get the idea here of the things they ask about. They ask about 2020 trends. They asked
about expert opinion on marketing. They asked about, you know, biggest frauds of the year,
you know, data points, things that are more interesting to the general audience, and not
I'd like to see the best app that can do CRM for photographers, right, like or something
like that. So people get trained to what to pitch. So the original version, and then we
started adding lots of different features.
I think that's super smart. And a lot of people who are listening don't know about these newsletters
that you mentioned. So can you explain, for example, what is what is helpful reporter
out the reporter out the lunch by Peter Shankman, acquired by decision, it's a newsletter, it's
a free newsletter comes out daily, journalists put in their asks, and it gets sent out to
everybody who's on the newsletter. It's really big, you know, tons of people on the newsletter.
And it's very simple, like the idea you just you opt in, you checkbox what your expertise
are. And you get these asks from journalists, there's tons of them in there. So it's very
hard to search through it. But you can essentially just look through all the queries per day,
and you might get seven of these emails a day. And there might be 100 in there per per
day or some, I don't know, it's pretty insane. But the amount of asks that some of these
journalists submit. And it's just one newsletter, right? There's also spot a guest, that's a
podcast one, where podcast hosts need somebody to interview specifically, like, I need e commerce
entrepreneur with 100k MRR or something like that. So it's like, very specific, then, you
know, there's tons of there's a hashtag called journal request on Twitter. It's only dedicated
to this. So it's like, if a journalist needs somebody to talk to, that's what they use
that hashtag with their question. So there's so many of these. So I we index all of them
let you search and buy keywords, you don't have to subscribe to all of them and go through
the details.
That's pretty cool. And you mentioned that you're not a product guy, you're not the one
coding all this stuff. You're more of a PR person or SEO expert and a writer and a marketer.
How do you as somebody who's not technical, get a product like this built, I can search
through all these different newsletters. And how long did it take you to do that?
It took forever, man. A good friend of mine, at the time when I was starting to think about
developing this was between jobs. So it's funny, like my wife and I crashed node conf
in Ireland, in this castle, they had node conf and in the, they always have it in this
like crazy castle on an island, right? Like 2014, like I was not, like I haven't been
coding since 2007, seven years behind, I hadn't really code much. I needed the technical guy
to build my initial sketch. And I was sitting around with a friend of mine who actually
said like, you should come and just crash it with me. Like he was a developer, we didn't
know what we were doing, but we're just like, sure, we'll go for a ride. Like we'll just
go to Ireland, hang out. So we crashed the conference, we showed up without tickets and
we just let in. And we're hanging out with our friend. And we met this other guy who
was his friend. And we were like, they were like, what are you doing here? Like, we're
actually like marketing people thinking about building this software company. And we don't,
we kind of want to find like engineers maybe to work with. And we just, we're fresh off
like I was fresh off that acquisition by Google, which I walked away from. So it wasn't like
a very sexy story. It was like, Dimitri helped build from zero to 40 million page views,
got acquired by Google, but Dimitri didn't join Google, didn't get any money. I was like,
what does Dimitri thinking? Like, what are you doing? What do you like? Like, are you
insane? So we kind of like that last part, we kind of kept it on the demo, like talking
to people, because you don't know the people. And so anyway, we met like some some engineers
and anyway, my friend and his friend were like, we'll help you out. Right. And so we
created this like Google Doc with like 30 3030 split. And they're gonna we're all gonna
just be founders. Right. And that just went like horribly wrong. Like basically, one of
the guys didn't do any work. The other guy did work and was pissed at the guy who wasn't
doing any work, the engineer and wanted to get him out of the 3030 split on this Google
Doc. And it wasn't even a project like we weren't earning any money or anything. But
it got into this like weird fight over equity. And I was like, guys, it's a stupid Google
Doc. Like we don't even have a product. Like what are you fighting about? We just need
to like build the MVP. So eventually the other guy left and we wrote this Google Doc and
there was just a lot of drama. And meanwhile, this guy was like, you know what startups
are not really for me, I want to make a real job. So he went in before the crypto craze
joined one of the exchanges, the crypto exchanges. And so once he got a full time job, like I
hardly got any help from him. And I was like, dude, like I can't keep building. I was trying
to hire like people from Ukraine, Pakistan, it was just not working out. I was like, I
need developers and I need them. I need some help. And then so eventually he left I hired
some part time developers contractors, then I started charging a bunch of money people
prepaid for it or paid for it and it wasn't working. So I use that money to try and hire
some more developers. It was just like a crazy journey, dude. But eventually I found developers
that I can trust and for the last three years or so, three plus years now, we've had knock
on what good good developers helping helping out but it was and the product stuff I've
been leading and I've messed it up so many times, just building stuff that customers
request and I don't know, like I was like, a bunch of people requested this thing, I
think it will be useful. Let's just build it. And I've hired again, in design firms
from Belarus to design stuff for me and launch it. And yeah, read a lot of books, kind of
learn things on the fly. I have advisors now that guide me on stuff. We have a process
on deciding which features to add and the roadmap.
