What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com and you're listening to
the IndieHackers 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 at their companies and in their
personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here is always
so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own successful
businesses.
Today, I'm talking to Mark Firstain, the CEO of a company called Recapped. How's it
going, Mark? Welcome to the show.
It's going well. Thank you for having me.
Thanks for coming on.
Of course.
I first met you almost exactly a year ago. I think it was last March at the first IndieHackers
meetup that we ever had in San Francisco. And I think you were the one who suggested
the location that we all meet up at Southern Pacific Brewing Company. Do you remember that?
Yeah, I do. I can't believe it's already been a year. I love that brewing place. It's perfect
for meetups.
We still have meetups there every now and then.
Nice.
The last time I talked to you was just a few weeks ago. And you were so hyped about your
company, man. You had just broken through some sort of wall. I'd never heard you that
excited to talk about Recapped. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what's gotten
you excited in recent days?
Yeah, absolutely. I'm really hesitant on saying we found product market fit because there's
20 different definitions out there. And for some people, that means we have 20 million
customers begging to give us money, which isn't the case.
But I'd say we are very close there to actually figuring out exactly what people want. And
for me, that's really been the biggest challenge for the last six months. Really, I guess the
past year. We had really identified the core market that we were going after, the problems
we were solving, and really started working on that messaging and getting it to a point
where it's actually really clear.
So now when I tell people what we do, now all of a sudden they're not giving us this
confused look. Now the answer more often than not is, that's really cool. Give me your business
card. Let's schedule a time. And that's what really has been getting me excited.
Well, this is why I'm excited to have you on the show, Mark. I talked to so many people
on here who are building these huge companies. They're doing millions or tens of millions
in revenue. They have dozens or hundreds of employees. And they don't quite remember what
it was like to first have that transition where people's eyes no longer glazed over
when they would tell them what they're working on or how it was supposed to solve their problems.
You are at the point now, Mark, where I would say that you've struggled a lot, and you've
learned a lot, but you haven't made it so far that you don't remember this early pain.
Would you say that's an accurate portrayal of where you're at?
Absolutely. And I'm excited for one where we have millions of revenue and dozens of
employees. But right now, I think this is the really fun stuff. Where I'm in the, I'm
in the pits, I'm on the phone calls, I'm helping close our key customers. Yeah, I mean, everything
is breaking every day. And that's like for me, that gets me really excited because otherwise
I'm just going to be bored and not as productive as I should be.
So give us a sense of where you are in terms of revenue, if you share that, or employees,
customers, etc.
Yeah, absolutely. So we have four employees now. We have a couple thousand in monthly
revenue coming in. And we have all of a sudden done about 1500 customers. But a gross majority
of those came in from like a lifetime deal that we did through a partnership with AppSumo.
Okay, so let's go back to the beginning. Not the beginning of Recapped, but even before
that. When do you think it was that you were first inspired to do your own thing, to work
on your own projects?
Yeah, good question. I mean, I think this is from the early days, right? So I think
this is something that's always been really a part of my identity. For example, back when
I was even in middle school, my dad got us a CD burner. And we were one of the first
ones in the neighborhood. And so every week, I actually would burn a mix of songs and sell
them for like $5. So I would have these like Mark mixes. And that was like just an early
hustle for me to start making money. And I mean, I've been doing stuff like that all
through high school, all through college. So I think very early on, I knew I wanted
to do my own business. I just didn't know what it was.
Would you say other people in your life would have described you as like an entrepreneur
in the making? Or did you sort of project that you were on some other path?
Yeah, great question. So I think I fought it for a large portion of my life. In college,
for example, everyone kept telling me to go into sales. And like most people, when you
think of sales, or when I thought of sales, I pictured this like greasy, slick back hair.
You know, someone that's trying to sell your snake oil. And for me, that's not what I wanted
to associate myself with. But actually, when I ended up getting my first sales job, I realized
how right everybody was.
So I think it's something that everyone described me as, but I didn't identify with it for a
very long time.
One of the cool things about going into sales is that I think it really illustrates the
fact that everyone is a business, even if you're an employee. There are a lot of jobs
where you just sort of get compensated on just a normal salary. But as a salesperson,
you're getting commission. And so you're incentivized to go out and do the thing that
you're supposed to do. And I think it's much closer to the realization of being an entrepreneur
than most other jobs.
Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny, I mean, there's so many different parallels between
sales and other aspects, like sales and dating. I mean, it's pretty much the same thing, right?
Like you have, I mean, everything is sales. And there's a couple great books on this that
if you can sell, you can make so many other parts of your life be more successful.
So when did you start your very first business?
Yeah, so my very first, I guess, official business was actually when I was working still
in sales at Citrix. I was a sales manager at the time. And I'd always been, I mean,
I'm a huge nerd. So I've always been playing video games. And I had this idea for a mobile
app with some of my friends. And so we created this company called TriHard Games, just as
kind of a joke, because we were a bunch of TriHards. And we created this mobile game,
which ended up being a huge flop. But it was probably the best year of my life in terms
of like pure fun. Because, you know, after coming home from work, every day, like six
o'clock, we would still work on it for two or three hours every night. And every Saturday
and Sunday for about 12 hours. And not once did it feel like work, which to me was kind
of the realization when I realized that my skill set and what I like to do falls very
much in taking something from zero to one, rather than from one to 10, for example. And
that's what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
I know a lot of people who work in sales. I don't know a lot of people who work in sales
and have the belief that they can just up and start a video game company. What gave
you the sense that this was even possible?
Yeah, I think anybody that knows me knows that I'm like, incredibly optimistic, like
almost to a fault for sure. I'd say it's one of my biggest strengths and weaknesses. Like
I overestimate, or I guess underestimate a lot of things. And I'm just like, yeah, how
hard could it be? And it almost always comes back and bites me in the ass. But I still
enjoy it because when I thought about it, I was like, oh, this app will take us one
month to make, and then we're going to make $3 million off of it, because it's going to
be great, right? Like what other alternative is there? It took about a year and a half.
We made $4,000. But still, I think that's really what it comes down to. It's just like,
I'm so optimistic. Ignorantly so. About most things, actually.