So are you working your 25 hour workweek even in the early days? Or is that more of a recent
development?
No, I think this has been like last three years or so. No, two, no, maybe two years
more. Like, I think the first year, 2014, 2015, I was still more like 40 hours. 2016,
I was that's when my second was born. And that's where I started April. So like after
April, like May, June, 2016. So I started doing the 25 hour thing, more or less pushing
towards it like it didn't just happen overnight. First, it was like 30 hours, maybe 35 hours.
And the 25 hours sometimes 30, but usually more like 25.
How expensive was it to work with all these different developers and these agencies and
design shops in the early days when just reach out wasn't really making very much money?
Oh, well, at first, my first few developers were I just gave them equity, I was like,
I'll just give you and I didn't know how to do that properly either. So I was like a third
of the company, a quarter of the company. They were like, all right, whatever. It doesn't
matter, right? But it starts mattering once you start making money. And later on, we pretty
much I mean, I didn't do a salary or anything for myself. So I just took all the money that
we ever earned, and just paid them. So I would, the game would be like, I'll try and pre sell
basically like an airline ticket, pre sell a bunch of future development for the features
and say, Listen, pay now and you'll be able to use it for x amount of months down the
road. And I'll bake my services into it. That's what I used to do for like forever now is
just I'll bake PR services into it, I'll help you do PR. And so they'll pay money, I'll
do PR for them, I'll take that money, and I'll fund development. That has been, you
know, like a game I've been playing for a little while just to keep things afloat. And
you know, I think we became a pure sass company, I think early this year, like, I mean, up
until early this year, we haven't been a true pure sass company, they've always had components
of services baked into it. And we started, you know, transitioning to pure pure sass
this early this year.
I like that strategy so much. Because when you're providing a service, if you're an expert
at PR or SEO or marketing or something, and people just pay you for your service, you
get a lot of money upfront, like you don't need to spend six months coding something
in order to sell a service, you can sell it immediately, and then do what you did and
use that to fund development, and design and other sorts of work. Whereas if you just have
a pure sass play, and you're charging, even if you're charging a couple hundred dollars
a month, it can take many years to build up to the point where you can afford a salary
for yourself, where you can afford to pay any employees or contractors. And so I like
that you sort of bootstrapped yourself by not saying that you're going to be limited
to pure sass, and that you actually start with a course and then services and then eventually
became a sass business.
Yeah, I think a lot of people should use services. There's a lot of people saying it's not a
good way to start a sass company, you got services in there, it's too muddy, you can't
get services out of it. Usually, I think it's a great way to start because you can supplement
your development and just earn money, and then get it to a point where you think you're
ready and then launch your pure sass. And meanwhile, you've built a company, and service
offering might change, pricing might change, some customers might leave, perceived value
might change or whatever, but it's still the same company. So I can say, Jessica Child
has been around for five years. We've been doing services for a good portion of that,
but we've been building a software product for all five years. And it's gotten backlinks
and publicity and people come to the site for five years. And PR has been associated
with it for five years. So it's a good way to do it. I think if you're listening to this,
think about it.