I think that optimism is pretty common with founders, with creative types who actually
start things. And I think it's because of the fact that it leads to this kind of self-delusion.
I've been in the same place where it's like, I'm going to start something new. And it's
going to be this huge thing in this short period of time. And I think if you don't believe
that, it's harder to take the first step. But if you do believe that, you take that
first step, and then you're committed. It's hard to quit. So you have to keep going.
Yeah, for sure. And then your ego starts playing into it. And you're like, well, I've already
told all my friends that I'm doing this. So now I have to keep doing it. Yeah, like for
me, one of my biggest inspirations, and this is probably going to get a lot of flack is
like Kanye West, who is the poster child for self-belief, right? And this ignorance that
comes with it. And I think that's kind of been one of the things that kind of helped
me channel that.
So walk me through the process of starting a video game company, especially as someone
who's working a full-time sales job. What's the first thing you guys did?
Yeah, so I'm one of those people that I have my notes section on my phone. I probably have
a new business idea at least once a week. And so I have this huge list of hundreds of
ideas. And I was sitting there playing, I think it was Tetris on my phone one day. And
I was like, it would be really cool if Tetris did this instead. So immediately, my first
natural instinct is to write it down and start drawing it out. So I took my iPad at the time
and I sketched out what the app should actually look like.
So then I kind of like put that away, about a week later, came back to it, kept adding
to it. And I just found myself really drawn to this idea. And I guess really the game
was, you have these different dots that are dropping from the screen. And there are multiple
colors. And you have to connect them or connect the same color once before they hit the bottom
of the screen. So kind of like Fruit Ninja meets Tetris, very simple idea. But I get
really competitive. And for me, it's this little repetitive tasks that get me going.
Immediately, I walked into my roommate's room at the time, who was also my best friend,
like 18 years, told him about this idea. And he's like, all right, I'm on board because
he got pumped off of my enthusiasm for it.
Then we realized that's great. We're these two guys who are both in sales. We don't know
shit about coding. So we're like, okay, well, we need to figure that part out. Luckily,
one of my best friends also was a developer at IBM at the time, actually. So we got him
on the project. He brought on his other two friends. Next thing you know, there's six
of us in my living room eating pizza and drinking Mountain Dew every day of the week.
So what's your role here? Are you lead game designer? Are you sketching out how the game
is going to work? Are you putting your sales abilities to work and trying to land some
sort of deals?
Yeah. In hindsight, I don't know why anyone actually works with me. I literally was just
like every month we would change focus and try and do something differently. And it's
because I would try a new game and be like, would it be really great if we could do this
instead? And looking back on it, working with me was probably just the biggest pain in the
ass.
Yeah, so I was sketching ideas. I was designing the game, I guess. I was the creative director
at the time, but with no real training in it and zero execution skills. I think really
it was just the pure enthusiasm. And we had nothing better to do. At the end of the day
it was really fun. And I think that's what kept us striving.
So you're not working on this game today, which means that you eventually stopped working
on it. How did that come to pass?
Yeah, so the project that was supposed to take a month and get us a couple million dollars
was about a year and a half. We finally released it. I still think actually if I were to go
back and do a third version of it, it could be really successful. And that's still on
my agenda to do later down the road.
So we released it. It actually did get top 10 action games on the Apple Store for about
three or four weeks. So we got a ton of different downloads. But what we realized is we are
these hardcore gamers who are playing World of Warcraft and are in these serious raiding
guilds at the time and literally hardcore gamers. And we were trying to make this game
for the casual market, the mom that's sitting in a grocery store in line playing a game.
And those two do not line up. And so one thing is, A, we didn't understand our market, and
B, we didn't play to our strengths. So if we had actually made a competitive game for
competitive people or a casual game for casual people, I think we would have seen a lot of
success. And those were, I'd say probably some of my biggest learnings from doing that
is you really just have to understand who your market is.
For example, if you're 45 and you don't use social media, you have no business making
a social media startup. Leave that to the 18-year-olds that are in college that are
using social media every day. Focus on what you know best. And for us, that was a very
heavy lesson to learn.
This is where the downsides of the wild entrepreneurial optimism come into play. Because yeah, it
gets you started. It gets you to take that first step, that first leap and start a company
where most people will be afraid to, but you're so confident that you do it. But then it might
cloud your judgment and stop you from asking some of the tough questions about whether
or not your business idea is actually a good one.
Yeah, absolutely. And for me, I think that's one of the things that later on in my other
projects, when I would look for a co-founder or someone to work with, I knew I needed someone
that would be more factual and more, I guess, let's say, down to earth, where when I have
these crazy optimistic things, they tell me, okay, that's great, Mark. I love it. But let's
take a step back. Let's focus on the details. How are you actually going to do this? Or
what about this one factor that you'd even think about? And I think having that kind
of like generating balance can be really, really powerful.
What are some of the things you guys did right when you were working on this video game company?
Yeah, good question. So I think the amount of downloads and the success that we had in
the App Store, all of it came from word of mouth. So in some aspect, the game was enjoyable.
And at the end of the day, we had fun with it. And I think a testament to that is after
working on it on a year and a half, everyone on the group still actually played it, which
I think that's really rare, because after a year and a half, the last thing you want
to do is work on something or play something that you've actually been working on.
And I think that one of the things is we did actually make it enjoyable, we made it fun.
And ultimately, I mean, that's the end goal for video games, and I guess really most entertainment
in general. And I think that was our biggest success.
I want to move on and talk about your current business, Recapped. But you mentioned that
you're a hardcore gamer, and that you played a lot of World of Warcraft with your friends
back in the day. And I've only had one other guest on the podcast who played World of Warcraft
that's Patrick McKenzie, aka patio 11. And we talked about it for a little bit. So I
want to talk about it with you as well, because I also played a ton of World of Warcraft back
in the day. In fact, Channing, my twin brother who runs
anti hackers with me, was my co guildmaster. And it's funny, you just start playing this
game and you pour a lot of time into it. And eventually at the highest levels, it would
get super competitive. And before you knew it, like Channing and I had this tiny guild
of like 10 people, and we kept recruiting and growing. And eventually we had 200 people
and 40 of them would sign on every night to do raids. And we appointed officers to sort
of lead their units. And we hired a developer to build out our website and our forums. And
it's crazy, because you're just a kid playing this game. And you don't realize it, like
the things you're doing are kind of the same things that people running businesses are
doing.
Yeah, it's so funny. Actually, I think in my first sales interview, after college when
they asked me like if I had any leadership experience, jokingly, I told them that I had
experienced leading a World of Warcraft, like guild. And clearly the person interviewing
me had no idea what video games were. But I mean, I think you hit on such a good point
in that the lessons you learn there can be applied to a lot of different things, right?
At the end of the day, there's a strict schedule that we adhere to. And granted, we were in
high school and college. Every Tuesday and Thursday at 7 p.m. Eastern, we're on there.
We're ready. We're good to go. And you have 40 people that you're playing with. And having
that kind of teamwork and having that specialization, that can be applied to anything, right? Whether
you're in a marketing role, or you're doing sales, or you're the co-founder. You have
to work with other people. And so you have communication, you have discipline, you have...
And then really, I think that just the competitiveness. For us, when we were playing, each of these
servers would have rankings of guilds. And everyone was competing for that number one
spot. And for me, that's really what drove me. I didn't give a shit about accomplishing
something. I just wanted to be better than someone else.
I just wanted to win.
I just wanted to win. I hate losing. Winning is all right. It's cool. But losing, nothing
infuriates me more in the world than losing. I was playing ping pong against someone the
other day. And they're like, oh, don't let me win because you're trying to win my business.
I put the pal down. I looked at him and I said, no, you don't know me. I will never
lose on purpose. And I think for me, that was really the biggest driver.
Yeah, I remember doing what essentially amounted to PR every month, so that we could show how
good we were and recruit better players than the other guilds on our server.
Absolutely.
Which is so much, man. There's a culture thing, too, where as the guild leader, you always
just wanted your team to do cool things. But you would start attracting these players who
were just in it for the loot. And you had to deal with that somehow. There's the fact
that the team you're leading is 100% remote. And I think at Recap, you also have a remote
team. Is that right?
It is, yeah.
World of Warcraft. It's a bunch of kids all over the world. And you got to somehow get
them to coordinate and learn these things and work together. So I wonder how much predictive
power there is behind somebody running a World of Warcraft guild and later on starting some
sort of tech company.
Yeah, that's so funny. I didn't even think about the remote workforce.
Yeah, man. This is 14, 15 years ago, too, which is crazy to think about. Anyway, enough
about video games. You eventually shuttered your video game company after working on it
for a year and a half. What was it like making that decision?
Yeah, I mean, for me, so this is actually something that I ultimately want to come back
to. And I think once we see the success that I want to see with Recap, my next passion
project is going to be launching another indie kind of video game company. And I see myself
doing that for a very long time, just because that is so integral to my childhood and what
I value and really just a creative outlet for me.
So after we released it, we worked on another app. But by that time, I had moved to California
to help lead up some sales teams out there. And it was really difficult. Not being in
the same room kind of lost its magic. So ultimately, we ended up just winding it down. But again,
since it was only just for fun, the day it stopped being fun is when we decided we can
all step away from this. While we had such a great team that we were working on it, at
the end of the day, we also had jobs that were paying us a lot more money than this
ever was. And so it wasn't really a hard decision. And in fact, we're all still really good friends.
And we always joke about and send memes to each other about something like Dot Drop,
which is our first game that we released.
Would you describe yourself as a future-focused person? When you say you quit and you didn't
really have any regrets and that you guys were just ready to go, were you excited about
new adventures in the future?
Oh, always. Again, I think going back to my ever-optimism is one thing I'm working on
right now actually is meditating and working on the present because of how much of a future-focused
person I am. I want to run and I want to fly before I can crawl usually.
What were you excited about after winding down your gaming company?
Yeah, so I had just actually landed in my first real sales leadership position in San
Francisco at App Academy, which is actually a coding boot camp, kind of similar to Lambda
School when you had Austin Allred on. And so I was now actually kind of stepping into
the big leagues. I was director of sales. I was 27 at the time. I wanted to be taken
seriously. So it fell very much in line with shutting down for once, stopping to focus
on any side projects. And it made a lot of sense at that point to really just put my
head down and really focus on being the best sales leader I could be instead of maybe saying
80% or 90% in this cushy role that I had before that.
So when you first went into this video game company, you were boosted by but also plagued
by excessive optimism. Was that the case as a sales leader? Do you feel like your optimism
drove the way that you approached the shop?
I think so. And I think ultimately that's one of the reasons that I was actually hired
is I saw a lot of different avenues. And I really do believe that coding is like modern
day magic. You have an idea and all of a sudden you go and you create it. To me, as someone
that's been, quote unquote, learning the code for the last five years unsuccessfully, that's
like one of the coolest skill sets to have.
And the value that you can create or the life change that you can create just by learning
how to code really, really stood out to me. And it was something that I really resonated
with. And for me, I saw these 10 different avenues that we could go down. And selling
something that you believe in, I ultimately think is the easiest job in the world. And
it's unfair how much you can make doing that just because it feels so fun. You're already
going to be talking about this and now someone wants to pay you a lot of money to do it.
That's the ultimate win.
How much is sales a matter of having this enthusiasm, optimism? How much is it having
the right tactics and the right know-how? Because most of us have no sales experience.
Most of the founders I talk to have no sales experience. What do they need to learn besides
to just be jazzed about what they're building?
Yeah, it's a really good question. I think ultimately, and I was going to do a course
on this. It's like selling for founders. Just because I do think of sales almost as a framework
if we compare it to engineering. A lot of people will look at sales and think it's this
mysterious black box. It's like, oh, you have to be natural at it.
I really disagree with that because I think almost anyone could be pretty decent at it.
There are methodologies and frameworks that you can employ and actually get pretty good
results.
Here's the thing. Even if you have the best sales tactics and you're not doing it organically
and authentically, I think you're going to get bad results. I think the reverse is not
true. If you are actually passionate about something and believe in what you're doing
and believe that your solution or your product is going to make someone else's life better,
then that will win out even if you don't have the sales tactics.
And then ultimately, I think the other aspect of it is sales is a numbers game. And the
harder you work, the more likely you are to succeed. So even if you have the worst tactics
and some enthusiasm, if you just work your ass off and put in twice the effort that someone
else does, you're probably going to be successful to some extent.