So let's talk numbers for a second. In 2015, you made $15,000 in revenue. In 2016, you
made $70,000 in revenue from Just Reach Out. And in 2017, you had a huge jump up to $300,000
in revenue. What happened in 2017 that helped your revenue jump so much?
We started, we did something kind of crazy. We did the AppSumo. AppSumo is a newsletter
that goes out to people seeking deals. It's kind of like Groupon for apps, created by
Noah Kagan. And it's basically a million plus people on the email list who are used to buying
stuff cheap, and they'll just buy anything because it's a great deal. It was not, I mean,
we made a lot of money that year. And it was not for us for this business, but it was not
the most money. But it was not the right kind of customers. A lot of those customers I ended
up paying to get rid of. I actually paid them to leave my platform. It did put us on the
map. So it did help there. Like after that, we just started getting a lot more real companies
contacting us, right? Just a lot of people heard of us after that. But the types of people
who signed on that deal, I'd say more than half of them, maybe even three quarters of
them were just not a fit for us. And I've heard that feedback from many people. I feel
like AppSumo usually is this newsletter. It's good for selling courses, maybe assets like
PDFs, things like that, where you're not using a tool for anything, right? Because these
people are not very sophisticated. They don't have anything interesting to say a lot of
times. And for them to do PR or use a tool, it's a big ask, you know? And it's really
geared towards lifetime deals for free kind of thing. But it didn't help us kind of put
us on the map. But yeah, that was the big push. And then we, I started doing a lot more
SEO. I started hitting these keywords like PR outreach. I was ranking number one or PR,
different type of PR, like media pitch, cold email, those kinds of keywords. And that started
driving new leads that were good leads.
Have you ever used any PR techniques to grow your own business? Just reach out.
I was, no, I actually have been. I've helped a lot of other PR companies do the same. Presley,
their customer hours, just a lot of different PR firms, PR companies that are good that,
you know, what they do, they just don't do it well for themselves. I've used the same
technique for us for all most of these years. Like that year I started pushing hard on it.
But my technique is very specific. It's like find a keyword like PR outreach, I want to
be number one, write the baddest piece of content there is that kills pretty much all
my competition. And then all my PR is geared towards promoting that piece of content. So
I'm trying to get guest posts there. I'm trying to get a podcast interview here. And so all
these interviews, all these posts out there talking about me or what I do, always link
back to one piece of content PR outreach, how to do PR outreach or media pitch or PR
hacks. And those are like, that's my approach. And so I get to rank number one for marketing
communication strategy, I'm ranked number one for media relations strategy right now.
And so once I get there, that's it, I do another keyword and another keyword. But it's very
simple keyword research, creating the content in my blog, and then reaching out to all these
people to try and cover me to get links to that piece of content. That's how I've done
pretty much all my PR and I've used just reach out for it, because I use it to find people
to pitch to be on their show or find people to pitch to write for them or something like
that.
So for people who aren't familiar with SEO and how it works, if you have a piece of content
and a lot of reputable sources link to it, Google treats that content as more important,
so to show up higher in the search rankings. And so by doing PR and driving it all to these
articles that you're writing, you're essentially telling Google, hey, this is a really important
article and it helps you get to number one. How much of your strategy is because you want
to be number one on Google and how much of it is because you want just the direct traffic
that comes from having these news organizations and press organizations write about you?
I want to be number one on Google. That's priority of the whole thing. It's changed
a lot as it has changed so much. So these days, the quantity of links doesn't necessarily
correlate to rankings anymore. The types of links, though, doesn't even help as much.
These days, it's more like clickability on these links. So if those links are actually
getting clicks, then they value and they actually push your rankings up. And it's really just
overall traffic and engagement on that piece of content. So is it being shared directly
off offline? Is it being sent in email, for example, or chat? Is it the time on site on
that piece of content really high? All these different metrics are dominating the ranking
behavior these days. But yeah, I'd say for me, number one is just ranking on Google.
I don't really care about the little bursts of traffic I get if I get mentioned somewhere.