A lot of this aligns with advice on what kind of company you should be building as a founder.
People say to follow your passions and work on what you like. And maybe that's not sufficient,
but it should be necessary because if you work on something that you really don't like,
how are you going to sell it to anybody else, like you just pointed out?
Like you said with sales being a numbers game, that means you have to get out of the building
and talk to people. And as a founder, I think it's very easy to just sort of shut yourself
up in your room, especially if you're a programmer to just code for 12 months at a time, not
talk to anybody. And the numbers at that point are zero. How many people have you talked
to? How many people have you sold to? How many people have you gotten feedback from?
Absolutely nobody.
No, absolutely. But in some aspect, that's the easier option because you're not being
vulnerable and you're not getting rejection. Because rejection sucks. And the worst thing
out there is having this great idea and then you go and talk to 10 people and they all
shit on it. And now all of a sudden you're like, oh, well, maybe this idea was stupid.
And that's a lot harder, I think, than actually just sitting in your room for the next 12
months and working on something by yourself.
Yeah, arguably the thing that you need the most as a founder in the early days is rejection.
You need people to tell you why they're not going to buy the thing that you're building
so you can find the people who will buy it or so you can make it better. And it's so
easy to do the opposite and just convince yourself that no, what you actually need to
do is just work for three or four more months. And then people love what you're building
and then you won't get rejected. But in actuality, if you do that, you're just setting yourself
up for the ultimate rejection.
Exactly. I think that's a really easy trap to fall in tune. I mean, I've been there myself.
So obviously you do not stay at App Academy forever because today you are full-time on
your own business recapped. When did the idea first enter your mind that you might want
to start another startup?
So one of the reasons... So I was actually... When I first started my sales career, I was
in North Carolina in Raleigh working at this great company called Citrix. Pretty big conglomerate.
But ultimately, I knew at the end of the day that when I first started working there, I
would end up in Silicon Valley in some aspect. Growing up, this was seen as the mecca. And
as someone who had this intersection for new technology, always being immersed in whatever
new tech is out there, and also the sales, it just made so much sense for me to end up
there.
So ultimately, I got very lucky in that we had a couple open positions in Santa Barbara,
California. So I went down there for a while. And then when I took the position in App Academy
in San Francisco, I knew all of that would eventually lead me to either co-founding or
starting my own business. So I'd say immediately.
You've got this ideas list that you carry around with you all day. You're adding to
it. You're probably refining your ideas. What was it about the idea for Recapped that stood
out to you compared to the other ideas in the list?
Yeah, I mean, for me, honestly, it was just something I needed. So we were working these
larger deals and we were working, I don't know how familiar you are with business to
business sales, but on average, it can be really, really difficult. You have, especially
with complex sales or with bigger ticket items, you have six, seven, eight different people
that need to sign off on something. And there was all this technology out there that helped
us find leads and get people's phone numbers and their LinkedIn email address and whatever.
But like the actual working and collaborating with those people, there was nothing.
And for me personally, it's just something that I needed for my team because I was just
tired of us losing all these deals. And that was a direct hit on my compensation. And frankly,
I just wanted to make more money and I wanted to save my reps some time.
And when I looked in the marketplace, I couldn't find anything out there. So going back to
kind of the naiveness that I had, I was like, oh, how hard can this be? I'll go ahead and
create it myself. It should only take a month. Fast forward to about two and a half years
later and here we are.
It's fascinating to me when people describe this process of working a job, really needing
a tool, not finding anything out there that does the right thing and then creating it
on their own. Why do you think no one else had built this tool?
It's a great question. And something that, you know, actually, I was just at a conference
the other day and someone was like, when I showed them what we do, their immediate reaction
was like, why is this the first time I'm hearing about this? Why hasn't someone done this five
years ago?
I think it's really easy to just take things for granted as this is the way that it's always
been. And sending 20 different follow-up emails and ceasing five different people and hoping
that something is in Dropbox and the proposal is somewhere else and all of these different
things are scattered, that's just the way it is and accepting it as kind of the status
quo.
I'm incredibly lazy. I want to make everything as efficient as possible. So I think really
it was just the lucky intersection of this is something I needed, but also something
that didn't seem that difficult to implement and that it should just be already implemented.
But I think it's really easy to just not think outside of the box and really just say, okay,
this is the way we've been doing it. This is the way it will always go.
Yeah, I think all of us run into ideas or potential ideas, problems that could be solved
that might be valuable and we just sort of, they don't really land. They don't really
hit us. It's something that this can be a potential business idea. I should work on
this. It's just like, oh, this is annoying. And you go about your day. So it's interesting
to see the moment at which that light sort of flicks on in your head and you're like,
wait, this is something more than just a problem. This is something I can solve and turn into
a business.
Well, yeah. And I think ultimately, thanks to you and your brother, I think that's what
The Hackers was a big involvement, I think, in my personal creation of recap because you
say that you're like, oh, this is just this little thing. But then you're doing interview
podcasts and this was a year or two years ago when I first started being part of the
community. You have someone that solves this really small point. For example, they do a
widget for locating maps. And all of a sudden, that widget is bringing them $10,000 in recurring
revenue every month. In that realization that even though it seems so simple, if it's providing
value for someone, you can have a great lifestyle business off of it.
And that's one of my favorite aspects of what you guys do at Indie Hackers is it shows that
you don't have to have this billion dollar Silicon Valley, 21 year old raised $50 million
type business.
Yeah, that's the goal, man. And I'm glad to hear that it played a role for you. I remember
reading a lot of your posts on the forum before we had that meetup. This is 2017. I actually
pulled one up right now. It says, it's called Tear My Website Apart. Sales, able to start
up by Mark Frischstein. And he said, hey, all, we're getting ready to launch and we're
hoping to get some feedback. And this is well before you actually launched. You're just
getting feedback on your idea, your landing page. Do you remember putting this post up?
Briefly, yeah. I know I've done a couple versions since then, so I'm really curious how terrible
the pitch is.