It's really making sure that I have some of these links pointing and these links start
getting clicks. And I don't focus on the links as much as people focus. You talk to any SEO
person, they're like, oh, link building, we got to build links. I don't focus on links
as much. I usually focus on the quality of the content. I focus on sharing the content
properly, promoting it, that type of thing. And then links as a secondary type of effort.
What if I'm an indie hacker who's trying to figure out if PR is right for me? You mentioned
that you did this AppSumo deal and you got a ton of customers. That's how you're able
to make $300,000 in 2017. But a lot of them weren't particularly right for you. Their
companies didn't need to be doing PR. PR is something you should only be doing if you're
trying to win the SEO game. Are there other reasons to do it?
No, I think PR, you don't need to go into SEO. I guess you're always complex. Like anybody
listening to this, like it's just a lot of work and this is not where you want to start.
I think what you should start with is figuring out who are your customer and where are they
hanging out? Like what podcast are they listening to? Is it offline? Is it a meetup? Maybe it's
a blog. Maybe it's some kind of forum, a Slack channel. Maybe there's like a very popular
Slack community, like online geniuses, or I don't know, maybe wherever they're there
to hang out. And then how do you target that audience? How do you go after them? And that's
where your PR starts from. Basically, don't go lights over Broadway, PR. Lights over Broadway
is I want to be in Wall Street Journal. Don't start there. Start with where are my customers
hanging out? And then how can I get in front of them? Should I do a guest post? Should
I do an interview? Should I offer a webinar? Should I do something to try and get those
customers to see my message for that publication? Because that publication, that blog, that
community, that podcast already has your audience. You just need to figure out the ones that
have like 80% of your audience. 80% of their listeners are your target market. And then
you go after them. And you build relationships with them and you do PR to promote yourself.
And then when you see those little bursts of traffic and they actually convert, then
you're like, okay, I think I've got something here. I can continue doing that, but I can
also marry that with my SEO stuff. Maybe I can work on my SEO game and keep doing this
thing. So take it in stages. Try and find a podcast that has 1,000 listeners a month
or maybe 500 listeners a month. That is in your industry, in your domain of expertise.
And try to get yourself on there and see if you get five new email subscribers after that
podcast goes live. That could be a little step in the right direction in the PR world.
And then get somebody who has 2,000 listeners a month and maybe you'll get 10 new email
subscribers on your website. So one step at a time that way to kind of get going. Oh yeah,
that's where I would start. PR would help with anything. It's just targeting the right
people. PR can be joint ventures with a blog or something. That could also be PR. So don't
think of PR as featured on CNN or Wall Street Journal. It's like getting on Indie Hacker's
podcast. This could be your PR initiative or something like that.
Yeah, there's a lot of advice to start small with the scope of your product, but also it
makes sense to do what you're saying and start small with your promotional efforts and your
PR and your outreach. You mentioned that the first step is to basically figure out where
your audience lives, figure out where to hang out and congregate online. How did you do
that with Just Reach Out and how can other founders do the same thing for their businesses?
I start my PR with interviewing my customers, really interviewing them and being like, dude,
where do you hang out? What kind of stuff do you read? Send me your best blogs, best
books. What kind of information are you interested in? And I learn about what they do. I have
tagging so I know when people sign up, I can see where they come from so I can get an idea.
But essentially, when I think back to talking with them, I always have a customer persona.
I know what they're like. I know that they're not communication professionals. They're not
PR consultants. They're not PR firms. They don't typically have a job, but they're a
large corporation. All my customers are kind of like your audience. They're indie hackers.
They're hacker type of folks. They got 10 people on their team, five people. They're
hacking away. They have amazing businesses and they want to scale them. They're doing
at least 3K spend on marketing. They have a content marketer on team. I know who they
might be and so I literally just researched the best content marketing blogs. That's
the type of stuff that my customers would be interested in, content marketing. I'll
see who's very popular in the content marketing space and then I'll figure things out. I might
figure out a conference to go speak at and figure out, is this the right kind of crowd
or meetup or something like that where I don't speak, I just show up. If I get to the right
kind of crowd, I'm like, all right, I think I met the right kind of group. This group
is called content marketing gurus. I'm like, okay, well, maybe I'll go after content marketers
specifically and see how that works because a lot of my customers are content marketers
already. That's kind of like the process I go through before I do any PR, before I do
any outreach, any of that. That's usually the case when I try and find somebody to do
any kind of PR. Then the next step is figuring out what to pitch and doing all that stuff
and outreach and stuff.