No, it wasn't bad. People liked your post. I think you explicitly requested them to tear
your landing page apart. And the feedback you got wasn't even that harsh. So you got
off easy. But by the time you made this post, I mean, you had already committed to this
idea. You'd put in the work to actually decide this is what you want to work on. And I'm
curious about what it took to get to that point. So tell me about that validation process
and how you settled on this one idea over all the others.
Yeah, great question. So, you know, we had at that point, we had, I believe, this was
like an alpha version of the app. I paid some coders to just scrap it together. It cost
me like a couple thousand dollars. And from that, but no marketing and really just putting
it up on my Facebook, I was able to get 10 paying customers, which sounds like a lot.
I mean, it was like, I don't know, $200 a month, right? And at the time, I was just
getting jaded at work. And I wasn't really enjoying what I was doing, because I kept
thinking about, you know, like, I want to, I want my own thing, right? Like, you know,
I helped drive millions in revenue the year before. And like, even though I was being
paid very handsomely, I still got a very small percentage of that, right? And I think for
me, it was like, that realization coupled with the fact that I had like these 10 customers,
and I'd spent no time attaining them. So again, you know, being naive, and I said, okay, well,
if I got 10 customers, and I spent five minutes, what could I actually accomplish if I, you
know, spend 40 hours a week doing this, right? And that was the kind of the turning point
there.
That's a very common thing among founders and indie hackers, which is this belief that
your employer is not really going to pay you as much as you could make if you brought all
of your skills to bear and started your own company or did something like that. And I
kind of referenced this earlier, when you're talking about sales, I was saying that everybody
is a business. And it's really true. Like, if you're an employee, you can kind of look
at yourself as a business that has one customer, which is your employer, and you're selling
your services to them in exchange for your salary, that's kind of your pricing. And when
you did your interview, that was basically you selling your skills, that was you doing
sales. And your competitors are all the other people who could have your job, basically.
So it makes sense if you look at yourself that way to be sort of frustrated with your
current position and say, I want to turn myself into an even better business, right? I have
more than one customer, and I can charge more for my services, and I don't have as many
competitors. So it's not surprising at all to see you get frustrated with your job if
you're thinking through that lens.
Yeah. And I mean, for me, I think, ultimately, it even came down more so to the control versus
the rewards. I know I'm a difficult person to work with. If I believe something, it is
going to be very stubborn, and good luck changing my mind. So I realized that I would rather
make 30% to 50% of what I was making, but do it on my own time, and with my own energy,
with my own kind of brand, than keep working for someone else, right? And I think, at this
time, I also wanted to travel, and I wanted to go spend a month in Thailand, which I still
haven't done. But I wanted that freedom, and I couldn't get that anywhere else.
Let's talk about this phase where you actually built something and started making money.
You paid a bunch of programmers to build a prototype. You posted about it on Facebook,
and pretty soon you had 10 customers paying you $200 a month total. Walk us through that
process and how this actually worked, because so many people never get to this point of
turning their idea into dollars online.
Keep in mind, at this point, I had been working on it and thinking through how to actually
implement the app for about a year and a half. And the last six months there is really when
the coders came in and actually brought it from wire, mockups and wire maps into actual
quote unquote working app, right? It barely did anything.
And I think, really, the biggest thing is I had already been spending so much time working
on it. And I was the ideal customer for it. I was a VP of sales. I had this product that
needed to be sold to these people. And so I think I was very lucky. And this is why
I always recommend solve something that you would pay for, because you don't need to go
out and interview as many different people. You can just really just fix your own problem.
Granted, you still want outside influence and feedback, because you're going to lie
to yourself. And I lied to myself as well while I was doing it. But it really did help
that I was essentially the target market.
Tell me about some of these lies you told to yourself about your early product and who
was going to want it.
Yeah, so for a couple of these, I started working with, for example, account executives.
For anyone that's not in sales, account executives are like the person who's actually making the
sale, right? They're not usually entry level. They're working up. And I would start working
with these account executives. And I'd show them the product, and they'd be really excited
about it. And they're like, yeah, I can do this through email. I don't need this.
For me, that was actually, then I started changing the product to better suit them.
Instead of realizing that this is not my target market, what I should be talking to is their
boss or their VP of sales, who's just going to mandate that they use it. And then they
really have no say in it anyways.
And it's so easy to get caught up and take this rejection seriously. And I actually had
a couple months there where I started second guessing and thinking through other ideas
that I had. And I was like, maybe recap isn't it? And I think it's really easy to do that.
And for me, even just lying to myself, I think you really need to know yourself. For me,
I realized pretty early on that I'm not someone that could sit in his room for 12 hours a
day hacking away and putting together a product.
I personally needed to be in a room with five other people who were just as excited and
that would challenge me and keep me accountable. Because otherwise, I would just turn into
this lazy piece of shit who did nothing and would get depressed because I had no human
interaction.
But on the flip side, if that's how you gain your energy and that's how you're the most
effective, then you should do that. And I think you really need to ask yourself, when
did you have the most fun? What was that environment like? When were you the most productive?
When were you the most stressed? And take all of that and help facilitate that into
how you're building a product or a business.
That's really difficult to do because especially in the beginning of the business as the founder,
you're wearing all the hats. If someone needs to sit in a room for 12 hours, that's got
to be you. How did you work around your limitations? How did you get to the point where you could
do the things that you like to do and the things you were effective at?
Yeah, I mean, this is a great question. And this is still something that I really struggle
with. For us, we're remote. We're actually going to be raising the round of financing
here shortly. I know it's not the indie hackers way. But once we do that, we're going to be
hiring a bunch of people in New York.
And for me, that's going to be the next pivotal point of recap is where we can actually start
having that internal network. And I do think our engineering team is probably always going
to be remote. And that's fine. But the people that I interact with on a regular with the
executive team and the sales team, I need them to be in person. So that's going to be
the big step. And then also I realized I need to, once a week, I go to a different meetup
in New York City. And I'm very fortunate that in New York, every single day, there's something
going on.
So every Wednesday, I go out. Every Thursday, I try and go on a date. Every Friday and Saturday,
I'm out with my friends. But Monday through Wednesday, I'm really, really working. I'm
head down. And I think for me, that's been a really good balance, just to keep my sanity.