We are reaching the end of our time, which sucks because I have so many things I want
to ask you. How do you turn a course into a product and there's so much more about what
kind of content is actually compelling that you should be promoting through PR. I'll have
to have you on again at some point, Demetri, if you're up for it.
I'm curious about what's driving you today. You have gotten your business to the point
where it's generating $30,000 a month. In the last couple years, you've really ramped
down on your working hours, working super light hours and taking it easy and spending
time with your family. What gets you up every day to work on? Just reach out.
When I think about it, it's like my entire career since that day when I showed up at
my software engineering job and said, I don't want to work anymore, has always been communications.
That's been my thing. I've wanted to help people build relationships with whoever they
want, whether it's like Bill Gates, Ashton Kutcher, who I've gotten responses from, Winkled
Glass Twins, Tim Ferriss, Matt Mullen, founder of WordPress, some of the biggest folks in
the industry I've gotten responses from. Whoever needs to build relationships with high profile
people or low profile, anybody else, that's been my mission, my vision, just helping people
build relationships to further their businesses. I love doing it. It's exciting and I love
just sending those emails out or sending those messages out and getting responses back and
teaching people how to do it and seeing success that comes from it. I think that's the main
kind of vision. I don't want people to give money to PR firms. That's another thing that's
pushing me. Every day, I know that there's tons of PR firms who close crazy deals and
give tens of thousands of dollars. I just don't want that to keep happening. I want
people to take PR in their own hands, think about it differently, and pitch journalists
and build relationships on their own. If I can inspire five people today, maybe three
people today, maybe even one person to do so, I think it's been a good day because the
less people outsource PR, the better, right? It's for everybody, right? That keeps me going
every day professionally and running this business. Even if this business gets sold
tomorrow, I'll probably still run my course. I'll probably still run my blog. I'll probably
still help people do the same. I just won't have a software company. I feel like it's
my life's mission to try and help people do this on their own. I've been able to do it
myself. I believe strongly that anybody who is dedicated enough can do it themselves too.
What's your advice for an aspiring indie hacker who's just getting started and who doesn't
know yet what they want to work on or what their personal mission is?
Dig deep into your passion. What motivates you in the past? Look through all the different
situations you've been part of professionally, personally, and try and think what got you
to a point where you just felt so good about it. You felt excited about something, right?
Try to translate that into a mission statement or a vision statement, Google mission statement,
Google vision statement to figure out what your purpose might be with life. It's an interesting
exercise to do, but it's just you need to know what your purpose in life is or your
vision or mission, like one of those three, and the others will come around. If you don't
have anything, just get experience by working with other people that you look up to, right?
You're always a product of the two or three people that are your best friends or people
you interact with, not your best friends, but people that you're interacting with all
the time. So getting into a company of people who do know what they're doing and are very
passionate about what they're doing, and then you can figure out things by working with
them or even conversing with them, just working on something.
That's great advice. It's easier said than done to surround yourself with the kind of
people who will push you and inspire you to do the sorts of things that you want to do.
But it's so valuable if you can find a way to put yourself in that situation.
Dimitri, thank you so much for coming on the show. Can you tell listeners where they can
go to learn more about what you're up to with JustReachOut?
JustReachOut.io is my platform, and then terminally prolific.com is my blog, my personal blog.
All right, thanks so much. Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, I'd appreciate it if
you took a minute to let Dimitri know. You can just go to ndhackers.com slash podcast,
find the episode and leave a comment. I'm sure Dimitri will see it there. Also, every
Monday I send an email with my thoughts about the latest episode of the podcast. I talk
about what went into making that episode, my relationship with a guest, and my takeaways
and conclusions from some of the things we discussed. So if you're interested in getting
that email, you can sign up at ndhackers.com slash podcast. Thanks so much for listening
and I will see you next week.
Bye.