Let's talk a little bit about the way that you validated this idea. You tried to sell
it to account executives at first. They weren't having it. They said that they would just
stick with email. And that was good enough for them. You didn't know immediately that
you were talking to the wrong people. You just thought that this wasn't going to work.
What kind of process did you go through to figure out that that's what was going on?
And how can other indie hackers do the same thing?
Yeah. So we were having these conversations with account executives. And I was like, okay,
maybe I was just lying to myself because this was my idea. And maybe no one is going to
want this. And I actually foolishly ended up believing it. And so right around October,
we ended up doing a campaign with AppSumo, which does like a lifetime deal discount.
And so we launched it. We're like, what the hell? Let's work with them. They had reached
out to us. And we were big fans because myself and my co-founder at the time were always
buying different AppSumo products. It's great. You pay $50, whether you use it or not, it
doesn't matter.
So when we launched it, the feedback and the reviews that we actually got were incredible.
But what's funny is the users that were using it were not account executives. They were
actually consultants and freelancers and maybe like digital marketing agencies or someone
that's doing marketing or web design or whatever. And for them, they actually immediately started
telling us, they're like, oh, this is great. This is like a collaborative proposal. It's
half proposals, half project management. And immediately, I was like, yeah, that's exactly
what it is. And I mean, immediately, we had like almost 1000 people that started using
it literally overnight. And for us, that was really the turning point because we're like,
okay, let's abandon the sales effort. And let's just go towards proposals. So we started
doing that for about like three months.
And then I realized, again, through these conversations that it's still solving the
exact same pain point, which is just communication with your client, and really just making sure
everyone stays on the same page. And there's like 20 different avenues that you can go
down that with. But I wasn't actually even talking to the right people. And as I was
working these deals, where I was trying to get like an agency on board, I found myself
still using recap to try and close these deals. And then it clicked in my head and I go, what
the hell was I doing? I was just talking to the wrong people, business to business sales
teams still absolutely need this. And ultimately, that's what I was most passionate about versus,
you know, like, yes, it's great to do proposals. But that was a market that's already really
crowded. And I think there are some really good products out there that do this. Whereas,
actual sales collaboration between people, that's an exciting space that no one is doing
properly, aside from us, of course.
And for me, that was wanting to take over this new market. And that's really what got
me excited about it. So we ended up starting in sales, going to agencies, going back to
sales. And that's been the focus ever since.
Oh, man, that thrashing back and forth. Not really knowing that your idea is going to
be changing your idea in your mind, changing how you describe it to customers. And really
just having a ton of uncertainty with what is going to work is exactly what it's like
to be an eddy hacker who hasn't found a product market fit yet.
Absolutely.
How do you deal with the emotions of working so hard and not really knowing if you're going
in the right direction without getting discouraged?
Jesus, when do I not get discouraged? I don't think that actually changes. I mean, I'd love
to get your thoughts on it. But yeah, I think one of my biggest suggestions when people
ask me, do they want to... One of my tips for starting a company is have a support network.
And being an entrepreneur is fucking hard.
If I knew it was going to be this hard, I don't know if I would have done it. And I
think that's... You hear other people say that, but until you actually do it, you don't
realize. At the best of times, you're celebrating for a day, maybe a couple hours. And then
all of a sudden something breaks or your biggest customer calls you and they want to cancel.
And that's literally like a daily roller coaster. But on the flip side, that's also what keeps
me really energized and excited because there's always something new that's happening.
And so I think it's so critical to have a co-founder that you can rely on or a spouse
or a best friend. This is the same reason why Combinator recommends. Co-founders are
at least groups of two because it's so difficult.
And I go through this every single week. And even when I talk to my mentors and people
in my network who have these successful multi-million dollar companies, and when I ask them like,
oh, well, everything must be peaches and sunshine. You're drawing a good salary. You have dozens
of employees. And they look at me and they're like, no, you're so wrong. There's always
something and I'm always having that second doubt.
I think really just the challenge gets bigger. And it's not, can we afford to pay our employees
this week? Now it's, can we afford to take over this new market or go after a new city
or whatever your product is?
Honestly, from my perspective, I think it's uniquely challenging when you're in this early
phase and you don't have that much traction. You think that you might be building the right
thing but it's totally possible and it's always a question in the back of your mind that you
are investing months into building something that is going to be a dud. What does your
support network look like that could get you through this time period where you were still
trying to figure out what recap is?
Yeah, excellent question. For me actually, so all my family was on the East Coast and
specifically New York. And so that was one of the reasons I actually ended up leaving
San Francisco when I started to recap and going to New York is because I needed that
support network. And I knew that if I was sitting in my room by myself in San Francisco
where every other day on TechCrunch, someone just raised $30 million and I was struggling
to get a customer, that would not help my mental state.
So shout out to my best friends and my brother who literally I think every single day I bombard
them with shit that they have no business being a part of. And they almost are like
my therapists and that's my support network. And to everyone else, I try and show that
everything is fine, everything is dandy. And yes, we're growing a lot but the internal
network knows the vulnerabilities that I'm going through. And I think that's like everyone
needs that.
So I think you'd quit your sales job by then. How are you supporting yourself financially
during this time?
Yeah, so in April last year I ended up quitting. I was fortunate enough. I knew that I wanted
my own business for a while. And as recap started picking up traction, I put all my
head down, I cut my expenses as much as possible. I put away about $50,000 to last a runway
of what I thought would be a year. And going back into it, I was like, oh, if I can't make
it in a year, I deserve to go broke. Luckily, literally by the 9th or 10th month is really
when we started seeing the results. Again, it took way longer than I thought it would.
But yeah, I was literally just living off savings and just trying to do anything possible.
Did some consulting gigs on the side. Luckily, I built up a little bit of a brand from like
a sales leader and thought leader. And so I'd have people reach out to me and I go,
asking these questions like, oh, it's great. Why don't I come in and do this training for
your team? And you guys pay me a couple thousand dollars.
And so that mixed with just doing everything possible, really helped fund recap in the
early days.
Yeah, that's another stressful part of being a bootstrapper. You are either quitting your
job at which point you have to watch your bank account sort of dwindle down to nothing
as you try to build your business. Or you're working nights and weekends on the side of
your job, which means you're not going to have really that much time for your friends
and family and hobbies and stuff like that.
And for me with any hackers, I just did the same thing you did. I quit my job. I was working
full time as a contractor. I quit that. And I had about a year of runway. And for the
first six months, I think I just kind of messed around. I worked on projects, didn't have very
much potential. I wasn't really marketing or advertising anything that I built. And
then I checked my bank account. And I was like, oh crap, it's time to get serious. And
I had to have a lot more discipline in what I worked on.
Did you find you had the same effect as well? Or watching your bank account dwindle, you
got more disciplined and more serious about your business?
Oh, absolutely. And I actually, I agree 100%. In the early days, immediately when I quit,
I was like, that first month, I really did nothing. I sat around and kind of hung out
because I was waiting for this product to be built, that I started working with this
co-founder. And we were taking the alpha version to a beta. And so I was like, oh, I could
just sit around. I know this will be successful. I'm going to be a millionaire overnight. Why
not? And then fast forward three or four months later, I'm like, holy shit, I've already ate
through 30% of my savings. I have nothing to show for it.
And that's really when it started to light a fire under me and actually start saying,
okay, now I need to go do this because in eight months, we will be running out of money.
And then I have to go back to working for someone else. And now I just spent the last
six months telling how all my friends and my whole network, how I'm never going to work
for someone else again, only to put my tail behind my legs and go find another company.
So that started thinking in. And this is actually something that I don't think a lot of people
know is before we did that AppSumo campaign, I had actually burnt through my savings a
lot quicker than expected with the move and relocating to New York. And we were about
two months out from actually going bankrupt as a company.
Oh, man.
So AppSumo actually ended up saving the company, because it reinvigorated, it got us literally
like 1000 customers overnight. And from that, we were able to get a bunch of actually paying
customers. And so that was like our launch. And so if I don't know what would have happened,
if we didn't go down that path.
So you did this AppSumo launch, you got a ton of people in the door. They're basically
convincing you at that point in time that what you should be making is proposal software.
And you eventually move away from that, because you realize that's a crowded market. You realize
that you're still using your own product recapped to handle your sales processes, though. You
figure, you know what, why don't we go back to the initial thesis, be a sales organization
selling software to salespeople? What did that process look like? And how did things
go from there?
That's a great question. So the really interesting thing about our product is that so we have
about 25 different industries used against, ranging from financial advisors to digital
marketing agencies to sales teams to onboarding teams. For us, the product didn't actually
change because early on, I wanted it to be very adaptive and very essentially open to
whatever use case the person wanted. We wanted to give them the freedom to use it how they
wanted within a certain guideline, of course.
And so for us, the product really didn't shift that much. Like sure, we had to scrap a couple
things off the roadmap because they wouldn't be as integral to a sales team. But the cool
thing is, and this I think very unique to us, the product itself didn't have to change.
Really what had to change was the focus of getting new customers and also the messaging.
But now, if you go to our website, we have recap for agencies and we have recap for sales
teams. And the messaging is completely separate, but the product is ultimately the same. And
I think for us, when someone asks me what I do, immediately my first question is, well,
what do you do? Because there's three different pitches I could give you.
And for us, that was a really cool opportunity for us in that we didn't really have to actually
start over or change from scratch or do these huge pivots. It's just, okay, now instead
of calling a director of business development at San Francisco Digital Agency, now we're
calling the VP of Sales at Stripe.
Walk us through this process of how you're making these calls nowadays. Because with
AppSumo, that was more marketing. There was a ton of users coming your way all at once.
Whereas nowadays, you have to actually go out, pound the pavement, make these calls.
What does that process look like?
So one of the reasons I knew I wanted to launch a B2B tech company is because the first six
years of my career was in B2B tech sales. So I had actually, up until this point, built
six or seven sales teams from scratch for the various companies I worked at where literally
we went from nothing to multimillion dollars in revenue, cold calling, and doing just cold
outreach.
So I was like, okay, well, it would be really stupid for me to go do a B2C consumer app
where I know nothing about. So for me, very early on, I knew I wanted to do B2B sales
because that's what I was good at and that's what I knew.
And so for us, really, it's grabbing leads, calling people, and just literally grinding.
I mean, it's not a pretty site. It's a lot of rejection. I think it's 99% rejection.
And the hardest thing in the early days is you don't even know... You barely know who
you're calling, but you don't even know what you're saying because you don't know what's
going to resonate from a value standpoint.
And I think that's where talking to your customers is so powerful because they'll actually give
you the words to use on your other calls. And so for that point, I had to go back, start
doing some more customer interviews and saying like, okay, if you were to pitch recap to
your coworker, what would you say? And I would take notes and I'd throw them all in Excel
sheets and come up with these sentences and really just work from there.
But I think just like anything else, it's taking something and just improving it 10%
every week. And finally, you get to something that doesn't look like dog shit.
You know, I don't hear a lot of stuff like this very often because most founders don't
do sales. They don't talk to a lot of people in the very beginning. They have no idea how
many people are going to reject them. And if they tried doing a couple of sales calls
and got a no, they might decide that they have to reconfigure their entire business.
How do you know what the line is between you're getting rejected so much, you need to go back
to the drawing board and change things, and you're getting rejected a lot, but it's only
a matter of making more calls and talking to more people?
Yeah, this is a really great question. So I was actually thinking about this the other
day, where you have these two different mindsets, right? You have one where you're telling yourself
like you have to believe in yourself and you have to do it foolishly and you have to keep
powering through. And then the other one is like, well, you have to listen to your customers.
And like, at what point do you balance that? I think luckily for me, the only thing I knew
was sales is a funnel, right? You start with 150 calls a day. Of those, you will talk to
10 people. Of those, you will book maybe four or five. Of those, three will show up. Of
those, you might close one, right? And I knew that that was the process. And I knew that
literally just if I put in enough at the top of the funnel, the end results, you could
predictably guess, right? And so for me, the only thing I knew was, okay, well, 300 calls
and that will get me to customers. And if you don't know that, I think it could be really
daunting because after a couple hundred calls, you're like, what am I doing? Why am I wasting
all this time on this? But for me, that was just the standard of business to business
sales. That's really all I knew.
Yeah, you're bringing your expertise into this. And I think a lot of people who start
companies, most indie hackers are software engineers and their expertise is building
software. So they're all about adding new features and making things faster and writing
tests and refactoring their code. And that's what they spend their time on. But I think
as a salesperson coming into this, it's a little bit advantageous because the challenge
of building a new business is usually not building the product. It's usually getting
it in the hands of customers and convincing them to say yes and give you money.
Yeah. I mean, for me, I think that was actually one of the biggest challenges is I kept going
back and being like, oh, well, if we just had this one extra feature, or if we fix this
one bug, people would buy like, how rarely is that the case? That's never the case. But
instead, if you can have someone that works with you and that partners with you and believes
in the vision of what you're building, and that vision might be a year down the road,
that is so much more impactful than, oh, well, they'll come to me next week when we build
out this one integration. Because if you're solving a big enough pain point, they will
use it no matter how shitty your product is.
If you look at the early versions of Segment and Dropbox and all these Hacker News postings
from like eight years ago, people still wanted to use it because it solved a key problem
for them.
You've been through a lot of highs, a lot of lows in the past year. And things have
recently started working out for you pretty well. But let's say you could go back in time
one year. What would you do differently?
So I think there's two big learnings for me here. One is I would have been more patient.
And so I always recommend people don't be so eager to jump into your ideal full time
without really substantial income coming in. Making that shift and now also eating through
your savings makes a pretty big psychological impression on you. And all of a sudden you
start holding yourself accountable to things that you didn't even think about. Literally,
it's a daunting task of all of a sudden you have no money coming in and you're eating
through your savings.
And so then it's like, okay, do I really want to add guac when I'm at Chipotle? And all
of these little subtractions are not good for your mental state. And they actually get
you to start working on the wrong things or making difficult decisions or even the wrong
decisions because now you're starting to think short term instead of long term.
So as much as you can afford it, keep working on that side hustle. Put in the hours during
the week. I promise you, if you cut Netflix out of your life, you probably will gain a
couple more hours a week that you can work on stuff that you really believe in.
And so one is be patient. And really, I wish I would have had 100 customers before jumping
in. But on the flip side, how long would it have taken me to get those 100 customers,
if ever? So I think there's a good balance there.
And then the second thing is really stick to your guns. And I wish I had learned more
about product discovery and customer discovery. I wish I didn't spend the first three months
interviewing account executives because that was the wrong audience.
And if I had only just spent time really just having that belief in myself, in my use case,
and really finding other people like me, aka VPs of sales, that would have maybe saved
six months and who knows where the product would have been. And I think those were really
the two big learnings for me over the past year.
Okay, let's do the opposite. What are some things that you did well for the past year
that you would definitely do again if you could go back in time?
I think the one thing I'm... One of the things I'm really proud of myself for doing is actually
just doing it. Earlier when you said that if you're an employee, you really are a business,
but you're selling it to one person, I think that really the only difference between someone
that's successful as a business owner and someone that's an employee is the business
owner just went ahead and did it.
And yes, they may fail, but just taking that first step and actually taking the plunge
is so, so important. And I think a lot of people hold themselves back from doing this
just out of fear or having... I understand if you have a family and you have a mortgage,
that's very difficult.
But if you're single and you're in your early 20s, that is the time to take the risks. And
I'm really glad that my mentors pushed me to do that. And when they pushed me to leave
Raleigh, North Carolina, and go to Santa Barbara, California, where I knew nobody, or to quit
that job and to go to San Francisco, or to quit that job and launch my own company, I'm
really just proud that I actually did it.
And that was my number one thing to people is just fucking do it. Stop making excuses.
With your back against the wall, you'll probably figure it out. And if you don't, you're going
to learn some stuff and it's going to make the next time easier. Or you may find out
you don't ever want to do it again. And those are all really good things to have because
I think of myself as the regret minimization network or framework that, for example, Jeff
Bezos will talk about is if I'm 60 and I'm looking back at my life, what am I going to
regret not doing? And that is a big push for me to actually do.
Listen, man, you're saying just do it. You're just doing it yourself. It's been really cool
to watch you go through this process, watching you post on the maniacus form asking for landing
page feedback.
And now, looking at you today, so happy with where your business has come, employing people,
generating enough revenue where you're not worried about putting guac on your burrito
at Chipotle. Can you tell listeners where they can go to learn more about what you're
up to at RECAPT and maybe about your personal life as well, if you share that sort of thing
online?
Yeah, absolutely. So with RECAPT, it's just RECAPT.io. So if you're a freelancer or a consultant,
I highly recommend you check it out. If you're in sales, no brainer. And then also, I am
decently active on Twitter. I think it's one thing I want to work on and that's Mark Fersch,
M-A-R-K-F-E-R-S-H. And then, of course, LinkedIn is really where I do like 90% of my stuff.
I have another sales blog as well, sellsomemore.com, where I do some recent updates. But going
forward, actually, if you subscribe to RECAPT.io, you're actually going to get YouTube videos
that we'll be posting. I'm going to be posting a lot of sales content going forward on tone
and how to get customers and how to cold call and really just like these really tactical
one-minute clips going forward. So I would check that out. I'll post everything to Twitter
as well. So that would be the best way to find me.
All right, Mark. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
My pleasure.
If you enjoyed listening to this conversation and you want a really easy way to support
the podcast, why don't you head over to iTunes and leave us a quick rating or even a review.
If you're looking for an easy way to get there, just go to ndhackers.com slash review and
that should open up iTunes on your computer. I read pretty much all the reviews that you
guys leave over there and it really helps other people to discover the show. So your
support is very much appreciated.
In addition, if you are running your own internet business or if that's something you hope to
do someday, you should join me and a whole bunch of other founders on the ndhackers.com
website. It's a great place to get feedback on pretty much any problem or question that
you might have while running your business.
If you listen to the show, you know that I am a huge proponent of getting help from other
founders rather than trying to build your business all by yourself. So you'll see me
on the forum for sure, as well as more than a handful of some of the guests that I found
in the podcast.
If you're looking for inspiration, we've also got a huge directory full of hundreds
of products built by other indie hackers, every one of which includes revenue numbers
and some of the behind the scenes strategies for how they grew their products from nothing.
As always, thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.